[xx]
WHEN ICEWEASEL WAS a little girl called Natalie, she and Cordelia played in the ravine, under the watchful eye of the house drones, or, if there was some incomprehensible violence-weather in the city – an uptick of kidnappings – a private security person who’d fit them with ankle cuffs she couldn’t loosen, no matter how many tools she tried. Cordelia never understood her impatience with these minor indignities, insisting they were for their safety. For Natalie, it was symbolic battle. If she’d ever gotten the cuff off, she’d have stuck it in her pocket. Ditching it in the Don River would bring the security goon down the hill. But it was designed to defeat a kidnapper with a hacksaw – anything that could brute-force it would take her foot with it.
She was in the ravine again, in winter, wearing a snug jacket, too-big boots with thick waffle-tread, and thermal tights that insulated so efficiently she was sweating by the time she and Nadie reached the end of the short tunnel. She paused in the tunnel-mouth, poised between captivity and freedom, and had called out softly, “Dis?”
“We’ll talk again,” Dis said. “I’ve already emailed my diff. I love you, Iceweasel.”
“I love you, too.”
She didn’t meet Nadie’s eyes. She’d just confessed to loving software. She hated herself for being embarrassed by it.
She’d seen pictures of Toronto winters in her father’s childhood, her grandparents’ – snow-forts, plows on the roads, salting trucks. But in all the time she’d spent in the city, there’d never been enough snow to make a decent snowball – not like the high-altitude snow she and Cordelia hurled at each other atop Whistler and Mont Blanc – just a gray frozen custard that froze to the sidewalks and streets in late January and lasted until April or sometimes May. On very cold days, it turned into treacherous ice, slippery to walk on and thin in places, your foot plunging through into lurking reservoirs of frozen water.
The floor of the ravine was that texture – frozen enough to almost burn if it touched your skin, unfrozen enough to be a gelatinous hazard that sucked at Iceweasel’s boots. She staggered through it in her borrowed clothes – some of Nadie’s ninja-wear, a bizarro-world version of walkaways’ printed cold-weather clothes, also lacking in manufacturer’s markings, also wicking and dirt-shedding and soft inside and rip-stopping on the outside, but printed with dazzle-textures that hurt the mind to look at. Looking at her knees as her legs fought the mud and slope as they sloshed downhill made her dizzy.
Even Nadie – wearing dazzle-stuff, hard to look at for more than a few seconds – struggled with the terrain, dancing a few steps down the hill, getting caught, lumbering a few more, using sickly trees to catch herself. Even so, she soon got ahead of Iceweasel. Iceweasel reminded herself she’d been a prisoner for months and had hardly exercised. Also, she wasn’t a ninja mercenary bad-ass.
Iceweasel breathed chest-heaving pants. It wasn’t just the dazzle fabric that made her dizzy. She had to keep going, but she’d be in trouble if she hyperventilated and keeled over. She slowed, used trees for handholds, rough palms of her oversized gloves gripping the trunks so ferociously they threatened to come off her hands when she put too much of her weight on them.
Nadie disappeared down the riverbank. Iceweasel was careful to eyeball the spot where she’d gone down, use it as a navigational aid. She considered running off, but she needed Nadie to get away. And Nadie could catch her without breaking a sweat.
Before she reached the riverbank, Nadie reappeared, snow-suit sheened to the waist with water. She slogged through the slush to Iceweasel, gripped on her upper arm.
“We need to be faster now.”
“I’m going as fast as I can—”
“Faster.” She pulled. She had the strength to make it mean something, and to keep her upright. Supporting both of them made Nadie stagger like a drunk, but a quick drunk. Iceweasel’s heart hammered, but she didn’t resist. She was in the world, in default, out of her cage. She breathed the same air as Gretyl. She looked at the same sky. This was what she wanted. This was freedom.
The riverbank was scored with ruts where Nadie heel-slid into the swift river. She planted Iceweasel on her butt. “Slide.” She skated into the water, knees bent like a shushing skier. She didn’t stop at the water, merely tucked deeply, then levered herself upright, braced against current, holding her arms out to Iceweasel as she skidded after her, scooting over the frozen mud on her butt, the air turning colder and wetter as she descended.
Seconds later, she was alongside of Nadie, facing upstream, wading, pulling herself with the help of Nadie’s sure grip and the branches and scrub growing on the side of the bank, some of which gave way when she put her weight on it.
