Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 22

"I haven't," Alan said. "Not since the weekend. Sunday morning. She said she was going home."

Another new sound, the sound of an adult crying. Marci's father, and his sobs made his chest shake and Mr. Davenport awkwardly came from behind his desk and set a box of kleenexes on the hard bench beside him.

Alan caught Mr. Davenport's eye and the vice princ.i.p.al made a shoo and pointed at the door.

Alan didn't bother going back to cla.s.s. He went straight to the golems'

cave, straight to where he knew Davey would be -- must be -- hiding, and found him there, playing with the bones that lined the walls.

"Where is she?" Alan said, after he'd taken hold of Davey's hair and, without fanfare, smashed his face into the cold stone floor hard enough to break his nose. Alan twisted his wrists behind his back and when he tried to get up, Alan kicked his legs out from under him, wrenching his arms in their sockets. He heard a popping sound.

"Where is she?" Alan said again, amazing himself with his own calmness. Davey was crying now, genuinely scared, it seemed, and Alan reveled in the feeling. "I'll kill you," he whispered in Davey's ear, almost lovingly. "I'll kill you and put the body where no one will find it, unless you tell me where she is."

Davey spat out a milk tooth, his right top incisor, and cried around the blood that coursed down his face. "I'm -- I'm *sorry,* Alan," he said. "But it was the *secret*." His sobs were louder and harsher than Marci's father's had been.

"Where is she?" Alan said, knowing.

"With Caleb," Davey said. "I buried her in Caleb."

He found his brother the island midway down the mountain, sliding under cover of winter for the seaway. He climbed the island's slope, making for the ring of footprints in the snow, the snow peppered brown with soil and green with gra.s.s, and he dug with his hands like a dog, tossing snow soil gra.s.s through his legs, digging to loose soil, digging to a cold hand.

A cold hand, protruding from the snow now, from the soil, some of the snow red-brown with blood. A skinny, freckled hand, a fingernail missing, torn off leaving behind an impression, an inverse fingernail. A hand, an arm. Not attached to anything. He set it to one side, dug, found another hand. Another arm. A leg. A head.

She was beaten, bruised, eyes swollen and two teeth missing, ear torn, hair caked with blood. Her beautiful head fell from his shaking cold hands. He didn't want to dig anymore, but he had to, because it was the secret, and it had to be kept, and --

-- he buried her in Caleb, piled dirt gra.s.s snow on her parts, and his eyes were dry and he didn't sob.

It was a long autumn and a long winter and a long spring that year, unwiring the Market. Alan fell into the familiar rhythm of the work of a new venture, rising early, dossing late, always doing two or three things at once: setting up meetings, sweet-talking merchants, debugging his process on the fly.

His first victory came from the Greek, who was no pushover. The man was over seventy, and had been pouring lethal coffee and cheap beer down the throats of Kensington's hipsters for decades and had steadfastly refused every single crackpot scheme hatched by his customers.

"Larry," Andy said, "I have a proposal for you and you're going to hate it."

"I hate it already," the Greek said. His dapper little mustache twitched. It was not even seven a.m. yet, and the Greek was tinkering with the guts of his espresso delivery system, making it emit loud hisses and tossing out evil congealed ma.s.ses of sin-black coffee grounds.

"What if I told you it wouldn't cost you anything?"

"Maybe I'd hate it a little less."

"Here's the pitch," Alan said, taking a sip of the thick, steaming coffee the Greek handed to him in a minuscule cup. He s.h.i.+vered as the stuff coated his tongue. "Wow."

The Greek gave him half a smile, which was his version of roaring hilarity.

"Here's the pitch. Me and that punk kid, Kurt, we're working on a community Internet project for the Market."

"Computers?" the Greek said.

"Yup," Alan said.

"Pah," the Greek said.

Anders nodded. "I knew you were going to say that. But don't think of this as a computer thing, okay? Think of this as a free speech thing. We're putting in a system to allow people all over the Market -- and someday, maybe, the whole city -- to communicate for free, in private, without permission from anyone. They can send messages, they can get information about the world, they can have conversations. It's like a library and a telephone and a cafe all at once."

Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to n.o.body, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."

"Well, *sure*," Alan said. "If you're all alone with a computer, you're just going to fall down the rabbit hole. You're in your own world and cut off from the rest of the world. But once you put those computers on the network, they become a way to talk to anyone else in the world. For free! You help us with this network -- all we want from you is permission to stick up a box over your sign and patch it into your power, you won't even know it's there -- and those customers won't be antisocial, they'll be socializing, over the network."

"You think that's what they'll do if I help them with the network?"

He started to say, *Absolutely*, but bit it back, because Larry's bulls.h.i.+t antennae were visibly twitching. "No, but some of them will. You'll see them in here, talking, typing, typing, talking. That's how it goes. The point is that we don't know how people are going to use this network yet, but we know that it's a social benefit."

"You want to use my electricity?"

"Well, yeah."

"So it's not free."

"Not entirely," Alan said. "You got me there."

"Aha!" the Greek said.

"Look, if that's a deal breaker, I'll personally come by every day and give you a dollar for the juice. Come on, Larry -- the box we want to put in, it's just a repeater to extend the range of the network. The network already reaches to here, but your box will help it go farther. You'll be the first merchant in the Market to have one. I came to you first because you've been here the longest. The others look up to you. They'll see it and say, 'Larry has one, it must be all right.'"

The Greek downed his coffee and smoothed his mustache. "You are a bulls.h.i.+t artist, huh? All right, you put your box in. If my electricity bills are too high, though, I take it down."

"That's a deal," Andy said. "How about I do it this morning, before you get busy? Won't take more than a couple minutes."

The Greek's was midway between his place and Kurt's, and Kurt hardly stirred when he let himself in to get an access point from one of the chipped shelving units before going back to his place to get his ladder and Makita drill. It took him most of the morning to get it securely fastened over the sign, screws sunk deep enough into the old, spongy wood to survive the build up of ice and snow that would come with the winter. Then he had to wire it into the sign, which took longer than he thought it would, too, but then it was done, and the idiot lights started blinking on the box Kurt had a.s.sembled.

"And what, exactly, are you doing up there, Al?" Kurt said, when he finally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoon breakfast coffee.

"Larry's letting us put up an access point," he said, wiping the pigeon s.h.i.+t off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladder and wiped his hands off on his painter's pants. "That'll be ten bucks, please."

Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies and toonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. "You talked the Greek into it?" he hissed. "How?"

"I kissed his a.s.s without insulting his intelligence."

"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner high-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network, huh?"

"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get you something."

What they had done, was they had hacked the s.h.i.+t out of those boxes that Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.

"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from his bas.e.m.e.nt that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked like they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-power Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian Tire.