"She's very pretty," Barry said. "Prettier than Mimi."
"If you say so."
"Kurt's awake."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You could introduce me to him."
I did it for your own good, you know. She couldn't bring herself
to say the words, for the enormity of what she'd done was
overwhelming her. She'd found three of his friends and treated
each of them to an evening of terror and hurt, and none of them
would tell her where her brother was, none of them knew. Maybe
they'd been innocent all along.
"Where are you?"
"Far from you," he said. In the background, she heard a girl
crying.
#
"It's going to happen, we're going to cover the whole Market," Kurt
said. He had the latest coverage map out and it looked like he was
right. "Look at this." The overlapping rings of WiFi false-colored over
the map were nearly total.
"Are those our own nodes, or just friendlies?" Alan asked, all his
confusion and worry forgotten at the sight of the map.
"Those are our own," Kurt said. "Not so many friendlies." He tapped a
key and showed a map of the city with a pitiful sprinkling of fellow
travelers who'd opened up their networks and renamed them "ParasiteNet."
"You'll have more," Buddy said. Kurt looked a question at Alan.
"My brother Brent," he said. "Meet Kurt."
They shook.
"Your brother?"
Adam nodded.
"Not one of the missing ones?"
He shook his head.
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