the men. She wandered down the hallway to her room, with Crystal following close behind.
“How come you’re the only one that looks like a drowned rat?” Crystal asked.
“I let them shower first.”
“You must be freezing,” Crystal said.
“I’ve been through worse.” Enda took a set of clothes from her drawers and carried them into her bathroom. Crystal stood in the doorway, watching as Enda stripped and started the shower running.
“Jesus Christ,” Crystal said, seeing the bruised and bleeding wound at Enda’s shoulder.
Enda waved her concern away and stepped into the shower.
“What happened?”
“Police dog drone.”
“What?” Crystal asked, incredulous.
“Hacked and reprogrammed. Now I can see why so many people protest the machines. Fucking vicious.”
Enda washed herself quickly, and dried off.
“I’ll clean the wound for you,” Crystal said. She gingerly pressed a finger to Enda’s chest, where blue-black gave way to the usual pink-white hue. Enda winced, looked down at the outline of claws marked clearly in bruised flesh and torn skin.
“First aid kit under the sink,” Enda said.
Crystal took alcohol swabs and bandages from the box while Enda dressed her lower half.
“The information I sold you panned out?”
“Yeah,” Enda said.
“Which one is he?” Crystal asked. She tore open a small sachet and retrieved an alcohol swab. Chill over Enda’s skin as Crystal cleaned the wound, and she flinched at the fresh sort of pain.
“Neither; that kid’s dead.”
“Shit,” Crystal said, and a distance in her eyes made Enda shake her head.
“It wasn’t me.” Crystal began to protest but Enda pressed on: “I got there too late.”
“That’s my fault,” Crystal said.
“The kid told me to find JD. He took some finding; now we’re here.”
“Drowned and bleeding.” Crystal stuck a gauze pad over the wound. “All done. Thank you for letting me stay.”
“You’re welcome,” Enda said. She put a hand gently on Crystal’s cheek and kissed her. “Thanks for patching me up.”
* * *
They convened in Enda’s living room, and she made them each a cup of tea—Russian Caravan with lots of milk and sugar, because they all looked like they needed some simple carbs to fuel their lagging cells. Troy had chosen Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy, which played quietly in the background, bringing a flood of memories to Enda’s mind. She didn’t care much for that simpler strain of jazz, but Satchmo had been her father’s favorite. Enda sat cross-legged on the floor, bathed in the glow of a small radiant heater, waiting for her bone-deep chill to thaw.
“I want to see it,” she told JD.
JD glanced at Crystal quickly. “Are you sure?”
Enda nodded.
JD reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. “Is that okay? Do you want to meet someone new?” he asked the device. He nodded and disconnected a datacube from the rear of the phone. “Here,” he said, and tossed the cube to Enda.
She snatched it out of the air and inspected it, felt the dense weight of the small cube. “What do I do with it?”
“Slot the cube into your phone; I couldn’t tell you how it’s going to manifest.”
“You’re talking like it’s a spiritual entity you’re summoning,” Troy said. “It’s definitely strange, but it’s hardly otherworldly.”
Enda slid the backplate off her phone, and slotted the cube into place. The phone seemed to grow warmer in her hand, but Enda dismissed it as heat from the bright filaments burning hot beside her feet.
“What are we talking about?” Crystal asked, sipping at her drink.
“This is the data I was contracted to retrieve,” Enda said.
Crystal moved off the couch and sat on the floor beside Enda, staring intently at the phone with her back against the wall, long legs stretched toward the middle of the small room.
“Am I going to have to download that game?” Enda asked JD.
“No, it’s not—it only went into the game because the game was there. What do you have on your phone that it might access?”
Enda shrugged. “Sudoku? My bank account?”
JD scrunched up his face. “I doubt it. We’ve been talking with it—it displays its responses on-screen. It will probably do the same for you.”
“I should call my contact at Zero,” Enda said. “I don’t have to tell them how I found it; I can leave out your name entirely. But they offered me a lot of money to track it down.”
Enda did not mention the blackmail, the Agency records they threatened to reveal. The file would see her extradited for her crimes. The provisional government that oversaw the area formerly known as North Korea zealously punished foreign agents they found in the rubble of the former