A Perfect Day, With Explosions, page 4
7
The Unwisdom Of Crowds
Being a welder meant familiarity with things burning. She was used to getting off shift smelling like burning metal, flux, and oil, until the challenge was to get the smell out of her hair and out of her skin so she smelled like a normal human being. They had a grill out back of the shop they sometimes fired up in nice weather, burning charcoal to grill (and sometimes burn) the chicken or the sausages.
This was nothing like that. This was the acrid stench of burning plastic, of electrical fire, of concrete dust and petrol something she couldn’t name but would never forget. The air set her hindbrain to screaming, even as she stayed low and crouched down with the trembling clerk. AJ shoved the security guard behind the desk with them, taking up a position with his pistol trained on the closed grates. Jenna could barely think over the pulsing scream of the fire alarm and the shrill wail of the robbery alarm, much less the panic beating at her self-control. She took a deep breath, letting it out, and another, and tried to think what was next. Find a way to fight the fire, and a way out, in case the way out was through the fire. They weren’t going out through the grates, that much was obvious. And the explosion had come from the parking garage, so that wasn’t safe. Down. There had to be a way to go down, and there had to be a service entrance to get there from here. Because there always had to be a way to take out the trash.
Lizzes had her hands over her ears, face contorted as she curled up in physical pain. For once, Jenna was glad for the hearing loss of the fabrication shop. AJ was trying to get them up and moving now, so she shoved her bags into Lizzes’ arms to free up her own hands. The redhead took them, almost reflexively, and then they were being pointed urgently to the back. Jenna tugged Lizzes through the staff door, into a small hallway with racks of shoes behind a heavy door on one side, and an employee break room and small office on the other. A white-haired old man was clutching a shotgun, and waving them back to a rear service door he’d clearly just unlocked.
She stopped right before she went through, and pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall as Lizzes went past, the clerk and Sam the security guard following. One quick smash of the glass with the extinguisher, and she had a fire axe to go with. That made her feel far better, as they were both tools - and weapons. So equipped, she headed out to the door. On the other side, it was nothing like the regular and irregular fire drills. The smoke was even stronger, choking, and she bent over double with racking coughs, trying to get her breath. The way to the parking garage was a mass of smoke and darkness, as the lights were out, and shattered ceiling tiles and steel supports hanging down, with water spraying from broken pipes and a floor full of dust and rubble.
Hands caught her shoulders, and a cloth was pressed over her face, even as she was hurried down the corridor away from the smoke. She looked over to see AJ looking around, eyes darting to track the slamming doors and moving bodies around them, of clerks who remembered the fire drills and customers who were following them… watching to see if any of the terrorists were following in pursuit. When they slowed up against the wall rather than force their way through a stream of screaming people, she passed the fire axe in her hand to the security guard, who looked much, much happier to have it, and took the cloth from AJ. He didn’t let go until she looked him in the eye and squeezed his fingers. That got a nod, and his hand went back to inside his jacket, clearly hovering on the gun he’d had out earlier, but not displaying it for anyone else to see.
Jenna tucked herself in behind him, feeling much happier for having him there, right in front of her. Lizzes was tucked right behind Twitch in similar fashion, as the two men communicated with a few cryptic hand signals and facial expressions. She wondered what they were waiting for, or if they were just getting ready to plow through… and then two men with rifles stepped through the door, their faces hidden behind masks. Jenna was still registering that they weren’t just a gap in the flow when Twitch and AJ drew their guns and fired almost simultaneously. When the bodies hit the floor, they fired again, making sure the terrorists wouldn’t get back up behind them. The sound of each shot felt like a punch to her head, and Jenna wished she didn’t have her hands full with the fire extinguisher so she could press her palms over her ears like Lizzes. She glanced at the other woman’s belly, a cold chill curling in her gut as she wondered how the smoke and noise would affect the little life there. The faster they got out, the better.
