A Ballad of Wayward Spectres
A Serialized Novel in Four Parts
Day 2
Here we are again, friends. I want to thank my fiancé, Jo, and everyone in my family for all of their support. Also, I couldn’t have done this without the advice, kindness, and constant morale boosts from Jessi Hodge, Sean Doyle, Brandon Harris, Kitty Milar, Jeremy McColllum,River Lackey, Teniqua Reynolds, Dustin Clark, Jennifer Bishop, Lee Cooper (for Biblical empowerment),Shelley Huckabee, Brittany Mercer, Steven Goldfried, Jeff Pearson, and Laura Johnston (for a much needed pushbefore Ballad Day 1).Thank you all, for anything and everything you have done.
This volume was written and edited under the influence of coffee from The Lab (Lafayette, LA), Johnston St. Java (Lafayette, LA), Community Coffee (Lafayette, LA), Starbucks (Winston Salem, NC), Krankies Coffeehouse (Winston Salem, NC), and Geeksboro Coffeehosue and Cinema (Greensboro, NC), as well as the music of Ulver (Perdition City, Shadows of the Sun), Sunn0))) (Monoliths and Dimensions, White1), Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Cross Soudntrack), and Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy VIII Soundtrack, Final Fantasy VI: Grand Finale).
COPYRIGHT © 2014 William Hill. All Rights Reserved.
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Day 2
I
Thunder whispered a threat.
Moments later, the first drops trickled down Alyson’s cheek, to her chin, and fell away. Apathy restrained her between two boxy metal conduits on an apartment building rooftop. She lay in the puddle, watching a dark gray canopy shift around a pallid morning sun, and wondered. Fantasy felt hopeful, but the idea of tapping into the S6 network with a marked and dated mobile wasn’t a valid option, no matter how the Alyson of her dreams would pull such a scheme off. She stayed hidden from sight until eight, when the water was up to her ankles.
She knew that she would remain wet all day, and she knew better than to blow fifteen dollars on an umbrella when that was a tenth of what remained in her pocket. Even if she got sick, cold meds were cheaper than a thin piece of fabric stretched over an aluminum frame.
Alyson reached for her pocket out of habit, and felt the soggy mess that used to be her notebook. She rolled her eyes, sighed, and took only the pen. She tugged the sleeve of her jacket up, and wrote down a quick agenda; food, tech, evasion, and shelter were scribbled in a diagonal line across protruding bones and veins along the bottom of her wrist. She stuffed the pen away, and stood up, smoothing out her drenched clothes. As her hands passed her hips, sharp pain dug into muscles. She tugged the side of her pants down. A dark purple cloud stretched down her thigh. She carefully replaced her clothes, and continued checking herself over. Her arms were somewhat dry, as well as her chest. From belly down, she was soaked. Her tan pants had gone from a sandy brown to a muddier tone. She zipped her jacket, and shuddered.
As she walked to the edge of the rooftop, still adjusting to the fresh pain in her hip, the shower turned into a proper storm as a flash of lightning illuminated the sky. Two or three train cars were locked in place on the Oct, powerless, as far as Alyson could tell.
Power outages won’t hurt anything, she thought, swiping the rain from her face in futility.
She climbed down a fire escape, taking every rung with a tight grip and held breath as she climbed back down to street level, where the morning commute continued as it would any other day. Traffic trickled through billowing puddles, horns blared from somewhere on a parallel street. She searched for cop cars, officers on foot picking up coffee from any of a dozen cheap venues along the street. She searched for watchers, people noticing that she wasn’t wearing a rain slicker, or that she looked like she had just climbed out of a swimming pool.
No one paid attention. She whispered thanks for small mercies.
She weaved between awnings and the shadow of the Oct, a rain spotted path that offered even less shelter than the store fronts.
Her playground felt small even as the buildings reached into the heavens around her, the horizon invisible behind steel, glass, and concrete. Uniformed cops were no longer blind to her existence. They wouldn’t call her by her own name, but she was marked regardless of the truth.
