Repo Virtual Corey White (chapter books to read to 5 year olds .txt) đ
- Author: Corey White
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âTheyâre lucky the kid canât,â Enda said, surprised by the edge of anger to her voice.
âWho is the deceased?â
âOsman, Khoder.â
âWho is he to you?â Li asked.
Enda didnât answer.
âThe departmentâs machine intelligence division has surveillance data that suggests Osman was involved in a âjobâ on the night of the World Cup. The same night of the apartment break-in that youâre investigating.â
âYou donât have anything on him, do you?â
âIf the kid was alive, Iâd have enough to scare him, maybe make him talk,â Li said. âHeâs dead, but I still have questions, and youâre going to answer them. Who was Osman?â
Enda clenched her teeth and exhaled loud through her nose. âKid was a hacker, and Iâd hoped he could answer some questions for me.â
âWhoâs your client?â
âI canât tell you that.â
âI know who the apartment belonged to. Is it Leeâs family, or is it someone at Zero Corporation?â
âI canât say.â
âEnda, for all I know, your client paid these four to rough Osman up. They need to be questioned.â
Enda shook her head. Sheâd already considered that angle, but it didnât make sense. Could Yeun have someone else on the job? Sure, but it would be another stack of muscles in an expensive suit like Mohamed, not four derelict youths.
âAm I free to go?â Enda asked.
Li shook his head. âYouâre free to go into a holding cell while I run this footage upstairs.â
âIt was self-defense, Li.â
âYou didnât have to enter that room.â
âLook what they did to that kid. Could you have stayed out of it?â Enda asked.
Liâs nostrils flared. âWhen the chief sees the footage, Iâll be able to start the paperwork to get you out of here. But until thenâ âŠâ He turned his hands up.
Li sealed Tiny back into its bag, peeled off his gloves, balled them up and put them back in his pocket. He stacked everything on the tablet, arranged the way it had been when he entered the room. The chair screeched over the cement floor behind him.
He paused at the door and turned back to Enda. âYou never told me where you trained.â
âWhat?â
âYou didnât hesitate to breach the room and charge someone armed with an AK-47. Iâm guessing thatâs not the sort of training you get at private eye school.â
âSchool?â Enda said. âIt was an online course.â
âPrecisely.â Li opened the door, and all the sounds of a busy police station flooded in through the gapâsuspects loudly protesting their innocence, bored police patter, the hum of a building held upright by the tension between crime and punishment. âOne day there wonât be a video recording. One day youâll find yourself in deeper shit than even you can handle. When that happens Iâll find out who you really are, Enda. When I do, I just hope I donât regret helping you.â
âYou wonât,â Enda said. Even she wasnât sure if that was a lie.
Li frowned and exited the room, leaving Enda alone with her silence.
The holding cell was a square, three meters a side. The raw concrete floor was cold beneath the thin-soled jail slippers. Enda paced the wall opposite the cellâs low cot, letting her fingertips brush the hard steel of the bars. When she hit the metal just right, a gentle gong would resound, only audible in the moments of quiet between the shrill cries and demanding shouts of the other prisoners.
Her contex were useless without her phone, but Enda was glad to be rid of the head-up display and the clock that always rested in the corner of her visionâtemporarily freed from the tyranny of time. The minutes would have passed ever more painfully had she been able to count them.
She paced, letting the conversations of the other prisoners wash over her.
âI didnât stab him. He walked into the knife.â
âIâm not a drug addict. My body runs hot, yâknow; it runs better on meth.â
âIt didnât happen. It didnât happen. I was in virt. It didnât happen. I killed her in virt, I didnât kill her in real life. It was so real, so real. So fuckinâ real, but it wasnât real, it wasnât real.â
Most of the voices spoke Englishâdisembodied unless Enda bothered to pause and pick them out from the row of cells and bodies receding along one wall. Enda knew enough Korean to get by in Seoul, but she rarely found it necessary in Songdo. She imagined the city as a twenty-first-century version of Hong Kong before it was returned to the ChineseâEastern culture, language, and traditions pushed to the sides by globalization and refugees fleeing the collapsed empires of the previous centuries.
Enda didnât miss America. She didnât even miss New York. She missed Brooklyn, but only in a rare moment of running fugue when reality fell away and she saw Songdo through the lens of memory and desire. It had happened only once: she had seen a Nigerian restaurant beside a trendy bar and a cafĂ© specializing in Australian brunch fare, and for a few short seconds she was back in Brooklyn. She was home. And then reality returned, carried on a salty breeze spiced with diesel exhaust. The simulated red brick facade across a tenement block flickered, and sheâd remembered where she was. Songdo. As much an Augmented Reality simulation as an actual cityâa fifty-fifty split between analogue and digital.
Enda flopped down onto the cot, and the hard bedsprings bit her flesh through the wafer-thin mattress.
This was why she ranâto calm her mind when it wanted to take her back through time and space, to deliver her to a country on the other side of the world, a country that she abandoned. The parents she left to die, one day, maybe soon, never knowing what happened to their daughter. The friends, the former lovers. Her expansive record collection.
She didnât regret her actions. But still, sometimes it hurt.
âWhat is your primary function?â Troy asked. He spoke quietly; in the background I could hear the
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