She looked back up to see AJ grabbing a rifle and checking it quickly for something, then shouldering it and scanning the store on the other side of the service door while Twitch grabbed the other rifle and quickly searched the bodies, taking a few other things. When he was done, AJ backed up and shut the door. Then he gestured at the rest of the group to keep moving. The white-haired store manager urged Jenna on, clearly intent on bringing up the rear with nervous looks back to see if anyone was coming up behind them. Lizzes was white-faced but holding it together, and poor Sam was struggling not to puke.
As Jenna picked her way over and around the bodies, trying to avoid walking in the blood, she noticed something wasn’t quite right with their clothes. Not just their heads, which she looked at and quickly avoided looking again, but the fabric… AJ and Twitch weren’t wearing high-end fashion, because it didn’t have obvious labels, but it could easily be mistaken for that because the clothes were clearly very high quality, tailored armorcloth that fit like it was bespoke. The terrorists were wearing counterfeit labels that should have been high end, but the fabric wasn’t quite right, and the cut wasn’t fine enough, either. As for the color… AJ was pulling her on, and she shuddered and concentrated on following him.
Ahead, people were jamming into a knot by the freight elevators and the stairs, getting in each other’s way in their rush to get through the door. Several frightened faces saw the rifles in the men’s hands, and must have mistaken them for terrorists. They ran screaming down the hall and away from the best escape possible, and Jenna couldn’t even hear herself protesting to them that they were wrong. There was no way to warn them that they were making a deadly mistake, and AJ and Twitch didn’t even try. Her men hit the dithering, half-frozen crowd like a battering ram and forced their way down the stairs, while she, Lizzes, and the shop crew just tried to keep up.
The fire alarm wasn’t nearly as loud in the stairwell, which was odd: she expected with the echoing surfaces in a hard plascrete and welded metal open well, it would be deafening - but as they got away from the service corridor and down the stairs, the sound faded from painful to merely loud. Sam was cursing under his breath, and helping the manager down the stairs. “C’mon, you can make it. Just keep moving.”
Jenna squeezed Lizzes’ arm. “You okay?”
Lizzes gave her a rather grim smile. “I will be, when we’re safe.”
As they got closer to the ground floor, the noise increased again - the service corridor outside was full of screaming with a panicked edge that made her expect to hear gunshots. What if the terrorists had already gotten in the corridors, and they were sitting ducks? But there was no easy way to stop; people behind them had filled the stairwell, and the weight of humanity was shoving them forward and down. To stop would be to get knocked down and run over by everyone behind them.
The service corridor was full of employees and customers alike, and both were screaming and shoving, sometimes in the completely wrong direction of the exit signs. Babies were wailing, sirens going loudly enough Jenna could feel the pulse of sound against her ribs above the general pandemonium. She stumbled over discarded shopping clothes and toys, slipped and nearly wrenched an ankle on the remains of someone’s drink, and grunted in pain as she got rammed with a shopping cart. Who was stupid enough to bring that with them? She shoved it back, and the woman who hadn’t even been looking where she was going started cussing at her. The words were lost in the din, and AJ and Twitch were moving on at an angle, so Jenna moved with them and left the bitch behind.
The crowd was so thick it was shoving hard at her, and she had to grab Lizzes to keep her from stumbling and getting knocked down. The clerk was gone - there was someone else, small and dark-haired and terrified in the space between them and the manager, who was now mostly being held up by Sam, and the security guard had acquired a small child riding his shoulders. She didn’t ask, and he wouldn’t have heard. They were squeezed so tight now that she could barely breathe, but there was a bright light ahead, real sunlight. She staggered and almost fell at a sudden absence of pressure as they squirted out the door. The staggering lack of crowd was shocking, and she looked uncomprehending on the trash-strewn ramp. Lizzes was pulling her, forcing her into a run to keep up with the men in the heat and the stifling, muggy air full of the baked, rancid smell of hot asphalt and leaking dumpsters.
Jenna’s lungs hadn’t gotten the message that she was safe; they were getting tighter and every breath was harder than the last to draw through a raw throat. She tried to stop to catch her breath, but AJ was pulling her arm now. “Keep moving, in case they have catch teams or snipers!”
