Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits Read Online Free

yourselves?”
    â€œHonestly? We don’t need the money. And if we meant you harm, couldn’t we have just driven your car into an abutment earlier?”
    That made sense, she supposed. Still, she wasn’t getting into a car with any of these people. Even if she decided to make the trip to Tabula Ra$a—which on some level she knew would be incredibly stupid and reckless—she’d find her own way there.
    Will said, “Are you still there?”
    â€œProve the money offer is real.”
    â€œHold on. All right, check your account. I just sent you five hundred dollars.”
    Zoey logged into her bank account and found he wasn’t lying—she now had a total of five hundred and seventeen dollars in her savings. Zoey sucked in a breath and thought, We can get the refrigerator fixed .
    Will said, “The rest I can put into an escrow account, give me twenty minutes and I’ll set it up … if you agree to make the trip.”
    â€œI’ll think about it. But don’t bother with the car, if I go, I’ll take the train.”
    â€œMs. Ashe, I would strongly, strongly advise you not to—”
    She hung up.
    It was seven PM ; if she took the train out of Denver, she could be in Tabula Ra$a by midnight. She pulled into traffic, not realizing that a tiny camera The Hyena kept on his dash had recorded her entire conversation, or that more than 1.5 million people were watching.

 
    FOUR
    Zoey didn’t want to be paranoid, but there was something about the man in the loincloth made of charred doll heads that made her nervous.
    He was at the opposite end of the train car, standing in the aisle muttering to himself, his only other item of clothing a pair of blacked-out welder’s goggles that made him look like he had bug eyes. When he had boarded at Salt Lake City—the last stop before Tabula Ra$a—Zoey had immediately assumed he was another crazy who had come for her, but then he had just silently taken a standing spot at the other end of the car and she felt bad for prejudging him. Still, Zoey studiously avoided looking in his direction; as any mass transit commuter can tell you, the only way to counter the dark powers of the mentally ill is to avoid eye contact. She gazed out of the window at the scrub brush blurring past at 250 miles an hour. She wondered if her head would go flying off if she stuck it out the window. Her cat meowed a complaint from inside the plastic carrier on her lap.
    Zoey’s nerves were eating her alive. For the tenth time she pulled out her phone and logged into the escrow account, mostly just because she liked seeing the $49,500.00 displayed on the screen. She dropped her phone back into her purse and nervously started scraping black polish off her thumbnail with her bottom teeth. It was her first time on the high-speed rail and for about five minutes she had been awed by the speed, and then she had quickly gotten bored and started to notice how much this particular car smelled like pee. She had bought her ticket at the gate and the only open seat was this one at the very rear of the car, next to the restroom. Whoever designed the train had put the seat about three inches too close to the restroom door, so it bumped her seat every time somebody went in or out. It had happened exactly nineteen times so far, and what was worse was that each person who did it would stop and look down at her like, Whose idea was it to put this weird girl in the way?
    Someone said, “What’s your cat’s name?”
    Zoey gave a start, because for a moment she thought the male voice was the crazy homeless guy with the doll heads on his crotch. But it wasn’t; it was the stranger in the seat next to her, a fancy young man in an old-fashioned suit who had spent the entire ride constantly checking his e-mail via a pair of wired-up eyeglasses. She looked him over and got the sense that this kid had taken vacations that cost more than she