BREND’S: $23.99
Kel was smiling about the night’s work. It was a quick follow-up for an exclusive aftershave called Brend’s™. We had placed the actual product three nights before. Brend’s™ had a very particular, complicated setup with a rotating, gimbaled platform that would keep the product faced toward the consumer at all times. Once the target had taken the bottle of aftershave, the expensive gear had to be extracted during a second visit.
“It will be easy,” Kel said lightly. “We’ll follow up with a half-dozen Moon Mints™ Placements and be done early.”
Margot sighed. “What will I do with the extra time?” She looked at Henri. Henry kept his eyes on Kel, and his smirk under control.
“Maybe he will use his extra time to ask you out,” Margot whispered to me. Henri did not hear, or at least pretended not to. I looked at her, feeling suddenly awkward and out of place. “Let him down easy,” she whispered again and laughed, like it was a really funny joke.
“What?” Henri asked.
Now I pretended not to hear. I felt my cheeks flush and I looked away, as though the wall was extremely interesting.
Everything went smoothly until we reached the fourth home. Most people understood our gear had to come back. They left the platform and lighting out neatly for us to reclaim.
Kel knew something was wrong when the map showed the platform was right beside the Consumer’s bed. Even under her mask, I could see Kel’s brow knit. She gestured for us to peek inside.
A lonely, sad and creepy scene confronted us. Rupert McMorse had unnervingly glued a photograph frame with a 3-D-enhanced portrait of his ex-girlfriend to the platform. He’d placed it beside his bed, like he wanted her to watch over him in the dark. He shifted, and the portrait shifted slightly to face him.
Kel shivered and signaled us all to back carefully out. We retreated to a Squelch Kel had tagged a floor below.
This Squelch was small, lined in undulating gray foam shapes that dampened sound. We had to crowd inside. It had clearly been designed for two, with a foam pad on the floor like a makeshift bed. It smelled disgustingly of must and sweat.
Kel wrinkled her nose and took out her Pad. She flipped through a set of photos of Rupert and his girlfriend that had been stored in his profile, noting the time and location of each, cross-indexed with emotional analyses of their faces as she grew more and more terrified and then disappeared.
“We could go in the daytime,” Henri said. “When he is at work.”
“I’d rather buy a new platform myself,” Margot said.
Kel gritted her teeth. “No. It has to match the serial number. Policy. And it reflects poorly on us not to retrieve it.”
“It reflects poorly on him to keep it.” Margot pouted, looking up as though she could see him two stories above us and shaking her fist at the lonely fool.
“We didn’t lose it,” Henri insisted, his pale green eyes looking at the floor.
Kel typed Rupert McMorse into her Pad again to see if she had missed anything useful in his info.
“Let’s gas him,” Margot said, breathing in deep and closing her eyes.
“If we use sleep gas, you will stay outside,” Kel said.
Margot pouted. “It makes me relaxed,” she whispered to me. She took another deep breath, imagining it. The fingers on her left hand flicked near her chin. Margot did that sometimes when she got dreamy. I had no idea why.
Kel fretted over the idea.
“Why would we use sleep gas if he’s already sleeping?” Henri asked.
Margot reached up and patted him on the head. “Think of it as ‘no-wakey’ gas.”
She gave me a wink. Henri turned away, red-faced. I wondered how long the two of them had known each other. They had a comfortable routine where Margot teased him, and he pretended he didn’t know she had a crush on him. Or maybe he really didn’t know.
Kel hoisted her pack on her shoulder and held the Pad out to me. Margot frowned at being passed over. I took it, my heart suddenly pounding. The words Carol Amanda Harving seemed ready to burst out of my fingers, but I steadied my hands and pushed the thought aside.
“Do your research. Make a plan. I have to get a sleep gas canister.”
“We have to wait in here?” Henri asked.
“Is that a problem?” Kel was impatient at his question.
“It’s gross,” Henri said, looking at the foam bed in the middle of the room.
Kel rolled her eyes. “Speth, see what you can find.”
I hesitated.
