<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #11

They drove a few dozen blocks back into Chinatown and pulled up to the back of the garage next to Greener Pastures. Cass leaned on the horn until the door next to the corrugated pull-down opened and a tiny little Asian man leaned out. He was wearing a filthy baseball cap on backwards, but his smile when he saw Cass on the bike was big and genuine. She revved the engine a few times before stabbing a thumb at the doorway. The little man nodded and disappeared, reappearing a moment later as the garage door pulled upwards. He was wearing filthy blue service overalls, and was shortly joined by three other, identical little men. Cass pushed the bike inside and shut it off, stepping back to admire it with the rest of them. Cass started swapping notes with them in language Fede didn’t understand, but he could tell by the tone of their voices and the low soft whistles that they were impressed. After several rounds of laughing and pointing grimy fingers at various parts of the bike she grabbed a socket wrench and a screwdriver. With a few deft twists of her wrist she pulled open a side panel and started popping screws. Her fingers flew over the polished metal housing, sculpted pieces of aluminum-bonded carbon fiber panels neatly lining themselves up to reveal the bare metal skeleton of the bike. Cass suddenly stood up, her hands on her hips. Even Fede was impressed — revealed, the bike was a pure racing machine. He could see wield marks where extra struts had been put in to support additional stress, and at least two extra shock plates. The Japanese men whistled again, loud and low. Cass nodded.

“Who did that?” asked Fede. The men ignored him, pointing and murmuring among themselves.

“I did” said Cass. “Come on.” She tossed the first guy the keys and gestured for Fede to follow her. They exited via the front door past the big plastic dragons and crossed over to enter Greener Pastures. Mil was working in the front room, this time setting up some muscle boxes. The square red plastic cases contained all the ingredients needed to shock muscle groups into sudden growth, and Mil was busily strapping them to a rangy redheaded man. The guy had a split tongue he was sucking on through his teeth as the muscle box stabbed and massaged the hormones into his chest. Having something cut into your muscle a thousand times a second wasn’t fun, but Fede understood that the pain was part of the procedure. It was a rite of passage.

They nodded at Mil as they entered, Fede following Cass towards the back of the store.

“You made that bike?” Fede asked.

“I modded it. The design is good, but when you bore out the pistons and amp up the carburetor you have to put in extra supports and...” she paused, glanced back at Fede.

“You have to hack it a little” she summarized.

“Who were those guys?” asked Fede.

“They let me use their shop” said Cass. “I worked there originally until I started at Greener Pastures, after I came up from California. Just basic chop shop work.”

“You speak Japanese with them?” asked Fede.

“They’re Chinese. They speak Mandarin. Mandarin slang, really — folks around here come from a lot of places, so they drop a lot of weird verbiage in from other places” she said.

“Where did you learn that? Are you Chinese?” he asked.

“Swiss” she said without turning. Her voice was flat, a studious neutral. “Swiss French. From Sion.” She stopped and turned to look at him. “You know where that is?”

He’d kept his goggles on after the bike ride, not in small part because he felt nervous about not understanding what the guys at the garage were saying. His buffer had caught her comment, and now he keyed against the text string, chose a visual representation of the data. Suddenly he was staring at a map of Switzerland. “Yeah. About... two hours from Zurich?” No, four hours — his fingers fluttered against the chord in his pocket, saw a swarm of train schedules fly by, an agent resolve an answer. “No, sorry. Two hours twenty-five minutes by train from Zurich. Looks like they’re not using the maglev there yet, huh?” Fede smirked.

She smiled out of one corner of her mouth, turned and continued down the hallway.

“We marked off part of the dojo for you. It’s not very respectful to Sansei” — she jabbed a thumb towards the front of the store — “but he agreed that if we were doing it to fund a full dojo it was worth impinging a little. Just remember to take your shoes off, okay? You don’t have to bow.”

She stepped into the Dojo, which was dark, and bent to take off her shoes. Fede was reminded again that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in person. There was something about the way she moved, her long limbs, the arc of her neck, the way she bent her arms. She stood and clapped her hands. A light went on inside a blue bubble out in the far corner of the room. “Shoes” she reminded him over her shoulder, and walked towards the light.

He slipped out of his canvas converse — black, retro — and followed. The light soon resolved into a one-person camp tent, an OLED panel lashed inside the top of its arced roof. A thick yellow power cord fed from the shadows of the Dojo’s edge to under the tent’s. An ethernet cable was wrapped neatly around it, secured every couple feet with black electrical tape. It was tidy work, definitely not Tonx’s. Cass kneeled and tightened a zip-tie securing the cord to a tent strut before crawling in, her slim figure turning to blue-tinged shadows. A moment later her head appeared.

“You coming?” she asked.

Inside the power cord was connecting to a translucent blue chest. The chest was empty other than a UPS (in case of power surges, Fede noted approvingly) and a power strip. One slot in the strip snaked up and out of the chest through a wire-clip mounting in a hole on the back of the chest, connecting to the OLED. The ethernet cable fed into a splitter, one lead feeding the OLED and the other taped against the side of the chest with several feet coiled loosely through the handle. The floor of the dojo was covered in thick soft mats, and as Fede sat back he saw that Cass was sitting on a tightly rolled sleeping bag in brilliant orange cameo.

“Thought of everything” he said.

“The cable’s connected to the main server rack in Tonx’s room” Cass said. “It’s limited, but Tonx said you’d hack into it easy enough. I try to keep things neat around here, despite Tonx’s best efforts.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Fede pushed his bag up next to the chest, looked around his new blue bubble.

“Why do you like it dark?” Cass asked.

“What?”

“Tonx said you’d like the rest of the Dojo to be dark. Said that’s how you liked to program. How come?”

Fede thought a moment. “It helps me see what I’m doing” he said. “When I program, it’s like I’m seeing the shape of the code, of the program. It’s easier to do when I can’t see anything else.”

Cass nodded, smiled slightly. Fede wondered if she thought he was crazy.

“He thinks you’re pretty good” she said. Her eyes reflected the glow of the OLED panel overhead. “Are you?”

“I guess so” he said. “What’s it to you?”

“It’s my ass on the line. Maybe Tonx didn’t tell you, but this is a big fucking deal. He’s pulling in a lot of favors to make this one go through. There’s a lot of risk involved. Tonx has every confidence in you, but I don’t know you from shit.”

She tilted her head and leaned forward, suddenly threatening, the muscles in her neck tight. “You going to let us down, Feed?”

Fede didn’t say anything. Cass watched him. When he’d been a kid Fede’s Dad had held him by the chin for the better part of twenty minutes, yelling at him that he wasn’t anything if he couldn’t look him in the eye. Fede had almost pissed himself on the cheap carpeting of their second-rate flat, but he had ended up staring his Dad down, looking into where his Dad really was, looking there and not flinching. Fede and Tonx had talked about it later, agreed that it was important somehow. Fede didn’t know where his Dad was now, but he knew he could keep his eyes pegged on this girl when it mattered. It mattered now.

“I’ll do it” he said.

She smiled that same half-smile again. “We’ll see. Just don’t get us killed, okay?” Cass leaned forward to crawl past Fede.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Who, Tonx? He’s out making arrangements. Our man is coming in through Florida and Tonx’s asked some colleagues to make the pickup. Tonx’s pretty well known in the body-mod scene down there. He’s done a lot of work, mostly on the Cuban edgers. They got some real hardcore shit. Tonx helped pioneer a lot of it.” She stopped, half-in, half-out of the tent. “You don’t know much about him, do you?”

Fede pulled out some drives and a hub and started cabling them together. Cass was gone a moment later.

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