Walkaway

[I]

GRETYL CAME FROM the fabber with everything they needed to build shelter – flexible frames and connectors the boys quickly assembled, photo-reactive film they stretched over each piece, clicking it together to make a half-dome with a vertical face and a doorway. They set it up in the field where they’d watched the drones. The area in front of the prison’s gates was crowded, no room for new structures big enough for a family of four. It was quieter. The rest of their crew were setting up there, too.

Limpopo wasn’t ready to go and might never be. She wanted to build an onsen. The mention of this put a gleam in the eyes of those who’d known her at the B&B, including Iceweasel. They emerged a consensus that they’d stay and help. The boys had never seen an onsen – they’d gone out of fashion in Gary – and avidly watched videos about them. They were committed to the project. Gretyl could have headed home, but there was no reason to be there as opposed to here. She could teach her classes anywhere. The little serious math work she did with colleagues was geography independent.

She didn’t like it here. It was too close to Toronto, to Jacob Redwater. It was weird that Iceweasel named their son after him, but being this close to what Gretyl thought of as “Jacob’s lair” made her edgy. That’s why Iceweasel wanted to stay. She needed to prove – to herself, to the world, to her monstrous father, who knew her every move – that she was unafraid. This had been hashed out during the naming thing. Gretyl understood there was no new information to be gleaned by refactoring that painful discussion. Once, she’d been foolhardy enough to argue with Iceweasel about this – a pregnant Iceweasel at that – and learned her lesson.

She still jumped at shadows.

“You hate this.” The boys were at the onsen job site, clicking fabbed bricks together. They’d been promised a salvage expedition to a site where a drone cataloged a whole butt-load of useful matériel, on condition of diligent work and good behavior that morning. Iceweasel had come back and flumfed on the camp bed, swooning, sipping her pack’s straw and glowing prettily with sweat.

“I don’t hate it. I totally understand—”

“Hating and understanding aren’t opposites. I want to let you know I know you hate this, and I’m grateful you’re doing it anyway.”

Gretyl shook her head. “I love you, too.”

Iceweasel stretched out an arm and felt blindly for her, patted her on the butt. Gretyl took her hand. It was nice to have a kid-free moment. It had been a while. They held hands and Gretyl closed her eyes.

“I got a new scan today,” Iceweasel said. “The boys, too.”

Gretyl opened her eyes. “Oh.” She tried very hard to keep her voice neutral and failed.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

Iceweasel took her hand back and sat up. “There was a crowd doing it, moms and kids, now the scanners are burned in and working. You know it’s harmless.”

“I know you can’t be harmed by the scanning process, but—”

“But someone could steal your scan and do something terrible to us. I know. We’ve been through it. They’re locked to my private key, or a supermajority of our friends’ keys, the usual group, same one we use for the rest.”

Gretyl shook her head. “Fine.”

“Obviously, it’s not fine.”

“Explain why you would feel so threatened that you got yourself scanned, but not so threatened that you wouldn’t just leave?”

“Getting a scan gives us some insurance.”

“Insurance? As in, if your father kidnaps you, I can run a sim of you to raise our sons? If we all die, maybe our friends will run us in simulation and wear us around their necks and we can talk out of their tits for the rest of time?”

“My dad’s not going to kidnap me.” In the first five years of their relationship, Gretyl got good at spotting when Iceweasel changed the subject. In the years since, she’d got better at figuring out when to mention it. She didn’t mention it.

“How do you know?”

Iceweasel moved her arm off her face, spat out the straw and sat. “Because I heard from him.”

Gretyl literally boggled at her wife. “Say that again?”

“I heard from him. Come on, you know he’s sent me messages. I don’t answer. I never answer.”

“Before, we weren’t in his back-yard.”

“You’re being superstitious. It’s no harder for Jacob Redwater to get to any place than it is for him to get any other place. Distance isn’t what keeps us safe.”

Gretyl had also been married to Iceweasel long enough to recognize when her wife was right. She shut up and tried to stop fretting. The boys returned, looking for clothes suitable for a salvage mission. They were distracted by hosing them down and dressing them up. Then all was forgotten, or at least they could pretend.

[II]

THE ONSEN ROSE, brick by brick. Things got going when some of its crew fabbed construction mechas, which, of course, the boys wanted to pilot. The mechas ran automatically, and had fail-safes. Everyone agreed the boys were good at them, and, unlike adults, never bored of repetitive manual tasks, provided they got to pilot robots while they did it.

At first, they insisted the boys have nearby adult co-pilots holding dead-man’s switches, but there were no adults with the stamina to keep up with the boys’ drive to build. Also, the onsen was going up fast as it was thanks to their contribution. It would have been a dick move to slow them down.

“Parenting,” Iceweasel pronounced, “is the art of getting out of the way of your kids’ development.” That settled it.

Besides, it gave them more time together than they’d had since Stan was born.

It was a second honeymoon, spent in the heady first days of a – very small – new nation, former prisoners and their families adding more each day, powdering the steel bars of the jails for fabber feedstock, pumping out support struts, spun for minimum weight/materials, structural versions of the bikes they’d ridden, but with more fail-safes. Hoa and friends came for a three-day stay, cycling on more of the same. They found a group of excited ex-cons who wanted to know how the weird bikes worked. Now there were three workshops making variations on the theme. It was getting to the point where serious arguments were brewing about bicycle/pedestrian etiquette.

Gretyl had forgot how energizing revolutionary life was. Back in Gary, they were set in routine, the kind of thing you have to do if you’re raising kids and keeping some life for yourself. Here, no two days were alike. Every day brought new challenges, new solutions. It had been years since Gretyl was part of a place where there were serious arguments on the message boards. Here they raged, even erupting into fist-fights, cooled out by peacemakers who rose to the challenge.

Just as she was getting pleased with it all –

“Gretyl.” The way Iceweasel said it froze her. She’d heard Iceweasel sad, afraid, even panicked. But never had she heard that note in her wife’s voice.

“What?” Gretyl waved her interface surfaces clear, flicked her wrists to shake off the tasks she’d queued. Their shelter felt cramped, not cozy.

Iceweasel was sweating. Her eyes were wide. Gretyl felt her heart pick up the pace.

Another woman stepped through the doorway. She was...coiled. Not very tall, hair cut short and stylish, face all planes, maybe Slavic. Her posture was like a cat about to pounce. Gretyl couldn’t guess her age: older than Iceweasel, but in such excellent physical shape it was impossible to say by how much. She had small, square teeth, which she displayed in a quick smile. Gretyl knew who she had to be.

“You’d be Nadie?”

Nadie nodded minutely. “Gretyl.” She extended a hand. Dry. Strong. Callused. Perfect manicure, dun-colored polish, blunt tips.

Gretyl looked from Iceweasel to Nadie.

“How bad?”

“Limpopo is bringing the boys. Nadie has a helicopter.”

“A helicopter.”

Iceweasel’s hands shook. Gretyl wanted to take them, but she was irrationally, powerfully angry with her wife. This was the other part of being a professional revolutionary: people around you died, all the time. Now her boys, her children, who had the power to make her ache with a force that radiated from the pit of her stomach to the furthest tips of her extremities, just by looking over their shoulders at her with unclouded eyes and sweet mouths, were in the path of unimaginable force. There would be guns and worse. The videos from Akron ran all the time, quick animations dropped into message boards to make cheap points about the brutality of the outside world.

