Chapter 31
A COMMANDING VOICE CAME FROM BEHIND THE BLINDING WALL of light.
"If it isn't Hunter Braque, skinny white boy looking like his mother didn't have time to dress him."
Even blinded and terrified, I flinched at this unfair fashion analysis. I might be wearing gray cords and a dried-chewing-gum-colored shirt, but I was going for social invisibility.
"I am undercover, you know," I protested.
"Yeah, you look it," a deeper voice called from the opposite direction - the big bald guy.
"And who have we here?" the first voice said.
I heard the rumble of skates on the concrete floor. I agonizingly pried my lids apart and saw Mwadi Wickersham gliding gracefully out of the retina-searing glare. I glimpsed more figures surrounding us, covering every escape route. The trucker cap and cowboy boots of Futura Garamond strolled out of the blinding wall of light. He stared at Jen's feet.
"Yo, look, she's got the laces," he said. A murmur of recognition passed through our captors.
"So she does," Mwadi Wickersham said, dark glasses peering down from her skate-enhanced height. "Did you come up with those yourself, honey?"
Jen squinted back at her. "Yeah. What do you mean, the laces?"
"Mandy had a picture on her. We've all been talking about them." Mwadi nodded, an imperious queen pleased with her subject. "Nice work."
"Uh, thanks."
"Let us go!" I demanded, if high-pitched noises can be construed as demanding.
Mwadi Wickersham turned toward me and said, "Not until we get a deal signed."
I turned toward Mandy, who was giving me the glare she reserves for people who perpetually insist that clam diggers are coming back.
"W-Wait," I stammered. "What deal?"
"The biggest deal of my career, Hunter." She sighed. "Do you think maybe you could not screw it up?"
We sat at one of the tables in the fake restaurant: Jen and me, Mwadi Wickersham, Mandy, and Futura Garamond. A few more henchmen stood around, half visible behind the bright banks of movie lights. I caught the flash of Future Sarcastic Woman's silver hair and the silhouette of the big bald guy, their alert poses suggesting that departure was not an option. From our island of light, the sound stage seemed to extend for miles in every direction, lending an echoey grandeur to our words.
"So you didn't get kidnapped?" I asked Mandy for the third time.
"Well... at first, I guess." She looked at Mwadi Wickersham for help
with the question.
Wickersham removed her dark glasses, and I blinked. Her eyes were as ^ green as Jen's but more piercing, narrowed to slits in the bright movie lights. She wore a white wife beater and faded, brandless jeans with a wide black belt, a fake gold chain around her neck: banji-butch street kid, circa mid-break-dance era. In winter you'd add a leather jacket. I knew from cool-hunting history that if you'd grown up in the Bronx in the 1980s, the uniform was practically Logo Exile.
She placed the glasses on the table, in no hurry to answer, possessed of that unquestionable authority achieved by being from an older generation but still totally cool.
"We decided to make a deal."
"You made a bargain with the client?" Jen asked, appalled.
"Sure. The element of surprise was blown anyway. And they wanted them."
"That we did," Mandy said.
"Wait," I asked. "You wanted what?"
"You sold out," Jen said to Wickersham.
I felt like I was reading subtitles that didn't match the dialog. "Huh?"
"It wasn't supposed to work out this way," Wickersham said darkly, the rumble of her skates ominous under the table as her feet slid restlessly back and forth. "We worked on those shoes for two years, getting them just right. We wanted to put them on the street with the sinister swooshes. But certain people in our organization thought they were too cool. A theory was proposed that we'd be making the client hip again by association."
"Kind of like a Tony Bennett self-parody thing," Jen said.
I found myself nodding. Some of this was becoming clear. "When we first saw the shoes, we weren't even sure whether they were bootlegs or the client being self-reflexive. So you got nervous, thinking the shoes might backfire?"
"I didn't get nervous," said Wickersham, in a tone that suggested she never got nervous. "But certain people did, and they acted on their own." She shrugged. "This is what I get for working with anarchists."
"They called the police?" Jen asked.
"Someone called the client," Mandy said. "Reported a shipment of bootlegs. Before the boardroom suits called in the cops, they sent a rep down to check out the shoes, a guy called Greg Harper."
"Your boss," I supplied. "And when he saw them, he must have realized he was looking at bootlegs that were better than the original."
Mandy chuckled. "And a suit like him didn't know how to cope with that. So he called in street-level expertise, telling me to deal with it."
"And you called in me and Jen," I said.