That was enough to get her up to a run again, though she didn’t get far before she started coughing. She pressed a fist to her aching sternum, and staggered on, until they came around the corner and found a police cordon, checking everyone staggering through and pulling the wounded and bloodied aside to a line of waiting ambulances. AJ and Twitch slung their rifles over their shoulders, and had their IDs ready well before they hit the line. They were still greeted with drawn guns and waved aside for a pat-down and bag check by seriously pissed off Home Defense guards.
Whatever the IDs were, they must have said something right, because it wasn’t long before Twitch was looking at the man in charge and tapping his temple in the receiving data signal. That’s when the silent glances made sense; the men were military, and must have been communicating with a comnet. They were rare enough around the shipyards that she hadn’t even thought about it, but as she noticed the odd texture on Twitch’s hands again, the pieces started to fall into place. It was some form of dermal armor; she’d seen that on the boss’s right-hand man. Once they were cleared, Twitch caught his wife by both shoulders, and gently kissed her. “Go with Jenna to the medics.”
“I’m fine.” Lizzes growled at him.
“Jenna’s not. She needs to be checked and treated for smoke inhalation. Go.” He turned her, and Lizzes grimaced, then looked at Jenna with a worried expression.
“I heard my marching orders.” Jenna grinned, but mentally cursed the way her voice sounded raspy and weak. The soldiers took them straight past a tent where the wounded were receiving triage, past the ambulances, and into the back of a semi-trailer. It was a sort of mobile office, with people monitoring data and images on holoscreens, absorbed in their tasks with a low mutter of communication back and forth on frequencies. Jenna was getting seriously twitchy about being in the wrong place when an exhausted-looking gray man stood up, and indicated they should sit on a surprisingly comfortable couch.
Lizzes said softly, almost warily, “Hello, Mister Crane. I’m supposed to take Jenna for treatment.”
“I’ve called the medics. You, my dear, are going to stay behind armored and shielded walls until we escort you home. May I get you ladies some water?” He was already pouring a pitcher into two cups, and Jenna was aware how desperately thirsty she was after all the smoke and running.
“Please.” She held her hands out for the cup, and drank it dry before Lizzes had even set all their shopping bags down and taken her first sip. A hand on her shoulder made Jenna look up; a uniformed man was right beside her, and she hadn’t noticed his approach. He was holding a tester for her to breathe into. She took it and exhaled into the tube by pure habit, not even stopping to ask who he was. When the lights came up yellow and red, he promptly attached a medical mask over her face, with a hiss of supplemental oxygen and the medicinal-mint taste coating her tongue. The familiar misty feel of aerosolized meds on each inhale helped her calm down; soon, breathing wouldn’t hurt quite so much. Jenna settled back against the couch, submitting with long practice for the inevitable blood sample draw, and reminded herself she couldn’t be grumpy about it, not if they were treating Lizzes, too.
Twitch and AJ showed up and suffered their own checks, though they didn’t have to have the oxygen masks. As soon as theirs were done, AJ sat next to her, and Twitch sat on the far side of Lizzes. Crane sat down facing them, and studied them as the others acted like he was an overstretched mooring cable liable to snap. “All right. AJ, report.”
AJ condensed the entire day into short, staccato observations with timestamps. Which confused Jenna. After all, who would care that they commenced lunch at exactly 32 after the hour? Or that the flow rate of people had been at a volume of so many people per square foot, moving at so many feet per second? Well, the last probably was useful in estimating the number of people inside the mall, and subtracting those that got away to have an estimate of those that remained. While AJ talked, Twitch was sketching on notepaper, looking like he wasn’t paying a single bit of attention - but now and then he’d chime in with a bit of information as AJ reported.
For his turn, he started by handing over the papers he’d been scribbling on - and she saw a sheaf of very neat sketches, with layouts of the stores. She couldn’t draw half as neatly without a ruler and a protractor to make straight lines and circles, or graph paper for a guide when making a quick layout before deciding the best order to weld things together. As for his report, she found herself uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t realized even the half of how paranoid he was. Right down to learning he’d run a background check on her… and nobody else was surprised by that.