“How long?”

“Not long,” Nadie said. “There were long arguments, thankfully. Gave me time to get here. But now they’ve decided, they’re moving.”

“Why won’t they shoot down your helicopter?” Gretyl asked. Her heart thundered.

“Because it’s my helicopter,” Nadie said. She tilted her head. “Zotta.”

“Right.”

Iceweasel’s hands were fists. There came the welcome sound of boys’ voices and the stamp of machinery. Gretyl didn’t bother with the door. She kicked through the photo-reactive film wall, splintering the cool dark of the interior with a spray of sunlight.

The boys were each piloting mechas. Limpopo, Seth and Tam were riding on them, standing on the robots’ shoulders, clinging to the handles on their heads. The boys whooped as they pushed the machines as fast as they’d go, apparently under orders not to worry about what they trashed. The mechas’ arms flailed ahead of them, smashing tents and yurts out of the way.

Iceweasel and Nadie joined her, coming through the door. Gretyl saw Nadie assess the group, minutely shake her head.

“We won’t all fit in your helicopter, will we?”

She’d spoken to Nadie. Iceweasel looked at her sharply. “Gretyl, don’t be an asshole—” Gretyl knew that one. It went like this: I fucked up, now everything you say will remind me of that and make me furious. She knew it. Didn’t have time for it. She ignored her.

“Not enough,” Nadie said.

“How many?”

“I came to bring you four.”

Gretyl recognized evasion. “How many do you have room for, though?”

Limpopo dismounted, helped the boys while the rest climbed down. Gretyl spared them a glance, made sure they were dressed, had sun-hats. “Get water,” she said to Iceweasel. Air, clothes, water, food. Walkaway triage. “Food.” To Nadie: “How many?”

“I came for four.”

Motherhood had made a coward of her. She was ashamed, because she couldn’t say, If our friends don’t go, we don’t go. It wasn’t her life on the line anymore.

“Take us all.” She tried to mean it.

Iceweasel was back, yanking compression straps on their biggest backpack, misshapen with whatever she’d thrown into it.

“How many?”

Nadie gave her a perfectly unreadable look, looked back to Gretyl. “Could you choose?”

“I’d rather explain choosing to my kids than explain why there were empty seats next to them when people started dying.”

“Would it make a difference if I told you they were coming in nonlethal?”

“Like Akron?”

“Not like Akron.” They had an audience crowded around. Whatever they saw in their body-language kept them quiet. “Exactly not like Akron. Akron made martyrs. It hurt them all over the world. They’re coming in nonlethal, as police, to restore order, to investigate murders.”

“What murders?” Limpopo said. She was stooped, had a tremor, but asserted herself with a tone that stood two meters fifty and cut hard.

Nadie shook her head. “No time.” She looked at them. “I can take, uh, one more.”

They looked at each other. Gretyl said, “She has a helicopter.”

They looked at each other again.

“I’ll stay,” Gretyl said. Iceweasel shot her a look of shock and sorrow. Gretyl gave her a look that said she would not entertain argument. It didn’t get much use in their relationship. It meant something.

Limpopo said, “This is my home. I’ll bear witness. Die, if it comes to that.”

Etcetera said something soft from her collarbones, pitched for her hearing. A small smile touched her lips. She caressed the speaker.

“You can’t stay,” Iceweasel said. Stan started to cry, such a rarity that Jake bawled too. Gretyl hefted him onto one hip and let him bury his face in her throat. Gretyl looked at Limpopo’s face. She was struck by how different it was, how much the years in prison hadn’t just aged her, but changed her. Before, Gretyl had been struck by the pains Limpopo took not to appear to give orders or hint at having authority. Now, she was pure alpha, radiating unquestionable dominance.

“I’m not leaving,” Limpopo said with unshakable self-assurance.

It was Seth and Tam’s turn. They looked from Iceweasel to Gretyl. “Gretyl,” Seth said. “You’re a mother, you can’t—”

“I can.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I will. There’s some things you can’t run from.” She thought of her grad student and what they’d gone through. “I want my kids safe, but our family has no more right to be intact than anyone’s.” She wasn’t making sense, not even to herself. “I’ve done a lot of walking away.” She shrugged. “I’m going to stay.”

It might have gone on, except for Nadie. She cocked her head, listened to something in her cochlea, discreetly wiggled her fingers, narrowed her eyes. “We’re going.” She held out her hands to take Stan from Gretyl. Gretyl held him and kissed him and blinked hard to keep the tears back. She did the same to Jake. She consciously committed the boys’ smell to her memory, telling herself that she would never forget the smell and faces and voices of her beloved sons. Then she took her wife into her arms and held Iceweasel with an embrace that stretched back through the ages to their first rough, furtive groping, through the years of love and companionship, the hardships and absences, the reunions and the fights and reconciliations. It took everything she had and everything she didn’t even know she had not to cry, especially as she felt Iceweasel’s tears on her own cheeks, salty and as familiar as her own.

Nadie made an urgent sound. “Take-off in seven minutes. We’ll have to run.” She ran, Stan on her hip. Iceweasel scooped their other son and ran after her and Seth and Tam gave her a helpless look and ran too.

Then it was her and Limpopo.

“Do you want to see if there’s anything in the shelter you want to save?”

Gretyl, moving in a numb dream, went back into the shelter, prodded their bedding and scattered possessions. There were three blankets, two small and one large. The small ones smelled like the boys, the big one like Iceweasel. She took them in her arms. Jake’s stuffed mouse, Mousey, fell out of his blanket. She picked him up by his worn, chewed paw. He stared at her with beady eyes as she tucked him back into the blankets.

“You can put them with my stuff,” Limpopo said.

They walked at a fast clip to the prison. Limpopo was distracted, stumbling as she walked and talked into her interface and texted at the same time. Sometimes, she’d ask Etcetera to send a message. By the time they reached the sprawling camp at the prison gates, it was semi-panic as people raced inside the gates or away from the prisons altogether, carrying bundles on their backs. Children cried, but apart from that, it was very quiet. Clipped, tight voices, many in that odd pitch intended for interface mics, not human ears.

“Inside,” Limpopo said. Gretyl heard a helicopter rotor, far off, brought on the breeze, getting quieter as it flew away. She stopped in her tracks and brought her hands to her face. She really sobbed. Limpopo led her by the elbow, whispering it was okay, her family was safe. They had to move.

Gretyl let herself be led. Her mind had split, one fraction was overwhelmed with sorrow and self-recrimination. The other part – the part that made that decision – racing through strategy and tactics for whatever was coming. Nadie said the coming forces wouldn’t make martyrs of them, they were coming to show this was fighting crime, not fighting war. Not fighting for the existence of a society whose end was coming.

Walkaways had something the default side didn’t have: except for a few children, every walkaway had been default, once. Almost no one in default – and no one whom anyone listened to, period – had ever walked away. Gretyl found it easy to superimpose the default view on situations.

They would be perversely cheered by a fight, by prisoners and their supporters – criminals-once-removed – brawling and being gassed into submission and stacked like cord-wood.

