Outcast

Book 0: Inscape

by Louise Carey

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Dystopian; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

TRUTH.
LIES.
IT CAN BE HARD TO TELL THEM APART.

When a bomb goes off at InTech HQ, everything changes for Tanta's corporation. Order becomes disorder. Safety becomes danger. Calm becomes chaos.

Tanta is tasked with getting to the bottom of the attack before violence and unrest overtake the city. But even though the evidence points towards rival corporation Thoughtfront, Tanta can't shake the feeling that she's missing something.

There's a dark secret at the heart of the case, one that will reveal more about her own corporation than Tanta would like. And the closer Tanta gets to the mystery, the more she comes to realise something terrible:

Sometimes facing the truth can be the hardest thing of all.

* * * * * * * * * * *

'Deft satire' New Scientist

'A page-turning thriller' Guardian on Inscape

'A high-octaine, cyberpunk-flavoured adventure' Washington Post on Inscape

'A propulsive thriller' SFX on Inscape

'Chillingly plausible' Claire North on Inscape

'This is cyberpunk rebooted' Stephen Baxter on Inscape

'Calling Hollywood: here's your next big streaming hit' Joe Hill on Inscape

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

‘Jeanie sent me,’ Yasmin Das says.

Cole frowns. ‘I don’t know a Jeanie.’

‘She said you might say that. But you did, once, and it’s about time you were reintroduced.’

Cole doesn’t know whether to be excited or alarmed by this information. He was only just thinking that he needed to learn more about his forgotten past, and who better to fill him in than someone who knew him personally? But Cole’s day job, before he lost all memory of it in the MindWipe, involved subjecting children to a programme of corporate mind control – and during his time off, he masterminded a false flag attack that left dozens of people dead. He can’t help feeling that anyone who knew that past version of him very well is not someone he’d like to meet.

‘What does she want from me?’ he asks Yas. ‘And why is she contacting me now?’

Yas gives Cole a look that he finds hard to read. ‘She wants your help. When you were working on the Harlow Programme, you used to feed her intel from inside the Black Box. She’d like you to do it again.’

The words hit Cole like a blow. It’s not just that this is one of the first pieces of concrete information he’s had about his missing years; it’s also the fact that Yas knows about his role in InTech’s covert programme of mental manipulation. It’s bad enough thinking about the Harlow Programme in the privacy of his own head; hearing Yas, someone he likes and respects, talking about it out loud is almost unbearable. He hates that she knows about his time in InTech’s most highly classified research and development lab – learning about his past almost isn’t worth the shame of having to talk about it with other people. He has so many questions that, for a moment, he can’t respond.

‘What? How …?’

‘Jeanie filled me in on the details,’ Yas answers, noticing Cole’s confusion but oblivious to his discomfort. ‘You and she were trying to halt the programme’s progression, but then she lost touch with you. Now there’s—’

A knock on the door cuts Yas off mid-sentence. Cole is turning to see who could be calling this late at night when she grabs his arm.

‘Don’t answer that!’ she hisses. ‘Listen, we don’t have a lot of time. There’s something brewing in the Black Box. Something big. Jeanie wants to stop it, and she could really use your help.’

She digs in her pocket and hands him something: it’s an oval of white plastic with a silver button in the centre, hanging on a length of cord.

‘Take this and hide it,’ she says. ‘You can use it to get in touch with us if you need to, but it’s for emergencies only.’

Cole has seen things like this device in retro technology exhibits – it’s a patient tracker, used in the days before MbOS technology to help dementia sufferers who strayed from their homes. He’s impressed. The tech is so archaic that it won’t be blocked by any of InTech’s firewalls or detected by their scanners. He takes it – then, at a loss for what to do with it, puts it in the fruit bowl on his kitchen table. There’s another knock on the door, louder this time. It snaps Cole back to attention; his professional interest has distracted him from the most obvious problem with Yas’s plan.

‘Yas, even if I wanted to help you, I don’t work at the Black Box anymore,’ he points out. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

The furtive expression crosses Yas’s face again. Cole finally identifies it as chagrin. ‘Yes. About that,’ she says. ‘You asked why Jeanie was getting in touch now. It’s because it might be her last chance for a while. We’ve been monitoring the chatter at the ICRD and Kenway has decided to – well – he’s putting you under house arrest.’

