Mountain of Black Glass (47 page)

Iskander was hit in the eyes by the dye. Terrified by the screaming alarm and his sudden blindness, he staggered away from the machine. Cho-Cho had also been sprayed in the face, and was rubbing his eyes frantically when Beto screeched in terror. Cho-Cho cleared the worst of the dye in time to see Iskander frozen in the headlights of an oncoming truck. They barely saw the impact, but the wet thump was so shocking that Cho-Cho let go of the heavy vending machine, still howling its warning cry as it teetered atop the dolly. A moment later it began to tip, the weight far too great for Cho-Cho to stop it even when he realized what was happening. Little Beto, wide-eyed as he stared at the spot where Iskander had been only a moment before, did not even see the huge box toppling on him. He disappeared beneath it without a sound.

Stunned, Cho-Cho had stood frozen for long moments. The car that had hit Iskander had stopped several hundred yards up the expressway, and other headlights were appearing now, slowing at the sight of the huge blinking machine lying on its side in the middle lane. Cho-Cho's muscles if not his wits returned to his control; he bolted into the darkness of the roadside, almost tripping on the dolly which was rolling slowly down the sloping expressway toward the shoulder.

The International Vending Company sustained such a blizzard of negative publicity, the tabnets struggling to outdo each other with stories about how a “killer machine” had chased one child to its death on a freeway and killed another outright by crushing his skull, that within a month of the accident they declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold their assets to another firm. Although Cho-Cho would experience other tragedies—his mother and younger sister were asphyxiated a year later when a trucker running his engine to stay warm during an evening's layover underneath the freeway accidentally filled their honeycomb with carbon monoxide—that night had already done much to form his expectations of life.

We are the rats in the walls,
was the only thing of his father's that he kept when he ran away, making his way up the East Coast in search of cooler summers and less vigilant police.
They will trap us, poison us. They want us dead.

 

Cho-Cho watched the little girl walk away with her head down, slow and sad like he had just told her he was going to burn up her house or something. Why had the old
vato
ever got involved with her in the first place? The old guy was weird, but he was pretty smart in his way—he knew lots of shit, that was for sure—so why did he get a little puppy dog like this to help him?

Because he hadn't had any other choice, the boy suddenly realized. He would have taken a street-smart animal like Cho-Cho if he could have, but they hadn't met in time. When they did, he had sent the little girl back to Mamapapa-land pretty quick.

This put a little spring in Cho-Cho's step as he made his way back through the walking park just beyond the school, but he still remembered to keep to the trees and stay out of sight of the paths. He was getting a little tired of eating the military rations the old cripple Sellars kept stacked in the tunnel, but he wasn't
that
tired of it—it was a lot better than not eating, and it also beat getting meals on trays in one of those kiddie jails, which was where he'd go if they caught him. If he was lucky, of course, and they didn't just take him out back of the base and shoot him instead—“snipe hunting,” the
azules
called it. You couldn't trust the people who ran things. They talked all nice on the net, everyone said, but he knew they didn't like rats at all.

Sellars was different, but Cho-Cho still wasn't sure why. In fact, he wasn't sure about anything where the man in the wheelchair was concerned. The old cripple was hiding from the army men, but doing it right underneath an army base. He was keyed into some kind of crazy part of the net that Cho-Cho had never seen—better than the best games or anything—but he wanted Cho-Cho to be the one to go, even though they could never quite make it work right, or at least not for very long. And he was always mumbling, like Cho-Cho's
abuela
in the mountains outside Guatemala City, who his dad had taken him to see once—a horrible sweaty boat ride that lasted days, just to meet an old lady living in some Indian village who didn't even have any teeth, and who kept a scrawny monkey on a leash right in her little house. She had seemed glad to meet her grandchild, but he couldn't understand her language and his father couldn't be bothered to translate much of what she said. He knew he would never as long as he lived forget the smell of that place, boiled corn and monkey shit.

It wasn't much different living with Sellars, although
gracias á Dios
there was no monkey. But the things the old man mumbled, even if they were in a language that Cho-Cho could actually speak, still didn't make any sense—he talked to himself about his garden, like he still had a house of his own, and mumbled words like “platforms” and “Ay-eye structures” like even if he didn't have a house, he was going to build one. Which was pretty funny, because if ever there was an old
vato
who couldn't even lift a hammer, let alone use one, it was Sellars. He had arms like broomsticks and had to work so hard to breathe sometimes, even with that “oxygen nation” stuff he kept boiling all the time like some kind of ugly soup, that Cho-Cho sometimes couldn't even sleep for listening to him wheezing and coughing.

It was funny, though. He didn't want the guy to die, even if he was an old cripple. Not just because then he'd be on his own hiding from the army men, and the
mu'chita
probably wouldn't even bring food no more. There was also something strange about the way Sellars talked to him that he couldn't quite understand. It was almost like the old man liked him or something. Cho-Cho knew better, of course. People like Sellars, white people with houses of their own—or who had once
had
houses of their own, anyway—didn't like street rats. They said they did if someone was doing a net story on how sad it all was, or if the government or the church was opening some fancy
caridad
place, but people like that didn't really want to spend time with a dirty little kid with teeth knocked out and sores on his arms and legs that wouldn't stop oozing.

But Sellars was definitely strange. He talked softly and called Cho-Cho “Senor Izabal.” The first time he did it, Cho-Cho almost kicked him right out of his chair, but it wasn't a joke, or at least not the kind Cho-Cho was used to. And Sellars thanked him for bringing him things. For a while Cho-Cho had been sure the guy was some kind of babybouncer—why else get friendly with a little
gatita
like that Christy Bell or whatever her name was?—and so he kept a sharp piece of metal he'd found in one of the base trash cans right in his hand when he went to sleep, his fingers curled around the sticky tape handle. But Sellars never did anything.