The water deepened to their waists. The riverbed was uneven and slimy against her boots. They did an admirable job of keeping out the water, as had her not-tight-enough tights. But there were three places where her borrowed ninja gear failed to attain a seal – her left ankle, another right below her belly button, over one hip. The water trickled into these spots, making spreading numb-patches that started coin-sized but were quickly entire continents of burning cold that sprouted questing archipelagos every time she stretched.
Just as she thought she was going to have to demand that they get onto land, Nadie scampered up the bank, dropped onto her belly and reached for her. They locked wrists and Nadie supported her while she got her grippy soles under her and wall-walked up to the scree. She shivered uncontrollably.
“My suit leaked,” she said around chattering teeth.
“Up.” Nadie pulled.
They were further up the ravine, somewhere near where Serena Gundy Park gave way to gate-guarded complexes on its north side. Nadie led them toward the condos, ninja-suits shedding dirt. Moving briskly made Iceweasel marginally warmer. The fabric wicked away water, but still she shivered.
“Here.” Iceweasel couldn’t tell what Nadie meant for a moment, then she realized they were in a small parking lot that must serve dog-walkers who wanted exercise, but not as much as they’d get slogging to the park through the service road behind the condos’ fences. There was nothing parked there, no one using the washed-out trails in the middle of winter. Then a nearly silent taxi swung off the road, up the short slipway to the lot. Its doors clunked.
“In.”
The taxi’s interior was warm and smelled of pumpkin-spice. There were two half-liter go-cups from Starbucks wedged in the cup holders, and a pair of machine-wrapped parcels that they had to slide over on the bench before they could sit. They were heavy.
“Drink up, should be hot.” Nadie slammed the door and the car slid into motion, fishtailing slightly as the tires tried the slushy ground, stepping through their characteristic exponential backoff dance as they sought optimal torque. It was a sensation from the days when she’d been a good girl and a Redwater, with cars from exclusive, bonded services pulling up whenever she summoned them, whisking her from a weekend cottage or a cousin’s jealousy-inducingly huge place in the Bridle Path or King City. She still reeled from captivity and the water, hypothermic patches on her skin and near hyperventilation.
But none of those journeys had been in the company of someone like Nadie, whose microexpressions had been exchanged for a macroexpression: satisfied, flare-nostriled animal excitement. This was Nadie’s element, the uncoiling of the spring she kept wound tight during the days of guard-keeping. This brought Iceweasel to another time, that half-remembered traumatic night when she’d been taken, after the downing of the Better Nation, the look on Nadie’s face that night, how it shone. Somehow, Iceweasel had forgot that expression until she saw it again. The shine in her eyes was only a shadow of the fully awakened Nadie that took her from the woods.
Iceweasel felt a cold deeper than the wet patches under her suit.
“Time to change.” Nadie slurped her enormous latte, which reminded Iceweasel to do the same. She hated the flavor, it had been her mother’s bugaboo, a marker of bourgeois striving and the punchline of snide jokes – “PSL” was a nickname at Havergal girls’ school for the strivers from the lower echelons whose parents had gone into deep debt to get them into those hallowed environs. The warm drink was welcome, despite her ingrained snobbery, hot and sweet with coffium tinge that eased the ache in her muscles and chased fatigue.
Nadie, meanwhile, had burst the seams on a parcel, sliding her thumb along the seal so it parted with a crackle. The tyvek wrapper slithered away, revealing neatly folded clothing.
Unselfconsciously, Nadie stripped out of her ninja-suit, then out of the singlet and tights she wore beneath. Iceweasel noticed she, too, had large, wet patches on her underthings. Nadie must have been every bit as cold as she was, but gave no sign of discomfort. Iceweasel stared at Nadie’s naked body, noting the scars, one long incision that looked surgical and went around her left breast; a trio of bullet-puckers on one thigh. She was muscled and had almost no body fat, anatomical drawing brought to life, with a thick pelt of blond pubic hair that spilled over her thighs and climbed partway up her flat stomach, lush curls of hair on her legs and tufts peeking out of her armpits.
She caught Iceweasel staring and looked back frankly. “You too. Warm clothes, warm drinks, quickly.”
Iceweasel looked away, blushing, remembering Gretyl’s generous curves, the feel of her breasts on her own, hot breath on her neck and in her ears, the way she teased at Iceweasel’s lips with thick fingers until Iceweasel caught them, sucking greedily, satisfaction in Gretyl’s gasp as she licked their tips.
