This chapter has been posted before and I've been adding to the story before it, but now everything is regular again and the story will be posted in order. Sorry about any confusion, and thanks for reading through it :) Let me know what you think of the story so far!
Popular culture always portrayed Texas as a dusty wasteland with quaint ranchhouses dotted miles apart, but then reality and popular culture rarely matched. Root pulled the car smoothly up to the curb in her sleepy old neighborhood and watched intently as the uniformed crime scene ants scurried around the house.
She had never known where to search for Hanna's body. It remained the one loose end of the whole matter, and so her smile was genuine when she called John to thank him. His disapproving voice admonished her for her actions, but it was surely a front; Harold would have done the same, and he clearly loved Harold.
She had not done nearly the damage she could have, really. She had given Mr. Russell two whole years of happiness, just living his life as if he had never kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Yes, it had been to sweeten the pleasure of his death, but in that case, they could both be called winners. However, she was the only one still alive, and that might be called victory more than anything else.
After the body had been removed in its black plastic bag, she drove slowly around the neighborhood, counting the houses and sidewalk cracks to get back to her childhood home. She had unwrapped her first computer there, an 'accidental' delivery with the return papers mysteriously missing. Her mother merely shrugged and said "God provides," but her eyes narrowed a bit as her slippers shuffled off down the hall laminate. She always dusted around the computer, and avoided speaking to her daughter when she was using it.
Of course, Root had spent most of her time at home on the computer. Bishop was nearly empty of interesting things, that part pop culture had gotten right; the internet connection offered her a dizzyingly wide array of new attractions. Sam's mother never questioned how Sam facilitated the machine's apparent connection to the outside world. She rarely questioned the burgeoning mastermind at all in those teen years, merely sighed and expressed ad infinitum a wish that Sam would spend more time outside the house. Even that came with a tinge of apprehension, though; Sam could see the uncertainty in her mother's eyes when her quiet child turned into a social butterfly around others, albeit a somewhat malicious butterfly that always got what she wanted. She had seen Sam's imitation of human behavior for what it was, a ruse, and although neither spoke of it, the years between Hanna's and her mother's death had been ones in which the buffer around her, the one that kept others out and away, developed out of her mother's quiet fear.
Once, Sam's mother had told the smiling ladies at church that her daughter's first language was computer, not English. She was half proud and half exasperated, for once displaying none of her usual judgment for her alien daughter. The pastel women gave her sympathetic looks and one said, "she'll be speaking Boy soon, I'll bet!" shaking Sam's shoulder. Sam had given a tight smile and gestured to the coffee and donuts waiting in the vestibule, taking her mother's casual nod as permission to leave the situation.
Root had learned to speak Boy, and Girl, and Woman, and Man, but not in a way of which those church women would have approved. It had been lucky that her mother died when she did; despite her careful discretion, the town's whispers and pointed glances had only grown louder and more numerous during her last years in Bishop. With her mother's death she cut the last tie to the high-horse town and ran headlong to New York. Like a whirlpool, the underworld to which she gave herself a bloody introduction tended to swallow up newcomers and spit their twisted bodies out onto harsh pavement. She avoided this fate by sinking to the bottom of the maelstrom and changing its currents to suit her own purposes. She manipulated killers, smooth-talkers, thieves, and addicts with ease, hacking with brutal finesse to achieve her ends. The end of those golden years was just now heralding a new era of intrigue in the form of a more perfect being: the Machine.
All this passed like cleansing wildfire through Root's mind, her whole history, stretching through her memory center and strutting off down her spine like the buildings that bled together as they streaked past her car windows. The corner store, the post office, the church in which she had ceased to believe in a higher power; all markers for some forgotten ancestor called Samantha Groves.
Even the old gas station persisted, though it leaned to the right, a dusty cowboy of legend ready at a moment's notice to draw his pistol. Root whipped her car into the space near the pump. The station had not succumbed to the siren call of self-service pumps, and she drummed her black-painted fingernails on the worn leather wheel impatiently. The familiar sound of boots crunching gravel rounded the car and stopped at her rolled-down window.
"What can I do for you, ma'am?" Root peered up through long batting eyelashes, a hint of her original accent seeping through the patina of New York speech like groundwater.
"Just fill her up, please." He nodded smartly and turned on a spurred heel toward the back of the car. Root stuck her head out the window into the afternoon heat, letting it strike down on her dark hair as she admired the station worker's arms in rolled denim sleeves, like any red-blooded Texas woman should.
"Maybe you could get the windshield too, Joe," was her next drawled suggestion.
He glanced down at the pocket of his faded shirt with a smile, shaking his head. "Actually, it's Evan. Joe is the owner." Root recalled a stooping, weather-beaten man who always spat out tobacco juice to punctuate his rambling sentences.
"Sorry about that. Evan." He nodded goodnaturedly and next appeared at the front of the car with a cloth and wiper. She gracefully climbed out of the car to lean languidly against the driver's side door.