If they fought back, it might be a massacre, but they wouldn’t be martyrs. They’d be ISIS, ideology-crazed monsters to be put down with whatever regrettable force was necessary.

All this while Gretyl still sobbed, each part of her observing the other with perverse fascination, wondering which one was the real Gretyl.

The boys’ prison attracted the hardcore networking freaks. They sent runners to the women’s prison asking for anyone with network experience to ride the faders on the routing algorithms that would rebalance their network infrastructure as parts of it were knocked out. Gretyl and Limpopo looked at one another.

“My place is here—” Limpopo began. One of her friends – the woman who’d shown them Limpopo’s bunk, whose name Gretyl couldn’t place amid the tense emotion – made a raspberry.

“Don’t be an idiot. You’re not our grandma, you’re just another con. We don’t need you here to look after us. Do your thing. Everyone knows you’re hot shit with programming and ops. Keeping our feeds running will do more to keep us strong than sticking your skinny old body between us and hired goons.”

Limpopo faked a punch, gave her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek and they were off.

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” They jog-trotted towards the men’s prison. “This place has more surveillance than anywhere you’ve ever been, by a factor of a hundred. Every centimeter is recorded all the time. Those feeds go into a data center that applies heuristics that ranks them so the guards can get it packaged as an infographic.”

Etcetera said, “You could package up an atrocity-feed. The worst stuff they do, pulled into a single feed that gets slicked together like a drama?”

“The idea is to prevent atrocities,” Gretyl said. “Nadie said they didn’t want martyrs, another Akron.”

They reached the gates as drones swarmed out of the skies, seeming to dive-bomb the prisons’ roofs.

“Uh-oh,” Gretyl said. Limpopo listened to a feed.

“No,” she said, “that was on purpose. They’re keeping a skeleton crew of aerial routers, enough for signals and telemetry, and landing the rest in Faraday cages until the first E.M.P. It’s a standard tactic, they say they used it in Nigeria, which makes no sense to me.”

“It was huge,” Gretyl said, “but they must have blocked it. Started with those floating cities off Lagos. Cut loose from the mainland in a walkaway uprising, literally, lost power and plumbing, didn’t have enough onboard to stay stable. Hired mercenaries from the subcontinent to pacify Lagos. The walkaways skunked them, kept their routers in boxes and released them in short bursts, mingling with the mercs’ drones so they’d have to pulse their own birds to get at the walkaways’. The feeds hardly bobbled. Made the mercs look like assholes.”

They arrived at an IT ops room in a third sub-basement. A young boy, no more than fourteen, gave them an enthusiastic tour of the ops center’s features – armored conduit joining it to hard-line fiber links and in-building conduit, backup batteries –

“It’s got its own air supply?” Gretyl said.

The boy shrugged. He was skinny, with a small afro and long arms and fingers, a face full of tilt-eyed mischief. “Every block’s got bulkheads they can bring down to just gas one little part of things. Cheap and effective, so long as your team’s got masks.” That explained all the kids in gas masks on the way in – the women’s prison had hardly any. They’d made their own from micropore kerchiefs and goggles. They’d passed a small, efficient assembly line on the way out.

It was a surreal vantage-point to witness the Battle of the TransCanada Prisons. They used private security on the front line, not mercs exactly. These were outsource cops, for-hire guys in uniform that cities with private police forces used – and other cities used to break police unions whenever they got uppity. Men and women in awesome body armor, stuff that looked like Hugo Boss from a cyberpunk revival, faceless and shielded, each an “army of one” with exoskeletons, scary burp-weapons. There were one hundred of them, with drone support and fast nonlethal foot-pursuit bots, headless cheetahs and dogs from alloy and soft solenoids, just enough smarts to run a target down and bear her to the ground, clobber her if she tried to get up before a signed all-clear.

The part of Gretyl that worried about her family receded as she and Limpopo fed the particulars to the global walkaway audience, wikiing countermeasures for every plan of attack they could conceive. Gretyl remembered her earlier thought about all walkaways having been defaults but not vice versa, wondered what the default counterintelligence operatives who monitored this made of it. They’d know this was what walkaways did, work in the open, but they also knew that when they fought each other, they used elaborate fake-outs. Would they be able to believe walkaways were just letting it all hang out, where enemies could see it?

The enemy forces formed a perimeter around the prison complex. The cameras tracked the drones’ overflight patterns, millimeter-wave, infra red, and backscatter.

The formalities: “All persons on these premises are subject to arrest. You will not be harmed if you come out with your hands in plain sight. You will have access to counsel. Human-rights observers are on hand to ensure the rule of law is respected. You have ten minutes.” The sound came from the prisons’ many speakers as well as bullhorns built into the front lines’ battle-suits. The fact they could still transmit audio to the internal speakers made every walkaway’s heart quail. It meant all the work walkaways had done to secure their nets and root out the back-doors left by TransCanada was insufficient. It implied the enemy had access to their cameras, could trigger the gas, seal the bulkheads –

The network ops boys scrambled, thundering fingers over their interfaces. Gretyl called up everything she’d learned about the network ops for TransCanada, things she’d tweaked when called on to help with something gnarly. Limpopo grabbed her arm, brought up infographics, started analytics on recent traffic to the audio servers. Etcetera got what she was looking at faster than Gretyl. He shouted at the boys, feeding them suggestions for ports to block, network traffic fingerprints to look for in the packet-inspectors.

Gretyl found calm in the knowledge they were inside one another’s decision loops. She handled diagnostics from walkaways watching the network, wordlessly updating models underpinning Limpopo’s infographics, noting as Limpopo integrated new data into her analysis.

In four minutes, they’d found four back-doors. Three were trivial, access accounts that should have been removed everywhere, but had been removed almost everywhere. The fourth was harder to de-fang, because it would require a whole-system reboot to catch. They solved it by building a big dumb filter rule that looked for anything that might be trying to log into it, dumping those packets on the floor. Just as they were finishing this hackwork, someone in Redmond messaged Gretyl urgently with one they’d missed, that maybe even defaults had missed, built in by the manufacturer for license-repossession for deadbeat customers who missed payments, which would let them put the whole system into minimal operation mode. In theory, you could only invoke this mode if you had Siemens’ signing key, but it would be naïve to assume that the Canadian spooks running this show didn’t have that.

“No way to know if that’s all of them,” Etcetera said, speaking the thought they were all thinking with machine bluntness.

“Nope,” Limpopo said.

Gretyl said, “Everyone off-site is looking. If there are more vulns, they’ll find them.”

“Eventually,” Etcetera said.

“You’ve got a backup,” Gretyl said. “What are you worrying about?”

“You.” That shut her up.

“You can be a total asshole,” Limpopo said, but without real rancor. The boys were tweaking their fixes, building in fallbacks, but they snickered at “asshole.”

“You have two minutes,” the voice said. This time it came only from the loudhailers outside, picked up by cameras aimed at the invaders. Some of their cameras were being blinded by pulsed light weapons, but that attack was designed for civilian institutions, not fortified prisons. TransCanada spent real money on redundant vision systems. Must have galled their shareholders to see all that money that could have been paid as dividends be diverted –

Gretyl’s phone rang, deep in her ear. She tapped it on, assuming it would be Iceweasel calling to make sure she was all right, which she appreciated and resented – I’m a little busy, babe – but it was a man’s voice.

