The Resisters Page 6

  ◆

  As with any story, there were many different ways Ondi’s actions could be presented to the Leaguers. In any of these, though, we thought that to be able to say that the unhacked player was now hacked would help present Ondi, not as an evil outsider who had wantonly jeopardized the safety of us all, but as a kid who had made a mistake. We could then move on to the more important question of what to do.

  The problem was that to be able to say this we had to reach Ondi and hack her. And how were we going to do that? We did not for obvious reasons want to go through pot-smoking Andrea and the ShelterBoat girls. Neither did we want to prevail upon poor Gwen if we could help it. We could, however, we thought, try locating the Nickelhoffs’ houseboat. For, yes, thousands of families lived in their Flotsam Town, but how many of them could have half-court basketball courts?

  Of course, to do a proper search, we were going to need our kayaks—a challenge, for while Ondi and others crossed the channel every day, they did so by ferry. Crossing by kayak was something else altogether, especially if the wind came up. Still, we told Gwen we were going on a trip, as we did sometimes. Eleanor left a note for Yuri, Heraldine, and Sue—her legal team—whose current challenge was to prove that the supplying of protective masks was not a possible remedy for their Surplus Fields complaint. It was a long note. Then early in the morning, I set up the heat signature forger to throw off Eleanor’s DroneMinder.

  * * *

  —

  The plastic houseboats came in paintbox colors—blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green. They were tied up one to the next, forming giant rafts, apparently to help stabilize them against the constant wind and waves; the rafts in turn lay in lanes radiating from an enormous food court, bright with flashing signs, and packed with mall boats as big as barges. Having gotten a dawn start, we could see the steam rising from the hot dishes as tray after tray of NettieFood was conveyed down to water level. Rocking canoes and kayaks pulled over to pick up food, their paddles colliding; people shouted their orders. We did not stop. Instead we paddled down one heaving lane after another, crowded with people washing dishes. Everywhere laundry and nets billowed on poles, and we saw more than a few water rats not only in the water but up on the decks of the boats, their webbed feet splayed to get a grip on the plastic. Their long tails twitched; people swept them overboard with brooms.

  No basketball court.

  We crossed the open water to another food-court hub, paddling hard. Enormous as the first one had seemed, this one was even larger. Its lanes, however, featured fewer laundry poles, and there was less shouting—fewer rats, too. The water was calmer. We even heard music floating from a window and saw boxes of flowers—a higher-rent district, it seemed. We worked our way up and down its spokes, happy that the paddling in this section was easier.

  Still no basketball court.

  We tried another hub and its spokes. Then another and another. Another.

  Another.

  Did we try them all? Without a map, we couldn’t be sure. Eleanor didn’t want to stop. But as the sky darkened, we had to start home. Our arms were so tired, we could no longer stay in sync; the boat lurched and zigzagged. The water roughened. The wind turned aggressive—back-bitey, my mother would have said. What would we do if it began to storm? The current proving stronger than we realized, we missed our dock by close to a half mile and had to battle our way back upstream. Fortunately, in the end, we did make it back. We were so tired, though, we fell asleep with our clothes on, then slept so long that Gwen, worried, woke us—something she had never done before.

  “Are you all right? Where were you?” she wanted to know. And when we told her, she insisted on bringing us breakfast in bed: chili sweet potatoes with yogurt, dried raspberries and apple rings on a chopstick, syrupbuns and coffee.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she kept saying. And, “I’m just so glad you made it back.”

  As for whether she would help locate Ondi—which we finally asked her—she was touched we had sought to spare her feelings. But “Look at your hands, look at your hands,” she kept saying. And, touching the sausage balloons that were our blisters, she insisted, yes, she would help. As for the best way to go about this, could she think about it?

  “Of course,” we said.

  “I think I know someone I can ask,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Was the someone the shadowy organizer of one of Ondi’s favorite haunts—an illegal vintage clothes store called the Velveteen Rabbit? All we knew was that a week later, Ondi stood in our house.

