Dub-Dub

By Stephen Frost (@sdfrost61)

I

Pinky, fifteen-years-old going on twenty-five, wakes up to the pulse of an alarm clock. It's three thirty a.m.

She lays in the darkness with her eyes shut for a moment, listening to the sounds of solitude. When she's ready, she reaches out, grabbing at the linen on the edge of the mattress with her left hand. With a secure grip, she tugs hard, throwing her right arm towards the edge of the bed, propelling herself upright. She picks up and shunts her legs across the bed. First the left leg, humping the ankle a few centimeters to the left, then the right, clasping the knee and shifting it until her legs are together. Then she repeats it. And again. When her legs are finally positioned by the edge of the bed, she pushes her fists into the mattress, lifting her body off so she can transfer her weight across the sheets to be nearer her wheelchair.

She pulls the chair close. Checking the brakes are locked, she grips the armrest pad and, leveraging herself off the mattress, finesses herself into the seat. Comfort is important, so she doesn't drag her legs off the scrunched bedding until everything feels right. When it is, she drops her feet onto the footplate, knowing the metal should be cool to her touch. But Pinky feels nothing.

"Hey, you need help in there?" her father says.

"No, I'm fine," she says, raising the armrest. "I'm just going to the toilet. Go back to sleep."

"Okay," he says. "Call if you need me, all right."

"I will," she says.

She listens to him coughing and rolling over, his bedhead knocking against the partition between them. She sits motionless until he's breathing heavily again, then wheels herself out the door.

* * *

Pinky and her father live in the Thirteen Streets, which consists of eleven short parallel streets bordered by two four-stack freeways choked with traffic. But she's not going down to street level to suck up dust into her lungs. She's going up, to the rooftop.

The ceiling fluorescents in the corridor don't work, but she can see a halo of light around the elevator button. She rolls toward it, the chair's rubber wheels silent on the cracked and chipped tiles. The tower has been designated for demolition longer than she's been alive, but at least the elevators are still functional. And just as important, it's still free to ride them. That's rare these days. Most of them are controlled by gangsters. That means it's free to descend, but if you want to come up, then it's cash only thank you or start climbing.

Pinky presses the button and waits. Her subdivided flat is on the 36th floor, and if she needs to go down to the street during the day it can take ten minutes or more for a car to arrive. At the dead hour, though, there's no one around, and the elevator arrives in less than a minute. There's no ding to signal it's turned up. The bell burnt out years ago.

When the doors open, the corridor is lit by a flickering bulb inside the car. It pulsates off and on as she wheels in. She pushes the button for the 75th floor, turning her chair around so she's facing forward as the doors close and the elevator starts to ascend. At this time of the morning, she usually has the car to herself. And it's the same today, although there's a strong odor of soapy noodles and urine that makes her think she's sharing it with something, if not someone.

The elevator groans upward, knocking against the sides of the shaft, a rocking motion that scares some but comforts Pinky. The screen above the buttons isn't working again, a blur of white specks filling its frame instead. At least the sound is down to barely audible static, which is unusual but welcome. The ascent slows as she reaches the transfer floor, where the car clunks to a stop. Pinky guides her chair out, trundling down the corridor to another elevator that will take her to the top. It slows as it passes the hundredth floor, but picks up speed again as its homes in on the roof. Then it stops with a judder, pings, and the doors slide open.

The 118th floor is no different from any other, just higher. In the monsoon season, when typhoons batter the coast, she sometimes feels the whole tower sway. But the forecast is for light westerlies this morning, which is a good sign. Or at least she thinks it's a good sign. You can never tell if it'll be clear from up this high until you step out onto the roof.

She bangs through a service door that says 'No Exit', out into a stairwell that smells of molding cement and dried rat poop. She holds her breath. Her father tells her that there are no rats up here anymore, but she thinks that's untrue. She's heard them, scurrying around behind the walls, fleeing the light that comes on automatically whenever the door is opened.

"Go on," she says, hoping noise will keep them at bay. "Get out." After seeing a woman bitten by a rat in the street recently, she doesn't like to take chances.

She swings her chair around until the rear wheels are hard against the bottom step. There's a nagging doubt she's forgotten something, which transforms into the realization that she should have checked the battery levels before she left. Although it's too late now to do anything, she squints at the dial, relieved that it shows they're almost fully charged. Flipping a small switch on the armrest, she activates the rubber tank treads under the chair, and with a soft whine the electric motor grinds her up fourteen steps to a door that opens out into the night.

* * *

Prosperous Billionaire Mansion in Phoenix Street was built for neither billionaires nor the prosperous. And it was never a mansion. Even in its heyday, it was a hardly more than an upended box culvert with window spaces punched out every three meters. It was built during the last gasp of support for public housing to accommodate an influx of refugees following the Crisis. And things only went downhill from there. It's still an upended concrete culvert, except now it's a dangerous one. Pinky doesn't think too much about whether it's safe or not, because the outlook north from the rooftop trumps probable risk any day. It's one of the best sights in the whole city.

