Page 35 of Scion

“Then we can’t go there.”

I slow to a stop. Green neon from a nearby shop coats the path and casts the old woman’s face into something vaguely eldritch. “Why not?”

“Because they might know about it.”

“They don’t. I know it’s confusing, but that’s why we refer to it as a safe house.”

“The Keres went over every detail of your life before they made the choice to save you, after the bombing. Every. Detail. If they were going to invest that much in you, they had to make sure you couldn’t be compromised. It’s all in the file.”

Silence again as I activate my cogs. De Alwes is afraid. Still in some pain from the wash, too, which is complicating things. But she seems genuinely worried.

“Is the safe house in the file?”

“I can’t imagine it’s not. There’s decades of raw tracking pulled from all over the place, all the way back to your childhood. Even some scraped DeGov data.”

“Ugh. What about from after I woke up?”

“A lot less, I think; it all seemed to run through the AI after they assigned it to you. If it doesn’t know something, they probably won’t either.”

Damn. This is why she asked about how long I’d known Manuel, before we met with him. If she’s right, then anything stemming from my life in Oceanus could be compromised. And since then… yeah. Manuel, and a couple of others, I kept off-book through necessity, because the Keres would never risk exposing themselves to anything that could bring down the wrath of DeGov. But none of those illegal contacts have properly secure places to lay low, even if they were willing to help. Which they wouldn’t be. And other than my visits to them, when was the last time Atti wasn’t in my ear?

Something must change in my expression, because Jasa quirks an eyebrow. “You’ve thought of somewhere better.”

“No.”

“Yes, you have.”

Another long few seconds of silence. I grimace. “Yes, I have.”

I FEEL THE PULSING THROB of Sanctum burrowing through the concrete streets long before we hear it.

We’ve been navigating the blustery alleys of Themis for almost a half hour now, pressing further into the Core. Bots whir by on their dawn patrol for refuse, leaving sterility in their wake. The digiglass sides of buildings light up whenever they catch enough of us for an adscan. I quickly become irritated by the cavalcade of messages directing me to where I can find “affordable” clothing. Jasa finds it hilarious, of course.

On the upside, at least adscans are disconnected: they’re allowed to visually assess you, but there’s no face-recog or retinal info, no communication past the client hardware. De Alwes wanted to take an autocab, initially, but she stopped asking when I explained that the Keres more than likely had access to private-public scanners. We can’t avoid those forever, and the Keres probably won’t be getting Atti to run face recog in parallel with DeGov—it should be a waste of resources, given how easy it is to get a Reconstruct—but I’m not going to take the chance for the sake of convenience.

“Where are we?” The old woman murmurs it, a little uncomfortably, as we round a corner into a main street. She walks close by my side as another pack of manic, shrieking revellers run past, skipping and snatching at invisible things in the air. They’re the third such group we’ve encountered in the past few minutes.

“The Bash.” She looks puzzled. “Nostrum district of the Core,” I elaborate.

“Oh.” She looks around curiously. The streets here are brightly lit by the lines of neon from every building that slowly morph from garish orange to garish pink to garish green, mixing and clashing. Farther down, there are lights that strobe and pulse and then move in hypnotic waves across the road as autocabs slide slowly over them, deftly avoiding wandering pedestrians. “That makes sense.”

We weave our way forward. Morning means little here in the Bash, surrounded by tall buildings and covered by the Plate; aside from a few grey reflections on high, it could just as easily be midnight. Certainly the district’s patrons don’t care what time it is. In my experience, there are usually more people out and about now than there are in the actual evenings.

“Why do they do this to themselves?” Jasa murmurs it as she watches another pair of wide-eyed users stumble past. Not to me, exactly. More a thought that’s escaped her lips.

I respond anyway. “Why wouldn’t they?”

She frowns. “It’s a waste. Pointless. They’re just passing time as quickly and painlessly as possible.” A grandmotherly, disapproving shake of the head. “I never understood why anyone would live their lives like that.”

“Right.” I draw out the word. “You know how many people live in Themis?”

“Eighty million?”

“Something like that. You know how many jobs there are?”

Silence, then, “They could always go off-planet.” I cough a laugh, and even de Alwes looks mildly embarrassed that she made the suggestion. At least in the cities, you don’t have to worry about your air getting turned off if you don’t do as you’re told. “Fine. Maybe not that. But this?”

“They have to spend their Basic on something. Keeps them out of trouble.”