  At bat, facing Gwen, Ondi had seemed defiant and ablaze and recovered from her trauma on the boat. But whether our shock had kept us from seeing her clearly or whether, there at home plate, she had simply risen to the occasion, she now had us shaking our heads again. Could this be the spunky little girl we once knew? All people grow out of their baby clothes, my mother used to say. Still, it was hard to accept how Ondi had changed.

  Her gold-and-red hair was as exuberant as ever, tamed by a wide blue band and spilling out the back in a glorious soufflé. Now, though, she wore lipstick—a clown-pink smear that made the rest of her face look tired—and her chin jutted out with a defiance that seemed not so much confident as reflexive. If she was once rebellious in a feisty way that spoke of youth and beans, she now seemed belligerent, a girl with a chip on her shoulder. To go with her RegiChip, a kind of PermaChip.

  We tried to be cordial.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said. “Welcome.”

  “What a lot of bullshit,” said Ondi. “Actually, you wish to hell you hadn’t had to go looking for me. And part of you wishes you hadn’t found me.”

  “Well, now, but that is absolutely not altogether true,” said Eleanor calmly. It was her courtroom manner, serene and unflappable.

  Ondi laughed. “You were always too honest,” she said. “God, but it drove people nuts.”

  “And here you are driving people nuts, too,” said Eleanor.

  Ondi laughed again—a harsh laugh. “Whatever could you mean?”

  Eleanor smiled. “Come on, funny girl. We haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s get the report first, then we can talk about the rest. How have you been?”

  Ondi was manifestly disinclined to be charmed, but when I led us all out into the garden for a sit, she followed. She had always loved the garden and, plopped down on a familiar pouf pillow, she looked around as if, hard as it might be to say who was or was not a friend among the humans, she and the vegetation were ready to take up where they’d left off.

  “What is that stalk?” she asked.

  “A sunflower,” said Gwen. “It’s going to be taller than my dad. We’re going to toast the seeds and eat them.”

  “A sunflower. Wow,” said Ondi.

  “They’re easy to grow,” I said. “A little work, a lot of drama.”

  “Wow.”

  Then Eleanor brought out some lemonade and cookies on a tray, and Ondi’s edge returned.

  “If you don’t think I see what you’re doing, I do,” said Ondi. “I see it completely.”

  “Interesting,” said Eleanor. “And here we see what you are doing as well.”

  That’s when Ondi should have said, What is that supposed to mean? Instead, flipping again, she accepted a cookie. Then she accepted and drank some lemonade—inching her way toward us, it seemed, like a squirrel trying to decide whether or not to lunge for a hunk of bread. Finally she said, “You don’t understand.”

  “And here we believe that it is you who doesn’t understand,” said Eleanor.

  “How can I not understand?”

  “Because we are often the worst explicators of our own actions and motivations, much less their consequences,” said Eleanor.

  Was this what now came with lemonade and cookies? Ondi planted her lemonade glass on the
ground in front of her and stood up as if to leave.

  “Who what when where how why,” said Gwen, using the exact tone Eleanor had always used when she said that, but with a sideways tilt of her head.

  Ondi gave her a crooked smile, and for a moment, you could almost see their old friendship flash between them.

  “Okay,” she said, and settled back down on the pouf—in which, as it happened, I had buried a deflector way back when. That was a good thing, given all Ondi was about to say.

  * * *

  ◆

  The story started with the days out at sea, which were terrifying. Her parents, luckily, were both excellent sailors. Her father had in fact been on the sailing team at college, and her mother had been his trusty crew. Happily, too, the boat in which they were Cast Off was a reasonable one—a Rhodes 4000, in good repair. It was not big, but it had navigational equipment, a solar battery, a small fridge, a tank of fresh water, and a cookstove. Ondi had actually thought it cool that every door had a latch. Even the doors of the cabinets in which they stocked their cans had latches, and there were cushioned alcoves in which they could sleep. Indeed, the day they set out, it almost seemed as if they were going on a vacation. All they were missing was a VirtualFlix player.