Out on the rooftop, she can see it's near perfect weather for reading. There's not a cloud in the sky. Not a hint of precipitation or wind. There's not a star to be seen either, but Pinky is willing to live without stars if the nights are clear and dry and still. She rolls to the edge, nudging the front wheels against an ankle high metal bar. The property developer didn't care if people fell or jumped off sixty years ago. The building management cares even less now. In a way she's glad, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to see over the Wall.

The Wall is a great hulking mass, reaching two thirds up the side of Prosperous Billionaire Mansion. It's so close that she could throw a stone across it onto the other side if she wasn't confined to a chair. She saw Bacon do it once, and he hasn't exactly got the strongest arm in the world.

The Wall was constructed from poured concrete rammed full of steel and sensors and booby traps, topped with twenty meters of razor wire. It's thick, even along its narrower apex, five or six paces wide. At the bottom, it must be more than fifty. It was built to stop the illiterates overrunning the wealthy on the northern side, and it's accomplished that in spades. It's an impassible barrier, which in all the years since completion has never once conceded a prohibited crossing.

Pinky reaches around behind her, to the backpack hanging off the push handles. Inside is a homemade optical sensor, which she clips to a swingarm bolted to the armrests. She pulls a small reader from the pack, connecting it to her power source and then to the sensor. When she turns on the reader, the screen emits a dull white glow. Resting it on her lap, she sights through the sensor tube.

Open windows are best, but they're rare. The next best option is a closed window with a view into the room unimpeded by curtains, shades or other blockages. But there are provisos. The glass should be clean, uninfected by nanotech or other technologies that play havoc with the optical sensor, and they should be unlit by external light. Red light is particularly bad, throwing the sensor completely out of whack. She starts scanning a thin white tower, finding a closed window that meets her requirements right off the bat.

She swipes the screen on her reader, bringing up the pervasive orange Dub-Dub logo. It's illegal for her to access Wattpad World, or for any Illiterate to even think about accessing it, but she bypasses the login and checks whether the sensor has established a connection with an active account. There's nothing. Putting her eye back to the slender tube, she continues scouring the shining façade, moving to another building when she finishes, and then another.

* * *

She finds one at the top of a cylindrical tower that's as smooth as liquid silver. Through the sensor, Pinky can see a reader laying on a small wooden desk, which stands on a floor that's carpeted and clean. She imagines the room smells of pine trees and ocean spray, though she's unfamiliar with both scents. It's the sort of thing she reads about in stories sometimes. She checks her reader to see if the sensor has connected. Five bars. It's perfect. She swipes into code-break, waiting until the Wattpad homepage loads. It takes less than ten seconds. As far as passwords go, this one's got 'like I could care' written all over it.

The recommended stories and library that shimmy into focus on her screen suggest the owner is a teen girl who loves romance fiction. The kind of books that have covers with hard-bodied boys around whose legs are draped pouting girls with back tattoos. The way Pinky sees it, most of these girls look like they've fallen out of their wheelchairs.

"Give me a break," she says under her breath, typing 'punchmyeyesout' into the search box. She taps on the author's latest book, Ten Reasons Aliens Hate You, picking up where she left off last time.

She starts reading. "Keeping an alien in the basement isn't doing anyone any favors, least of all your dead parents." Classic 'punchmyeyesout', she thinks, hitting the vote button before she's read half a dozen more sentences. By the second page, as Pinky is laughing out loud, the screen fades away to black.

"Damn," she says, raising her eyes from the reader and peering through the optical sensor into the room. At first, she assumes it's out of focus. But that's not it. The reader's gone, and something is moving around on the desk. Looking down at her own reader, she sees it's logged out. She looks through the sensor again. The movement has stopped, and she focuses in on what appears to be a handwritten note.

I know who you are, you Illiterate scumbag. God save Wattpad World, because nothing will save you.

In a panic, Pinky zooms out so she can see the whole room. There's a girl, about her own age, standing to one side of the desk. She's smiling at her, waving cheerfully. Then she turns and walks away.

II

The noise from the street barely reaches as high as the rooftop, even on the days when the traffic reaches sensory overload. And in the early mornings, it's even quieter. A hush drapes over the whole Thirteen Streets, giving it a sense of calmness that doesn't feel honest. Right now, though, Pinky isn't aware of any of that. Her chest hurts as though she's been kicked by a horse, and she wants to vomit. She instinctively reverses the chair away from the edge, back towards the door, gasping for breath as fear rises inside her.

By the time she gets back to the elevator doors, she's run a dozen scenarios through her head. The worst, which was also the first, is that her father loses his job, they get turfed out of their flat, and spend the rest of their foreshortened lives begging on the streets. Pinky's like that, always imagining the worst. Bacon is always telling her that she worries too much. "It'll never happen," is his favorite phrase. "What if someone sees you?" she asks, when he shoplifts. "It'll never happen," he says. She's a 'what if' girl. He's a 'who cares' guy. In a sane world, they shouldn't even be friends. But sanity went south before either of them were born.