Panic spikes through Cole. ‘What?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Yas whispers. ‘Really, I am. This shouldn’t be happening to you. But there’s a way you can use it to do some good. Or get revenge, if that’s your thing.’

Shouting from outside, now: ‘Neuroengineer Cole! Open the door!’

‘Yas,’ Cole hisses through gritted teeth, ‘what is going on?’

‘I have to go!’ Yas replies. ‘We know Dr Friend is going to request you be reassigned to the Black Box. If you’re in, then once you get there, look out for our man on the inside. From what I’ve heard, he needs all the help he can get.’

The door bursts open, flying from its hinges. Cole whirls around: four armed guardians enter the flat at a run, their weapons trained on him.

As the guardians cuff him, they turn him back towards the open window. Yas is gone.

Everyone has always called her Fliss, except her mother.

One of Fliss’s earliest memories is of her mum correcting her when she tried to shorten it, the lines on her worn face deepening into a disapproving frown. ‘You’re Felicity,’ she said. ‘Felicity Loh. It’s a good name. A proper name.’

By which she meant an old name, one from before the Meltdown. But they’re not living before the Meltdown, are they? And besides, her mum told her that felicity meant happiness, and Fliss found herself resenting that, as though the name were a standard she had to live up to. She’s not happy, not most of the time. Who is? And so, she started calling herself Fliss, and after she left the settlement at Gatwick and joined the crew, everyone else did the same.

Fliss has been thinking about her mother a lot today. It’s probably because she’s out teaching Josh how to hunt drones, and teaching is something Mum has always been good at. They’re perched on the roof of an abandoned house, one of a row of identical houses – she, Josh, and the rest of the crew. Josh had wanted to wait inside one of them, in the shade; the heat is already becoming oppressive, and he’s a redhead who burns at the mention of sunlight. But Fliss had insisted on this position and, since she’s the leader, Josh had to agree.

‘You need to brace yourself against something or the recoil will knock you over,’ she tells Josh patiently. ‘It’s not like in the movies.’

The crew don’t have a television of their own, but many of the settlements they stop at do and occasionally, when times are good, they’ve traded some of their food or meds for the chance to watch a film. Fliss likes the westerns best. They’re all from long before the Meltdown, but the stories of bandits and frontier towns remind her of life in the wasteland. The gangs of outlaws are even a little like her own crew, though they have it easier than she does. Cattle rustlers only have cowboys and sheriffs to contend with. Fliss and her crew have the corps.

‘I know it’s not like in the movies,’ Josh snaps back. ‘I’ve seen you do it, haven’t I?’

Fliss feels an answering stirring of annoyance, which she tries to suppress. Her mother is endlessly patient, and taught Fliss how to dress wounds, snare rabbits and scale trees with a supply of gentleness that never ran dry – even when Fliss was cross or slow. Of course, this particular lesson would horrify her. They never attacked drones at Gatwick; their philosophy was to avoid the corporations’ notice as far as possible.

‘I know you have, Josh,’ she replies, calm as she can manage. ‘But you won’t know what I mean until you’ve tried it yourself. Here—’ She takes the gun from its holster on her belt and shows Josh the stance again: legs slightly apart, back braced against the chimney stack, left arm supporting and steadying her right. ‘Like this.’

Josh copies her, making a gun out of his thumb and index finger and squinting along it into the sky. He fires off a volley of imaginary shots, then mimes a drone going down in flames.

‘I get it,’ he says. ‘Now give. I want to try.’

‘If you’re going to fuck about, I’ll take you back to camp,’

Fliss retorts. ‘Maybe I should have let Gabriel or Sonia handle this one after all.’

She glances at them as she speaks. They’re sitting with Ben on the flat roof, sharing a canteen of water. Sonia only rolls her brown eyes – she doesn’t have any more patience for Josh’s idiocy than Fliss does – but Gabriel shoots her a look of mute appeal. He has a soft spot for Josh, who is the youngest and newest of the crew. Fliss doesn’t relent; Josh may be a kid, but he needs to know this isn’t a game.

He sobers immediately. ‘I’ll be serious! I promise.’

She hands him the gun with a show of reluctance, and he takes it reverently, making a big deal out of it. It lies in his palm, compact and dense, its once-shiny surface flecked with rust. Fliss oils it regularly, but it was old and beaten up when she got it.

Josh curls his fingers around the handle and takes up the stance she showed him, pointing the gun at the sky to the east. Then he sights along the barrel, squinting into the flat stare of the sun.

