Wang ascended the stairs of the modest building until he reached the third floor. He knocked on Ma Jie’s door, and it opened, and there she was, in a long silken gown that made him hunger for what was beneath.

“I’ve missed you, my love,” she said.

Wang smiled and stepped into his lover’s embrace.

A hundred kilometers away, the Avatar smiled. This, at last, looked like a way to reach her children.

38
Minor Anarchy

Saturday 2040.11.17

“I wish I was going with you,” Rangan said again.

“You want to get caught?” Tempest snapped, her face a checkerboard of black and white. “You want to take us all down with you?”

“Leave off, Tempest,” Cheyenne sighed, hoisting a bag from the floor, her face similarly painted. “Not like you wanna be recog…”

“Hey!” Tempest interrupted.

Something flashed between their minds. Rangan caught the bare edge of it. Tempest silencing Cheyenne, before she revealed something.

Rangan grimaced.

These three knew almost everything about him.

He didn’t even know their real names.

Beggars can’t be choosers, he thought.

“I just want to see how the mesh works,” he said.

“You want to make yourself useful?” Tempest asked. “Check what I told you about the chemreactor hack. I don’t trust it.”

Rangan opened his mouth.

“The mesh is going to work great,” Angel said from behind him, before he could speak. She patted his arm as she walked by. “Thanks for your help.”

Rangan closed his mouth and nodded. He’d been able to help a little. He wasn’t quite as horribly rusty as he’d feared. Coding was still coding.

Angel walked over to the one blank wall, next to Tempest and Cheyenne.

They were dressed and face-painted as court jesters, costumes that gave them an excuse for the high contrast blocks of white and black across their faces that conveniently threw off most of the cues that facial recognition software looked for. The rest of their costumes were made up of flamboyant patchwork clothes in matching and horribly clashing patterns and colors that went with the face paint; no wigs this time, but tall pointy hats that covered their real hair and conveniently contained the Nexus-boosting antennae they’d built.

And juggling balls and pins, which in turn necessitated gear bags, which in turn created plenty of space for doses of Nexus. Many, many doses of Nexus.

“Alright, Axon,” Tempest said. “Camera three.”

Rangan nodded, stepped back to the table with surveillance cameras, and picked up the one she’d specified.

“Alright,” he said, as brightly as he could, trying to ignore the obvious tension coming off their minds, to make this a moment of fun, of lightness. “Time for your close-ups!”

Tempest scowled.

“Come on,” he said, panning the camera across their faces, “You are undoubtedly the hottest three-person, all-female, DC-based, hacker collective with the goal of bottoms-up neural-software based…”

Angel laughed at him.

Cheyenne rolled her eyes.

Tempest flipped him off.