In the elevator, she hits the button for 75. It stops at the 105th, where two older girls get in. One has transdermal implants that look like horns and a face tattoo that glows in the dark. Pinky's seen her around, but they've never spoken. She's not even sure they share a language.

"Sticky little unit," says the girl with horns, clarifying the language issue. She nods at the optical sensor and reader.

The comment throws Pinky off. Strangers usually don't say anything to her, ignoring her as though she were invisible. Either that or they gush about how brave she is, an inspiration to people who can walk. Please. Going up and down in an elevator by yourself and leaving a messy bed for your father to make every morning isn't brave and inspirational. It's called being a teen. The girl with horns is defying categorization. In a good way.

"Um, thanks," says Pinky, not sure what else to say.

"Been reading, huh?"

"Ah, yeah," says Pinky, wishing she'd packed her reader and sensor away.

The girls with the horns laughs. "Don't leak, filth," she says. "I'm one, too. A reader."

The elevator bumps to a stop at the 75th, the doors scraping open. The friend holds the button so Pinky can exit first.

"Mind if I scope it out, filth?" says the girl with the horns, squatting down to examine the optical sensor. "Wah, so debased. Look at this." She gestures to her friend. "Look, she used an old photobipolar transistor to break the light beam. Sticky as."

"It's more reliable," says Pinky. "And I can get them for free."

"Even better," says the girl with horns. "But I'd never think of doing it that way." Her friend walks off to press the button for the second elevator. "So how come you're down from up on top. Should be sticky sweet up there tonight."

"I...," Pinky begins, but a tear wells up in her eye and runs down her cheek. She starts to cry.

"Hey, my horns, they're nothing, okay?"

"No, it's not that," says Pinky, wiping the wetness away. "I'm in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" says the girl with horns, pressing down on her knees to push herself up until she's standing. "Some trouble up on top?"

Pinky nods her head. "Someone saw me reading."

"No need to leak," says the girl with horns. "This is nothing."

"No, it's not nothing," says Pinky. "She shut me down. Wrote a note to me. So I could see it."

The girl with horns looks down the corridor at her friend. "Is coming?"

"Closest one is banged at 26," she says.

"Shit," says the horned girl. Then to Pinky, she says, "You sure she wrote something. For you?"

"Yes," says Pinky. "She smiled and waved at me after I read it. They're going to come and get me, I know."

"It'll never happen."

Despite herself, Pinky smiles.

"What, filth?" says the girl with horns. "What're you laughing at?"

"No, it's just a friend of mine always says that. You reminded me of him."

"This friend?" says the horned girl.

"You wouldn't know him," says Pinky.

"I know a little shit-weasel who says it, too," says the girl. "He's a plank, he's called Bacon."

Pinky looks up at the girl with horns. Her face is flickering in the dark as the lights go on and off. The horns shine like spot lights. "You know Bacon?" says Pinky.

The girl nods. "But you made one mistake. I don't remind you of him."

Pinky doesn't understand what the girl means, but the friend at the elevator says, "It's here" just before the bell dings.

Inside the car, Pinky stares at the doors.

"You know why?" says the girl with horns. "Because I'm his sister. Older sister. And that little plank should remind you of me. Not the other way around."

* * *

Bacon doesn't read, he tinkers. Like a maniac. Pinky met him one day in the Cattle Depot, the old quarantine and slaughter yard, with its forged-iron eye-bolts driven into the brick walls and shallow concrete drainage ditches for sluicing out blood. It's a good thing for Pinky the place hasn't seen a bovine quadruped for fifty years. Maybe more. She can't stand the sight of blood.

Twenty ramshackle stories of salvaged corrugated iron, bamboo and crumbling cement sprout out of the original structure. Nowadays it's a pirate's den. If you want it, the Cattle Depot has it. Pinky first started going there when she started looking for pieces to build her wheelchair. She's been a regular ever since. They say you can buy a human heart if you have the money, but Pinky is skeptical. It's the sort of story Bacon tells to make himself sound all gangster.

"He never said he has a sister," says Pinky, as the elevator descends.

"What floor?" says the friend.

"Thirty-six," says Pinky.

The elevator stops at the 55th floor, but nobody's waiting. The friend punches the button to close the doors. It starts to descend again, thudding to a stop at the 43rd. An elderly man enters, inspects the girl's horns for a moment, and then scowls at Pinky. She understands people's frustration when she's in the elevator at peak times. Her chair takes up a lot of room. That's why she keeps clear when the cars are full. But it's as good as empty now, so why the dirty look? It's not as though she took up riding around in a wheelchair to inconvenience anyone.

He rides the car for five floors, getting out at the 38th.

"That must be the prosperous billionaire," says the friend.

