“Yeah. You could introduce me to him.”
I did it for your own good, you know. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, for the enormity of what she’d done was overwhelming her. She’d found three of his friends and treated each of them to an evening of terror and hurt, and none of them would tell her where her brother was, none of them knew. Maybe they’d been innocent all along.
“Where are you?”
“Far from you,” he said. In the background, she heard a girl crying.
“It’s going to happen, we’re going to cover the whole Market,” Kurt said. He had the latest coverage map out and it looked like he was right. “Look at this.” The overlapping rings of WiFi false-colored over the map were nearly total.
“Are those our own nodes, or just friendlies?” Alan asked, all his confusion and worry forgotten at the sight of the map.
“Those are our own,” Kurt said. “Not so many friendlies.” He tapped a key and showed a map of the city with a pitiful sprinkling of fellow travelers who’d opened up their networks and renamed them “ParasiteNet.”
“You’ll have more,” Buddy said. Kurt looked a question at Alan.
“My brother Brent,” he said. “Meet Kurt.”