"Is it just me, or is it hot even for Bishop?" Root tilted her head up. The cloudless blue sky marched empty for miles in all directions, and she stared with unfocused eyes at nothing in particular.
"We've had a hot one, that's for sure," her companion agreed. "So you've been to Bishop before?" He paused in his soaping of the windshield, and Root turned a smiling face to him.
"As a kid," she explained carelessly. He had ceased soaping and was now wiping the glass down with a practiced hand.
"Just visiting, then? What brings you?" His rough voice was that of a hundred boys and men that had crowded her child- and young adulthood, interchangeable and extremely forgettable, but it brought more Texan unbidden to her tongue.
"Business," was the short reply, but a ghost of her mother made an unprompted and rare appearance in the back of her mind, urging her to elaborate, to 'talk to the gentleman.' "I'm here from New York on business."
"Yeah? Had some other New Yorkers here yesterday. Y'all here together?" In a town as small as Bishop, questions like this were not nearly as ridiculous as they would have been anywhere else.
"Tall Neanderthal?" Root queried with amusement. The worker's confused squint prompted her to try again. "Tall guy in a suit?"
He nodded, understanding now. "Yes, ma'am, that's the one. And a black woman. Some kind of police detective, is she?"
Root nodded her perky assent. "Those are the ones."
"Then you're here about the Frey girl," he replied with approving surety. He had finished the windshield and rounded the front left bumper to lean a respectful distance down the door from Root. He flipped the wet cloth on his faded blue jeans, disregarding the wet stripes it left in its wake to evaporate in the heat.
Root raised her eyebrows flirtatiously. "And how would you know that?"
"Got a friend down at the station house, heard the sheriff wasn't too pleased with your friends' manners." He grinned good-naturedly to show he meant no harm by his words, and Root smiled back.
"That sounds like them all right."
He looked down in thought, then back up at Root. "Heard they found that girl in the librarian's patio." Root's smile shifted to a more conspiratorial grin as she leaned in and lowered her voice.
"You may have heard right," she confided, "but that's about all I can say." He nodded once, satisfied. Root leaned back against the car door, looking to her left at the handle protruding from the gas tank.
"I think it's full. Do I pay inside?"
"No, ma'am, right here's fine if it's cash." He un-leant himself from the door and craned his neck to note the numbers on the antique pump. "$52.68." Root opened the car door and pulled out her wallet, counting out three twenties.
"Keep the change." She climbed up into the car and smiled out the window at the worker even as she pulled away. She saw his relaxed wave in the rearview mirror, and her gaze followed him until he turned and sauntered back into the station.
The drive back to the airport was monotonously full of uniform one-and-a-half-story homes sliding into rolling fields and endless sun. Her mind wandered to other matters, and she arrived at the rental lot in what seemed like minutes.
Light luggage and few accessories made quick work of the security line, something that Root had perfected over the ten years since her first plane trip. The heavy stasis of waiting was nearly interminable, but as she settled into her first-class seat she was finally able to open her computer and pull up a file folder that was simply called 'Her.' The information flowed freely from her mind, through her fingers, and onto the bright screen, following the ever-running bar marking her place in the document.
Harold Finch—designer, leader
John Reese—pet, muscle
A search of the NYPD's duty roster and work hours for the last week yielded the most likely candidate for the next name.
Jocelyn Carter—police detective
Each name linked to another document, full of information, job and personal histories, credits reports, newspaper articles, confidential files from the upper echelons of the intelligence community. These yielded links to a dozen more covering the main aspects of Finch's little operation.
As she tapped out more information about the newest known member of Finch's team, Root smiled. The suited monkey might think that he had ended Root's encounters with his employer, but Harold was more intelligent than that. New York to Maryland, Denton Weeks' connection to the Machine, all of these reminders that a preponderance of information and knowledge of the weak spots in humanity would lead her directly to what she wanted most. He had to recognize the opening gambit of a long game, even if he could not yet know the inevitable outcome that Root foresaw. Though this move had failed, Root's patience was infinite and her skills vast; it was impossible that she should be kept from the god-like Machine for long.
Even as the flight attendant's electronic voice warned the passengers of their imminent arrival and asked politely that they stow their devices, Root saved the last file she had been editing. She created a new folder within the larger one and added all the files pertaining to the events of the last few months.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to turn that off." Root's winning smile to the beleaguered attendant banished all remnants of Texas when she spoke.
"One moment, I just need to save this. I'd hate for the boss's report to be deleted," she giggled. She glanced down the aisle briefly to the squalling child in economy class. "Don't worry, I'll put it away," she whispered sympathetically. The flight attendant threw her a grateful look and bustled off.
Just before shutting the computer down, she typed a name into the folder heading: Opening Moves.
Ten minutes later, the plane landed with a whump and a pressure along the seatbelt holding Root in her seat. Even though others jumped up and grabbed at bags and purses, she remained seated for a moment. In the bubble of quiet that she projected around herself, she smiled. She was back in New York. Now the mid-game could begin.