They all laugh. Pinky wishes she could come up with witty remarks so quickly, but she can never think of anything to say until about thirty minutes after the moment has passed. She looks at the floor, not knowing what to do now.

The button next to number 36 lights up, and the elevator bounces to a halt, dangling on its wire ropes.

"You're floor, filth," says the girl with horns. "Tell Bacon to come and see me sometime."

"Yeah, sure," says Pinky, thinking she's going to have a lot of questions for him next time they meet.

The door slides open. The corridor is dark, not even a light shining unsteadily. The car hasn't stopped flush with the floor, it's five of six centimeters lower, so she'll have to rock her chair back and forth to get the front wheels over the bump. The girl with horns gets out and helps by lifting the front up.

Pinky is about to say thanks, when the girl with the horns holds the palm of her hand up and a finger to her lips. She signals to her friend in the car to pull the chair backwards. Once inside, she waits for the doors to close.

"That your place at the end of the corridor?" says the girl with horns, half whispering, half mouthing it.

Pinky nods her head.

"Then you got a problem," says the girl with horns. "The scum-scum law. It's at your door."

* * *

It's worse than she could imagine. They'll wake her father, question him while he frets about her whereabouts, and then take him away to 'have tea'. Which means they'll put him in a room and beat him until he 'confesses', if what people say is true. And she's sure it's worse than they say.

"No," says Pinky. "No. I have to go back so that he knows I'm okay."

The girl with the horns starts messaging someone on a phone. A mobile phone. Pinky almost says it out loud. She's seen them in the Cattle Depot, but always thought they were antique curios. The sort of thing you'd hang on the wall. That they might function never entered her head.

The girl with the horns looks at her. "Sometimes the old ways are the best."

"If you want to stay out of sight, then there's no better technology," says the friend. She smiles. "Don't worry, she's contacting her brother."

"Bacon?" says Pinky. "What's the point of calling Bacon?"

The friend says, "Bacon has the right..., he has the right skill set to help your father out."

Pinky is about to protest this, having known Bacon for several years and in all that time never observing any action that could be rightfully described as a skill set capable of assisting anyone in serious trouble. But before she can say anything, the girl with horns pockets her phone and says, "Don't worry. Bacon'll fix it."

The elevator shudders to a stop at the ground floor.

"Here, you follow Oil," says the girl with horns. Then to Oil, she says, "Take her to the Bookshop. I'll meet you there later."

Pinky starts to ask what's happening, but the girl with horns walks off towards the Wall, leaving her with Oil.

"Come on," says Oil. "We don't have much time."

They set off along the street. Some early morning hawker stalls are opening, the owners unlocking fold-up sides made of rusting tin, heating vats of lard or chopping vegetables or meat on giant wooden blocks. Some already have the first batches of food on trays for sale, early risers seated on small plastic stools eating and talking to each other. The smell of fried food hits Pinky's nostrils, and for a moment override her neural receptors.

"Siu mai," says an old lady waving a plate of pork dumplings in front of them. Oil waves her away.

"C'mon," she says, walking quickly along Phoenix Street in the direction of the Cattle Depot.

Pinky follows, until the smell of food is behind them, and the electric stink from the freeway stack starts drying her mouth and stinging her eyes. Entering a pedestrian tunnel, she cruises down the incline, then wheels alongside Oil.

"What can Bacon do?" she asks. "If these are police, then my father is–"

Oil stops, and turns to face Pinky. "Listen," she says. "Your father is going to be okay. But we need to get you to somewhere safe before they realize you're not in the building."

They begin moving again, side by side. "Let's face it, you're pretty easy to spot on the street," says Oil. "And besides, if your father finds out we let you get caught, there is going to be hell to pay."

Pinky concedes the point about being easy to spot in the street, but the second one rattles her. She wants to ask Oil what she means, but the girl's long legs have soon outpaced the chair. She speeds up, but only catches Oil at a side entrance to the Cattle Depot, where she's talking to a woman in hushed tones. When Pinky draws up the woman looks at her. "This is Tony's daughter?" she says to Oil, unlocking the gate and opening it to the darkness inside.

"You know my father?" asks Pinky as she rolls through the entrance.

The woman chuckles, and says to Oil, "She's asking do I know her father?"

When Oil doesn't join in the laughter, she says, "She doesn't know?"

Oil shakes her head. The woman raises her eyebrows, but says, "Well, talking here isn't getting us far." And with that, she walks off into the darkness. Oil stands aside to let Pinky pass, then follows along behind after shutting and locking the gate. The corridor is dark but straight, and Pinky keeps her wheels in line so that by the time she's in danger of clocking a brick wall her eyes have adjusted enough to see it before making contact. There's another door, then a third one to negotiate, each locked again after they pass through.

As the walls narrow, the woman in front slows, turning every now and then to check on Pinky. The floor surface starts to get rougher, and she feels it in her back as the chair shudders over missing or misaligned bricks. At a metal gate, Oil and the woman stop to share a few quiet words.

