1
On the morning of the second meteor, Cora’s 1989 Toyota Camry gave up the ghost for good. The car was a manual transmission with a stick shift its previous owner had wrapped in duct tape years ago, a time bomb the color of expired baby food that should have gone off sooner than it did. At $800, she had paid more for it than it was worth, but back then, she had been a freshman in college and desperate for a car. In the two years since, she’d grown accustomed to the ever-loudening squealing of the fan belt, but on this morning, after she put her key in the ignition and the engine turned, the squealing turned into a hostile screech. A disheartening thunk thunk thunk followed, then a snap, then an angry whirr, all before she could react. But by the time she turned off the ignition, it was clear that the car, her first and only car, was dead forever.
And she was already late for work.
As the Camry went into its final death throes, Demi, who was locking the front door on her way to work, froze mid-motion as she beheld the scene, wearing an expression of disappointment, but not surprise. Cora’s feeling of horror that this was even happening quickly hopped to embarrassment before settling onto her old standby: numbness. She got out of the car, with no choice but to leave it on the street despite it being street cleaning day, approached her mother, and asked, “Can you give me a ride to work?”
Demi looked at her like she had just lost their house in a drunken bet. “Sure.” It was the last word she said to Cora for about half an hour.
In short order, Cora was suffering the indignity of her mother driving her to work through the vehicular sludge of the 110. In any other circumstances, Demi would have told Cora she was shit out of luck, that she should have gotten the car fixed months ago, and that she could find her own damn way up to downtown LA. But it had been through PMT, the temp agency Demi worked for, that Cora had her temp job, and it had been Demi who had vouched for her. And so, here they were, crawling under the 105, Demi sacrificing her own punctuality for her negligent daughter’s.
“What happened to that $200 I loaned you?” asked Demi just after they passed Rosecrans, her anger now cooled enough that she was capable of speech. “You were supposed to replace the belt and get your hair done, and you have done neither.”
Cora resisted the urge to pull her hair behind her ears, as though that would hide her mess of a dye job. She’d bleached it blond several months ago, before she’d dropped out of college, but about six inches of her natural wet-hay hair color had grown in since.
“I had to use it on gas,” lied Cora, keeping her gaze on the passenger-side mirror. “And I had another credit card bill I needed to pay off.” The truth was she had used that money on a Neko Case concert, her third this year, but Demi didn’t need to know that.
“Sure you did,” said Demi. “After today, you take the bus.”
Cora did not retort or offer excuses. She knew it was absolutely on her that she had not fixed the car. The fan belt was just the last in a long line of events that only tightened the spiral of powerlessness that was coming to define her existence, and by this point, she was getting used to it. Trying to exert some control over her life was an exercise in futility, so why bother? A good concert was the one place she could genuinely lose herself, have an out-of-body experience and detach from the deteriorating morass that was her life. And if it meant getting bitched at by her mother and an indefinite period with no car, then oh well. That’s life.
That was when she noticed the black Town Car tailing them. It was close, like it was being dragged along on a hitch, so close she could see the faces of the two men in the front seat clearly. On the driver’s side was a younger-looking man of East Asian descent, seeming to curse whatever cosmic force had made him be awake this early. His passenger was a slender-faced white guy with black wavy hair, maybe late thirties, though it was hard to tell, as his face was obscured with a cartoonishly large pair of aviators.
“Jesus,” said Cora. “What is their problem?”
“What?” Demi looked in her rearview mirror. “Oh, Christ. Those assholes again.”
Suddenly, Cora was on alert. “What, you know them?”
“Well, I’ve seen them,” said Demi. “More than once on my way to work. They always tailgate.”
“Holy shit,” said Cora, a little shocked at Demi’s blasé attitude. Did it not occur to her that these people might be stalking her? Cora had been on guard for that sort of thing well before she dropped out of UCI.
“I’ve never seen them anywhere else, though,” said Demi. “I figure they leave for work around when I do.”
Cora turned around to study them, but they didn’t seem to notice her at all. Probably just a couple of guys who were late for work, thoughtlessly tailgating Demi’s car like it would get them there any sooner. That wasn’t so abnormal, but the fact that the car didn’t have a front plate caught her attention. Only out-of-state cars lacked a front plate, and a commuter wouldn’t be from out-of-state.
