#
Davey haunted the schoolyard. Alan had always treated the school and its
grounds as a safe haven, a place where he could get away from the
inexplicable, a place where he could play at being normal.
But now Davey was everywhere, lurking in the climber, hiding in the
trees, peering through the tinsel-hung windows during class. Alan only
caught the quickest glimpses of him, but he had the sense that if he
turned his head around quickly enough, he'd see him. Davey made himself
scarce in the mountain, hiding in the golems' cave or one of the deep
tunnels.
Marci didn't come to class after Monday. Alan fretted every morning,
waiting for her to turn up. He worried that she'd told her father, or
that she was at home sulking, too angry to come to school, glaring at
her Christmas tree.
Davey's grin was everywhere.
On Wednesday, he got called into the vice principal's office. As he
neared it, he heard the rumble of Marci's father's thick voice and his
heart began to pound in his chest.
He cracked the door and put his face in the gap, looking at the two men
there: Mr. Davenport, the vice principal, with his gray hair growing out
his large ears and cavernous nostrils, sitting behind his desk, looking
awkwardly at Marci's father, eyes bugged and bagged and bloodshot, face
turned to the ground, looking like a different man, the picture of worry
and loss.
Mr. Davenport saw him and crooked a finger at him, looking stern and
stony. Alan was sure, then, that Marci'd told it all to her father,
who'd told it all to Mr. Davenport, who would tell the world, and
suddenly he was jealous of his secret, couldn't bear to have it
revealed, couldn't bear the thought of men coming to the mountain to
catalogue it for the subject index at the library, to study him and take
him apart.
And he was... afraid. Not of what they'd all do to him. What Davey would
do to them. He knew, suddenly, that Davey would not abide their secrets
being disclosed.
He forced himself forward, his feet dragging like millstones, and stood
between the two men, hands in his pockets, nervously twining at his
underwear.
"Alan," Marci's father croaked. Mr. Davenport held up a hand to silence
him.
"Alan," Mr. Davenport said. "Have you seen Marci?"
Alan had been prepared to deny everything, call Marci a liar, betray her
as she'd betrayed him, make it her word against his. Protect
her. Protect her father and the school and the town from what Davey
would do.
Now he whipped his head toward Marci's father, suddenly understanding.
"No," he said. "Not all week! Is she all right?"
Marci's father sobbed, a sound Alan had never heard an adult make.
And it came tumbling out. No one had seen Marci since Sunday night. Her
presumed whereabouts had moved from a friend's place to Alan's place to
runaway to fallen in a lake to hit by a car and motionless in a ditch,
and if Alan hadn't seen her --
"I haven't," Alan said. "Not since the weekend. Sunday morning. She said
she was going home."
Another new sound, the sound of an adult crying. Marci's father, and his
sobs made his chest shake and Mr. Davenport awkwardly came from behind
his desk and set a box of kleenexes on the hard bench beside him.
Alan caught Mr. Davenport's eye and the vice principal made a shoo and
pointed at the door.
#
Alan didn't bother going back to class. He went straight to the golems'
cave, straight to where he knew Davey would be -- must be -- hiding, and
found him there, playing with the bones that lined the walls.
"Where is she?" Alan said, after he'd taken hold of Davey's hair and,
without fanfare, smashed his face into the cold stone floor hard enough
to break his nose. Alan twisted his wrists behind his back and when he
tried to get up, Alan kicked his legs out from under him, wrenching his
arms in their sockets. He heard a popping sound.
"Where is she?" Alan said again, amazing himself with his own
calmness. Davey was crying now, genuinely scared, it seemed, and Alan
reveled in the feeling. "I'll kill you," he whispered in Davey's ear,
almost lovingly. "I'll kill you and put the body where no one will find
it, unless you tell me where she is."
Davey spat out a milk tooth, his right top incisor, and cried around the
blood that coursed down his face. "I'm -- I'm *sorry,* Alan," he
said. "But it was the *secret*." His sobs were louder and harsher than
Marci's father's had been.
"Where is she?" Alan said, knowing.
"With Caleb," Davey said. "I buried her in Caleb."
He found his brother the island midway down the mountain, sliding under
cover of winter for the seaway. He climbed the island's slope, making
for the ring of footprints in the snow, the snow peppered brown with
soil and green with grass, and he dug with his hands like a dog, tossing
snow soil grass through his legs, digging to loose soil, digging to a
cold hand.
A cold hand, protruding from the snow now, from the soil, some of the
snow red-brown with blood. A skinny, freckled hand, a fingernail
missing, torn off leaving behind an impression, an inverse fingernail. A
hand, an arm. Not attached to anything. He set it to one side, dug,
found another hand. Another arm. A leg. A head.
She was beaten, bruised, eyes swollen and two teeth missing, ear torn,
hair caked with blood. Her beautiful head fell from his shaking cold
hands. He didn't want to dig anymore, but he had to, because it was the
secret, and it had to be kept, and --
-- he buried her in Caleb, piled dirt grass snow on her parts, and his
eyes were dry and he didn't sob.
#
It was a long autumn and a long winter and a long spring that year,
unwiring the Market. Alan fell into the familiar rhythm of the work of a
new venture, rising early, dossing late, always doing two or three
things at once: setting up meetings, sweet-talking merchants, debugging
his process on the fly.