"Don't worry, she can descend stairs," says Oil, speaking loudly and turning to Pinky. "Right?"

The gate swings open, clanging heavily against the wall. Despite the darkness, the narrow stairwell is visible.

"It's steep," says the woman. "Are you sure you can get down? We can carry you."

"No, it's okay," says Pinky, maneuvering the chair into position. She flips the switch on the armrest and the chair moves forward to teeter on the edge of the first step. Slowly, the rubber tank treads extend, pushing the front of her chair up and creeping over the nosing. She feels it lurch forward, but the stabilizers keep her level. The electric motor groans, and Pinky realizes this is the toughest test of her tank treads so far. She hears Oil say to the woman, "Told you."

At the bottom, the woman slides between Pinky and the wall, opening another door.

"Ready for a surprise?" says Oil.

The lights hurt Pinky's eyes when she enters, but even with them squeezed shut she knows the voice that says, "About time, young lady."

III

Bacon is standing behind her father, who walks over to hug her.

"Thanks, Oil," he says. "Between you and Bacon, I've avoided a week in an interrogation cell."

Pinky's father detaches the optical sensor from the swingarm. "Let's have a look at who left a note for you," he says, connecting a long lead to it. An image of a neat bedroom comes up on an outsized screen.

"Is this the room?" Pinky's father asks.

Pinky nods her head. "Um, Dad...," she says, but words fail her.

"I'll explain everything in a moment," he says, scrolling through pictures of the room. "But I need to see this first."

Pinky watches the screen, her stomach and brain as numb as her legs. When the girl's picture appears on the screen, she almost vomits.

"Shit," says her father. "It all makes sense."

"Who is it?" asks Bacon.

"That," says Pinky's father, taking his eyes from the screen, turning to look at them all, "is the daughter of Marius Lee."

Silence descends on the group and a moment or two passes before Pinky can ask, "Who's Marius Lee?"

"Marius Lee?" says Oil. "The Boss of the Wall, right?"

"Yes," says Pinky's father. "But he's got his fingers in more pies than Wall security. We've suspected for a while now that he's formed a secret unit to track down readers on this side. This was a trap for Pinky. His daughter's probably had her curtains open for months waiting for this."

"So he's finally shown his hand, then?" says Bacon. "But if those two idiots at your door tonight are any indication, then we're pretty safe."

"They weren't Marius Lee's men," says Pinky's father. "They're just a pair of goons dispatched to send a message."

"What message?" the woman asks.

"That there's a war coming," says Pinky's father. "The days of cutting connections from the other side of the Wall are over. They're coming to stamp out readers."

* * *

There's a legend, more rumor than fact, that Dub-Dub was once an open source platform where millions of writers and readers met to share their souls. Pinky's heard this since she was ankle high to a fighting cricket, but has never believed it. It's comes up often with Bacon – a true believer – and she's always argued that if such a wondrous technology existed, why did everybody let it die? Or give control over it to readers on the other side of the Wall?

"No," she says to Bacon, as they discuss it now in the corner, whispering as her father talks to others coming into the room. "Dub-Dub was always theirs. We never had it."

"But we did," says Bacon. "Don't you see? Taking away writing and reading, it's the first step to control."

"Then why did people just, I don't know, let it go without a fight?" she says. "How could you have something like Dub-Dub and just let rich people take it away from you?"

"It's not as though we let them take it," says one of the men standing next to Pinky's father. "Governments and big companies slowly strangled it. They closed off a piece here, a bit there. People didn't worry too much at first. Yeah, okay, some did, but most didn't."

Pinky realizes a silence has descended on the room. She recognizes the authority in his voice, the fundamental truth to what he says. Incremental appropriation is something she understands. It's how she lost her legs.

"And then what?" she asks.

The man laughs, his mouth twisted. "Then they locked it up with paywalls. If you had money, you had fast connections and access to whatever you wanted. If you didn't have money, you got a connection that dripped knowledge like a bad tap. And then when people with shit connections looked like they might get nasty about it, they built the Wall to keep us on this side. And then they turned off the drip completely."

"I told you," says Bacon.

"You what?" says Pinky. "If you explained it like that, I would have agreed."

"Well, I couldn't tell you everything–"

"And speaking of everything," says Pinky. "I just discovered you have a sister."

"Oh," says Bacon. "That would be May."

Pinky ignores him. "She implied, or I inferred, that you are actually useful."

Bacon blushes, looking down at the floor.

"And what's more," says Pinky, warming to her theme. "Everything that's happened this morning, all this. My father knew I was on the roof. And your sister and Oil knew I was in the elevator. And you knew ... I don't know what you knew. But it's more than I do."

Bacon is silent, which in Pinky's eyes is support for her accusation. "So you admit it. You knew that they would find me reading. And you knew that when they did, I'd be in danger."

Bacon looks at Pinky's father.