She’d spent eight hours being Marina Dekare, and it had derailed her life. Alyson hoped that she’d washed the treacherous woman away in the night, and left her in the puddle where she’d slept. She prayed that she could slip into another life by nightfall, despite the absence of her tools.
Alyson settled on a fast food breakfast composed of a crumbling biscuit and bland sausage. She sat down in a booth and nibbled the tiny meal. She decided that she’d skip lunch; an unnecessary expense. She hadn’t eaten since the previous morning at the little diner. The police came to visit before she could call up room service. She couldn’t be still. The bright hell of fluorescent lights and translucent red-and-yellow plastic dividers between the seats were an eyesore. She almost missed the dreary street scenery while staring at the hideous cartoon dog that was the eatery’s mascot.
She balled up the biscuit wrapper and pushed it aside, and took a sip of water before rolling her sleeves back up. She grabbed the pen from her pocket and marked through “food” on her wrist, and looked at the next step, tech.
Obtaining new technology was the ugliest part of her line of work. A new line of products, or a network upgrade, such as the shift from S6 to MT1 and then into Pri T-I, usually meant that she’d have to start from scratch. However, she was glad that some people didn’t want to upgrade. S6 was still in service for people who didn’t delve into the latest in mobile technology. The technologically illiterate were plenty satisfied by simple phone calls, and maybe watching the occasional streaming video if someone sent them the address. MT1 was considered dated and confusing, an analysis that Alyson agreed with long before the tech news sites started to complain. Pri T-I, or Privatized Transferal-Integration, was considered a revelation in telecommunication for simplifying the language required to build software. It ran off of basic C#+ and HTML7 libraries, and every program was based on the same core code to simplify interactions between different applications, and how they would transfer between a mobile and any other computer.
None of it affected Alyson in a major way. The machines at the other end of the signal still worked the same as they always had; they had flaws, and, given time, she could find them. She just needed a way in. Pri T-I made her tricks simpler than ever. Keeping S6 online maintained her Last Resort, and that was a great boon to her work than most of the upgrades she’d endured.
Alyson scribbled on the restaurant tray liner, each jagged swirl streaked out into what she was missing; her mobile, her laptop, somebody else’s money. She knew she couldn’t start the day’s work, frustrating as it would be, until after ten. She needed to research what product she’d need, and no one would be open for a while.
Alyson left, pulling her coat closer to her body as she stepped out the door. Clouds thinned out before her patient eyes, leaving a damp drizzle behind. She slicked her hair back, hoping the rain would hold it into some awful frizzy form, just so she could see. She crossed the parking lot, paranoid and cold, watching time trickle by.
Rich opened the door to a narrow silver diner, immersing himself in the scent of burnt coffee and sticky syrups emanating from the stained black and white tile, and red marbled countertops. He saw Martin within seconds, seated at the far end of the bar stirring a dollop of creamer into his coffee. Rich sat down next to him, and stuck a folder next to his coffee.
“Most people say good morning first,” Martin muttered before gulping half of the steaming drink. “What’s this?”
“That is a copy of the orders that Derrick gave his team last nig
ht. Check out the photo on page two,” Rich replied.
Martin groaned and opened the document. Sure enough, a photo of a brunette in her early twenties was in the place of the middle age black woman that Rich gave him before his visit to the airport. “She’s good.”
“Scary fucking good.”
“Have you run a check on her photo?”
“It’s going through the system right now. It was about half done when I left,” Rich said. “I asked Derrick what he knew so far.”
“I’m sure this is going to be funny. What’s he got?” Martin said. A waitress set a plate with two fried eggs and toast before him.
“Marina Dekare went through a series of five pigment augmentations. Apparently that’s supposed to just completely shift the shape of her jaw, and how big her nose is, right?”
“It is an older photo, right? She’s a rich bitch. They all get plastic surgery done as soon as they can grab a few hundred bucks. Shit’s way too easy to not do it.”
“You know as well as I do that you have to file any major changes with the USIPA,” Rich said.
Martin nodded as he took a bite of his toast. “And that’s not in the record?”
Rich pulled the folder back and ran a finger along the contents.