Kel’s shoulders dropped. She put her bag down and knelt close to me. “I don’t know what your rationale is for this.” She did a quick, zippered lips. “Maybe you don’t want to communicate at all. Maybe you want to draw attention to the silence already created by zealous Intellectual Property Law.”
“Maybe she is just still thinking about what to say,” Margot offered.
“I think she—” Henri started to say.
“That doesn’t matter,” Kel cut across them. “Whatever it is, Speth, you should know this Pad records nothing. Your Cuff is jammed by it. It is impossible for any of it to be tracked or recorded or charged. It is self-contained. It is outside the system. No Ads. No Terms of Service. Nothing like that.”
Margot took a breath to make another comment, but then fell to watching Henri watch me.
“And if,” Kel continued, “you are concerned about the philosophical nature of communication, you should know that creating layouts and looking up Rupert McMorse, or anyone else, is part of this job. It is research, not communication. Do you understand?”
I looked at her. I understood.
“Why do you ask her that?” Henri said, like it was unfair. “How do you know if she understands or not?”
Kel stood and moved to the door. “I’ll know when I get back.”
With that, she slid the door open and shut and was gone.
Margot pulled in close, looked at the Pad, then at me, and then the Pad again.
I typed Rupert McMorse. His file came up. Margot sighed and rested her chin on her knees.
“What did you think she was going to look up?” Henri asked in a whisper.
“Something interesting,” Margot said in a long, slow voice.
The Pad brought up a long medical history, with several diagnoses for mental illness. I wondered, if he was so crazy, what did he do for a living?
The answer was nothing. He had inherited several words, including mellow, runny and obey. He bought things. He drove the ring. Brend’s™ noted he shaved every day.
He’d also stalked his girlfriend until she moved to another dome and disappeared from the system.
“I hope she got away,” Margot said, pointing at that last fact on the screen. A chill ran down my spine as I thought of what the alternative might be.
Henri moved in on the other side of me and looked. He used a blunt finger to scroll from one room to another to find a back way in or out. Margot turned, heaving a sigh, disappointed. She began to work through her bag.
Henri looked at me, at her, and then quickly typed his own name in the search box.
Henri’s info came up, and I saw the layout of his apartment, not so different from mine, but all that space was only for him. He lived alone, mid-ring, not too far from me, but in a better section, and on the twelfth floor.
Margot snorted out a disapproving breath and dropped her bag. She turned. Her eyes were narrowed. With a nervous flick, Henri wiped the information away and pulled the McMorse info back up. Why had he shown me his home? His face burned bright red.
“What are you looking at?” Margot asked. “You both look guilty.”
I flipped the screen up and scanned through the building. I was dying to type Carol Amanda Harving’s name.
The floor above McMorse was assigned to a Lawyer named Gale Krii. There was no note as to whether Gale was a man or a woman. The map was a blank outline. Most names had dropdowns full of information about habits, income, preferences and proclivities. This name was suspiciously devoid of content. He or she appeared to own the whole floor.
Margot scooted on her butt over to me. “Some people do not wish for their personal data to be revealed, so they pay to have it blocked.”
She leaned in and looked at the screen with me, taking Henri’s place.
I examined Rupert McMorse’s apartment for a bit and couldn’t learn much from it. We’d already been in his home. The difficulty was in getting into his room without waking him, and that problem would be solved with sleep gas.
“It will take Kel twenty minutes to get back,” Margot said in a singsong voice. Her finger circled the screen. “Are you done?”
I looked at her. Did she want time with the Pad? She pulled up a map and pointed.
“She keeps the sleep gas in a locker on the Forty-Third Radian. She thinks I don’t know. Anyway, the plan is simple: Rupert McMorse will sleep. We will take back our gear. Voilà.”
Voilà. I didn’t know what that word meant, exactly.
“You should explore,” Margot said. “You must be curious.”
A moment passed between us. Did she know? She waited, her shrewd eyes looking me over. I felt a small tingle of excitement and fear.
“I see how it is,” she said, giving in to something I had not said. She stood up and pulled Henri along with her.
“What?” Henri asked, looking back at me.
“She doesn’t want us to see,” Margot said. “Maybe it is too much like communication. How big is your biceps, Henri?”