His first victory came from the Greek, who was no pushover. The man was
over seventy, and had been pouring lethal coffee and cheap beer down the
throats of Kensington's hipsters for decades and had steadfastly refused
every single crackpot scheme hatched by his customers.
"Larry," Andy said, "I have a proposal for you and you're going to hate
it."
"I hate it already," the Greek said. His dapper little mustache
twitched. It was not even seven a.m. yet, and the Greek was tinkering
with the guts of his espresso delivery system, making it emit loud
hisses and tossing out evil congealed masses of sin-black coffee
grounds.
"What if I told you it wouldn't cost you anything?"
"Maybe I'd hate it a little less."
"Here's the pitch," Alan said, taking a sip of the thick, steaming
coffee the Greek handed to him in a minuscule cup. He shivered as the
stuff coated his tongue. "Wow."
The Greek gave him half a smile, which was his version of roaring
hilarity.
"Here's the pitch. Me and that punk kid, Kurt, we're working on a
community Internet project for the Market."
"Computers?" the Greek said.
"Yup," Alan said.
"Pah," the Greek said.
Anders nodded. "I knew you were going to say that. But don't think of
this as a computer thing, okay? Think of this as a free speech
thing. We're putting in a system to allow people all over the Market --
and someday, maybe, the whole city -- to communicate for free, in
private, without permission from anyone. They can send messages, they
can get information about the world, they can have conversations. It's
like a library and a telephone and a café all at once."
Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with
computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to
nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."
"Well, *sure*," Alan said. "If you're all alone with a computer, you're
just going to fall down the rabbit hole. You're in your own world and
cut off from the rest of the world. But once you put those computers on
the network, they become a way to talk to anyone else in the world. For
free! You help us with this network -- all we want from you is
permission to stick up a box over your sign and patch it into your
power, you won't even know it's there -- and those customers won't be
antisocial, they'll be socializing, over the network."
"You think that's what they'll do if I help them with the network?"
He started to say, *Absolutely*, but bit it back, because Larry's
bullshit antennae were visibly twitching. "No, but some of them
will. You'll see them in here, talking, typing, typing, talking. That's
how it goes. The point is that we don't know how people are going to use
this network yet, but we know that it's a social benefit."
"You want to use my electricity?"
"Well, yeah."
"So it's not free."
"Not entirely," Alan said. "You got me there."
"Aha!" the Greek said.
"Look, if that's a deal breaker, I'll personally come by every day and
give you a dollar for the juice. Come on, Larry -- the box we want to
put in, it's just a repeater to extend the range of the network. The
network already reaches to here, but your box will help it go
farther. You'll be the first merchant in the Market to have one. I came
to you first because you've been here the longest. The others look up to
you. They'll see it and say, 'Larry has one, it must be all right.'"
The Greek downed his coffee and smoothed his mustache. "You are a
bullshit artist, huh? All right, you put your box in. If my electricity
bills are too high, though, I take it down."
"That's a deal," Andy said. "How about I do it this morning, before you
get busy? Won't take more than a couple minutes."
The Greek's was midway between his place and Kurt's, and Kurt hardly
stirred when he let himself in to get an access point from one of the
chipped shelving units before going back to his place to get his ladder
and Makita drill. It took him most of the morning to get it securely
fastened over the sign, screws sunk deep enough into the old, spongy
wood to survive the build up of ice and snow that would come with the
winter. Then he had to wire it into the sign, which took longer than he
thought it would, too, but then it was done, and the idiot lights
started blinking on the box Kurt had assembled.
"And what, exactly, are you doing up there, Al?" Kurt said, when he
finally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoon
breakfast coffee.
"Larry's letting us put up an access point," he said, wiping the pigeon
shit off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladder
and wiped his hands off on his painter's pants. "That'll be ten bucks,
please."
Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies and
toonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. "You talked the Greek
into it?" he hissed. "How?"
"I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence."
"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner
high-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network,
huh?"
"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get you
something."
#
What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes that
Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.
"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from
his basement that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked
like they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-power
Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small
enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian
Tire.
Adam vaguely recognized the day's street-kids as regulars who'd been
hanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairy
eyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt's
weren't much like the kids he'd had working for him over the years. They
might be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls were
cutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys looked
like they'd been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, like
they were spoiling for a fight. Alan tried to unfocus his eyes when he
was in the front of Kurt's shop, to not see any of them too closely.
"They work," Kurt said. He smelled terrible, a combination of garbage
and sweat, and he had the raccoon-eyed jitters he got when he stayed up
all night. "I tested them twice."
"You built me a spare?" Alan said, examining the neat lines of hot glue
that gasketed the sturdy rubberized antennae in place, masking the
slightly melted edges left behind by the drill press.
"You don't need a spare," Kurt said. Alan knew that when he got touchy
like this, he had to be very careful or he'd blow up, but he wasn't
going to do another demo Kurt's way. They'd done exactly one of those,
at a Toronto District School Board superintendents meeting, when Alan
had gotten the idea of using schools' flagpoles and backhaul as test
beds for building out the net. It had been a debacle, needless to
say. Two of the access points had been permanently installed on either
end of Kurt's storefront and the third had been in storage for a month
since it was last tested.
One of the street kids, a boy with a pair of improbably enormous raver
shoes, looked up at Alan. "We've tested these all. They work."