“Oh, my god. What?”
“Somebody tried to…” She tried to think of a word for what had occurred. “… mail something to me. But we’re okay.”
“Oh, honey. Did you call the police?”
“Sure. It’s, uh, all taken care of. But there might be more of them. Bad guys, I mean.”
“Ugh, Z, this city, I tell you. Did you hear what happened last night at Zero Hour? Me and Maddie were at the bar, just minding our own business, and this guy just slams into me. They were fighting, the bar jammed me in the ribs. I have this huge bruise. Look—”
“Mom, I want you to stay here, for a bit. At the house. And to not go out without security. Just for a while.”
“Well, if they come with me to class, they have to stay outside. I can’t have scary guys looming over the—”
“You may have to skip the classes.”
“I can’t, I’m teaching.”
“If they fire you, we will buy the clinic and put you in charge of the whole thing. A whole chain.”
“Here, have some cheese, I’m full.”
“No, thank you—”
“Drink? Coffee? Anything? I never get to do anything for you!”
“No, I just need to not be nervous, I’ve got a big meeting this morning with … I’m not sure what he is.”
“Oh! I’ve got something for that, too. This is perfect. Clarity and I are selling these mood-enhancing skin creams, it’s an amazing program and the product, oh my god. Here…”
Ah, there it was. Her mother pulled out a white tube the size of a fat cigar, animated flowers dancing on the label. She pulled off a cap and there was a spiral pattern of tiny slits in the end. When she twisted it, the cream squirted out of those slits in thin white layers, then a dotted yellow ball emerged, forming a perfect miniature daisy made of skin cream. Her mother swiped it off with her fingers and spread it between her palms.
“Give me your hands.”
Zoey would have worried about applying a mood-enhancing anything to any part of her body if she for one second thought the stuff actually worked. She let her mother spread it on her palm and fingers. She felt a mild tingle, something they’d added to enhance the placebo effect.
“Great, right?”
“Yeah. So, I’ve got to run—”
“All we need you to do, if you can, is just use this on camera at some point. And say the name of the cream. The brand is Mood Food, there are twelve moods, this one is Amazey Daisy. It builds confidence!”
“Do I … have to say the whole thing?”
“No! You don’t have to do it at all. But if you can that would be huge, I get a free set and fifty credits for a mention. And if you can say the whole thing, yeah, that’d be amazing.”
Clarity said, “Also if you mention the effects, you need to point out that the health benefits haven’t been verified by the FDA.”
Zoey looked over the tube. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but how many tubes of this did they make you buy, as your starter stock?”
Her mother said, “Five hundred.”
Clarity sensed the conversation was taking a wrong turn. “That’s at only half of the sell price! Just moving this initial stock and she can clear twenty thousand dollars, easily. And for every sales associate she recruits—”
Echo walked into the kitchen and Zoey said, “Oh, thank god.”
Zoey’s mother took one look at Echo, then her eyes went wide and she said, “Oh my god, you look a-may-zeen! Look at your hair!”
“Will says it’s time to go.”
Zoey’s mother sighed. “It always is.”
Zoey took the chance to escape and as they entered the hall, Echo said, “Ha, I told him you wouldn’t wear the dress.”
10
It was decided that the envoy to meet Megaboss Alonzo and his gang of murderous cannibals was to consist of Will, Zoey, and Wu. Budd was going to go to Fort Fortuna to talk to the staff there, and Echo and Andre were going to try to track down any friends or family of Dexter Tilley, to try and figure out how he’d wound up losing both his life and all of his most important organs while he was supposed to be learning how to recover copper plumbing from defunct buildings. They were covering all of the bases in case the Alonzo thing was a dead end, since most things in life are.
Zoey owned multiple vehicles with various arrays of countermeasures (the leopard-print convertible, for instance, could launch a drone from its trunk that could do serious damage to up to a dozen bad guys), but obviously the first choice was to avoid detection/confrontation altogether. In a city with more cameras than people, this was not easy. In fact, Wu said that there were four drones with eyes on their driveway, either owned by bounty hunters or street streamers hoping to catch the ambush by said bounty hunters.
The three of them left the house in the convertible (by far the most recognizable of her vehicles) and pulled into a car wash that Zoey frequently used and also owned, one built with a Roman bathhouse theme in which scantily-clad animatronic slave girls would come out and scrub down your vehicle. A nondescript van had entered said car wash one minute ahead of them, and while both vehicles were progressing through the wash, the water and scrubbing girls abruptly stopped and allowed the three of them to exit the convertible and enter the van in front. They would continue on their way in the van and the convertible would then lead the spy drones through a series of leisurely stops around the city, the tinted windows hiding the fact that there was no one inside.
The nondescript van bore the faded logo of a ride-and-breakfast commute service, boasting it would serve pancakes and eggs while the vehicle waded through morning traffic. The entire exterior of the vehicle was in fact just a series of bolted-on panels that could totally alter its make and model, one of nine outfits they could swap out. The interior was that of a state-of-the-art transport designed to move high-value targets through war zones. Wu was behind the wheel (if someone had to take over the autopilot in an emergency, he was the one trained in evasive driving), Will in the passenger seat, Zoey in the back. She was seated in front of monitors that could display a list of potential threats, right down to any unusually aggressive facial expressions on passing motorists. She glanced at them and then started playing a game on her phone.
Zoey asked where Megaboss Alonzo’s headquarters was and Will said, “The Styx.”
“Like, outside town?”
“No, S-T-Y-X. Guess you’ve never been. There’s a tunnel system under the city and Alonzo has laid claim to most of it. His rationale is that property deeds don’t extend that far under the surface and also that no one can physically stop him from claiming it. He’s right about the second part, which is all that matters.”
“Underground? How do we get there?”
“There’s an entrance in West Turner.”
Zoey was from a small town of fewer than ten thousand people and the most confusing thing about moving to the city was how big of a deal people make about which neighborhood they’re in. Back home there had just been the trailer parks (her domain), the one rich neighborhood around a lake, and then everybody else. Here, people identified their neighborhood as their location, rather than the city (“That’s how we do it in Beaver Heights!”) but the borders weren’t official and bitter disputes broke out over whether a new housing development was in West Turner or the adjacent West Arlington (there was no East Turner). These disputes were particularly nasty when one of those was well established in the public mind as the “bad” neighborhood, as was the case with West Turner. Zoey, however, was not at all nervous about taking a trip there and quietly congratulated herself for not being nervous.