Fliss watches all this approvingly. She had her doubts about letting Josh get his hands on the gun. It’s the only working one the crew has, and he has a tendency towards recklessness. But he’s been begging to learn how to use it since he joined them, and Ben did barter for a shotgun from some traders in Crawley the last time they passed that way. It doesn’t work yet, but with a bit more tinkering it might, and the crew could use another shooter.

A dark speck comes into view, silhouetted against the light. At the same moment, Fliss hears a high and steady humming, still distant, but coming their way. The delivery drone is heading straight for them.

‘It’s here,’ she says, with satisfaction. ‘Right on time.’

All at once, Josh’s arms start to tremble. The gun is probably heavier than he was expecting it to be, but Fliss knows that’s not the only reason.

‘What if it’s armed?’ he asks. His voice is a high whine that matches the sound of the drone’s motors. He coughs, embarrassed.

‘They’re never armed on this route,’ Gabriel tells him, affecting not to notice Josh’s discomfort.

‘But what if it is? What if they’ve noticed what we’ve been doing?’

‘They haven’t,’ Fliss chimes in. ‘We’ve been careful.’

This is true. The crew have a rotation of drone routes that they change up regularly. They never strike the same flight path twice in a row, or twice at the same point. They leave as long between hunts as they possibly can. And this route is one they know well. One of the big corporations uses it to ferry staple foods from the agricultural zones in the south over to London: the delivery drones carry grains, pulses, occasionally root vegetables – nothing valuable. There’s no reason to think the drone would be armed. But still …

You can’t always tell the armed drones apart from the normal ones, not by sight. You know when you’ve hit one though, because it’s the last thing you’ll ever do. Usually. Some of the corps just put regular guns on theirs, and in that case, you might get away with a chestful of scars or a chunk out of your ear, like Ben has. But Thoughtfront put heat-guided missiles on their really important shipments, and some of the pharmaceutical corporations use even nastier things. Things that can melt your skin off and leave you choking on your own lungs.

It’s how Fliss’s predecessor died. Fliss was little more than a kid herself when it happened, and she tries not to dwell on the memory, but occasionally an image from that day will resurface. It was only her, Harry and Sonia in the crew then, and they were trying to snag a shipment from AviLife – painkillers and birth control, but they were hoping for antibiotics, too, which are rare as hens’ teeth and far more valuable. Harry had been closest when they brought the drone down, so he’d got the brunt of the gas when the little cannister exploded. Fliss, to her shame, had run. Sonia, too. They’d returned several hours later to find the shipment melted and Harry … In the end, she and Sonia had been too afraid even to bury him. The crew wear gas masks when they go to collect a drone now – Fliss traded for them herself – but she hasn’t hit an AviLife shipment since.

Overhead, the sound of the drone is getting louder, and Josh’s shaking has intensified. The kid is all swagger and no substance; he’s been boasting about his imagined prowess with a gun for weeks, and now that it comes to it, he’s running scared. Fliss could remind him that she did tell him this was a serious business. Instead, she squeezes his shoulder.

‘You’ll be OK,’ she says.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and thumbs the safety off. The gun wavers a little, but he steadies his right hand with his left, like Fliss taught him, and finds his target. The drone is closer, larger. But it’s not time yet. Timing is everything. Fliss has drilled into him, again and again, that he has to wait until it’s almost directly overhead. He pauses, gauging the distance. Beside him, Fliss counts down slowly from five in her head. When she reaches zero, she feels Josh tense up, and he fires.

The recoil takes him by surprise, as Fliss warned him it would. He does not stagger, but his right arm flies backwards, and the shot goes wide. He fires again, and a third time, chasing the drone across the sky. But he has no better luck. It’s above them, and then it’s gone. The sound of its motors recedes in the still air until all is silence again.

‘Fuck,’ Josh says. Fliss knows he’s aiming for angry, but he just sounds shaken.

‘Don’t worry about it.’ She takes the gun from his hand and holsters it again. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’

Fliss steps away from him, gazing into the sky to the west. She can still just about make out the drone, a dark spot on the horizon. In the crate it carries, there is flour or potatoes or lentils, maybe even some spices or sugar. Enough to feed the crew for a month, with plenty left over for trade. It’s out of the gun’s range now, but she can still see it, drifting lazily along in the pitiless blue of the sky. Fliss almost wishes that it had shot back, and that she and the crew had been forced to flee in a hail of bullets. In fact, it’s very rare that they lose someone to attacks from the delivery drones. Most of them just fly right by – too high to reach, or gone too fast to catch. Mostly, the corps ignore them. Somehow, this makes it worse.

