FREE SAMPLE (Ch.6)

John and Dowe woke me before my alarm did.

“Phil. Philli!” one or both of them hissed through my door. “Are you awake?”

Not by choice, I thought to myself as I groaned and pushed the blanket aside. Tommy contorted his body in a terrific stretch, then jumped off the bed and pranced to the door. He mewed and scratched at the frame.

“Tommy’s awake!” John crowed, losing all concept of an inside voice. “Go get your mom out of bed, kitty.”

“I’m up, I’m up,” I mumbled. I groped for my house shoes in the near darkness; judging by the lack of light bleeding through the shutters, it was barely sunrise. What were they doing here so early? “What do you need?” I groused, fully aware I was being saltier than necessary.

“Uh, come outside, and then we can talk,” one of them returned, which wasn’t ominous at all.

I sighed and opened the door—and almost screamed when I came face to face with their identical grins. They were both standing unacceptably close to the door, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow hall, like they were a jack-in-the-box that could spring out at any moment.

“Wow, hi,” I managed, leaning back. “What are you doing?”

“We know it’s early,” John said in a voice still too loud for the time of day. They were both fully dressed and looked like they’d been up for hours, not that I’d ever seen either of them act tired.

“That’s why we brought a peace offering.” Dowe held out a mug of coffee with both hands. With slow, dramatic movements, he bowed and set it on the floor at my feet. Then both he and John folded their hands and backed away slowly, like they’d just made a sacrifice at a shrine. They looked so ridiculous, with their hips scraping the wood paneling as they stumbled over each other, that I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Ceasefire accepted,” I said, and bent to pick up the mug.

Dowe grinned and elbowed his partner. “Told you! It works on Nic, too.”

I smiled sadly at the steaming liquid as the memories invaded my groggy brain. Picking up Nic’s coffee habits had been an accident, but, just like our unexcepted relationship, it was something I didn’t regret adopting.

I took a slow sip. “What are we doing up so early?”

“We called our mechanic, did some sweet-talking,” Dowe said.

“I did some sweet-talking,” John interrupted. “She hung up on you!”

“It was a bad connection!” Dowe argued, then looked back at me. “Anyway, we got an appointment to get your chip removed—but it’s all the way across town, so Lanzhou wants to head out before rush hour hits.”

“Which, on a weekday, is about 5am.” Lanzhou stumbled out of his bedroom at the top of the stairs. He shrugged on a jacket and offered me a sleepy smile. “Better take that coffee to go—we’ve got some walking to do.”

After spending five minutes convincing John to leave Tommy at home, we started the long trek across the sprawling city. Even though the crowds hadn’t fully woken up yet, it still took us over an hour of transferring between buses and subways to reach our destination. Lanzhou was armed, and I kept my hood up and my head down, but I wasn’t really worried. Most of the Chinese populace didn’t know I was here—yet.

The commercial district we found ourselves in was on the bleeding edge of downtown. The high rises were so tall that they blocked out the rising sun, making the street seem dark and chilly like a cave. A glinting array of neon and automated vending machines struggled to modernize the concrete buildings and backlit signs that had clearly been there since the last century. The narrow storefronts competed for attention with a circus of flapping banners, while lanterns and flags strung across the road added to the noise. The whole place was loud, cluttered, and colorful, but after being in Beijing for a week, I was surprised at how comforting the chaos was beginning to feel.

John and Dowe led us to a phone repair shop at the end of a long alley. The only part of the store’s banner that was in English were the words “KIMCHI MOBILE,” but the intent was made clear by the fact that every inch of the windows was plastered over with posters advertising the latest devices for suspiciously low prices. I felt a bit guilty thinking it, but it definitely looked like the kind of place where someone would try to scam you into buying a knockoff watch.

The door buzzed as we entered. I took one look at the place and almost walked back out. To say the shop was a disaster would have been putting it kindly; it looked like a shipping container of electronics had gotten upended in the store. The smudged glass display cases were crammed with refurbished phones, while stacks of laptops balanced precariously on the shelves. Every flat surface was strewn with hard drives and broken keyboards, as if a serial killer had gutted a dozen computers and left the corpses to rot.