Lizzes’ recollection of the day at least mentioned the actual dresses and shoes, which was the entire point of their trips. Jenna looked down at the lone bag of shoes, remembering her sandals. She was too exhausted to care about them now, sagging forward to lean with her elbows on her knees, trying to hold her head up at least enough to watch the others. She had definitely fallen in with the wrong crowd, and her lungs were tight with an exhausted desire to cry, matching the ache of unshed tears and the pounding headache from she didn’t know what. Maybe the meds. Even Lizzes’ wry mention that Jenna had better fashion sense than her didn’t feel like a compliment, just another reason she didn’t have anything in common with them.
Then it was her turn, to remove her oxygen mask and answer questions. Mister Crane looked as tired as she felt - except his eyes, which were sharp and hard as high-tensile steel. “Miss Jenna Brooks. I have to ask, how does a welder have any fashion sense at all?”
It would have been more offensive if she hadn’t been hearing it for years. “Just because I have a manual labor job, sir, doesn’t mean I can’t have my own hobbies, or be as girly as I want when I’m off the clock.”
Mister Crane gave a faint nod, acknowledging her point, but still managed to look extremely skeptical. “Why welding?”
“I like it. I’m good at it. It pays the bills.” She glared at him, too tired to be tactful. “Not all of us get comnets and college educations handed to us when we hit sixteen.”
“Hey, I worked my way through my master’s.” Lizzes said, holding up her hands on her lap with fingers spread to indicate no offense taken.
Jenna wasn’t about to tell them where the money had gone; it wasn’t any of their business. Instead she grinned. “Give me five years, and I’ll have enough to pay for a college degree. But I’ll buy a house instead, and have something real and solid to show for it.” College grads got so uptight that people didn’t respect the degree like they did, but they never respected hard-earned certificates and ratings that meant more than their bench-warming for four years while racking up loans.
Crane didn’t rile, though. He said softly, almost as an afterthought, “Did you see anything out of place today? Anything that shouldn’t have been that way?”
Jenna frowned, worrying over the question, and finally gave up and admitted it. “Yes.” The silence stretched uncomfortably, as Crane waited her out. Jenna finally muttered, “But you’ll make fun of me if I tell you.”
He was silent a moment, and then leaned forward, still holding her gaze. Softly, he said, “Try me.”
The silence stretched as he waited patiently, with no change to his dead serious expression. Anyone else would have given up or broken up laughing and made fun of her already; he waited as patiently as a stone, not even blinking, until she gave a small wince, and admitted, “The terrorists, the ones they shot, were wearing fake fashion.”
Crane didn’t laugh. Lizzes did, and Twitch lifted an eloquently belittling eyebrow. At least, she thought, AJ didn’t react. But he wouldn’t, even if he thought she was as stupid as it sounded. Jenna flushed at their looks, looking away, but her attention was dragged back to Mister Crane. With no change of expression, no break in the intensity of his stare, he simply said, “Explain?”
“They were dressed head to toe in counterfeit designer clothes and shoes. They had the right labels, but the cut wasn’t right, and the dyes were off, and the mix of brands was just stupidly wrong in ways no one would wear like that!” She knew it sounded utterly ridiculous to complaining about the clothes on corpses, and felt her face get even hotter.
Crane sat up very straight, eyes narrowing. He suddenly seemed exactly as dangerous as the others treated him. Every muscle was tense, like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, for all his voice stayed deceptively soft. “Do go on.”
“I mean, you know there’s a black and gray market for fashion, and it gets shipped in from the Fed and sold by various shady groups fronting in the street bazaar. Who doesn’t? But they were just… off. The brands they were wearing don’t go together. Even the people who flaunt their fakes would never put them together that way, because it’s sending the wrong signals.”
Crane was smiling, and it was disturbingly predatory. She edged back in her seat, away from him, only to a have AJ’s strong, gentle arm wrap around her back, stopping her from retreating as Crane leaned forward. “Were the clothes old? Or new?”