She probed the package, found its seams, split them, pulled away the tyvek. The clothes were extreme normcore, the most nondescript garments she could imagine, the kind of thing that extras in dramas wore. There was a faded Roots sweatshirt, high-waisted slacks frayed around the cuffs, woolen athletic socks that sagged from overworn elastic. To complete them, a pair of Walmart panties and a one-size bandeau bra of the sort they gave you when you got busted for being out-of-uniform at school, dispensed out of a kleenex-style box on the Dean of Girls’s desk. Both the bandeau and the panties were gray from repeated washings.
Except they weren’t. All the clothing had a printer-fresh smell, still offgassing pigment-infusions. When she looked closely, she saw the dirt and the gray and even the faded ROOTS letters all printed on, the dirt betraying itself with minute compression artifacts. These clothes had been printed to look like they weren’t brand new.
“Where did these come from?” She pulled on the panties, which felt fresh from the wrapper.
Nadie watched her examine them, watched her undress. She conjured up the feeling of the B&B, the onsen state of mind that refused self-consciousness about nudity. She used the feeling to banish the horniness and Gretyl-longing that filled her.
“A service. There are times when someone has to go from one place to another without being noticed. Your father uses these services. They can be co-opted, but only with very high-level pressure, and never quickly. They are expensive. The record of this journey is not something anyone can find easily, not even the police. Especially the police.”
Iceweasel struggled into the rest of the clothing, found a parka with a fake-fur fringed hood, decided to leave it for now. Between the drink and the blasting passenger compartment heater, she was starting to sweat. She rubbed a spot on the compartment’s side. It made a window for her, showing the streets of Toronto sliding past at a steady clip, the private-hire car sliding nondescriptly through the traffic without any of the showy maneuvers of her father’s cars.
They crossed the Bloor Viaduct, heading west. There was something... wrong.
“Did you see that building?”
“What building?
“With the metal shutters and crash barriers.”
Another building, similarly fortified, slid past. Then another, windows smashed and blackened by fire, scorch-marks stretching up far as she could see, two stories’ worth of façade gone altogether, a round hole in the building’s skin like a screaming, black-toothed mouth, charred furniture inside.
“Was that one bombed?”
“There’ve been riots. It’s why your father is away.”
“Who’s rioting?”
Nadie snickered. “Depends on who you ask. The opposition says it’s provocateurs staging false-flag operations. Security services say it’s radicals and walkaways and people paid by foreign governments to destabilize Canada.”
“What about the rioters themselves?”
Nadie shrugged. “Some say they’re black bloc. Some are the usual concerned citizens, down with corruption, up with democracy. Many young people, a lot of kids from the general strike contingent – once you’ve been kicked out of school, why not go running loose in the streets?”
“General strike?”
“Lots of things happened in default while you’ve been off in the woods, Iceweasel.”
Intellectually, she knew this was true. Sometimes new walkaways told stories about default. Once they’d built the second B&B, she stopped caring. Being a walkaway had once been in opposition to default, but after a year or two, being a walkaway became who she was. Default was a distant, terrible phenomenon, like a volcano that occasionally sent up plumes that overshadowed her sky, something she could do nothing about except avoid.
“How does it get to be a riot? When I was—” One of you. She caught herself. “Before I left, they’d kettle you before you took ten steps. The only protests you saw were tiny, shitty ones with permits, behind fences down alleyways—”
“Sure, when it was a few protests. But the protesters are canny. Some get together at one site, wait for the kettle, then others gather somewhere else, and somewhere else – if they have numbers and patience, they occupy all police resources and still take to the streets. A lot of them get arrested afterwards, from footage, or if they leave DNA or their gaits are recognized by the cameras, but they’re canny.”
She stared more.
“But why? What do they want—”
Nadie shrugged again. “What everyone wants. More for themselves. Less for people like you.”
Iceweasel felt a jet of anger, saw Nadie’s microexpression, testing.
“Like you, you mean. Not mine anymore. You can have it.”
“We take care of that next.”
The car barreled west and west, through increasingly unfamiliar neighborhoods. For an unbelievable stretch – forty-five minutes, in swift traffic – they moved through a forest of towering high-rises whose south faces were skinned with sun-tracking mirrors focusing light down on solar arrays in their high-fenced yards.