I was suddenly feeling much less confident about letting this woman dig into my hand to remove a very delicate bomb. Oh Jesus, I hope this is the right choice.

The young clerk behind the counter put his own phone down long enough to wave at us. “Ahh! You here for the latest phone? We’ve got the 87S, very new—70% off, just for you!” He turned his grin on me, as if correctly assuming that I was the one with the most disposable income.

Dowe planted his hands on the counter. “No, no, we’re here to pick up a custom order… if you know what I mean.”

John folded his arms and jerked his head in a way that was probably supposed to look cool but came off as anything but. “It’s under the name John Dowe.”

The clerk glanced at his monitor and clicked a button, then crooned in understanding. “You have an appointment?”

“I have a lifetime subscription,” Dowe intoned.

“Very good… this way.” The clerk lifted the gate and waved us behind the counter. John and Dowe went first. I had to suck in my breath to keep from knocking over a pyramid of computer towers as I squeezed through the narrow hallway to the back of the store.

We followed the clerk into the storeroom. He kicked aside a box, revealing a trap door. The secret entrance had clearly been retrofitted; the shiny metal panel was at least fifty years newer than the building, with a massive latch and a blinking keypad. It looked like something out of a space station, which somehow made me even more uneasy.

The clerk pressed his thumb to the keypad, and it chirped welcomingly. The lock released with a hiss, and he threw the panel back, revealing dimly lit concrete stairs. He gestured at John and Dowe to lead the way, which they did eagerly.

I hesitated at the top of the stairs. “I’m right behind you,” Lanzhou whispered in my ear, but even I could tell he wasn’t thrilled by the prospect.

I muttered a prayer and started down the steps. The clerk stared at us until we had cleared the entrance, then slammed the door. I heard the lock slide shut with a loud click. Shivering, I ran the rest of the way to the bottom.

Beneath the store was a massive workshop. It was a huge space—at least four times the size of the sales floor above—but there was barely room to walk around all the mechanical paraphernalia. The owner of the workshop was clearly a jack of all trades and a master of none; a glance around revealed at least a dozen abandoned projects. There was a vintage car with its engine gutted on one side of the room and a wingless helicopter on the other, and the skeleton of a robot dangled from the ceiling by thick wires. The stuffy air reeked of grease and freshly fabricated plastic, and an abundance of fluorescents lit the room as bright as noonday, making the place buzz like a hornets’ nest.

Dowe stepped forward and rapped his knuckles on a worktable. “Seoul? You in here, beautiful?”

A screeching voice echoed from somewhere across the room. “Don’t you dare try and flatter me!”

Something crashed into the wall behind Dowe’s head and clattered to the floor. I looked down to see a rusty wrench skid across the stained concrete. Did she just throw something at him?

Dowe sidestepped so he was partially hidden behind a stack of boxes. “I take it you missed me?”

She was not appeased. “Some nerve you have coming in here after you didn’t pay me!”

“I paid you!” he protested.

“Not enough!” she shrieked back. I saw movement from behind the broken helicopter and turned to see a young woman emerge. She was in her twenties, but she was at least half a foot shorter than me and looked like she couldn’t have weighed more than a sack of rice. Her boyish hair was dyed an electric shade of blue, which contrasted sharply with the orange tracksuit she wore. She had goggles strapped to her forehead and two utility belts hanging off her thin waist. She was distinctly Asian, but I could tell by her accent that she wasn’t from around here.

She aggressively wiped her fingers with a rag, then threw the cloth on the floor. “I told you, I’m not doing any more work for you until you repay me with interest—oh, hi John.”

She broke off mid-sentence to smile at him. He wiggled his fingers. “Hi, Seoul.”

Dowe gaped at his partner. “Is there something I should know?”

“What’s there to know? He tips.” Seoul skipped over to John and stood on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. He reddened and beamed like she’d just scratched his favorite spot behind the ears.