She’s about to turn away, to go and retrieve her rucksack for the trek back to camp, when several things happen at once. There’s a muted pop behind her, and something flies past in her peripheral vision, almost too quick to see. An instant later, the distant drone drops from the sky like a stone.

‘Uh, Fliss?’ There’s a note of fear in Sonia’s tone.

Fliss freezes in place rather than spinning around to see what the matter is. The pop was quiet – if she’d been talking, she might have missed it – but it has set her heart hammering. She knows what a gun sounds like.

‘Good shot,’ a man says. His voice is a hard drawl.

The hairs on the back of Fliss’s neck rise. There aren’t any settlements in this part of the wasteland; the only other people likely to be out here are rival crews. Crews don’t tangle with one another often – the wasteland is large, and there are enough things trying to kill its inhabitants without them turning on each other – but hostile takeovers are not unheard of. If that’s what’s happening here, if another crew like the Grins or the Red Flags has come to swallow them up, then the others might yet survive, but there’s no hope for her at all.

‘You can come down,’ the voice adds. ‘We’re not going to shoot.’

Well. That’s unexpected. Fliss turns slowly to see who has got the drop on her. Two figures, a man and a woman, are standing in the middle of the potholed street. They’re wearing sleek, black body armour and close-fitting helmets that obscure their faces. They’re both armed – the man with a pistol, and the woman with an enormous thing that looks a bit like a grenade launcher, which she carries mounted on her shoulder. The man has his gun trained on Gabriel, Sonia and Ben, who are still sitting where Fliss left them, exposed on the flat roof. Fliss shoots Sonia a warning look. Stay still. The strangers have the upper hand, here. Run, and they’re likely dead.

Josh has darted behind the chimney stack. ‘We’re armed,’ he calls, acting the tough guy. ‘So, you’d better back off, or—’

‘Shut up, Josh,’ Fliss says. Her voice is calm, almost inflectionless.

These two aren’t from a rival crew; she can see that at a glance. They’re corporate: her scavenged handgun won’t even begin to cut it. With a jerk of her head, she orders everyone down to the ground. The others slip off the flat roof, while Fliss scales the wall beside the chimney breast. She has to put her back to the strangers while she climbs down, which makes the space between her shoulder blades feel tight and itchy. If they wanted to shoot her, though, they could do it just as easily to her face. As soon as she reaches the ground, she turns back to them, showing her hands.

‘We’ll leave,’ she calls. ‘We want no quarrel with you.’

‘Smart girl.’ The woman is speaking now. There’s some kind of distorter in her helmet that makes her voice sound thick and robotic. ‘But you’ve got nothing to fear from us. We just want to talk.’

Which is an odd opening gambit from someone so heavily armed. Fliss’s eyes must betray something of her thoughts because the woman laughs, the sound a low gargle, and unships the grenade launcher from her shoulder. ‘This? I didn’t bring it to threaten you. I thought I made that clear when I shot down your drone.’

Fliss boggles. She’d assumed when she saw the two that the shot must have come from the pistol. The grenade launcher is massive, and it just downed a drone that was over a mile away. To hit something from that distance, with that force, and to make as little noise as a snap of the fingers? It’s impossible.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ Fliss asks.

‘We’ve been following your crew’s activity for some time, and we want to go into business,’ the man replies. ‘We have weapons and resources, and you have a talent for shooting down drones. We’d like to make use of it.’

‘Here,’ the woman says. ‘A gesture of good faith.’ And without further preamble, she offers the launcher to Fliss, holding it out to her with both arms, like it’s a child.

Fliss’s mind whirls. This feels like a trap. No one has ever given the crew something for free, least of all a corp. In the wasteland, you scavenge what you can get and steal what you can’t. She thinks, again, of her mother, of what she would say if she could see Fliss with these two corporate goons.

You can’t win against the corps, Felicity, and you can’t bargain with them. They aren’t human. All you can do is run, as far and as fast as you can.

