Meira and the young man called Mouse drove in silence awhile, punctuated only occasionally by the latter's tight, labored breathing. He seemed to have staunched the bleeding in his leg, but still looked rather pale and withdrawn. The residual fright from their narrow escape abated somewhat, and Meira found that she could now address practical matters.
"We need to ditch this car, kiddo. We need to find a place to patch you up properly, and get you back to your people." Her knuckles began to turn white on the steering wheel, no small feat considering how dark her skin was. "The car's most important. Back window's all smashed up from that explosion, and I bet my tail lights are out too. Last thing we need is a cop pulling us over for that and seeing us with the guns and you all shot up."
The last comment seemed to rouse the young man. Barely a whisper, he said, "No cops. We can't get stopped by cops, not now. The Agents . . ." his speech devolved into a pained moan as he clutched at his side.
She nodded, and noted that he said Agents with a capital A in the same way she said Suits with a capital S. It doesn't matter what anyone calls them -- they're bad news with a capital B. For all that her strange sensitivity to the Suits disturbed her, she was thankful for it now, for none of them seemed to be around just then. "Yeah, we need another car. You just relax, before you go into shock."
"I'll be okay. This was in my training. It's all in my head anyway." He chuckled, but broke it off with a painful grimace.
Meira looked sidelong at the young man, worrying that he may be in shock already. The broken ribs and hole through his leg were certainly not just "in his head." She slowed a bit, and kept a keen eye out for likely vehicles in the warehouse district. The trouble was, she didn't know how to break into a car or hotwire one.
"Listen, Mouse. We may find a car, but do you know how to steal one?"
He shook his head. "Nah. I mean, I can, but I don't usually go around with that program loaded. It's not part of the standard loadout, but maybe it should be. I'll have to remember that."
Meira knitted her eyebrows. She thought maybe he was going a little crazy with the pain and blood loss, but he sounded completely sure of himself. "Well, we'll have a tough time of it then. I've never stolen a car in my life." She almost told him that she'd bought this particular car for perhaps a few hundred dollars, if only to spare her actual vehicle the sort of abuse a vehicle might take while spying on criminals like him and watching for Suits. But that sort of disclosure seemed unwise -- why tell this Mouse person more than he needed to know?
He sounded wistful as he continued, "See, I told you we're screwed. If I had my phone, I could call up Tank and see if he can teach me a thing or two about stealing cars and maybe getting an exit. Maybe you oughta just let me out here; you don't need to get in trouble because of me. Maybe Tank will get my signal and send Apoc and those guys out to get me. He might not get a good signal if I'm moving around so much."
Meira ground her teeth together. The boy was talking pure nonsense now. "That's enough. I don't care to get in trouble from the cops or the Suits or whoever, but I really don't care to let you out here and have the Suits eat you for breakfast. The longer you're out there alone, the more likely it is that'll happen, if you don't bleed out, get gangrene in your leg, or simply die from shock. Whatever . . . bug or transponder you have that might allow your friend to find you, don't you think the Suits can find you too? I've been watching them, you know. They're very good." She knew she said too much then, but the boy needed sense talked into him.
The boy nodded, seeming to see things her way. Then, of a sudden, he looked alarmed. "You go looking for them? Are you crazy? They'll kill you, you know."
"Government agents don't just kill people. I know they don't. I haven't done anything wrong. Well, at least until tonight." She shivered at the memory of the pistol's recoil in her hand, and looked at it now like it had crawled out from under a rock.
Mouse laughed mournfully. "Government agents? You don't understand, lady. They . . ." he broke off then, looking as if he too had said too much.
Which was just as well; she didn't want to push him. Meira spotted an unattended pickup truck near a darkened warehouse. She pulled into the lot next to the truck and killed the engine.
More calmly now, Mouse said, "You said that you've been watching them, and you said they 'don't just kill people.' But you've seen them kill people. You've seen them do some crazy things."
"I've seen them kill people who were trying to kill them," she said, the lie sounding unconvincing in her ears. "That guy Yorick was shooting a machine gun at them, a big one --"
"And did he hit a single Agent?" Meira didn't have an answer, so she just looked at him. He still looked clammy and pale, and his mouth still had a bit of blood at the corners, but he seemed much more alert. "Come on. Let's see what we can do about the truck."
Her eyes widened in alarm as the young man opened his door and started to climb out. She reached out, but he was already out of the car. He was a little unsteady, but standing upright. How in the hell?