Dowe huffed. “I don’t even know you.”

Seoul ignored him and turned to me. “Now who’s this?”

I started to offer my hand, then remembered why we were here. I settled for a polite bow of my head. “Blue Fire.”

She whistled. “You boys are working for Blue Fire now? How’d you lie your way into that job?”

John shrugged. “She needed a distraction.”

“As a matter of fact,” Dowe inserted, “we were her first partners—”

Seoul cut him off with a flick of her hand. “Still not talking to you.” She focused her attention on me again. “I heard a rumor that you were in the city but didn’t realize you were working with these saints. What brings you to my shop?”

I held out my right palm. “I need an implant removed. Careful—it’s reactive to touch.”

She grunted and pulled her goggles down over her eyes. She snapped her finger against the side of the eyepiece, and the device whirred to life, a maze of blue code reflecting on the lenses. She leaned over and scanned my hand. “And what exactly was the purpose of this contraption?”

“It’s an assassination weapon.” I winced; it felt uncouth to talk about it so forthrightly, but if she was going to remove the chip, then she needed to know what she was dealing with.

“Who were you trying to assassinate? Godzilla?” she mocked. “This thing is juiced. I could probably power Jimin with this battery.”

“Jimin?” John questioned.

She gestured at the robot hanging from the ceiling.

“Well, you’re welcome to keep the battery if you can get it out,” I said. “All I need is the code off the programming chip.”

She pushed her goggles back on her forehead. “Add 10,000 yuan, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

I glanced at Lanzhou. Thanks to my inheritance as a Nolan, ten grand—in any currency—wasn’t a sum even worth mentioning, but until we could figure out a way to launder my money without Asia knowing, the Tangs would have to front the bill.

Lanzhou nodded. “Get it done.”

“We’re going to need mood music for this.” Seoul clapped her hands, and K-pop music started blaring from one of the computer terminals at a volume too loud for comfort. The anti-government lyrics were an angsty mix of English and Korean and were somehow strangely appropriate for the illegal activity going on in the shop.

Seoul gestured at a rusted metal chair next to a workstation. “You, sit. The rest of you, make yourselves at home—but don’t you dare touch my car.” The threat was directed with a glare at Dowe.

He opened his mouth to object, but Lanzhou shepherded them over to the other side of the room. I sat down in the chair and tucked my backpack underneath, then obediently laid my arm on the cold metal table.

Seoul turned on a spot lamp and shone it over my palm. After glancing to make sure the others were out of earshot, she leaned over and whispered, “Look, I’m sure you get this a lot, but it’s an honor to meet you.”

I had, in fact, been getting that a lot lately. “Thanks for your help,” I deferred.

She went in for a handshake, then reconsidered. She settled for a sloppy salute instead. “Name’s Seoul, in case you missed it.”

“Like the city?” I guessed, finally putting two and two together with her accent. Although, “former city” would have been a more accurate term for the crater that represented the defeated South Korean capital.

“It was my parents’ subtle way of protesting the North Korean takeover. Never mind that happened twenty years before I was born.” She grinned, and the sharp lighting from the lamp made the gesture look mildly terrifying.

I shifted back in the chair to restore some personal space. “We all do our part.”

She mercifully took the hint and turned to open a tackle box that was sitting on the table. “Now that we’ve gotten acquainted, I’d better be at the top of your contact list. Anything you need, you just call me. Don’t bother with those other guys down the street.”

“Thanks, I won’t,” I repeated, not that I had any idea who the “other guys” were.

“If it has a wire, I’m your girl. Phones, laptops, cars, implants…” She rooted through the tools in the box, tossing what she didn’t need aside.

I watched her carelessly hurl implements on the floor and remembered what John and Dowe had said about getting work done. I glanced across the workshop, where they had gathered a pile of tools and screws and invented some impromptu board game. Lanzhou sat between them, looking utterly confused and more than a little bit unnerved.

“So…” I ventured, making sure my voice was low enough not to carry across the room, “how do you know John and Dowe?”