She hadn’t really been paying attention to NPR’s Morning Edition, which had been reporting something about the previous day’s wild fluctuation of the Dow Jones, but their next segment made her shoot to attention. “In the three years since it was founded,” said the newscaster, “The Broken Seal has gone from fledgling website to the forefront of the transparency movement.”
The words “The Broken Seal” sent a sharp icicle through her chest, and she momentarily forgot about the tail.
“But one month after the website’s most infamous and controversial leak gave The Broken Seal and its founder, Nils Ortega—”
Demi reflexively slapped a button to change the station, and a Fergie song piped innocuously from KIIS-FM. Cora shot her a look. “I’m sorry,” said Demi, smiling coldly. “It’s too early.”
Cora didn’t know how to respond. On the one hand, she felt like it might be a good idea to know why “The Broken Seal and its founder, Nils Ortega,” were in the news, but on the other hand, there was no subject she wanted to hear about less.
“It’s okay,” said Cora, glancing again at the Town Car behind them. “I don’t want to think about it, either.”
She turned to face forward, watching the tall buildings of downtown LA sprouting up like distant spires in the haze, and tried to put thoughts of The Broken Seal and stalkers from her mind. But the tailgaters, bored though they looked, were not letting up.
“Mom,” she said, “ever feel like we’re being spied on?”
“By who?”
“I don’t know,” said Cora. “Like … paparazzi or the government or something.”
Demi blinked hard but didn’t look at her daughter. “What, because of Nils?”
“Yeah?”
Demi snorted. “Maybe, but anyone who follows us would be on the wrong trail.”
“Well, I know that,” said Cora, unconsciously bopping along to “Fergalicious,” her movements restrained by her too-small business casual button-up shirt. She had bought it for an interview a year ago, but she had gained a size since then. “But maybe they don’t. Maybe they think we know something. And that’s why they’re, you know, spying on us.”
“I try every day not to think about it.” Demi tried to laugh, but it came out more a sigh. “If they are, I’d rather not know.”
Cora bit her lip and looked behind them again. “Really?”
“I have enough to deal with,” she said. “I feel like if I knew I was being spied on or phone tapped or followed, I wouldn’t even know how to function.”
“I guess,” said Cora, eyes still on the car behind them. She switched the station back to NPR, but the report on The Broken Seal had already come and gone. “Lu says we’re always being monitored.”
“I know she does,” said Demi coldly. “I know.”
Cora decided to drop it and tried to keep her focus on the Dodge Stratus in front of them. Living under The Broken Seal’s shadow was a source of chronic fear that had only worsened since the Ampersand Event and subsequent leak of the Fremda Memo. Like the fan belt on the verge of snapping, The Broken Seal was a time bomb that would inevitably blow up in their faces. Again, she looked into the passenger-side mirror for the Town Car but saw that it had vanished. She couldn’t shake the dread that this was the day the bomb would go off.
Once Demi had dropped her off at the Kaiser building downtown, Cora tried not to think about the Town Car, trudging through four hours of mind-numbing data entry during which, owing to company policy, she was not allowed any internet access. On her way to lunch, however, the dread only now starting to subside, she spared a glance out the window, at the roof deck of the parking garage several stories below.
There was the Town Car.
Seeing the car briefly stunned her into a stupor; she had not actually expected to see anything there. Why hadn’t she turned the station back to NPR? Why, God, why had she listened to “Fergalicious” instead of the news?
She whirled around, scanning the mostly empty cubicles, half expecting the Town Car guys around any corner to throw a bag over her head and stuff her in their trunk. She considered leaving work altogether before deciding it would reflect poorly on Demi, and she was already on Demi’s shit list. Besides, the Town Car was there, the men were not. They were likely somewhere in the building. Perhaps they were waiting for her to leave. Probably, this was nothing.
Possibly, it wasn’t.
Cora stiffly brushed past the few other people in their cubicles who had decided to work through lunch. By the time she made it to the elevator, half convinced a couple of FBI agents were waiting in ambush at the exit, she decided to go to the cafeteria on the third floor rather than find lunch anywhere half-decent. But when the elevator doors opened, a large brick of a person stood on the other side. His face lit up upon seeing her, and Cora struggled not to wince in return.
“Sabino!” It was Eli Gerrard, one of the only people at Kaiser she knew by name. Eli was not a temp but a college graduate who worked in IT. “You okay?”