The Unwisdom Of Crowds
Being a welder meant familiarity with things burning. She was used to getting off shift smelling like burning metal, flux, and oil, until the challenge was to get the smell out of her hair and out of her skin so she smelled like a normal human being. They had a grill out back of the shop they sometimes fired up in nice weather, burning charcoal to grill (and sometimes burn) the chicken or the sausages.
This was nothing like that. This was the acrid stench of burning plastic, of electrical fire, of concrete dust and petrol something she couldn’t name but would never forget. The air set her hindbrain to screaming, even as she stayed low and crouched down with the trembling clerk. AJ shoved the security guard behind the desk with them, taking up a position with his pistol trained on the closed grates. Jenna could barely think over the pulsing scream of the fire alarm and the shrill wail of the robbery alarm, much less the panic beating at her self-control. She took a deep breath, letting it out, and another, and tried to think what was next. Find a way to fight the fire, and a way out, in case the way out was through the fire. They weren’t going out through the grates, that much was obvious. And the explosion had come from the parking garage, so that wasn’t safe. Down. There had to be a way to go down, and there had to be a service entrance to get there from here. Because there always had to be a way to take out the trash.
Lizzes had her hands over her ears, face contorted as she curled up in physical pain. For once, Jenna was glad for the hearing loss of the fabrication shop. AJ was trying to get them up and moving now, so she shoved her bags into Lizzes’ arms to free up her own hands. The redhead took them, almost reflexively, and then they were being pointed urgently to the back. Jenna tugged Lizzes through the staff door, into a small hallway with racks of shoes behind a heavy door on one side, and an employee break room and small office on the other. A white-haired old man was clutching a shotgun, and waving them back to a rear service door he’d clearly just unlocked.
She stopped right before she went through, and pulled the fire extinguisher off the wall as Lizzes went past, the clerk and Sam the security guard following. One quick smash of the glass with the extinguisher, and she had a fire axe to go with. That made her feel far better, as they were both tools - and weapons. So equipped, she headed out to the door. On the other side, it was nothing like the regular and irregular fire drills. The smoke was even stronger, choking, and she bent over double with racking coughs, trying to get her breath. The way to the parking garage was a mass of smoke and darkness, as the lights were out, and shattered ceiling tiles and steel supports hanging down, with water spraying from broken pipes and a floor full of dust and rubble.
Hands caught her shoulders, and a cloth was pressed over her face, even as she was hurried down the corridor away from the smoke. She looked over to see AJ looking around, eyes darting to track the slamming doors and moving bodies around them, of clerks who remembered the fire drills and customers who were following them… watching to see if any of the terrorists were following in pursuit. When they slowed up against the wall rather than force their way through a stream of screaming people, she passed the fire axe in her hand to the security guard, who looked much, much happier to have it, and took the cloth from AJ. He didn’t let go until she looked him in the eye and squeezed his fingers. That got a nod, and his hand went back to inside his jacket, clearly hovering on the gun he’d had out earlier, but not displaying it for anyone else to see.
Jenna tucked herself in behind him, feeling much happier for having him there, right in front of her. Lizzes was tucked right behind Twitch in similar fashion, as the two men communicated with a few cryptic hand signals and facial expressions. She wondered what they were waiting for, or if they were just getting ready to plow through… and then two men with rifles stepped through the door, their faces hidden behind masks. Jenna was still registering that they weren’t just a gap in the flow when Twitch and AJ drew their guns and fired almost simultaneously. When the bodies hit the floor, they fired again, making sure the terrorists wouldn’t get back up behind them. The sound of each shot felt like a punch to her head, and Jenna wished she didn’t have her hands full with the fire extinguisher so she could press her palms over her ears like Lizzes. She glanced at the other woman’s belly, a cold chill curling in her gut as she wondered how the smoke and noise would affect the little life there. The faster they got out, the better.