“Doesn’t everybody know a John Dowe?” she quipped, then laughed at the exhausted joke. “They came asking for my help after the government botched their neurosurgery.”

I stiffened at the mention of the all-too-familiar punishment. “They’ve been through neurosurgery?”

“Trust me, the government has tried everything to get those two to shut up.” Seoul glanced at me. “They didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head. John and Dowe hadn’t been forthcoming with their personal history. Although, in their defense, I’d never actually asked about their past.

“They probably forgot.” Seoul pressed a button on a mini power tool, and it whirred violently. “To be honest, I’m surprised they lived to tell about it.”

As was I. I knew two other people who had been through neurosurgery: Nic’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Von Nieuwenhuyse. According to Nic, they’d both been brilliant scientists prior to the procedure; Mr. Von was almost single-handedly responsible for putting humans on Mars. But all of that had been erased when Asia had them convicted for religious noncompliance and put under the needle. She’d done it to try to convince Nic to complete Red Rain. She succeeded, but Nic found out who authorized the procedure and broke up with her.

The Vons had survived the surgery physically, but their minds were shattered. I’d lived with them for a month when I was last in Boston, and the only way they could function was by developing precise patterns. If there was even the slightest deviation from the status quo—like me coming home five minutes late—they had a nervous breakdown.

John and Dowe were hardly neurotypical, but compared to the Vons, they were doing brilliantly. They at least remembered people and events from the past six months; the Vons couldn’t even remember their own children.

I looked down at Seoul. “But how… how can they remember stuff?”

She bowed and spread her hands dramatically. “One of my finer projects.”

“I don’t—I don’t understand,” I said.

She grabbed a rag off the table and splashed some rubbing alcohol on it. “I installed experimental brain implants that helped restore some of their memories. I say ‘some’ because they got aftermarket prototypes—cheapskates.”

I struggled to process what I was hearing. A hundred undead hopes resurrected and created a hurricane in my chest. If John and Dowe were functioning on Chinese knockoff versions of this device, then what was the original implant capable of? Was it possible that the Vons could be brought back from the dead?

“How does this implant work?” I asked.

“The logic is fairly simple, honestly.” She picked up a tool and started sanitizing it with the rubbing alcohol—although seeing as the cloth was stained with grease, I wasn’t sure the device was getting any cleaner. “Neurosurgery doesn’t erase memories. It just rewrites the neural pathways so people aren’t triggered by things the government deems problematic.”

I knew that was true; I’d read as much in a medical journal while studying the Vons’ condition. Instead of brainwashing the victim and starting with a clean slate, neurosurgery was supposed to “cut out” the noncompliant parts of a person’s psyche. The theory was that you could delete the Christian or the revolutionary but keep the doctor or teacher. The problem was that it almost never worked.

“Think of it like snipping the wire to a light bulb.” Seoul demonstrated with a clack of the tiny shears she had in her hand. “The light bulb’s still there—there’s just no power going to it.”

I was beginning to catch on. “So, if you can reconnect the power…”

She grinned. “Exactly. Unfortunately, repairing the neural pathways themselves is an art we haven’t quite mastered yet. But a synaptic device doesn’t need any fancy neurons to access those memories.”

I frowned and waited for her to explain.

“It’s a combination of two very basic technologies: synaptic reading and augmented reality.” She shifted through the junk on the table until she found two pieces of circuit board, then turned to face me. “The synaptic device reads the stored memories,” she held out one piece of circuitry in her right hand, “and the reality augmenter projects it to the mind.” She held out the other piece of circuitry in her left hand, then smashed the two together.

“You can bypass the damaged neurons entirely,” I murmured.

Seoul muttered a proud mmhmm and tossed the circuit boards back on the table. Taking the same alcohol-soaked cloth, she grabbed my arm and started sanitizing my hand.

I numbly let her work. My heart was pulsing as I remembered who else had a damaged brain.

My father.

I looked down into Seoul’s eyes, begging her to tell me this was all true. “You can bring someone back. You can restore who they once were.”

