So Yesterday (20 page)

Whatever the anti-client wanted from Mandy, now was
the time to rescue her. And quickly. Futura Garamond had said he was coming
back.

Jen mimed a knock on the door, a questioning look on
her face.

I quickly shook my head. The last thing we needed was
Mandy calling out, asking who we were. Her sharp voice was famous for its
ability to get the attention of unruly focus groups.

I made a punching gesture at the door, and Jen nodded
agreement. We were going to have to break it down.

Unfortunately, we hadn't remembered to bring a
battering ram. The door looked formidable, its metal painted industrial gray.
And once the first blow rang out, we were going to have company pretty soon. We
would have to crash through, drag Mandy out, and make a run for the other end
of the studio.

I looked around for something to hit the door with and
spotted a fire extinguisher hanging in a corner.

Jen stepped in front of me, shaking her head. She
pointed back to where we'd hidden.

In the work lights I could clearly see the piece of
equipment we had crouched behind. It was a camera dolly, a heavy, four-wheeled
cart used for filming traveling shots. Attached to its front was a heavy,
cranelike arm for holding the camera.

I smiled. We did have a battering ram.

We stole quickly back to the dolly and gave it a
tentative shove. It glided forward easily on rubber tires designed to provide
the camera with a smooth, silent ride.

Jen and I grinned at each other. Perfect.

We lined it up with the door, aiming the camera crane
dead center.

"One
...
two
...
three
...,"
Jen mouthed, and we leaned our weight against the
dolly. Engineered to roll fast, it built speed quickly and quietly moved across
the smooth floor.

About five seconds from collision the door opened.

Mandy was standing there, a puzzled look on her face,
the small room glaringly white behind her. I skidded to a halt, but our
battering ram pulled itself from my grasp, rolling unstoppably ahead.

"W-What the
...,"
Mandy stammered as the dolly hurtled toward her;
j
then, at the last instant, she
did the sensible thing and slammed the door shut.

The dolly struck with a bright metal crunch, the sound
of a car hitting a garbage can at full speed echoing through the vast space.
The door crumpled inward, closing around the dolly's camera crane like a
stomach around a fist.

"Mandy!"
I cried, leaping forward.

Jen and I pulled the dolly back frantically, and the
door swung outward, then tumbled from its hinges, crashing to the floor.

Mandy was standing inside the little room, looking
down at us from her perch. I realized she'd jumped up onto a toilet to escape
the rampaging dolly—she was in a bathroom. The sounds of flushing noises came from
the imperturbable plumbing.

"Are you okay?" I shouted.

"Hunter? What the hell
are you—?"

"No
time!" I cried, and pulled her down. Jen was already headed back across
the studio floor, out of the pool of work lights and into the darkness. I
dragged a very stunned Mandy after me, bruising my shins against shadowy
obstacles as we charged for the big sliding stage door.
                                                                   
j

The sounds of confusion came
from behind me, doors swinging open
j
and light spilling into the
studio. If only we could make it back to the
i
security guard at the front entrance or even out into
the sunlight
...

"Hunter!" Mandy
screamed, a dead weight behind me.

"Just run!" I
yelled, trying to yank her forward, but she planted her heels and pulled me to
a stop.

I spun and faced her.

"What are you
doing?"
she cried.

"Rescuing you!"

She looked at me for an endless second, then sighed
and shook her head. "Oh, Hunter, you are so yesterday."

Then the world exploded, buzzing and powerful banks of
film lights hitting us from every direction.

"Oh, shit," I heard
Jen say.

I covered my eyes against the blaze of color,
completely blind. Footsteps and the sound of metal skate wheels closed around
us.

Oh, shit, was right.

CHAPTER 31

A
COMMANDING VOICE CAME FROM BEHIND THE BLINDING WALL
of light.

"If it isn't Hunter Braque, skinny white boy
looking like his mother didn't have time to dress him."

Even blinded and terrified, I flinched at this unfair
fashion analysis. I might be wearing gray cords and a dried-chewing-gum-colored
shirt, but I was going for social invisibility.

"I
am
undercover, you know," I protested.

"Yeah, you look it," a deeper voice called
from the opposite direction—the big bald guy.

"And who have we here?" the first voice
said.

I heard the rumble of skates on the concrete floor. I
agonizingly pried my lids apart and saw Mwadi Wickersham gliding gracefully out
of the retina-searing glare. I glimpsed more figures surrounding us, covering
every escape route. The trucker cap and cowboy boots of Futura Garamond
strolled out of the blinding wall of light. He stared at Jen's feet.

"Yo, look, she's got the laces," he said. A
murmur of recognition passed through our captors.

"So she does," Mwadi Wickersham said, dark
glasses peering down from her skate-enhanced height. "Did you come up with
those yourself, honey?"

Jen squinted back at her.
"Yeah. What do you mean,
the
laces?"

"Mandy had a picture on
her. We've all been talking about them."
i
Mwadi nodded, an imperious queen pleased with her
subject. "Nice work."