"Don't look at him to protect you," she says. "I'm going to have words with him, too. But you knew. You knew I would get caught. I'm right, aren't I?"

Bacon nods his head, avoiding Pinky's eyes.

"So I was just bait?" she asks, her voice rising. "A goat tied up to lure out a komodo dragon?"

"You're not a goat–"

"And you're not a friend," says Pinky. "I trusted you."

As Bacon looks at his feet, Pinky rounds on her father. "And you're worse," she says, a tear running down her face. "You're my father."

"You should have told her, Tony," says the woman who let them through the gate. "You owed her that much at least."

There's a long silence. Someone scrapes their shoe on the floor. There's a thud as something heavy drops on the floor above them.

The picture of Marius Lee's daughter is frozen on the screen. Pinky turns her chair around so she's facing the wall, her back to everyone.

"Okay," says Pinky's father. "How about you give us a few moments."

The room rapidly empties. Pinky hears but doesn't see them leave, and she flinches when she feels her father's hand on her shoulder.

"I don't care that Bacon didn't tell me," she says, her nose running. "But you're my father."

"I should have told you this a long time ago," he says, stroking her hair.

Pinky pulls her head to one side, but when her father strokes it again, she doesn't move. Instead, she raises her hand and holds onto his arm.

* * *

"Before you were born," he starts, "your mother and I were readers."

Pinky turns her chair around to face her father. The room is empty and quiet, save for the slow chop of a fan circling above them.

"And after you were born, we kept reading on Dub-Dub. We wanted you to grow up a reader. One night, your mother went out to connect into Dub-Dub. We didn't live in the Thirteen Streets in those days. Our place was on the Island. We used to go up on a nearby hill to read, and she went there that night. I put you down, you were always a quiet baby. Perfect, really. And you went to sleep, curled up in your cot. I used to watch you breathing, and hope you would love to read as well, and that the world would be a better place when you were, well, when you were this age."

Pinky's father sits down, pulling his seat up close to his daughter's wheelchair.

"So this night, your mother went out. She was gone a long time, and I started to get worried. She loved to read, but even for her it was a long time. Just like now, you couldn't spend too long logged in. They'd trace you. I got worried, so I went and got a neighbor to come and watch you, and then I went looking for your mother. I never found her."

"But you said she died in an accident," says Pinky.

Her father strokes her knee. "I know. You were young, and I didn't want you to grow up worrying. I loved your mother very much. And then after she ... after she disappeared, you were the only person I had–"

"What happened?"

"She was traced. And that's all I know. Perhaps they took and interrogated her. Perhaps they tortured her. Perhaps they killed her immediately. I don't know."

Pinky, who has never known her mother, and can't visualize her in her mind, looks at the tears in her father's eyes.

"You're just like her," he says, rubbing at them with the backs of his hands. "I mean, you look like her. You're got her smile. And her love of reading. And her stubborn streak."

"I'm not stubborn," says Pinky, laughing quietly. Her father smiles.

"I tried to do a good job," says her father. "I did my best. And I think your mother would be very proud of how you turned out. I know she would have helped you build your chair. She loved doing things like that."

Pinky looks down at her legs, and then around the room. "Is all this to do with mum?" asks Pinky. "I mean, all these people?"

"Yes, in a manner," says her father. "After your mother ... after she disappeared, I started meeting people who wanted to take back our right to read. I mean, do more than just hiding out to read like rats in the dark. We wanted to take back Dub-Dub."

"And is this part of the plan?" asks Pinky, waving her hand in the air. "All of this? Me?"

"No," says her father. "I mean, yes. I mean ... yes and no. No, I didn't mean for you to get involved like this. I wanted to tell you in my own time. Not like this. But yes, I want you to be a part of this."

"How?" says Pinky. "I'm not exactly great at running away from whoever it is coming after us."

"It's not your legs that interest me," says her father, getting up from his seat. "Let me show you something."

* * *

When Bacon's sister, May, arrives at the Bookshop, her tattoo is glowing and her horns are dark. She has blood on her face and a cut on her forearm that looks worse than it is. While Oil attends to it, cleaning off the clotting blood and spraying cheap gauze over it, May reports to the group.

"One of Marius Lee's units has come through the Wall," she says, as though she's discussing backend interfaces for do-it-yourself readers. "It's as we thought. He couldn't resist flagging his intention with that note to Pinky."

"How many?" asks Pinky's father.

"Twenty-eight," says May. "They're heavily armed. They're not here to block signals. They're here to kill."

"Which means they'll have specific targets," says one of the men standing next to Pinky's father. "It's an assassination squad."

"All right," says Pinky's father. "You all know what you need to do. Let's send Marius a little message."

He waves to Pinky before he starts climbing the steps. "You'll be fine," he says. "I'll see you when I get back."

IV

"So," says Pinky, when they've all gone. "Dad tells me you've been his little spy. An operative, assessing my every move."

