So Yesterday

"Hunter, do you ever feel like there's some problem with the glue these days? Like maybe if anyone figured out what to throw and who to throw it at, everything would fall apart pretty quickly?"

"All the time."

"Me too." We were crossing a worn patch of Hudson Street, and Jen swung a shoe at the top of a cobblestone. It was solidly submerged in sunbaked tar and didn't budge. "So, that's the anti-client's mission, isn't it? Ungluing things? Maybe they've figured out what to throw."

"Maybe." I shaded my eyes with one hand and squinted at the next street sign, then at the numbers. Movable Hype was halfway down the block, in an old and towering iron-frame building. "But more likely they're just throwing everything they can."

"Closed on Saturday," I said, stating what should have been obvious even before we'd bothered to walk over here. No one had answered our buzz. This was a place of business, and no matter how crazy Futura Garamond's typesetting aesthetic might be, he didn't work on Saturdays in summer.

"Good," said Jen, reaching for the buzzers. This motion gave me a nervous feeling in the bottom of my stomach.

Through the speaker: "Yeah?"

In Jen's fake gruff voice: "Delivery."

Muttered by me: "Not this again."

From the buzzer: buzz.

Movable Hype was on the top floor, and the stairs wound upward around the old-style elevator, locked up for the weekend at the bottom of its ten-story cage. Jen soon took a half-floor lead—I could see her red laces flashing through the ironwork surrounding the elevator shaft. She took the stairs like someone who lived in a walk-up. (My parents' building was over the critical six-floor limit, so I was used to riding.)

"Wait up!"

She didn't.

When I arrived on the tenth floor, Jen had already found the door to Movable Hype at the end of one long hall. "Locked."

"Gee, that's a surprise. What are we going to do, break it down?"

"Too strong. But check this out."

She led me around a corner to where a set of windows overlooked a central air shaft. In the old days, rents in New York were based on the number of windows a place had. So landlords invented buildings with hollow centers, creating that famous NYC feature: a window that looked out onto someone else's window about three feet away. Mandy always complained about how Muffin, her cockroach-eating cat, would jump across the gap to other tenants' apartments on hot, open-window days, presumably to see if their cockroaches were any tastier or less cat-shy.

Jen pointed through one of the windows. Across the corner of the air shaft was another window, perpendicular to the one we peered through. I could see a few desks and darkened computers.

"Movable Hype," she said, and unlocked the window.

"Jen…"

The window slid up, and she hooked a leg out over the hundred-foot drop.

"Jen!"

She reached toward me. "Hold my hand."

"No way!"

"Would you rather I do this alone?"

"Uh, no." I realized this wasn't an idle threat: she was ready to lean across and try the other window whether I helped or not. I felt a burst of | sympathy for Emily. If this was Jen at seventeen, what had she been like I at ten?

"Look at it this way. It's only a couple of feet across. If it wasn't for the drop, you wouldn't think twice about it."

"Yes, if it wasn't for the certain-death issue, I wouldn't think twice about it."

She looked down. "Pretty certain, yeah. Which is why you're going to hold my hand." She reached out again, impatiently waving me over. I sighed and grabbed her wrist with both hands.

"Ow. Too tight."

"Live with it."

Jen just rolled her eyes, then leaned her weight away from me and out over the shaft. Her other hand reached the Movable Hype window easily. Her wrist twisted in my hands as she tugged the window sash upward a few inches; then it stuck.

"Hang on." She shifted her weight on the sill, leaning farther out. I leaned back as if Jen was a rope in a tug-of-war, propping my feet against the wall just below her. She managed to pull the opposite window open another foot.

"Okay, you can let go now."

"Why?"

"So I can go over, silly."

I thought about refusing, just standing there holding her wrist until my hands wore out, keeping her on the sane side of the air shaft. But she would just outwait me. And cutting off the circulation in one of her hands wasn't much of an answer to the certain-death issue.

"Okay, letting go." I straightened, releasing Jen gradually, and she shook out her wrist.

"Ow. But thanks."

"Just be careful."

She smiled again and swung the other leg out. "Duh."

Keeping a white-knuckled grip on the near window with one hand, she slowly slid her weight from the sill, planting one black trainer in the corner of the air shaft. Her other hand reached out and grasped the other sill, then she pulled herself across.

In the seconds when her weight was equidistant between the windows, I felt my stomach flip inside out and then twist once around. I wanted to grab her hand again but knew that my sweat-slick palms were the last thing she needed contact with at this exact moment. Then she was across, both hands on the far sill, her feet scrabbling on the outside wall to push her up through the open window.

The red laces disappeared inside with a muffled crash.

"Jen?"

I leaned out, not looking down at the vertiginous drop.

Her face appeared in the window, all grins.

"Wow. That was cool!"

I took a deep breath, adrenaline still pounding through me. Now that Jen was safely over the air shaft, I realized that I was itching to get across myself. Fu

I remembered my resourcefulness in the meteorite room, my mighty escape through the valley of the Poo-Sham flashes. I had no bangs and I was ready for danger.

I hooked one leg out. The air shaft seemed to tug at me, calling me to cross it.

"Uh, Hunter…"

"No, I want to get in there too."

"Of course, but—"

"I can make it!"

She nodded. "I'm sure, but I could just unlock the door, you know."

I froze, my weight poised evenly atop the sill, one hand clutching the near window in a grip of death, the other reaching out over oblivion

"Yeah, I guess you could do that."

I pulled myself back in and padded down the hall to the slightly less challenging entrance of Movable Hype. The metal-jacketed door rattled once for every keyhole, then opened.

"You're not going to believe this," Jen said.

Chapter 26

THE WALLS WERE COVERED WITH THEM. PAGES AND PAGES.

They weren't the usual Futura Garamond layouts. For once he had reined himself in, mimicking exactly the pseudo-hip but unthreatening style of a certain magazine for rich young trust-funders.

"Hoi Aristoi," Jen said.

"Sort of." I looked closer. The photographs in the layouts were all from the party, penguins and penguinettes looking drunken and wild-eyed, almost animal in their petty squabbles, overt jealousies, posturings for status. You could read the body language like a neon sign. The crumpled dresses and crooked bow ties were also crystal clear. As the pictures progressed, the whole machine of privilege and power became unglued before your eyes—as pathetic as a cummerbund spattered with Noble Savage. By contrast, the occasional stuffed caribou glimpsed in the background seemed intelligent and sane.

Thousands of printed photos were piled on a long workbench along the wall, the booty of five hundred cameras, an embarrassment of riches. As per Jen's theory, every photo taken on the giveaway cameras had been wirelessly captured by the anti-client.