Beyond these were brownfield sites, chain-link-fenced, ringed with ostentatious sensor arrays intended to intimidate anyone pondering climbing over. She knew this kind of place – it was the mainstay of walkaways. She did strategic assessments of the sites, figuring out camera-angles, estimating the salvage that could be dragged away from within the fence’s perimeter before a security crew arrived.
They turned off the two-lane highway onto a rural road, then into the remains of a small town. It looked uninhabited, an abandoned main street with a gas station and a grocery store and a shuttered Legion Hall. Another car was parked by the roadside, low-slung, with blue flashers on top – a police interceptor.
Her asshole tightened and the taste of pumpkin-spice stomach acid rose up her throat. “Shit.”
Nadie shook her head minutely. “Don’t worry.”
They pulled in, head-to-head with the police car. The doors of their car opened. They stepped out – Iceweasel grabbed the parka as she did, pulled it on, heart hammering. The doors closed themselves and the car carefully reversed between them, did a three-point turn on the main street and drove the way it had come, their old clothing in it.
“It’s off the grid now.” Nadie watched it drive away. “It’s heading for a scrapper, will get broken up there, all identifying transponders smashed and melted. Single-use cars are more expensive, but it’s the only way to be sure nothing is recovered.”
Iceweasel was so distracted by the thought of a single-use automobile that she almost forgot about the police interceptor. Then its doors clunked open and she plunged her hands into her parka’s pockets – lined with soft fleece – and bit down her rising panic.
The woman who got out of the interceptor was middle-aged, in a duffel coat and mud-spattered yellow rubber boots. She was Asian – Chinese maybe – when she looked them up and down, her fleece earmuffs slid and some of her gray-streaked black bob came loose and blew in the wind.
“Weapons?” She had a strong voice, unaccented, commanding.
“None. But if you have any, I would like to negotiate with you for them.”
The woman pursed her lips. “Smartass. In, before we freeze.”
Nadie walked to the interceptor and made to get in, waved impatiently at Iceweasel: “You first, come on.”
Moving like she was in a nightmare where you can’t stop yourself from going into the room where the monster waits, she drifted to the interceptor, stooping to enter. She swallowed panic at the smell, which was purely tactical, eau de zip cuffs and ruggedized interfaces and body armor. The older woman entered from the other side and then Nadie came in behind her and she was sandwiched in the middle. She stared at the heavy plexi separating the passenger compartment from the front cop compartment. There were grommets set into the floor, walls and ceiling, molded into the bodywork. For restraints. She swallowed once more.
“Calm, calm. Come on, no need for all this.”
“She’s shaking like a leaf. Young woman, there’s no need. I used this car because it was the fastest, most secure means of transport at my disposal. You aren’t under arrest. You aren’t being kidnapped or rendered, or being taken to a lonely country lane where you’ll be killed, your body slid into a trench—”
“This is supposed to be reassuring?” Nadie’s tone was bantering. This spooky shit was her element, rendezvouses in commandeered official vehicles in ghost-towns.
“Fine. The point, Ms Redwater, is that you are perfectly safe and have no cause to worry. My name is Sophia Tan. I know your father, of course, and I know your uncles better.”
The name rang a bell. Iceweasel studied Tan’s face. It was familiar.
“You were... deputy premier or something?”
She laughed. Her smooth skin sprouted laugh lines. “No, dear, I was attorney general. The Clement years. We met, though I had forgot about it and I suppose you did, too. But my social diary doesn’t lie. You were a schoolgirl, a charity event for something your uncle worked on, the scholarship fund for Upper Canada College.”
“You’re right, I don’t remember. I hated those things.”
“Me too.”
She was warming up. She unzipped her parka, took deep breaths. Nadie looked from her to Tan.
“Onto the business at hand,” Tan said. She touched her fingertips together in rapid succession. “Evidentiary.” A line of red lights along the compartment’s ceiling began to pulse. “Everything we say and do now is being recorded on tamper-evident storage. The car will transmit a hash of the video to a federal data-retention server at ten-second intervals. Everything we say is admissible in any court in Canada or any OECD nation. For the record, I am Sophia Ma Tan, Social Insurance Number 046 454 286. Ms Redwater, please identify yourself.”
She cleared her throat. “Natalie Lilian Redwater, Social Insurance Number 968 335 729.”