  They weren’t gone for two days, though, before the first storm hit. Many things immediately went overboard, including the messenger drone I’d fashioned for them, but that was hardly their biggest problem. The storms that had begun to build and build in the last half century were now behemoths, with maelstrom winds and fusillades of rain; there were many hours when Ondi’s father forbade anyone else on deck for fear they’d be blown or washed off, while down below they worried that he would be swept away himself. Even on the calmer days, the swells were the size of buildings. Ondi said she could still feel the upupup crash, upupup crash in her stomach and legs; she could still feel the boat pitching wildly and hear the winds howling and howling—“as if there were something the matter with them,” as she put it. The waves, too, crashed and crashed and crashed. Sometimes they were filled with trash. It never stopped.

  But that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst of it, Ondi said, was that they had her one-hundred-fifteen-year-old grandfather—her mother’s father—with them. Grandpa Barney was once a veterinarian who had respected animals and was respected in return but who apparently gave people what they had coming to them. As he liked to say, the bigger the bigot, the bigger the boot. Now he was a frail Asian man with a sparse white beard—or not even a beard, just these random hairs—and an open mouth. Ondi was terrified of the way his jaw hung, showing the pale insides of his mouth. His tongue was white, his teeth long and yellowed. He knew better than to try to stand in the lurching boat but was still knocked off his bench so many times that Ondi’s father rigged a kind of hammock for him, out of a sheet. Then, if they kept the knots tight, Grandpa Barney swung during the storms. The swinging was violent and made him throw up, but it was better than his being thrown across the boat, and in the occasional lulls, Ondi could sit by him and hold his hand and try to get him to eat something. He had to eat something, she kept telling him. He had to eat. Grandpa Barney, though, did not eat. Instead, wrapped in several blankets, he shuddered uncontrollably. Ondi’s mother cried. Anyone could see he was in agony, she said; anyone could see he was going to die. Between the storms, they tried to sail for land.

  The Enforcers were everywhere on their orange HydroBikes, though, and where there wasn’t an Enforcer, there was an EnforceBot in an AquaDrone. Dying man or not, Ondi’s family was driven, over and over again, back out to sea.

  This went on until Grandpa Barney had nothing left in him—until there was nothing left in any of them. Grandpa Barney didn’t talk much, but when he did, all he would say was that he wanted to die—as, in fact, they all did. Ondi’s mother, especially, wanted them to all hold hands and jump into the ocean, but her father said they couldn’t, because of Ondi. We have a child, he said. Think of her young life. And to Ondi, he said, We have you. We all have to live, because of you. And when she said, This is all my fault, he said, It’s not.

  Which was about the nicest thing he had ever said to her, Ondi said, maybe because there was nothing to drink out there. And later he said it again, adding that she had been manipulated.

  Eleanor’s eyebrows rose at that, but neither she nor I asked by whom.

  Finally an Enforcer sped up to them. Ondi thought he seemed like a nice enough man but he did not leave his boat, just shouted up at them with an ampliphone. As for his message, that was that they could re-Register. They could rejoin the ranks of the Surplus. But someone had to be winnowed. They were surprised that he used that term—it was as if he knew how the Surplus talked. And did he mean Ondi’s grandfather? Since neither of her parents would ask it, Ondi did, loudly—shouted it, really. And maybe the man understood. Otherwise, why did he laugh before he sped off?

  Of course, the answer was no.

  But Grandpa Barney got wind of it. And that night, when everyone else was asleep, he somehow managed to roll himself out of his hammock and climb up onto the deck. He did slip while he was up there and fell with a thump loud enough to wake Ondi—which was when she scrambled up the ladder and shouted, Stop! Stop! But it was too late. He had thrown himself overboard.

  “My god,” said Eleanor.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gwen.

  Ondi looked as if she were filing a report. She stood, took her glass, and brought it over to the burgeoning sunflower stalk. Then, lifting the big leaves out of the way, she carefully poured some lemonade onto its roots.