It’s advice that Fliss has disregarded, time and again. She has stolen from the corporations to feather her nest and fill her belly, and she’s always managed to come out all right. Working with them, though … That’s new. It feels risky. She looks to the rest of the crew. Sonia, Ben and Gabriel look back, waiting on her decision. Josh only has eyes for the grenade launcher; Fliss isn’t sure whether he’s staring at it with fear or lust.

She thinks about it for a long, slow minute. You can’t trust a corp. But it’s not like the crew are in a position to be turning down offers of help, whatever their source. She steps forward and takes the launcher from the woman’s arms. The woman’s hand brushes against Fliss’s own as she does so. It feels human enough.

‘I’m listening,’ Fliss says.

‘I want everyone to bring their A game tonight,’ Tanta’s team leader says. ‘This is an important assignment, so keep your minds on the job.’

He’s looking at Tanta when he says it. Reflexively, she adjusts her uniform, straightening her lapels and tugging the hem of her shirt down to cover the body armour beneath it. She’s not used to dressing in formal wear; the collar of her white shirt feels like it’s cutting off her air supply, and the tailored black trousers impede her freedom of movement. But it’s important she look the part.

There’s a soft chime in her mind as a notification comes through, and she touches a finger to her temple, summoning her Array. The AR display glimmers before her eyes, bright in the dim interior of the van. T minus two minutes. On the seats beside her, her colleagues shift uncomfortably in their ties and waistcoats. Their team leader, Senior Guardian Porter, is sitting facing Tanta. His waistcoat is too tight for him, and his red face gleams with sweat. Evidently the formal wear doesn’t agree with him, either.

‘Now, I know some of you are a little new to this,’ he continues. There’s a collective creaking as the rest of the guardians turn in their seats to look at Tanta. Porter is being his idea of subtle, but she is the only new person to have joined this team for years.

‘I want to reassure those people that it’s normal to be nervous,’ Porter says. ‘This may all seem daunting at first, but if you keep your head down and follow my lead, you’ll be fine. Got it?’

There’s no one else he could be addressing, so Tanta forces a nod, eyes on the floor. Her cheeks are burning. She’s been working in Porter’s unit for two months – ever since Douglas Kenway demoted her from the InterCorporate Relations Division to the community guardians – but she still gets a pep talk every time she goes out on any assignment more challenging than gate duty. She’s sure Porter means well; he probably has no idea how to speak to a teenager and has assumed that because Tanta is young, she must need babying. Most of her colleagues in the unit are in their fifties.

‘Good,’ Porter says. He looks like he’s going to continue with his lecture, but the vehicle slows to a stop. They’ve arrived. The van’s double doors swing open and the team climb out into the cold night air. They emerge outside the southern face of the Needle and file in through its staff entrance. The slender pyramid with its jagged spire is InTech’s corporate headquarters, and during the day it plays host to thousands of office workers who are occupied with everything from high-level trade meetings to maintaining the corporation’s main server room. Tonight, however, it is playing host to activities of a different kind.

It’s Foundation Day, the anniversary of InTech’s incorpor­ation, and this evening the Needle has been transformed into the venue for the biggest party south of the riverbed. The skyscraper glows like a beacon, warm and inviting. In the restaurant and event hall near its apex, servers are busy pouring champagne into crystal flutes and arranging platters of canapés.

At the other extreme of the building, in a dingy security room on basement level one, Tanta and her colleagues cluster around Senior Guardian Porter and await their orders.

‘I want you all to set your ’scape security apps to record,’ Porter begins. ‘I’ll be down here in the command centre, monitoring the footage as it comes in. I’m sending you your individual assignments via MindChat now. Most of you will be on the external doors, checking ’scape idents and conducting bag searches.’

There’s a collective groan as everyone receives their instructions. No one likes being on door duty, especially in this weather.

‘Can’t we check IDs from inside?’ asks Wright, one of Tanta’s colleagues. ‘It’s not like a few gate-crashers will be the end of the world.’

Porter fixes him with a glare. ‘Director Kenway himself will be at this event, and these security arrangements have his seal of approval. If any of you have a problem with them, you can take it up with him personally, got it?’

The protests subside into half-hearted muttering. One thing Tanta has learnt since joining the guardians is that she isn’t the only one who dislikes Douglas Kenway. He still runs Residents’ Affairs, the division responsible for the community guardians, alongside his new role as Interim Director of the ICRD, and he has a reputation among the rank and file for being both quick to form grudges and slow to give them up.