"Uh, thanks."

"Let us go!" I
demanded, if high-pitched noises can be construed as demanding.

Mwadi Wickersham turned toward
me and said, "Not until we get a deal signed."

I turned toward Mandy, who was
giving me the glare she reserves for ' people who perpetually insist that clam
diggers are coming back.

"W-Wait," I
stammered. "What deal?"

"The biggest deal of my
career, Hunter." She sighed. "Do you think maybe you could
not
screw it up?"

************************************

We sat at one of the tables in the fake restaurant:
Jen and me, Mwadi Wickersham, Mandy, and Futura Garamond. A few more henchmen
stood around, half visible behind the bright banks of movie lights. I caught
the flash of Future Sarcastic Woman's silver hair and the silhouette of the big
bald guy, their alert poses suggesting that departure was not an option. From
our island of light, the sound stage seemed to extend for miles in every
direction, lending an echoey grandeur to our words.

"So you didn't get
kidnapped?" I asked Mandy for the third time.

"Well
...
at first, I guess." She looked at
Mwadi Wickersham for help
with the question.
                                        

Wickersham removed her dark glasses, and I blinked.
Her eyes were as ^ green as Jen's but more piercing, narrowed to slits in the
bright movie lights. She wore a white wife beater and faded, brandless jeans
with a wide black belt, a fake gold chain around her neck: banji-butch street
kid, circa mid-break-dance era. In winter you'd add a leather jacket. I knew
from cool-hunting history that if you'd grown up in the Bronx in the 1980s, the
uniform was practically Logo Exile.

She placed the glasses on the table, in no hurry to
answer, possessed of that unquestionable authority achieved by being from an
older generation but still totally cool.

"We decided to make a deal."

"You made a bargain with the client?" Jen
asked, appalled.

"Sure. The element of surprise was blown anyway.
And they wanted them."

"That we did," Mandy
said.

"Wait," I asked.
"You wanted what?"

"You sold out," Jen
said to Wickersham.

I felt like I was reading subtitles that didn't match
the dialog. "Huh?"

"It wasn't supposed to work out this way,"
Wickersham said darkly, the rumble of her skates ominous under the table as her
feet slid restlessly back and forth. "We worked on those shoes for two
years, getting them just right. We wanted to put them on the street with the
sinister swooshes. But certain people in our organization thought they were
too
cool. A theory was proposed
that we'd be making the client hip again by association."

"Kind of like a Tony Bennett self-parody
thing," Jen said.

I found myself nodding. Some of this was becoming
clear. "When we first saw the shoes, we weren't even sure whether they
were bootlegs or the client being self-reflexive. So you got nervous, thinking
the shoes might backfire?"

"I didn't get nervous," said Wickersham, in
a tone that suggested she never got nervous. "But certain people did, and
they acted on their own." She shrugged. "This is what I get for
working with anarchists."

"They called the police?" Jen asked.

"Someone called the client," Mandy said.
"Reported a shipment of bootlegs. Before the boardroom suits called in the
cops, they sent a rep down to check out the shoes, a guy called Greg
Harper."

"Your boss," I supplied. "And when he
saw them, he must have realized he was looking at bootlegs that were better
than the original."

Mandy chuckled. "And a suit like him didn't know
how to cope with that. So he called in street-level expertise, telling me to
deal with it."

"And you called in me and Jen," I said.

Futura Garamond spoke up, his trucker cap bobbing.
(The logo on it was the classic naked-girl silhouette found on the mud flaps of
eighteen-wheelers, which was daringly last year of him, I thought.) "By
this time, we'd realized what had happened. So we decided to move the shoes out
of town until the heat was off. But Mandy showed while we were setting up the
move. Certain people panicked." He and Wickersham cast disappointed looks
at the big bald guy.

Who shrugged. "Had to improvise, didn't I? Left
the shoes, brought in Mandy. Worked out all right."

"So you
did
kidnap her," Jen said.

"Like I said, I improvised."

I turned to Mandy. "But then you wound up
negotiating with them?" My tone was incredulous, but frankly, cutting a
deal with her own kidnappers sounded like the Mandy I knew and loved. I could
imagine her tapping her clipboard, ticking off contractual issues one by one.

"A sharp operator, Ms. Wilkins," Wickersham
admitted, giving Mandy the Nod. "She realized that we wanted to ditch the
shoes and the client wanted to buy them. And she offered a good price."

"Just a couple more points and we can wind this
deal up." Mandy looked at her watch. "We'd be done by now if you two
kids hadn't shown up in rescue mode."

"Yeah, sorry," I said. A scorecard flashed
in my head—Amateur Detectives: Still Zero.

"But how could you
sell
them?" Jen pleaded with
Wickersham. "They'll go straight into the outlet malls!"

The older woman spread her arms helplessly.
"Anarchy's a cash business, girl. The
Hoi Aristoi
operation wound up with some
major cost overruns."