Futura Garamond spoke up, his trucker cap bobbing. (The logo on it was the classic naked-girl silhouette found on the mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers, which was daringly last year of him, I thought.) "By this time, we'd realized what had happened. So we decided to move the shoes out of town until the heat was off. But Mandy showed while we were setting up the move. Certain people panicked." He and Wickersham cast disappointed looks at the big bald guy.
Who shrugged. "Had to improvise, didn't I? Left the shoes, brought in Mandy. Worked out all right."
"So you did kidnap her," Jen said.
"Like I said, I improvised."
I turned to Mandy. "But then you wound up negotiating with them?" My tone was incredulous, but frankly, cutting a deal with her own kidnappers sounded like the Mandy I knew and loved. I could imagine her tapping her clipboard, ticking off contractual issues one by one.
"A sharp operator, Ms. Wilkins," Wickersham admitted, giving Mandy the Nod. "She realized that we wanted to ditch the shoes and the client wanted to buy them. And she offered a good price."
"Just a couple more points and we can wind this deal up." Mandy looked at her watch. "We'd be done by now if you two kids hadn't shown up in rescue mode."
"Yeah, sorry," I said. A scorecard flashed in my head - Amateur Detectives: Still Zero.
"But how could you sell them?" Jen pleaded with Wickersham. "They'll go straight into the outlet malls!"
The older woman spread her arms helplessly. "Anarchy's a cash business, girl. The Hoi Aristoi operation wound up with some major cost overruns."
Jen nodded slowly, and her expression changed. "So how did that work?" She leaned forward, eyes widening like a Japanese ten-year-old's. "The paka-paka thing, I mean. Have you really figured out how to rewire people?"
Mwadi Wickersham laughed. "Hold on to your skates, girl. I like you, but we just met. And I might not even know what you're talking about."
Jen smiled sheepishly, her smile luminous from the praise.
Until Mwadi continued: "The question is, what to do with you?"
I shared a sidelong glance with Jen. That question had been on my mind as well.
"Uh, I'm sure the client wants you to let us go," I said, glancing over at Mandy.
She stared back at me silently, still annoyed, her fingers drumming on the table. I swallowed dryly, remembering the client's record on child labor....
Mwadi cleared her throat. "Our deal's pretty much sewn up, and there was no mention of Hunter Braque in the contract. Or you, sweetie. What's your name, anyway?"
"Jen James."
In a weird and off-the-subject flash, it occurred to me that I hadn't known Jen's last name until that moment. As I've said, things were moving quickly.
"Well, Jen James, we might have work for you two."
"Work?" I said.
Mwadi nodded. "We've got other irons in the fire, lots of plans, and now we've got the cash to get them moving. You both know the territory. If you didn't, you never would have made it all the way here."
"What territory?" I asked. I wasn't even sure what planet we were on.
Mwadi rose from the chair to her full two-by-two-wheeled height. She spun around once, reminding me of the ever-rotating Hiro but saturated with grace and power rather than Hiro's nervous energy. She began to skate in slow circuits around the table, frictionless as a swan with a tail-wind, weaving the client's fantasy world (her own weird version) into existence from the multicolored threads of movies lights.
"You know the cool pyramid, don't you, Hunter?"
"Sure." I drew it in the air with two fingers. "Innovators at the top, under them the Trendsetters, then Early Adopters. Consumers at the very bottom, with Laggards scattered around the base, sort of like leftover construction materials."
"Laggards?" She narrowed her eyes at me as she halted, old-school metal wheels scraping the concrete floor like fingernails. "I prefer the term Classicists. Rock Steady Crew, still break dancing after twenty-five years? On the cardboard every day, whether breaking's in style or out? They're not Laggards."
"Okay," I agreed. "Rock Steady are Classicists. But guys wearing tucked-in Kiss T-shirts are Laggards."
A grin flashed across her features. "I can live with that." She resumed her fluid circling. "But the pyramid's in trouble. You know that."
"I do?"
"Because of cool hunters," Jen cut in. "And market research, focus groups, and all that crap. They squeeze the life out of everything."
Mandy spread her hands. "Hey, sitting right here!"
"That's the score, though," Wickersham said. "Hunter, your girlfriend knows what she's talking about. The ancient pyramid has sprouted mailing lists and databases. The sides are too slippery now, so nothing sticks anymore. The cool hits the mall before it has time to digest."
And of course, all my brain had processed from this last metaphorical hash was that someone who was not my parents had referred to Jen as my girlfriend. Pathetic.
As a result all I managed was, "Yeah," all soulfully.