So was he just
un anciano loco
? But if he was, how did he get into that amazing place—a world better than the net, a world Cho-Cho had seen with his own eyes or he wouldn't have believed it? And why would Sellars only bring him online after he'd fallen asleep? He must have some lockoff big station he didn't want Cho-Cho to see, something worth monster
cambio.
The whole thing was so strange that it had to mean money somewhere, and Cho-Cho wasn't going to miss out. When you were a rat, you had to take what you could get, any time you could get it. Besides, he had to figure it out just so that if the burned-up old man died,
Cho-Cho El Raton
could still get back to that place on the net, to that utter tasty, wild place.

 

“S
O her father has the sunglasses . . .” Sellars tried to keep his voice even, but it was shockingly bad news. It had been a dreadful gamble, but at the time he had done it, there had been no other choice—it was either give her the device or risk having her constantly coming to prearranged meetings at his hiding place, and how long could one hope to keep that up with a child before attracting notice?

Cho-Cho shrugged. “Is what she said.” He was being unusually opaque today, even by his own standards. At the best of times the boy moved in a permanent dark cloud of suspicion and reflexive anger, but that meant he was fairly easy to read. Sellars had often brooded on the hopelessness of his own cause, but never more so than when he considered that his only real-world allies were the primary-school daughter of the man hunting for him and a boy only a few years older who hadn't slept in a house in years—a boy who at the moment was chewing the corner off a foil sack of RTE pudding so he could suck out the contents like a chimp with a marrowbone.

Sellars sighed. He was so tired, so very tired, but this latest crisis could not wait. It might even be too late already—the Storybook Sunglasses would hold up under a standard examination, but if someone researched the components, which Sellars had assembled over two years of stealthy mail fraud and fiddling with the base's records, they would realize that the receiving range for the device was very short indeed. Even if Christabel did not break under what must be terrible pressure, her father and his staff would know that whoever was narrowcasting to the sunglasses must be almost on top of them. Or beneath them.

If he had been the type to shudder he would have done so. Next up the line would be Yacoubian, and—although Christabel's father and his other subordinates might not know it—the entire weight of the Grail Brotherhood. The whole thing would be over in hours from the moment the deduction was made, so quickly that Sellars might not have a chance to do more than destroy himself and his records. In fact, the process might be in the chain at this very moment.

He steadied himself by thinking of his Garden, of the virtual plants twining and tangling. Nothing was ever simple, but that was true for his opponents as well as for himself. He would have to do something, that was all, and the obvious point of attack would be Christabel's father, Major Michael Sorensen. If Sellars had possessed the strange operating system the Brotherhood used, he could just reach out and hypnotize the man when he was next online, manipulate his mind. The sunglasses could be made to disappear, the entire subject to be forgotten. Of course, first he would have to be willing to interfere with the man's mind, to risk Christabel's father's sanity and perhaps even his life.

Sellars looked at Cho-Cho, whose grubby face was at the moment made grubbier still by the chocolate pudding smeared on his chin. Was there a difference between using innocents like Christabel—or even this child, who compared to Sellars himself was definitely an innocent—and mucking about in the mental plumbing of an adult?

“It comes down to choices, Señor Izabal,” he said aloud. “Choices, as my friend Senor Yeats would have been the first to point out . . .

“. . . And coats don't get much more tattered than you and me, do they?”

Cho-Cho stared at him, rubbing his mouth and transferring pudding freely to wrist and forearm. “Huh?”

“A bit of poetry. I have a choice to make. If I make the wrong one, something very, very bad will happen. If I make the right one, something very bad might happen anyway. Have you ever had to make a choice like that?”

The boy regarded him from under long lashes, an animal quietly preparing for defense or flight. At last he said, “All the time I have to think, is like that—bad one way, bad the other. They always get you in the end.
Siempre.
”

Sellars nodded, but he felt something much like pain. “I suppose they do. Now listen carefully, my young friend, and I'll tell you what to go back and say to the little girl.”

 

I
T felt like four whole days had passed since she came home from school instead of only four hours, but all she could do was think about what the terrible boy had told her. She didn't even know for sure if Mister Sellars had really said that. What if the boy Cho-Cho was telling a lie? What if Mister Sellars was really sick, and the boy just wanted to do bad things? She saw someone on the net once saying that children like that boy didn't believe in the law, which she knew meant that they would steal and hurt people. He had pushed her down, hadn't he? Told her he was going to cut her?

She desperately wanted to go and ask Mister Sellars, really ask him his own self, but her mother was just a few steps away from the kitchen table, and even so she kept looking over her shoulder all the time, like she thought Christabel might try to sneak away.

She had been doing her homework, but all the thoughts had her so confused that she couldn't do her fractions right, couldn't remember which was the denumerator and which was the nominator or anything, and so she had just put in numbers and erased them, over and over.

“How are you doing, honey?” her mom asked, using her sweet voice, but she sounded worried, like she did all the time these days.

“Okay,” Christabel told her. But she wasn't okay. She was afraid that her daddy wouldn't come home on time. She was even more afraid that if he did come home on time, something so bad might happen that nothing would ever be okay ever again.

 

It didn't help that her daddy was in a bad mood when he came in, swearing because he had kicked over a watering can on the porch that shouldn't have been there. Mommy apologized, then Daddy apologized, but he still wasn't in a good mood. He barely said hello to Christabel before he went into his study and closed the door.

Christabel looked at the clock on the wall above the sink and saw that there were only ten more minutes to go. She poured herself a glass of water but didn't drink any, and stared at the cartoons on the refrigerator, even though she'd seen them all before.