She contorted her face in a disheartening gesture. “Sort of. It’s not flawless, and it takes a lot of programming before the device really starts working. You have to ‘teach’ it what memories you want it to pull for certain words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, struggling to swallow my heart as my hopes plunged back down again.

“Think of it like a search engine. If you say ‘daughter,’ it’s going to scan the memory banks and pull up all images associated with that word. It’s really overwhelming at first, and there’s no order to the results. You have to train the algorithm, and even then, sometimes it gets it completely wrong.”

I looked over at John and Dowe, who were bickering over what number their makeshift die had landed on. “Is that why they’re…?”

“They’re what?” Seoul prodded.

I struggled to come up with a polite way to say it, but there was no polite way to describe the mental state of John and Dowe. “Well, most people, when you tell them you need a distraction, would reach for a flare gun, not a can of whipped cream.”

Seoul laughed. “Oh no, Dowe’s always been creative like that. And John… well, it’s not really his fault. He’s the second.”

“Second of what?” I demanded.

The question apparently wasn’t important enough to answer, because she kept blathering on. “No, their problem is they bought fake implants off a scammer. Their chips can only hold about a dozen terabytes of information. As soon as you learn something new, poof…” She fluttered her fingers like a fleeing bird. “There goes something else important. Like how much you owe your mechanic.”

She paused to stare at them, but I could tell by the tweak in the corner of her lips that she wasn’t really mad. “Thankfully, the technology has come a long way in the last few years, or so I’ve heard.”

That was all I needed to hear. “I need three of these devices.”

She dropped whatever she was holding. “What?”

“I need three of these implants,” I repeated, “as soon as possible.”

“Okay, first of all.” She took a step back and punctuated with both of her hands. “There is no ‘as soon as possible’ on the black market. You get what you can when you can get it. And second of all—”

“I thought you said you were ‘my girl’ when it came to anything with a wire.” I arched my eyebrow in a gesture Nic would have been proud of.

She halted with her mouth open. “Okay, erase that list and start over. New first of all: That’s rude.”

I shrugged.

She growled and tensed her muscles in a pose that would have been threatening had she been more than five feet tall. “Fine. Then let me put it this way: These devices are extremely illegal and use extremely rare components. That means they’re extremely expensive.”

“Money is no object,” I replied, and it really wasn’t. “Besides, if that’s the case, then it seems a job like this would warrant a pretty hefty finder’s fee, wouldn’t it?”

She blinked as every muscle in her body relaxed, and I knew we had a deal.

“And if adding an extra zero doesn’t provide the necessary incentive…” I traced my finger through the grime on the worktable. “You can tell them Blue Fire sent you.”

“That… might actually work,” she admitted. She let out a puff of breath, causing a stray chunk of her blue hair to flop into her eyes. “All right, fine, I’ll do it. I make no promises that I can get three of them—but I’ll start making calls.”

“That’s all I ask.” My voice was calm, but my mind was anything but as my soul whirled out of control. Would this work? Could we bring the Vons and my father back from the dead? Would I finally be able to put my family back together? Seoul claimed the devices weren’t perfect, but any memories would be better than none. I would spend the entire Nolan fortune if it would bring even a piece of my father back.

The Holy Spirit pressed down on my chest, and I took a deep breath. As much as I wanted to drop everything and save my father, I knew I had to trust Seoul to do her job. I wouldn’t know who to call about one of these devices even if I could safely get online. There was nothing I could do but wait—and pray.

I closed my eyes and started doing just that, and hard.

“Well,” Seoul chirped, ending the subject like one closes a book, “let’s get you disarmed before you blow up a rhino with this thing.”

I looked up just in time to see her snap a magnetic clamp over my wrist, pinning it to the table. She tugged on a pair of gloves, then yanked her goggles over her eyes. Grabbing the tiny shears, she reached for my finger, then hesitated.

“Oh, I should probably warn you.” She glanced at me, her expression unreadable behind the code flickering across her lenses. “This is going to hurt a lot.”