"Hey!" she called out as she got out of the car. "Your leg . . ."
"It's all right. Good as new. Well, not so new, but it doesn't matter. My leg's not really hurt. Now if I can just convince myself my ribs aren't broken, I'll be fine." He smiled wanly at her.
Meira looked at him uncertainly. "You must be outside your god damned mind. All of you." She shoved her hands into her jacket pockets.
Mouse leaned against the truck's cab and said, "Yeah, well. I guess we can check under the frame. Maybe they left a spare key --"
"Woah, hey," interjected Meira, looking distracted. "There's, uh . . . something different about your phones? Different from regular cell phones."
"Uh, yeah. They use our hacked signals . . ."
"And you wanted to talk to your friend, right?" A mischievous smile played over her lips.
"Yeah, Tank. Why . . .?"
She produced a matte black phone from her pocket, the spring loaded receiver still open and exposing the keypad.
"Holy shit!" Mouse pushed himself from the truck and nearly fell as he hobbled over to Meira. "Where did you get this?"
"I must have kept it after Yorick died. Same as the gun. Can you use it to talk to your friend?"
"Yeah, just gimme a minute. Keep an eye out for the cops, okay?" Without waiting for her answer, the young man started fiddling with the phone.
Meira turned away as Mouse went to work. The pistol hung heavy in her hand, a weight both alien and familiar. She thought maybe a pistol was such a simple tool that anyone would feel comfortable with it, but as much as she liked the idea, she discarded it immediately. If it was simple, why did so many people end up accidentally shooting their friends or themselves? She knew with a resolute certainty that she would never shoot someone out of clumsiness.
While Mouse worked, she more or less ignored him, but did hear snatches of the boy muttering to himself, and once saw him chew his thumbnail in a peculiar way while he stared at the phone. Instead, she tried to become more familiar with the pistol. She pointed it away into the murky gloom, and noted that her hands seemed unnaturally steady, her breathing regular and measured. She held it with one hand, and then with two; both felt comfortable and natural. That, by itself, was cause for consternation. She held it in her left hand, and then her right; both resulted in steady aim and a surety that she could hit what she was pointing at. That was utterly unnatural -- she had always been stronger with her left hand than with her right.
Holding the pistol in both hands, one leg cocked behind the other so as to give an imaginary attacker a smaller profile to shoot at, Meira aimed at her car's driver-side door. She gasped as a flicker of light played over the door; in a movement too quick for thought, she spun in place and let herself fall, her rear end hitting the ground hard, her pistol pointed up and away. But there was no one there.
Alarmed, Mouse dropped to one knee and reached for his submachine gun. "Shit. Agent?"
Meira shook her head and stood up. "Ah, no. Sorry. Thought I saw something. Nobody here but us." Mouse looked at her uncertainly, stood, and refocused on the phone.
As she dusted herself, she wondered about that drop to the ground. Sure, it seemed wise, if someone was indeed behind her, but she figured that sort of reaction developed with experience in combat, and with the proper training. She had neither. Warily, she brought the gun to bear on her car again, willing herself to not see what she thought she saw. Alas, like so many other things gone completely haywire that night, the sprite came back. Or, that's what she thought it was. Meira aimed at the door again, and a dime-sized luminescent blue dot appeared there. She swung her arm to the rear tire, and sure enough, the dot tracked with where she expected a bullet to go.
"Mouse? Uh. Do you all carry pistols with laser sights on them?"
"Not usually," he replied distractedly. "We're all pretty good shots without them."
Meira grunted and looked at the pistol suspiciously. Though it went against every instinct, natural and alien, she pointed the pistol at her right palm, which was much paler than the rest of her skin. The round sprite was there, still dime sized, but blinking red, about twice a second, like a mark of the stigmata. That's not right, she thought. I've played with laser pointers. The dot is supposed to get bigger when it's right up against something. And what's with the blinking? She aimed it again at the car, and the blue dot played over the windshield and inside the car, where the bullet would surely pass through the glass. Peripherally, she noted hazy blue blurs within the car's cab, on Mouse's body, and on the truck. Somehow, she knew for a fact that those were possible ricochet paths and targets. Irrationally angry now, she ejected the magazine and racked the slide to eject the round in the chamber, and pointed again at the car. Meira was rewarded this time with no sprite at all. Mechanically, she added the loose round back into the magazine, inserted it into the magazine well, and racked the slide again.