Henri looked pleased to be asked, and his attention snapped to Margot.
My finger drifted up to the search icon where Henri had just typed his name. My heart began pounding harder. What if Carol Amanda Harving lived somewhere far away? In another dome? What if my search turned up nothing? She could have paid for that privacy.
“Don’t look me up, though,” Margot said. Her hand was on Henri’s arm as he flexed for her. This was my moment. I paused. Did Kel know I needed this? What did I hope to accomplish?
I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to explain the dire situation Carol Amanda Harving had put us in. I wanted her to listen and agree to desist, but how could I make that happen if I didn’t speak? And, even if I did speak, what made me think she would care?
It didn’t matter. I had to know. I needed a place to start. Carol Amanda Harving, I typed.
The display moved off to a building not so far away, Malvika Place. My breathing grew a little faster. Hers was one of the few buildings in the city that extended out above the dome. Her apartment was listed on the eighty-ninth floor, just outside. The apartment was one of two enormous spaces that showed up blank inside. The Pad provided no information about her, not even her alleged birth date. All it listed was her name and that apartment.
I stared at the block of shape and tried to control my outward reaction. The skin on my back bristled. What else could I learn from this? I scanned the building for a way in.
Just then the door slid open; Kel had returned.
“That was fast,” Margot commented.
“Let’s go,” Kel said, tossing a green pony bottle of sleep gas each to Margot, Henri and me. Margot turned hers over with a grin.
“Be careful with it,” Kel said, then she warned, “Margot, if yours goes off accidentally...”
“Where did you go for these, your house?” Margot asked, grinning.
Kel ignored this and held out her hand for the Pad. Margot grabbed it on her behalf, before I could clear Carol Amanda Harving’s name. Margot peeked and cleared it quickly for me.
My hands were shaking.
Now that I knew where she lived, would I do something foolish? Probably.
Carol Amanda Harving. Her name kept repeating in my head. I couldn’t concentrate. Could I bring Sam to reason with her? He was a good talker. Maybe he could charm her.
Margot placed her gas canister in her bag, and I did the same, sliding it into a small loop that held it tightly cushioned inside. She caught my eye and gave me a look I couldn’t read. I micro-shrugged in return.
Kel moved ahead of me, covered from head to toe in black, and led us to work. In the psychopath’s apartment, I scarcely paid attention. Henri gassed the room, and a moment later, I found he was staring daggers at me for my loss of focus. He had thrust a face mask into my hands, and I had barely noticed.
Rupert McMorse snored away in his bed. His ex-girlfriend’s portrait faced him in mock adoration. I peeled the frame from the platform and gathered our equipment. Afterward I placed the girlfriend’s photo back so it faced him. I thought he would like that. I pitied him, in a way.
I felt a little lightheaded as I turned away from the nightstand. Out the bedroom window, there was a clear view of Malvika Place. I stopped and looked for a moment, considering my options, and then moved on.
The sleep gas had worked like a charm. Suddenly I was exhilarated, not by the job, but at the thought that I could finally do something.
When we were finished I was escorted home. They brought me to my roof and, seeing I had safely arrived, they all took off in opposite directions. I assumed they each went home to sleep and rest for the next night’s Placement.
For half a minute, I considered going straight to Malvika Place, but I needed time to plan. I gathered myself together and prepared to go back home and, hopefully, sleep for a few hours before school. But before I arrived at the stairs, Margot zipped back into view.
Margot? She gestured, and it took my brain a moment to catch up and understand. She wanted me to follow her.
I hesitated. What did she want? Did she know about Carol Amanda Harving, and the notice to desist? Did she have a plan for me?
If I went straight to bed, I could fit in a couple of hours of sleep before I had to get up for school. I knew that was the safest course. I was bone weary, and I could feel in my gut that Kel would not approve of my following Margot. (Or Margot egging me on.) Paycheck or no, I was still a Placer in training.
Yet how could I refuse? How would I sleep wondering what Margot wanted, and knowing she would like me less—respect me less—if I did not follow?
Sleep would have to wait. I had to find out what she wanted.