“Is this Gretyl Jonsdottir?”

“Yes.” The call came on her friends-and-family-only ID. It wasn’t known to anyone who sounded like that.

“Where is Natalie Redwater?”

“Who is this?” Of course she knew.

“This is Jacob Redwater. Her father.”

Gretyl’s game-theory spun up, playing different gambits, trying different theories for what Jacob Redwater wanted. Undoubtedly he knew about her relationship with Iceweasel, must have known about the boys, known there was a Jacob Redwater II out there. He’d kidnapped Iceweasel, determined to make her into a zotta, into a Redwater. She’d hurt him where he was weakest, in the money, and he must have been furious.

He must feel some strange version of love for her. She’d known zottas at Cornell, patrons of her lab. She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to – many were witty conversationalists. But there was something... off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.

If she told Jacob Redwater that Iceweasel had gotten away, would he use his influence to make the attack on the prisons more violent? Or would he (could he?) pull forces off the prisons to chase down Iceweasel? More chilling: was Jacob Redwater working with Nadie? Had Nadie kidnapped Iceweasel perhaps to forge some alliance with the rest of the Redwater fortune?

She was spooking herself. She went for straightforward: “What do you want?”

“I would like to speak with my daughter.”

“That’s not possible.” She stuck to the truth, if not all of it.

“Ms Jonsdottir, I know you love my daughter.”

“That’s very true.”

“Hard as you find this to believe, I love her, too.”

You’re right, I do find that hard to believe. “I’m sure you do, in your way.” She didn’t mean to micro-agress him, but it slipped out. How could she let that pass?

He pretended he didn’t notice, though she was sure he had. “I don’t want—” He was overcome by some emotion, or a very good actor. Or both, she reminded herself. The zottas she knew were good at compartmentalizing, sociopath style, understanding other people’s emotions well enough to manipulate them, without experiencing actual empathy. “There are children,” he said. “Her children.”

“Mine, too,” Gretyl said.

“Yes.”

“Whatever is about to happen, it doesn’t have to happen to my daughter, or my grandchildren. Your children.”

“Where are you, Mr Redwater? Are you at the prison?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

She’d thought so – the background noise was an echo of the sounds she’d heard through the prisons’ outward cams.

“You knew they were coming.”

“I knew. That’s why I came. To keep Natalie safe.” There was a moment. “I could get you out.”

“Why aren’t you talking to—” She almost said, Iceweasel, then Natalie, settled for, “your daughter?”

“She won’t answer. It wasn’t easy to get this address for you, but I needed to get a message to her. I know you wouldn’t sacrifice your children for ideology.”

Fuck it. “You think Iceweasel would?”

“I think my daughter is justifiably angry at me. This means that I can’t explain certain... facts to her. We can’t even have this discussion.”

“They’re moving in on us, Mr Redwater. We can’t have this discussion if I’m under attack.”

“I can’t call them off.”

She didn’t say anything. Iceweasel paid enough attention to know Jacob Redwater’s branch of the family assumed control over the main dynastic fortune, making him the primary family power-broker. Gretyl would be surprised if they didn’t own a major stake in TransCanada, not to mention outsource cops.

“It’s not my call. Honestly.”

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about.” She disconnected. Limpopo stared thoughtfully.

“My in-laws are seriously fucked up.”

Etcetera laughed, a weird noise through the speaker. There was always something weird about sim laughter. Some sharp-defined edge to it, enforced by the sims’ bumpers. Gretyl had been scanned. Maybe this was how she’d laugh at her sons’ antics in the future.

Time ran out. The outsource cops’ drones plummeted in controlled dives, signaling impending attack. The boys in the data center made giddy, frightened noises as they landed their skeleton fleet, chasing the cops’ drones down, just as the first volley of bullets stitched the sky, tracking the drones, killing more than half before they landed. The hard-line fiber links went dead, except the ones that had been covertly dug up and spliced into direct-link microwave repeaters, far from the prison, out in farmers’ fields.

Gretyl and Limpopo’s fingers collided as they jabbed the same spots on the infographics, cutting service over to those links, tuning the caches and load-balancers to accommodate a sudden two-order-of-magnitude drop in throughput. Traffic in and out of the prisons was now queuing deeply in repeaters’ caches. Out in the world, other caches were doing the same. The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, Gretyl thought, and grinned at the ancient, pre-walkaway slogan. It had been true for a while, then a metaphor, then wishful thinking, and now it was a design specification.

She was in the zone, a human co-processor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart. The part of her that railed and wept when she sent her wife and children away and stayed behind woke briefly and noted that this was the real reason she’d done it. This incredible feeling of strength and connection to something larger. It had been years since Gretyl felt this. Now she felt it again, she realized how much she’d missed it. Living in a better nation was preferable to living in a worse one – but living in the nation’s first days was the difference between falling in love and being in love. She was cheating on her wife. Carrying on an affair with armed insurrection.

The prisons had defenses. The oncoming forces knew exactly what they were. The crowd had ideas about this. As the mechas with the battering rams stepped into position before each gate, the prison’s own anti-camera dazzlers came to life, lancing beams of powerful, broad-spectrum light directly into the mechas’ sensors. They were shielded against this, but imperfectly, meaning the mechas had to slow down and rely on ultrasonic sensing to guide their passage. The defenders triggered the prison’s sonic antipersonnel weapons, relocated from the cellblocks to the outside walls. The mechas slowed more. Then the defenders opened up with the water cannon.

Under normal circumstances, the water jets wouldn’t bother the mechas. They had excellent gyros. In a pinch they could assume three-point stances for stability. But they were attached to each other by the rams they held in two-by-two grids. The jets hit them from different angles, so the front ones’ corrective shuffling further unbalanced the rear ones, and vice versa. The water-cannoneers set up a rhythm that pushed them further off balance. Within minutes, two of the mecha teams were sprawling. The third retreated in unsteady steps.

Gretyl heard cheers, saw jubilation in the chats. She knew this was only a skirmish. They were hugely, physically overmatched. The private cops withdrew behind their armor and a volley of RPGs streaked through the air, bullseyeing each water cannon and the apertures for the anti-photo beams. They’d expected it, but it was terrifying nevertheless, even as the channels filled up with damage manifests, estimating the total cost to TransCanada’s physical plant, watching the company’s share price slide down, as default analysts reading over their shoulders changed their bets on whether TransCanada was going to end up with usable plant or smoking rubble at the end of the day.

Her phone rang again.

“Hello.”

There was latency-lag, then Jacob Redwater’s voice, flanged and compressed. “I want to speak to my daughter.”

“You’ve made that clear to her on more than one occasion.”

There was a long pause. “Her mother died last year.”

“You have my condolences.”

“I couldn’t find a way to tell her.”

“I’ll make sure she knows.”

The boys in the data center lofted a swarm of drones, including some they’d hidden in the woods, behind the enemy lines. The drones’ feed showed the enemy forces, disciplined and still, poised for their next assault. The damaged mechas limped to the back. The enemy opened fire on their drones. The boys kicked them into automated high-intensity evasive maneuvers that would lop their batteries’ duty-cycles in half. Nearly all survived the first round, though their video feeds turned to a scramble of nauseating roller-coaster footage. The boys’ hadn’t sent them in random patterns – each one ended up in proximity to an enemy surveillance-drone, riding its tail. When the ground forces opened up with HERF weapons that fried the drones and knocked them out of the sky, they also took out their own aircraft.