"I thought you had it figured out," Wickersham continued, nodding. "While waiting for you to find us, we read most of your old cool blog and got the scoop from a bunch of your friends. We have some of the best social engineers in the history of hacking working for us." She nodded at Future Woman, then turned back to me. "We know you cold, Hunter, and we think that you realize something's wrong with the pyramid. You've known it since you were thirteen."
I felt that lump, the one from my first year in school here. The cobblestone in my stomach. "Yeah, I guess."
"So the pyramid needs some reconstruction work; a new level in the hierarchy needs to be innovated," she said, green eyes flashing in the; movie lights. "Something to slow things down again. To trip things up. How well do you know the first heroes, Hunter?"
My knowledge of history includes many obscure details but few big pictures. "First heroes?"
"The first Innovators invented myth," Wickersham said, "before religion got turned into mall metal for Consumers. In those old stories the first heroes were tricksters, coyotes, and hustlers. Their job was to jam nature, mess up the wind and stars. They messed with the gods, remixing the world with chaos."
She slid to a halt.
"So we're taking a page out of the old books, adding Jammers to the pyramid."
"Jammers." Jen's eyes widened. "The opposite of cool hunters."
Mwadi smiled. "Right. We don't help innovations move down the pyramid; we mystify the flow. We market confusion, jam the ads until the Consumers don't know what's real and what's a joke."
"Loosening the glue," I said softly. The floor seemed to rumble beneath my feet. In fact, the floor was rumbling.
A wash of red light fell across us, the giant studio door sliding open to let in the last rays of the descending sun.
Outlined against the bloody sky were about a dozen figures. I recognized the one in front: he was the would-be writer from the coffee shop, the one who'd ridden with us on the train into Dumbo. He'd been following us.
The other figures were carrying baseball bats, and their heads and hands were purple.
The hoi aristoi had arrived, and they were pissed.
Chapter 32
MWADI WICKERSHAM WAS CHUCKLING.
"Damn, look at those heads. That stuff worked too good."
"Run?" Futura asked.
Her broad shoulders shrugged. "Looks like it. You take Mandy, I'll grab these two. See you at the factory. Lights!"
Seconds later the long banks of movie lights all switched off, and once again I couldn't see a thing.
"Come with me, kids." A strong hand grabbed my arm, lifting me to my feet. Then I was running, following the sound of roller skates on concrete, in the wake of an unstoppable force that brushed aside invisible obstacles. From behind us came shouts and crashes as our pursuers stumbled through the hodgepodge of movie sets and lighting. The Jammers were barely visible - a swift, silent horde marked by bobbing flashlights in the dark.
I heard Jen's breath next to me, reached out to feel for her hand. We steadied ourselves against each other as we were led around a sharp turn, then pushed up a ladder, Wickersham's skates clanking on metal rungs behind us. We stormed along the catwalk, then through a door high in the wall. A long hallway opened up before us, dimly lit by a row of dirty skylights, leading to a window red with sunset.
Mwadi zoomed around us, shot ahead on her wheels, and had the security gate open before we caught up. She pulled herself out onto the fire escape, and Jen and I followed. Our combined weight tipped the ancient metal stairs into motion, Mwadi clunking down them as they swung to ground level on a wailing, rusty hinge.
Hitting asphalt, she skated furiously around the corner. Jen and I looked at each other.
"Maybe we should escape now," I said.
"We are escaping."
"No, I mean escape the anti-client."
"They're called Jammers, Hunter. Weren't you listening? And we don't have to escape; they want us to work for them."
"What if we don't want to?"
"As if."
Jen turned and dashed after Wickersham. I couldn't do much but follow.
Around the corner Mwadi was zooming up a handicapped ramp to the sliding door - we had circled back around to the sound-stage entrance. She rolled it shut, closed the massive padlock hasp, and jammed her flashlight into it, leaving the hoi aristoi trapped in darkness.
"Lucky all that stuff's rented," she said, rumbling back down the ramp. She looked at an empty limo waiting by the door. The driver must have been inside the building with his employer. "Either of you know how to drive?"
"No."
"No."
She shook her head. "Damn city kids. I can hot-wire, but I hate driving with skates on."
But Jen was already opening the driver's-side door. "It's okay, I've played tons of..." She mentioned a certain video-game franchise with the same name as the crime we were about to commit.
"Good enough for me," Wickersham said.
Already outvoted, I got in.
In 2003 a University of Rochester study revealed that kids who play mega-hours of video games have superior hand-to-eye coordination and faster reflex time. Parents and educators were shocked, appalled, disbelieving.
