“If someone knew my seat number on the flight over, they could get a ticket number and trace it back, right?”
“If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal.”
“From there, they could go to Kelsey-”
“From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan, which implies very serious resources.”
“There was a woman, on the plane… She had the seat beside me. Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Tokyo.
“You carried her suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me this story. All of it. When did you first see this woman?”
“In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA samples and I saw her do this weird thing Chia began the story of Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled and sharpened her stick, frowning.
“Fuck your mother,” Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her story. The translation rendered her tone as either amazement or disgust, Chia couldn’t tell.
“What?” Chia’s confusion was absolute.
Zona looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. “An idiom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with your mother.” She lowered the stick and did something to her knife, folding the blade away with a triple click. The lizard she’d adjusted 0
111 earlier came scurrying low across a narrow ledge of rock, clinging so close as to appear two-dimensional. Zona picked it up and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.
“What are you doing?”
“Harder encryption,” Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel of her jacket, where it clung like a brooch, its eyes tiny spheres of onyx. “Someone is looking for you. Probably they’ve already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is secure.”
“Can you do that, with him?” The lizards head moved.
“Maybe. He’s new. But those are better.” She pointed up with the stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with streaks of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so high. Two things flying. Big. Not planes. But then they were gone. “Illegal, in your country. Colombian. From the data-havens.” Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground and began to twirl it one way, then the other, between her palms. Chia had seen a rabbit make -fire that way, once, in an ancient cartoon. “You are an idiot.”
“Why?”
“You carried a bag through customs? A stranger’s bag?”
“Yes –
“Idiot!”
“I am not.”
“She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive.”
But you went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and suddenly felt like crying. “But why are they looking for me?”
Zona shrugged. “In the District, a cautious smuggler would not let a mule go free.
Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere behind and below Chia’s navel, and with it came the unwelcome recollection of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of something she hadn’t recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between her t-shirts. When she’d used one to dry her hands.
“What’s wrong?” 112 William Gibson I “I better go. Mitsuko went to make tea. . . Talking too quickly, biting off the words.
“Go? Are you insane? We must-”
“Sorry. ‘Bye.” Pulling off the goggles and scrabbling at the wrist-fasteners.
Her bag there, where she’d left it.
113 17. The Walls of Fame