"Listen, Pinky," says Bacon, holding his hands up. "It started out like that. Yes, sure. But–"

"Yeah, yeah," she says. "Don't worry. He told me a lot more besides when he showed me this sticky little unit."

Pinky looks at the layout in front of her. "This must have used half the electronics in the Cattle Depot," she says. "And most of it's been built by me."

Bacon nods his head. He's never been talkative, but he's quieter than she can ever remember.

"Unknowingly," she adds. "I can't believe you never said a thing."

"I'm laying the blame for that squarely on your father," says Bacon.

"Yeah, well..." says Pinky, running her fingers over the controls.

"You know," says Bacon. "I just want to give that bastard of the Wall something nasty. He's never going to see us coming."

"I'm scared, Bacon," she says. "We're not just talking about breaking codes. Or reading something we shouldn't."

"Everyone that was in this room is scared," says Bacon. "Tony, your dad, I mean. He's scared, too. He's told us over and over that if we're not scared he doesn't want us around."

Pinky closes her eyes, gripping at the arm rests. She tries to recall her mother's face, but can only evoke images from the pictures her father has shown her. None of the memories are her own. Perhaps she would feel some anger if she could, but instead there's a hole.

She looks at the machinery surrounding her, recognizing most of it. When her father showed her the room less than half-an-hour ago, full of its refurbished electrics, he explained how he told Bacon to take every problem to her. Pinky'll work it out, he would say. Her chest constricted when he described how all the pieces would combine to help kill her mother's executioner. She was silent for a long time before asking him if the right to read was worth murdering for. She asked him whether one murder deserves another. Now, the only think she knows with any certainty is that she wants to protect her father and Bacon.

"Yesterday I was a girl who wanted to read," she says. "This morning I'm being asked to fight in a war I didn't ask for. I really don't know if I can do this, Bacon. I mean, yesterday I thought my father was a cleaner. It turns out he's an underground resistance leader. Or something."

The room is hot, and she has started to perspire. Bacon's apparatus generates heat, and it's building up like hot air that's pushed in front of a storm. She steers her chair so she's sitting at the control center. The orange dots on the screen in front of her represent Marius Lee's assassins, each identified by a number. Bacon sits on the other side of the room relaying information to Pinky's father and the team.

As the orange dots fan out across the Thirteen Streets on her screen, Pinky lays her head back to look up at the ceiling. It's the waiting she can't stand.

* * *

When the first dot disappears, Bacon lets out a whoop. It's like a game for him, thinks Pinky. Taking out orange dots on a screen. A moment later, another dot fades to black. But there's a life melting on the street, too, she thinks.

Pinky tweaks a sensor to keep little blips in focus. If it were a game, she'd enjoy it. There's beauty in what they do. They appear to move randomly, but she sees the pattern in their advance. She's sure she could track them mathematically, without the sensors. For a while she's lost in the numbers, mapping sequences in her head. But a tightness in her chest brings Pinky back to a world that isn't all numbers and patterns.

Another orange dot dims from the screen. And then another.

"Four down," says Bacon. "Twenty-four to go."

Pinky looks at the screen. The four neutralized dots have left three sections of eight combatants in a triangular formation. Something stirs in her mind. Something from a book she read a long time ago on Dub-Dub. She closes her eyes to think.

"Hey," says Bacon. "Wake up. We need you."

"I'm not asleep," says Pinky. "There's something weird going on here."

Bacon looks at her askance. "The only weird thing here is you," he says. "You do know there are four down, right?"

Pinky gestures him to come over and look at her screen. "Look," she says, pointing to three triangles of eight dots each.

Bacon looks, but doesn't say anything. Pinky asks him to plug her reader into his contraption, and within seconds she's into Dub-Dub.

"Damn," she says, scrolling through #artofwar. "This thing is fast."

Bacon laughs. "You built it."

Pinky pays him no attention. She's looking for a book cover with a red sun and a white sword. There are more books here than she remembers, and she curses herself for not committing the author's name to memory. About to give up, the book scrolls onto the screen.

"Zinzang," she says, reading the two Chinese characters on the cover. "Who would have guessed it? War."

Opening it with a tap on the screen, she examines the chapter headings. "Chapter Six," she murmurs to herself, clicking on it. "Yes, this is it."

* * *

Pinky starts to read.

"Chapter Six. Strategy and Misdirection: In enemy territory, limit your exposure. Do not seek to attack your enemy openly. This path leads to defeat. The battlefield exists only in the mind. Hold back. Wherever possible, a skillful general misdirects rather than engages his enemy. Know your enemy's strategy beforehand and use it against him. The chimera of victory lowers his guard. Await your enemy. It will weaken him to come to you."

She puts down her reader and looks at the screen again. The three triangles are splintering now, into units of four and two, but still maintaining a mathematical progression across the Thirteen Streets.

"Tell everyone to retreat," she says, surprising herself with her tone of voice. "Tell everyone they should not engage with the enemy. It's a trap."