Every teenager I know was like, "Duh."
Jen took us through the empty streets of the Brooklyn Navy Yard fast and furious, leaving streaks of rubber on the hot summer asphalt. She slowed down only when we passed through the open gates and turned onto Flushing, keeping it legal.
I turned to look out the back window. There were no signs of pursuit.
"We're cool."
"What about everyone else?" Jen asked.
"They'll be fine," Wickersham said. "Practice makes perfect."
I had to ask. "You practice running away?"
"We knew we'd make enemies. Other organizations have fire drills; we have oh-shit-someone-found-our-ass drills. Now, a question for you two: why did someone find us?"
There was an uncomfortable silence.
"Well, you see, when we were tracking you down, we enlisted some help from an acquaintance of mine" - I cleared my throat - "of the purple-headed persuasion. And it appears that she called all her friends, and they called their friends, and someone had us followed."
"That's what I figured." Mwadi shook her head. "And I thought you kids were so damn clever.
"It's my fault," Jen said.
"Not any more than mine," I protested.
Jen's knuckles turned white on the wheel as she grimly followed Flushing Avenue. "I was the one who told Hillary what we were doing."
"That was just to get her to help," I said. "You didn't plan on telling her what we found out, did you?"
"Of course not. But it was me who spilled the beans. It didn't even occur to me that Hillary might be playing us."
"Take this left," Wickersham said. "And shut up a second."I
She made a call, speaking quickly and softly into a cell phone, guiding Jen with gestures. I wondered what was being arranged for us at the other end of this trip now that we were in disgrace.
But part of me felt at peace: finally we had answers. Things had fallen into place, not far from our theories and paka-paka revelations: renegade cool hunters, a charismatic Innovator, a movement that wanted to rock the world. Maybe Jen and I really did know the territory.
It was nice to discover that sometimes the useless facts in my brain had some relevance, that my fantasy world matched up, at least occasionally, with the real one. That all my time spent reading the signals around me hadn't been completely wasted.
Maybe the signs had been around even before Mandy disappeared, as obvious as the stones in the street. People pushing back from being force-fed, ready to rebel; maybe Innovators only channel something that's already there. Maybe the Jammers had to happen.
And whatever else went down, at least Mandy was okay.
I leaned back and closed my eyes, exhausted. There was nothing more to do but wait for the car to get where it was going.
"That way. ' Mwadi Wickersham flicked her phone closed.
Jen turned, easing us down an alley, the sides of the car scraping stacks of garbage bags. We pulled into a bare courtyard, surrounded on every side by derelict buildings, their black windows watching us like empty eyes. A rental truck was already there, the one we'd spotted on Lispenard Street the day before.
Two figures were tossing shoe boxes from it into an unruly pile. My eyes caught the flicker of reflective panels as shoes tumbled out onto the dirt.
A third person stood next to the growing pile.
She was pouring gasoline onto it.
"No," I whispered.
The limo came to a crunching halt, a bottle popping under one tire. Mwadi leapt out, her wheels gliding across the rubbish-strewn courtyard like it was a hardwood rink.
Jen and I ran to the edge of the pile.
"What are you doing?"
"Getting rid of these, as per our agreement with the client," Wickersham said. "They'll get the prototypes and the specs. The last thing they want is the originals showing up on the street."
"You're burning them?" I cried. "They should be in a museum!"
She nodded sadly. "You got that right. But thanks to you two, our security's been compromised. We got to do this quick and dirty."
A match went down onto the pile, and the smell of burning gasoline rushed at us.
"No!" I cried.
Then a wave of heat forced us back, fire spreading across the pile like the sweep of a hand. Shoe-box lids popped off, carried up by the superheated air, revealing beautiful forms inside. The elegant lines warped and twisted, reflective panels glittering for a few seconds in the blaze before they blackened. The smell of burning plastic and canvas followed, forcing acid tears from my eyes.
Jen tried to shout something but only managed to cough into a clenched fist.
The pyre turned greedy, sucking the air around us into itself. Bits of paper rolled past my feet, drawn toward the blaze by the column of smoke climbing out of the courtyard. Sickeningly, I realized that the thick, black cloud overhead was the shoes, transmuted from something beautiful and original into shapeless smoke. I was breathing the dream shoes into my lungs, choking on them.
Mwadi Wickersham shouted orders into her cell phone as the last few boxes were thrown onto the fire before my eyes. I was forced back farther by the heat, helpless to prevent the conflagration. The shoes were going, going... gone.