“Good work!” Gretyl shouted over her shoulder at the boys, who didn’t need anyone to tell them – they were dancing with victory. Meanwhile, the drones’ brief flights had managed to clear 75 percent of the network backlogs, massively relieving the congestion on their surviving fiber.

Jacob Redwater said, “Your supply of drones is limited. We can get resupplies.”

“Yes. We can’t win this with force.”

The external speakers clicked on. A voice spoke: “Gordy, this is Tracey. Your sister Tracey, Gordy. I know we haven’t spoken since I walked away, but I want you to know that I love you. I’m safe and happy. I think about you every day. You have a niece now, we called her Eva, for Mom. The way we live here is better than I ever thought. People are nice to each other, Gordy, the way it was when we were kids. I trust my neighbors. They look out for me. I look out for them. We’re not terrorists, Gordy. We’re people default had no use for. We’ve found a use for each other. Gordy, you don’t have to do this. There are other ways to live. I love you, Gordy.” Another voice, a baby, crying. “That’s Eva, Gordy. She loves you, too. She wants to see her uncle.”

The feeds zoomed in on one of the front-liners, a man, whose shoulders shook. This had to be Gordy. The crowd had identified him through gait analysis, doxxed him, walked his social graph, found a hit in a walkaway town in Wyoming, gotten Tracey out of bed, recorded the message.

The silence stretched. The private cop beside Gordy put a tentative hand on his shoulder. Gordy shook it off violently, shoving him away.

The moment stretched. Then Gordy shucked his gauntlets with a flick of his wrists, sending them to clatter in the road. His bare fingers worked the catches of his visor, until it yawned open. His face was an indistinct moving blur, brown with camera-corrected streaks of white where his teeth and eyes were. He took his helmet off, shucked his weapons, let them fall around his feet.

The cops around him stared, body-language telegraphing the open mouths behind their visors. He walked off, orthogonal to the jails and the cops’ lines, up 15 toward Ottawa, toward the dairies and dells of eastern Ontario.

He walked away.

The silence was something holy, church silence. It was a miracle, battlefield conversion.

“Akin!” the voice was amplified, from behind cop lines, loud enough to rattle the glass. “Get back into line, Akin!” It was a command voice, an asshole-tightening order-giving voice. Gordy’s shoulders stiffened. Gordy kept walking, divesting himself of more body armor, dropping the jacket into the road behind him as he walked. His head was high, but his shoulders shook like he was crying.

One of the cops in the front line raised his gun, muzzle big as a cannon, built to send focused, bowel-shredding ultrasonic at its target: the prolapsizer, they called it. The man whose hand had been flung off Gordy’s shoulder tackled the man with the gun before he could aim. They writhed on the ground until they were pulled apart by more cops, and stood, facing one another, held by the arms, chests heaving.

Gordy disappeared over a hill.

Jacob Redwater’s breath was noisy on Gretyl’s phone.

“We can’t win this with force.” She hung up as the next announcement started playing through the prisons’ outward-facing speakers.

In the middle of the third announcement, the cops opened fire on the speakers, more RPGs. The prisoners switched to backups, out of sight behind the roof line. When the cops’ drones went up for a look, they were harried by more walkaway drones, which chased them around the sky and even suicided on two cop drones. While the air battle raged, they got four more announcements out. They got five walkouts from seven announcements. The crowd was going fucking bananas on the boards. They doxxed the cops on the lines as fast as they could, running their graphs, finding more people to record messages.

Gretyl shook her head in amazement as the recordings came in. In the men’s prison, someone was playing D.J., queuing them up. In the women’s prison, someone else was doing the same. One of the boys in the control room did for the cops out front of their institution. She had been skeptical of the plan.

It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes – or family Christmas dinners – away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.

Announcements eight through ten played on the parapet speakers, before the cops brought out mortars – mortars! – to attack the walls, bringing them down in piles of rubble amidst mushrooming dust clouds. TransCanada’s stocks plummeted. The contagion spread to all those other places where walkaways were holed up – universities, research outfits, all those refugee detention centers. When the market saw what it was going to take to get those facilities back to default ship-shape, investors panic-sold. They always panic-sold, every time one of these fights broke out. Even the true believers in zotta superiority sold. The root of credit was credo: belief. Watching rent-a-cops bring out their big guns to wipe out speakers had an enormous impact on the market’s animal sentiments: their belief system was crashing, just as it had every other time.

More drones: with speakers, crowd-control drones that came stock with the prison, so big they needed extra avionics to course-correct them from the vibrations of their own speakers.

The drones homed in on the men and women they’d targeted, turned them into spectacles as their squad-mates stared at armored cops haloed by circling drones, too close to their bodies to shoot down safely, even with armor. What if their hydrogen cells blew? What if they were booby trapped?

When the order went out to rotate those unlucky bastards, they trudged toward the APCs at the back of the formation, circled by buzzing drones that haunted them like outsized, big-voiced fruit-flies. In one case, a drone managed to slip inside the APC with its target. The big tank-like car rocked on its suspension as cops inside chased it around, freaking like a church-load of parishioners chasing a lost bat. The video from that drone was a tilt-a-whirl confusion of fish-eye claustrophobia. Eventually, motion stopped as the drone was smashed to the APC’s deck. A moment later, the hatch of the APC opened and three more cops walked away, two women and a man. The man and one of the women argued with the other woman, maybe trying to convince her to stay, but they all left their weapons by the roadside as they struck off for Ottawa.

Things settled. The prisoners had damned few ways to make contact with the cops now, which meant that there could be no negotiation. There had been none before.

Gretyl’s phone rang.

“You have to get Natalie out of there. Now.”

Gretyl felt her guts curdle. Maybe it was a zotta trick to flush them out by making them think the big push was coming. Redwater wasn’t above that. But he sounded desperate in an un-Redwater way.

“No one is coming out until we can all come out.” She carefully avoided confirming Iceweasel’s present location. She guessed this meant Nadie wasn’t working for the old man, because otherwise she’d have let him know his precious bloodline was safe.

“The children—”

“There are many children in here. Why does it matter if they’re related to you?”

He made a puppy noise, between a bark and a whimper. “You evil bitch.”

“I’m not the one with all the guns. Are you here, Mr Redwater? Can you see what’s going on?”

“I can see it. It’s good theater. I’m sure your friends are excited by it, Gretyl. But it won’t matter in five minutes.”

“If I’ve only got five minutes left, I’d better savor them.” She hung up on him again.

“Why don’t you block him?” Limpopo said.

“Because so long as she keeps talking to him, she might be able to convince him not to let his buddies blow our asses up,” Etcetera said.

Gretyl shook her head. “That’s not it.” She looked at the infographics, watched network traffic flow, wondered if it was true that Jacob Redwater could be their savior, whether he was the reason their network links were up at all, so he could call her. “Maybe that’s part of it. But this is the asshole who took my wife away, fucking kidnapped her. It’s not nice, but I’m enjoying making him squirm.”

Limpopo shrugged. “Your last minutes on Earth, and you’re spending them exacting petty revenge? It’s your life, I guess.”