She looked back up to see AJ grabbing a rifle and checking it quickly for something, then shouldering it and scanning the store on the other side of the service door while Twitch grabbed the other rifle and quickly searched the bodies, taking a few other things. When he was done, AJ backed up and shut the door. Then he gestured at the rest of the group to keep moving. The white-haired store manager urged Jenna on, clearly intent on bringing up the rear with nervous looks back to see if anyone was coming up behind them. Lizzes was white-faced but holding it together, and poor Sam was struggling not to puke.
As Jenna picked her way over and around the bodies, trying to avoid walking in the blood, she noticed something wasn’t quite right with their clothes. Not just their heads, which she looked at and quickly avoided looking again, but the fabric… AJ and Twitch weren’t wearing high-end fashion, because it didn’t have obvious labels, but it could easily be mistaken for that because the clothes were clearly very high quality, tailored armorcloth that fit like it was bespoke. The terrorists were wearing counterfeit labels that should have been high end, but the fabric wasn’t quite right, and the cut wasn’t fine enough, either. As for the color… AJ was pulling her on, and she shuddered and concentrated on following him.
Ahead, people were jamming into a knot by the freight elevators and the stairs, getting in each other’s way in their rush to get through the door. Several frightened faces saw the rifles in the men’s hands, and must have mistaken them for terrorists. They ran screaming down the hall and away from the best escape possible, and Jenna couldn’t even hear herself protesting to them that they were wrong. There was no way to warn them that they were making a deadly mistake, and AJ and Twitch didn’t even try. Her men hit the dithering, half-frozen crowd like a battering ram and forced their way down the stairs, while she, Lizzes, and the shop crew just tried to keep up.
The fire alarm wasn’t nearly as loud in the stairwell, which was odd: she expected with the echoing surfaces in a hard plascrete and welded metal open well, it would be deafening - but as they got away from the service corridor and down the stairs, the sound faded from painful to merely loud. Sam was cursing under his breath, and helping the manager down the stairs. “C’mon, you can make it. Just keep moving.”
Jenna squeezed Lizzes’ arm. “You okay?”
Lizzes gave her a rather grim smile. “I will be, when we’re safe.”
As they got closer to the ground floor, the noise increased again - the service corridor outside was full of screaming with a panicked edge that made her expect to hear gunshots. What if the terrorists had already gotten in the corridors, and they were sitting ducks? But there was no easy way to stop; people behind them had filled the stairwell, and the weight of humanity was shoving them forward and down. To stop would be to get knocked down and run over by everyone behind them.
The service corridor was full of employees and customers alike, and both were screaming and shoving, sometimes in the completely wrong direction of the exit signs. Babies were wailing, sirens going loudly enough Jenna could feel the pulse of sound against her ribs above the general pandemonium. She stumbled over discarded shopping clothes and toys, slipped and nearly wrenched an ankle on the remains of someone’s drink, and grunted in pain as she got rammed with a shopping cart. Who was stupid enough to bring that with them? She shoved it back, and the woman who hadn’t even been looking where she was going started cussing at her. The words were lost in the din, and AJ and Twitch were moving on at an angle, so Jenna moved with them and left the bitch behind.
The crowd was so thick it was shoving hard at her, and she had to grab Lizzes to keep her from stumbling and getting knocked down. The clerk was gone - there was someone else, small and dark-haired and terrified in the space between them and the manager, who was now mostly being held up by Sam, and the security guard had acquired a small child riding his shoulders. She didn’t ask, and he wouldn’t have heard. They were squeezed so tight now that she could barely breathe, but there was a bright light ahead, real sunlight. She staggered and almost fell at a sudden absence of pressure as they squirted out the door. The staggering lack of crowd was shocking, and she looked uncomprehending on the trash-strewn ramp. Lizzes was pulling her, forcing her into a run to keep up with the men in the heat and the stifling, muggy air full of the baked, rancid smell of hot asphalt and leaking dumpsters.
Jenna’s lungs hadn’t gotten the message that she was safe; they were getting tighter and every breath was harder than the last to draw through a raw throat. She tried to stop to catch her breath, but AJ was pulling her arm now. “Keep moving, in case they have catch teams or snipers!”