Porter looks them all over, nodding to himself. ‘Didn’t think so,’ he says. ‘Now, does anyone have any questions?’

Tanta coughs. ‘I haven’t received my assignment yet, Senior Guardian.’

The Senior Guardian’s glare melts into a patronising smile. ‘Ah, yes, Tanta,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a special job for you.’

Tanta hefts a platter of canapés in one hand, a tray of drinks in the other, and suppresses a sigh. Foundation Day is usually a cele­bration that she enjoys. The lights and fireworks are comforting at the dark tail-end of the year, and most CorpWards and wagers get a day off in honour of the festivities. Even during the times when she was too busy to take a full day away from her training, the general air of revelry and cheerfulness was always enough to lift Tanta’s spirits in the past.

Not this year. This year, her bad mood could sour milk. When Senior Guardian Porter had kept her behind in the command centre, she had hoped – for one brief, shining moment – that he was going to give her something interesting to do. A guest to tail, some intelligence to gather, an important message to deliver. Instead, he had told her he wanted her to be a waiter.

‘Given you’re still recovering from your injury, I think the stress of working security at such a high-profile event might be a bit much for you at the moment,’ he had said. ‘I’d like you inside the venue instead, helping the servers. Make sure none of the guests get too rowdy.’ He’d winked at her. Winked. ‘I’m sure they won’t give you any trouble.’

Tanta had only nodded in reply, not trusting herself to speak. A bit much?! Her injured hand has been out of its cast for weeks, and as for stress, she has held positions of greater responsibility than Senior Guardian Porter ever will in his life. She could tell him things about corporate duty and sacrifice that would shock him to his core, for all that she’s less than half his age. Though of course she can’t, really. Her service record is classified: more senior employees than Porter might try and fail to access it. So, he had sent her off to hand out drinks and direct drunken guests to the toilets, and Tanta had bitten her tongue and let him do it.

She’s in the event hall now, a vast, open-plan room on the penultimate floor of the Needle. Smart dinner jackets and flowing evening gowns fill the space with elegance and colour. Servers, Tanta among them, flit between the parrot dresses and penguin suits, topping up glasses and offering around food. The venue is almost the highest point in the city, topped only by the penthouse apartments of InTech’s board members, one storey above. Floor-to-ceiling windows line the entire room, offering a sweeping panoramic view. There’s a large group of guests clustered around the ones to the south, admiring the twinkling lights of InTech’s flats and skyscrapers.

No one is looking through the windows on the opposite side of the room – in fact, people are going out of their way to avoid them, giving the crowded hall a lopsided appearance. Tanta doesn’t need to be an ICRD agent to know why. The windows to the north look out over the riverbed, filled with barbed wire and gun turrets, to the city beyond – Thoughtfront’s side of the city, where no InTech employee has been welcome since the Bridge Gate closed and relations between the two corporations took a turn for the worse.

Even the guests unlucky enough to be positioned closer to the northern windows avert their eyes from the offending view, without ever speaking a word on the subject. This isn’t the time to be dwelling on the cold war between InTech and Thoughtfront; it’s a party. Tanta is the only one to find her eyes drifting towards the riverbed and its impassable bridges again and again. It’s hard to believe that less than a year ago she was on the other side of that no man’s land, infiltrating Thoughtfront’s side of the city for the sake of her corp. That was a harrowing time, but she can’t help looking back on it now with a pang of yearning. She’d rather be back behind enemy lines, with all the danger that entails, than stuck in InTech as a glorified security guard.

The indignity of her new role would be easier for Tanta to bear if InTech’s threat level were low; then, she could at least take comfort from knowing that the ICRD didn’t really need her. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case. Tanta knows more about the dangers facing her corporation than most. It was her investigation two months ago that uncovered the reason InTech and Thoughtfront are at each other’s throats in the first place: a false flag attack, carried out by Cole but orchestrated by parties unknown, designed to trick each corporation into thinking the other was moving against it. But even if she’d had nothing to do with those events, she’d still be able to read the signs that something is amiss.

Ever since the summer, the mood on the south side of the city has been tense and anxious. InTech’s Communications Division is ruthlessly efficient at coordinating media blackouts, and even the most public catastrophes of the summer – the Ward House fire and the viral attack on the sleeper factory – have been successfully passed off as tragic accidents. But not even InTech can explain away the closure of the Bridge Gate.

Tanta is too young to remember much about the original split between InTech