It cut. It was true. Limpopo had always been better at big picture and living the moment. Prison had made her even more stoic. Gretyl tried to imagine what she had endured over the years.

The network links went abruptly dead, their drones shot out of the sky at the same time as the fiber lines cut off.

“Guess I won’t get a chance to apologize to the old bastard.” She groped for Limpopo’s hand. Her grip was dry and her hand felt frail, but it was warm, and it squeezed back.

“I love you, Limpopo.”

“I love you, too.”

“Me too,” said Etcetera.

“Thank you.”

They squeezed their hands tight.

The boys chattered like monkeys in a tree. Some asked impatient questions of the two old ladies holding hands and staring at infographics, but Gretyl and Limpopo had nothing to tell them.

The cameras still brought feeds from outside, because the local net still ran, still spooled its footage for exfiltration to the rest of the world. The police lines tightened. There were no more identifiable humans in them. They were all inside the mechas and the APCs, or pulled way back behind the police buses and the administrative trailers that came in on flatbeds. The strategists on the other side wouldn’t risk more psy-ops from the prisoners, even if it meant fighting from behind armor. The tactics of mechas and APCs were primarily lethal, everyone knew it. You couldn’t arrest someone from inside a huge semi-tank or killer robot suit. You could stun them or kill them, but you couldn’t read them their rights or handcuff them.

The mechas stepped forward smartly and planted charges around the surviving perimeter walls, scampered back on three legs, flattening for the explosion that shook the walls down, making the foundations shake, even in their sub-basement.

The cameras on that wall went dark. They retasked cams from the interior courtyard to their infographic feeds, watched the exercise repeated. The APCs rolled, forming an armored wall, the mechas stepped over them, planted fresh charges, retreated. Gretyl reflexively checked to see what the markets were doing, but of course, there was no external feed. It didn’t matter for them. The ending was coming. First days of a better nation. Last moments of the worn-out, fragile physical bodies of some stupid, imperfect walkaways. Gretyl didn’t let herself dissociate, made herself look at the screens, watch the wall come down, the cameras go dark. She squeezed Limpopo’s hand harder.

Her phone rang.

She looked at the infographics, saw somehow, the networks were back online. The networks, which the cops had physically seized, pwned with actual wire-cutters, were online again. Her phone rang.

“Please.” He was crying.

“Mr Redwater?”

“Please. I can’t—”

She almost relented. Go ahead, kill us, your daughter and grandsons are far from here. It was a reflexive thought, common mercy for an old man whose voice cracked with sorrow.

“If you can’t, you shouldn’t. Everyone here has someone who will weep for their deaths. If you have power to stop things—” He clearly did, how else to explain the network link, the mechas and the APCs now still in the courtyards, facing the ruined façades, offices and store-rooms sitting naked to the air, fourth walls removed, looking like sets for dramas. “If you can do anything to stop this, you could save their lives.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You won’t.”

“Can I – Will you come speak with me about it?”

“Mr Redwater, with all due respect, I am not a fucking idiot, you kidnapping, evil fuck.” She said it evenly, but her pulse raced. Limpopo gave her a silent cheer.

“Can I come in, then? Alone?”

She thought. It wasn’t likely a zotta would turn suicide-bomber – blackmail or brainwash someone else to be a suicide-bomber, sure, but not risk their own skin. At the rate things were going, they were all going to die in hours, possibly minutes.

“I don’t think anyone here would object to that. As to what happens out there, with all those weapons and tanks and killer robots—”

“That’s my lookout.” He sounded in control of his emotions now.

“Leave our feeds up. No safe conduct if we can’t reach the outside world.”

There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected, but when he spoke, she heard a single clipped plosive as he unmuted his mic. He’d been talking to someone else.

“Out of my hands. But I’ve made a request.”

She shrugged. “It’s the boys’ prison. The southernmost one.”

Quickly, she tapped out a message to the rest of the walkaways, the ones in the jails and in the crowd, explaining Jacob Redwater had asked for safe passage so that he could talk to his daughter’s wife. She implied, but didn’t state, that Iceweasel and the boys were in the building. As the crowd voraciously doxxed Iceweasel’s dad and parceled up tremendous quantities of information on the sprawling Redwater empires, Limpopo and Gretyl whispered to one another about what would happen next.

“It sounds like he’s snapped,” Limpopo said. “Some kind of shear between Jacob Redwater, zotta, and Jacob Redwater, human. Deathbed conversion or something. You said his wife died?”

“Yeah, but from what Iceweasel said, they were basically divorced for most of her life, in all but name. She had a sister, don’t know what became of her. I’m sure he’s got access to as much company as he wants.”

“Whatever else he was, he was charming,” Etcetera said. “In that smart, sociopathic way. Fun to argue with, if you weren’t his daughter.”

“There he is,” Limpopo said. The boys gathered around their screen as they zoomed and error-corrected the feed from the remaining cams in the inner courtyard. He was dressed in bottle-green cords and a down vest over a long-sleeved shirt. His hair was white, but his face was smooth, his posture erect. He walked slowly and purposefully. He was old, but he didn’t look frail.

“Can one of you get him, please?” Gretyl said to the boys. “I don’t want to go up in case he’s planning to snatch me.”

The boys argued over who would do it. A kid named Troy, sixteen with a short afro, an easygoing smile and, smart, fast eyes, won. He raced away. A moment later, they watched him on the screen, talking with Jacob Redwater, leading him.

“This oughta be good,” Etcetera said.

Gretyl wondered where Iceweasel was, whether she was seeing this. There was a lot of clamor from the crowd to livecast her talk with Redwater. She said no, firmly, while agreeing to record and release it later, depending on whether there was a later.

Jacob Redwater came into the control room, preceded by a bow-wave of understated cologne. Gretyl stood and looked him up and down, looking for bulges indicating guns or other surprises. Not that they had to bulge much these days, and not that she knew much about what kind of bulges they made.

His face was impassive. He’d been crying, minutes ago, broken and lost. Now he wore the zotta mask, two parts charming sophisticate, one part dead-eyed predator. A man who could make entertaining conversation over dinner, then go home and bankrupt your employer and put you on the street.

“Hello, Gretyl.” He stood before Troy like Troy had a gun in his back and he was pretending that it wasn’t there.

“Hello, Mr Redwater.” She extended her hand.

His hand was warm and firm. “Call me Jacob.”

Limpopo gave him a funny look. Gretyl remembered Jacob Redwater had set her up to be rendered to this prison, ripped from family and everything dear to her. She was used to thinking of him as the man who’d sired and kidnapped her wife, but he was Limpopo’s arch-nemesis. She wondered if Limpopo would shiv the bastard, who surely deserved it. She was about to lunge to take out her frail old friend, frailer alongside this vigorous, unthinkably rich man, but Limpopo held her hand out.

“Limpopo.” He tilted his head, straining to recognize her.

“Hello, Jacob.”

“Nice to see you,” said Etcetera. Redwater’s eyes widened. He started at the speaker between her collarbones. “It’s me, Hubert. I’m dead.”

“I see. Nice to talk to you again, even so.”

Troy brought him a chair. The three sat together, boys clustered at the room’s other end, ostentatiously not listening while ferociously eavesdropping.