She puts her reader on the countertop. Another two dots vanish from the screen.

Bacon pumps his fist in the air.

"Did you not hear me?" she says. "Tell my father it's a trap."

"Did you not here me?" he mimics in a high pitched voice. "Six dead so far. Everything's going our way."

Pinky shouts at him. "It's not going out way. We're meant to think it is, but it's not."

"Right," says Bacon, as another dot disappears. "And that's seven."

"Give me your screen," says Pinky. "Let me talk to my father. At least he's not an idiot."

Bacon steps back, holding the screen in his hand. It's difficult for him to play dodge in a confined space, but Pinky is at a powerful disadvantage. She reverses her chair from the desk, and wheels around on him. He ducks away, but she follows him, her electric motor whirring as she accelerates. Bacon sits on a desktop, waiting until she's close enough before lifting his legs and swiveling his hips to easily slip away. The footplate of Pinky's chair thuds into a desk leg. She reverses, hard, then pivots and moves forward. Bacon stands in front of the main screen as Pinky bears down on him. He sidesteps at the last moment, but Pinky, anticipating this, brakes hard, swerves and launches herself out of the chair. But he's too fast, and she plows into the floor.

She flings her hands out to cushion the blow, but still falls awkwardly. Pain shoots up her side, all the way to her jaw and ears. As she lays there, she starts sobbing, more from frustration than anything else.

"You're an idiot," says Pinky, speaking into the floor. "The orange dots are meaningless."

There's a long silence. Pinky lifts her head to see if Bacon is still there.

"They've all gone," he says. "All the dots have gone."

* * *

Bacon helps Pinky back into her chair, accepting a slap to his face that cracks the silence. When she asks for his screen, he hands it over without a hint of protest. She sits at the countertop, replaying the last moments of the remaining orange dots. They evaporate like drops of water on a hotplate. She uploads her data, sending it to her father and other leaders that Bacon lists. She hands the screen back to him. They sit and wait for a response.

After a while, Pinky goes back into the Bookshop, staring at the titles on the shelves above her. It's hard to imagine that books made from trees coexisted with mobile phones and the beginning of Dub-Dub. She doesn't recognize very many titles, and wonders if a paper book is more satisfying to read than electronic ones. Sometimes she yearns for something better, but has only a fleeting notion of what better might entail. The more Pinky thinks about it, the less she's sure what a good book is.

She picks one from a low shelf, without a cover, and opens it. There's a smell, like dust and spider webs, but the pages feel smooth and dry in her fingers. Her eyes come to rest on some lines.

"As he struggled to survive and bring his men home," it reads. "But could not save them, hard as he tried – the fools – destroyed by their own recklessness..."

She closes and puts the book in her lap.

"Why aren't they responding?" she says, turning her head towards the room where Bacon sits at his desk.

"There must be something wrong with the screen," he says.

Pinky's heart thuds, her chest constricting. She sees her mother waving, her hair blowing in the wind.

"No," says Pinky. "There's nothing wrong with the screen."

V

She's used to it now. The smell of brine and oil and the water rolling perpetually under the hull. She sleeps as well as can be expected, waking in a sweat only when she dreams of her father's death. They replayed it over and over on the giant screens dotting the Wall and on the glass sides of buildings in the Thirteen Streets. But the push and the pull of the boat mostly calm her now, and she accepts her life as a cork bobbing between outlying islands.

Sometimes, through the towers and under the deck of Stonecutters Bridge, she catches glimpses of the Wall at night, its lights coloring low hanging clouds a dirty bronze. If she looks hard enough, she can see the Dub-Dub logo on the side of buildings on the northern side. But she doesn't look hard very often.

"Pinky?" says a voice behind her.

"Okay," she says. "Come here."

A girl, three or four, steps around her wheelchair. She stands on the footplate and scrambles up onto Pinky's lap.

"Here," she says, handing Pinky a book. It has a picture of a green caterpillar on the front.

"You never get tired of this one?" asks Pinky.

The girl shakes her head.

They laugh together, and Pinky starts to read. The moon shines above the sampan, casting a silver thread across the undulating swell. By the time the caterpillar has eaten through an apple, the little girl is asleep. Her mother comes to take her from Pinky's lap.

"She's not being a nuisance, is she?" asks the mother.

Pinky shakes her head. In truth, if not for the child she would sleep less and think more. And she's had enough of thinking.

"No," she says. "She's never any trouble."

Her eyes follow the silver thread across the water, where it draws a line straight to the building behind the Wall on which the Dub-Dub logo shines the brightest. The building in which Marius Lee lives with his daughter.

A message arrives on her reader. It's from Bacon.

"The last ones are in place," the text says. "It's in your hands."

She watches the mother put her daughter to bed. There's a war coming. But this time it's not coming to the south. This time it's coming from above, and the fat, prosperous billionaires who live north of the Wall will never know what hit them.