Watch Dogs Legion: Daybreak Legacy (Watch Dogs: Legion) by Stewart Hotston

Author:Stewart Hotston [Hotston, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: science fiction, technological thriller, media tie-in
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

33

Barbara wanted to know how Maxine was. No one would tell her. If only someone would, she could calm her heart down, could stop thinking of being unsafe, of… being outside the flat.

The room had no reflective surfaces, but it didn’t stop Barbara looking inward at herself. How’d you let it get so bad? she asked. When did leaving the flat become so dangerous?

She knew when. She knew how. Bit by bit, choice by choice. Her home in Southall was safe. Insulated. She lived online. People were too annoying to see in person. Keeping them on the other side of the screen gave her a kind of freedom she’d always yearned for but had never experienced.

Except she knew that reasoning was nonsense. Justifications she’d worked up to hide from how frightened she’d become of everything. Of a thousand risks she’d somehow stopped assessing without assuming the worst-case scenario for them all.

Well, here you are, she thought, shivering on the edge of full-blown panic. Time to get a grip.

She chuckled out loud. Her inner enemy self wouldn’t be defeated by grandiose words. Yet, it was enough for her to know she needed to change if she was going to be free of the fear which gripped her in its claws.

You need to leave London, she thought. Break away, bust out, burn up until it’s all gone.

Just not yet. Not until Halley was dealt with. The thug might be sympathetic, but they’d crossed a line. She was going to finish the fight they’d started.

The security services had insisted she change into grey jogging pants and hoodie. Her shoes were taken away and she was given paper slippers. At some point someone had tried to perform a body search, but she’d objected and the two officers, both women, had retreated when she asked them what they expected to find in an old woman’s cavities. She was surprised they cared enough to back off. In her experience, the thin blue line loved to humiliate women when it got the chance.

She’d been kept on her own for a couple of hours. Barbara had expected her Optik to work – it wasn’t like Victorian police stations had been built with a mind to managing electronic comms – but wherever they were, the people in charge were serious, because she had no connection to the outside world.

Eventually, one of the women who’d tried to search her returned and led Barbara out, down a corridor, and into an interview room. A camera was set up, and behind it sat two officers, a man and a woman.

“Where’s my duty solicitor?” asked Barbara straight away.

The man reeled off clauses from an Act she didn’t know, the long and the short of it was that she was on her own for the time being. They correctly identified her as Barbara Arscott, but beyond that, their biography was way off, thanks to Halley.

“You got this off the back of a cereal packet?” she asked them when they wanted her to confirm they had it right.

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