  “Those leaves are so big,” she said. “It’s like they’re on the wrong planet. Or at least in the wrong climate. Like they should be in the tropics.”

  “They really are big,” I said.

  “Or the Jurassic. They should be in the Jurassic.”

  No one else said anything for a time. Ondi plopped back down. Eleanor offered her another cookie. She accepted.

  “And this is how it started?” I asked finally. “The grief and anger you brought home? That eventually led to your playing unhacked and so on?”

  Ondi nodded and chewed.

  “I can see that,” Eleanor said. “Or at least the grief and anger part. What you experienced on that boat…”

  None of us knew quite how to finish her sentence.

  “It would scar anyone,” I supplied finally. I felt like an old-time dental-hygienist-in-training, handing an implement to a dentist; I could only hope that I got it right, and that the tool I proffered would be taken from my hand.

  “Exactly,” said Eleanor. “It’s not like a bad dream you wake up from and shake off.” She paused again.

  “Grief deranges.” Gwen’s loose hair bloomed enormous behind her, but her manner was restrained.

  Ondi looked surprised. “It does,” she said. “That’s the word. It deranges.”

  “Healing is slow,” said Gwen.

  “Yes.” Ondi tilted her head at Gwen. “It is. It is slow.”

  “You do realize that we were not the ones who sent you out in that boat, right?” said Eleanor. “You realize that we were the ones who knit sweaters and blankets for you. Grant made you a messenger drone.”

  I shrugged off the acknowledgment.

  “Remember?”

  Ondi frowned. “My parents told me never to have anything to do with you again. But the truth is…”

  We waited.

  “The truth is that even if you were bribing us with them, we wore your sweaters every day and wrapped my grandfather in your blankets. Probably it was thanks to the blankets that he even lived as long as he did. Without them, he probably would have died right away.”

  “Which might have been a mercy?” suggested Gwen. “In a way?” She let the accusation of bribing the Nickelhoffs go unanswered and spoke tentatively—in a voice she would have m
ocked as quaveringly questioning in someone else—not wanting, we could see, to offend her friend again.

  And how sad but also relieved Gwen looked when, finally starting to cry, Ondi said, “Yes.”

  Eleanor produced a handkerchief.

  “We were still glad he had the blankets,” Ondi went on. “My mother even said later that she wished we had kept them. And my father said we were fools to give them back the way we did. He said we should have kept a sweater each.”

  “So why didn’t you?” asked Eleanor.

  “Because we told Aunt Nettie we would have nothing else to do with you.”

  Eleanor flashed me a look.

  “We’ve been black-coded,” I guessed.

  Ondi dabbed at her eyes.

  Gwen, Eleanor, and I all put our glasses down together, as if the day were suddenly too cold for lemonade.

  “Meaning it didn’t matter whether or not you were hacked,” I said. “Because Aunt Nettie already knew about the League. You didn’t need to make sure Aunt Nettie couldn’t track you.”

  “My mother said you are fools, and you are,” said Ondi.

  “And given the situation, why get hacked—suggesting that you were a League sympathizer?” I went on. “Was that your thinking? That it was better to let Aunt Nettie track you, never mind that you ran the opposite risk—that even if Andrea never realized you hadn’t been hacked, as she probably wouldn’t, we might still realize?”

  Ondi played with the handkerchief. “That was part of it.”

  “And the rest of it?” demanded Eleanor.

  Ondi reached for a cookie—a moment when Eleanor would normally have pushed the dish closer. She did not.

  “When were we black-coded?” she asked instead. “Do you know? Were we black-coded when you came back?”

  “No. Or at least I don’t think so.”

  “So how do you know we are black-coded now?”

  When Ondi didn’t answer, Gwen guessed. “Because you’re the one who got us black-coded. You came to the game knowing Aunt Nettie knew about everyone. Including the Thistles. Including all those girls who used to be so mean to us.”