Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

[vii]

“Hello, Jacob,” Natalie said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.

“I don’t like this, you know.”

“Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”

He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.

“Your mother and sister want to visit.”

She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt-hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.

“It’s not like I could stop them.”

He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult—” She suppressed a snort. “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”

She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”

“What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of deprogramming looks like?”

“I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”

Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini—especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.

After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was … hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.

They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants.

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