Redwater said nothing. Gretyl put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, arching her back to work the creak and ache of sitting and terror out. “What did you want to talk about, Jacob?”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You don’t want your daughter hurt. You’re indifferent to what happens to the old dyke she’s shacked up with.”

He shook his head. “I don’t care about your sexuality. My cousin is gay, you know.”

“I know. That’s the reason you’re running the family fortune these days.”

He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. You can believe that if you want. The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing.”

“Money.”

“Power. Money’s just keeping score.”

“Must have really fucked you off when Iceweasel gave her share to that merc.” She wanted him to squirm. She’d expected him to be the weeping man on the phone. She didn’t want to die with the sight of him erect and proud burned into her optic nerve, proof the sun would never set on the zotta empire.

He nodded. “It made things complicated in our family. But it wasn’t fatal. Nadie and I are on good terms these days, believe it or not.”

Gretyl kept her best poker face, willing herself not to give away the fact that Nadie had Iceweasel and the boys with her.

“I would like to see my daughter and my grandsons.”

“I think you gave up that right when you had her kidnapped, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said. They looked at her. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “When you had me disappeared.”

“When you had me murdered,” Etcetera said.

Redwater was impassive. Gretyl thought she saw anxious tells, sudden realization by this arrogant princeling that he was three levels underground, surrounded by people who owed him a debt of violence.

He spoke carefully. “I didn’t say I had a right to it. The things that happened were beyond regrettable. They were terrible. I brought Natalie home because I knew there was trouble ahead for you and your friends. The murders of those two security operators tipped things over the edge. There was no way things would be business as usual after that. I wanted her safe. The things that followed, what happened to you, were nothing to do with me.”

She and Limpopo started to speak at once, broke off, looked at each other. Limpopo made a “go ahead” gesture. “He’s your father-in-law.” She smiled sardonically.

Jacob Redwater returned the smile, pretending he didn’t notice its venom.

“What murders, Jacob?”

“The two people that Zyz lost at the ‘university’ complex. Went in, never came out. That was bad enough. But then we discovered that they’d been captured and subsequently executed – euthanized – that their remains had been desecrated—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gretyl said. But she knew. For the first couple years, the deadheading bodies of those two mercs had been like unwanted family heirlooms, dutifully lugged from one place to another, scans cared for and backed up. Back when she was on the move all the time, the arrangements for their care had been a constant reminder of the terrible thing they’d done in the tunnels of Walkaway U, Tam’s dire warnings, the obligation they’d created for themselves. Once they’d settled in Gary and moved the two bodies, or people, or whatever, into canopic jars in the basement, automatically tended as they slept in endless, blank-faced, brain-dead stasis, she’d managed to put them out of mind – mostly.

“So you kidnapped her and deprived her of clothes and companionship because you had her best interests at heart?”

“Yes. Because I knew the alternative was much worse. Death. As you discovered. That’s why I’m here. Because, whether or not you believe this, I love my daughter. I raised her. I held her when she was born. I told her bedtime stories. I changed her diapers. She is my flesh and blood. I am a part of her, always will be. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want my grandchildren to die.”

“But we can all die?” Limpopo said. “No especial reason to keep us around. Apart from generating income for TransCanada, we’re surplus.”

He shrugged. “Not my department. I’m interested in my family. Your family can look out for you.”

“That’s mighty white of you, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said.

Gretyl almost asked him how much diaper changing and storytelling he did, how much of it was delegated to au pairs. She couldn’t see the point. Jacob Redwater was exactly what he seemed: a zotta who cared about getting things he wanted, didn’t give a shit about what happened to everyone else. However much diaper changing he’d done, it was enough to reinforce whatever part of him believed kidnapping his daughter was an acceptable alternative to stopping his pals from killing everyone within ten klicks of her.

She stared at his excellent skin tone and the muscular shoulders under his vest. He looked like he was having a day off at the cottage, someone in a stock-art photo advertising a line of fine outdoor/casual clothing. Burnished by his years, not battered. Not like Gretyl, not like her friends. She walked away because she couldn’t be a party to making men like this immortal gods. They didn’t need her help.

“Your daughter doesn’t want to see you.” It was true. She didn’t have to ask Iceweasel – she’d never wavered on that.

“She named her son after me.”

“We named our son after you so she’d never forget what she turned her back on. I didn’t understand at first. She explained that she wanted to make a Jacob Redwater that wouldn’t be remembered as a selfish monster.”

He was impassive.

“Holy shit.” A boy pointed to the screens.

They followed his finger. There, walking up Highway 15, was a big crowd. Hundreds of people. At the front, still in remains of uniforms and body armor, were the cops who had walked away. They split into three smaller groups, walked right into the private cops who tried to stop them from entering the prisons’ inner courtyards, scuffling briefly as they tried to decide how much force they could use against these newcomers. Then they were beyond the cops, between them and the prisons. They linked arms and sat down in front of the buildings, saying nothing. The walkaway ex-cops sat in the middle. Gretyl understood the crowd around the world hadn’t stopped when the feeds went dead.

On cue, new drones buzzed the courtyard, all kinds, including network relay. She saw the massive expansion in bandwidth from her seat, surging over the infographics in a flood of blue that went green as the caches on both sides of the link emptied and the congestion cleared – they were in sync with the world.

Jacob Redwater looked... quizzical. He narrowed his eyes. As the boys waved the feeds to zoom over the whole wall, he gave a minute head-shake, as if to say that’s not right.

What had Nadie said? They don’t want another Akron. They don’t want martyrs. If they bomb the place, it will be with the cameras off. They were into new tactical territory now, on both sides. There had been many assaults on walkaway strongholds by default regimes – religious fundamentalists in America and Saudi Arabia; no-insignia mercs in Ukraine, Moldova and Siberia; storm troopers backed by huge, network-killing information weapons in China. There had been advances and retreats. Never this kind of siege.

Gretyl’s phone rang. She knew from the buzz it was her wife. She whooshed out a sigh.

“We’re okay.” She knew Gretyl would have been quietly freaking after a protracted radio silence.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. The boys love you. Are you okay? We’ve been watching it here. The boys are livid that they didn’t get to stay and help with the drones. They’re not quite clear on the danger. I don’t want to worry them.”

“Don’t.” She was keenly aware of Jacob Redwater straining to hear, wishing she’d learned how to do that subvocalization thing with her interfaces. She’d never had much call for private audio-spaces – too much of a hermit.

“Don’t? Oh, worry them. Are you okay? Can you talk?”

“I can.”

“But not much. Why? Who’s there? What’s going on? Are you safe?”

She sighed. Her wife was good at a lot of things, but covert ops wasn’t one of them.

“Your father is here.”

It was an eerie silence, silence of an over-compressed audio channel discarding background noise. “Is he going to hurt you?” She sounded cold.

“He would have a hard time doing that. He’s locked in with us, in a sub-basement of the boys’ prison, a control center. He wanted to talk to you and since you wouldn’t take his calls, he called me.”

Jacob Redwater was thinking hard about where Iceweasel was. What it meant that she had to have this explained.

“Of course he’d know how to get in touch with you. You going to ransom him?”

