The Wire Hanger

Chapter Fourteen

But Jezebel didn’t show up that day, or the next one. Noah spent his time alternately skulking about the house in a bad temper and fiddling with the electronics. The room he was staying in, which I had come to think of as his room, was filled with even more equipment than his room back at his little house, with screens and maps on every available surface. He showed me where he’d traced my mother and the other women – “They’re all there, you see, but we think it’s probably underground.”

            I stared at the collection of glowing red dots. None of them were moving. “How are you tracking them?”           

            “ID bracelets, of course,” he said. “Same way the corporation does it, only I’m better at it.”

            “Sure, whatever,” I said, though privately I had to admit that I thought it was probably true. “So you can track where I am right now?”

            Noah grinned, typed something unintelligible on the keyboard on his lap, and tilted the screen towards me. A satellite feed zoomed in on a rooftop.

            “That’s us?” I asked, astounded.

            “Yep.”

            “So why aren’t they – the Protectors – why aren’t they here, if I’m on the run?”

            “I can see you. They can’t. I’m better, remember? And anyway, the Professor has this house encrypted. It’s one thing to find you from inside the network. It’s another to look from the outside.” But then he frowned and started scribbling on a notepad, which had a doodle of something that looked like a cat. It wasn’t a very good cat. “Can you go, please,” he said abruptly, scrutinizing his own handwriting. “I have to figure something out.”

            Rude, I thought, and closed the door behind me rather more firmly than was necessary.

            It turned out that what he was working on was a personalized encrypter – a way to hack into the ID bracelet’s technology and create an encryption within it, so that no trackers would be able to find it.

            “Like a forcefield,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.

            “Not like a forcefield. It’s an encryption field.”

            As far as I was concerned, these were the same things. “Okay, so, it makes you invisible, basically.”

            “Basically,” he said. “But listen, I have to test it.”

            He looked at me for a long time before I got it. “Oh! You mean on me.”

            “Yeah, I mean, if that’s okay.”

            I shrugged. “Why not. Right now?”

            “You got somewhere better to be?”

            After briefly closing my eyes to maintain a sense of inward calm, I said, “Okay. What do you need me to do?”

            “Sit there,” he said, motioning towards a stool. “And hang on for a minute, I just have to get the settings right…” He fiddled around with the computers for a few minutes and then turned to me, pushing his hair out of his eyes. He still needed a haircut. “Hold out your arm.”

            I extended my left arm to him. I had never given much thought to the bracelet before the last few months – everyone had them, nobody talked about them, and when I complained about it as a kid my mother would just say, mildly, that they kept us safe. Thieves were identified the second they stepped out of a store. Someone on the run was virtually banished, unable to step into a home or through a doorway, and so it hardly mattered if they weren’t caught – they were trapped within the walls of the city, but couldn’t live inside it either. Most of them ended up turning themselves in.