Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)(36)
Once we’re sure it’s dead, she helps me stuff my equipment back into my bag, and we set off again as quietly as we can.
We emerge from the tunnel in an alleyway behind a twenty-four-hour dance club, the pulse of the beat inside shaking the walls around us. The daylight, even diffuse and artificial as it is down here, makes me stumble and blink. I’m about to turn and stride for the mouth of the alley when Sofia grabs my arm, spinning me back to face her. My heart stutters—surprise, no more—and then she reaches up to pull my head torch free, and smooth back my hair, then pluck a spiderweb from my chest.
“We don’t want to draw attention,” she says, lifting my hand and positioning it palm-up so she can dump both torches in it, then running her hands over her own clothing, straightening it quickly. It’s like she’s putting herself back together as she does it, and when she looks up at me once more, she’s composed. Everything that’s going on inside her is locked away tight. I envy her the ability.
I stuff the torches in my bag and turn to lead the way. We take a direct route—we’re as sure as we can be that they’re not tracking us remotely, so now we need to clear the area before they get eyes on us physically. Keeping our heads down, we push through the marketplace, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be coming back here at all. It feels like we’re on a track now, heading toward the confrontation I’ve been planning for years, with no way to avoid it. The rift, the whispers—they’re here on Corinth, so either we take the fight to LaRoux, or somehow, he’s going to bring it to us.
The elevator up to Mae’s level is quiet, and the difference from the cacophony of the market is obvious the moment the doors slide open. We squeeze past a bunch of door-to-door evangelists and a couple clearly on a date—locked at the lips and hips—and walk out into the neat and tidy streets of her neighborhood. The mid-levels lack the ostentation of Kristina McDowell’s penthouse, but the small, compact homes around here are nothing like the tenements in the slums, either. The buildings are no more than ten stories high, and most dwellings have a whole story to themselves. This is about the level where you start getting your own bedroom, even if it’s just a hidey-hole.
Mae’s three blocks away, and she opens the door on the third knock. Her mouth falls open when she sees me, and though I summon up a ghost of my usual smile, it doesn’t seem to help any. “Honey, what the hell?” she whispers, stepping back to gesture us urgently inside. “Your whole setup went dark an hour ago, and there’s some serious chatter about something going boom in the Botigues quarter. I’ve been frantic. Get inside, quick.”
I push the front door closed, leaning back against it and letting my breath out slowly. My heart’s still pounding, lungs aching as though I’ve been running for kilometers. This is Mae’s house, I tell my body. Start behaving. We’re safe here. “The truth is better than the rumors,” I say. “Mae, this is…” I pause. “Alice. Alice, this is Mae.”
Whatever Sofia was expecting, I’m one hundred percent sure this wasn’t it—Mae looks about as wholesome as they get, in one of the vintage tea dresses in fashion right now, hair caught up in a neat ponytail, as if she just slipped in from a social game of tennis. She looks like she should be serving on the fund-raising committee at her kids’ school—and in fact she does—instead of partnering me on the galaxy’s most notorious hacks.
Still, I’ve got to give my girl her due. She sticks out her hand to shake like she’s just been introduced to Mae at a cocktail party, and her smile looks a world better than mine. “We owe you,” she says simply.
“My friend, that’s one complicated ledger, trust me,” Mae laughs. “I’m assuming if we’re doing introductions, you’re sure you weren’t followed, honey?”
I nod, suddenly—uncomfortably—aware that I need to tell Mae not to refer to me as the Knave where Sofia can hear. As if I needed this day getting any more tangled. “I’m sure, but my den is gone. I had to burn it all.”
She lets out a slow breath. “You need gear?”
I nod again. “We won’t stay any longer than we have to, but this is the only place that has what I need to work out our next step. I thought…” But what I’m asking for is huge—the average user’s private enough about letting somebody onto their system. For Mae to let another hacker into her rig is akin to her inviting somebody to waltz on in while she’s naked. There’s no reassurance I can offer that would matter—the truth is, I could do whatever I wanted once she let me in, and she knows it. So it comes down to trust.
Mae nods slowly. “We’re in this deep, may as well go the whole way. Come on through, both of you. Let’s get you set up before the kids get home from school.”
I see Sofia taking it all in as we head out the back—I’m good at electronic networks, and she dominates the social ones, after all. So she’s doing what she does best. I see her study the school schedules on the screen in the kitchen, the photos of Mae and her kids, the comfy, mid-priced furnishings. Mae and her partner Tanya used a donor for the kids, then Mae ended up a single mom when it turned out raising babies was hard work. She shrugged, and said better to raise two than three. That’s what Mae’s like—the kids are the thing that matter. Sofia’s working that out, I’m pretty sure, from what’s on show here.