She couldn’t stop the smile. Because she was expecting it, she got between Jacob Redwater and the door as he stood suddenly, knocking over his chair. He came at her. She remembered what a fit, gym-toned, personally trained, technologically tuned bad-ass he was. She was about to get slugged. That’s when Troy landed on his back and bore him to the ground, arms locked around his neck. The other boys each took a limb and sat on it.

“Gretyl?” She sounded alarmed.

“No problems. Give me a sec?”

She looked down at Jacob Redwater’s face. He was calm, like he was relaxing with a glass of wine in his den, not lying on a concrete floor with four juvenile delinquents sitting on him. “Jacob, Iceweasel and the boys left before this started. They’re safe. Would you like me to ask Iceweasel if she’d be interested in talking to you?”

“Not if I was starving to death and he was the only drive-through on Earth,” Iceweasel said, making Gretyl snort. It was crueler and more gloat-y than she’d intended. She caught herself before she apologized to the spread-eagled zotta.

“I know the answer. Do I get to leave?”

“Why should we let you? This place is full of handcuffs and cells. We could lock you up, make sure whatever happens to us happens to you. It might not stop them from nuking us. Then again, it might.”

“Probably not. I used up everything I had, stopping things so I could get in here. Giving into me cost them a lot—” He nodded toward the screens, where private cops and the walkaways faced each other beneath a canopy of drones. “The people calling the shots wouldn’t mind losing me. It would destabilize things, but it would also set an example for the next time something like this happens. I’m not the only powerful person related to someone on your side, you know. Object lessons are expensive. It’s wasteful to pass them up when they’re available.”

“They’re not going to kill you,” Limpopo said. “Not Jacob Redwater. We’ve seen your board seats. Too many people owe you too much, depend on you too much—”

Etcetera interrupted – beyond weird, Limpopo and her collarbones arguing – “That means there’s people who would love to step into his shoes.”

Redwater shrugged best as he could. “You’re both right. If I died here with you, there would be hell to pay. But very powerful people would get the chance to make themselves much more powerful. The reason I was allowed to do what I did was that it’s a fully hedged risk. Delighted if I die, delighted if I don’t.”

“He probably makes a new scan every morning after breakfast,” Etcetera continued, with machine smugness. “He’d be up and running on a huge cluster by dinner.”

“Not that often. But I’m current, and they’ve dry-run my sims. There’s messy probate questions, so it wouldn’t be dinner, exactly.”

Gretyl hated how he could be pinned to the floor in hostile territory and still be calm and in charge.

“Gret?”

“Sorry, I kinda forgot about you. Look, darling, I should go. I love you. I love the boys. You are my world.”

“We love you, too.” She was crying. Gretyl blinked hard and made herself not cry. Jacob Redwater watched her closely.

Then Iceweasel made a surprised noise. Gretyl jumped. “What is it?” She saw the monitors and gasped.

The private cops were retreating, rank by rank, into the APCs, which were pulling out in an orderly fashion. The cops faced out, toward the prison, as they waited their turn to board their vehicles. As if this wasn’t amazing enough, a cop broke ranks, took off her helmet and dropped her gun, just as others did earlier that day, and crossed over to the walkaway lines. Two more did it. The orderly retreat stopped being orderly. Cops milled about. Many looked like they were listening intently to voices in their helmets. Some talked avidly to one another. They called out jokey, comradely farewells to the ones who’d crossed over.

Jacob Redwater was at a loss. He watched the spectacle, craning his neck from the floor. The expression on his face was the closest thing to fear that Gretyl imagined she’d ever see.

“What do you think, Jacob?” The laugh in Gretyl’s voice was involuntarily mean. “They pulling out so they can nuke us and send a message? Or are they getting out before the stock market melts down and their guard labor walks out?”

“May I sit?”

“Not my decision.”

The boys looked at each other and got up. He sat and worked his shoulders.

“I’m leaving.” He was still transfixed by the feeds. One of the APCs was disrupted by a cop who climbed back out and deserted.

Gretyl looked at him. He was still upright and unwavering, armored with dignity.

“Jacob, I know there will always be people like you.”

“Rich people.”

“People who think other people are like them. People who think you either take or get took. We’ll never be rid of that. It’s a primal fear, toddler selfishness. The question is whether people like you will get to define the default. Whether you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, doing for all of us before we do to you, meaning we’re all chumps if we’re not trying to do to you sooner. That default was easier to maintain when we didn’t have enough. When we didn’t have data. When we couldn’t all talk to each other.”

“Okay.” No hint of overt sarcasm, all the more sarcastic for it.

“We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”

“Okay.” He was a little paler. Maybe that was wish fulfillment.

“I think your ride is leaving,” Gretyl said. She was elated. The fatalistic acceptance of her impending destruction uncoiled from her chest, turned to victorious song. The part of her that had been emotionally prepared to die caught up to the part of her that knew she wouldn’t have to. She wanted to drink everything that could be drunk, fuck and sing, build a bonfire and dance naked around it. She was almost dead. Now she would live. Forever, perhaps.

“Good-bye. I’ll tell Iceweasel and the kids that you asked after them.”

That hit. He oofed like he’d been gut-punched. She felt like a sudden and total asshole. Whatever kind of monster Jacob Redwater was, he was someone to whom family mattered, in a twisted, coercive way. She almost apologized. She didn’t. She thought she would, but he was gone. Limpopo hugged her ferociously, Etcetera muttered into her cleavage from his speaker. The boys whooped and danced.

“I love you,” Iceweasel said.

“I love you, too, darling. I’m coming home.” She wiped tears of joy off her face. “Unless you and the boys want to come back and stay for a while?” She knew it was a stupid thing to ask. She wanted to keep the first days rush alive for a little longer, before going back to the ongoing days default they’d built in Gary.

“No,” Iceweasel said. She groped for more words, but apparently none came. “What happened to my father?”

“He left. Intact.”

“I think I see him now.”

Gretyl looked at the screen. There he was, walking away, a phalanx of private cops escorting him behind their lines, back to the command vehicles. “That’s him.”

“Fuck,” Iceweasel said. Gretyl’s heart ached and grew two sizes when she heard the boys giggling at their mom’s swearing. What had she been thinking, putting herself in danger? Risking never seeing her wife, her beautiful boys, ever again? What madness came over her? Was she secretly suicidal? “When will you leave?”

“Tomorrow or a little later. There’s bound to be a lot of people moving around, next couple days. Hoa might bring bikes. Whatever makes sense.”

“Will you bring Limpopo?”

She looked at Limpopo, who watched with frank interest. Stooped and old, eyes blazing, take-no-shit attitude you could see from orbit. Gretyl knew from the first time she’d seen Limpopo that the woman was a fucking superhero.

“Iceweasel wants to know if you’ll come with me.”

Limpopo didn’t hesitate. “No. There’s things here I want to help with. It’s my place. I bought it with fourteen years of my life. There are lots of fights to come, and I want to be here with the people who fought for this place. I’ll stay.”

“You hear that?”

“Tell her we love her. Tell her that she has a home here, too. Any time.”

Gretyl said it. Limpopo nodded gravely. The boys watched them wide-eyed, still shocked from the sudden lifting of their death-sentence.

Etcetera added, “Tell the other Limpopo she doesn’t have to worry about me coming back any time soon.”

“I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort.”

It turned out that sims could harumph. It was a new one on Gretyl.