That was enough to get her up to a run again, though she didn’t get far before she started coughing. She pressed a fist to her aching sternum, and staggered on, until they came around the corner and found a police cordon, checking everyone staggering through and pulling the wounded and bloodied aside to a line of waiting ambulances. AJ and Twitch slung their rifles over their shoulders, and had their IDs ready well before they hit the line. They were still greeted with drawn guns and waved aside for a pat-down and bag check by seriously pissed off Home Defense guards.
Whatever the IDs were, they must have said something right, because it wasn’t long before Twitch was looking at the man in charge and tapping his temple in the receiving data signal. That’s when the silent glances made sense; the men were military, and must have been communicating with a comnet. They were rare enough around the shipyards that she hadn’t even thought about it, but as she noticed the odd texture on Twitch’s hands again, the pieces started to fall into place. It was some form of dermal armor; she’d seen that on the boss’s right-hand man. Once they were cleared, Twitch caught his wife by both shoulders, and gently kissed her. “Go with Jenna to the medics.”
“I’m fine.” Lizzes growled at him.
“Jenna’s not. She needs to be checked and treated for smoke inhalation. Go.” He turned her, and Lizzes grimaced, then looked at Jenna with a worried expression.
“I heard my marching orders.” Jenna grinned, but mentally cursed the way her voice sounded raspy and weak. The soldiers took them straight past a tent where the wounded were receiving triage, past the ambulances, and into the back of a semi-trailer. It was a sort of mobile office, with people monitoring data and images on holoscreens, absorbed in their tasks with a low mutter of communication back and forth on frequencies. Jenna was getting seriously twitchy about being in the wrong place when an exhausted-looking gray man stood up, and indicated they should sit on a surprisingly comfortable couch.
Lizzes said softly, almost warily, “Hello, Mister Crane. I’m supposed to take Jenna for treatment.”
“I’ve called the medics. You, my dear, are going to stay behind armored and shielded walls until we escort you home. May I get you ladies some water?” He was already pouring a pitcher into two cups, and Jenna was aware how desperately thirsty she was after all the smoke and running.
“Please.” She held her hands out for the cup, and drank it dry before Lizzes had even set all their shopping bags down and taken her first sip. A hand on her shoulder made Jenna look up; a uniformed man was right beside her, and she hadn’t noticed his approach. He was holding a tester for her to breathe into. She took it and exhaled into the tube by pure habit, not even stopping to ask who he was. When the lights came up yellow and red, he promptly attached a medical mask over her face, with a hiss of supplemental oxygen and the medicinal-mint taste coating her tongue. The familiar misty feel of aerosolized meds on each inhale helped her calm down; soon, breathing wouldn’t hurt quite so much. Jenna settled back against the couch, submitting with long practice for the inevitable blood sample draw, and reminded herself she couldn’t be grumpy about it, not if they were treating Lizzes, too.
Twitch and AJ showed up and suffered their own checks, though they didn’t have to have the oxygen masks. As soon as theirs were done, AJ sat next to her, and Twitch sat on the far side of Lizzes. Crane sat down facing them, and studied them as the others acted like he was an overstretched mooring cable liable to snap. “All right. AJ, report.”
AJ condensed the entire day into short, staccato observations with timestamps. Which confused Jenna. After all, who would care that they commenced lunch at exactly 32 after the hour? Or that the flow rate of people had been at a volume of so many people per square foot, moving at so many feet per second? Well, the last probably was useful in estimating the number of people inside the mall, and subtracting those that got away to have an estimate of those that remained. While AJ talked, Twitch was sketching on notepaper, looking like he wasn’t paying a single bit of attention - but now and then he’d chime in with a bit of information as AJ reported.
For his turn, he started by handing over the papers he’d been scribbling on - and she saw a sheaf of very neat sketches, with layouts of the stores. She couldn’t draw half as neatly without a ruler and a protractor to make straight lines and circles, or graph paper for a guide when making a quick layout before deciding the best order to weld things together. As for his report, she found herself uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t realized even the half of how paranoid he was. Right down to learning he’d run a background check on her… and nobody else was surprised by that.