Jen nodded slowly, and her expression changed.
"So how did that work?" She leaned forward, eyes widening like a
Japanese ten-year-old's. "The paka-paka thing, I mean. Have you really
figured out how to rewire people?"

Mwadi Wickersham laughed. "Hold on to your
skates, girl. I
like
you, but we just met. And I
might
not even know what you're
talking about."

Jen smiled sheepishly, her smile luminous from the
praise.

Until Mwadi continued: "The question is, what to
do with you?"

I shared a sidelong glance with Jen. That question had
been on my mind as well.

"Uh, I'm sure the client wants you to let us
go," I said, glancing over at Mandy.

She stared back at me silently, still annoyed, her
fingers drumming on the table. I swallowed dryly, remembering the client's
record on child labor....

Mwadi cleared her throat. "Our deal's pretty much
sewn up, and there was no mention of Hunter Braque in the contract. Or you,
sweetie. What's your name, anyway?"

"Jen James."

In a weird and off-the-subject flash, it occurred to
me that I hadn't known Jen's last name until that moment. As I've said, things
were moving quickly.

"Well, Jen James, we
might have work for you two."

"Work?" I said.

Mwadi nodded. "We've got other irons in the fire,
lots of plans, and now we've got the cash to get them moving. You both know the
territory. If you didn't, you never would have made it all the way here."

"What territory?" I asked. I wasn't even
sure what planet we were on.

Mwadi rose from the chair to her full
two-by-two-wheeled height. She spun around once, reminding me of the
ever-rotating Hiro but saturated with grace and power rather than Hiro's
nervous energy. She began to skate in slow circuits around the table,
frictionless as a swan with a tail-wind, weaving the client's fantasy world
(her own weird version) into existence from the multicolored threads of movies
lights.

"You know the cool pyramid, don't you,
Hunter?"

"Sure." I drew it in the air with two
fingers. "Innovators at the top, under them the Trendsetters, then Early
Adopters. Consumers at the very bottom, with Laggards scattered around the
base, sort of like leftover construction materials."

"Laggards?" She narrowed her eyes at me as
she halted, old-school metal wheels scraping the concrete floor like
fingernails. "I prefer the term
Classicists.
Rock Steady Crew, still break
dancing after twenty-five years? On the cardboard every day, whether breaking's
in style or out? They're not Laggards."

"Okay," I agreed. "Rock Steady are
Classicists. But guys wearing tucked-in Kiss T-shirts are Laggards."

A grin flashed across her features. "I can live
with that." She resumed her fluid circling. "But the pyramid's in
trouble. You know that."

"I do?"

"Because of cool hunters," Jen cut in.
"And market research, focus groups, and all that crap. They squeeze the
life out of everything."

Mandy spread her hands. "Hey, sitting right
here!"

"That's the score, though," Wickersham said.
"Hunter, your girlfriend knows what she's talking about. The ancient
pyramid has sprouted mailing lists and databases. The sides are too slippery
now, so nothing sticks anymore. The cool hits the mall before it has time to
digest."

And of course, all my brain had processed from this
last metaphorical hash was that someone who was not my parents had referred to
Jen as my girlfriend. Pathetic.

As a result all I managed was, "Yeah," all
soulfully.

"I thought you had it figured out,"
Wickersham continued, nodding. "While waiting for you to find us, we read
most of your old cool blog and got the scoop from a bunch of your friends. We
have some of the best social engineers in the history of hacking working for
us." She nodded at Future Woman, then turned back to me. "We know you
cold, Hunter, and we think that you realize something's wrong with the pyramid.
You've known it since you were thirteen."

I felt that lump, the one from my first year in school
here. The cobblestone in my stomach. "Yeah, I guess."

"So the pyramid needs some reconstruction work; a
new level in the hierarchy needs to be innovated," she said, green eyes
flashing in the ; movie lights. "Something to slow things down again. To
trip things up. How well do you know the first heroes, Hunter?"

My knowledge of history includes many obscure details
but few big pictures. "First heroes?"

"The first Innovators invented myth,"
Wickersham said, "before religion got turned into mall metal for
Consumers. In those old stories the first heroes were tricksters, coyotes, and
hustlers. Their job was to jam nature, mess up the wind and stars. They messed
with the gods, remixing the world with chaos."

She slid to a halt.

"So we're taking a page out of the old books,
adding Jammers to the pyramid."

"Jammers." Jen's eyes widened. "The
opposite of cool hunters."

Mwadi smiled. "Right. We don't help innovations
move down the pyramid; we mystify the flow. We market confusion, jam the ads
until the Consumers don't know what's real and what's a joke."

"Loosening the glue," I said softly. The
floor seemed to rumble beneath my feet. In fact, the floor
was
rumbling.

A wash of red light fell across us, the giant studio
door sliding open to let in the last rays of the descending sun.

Outlined against the bloody sky were about a dozen
figures. I recognized the one in front: he was the would-be writer from the
coffee shop, the one who'd ridden with us on the train into Dumbo. He'd been
following us.