“Um,” she managed. The door began to close, but Eli smashed the Door Open button, smiling like he’d done her a big favor as the door bounced back open. He fancied himself part of the hacktivist crowd, and, like most of his peers, he adored Nils Ortega.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure whether Eli was the best person she could have bumped into or the worst. She grimaced, conscious of how suspicious she looked, and moved inside the elevator. “Well…”
His eyes lit up as the doors closed behind her. “Is it something to do with The Broken Seal?”
“Maybe?” she said, now kicking herself for being in a situation where she was trapped in an elevator with this man. Even at a distance of a couple of feet, his eagerness, his overfamiliarity, felt like a violation of her personal space.
Eli was a scene kid, the type that was just a little too into Panic! at the Disco to be trusted. Ever since she’d started temping here a couple of weeks ago, Eli had been one of the first people who had taken a special interest in her, and for the worst possible reasons. At first, he saw her as an in where The Broken Seal was concerned and then, when he realized she wasn’t, he turned cold. She saw him sometimes talking to other people while staring at her. She was always waiting for him to accuse her of being a traitor to the cause, an enemy of free speech.
Hell, people like Eli were more than their share of the reason she was so paranoid. Back in July, she’d made the mistake of doing an interview for the Los Angeles Times. She’d answered their questions as diplomatically as possible—had Nils Ortega been a good father to her, her brother, and her sister? No. No, he had not. There was a reason he hadn’t been in their lives for half a decade. Oh, the outrage in the hacktivist community that she had dared insinuate that their god-king was fallible. She’d had to delete all her online profiles, both the ones with her current legal name as well as the old ones that still bore the name “Cora Ortega.”
But Eli had never been beastly to her as so many others had, at least not to her face. She figured she may as well see what he knew. After all, he actually followed this junk. “I think I’m being followed.”
His eyes twinkled. “Really? By who?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m a little freaked out.”
“Where?”
“They’re outside. Or at least their car is.”
“Is it the feds?”
“Maybe? Probably? I don’t know.”
“Oh, man, this could be huge,” he said as the door to the third floor at long, long last opened. Cora all but fell out of the elevator, and he followed. “All that shady stuff the feds have done that’s come out—up in Altadena and Pomona. You know?”
Cora stopped in front of the women’s room and restrained the urge to roll her eyes. “I’ve heard rumors.”
“People saw some stuff. Real witnesses after the Ampersand Event. But then the government fried their brains and erased their memories so they couldn’t say what they saw.”
“Yeah, I heard that one.”
“Why would that have happened if they didn’t see something they weren’t supposed to see?”
Despite deliberately trying to avoid all things Nils-related for her own sanity, she was well aware of that conspiracy theory. People like Eli thought the Ampersand Event was a spaceship or something, a UFO or a scout, or at the very least a probe. Cora, like most people, believed it was a rock that fell out of the sky and landed in the hills north of Pasadena. “I don’t think that has anything to do with who’s in the parking lot.”
“It might,” he said. “What makes you think they’re following you?”
Cora almost started moving toward the cafeteria, but stayed put next to the women’s room in case she needed a place to escape where he wouldn’t follow. “They were behind our car on the way here. Then, just now, I saw the car parked on the roof of the parking garage.”
“And you assume they’re here because of you?”
Another batch of people unloaded from the elevator, and Cora kept her voice down. “I don’t know, maybe? I mean, there was something on the news this morning.”
“Oh, right. That.” He watched her while she waited for him to continue, a tiny smile starting to form.
The spike of fear, the same one that always came with the mention of Nils, prodded her in the gut again. “What?”
“You don’t know?”
“Eli, The Broken Seal is at the top of my list of things that I try not to think about if I can help it,” she said. “Did he say something about me?”
He ignored her question. “I just can’t believe you don’t know. If I were you—”
“You’re not me.”
Eli took a deep breath, like he was about to bungee jump for the first time. “Dude. If my dad released the most important leak in human history, no, the most important discovery in human history—”
She snorted and started to respond, but he cut her off.
“I’d be all over it,” he said. “You’re an inch away from some of the most important stuff that’s ever happened on this planet. I would be on it. Every hour, on the hour. I’d know what’s up.”
“You are on it, Eli. And that’s why the sky gods gave you to me. So just tell me what you know or leave me alone.”
“Did you ever read it?” he asked. “The Fremda Memo?”
That caught her off guard. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with why the feds might be following you!” he said. “It has everything to do with these cover-ups!”
Copyright © 2020 by Lindsay Ellis