Lizzes’ recollection of the day at least mentioned the actual dresses and shoes, which was the entire point of their trips. Jenna looked down at the lone bag of shoes, remembering her sandals. She was too exhausted to care about them now, sagging forward to lean with her elbows on her knees, trying to hold her head up at least enough to watch the others. She had definitely fallen in with the wrong crowd, and her lungs were tight with an exhausted desire to cry, matching the ache of unshed tears and the pounding headache from she didn’t know what. Maybe the meds. Even Lizzes’ wry mention that Jenna had better fashion sense than her didn’t feel like a compliment, just another reason she didn’t have anything in common with them.
Then it was her turn, to remove her oxygen mask and answer questions. Mister Crane looked as tired as she felt - except his eyes, which were sharp and hard as high-tensile steel. “Miss Jenna Brooks. I have to ask, how does a welder have any fashion sense at all?”
It would have been more offensive if she hadn’t been hearing it for years. “Just because I have a manual labor job, sir, doesn’t mean I can’t have my own hobbies, or be as girly as I want when I’m off the clock.”
Mister Crane gave a faint nod, acknowledging her point, but still managed to look extremely skeptical. “Why welding?”
“I like it. I’m good at it. It pays the bills.” She glared at him, too tired to be tactful. “Not all of us get comnets and college educations handed to us when we hit sixteen.”
“Hey, I worked my way through my master’s.” Lizzes said, holding up her hands on her lap with fingers spread to indicate no offense taken.
Jenna wasn’t about to tell them where the money had gone; it wasn’t any of their business. Instead she grinned. “Give me five years, and I’ll have enough to pay for a college degree. But I’ll buy a house instead, and have something real and solid to show for it.” College grads got so uptight that people didn’t respect the degree like they did, but they never respected hard-earned certificates and ratings that meant more than their bench-warming for four years while racking up loans.
Crane didn’t rile, though. He said softly, almost as an afterthought, “Did you see anything out of place today? Anything that shouldn’t have been that way?”
Jenna frowned, worrying over the question, and finally gave up and admitted it. “Yes.” The silence stretched uncomfortably, as Crane waited her out. Jenna finally muttered, “But you’ll make fun of me if I tell you.”
He was silent a moment, and then leaned forward, still holding her gaze. Softly, he said, “Try me.”
The silence stretched as he waited patiently, with no change to his dead serious expression. Anyone else would have given up or broken up laughing and made fun of her already; he waited as patiently as a stone, not even blinking, until she gave a small wince, and admitted, “The terrorists, the ones they shot, were wearing fake fashion.”
Crane didn’t laugh. Lizzes did, and Twitch lifted an eloquently belittling eyebrow. At least, she thought, AJ didn’t react. But he wouldn’t, even if he thought she was as stupid as it sounded. Jenna flushed at their looks, looking away, but her attention was dragged back to Mister Crane. With no change of expression, no break in the intensity of his stare, he simply said, “Explain?”
“They were dressed head to toe in counterfeit designer clothes and shoes. They had the right labels, but the cut wasn’t right, and the dyes were off, and the mix of brands was just stupidly wrong in ways no one would wear like that!” She knew it sounded utterly ridiculous to complaining about the clothes on corpses, and felt her face get even hotter.
Crane sat up very straight, eyes narrowing. He suddenly seemed exactly as dangerous as the others treated him. Every muscle was tense, like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, for all his voice stayed deceptively soft. “Do go on.”
“I mean, you know there’s a black and gray market for fashion, and it gets shipped in from the Fed and sold by various shady groups fronting in the street bazaar. Who doesn’t? But they were just… off. The brands they were wearing don’t go together. Even the people who flaunt their fakes would never put them together that way, because it’s sending the wrong signals.”
Crane was smiling, and it was disturbingly predatory. She edged back in her seat, away from him, only to a have AJ’s strong, gentle arm wrap around her back, stopping her from retreating as Crane leaned forward. “Were the clothes old? Or new?”