She caught Mouse eyeing her over the cell phone. "Any luck?" she said before he could ask anything uncomfortable.
"Yeah, I think so. Hopefully Morpheus hasn't changed Nebuchadnezzar's incoming comm access freqs." He still seemed distracted, and began pushing buttons on the keypad as if to dial someone. He must have hit fifteen successive keys before Meira stopped counting. She guessed that Morpheus must be a colleague of his, but couldn't fathom who or what was named after that old Babylonian king.
Mouse pressed the phone to his ear and chewed at the cuticle of his thumb. He listened awhile, and she guessed that he heard what he wanted to, for relief flooded into his youthful face. "Tank! Oh, man, it's good to hear you. I'm using a phone from one of the guys on the Hokkaido. I don't think many of them made it out. You won't believe this though. Are you picking this up? Do you see this?" He stared intently at Meira for a moment, and then spoke again, "No, it's cool. Look, if that was going to happen, don't you think it would have already? Something weird about her, man, but I don't care. She saved my ass back there." She squinted at him a little, not appreciating being talked about as if she wasn't there. "Look, let's talk about this later, huh? I'll clean the nutrient dispensers for like a month if you can do two things for me. Hit me with a program to break into and hotwire a late model half ton pickup truck, and find me an exit."
Mouse listened another moment, and said to Meira with more animation that she'd seen in him, "All right. We're gonna get out of here, no problem. I'm gonna start the truck, okay, but you gotta--" Mouse stiffened, his face going suddenly tense as if someone touched him with a live wire. Alarmed, Meira reached out to him, but Mouse relaxed again after only a moment. "Right, so. You're going to have to drive. My leg only hurts a little, but it doesn't work well enough to drive."
"What in the hell was that?"
"What? Oh, that? Ah, nothing. Don't worry. Look, there's no good way to break into the truck, it looks like. We're going to have to smash the window. After that, I'm going to need a crowbar or something like it. Do you have one in the trunk, maybe?"
Numbly, Meira moved towards the trunk of her battered car while Mouse kept talking into the phone. It took some doing to open the trunk, due to the shrapnel, but after a moment, she retrieved a tire iron and a short handled hatchet. She came back, holding both tools in one hand, and the pistol in the other.
"Good, okay. Now, first, we could use the axe," he took it from her, "and get into the truck like so." With a single well-placed stroke, Mouse smashed the driver's side window, and used the axe blade to clear the remaining glass out. "Er, it's going to be a little loud when you're driving. Sorry." Meira shook her head, but didn't say anything. He dropped the axe, took the tire iron, and handed her the phone. "Here, you talk to Tank awhile while I fiddle with the truck."
She turned away from the truck and stared at the phone as if it was something alien. She wasn't altogether sure she wanted to talk to Tank. Plastic and metal screeched and groaned behind her as Mouse went to work. She pressed the phone to her ear and listened for a moment.
A male Latino voice murmured, ". . . the loading program took a little longer than usual, sir, but I think it was because of the different software Mouse was using . . . I'm not sure how he got a hold of a Hokkaido phone. Could be the Blue Pill took it . . . I don't know, sir, she's not reading right at all, here. I thought it was a problem with the Matrix feed, but it's localized on her signal. Oh. Shit. Hello?"
An engine roared to life behind her. Meira let the phone fall from her ear as she turned and saw Mouse, who was grinning smugly. "All right, ready to rock and roll! I think I know where the exit is."
"Great," she said, trying to not sound too nervous. "We don't need to keep your friend on the line, do we? You can call him back if we need directions." She slid the receiver closed over the keypad, and pocketed the phone.
"Sure, yeah."
As Meira climbed into the driver's seat and drove where Mouse directed, she tried to puzzle out what the man called Tank meant by "her signal" and "Matrix feed," what happened that Mouse suddenly knew how to hotwire the truck, and why exactly the colored sprites flickered in her vision when she aimed the pistol. She could find no answers within, and Mouse wasn't volunteering anything. She entertained the thought of letting every question in her head spill out of her mouth now, but decided against it; as friendly as he was, she wasn't certain he'd tell her what she wanted to know. However, this Morpheus person, he seemed to be the kid's boss, of a sort. If Morpheus would be there to pick Mouse up and treat his injuries, she would get her answers from him. Her right hand dropped to the pistol by her side.
Damn right I'm going to get some answers.