Black Marion

23

In the first week following Haneul's escape from the Sky, the Council mandated the architectural project SEA103, which created an accessory that logged and analyzed Tag activity. It was a simple assignment, taking no more than a week to perfect, and soon fed reports to CyberSec of individuals who frequently triggered the System's memory wipes. Those had not been a threat to State security in the past, but after unearthing Haneul's systematic method of working around the wipes, the State took their precautions. Nine men and women were detained and interrogated, and all of them subsequently released.

As for Alex, Haneul's diagrams and notebooks had very different implications. She tried to imagine what it would be like to realize, time and time again, that she had no control of her reality. She couldn't. To endure that took a special resilience, and Alex recalled the image of the doctor in his operation room, smiling down at the face of the child he'd just saved. Glimpsing the half-finished translations of his forty-six notebooks, Alex discovered that even now, she still had new depths to uncover in her feelings.

Before the State could completely decipher his journals, Alex erased them from the digital record, taking care not to pry into the private lines herself. Once she removed the physical copies from evidence, she kept them secure in a box until November.

By the end of October, the pace of things slowed. To keep her head out of the water, Alex had taken the lead in retracing Haneul's escape route via security interference. Midground was where investigation ran out of tracks. Similarly, Alex reported no progress on her decryption assignment. As old routines took over the dead ends, she had the space of breath to work out a sustainable way of hiding her tracks, no matter when or where she went.

When November 1st came around, Alex looked more carefully in the mirror than she had in a long time. Her skin was tinged pink from the embarrassment that she was worried about something as inconsequential as appearance, but in fact, concealing the shadows beneath her eyes and the dryness of her lips was a customary habit. She only paid more attention tonight to little flaws, wondering if the doctor might too.

An hour before midnight, she left her apartment for midground, a fluster of emotions hardly bundled by the three-layered cottons of her sweaters and coat.

Bridge M117 was located in a ghostly district of midground, between the tower stacks of two sprawling manufacturing plants. The smog tunnels that routed the pollution away from the Sky and toward the Ground were leaking, which dusted the area with a gray fog, and aside from the mechanical hum in the distance, there was no sound. Nothing but machines seemed to visit this place, so it was surreal to find a little tattoo shop at the base of a metal building.

It was an abandoned shop. Closer, Alex saw grime and dust over the windows, black behind the glass. The signs were rusting, and so was the frame of the door. Something brown was collecting along the edges, crackless, as if no one had opened those doors in years.

She did not want to be the first intruder, so she waited in the adjacent alley. It was 11:46.

The seconds passed in an excruciating rhythm, and a cold sweat was breaking under her sweaters. Her ears, covered by the dark hood of her coat, were freezing, but her throat felt like it was sweltering in summer heat. She tried not to think about what it would mean if Haneul didn't show. She tried to focus on the anticipation, but this became blistering—her want to see the doctor again. She thought, with the strange smell and the gray fog in the air, that she might be sick soon.

Two minutes before midnight, there was a soft whir in the distance. Alex straightened, searching. A few moments later, a small blue falcon crossed the bridge and pulled into the nearby lane. It was an old model, worn and scratched. The door slid open. Haneul stepped out.