“Ms Redwater, when you attained your twenty-first birthday on July 17, 2071, you came into full possession of your family trust, a copy of which I obtained from the Public Trustee. I have a hard-copy of the trust documents here.” She retrieved a plastic document folder from a pile by her feet and held it up, flipped the page and did so again, repeating the process forty times. Iceweasel’s eyes glazed.
At last, she was given the papers. They were vaguely familiar – she’d signed a set of documents on her eighteenth birthday, with her father and someone from the family law office, a Bay Street white-shoe firm called Cassels Brock. The young woman from the firm made a point of explaining each document in detail, seeking verbal confirmation of her comprehension at set intervals, while a bulky, sealed evidentiary camera peered at them. This was a reversal of that process, undoing what she had done.
“Ms Yushkevich, please identify yourself.”
Nadie had slipped smoothly into waiting, that relaxed attention/inattention she’d had during the long stretches of guard duty at the start of Iceweasel’s imprisonment. Now she came to life like a machine woken from sleep-state: “Nadiya Vladimirovna Yushkevich. Belarusian passport 3210558A0101. Bahamian national ID number 014-95488.”
The rest of it was call-and-response, orchestrated flawlessly by Tan, with endless professional patience for bureaucratic ritual. She referred periodically to a long checklist, made them redo any step that was less than flawless. Once, Iceweasel stumbled six times in a row over the complex wording of her statement of noncoercion and mental capacity. Tan gave her two precisely counted minutes to calm herself before giving her the wording again. Iceweasel got it perfect.
As their throats ran dry in the heated car interior, Tan produced waterskins, sipping at her own, pinching it shut and tucking it on the bench between her and Iceweasel.
“That’s that, then.” At last. The sun had set. The sky was murky with low cloud. The rising moon visible as a dull glow above the tree line. “End evidentiary.” The red lights went out.
“Won’t my dad’s lawyers know we’ve done this?”
“Oh yes,” Tan said. “I’ve made very powerful enemies today. Ms Yushkevich and I have an arrangement that compensates me adequately for that.”
In the dim light of the compartment, it was impossible to read either face.
“Now what?” She remembered the woman’s joke about dumping her body, realized if that was in the cards, now would be the time. “Time to bump me off?”
“Certainly not,” Nadie said. “When this is challenged in court, any sign of foul play will make my case much harder.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” Tan said, “we like you. Nadie spoke very highly of you.”
She didn’t know what to think. Nadie was a killer ninja super-spy – far as Iceweasel could work out, Nadie viewed her as a piece of complicated, delicate furniture.
“I like her, too,” she managed.
Tan did something with her fingers and the windows depolarized, showing the true view of the outside, not a video feed. The smudgy sky, the black silhouettes of the winter trees, the crumbling buildings.
“You have everything?” she said to Nadie.
“Food, water, power, if you have them,” Nadie said.
“Just as you requested.” She nudged a backpack on the car’s floor with her toe.
“Phones? Clean ones?”
“Couldn’t do that on short notice. But I brought you fresh interface things, rings and such. I keep a stash, factory sealed and bought through anonymizers and dead-drops, just in case. They’re old, so you’ll want to bring up their patch-levels before you expose them to wild network traffic.”
“That will do,” Nadie said. To Iceweasel’s surprise, they shared a long embrace, almost a mother–daughter thing.
“Look after yourself. And take care of our little Iceweasel. She seems a nice person. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for either of us if...”
“As far as I’m concerned, she’s a client. I don’t lose clients.”
“I know it.” She drummed her fingers and the door-locks popped and the lights came up, making the windows into dark mirrors.
“Come on,” Nadie said.
Tan held out her hand. Her skin was dry, her hand frail, an old woman’s hand, much older than her face. “Best of luck. God knows if I was your age, I’d do the same. This all can’t last. Even if it can, it shouldn’t.”
Iceweasel met her eye, nodded. She didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but she had an inkling now.
She stepped out, zipped up the parka, pulled up the hood, found a pair of thin, plasticky gloves that were fantastically warm while being so membranous they were almost surgical gloves.
Nadie had already zipped up. She raised a hand to the police interceptor, more a-okay semaphore than bye-bye wave. It pulled away smoothly. They watched the tail-lights disappear, then stood in the closed-in, frigid dark.
“Now what?” Iceweasel said.
Nadie’s voice was full of ironic cheer. “Now we walk away. What else?”