"Sugar! Sugar! Sugar!"
"You can say shit Mel, we're not six."
Mel is doing that thing where her eyes are fixed on the middle distance, open but not really seeing. I know that she's reading a ticker tape of messages that flies across her eyeline, a kind of Weaver news feed tailored for Spiders. Intelligence for agents on the frontline.
We are sitting in a car with tinted windows opposite a hyper-corpo plaza adorned with hyper-corpo art, where the Republic of London's sole remaining media corporation has its palace.
The building shoots heavenward, an arch piece of power architecture, gleaming amongst the filth of old London. And in the plaza outside, a semi-permanent camp of protestors and migrants, people with grievances trying to grab the attention of camera crews. Mel told us they sometimes even try to storm the entrance.
Hardcore corporate security teams patrol with every kind of weapon imaginable, lethal, non-lethal, visible and invisible.
"The backups are gone." Says Mel.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"The safe house where I stashed the backup got made last night, everything in it got cleared out."
"And you only made one back up?"
"Jesus there has not been time, while you were at school we were under constant attack. I can't just upload the thing to a half dozen cloud servers, got to wrap it in nine layers of cryptography first. Access the web through a dozen proxies. It is hot data. Bots all over be crawling for it."
"So, it's OK we have the tape, we go in. It's still OK right."
"Yeah, it's fine but if we get jumped, arrested or the contact turns out to be a traitor, then we lose everything."
"What do you say Ursula?"
"If they got the backup when they busted that safe house last night, then they already know what's coming, if we don't act now, we lose our chance." I say.
Out the corner of my eye, something moves real fast. I turn to see someone throwing something heavy at one of the mercs. Trash can. He fires back with a heavy-duty Taser. You can see smoke coming off this old guy. Things are escalating.
"Bollocks, I can't leave you lot here with that going on, the riot squad will be here in a minute. This could go west, I've seen arguments over spilled beer in this city go to full scale civil unrest in minutes, cars torched."
"We will come in with you. Pretend it's a school trip. Bring your daughters to work day." Suggests Ty.
"Some kind of blended family this." She laughs.
"We're all screwed anyway." Vash adds, sagely.
"Jesus why did I swear to Amanda bloody Loveless to follow you, an idiotic child into the eye of every storm your whims and fancies take you. I'm supposed to be the adult in the room." Mel directs this squarely at me.
But she takes us anyway. Wading through the throng of bodies in the plaza with ease, a touch here a shove there, manipulating the bodies to form a slip stream in which we follow hand in hand like baby ducklings following mother.
At the gates she has an argument with a corpSec monster, giant roid-monkey in glistening body armour covered in corpo logos like a race car.
But Mel has the magic words, all thanks to her Weaver connections, and of all the people clamouring to get in, it's us that end up going through the airlock doors, and trudging through the marble floored entry hall through something pretty darn similar to airport security.
The feel of the glass on the finger print reader is unreal, not grease, as if it were fresh out of the box. Must be coated in super smart chemicals. The flash of light in the retina scanner runs through an ombre of muted colours, in itself a little pleasure, so exquisitely designed.
But we have demons inside of us, rearranging things for us, making sure our data is never really found, somehow soothing the systems that try to identify us into feeling that we are very lovely indeed and most useful to professional journalists. Don't mind me, I'm just a walking colony of autonomous softwarez.
So, we almost don't panic until we see the foyer of the third floor flooded with the white and red uniforms of Witch Hunters. They're everywhere.
And I'm trying to make my face disappear, because I'm one of the pictures in their morning briefings, and I don't quite have the powers to rearrange my face at will.
Ty has taught me how to change my physicality, to walk like someone else. So, I do, and he has taught me how to be invisible in plain sight, so I try my best to follow his expert lead. Nobody looks at plain, bookish girls, especially if they look like they're on the wrong side of the class divide.
But it's working, because here the hunters do not seem to feel like they are on duty. They're not on high alert, and we don't need to know why, just thank the goddess and her sisters.
And finally, we're shaking hands with a journalist, a weaver connection. Looks maybe half Chinese. Liu she calls herself. She even hugs Mel, a proper bear hug.
"The Weavers are everywhere." She winks as she says it.
And she sits to watch the tape with us. Drawing all the blinds with a wave of her hand. Playing a drone sound that interferes with listening bots. Stops speech to text programs from working properly. And no doubt, she employs a whole host of other measures we don't see to hide what we're up to.
"This is strong. Best evidence I've seen yet. We all knew it was happening but we never had a confession before." Educated London accent. Corp class.
Liu takes a sip of some aromatic coffee.
"I think you're bloody mad all four of you coming here today of all days, we have Marketta coming in for a live show." She whispers.
"I feel like maybe you could have found this out in advance Mel." I say.
"I doubt it. It was only decided about five minutes ago. We have live studios on the higher floors, we do the 24-hour news reel up there. Marketta seems to be able to command the airwaves whenever she feels like it. That's in spite of our supposedly independent verification team."
"So, can you get this vid out to the public?"
"I'll try. We still have a bit of editorial freedom, but the political sitch in here is insane."
"How so?" Asks Vash
"You don't know? The Corp that owns the Witch Hunt just bought the Channel."
"But this is the only news channel in London. Only news channel on the Island still certified against fakery." Replies Mel.
"Yes, and most people don't watch it anyway. It's a briefing service for Corp execs and Republic politicos really. You won't get the hoi poloi tuning in."
My heart sinks.
"But they are the decision makers after all. Don't forget, the Republic is still a Liberal City. This might just blow up. But then again, they might decide to drop the item at the last minute. Happens all the time."
There is an awkward silence. Liu eventually fills it.
"They like to make it look like there is a debate going on around the hunt, even though they own it.
The point is the hunt keeps the underclass happy. It's politically expedient to have them focus on witches instead of how little the Republic is actually doing to lift them out of squalor."
Mel takes her player back; she has not even trusted Liu enough to let her slot the SD card in her own terminal.
It's your call Ursula. We can leave his here or take it with us.
I look Liu in the eye as I hand her the tiny slice of flash memory. I'm all in.
"Our lives are in your hands." Is all I can think to say.
Later back at the safe house we sit and watch the news for hours projected onto the wall. In the small hours of the morning, a segment comes on titled, 'Is the witch hunt a fake?'
A few talking heads. Someone from the University of London talking about the witch crazes from history. Liu comes on, and she starts talking about secret sources and video evidence of high-level corruption, falsifying evidence, coercion of witnesses etcetera, etcetera.
And she plays the video, and it's kind of cut funny, but it's clear enough. Anna and Kath recording dates and times they have had meetings with the Witch Hunt, what they were offered, when and how they got paid. They got lots of detail recorded. Insurance policy.
And then Liu repeats the question at the end, what if the Witch Hunt itself is corrupt? And the production team tries to get a statement from some powerful people who refuse to speak. There's a video of Liu following Marketta down a street, Marketta smiles, brushes her off muttering something about deep fakes.
And it's all over. Not sure whether to laugh or cry. Mel cracks open a beer. She's satisfied at least. Ty and Vash whoop and jump up onto the ten-thousand-dollar designer sofa and start hitting each other with the cushions.
I'm smiling, I realise after a while. And then we're all hugging and shrieking.
###THIS NOVEL IS IN OPEN BETA###
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