Welcome to
The Cavern

Username:
Password:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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Username: om3ga
Password: 2e302#iL

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Welcome, om3ga!

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liangshan_marsh (02:43:12): hey!
liangshan_marsh (02:43:17): didn't think u were coming
om3ga (02:43:39): took a while to get the firewalls set up right. jaloux came knocking again. how is it?
liangshan_marsh (02:43:47): u too then? bastards lurking everywhere
liangshan_marsh (02:43:53): cracked the third firewall
liangshan_marsh (02:43:59): could use u

Lan Fan tapped her thumbnail against her teeth. She hadn't washed her hair in three days. It felt stringy and damp against the back of her neck as she leaned back, and turned the high-power fan by her feet towards the core of her CPU. Her air conditioning had gone out over a week ago, and with all the extra mods on her server, Lan Fan wasn't about to take any chances. Even though she had all of her programs backed up and stored on terabyte drives that she'd stowed in P.O. boxes around the city, there was too much left on her main machine for her to risk it. She grabbed an elastic and tied her hair up at the back of her head, ignoring the tickle of her split ends against the top of her spine. She needed to get her hair cut and redyed. The blue streak by her face was almost completely green, and it needed rebleaching.

om3ga (02:50:23): where?

She waited. Marsh was never all that good at responding on time—she had a feeling he forgot, in the midst of coding, that people might be waiting on answers—but for once he was back within a minute.

liangshan_marsh (02:51:11): working on the king

Lan Fan sucked in air through her teeth, and then set her IP cycler to running before joining the digital battlefield.

It had been Marsh's idea to hit Bradley Industries. A weapons manufacturer, he'd said, and a major provider for the army. King Bradley, toast of the Centralis bureaucracy. Think about all the things we can pick up from him. IronChild had been all for it, his teeth-rotting perfect grammar a cacophony against her screen. It had just been the three of them that night, and as always, they were so in sync it made her hurt. BI was their new target. Lan Fan had sent a PM to snipersight just to see if she wanted to join, but she'd never received a response. It had worried her, until she'd heard from IronChild that snipersight had been hit by Pater three days ago and didn't have the account left to answer. Something had congealed in Lan Fan's gut like old sausage at the thought. snipersight was one of the best The Cavern had to offer; if Pater could shut down snipersight, she didn't want to think what else the bastard could do to others.

Bradley Industries was one of Centralis' biggest companies. About half her building had factory jobs with it. The other half was part of its legal department. Lan Fan sucked her teeth again and then drew up two of her extra firewall programs before opening can_of_worms. That was Marsh's name for it, anyway. She'd coded the worm so it would swallow firewalls and repurpose them within its own skin, a virus that constantly rebuilt itself with the flesh of the body it consumed in order to hide from antimalware programs. Marsh was almost through cracking the fourth firewall; she threw some lines of code at him and they were through. She put her foot on the small fan by her feet and rocked it back and forth in triumph. The fifth firewall was almost ridiculous compared to the others, thinner, the code barely worth the name, and they were through in seconds. Marsh hadn't needed her help after all.

Lan Fan sat back in her chair and deployed her Eater program, one that would go through and extract all Bradley Industry documents in this intranet and torrent them to her own computer in ZIP files. Her processor meant it would only take a few minutes, but since the BI techies had probably figured out their walls had been breached, she had less than that. She sent out another program, the one she'd named herself—flashbomb—and set it off somewhere near the financial files. She fancied she could see the IT nerds descend, like crows on something shiny. Her pulse fluttered in her neck. Her computer chimed. She had all the documents.

She was about to close out of Bradley Industries when the computer chimed again, an anxious trill, and her first firewall collapsed.

"Crap," she said aloud, and then again. "Crap. Crap!"

She had good firewalls. Nobody in The Cavern had been able to break through her firewalls. Pater was slamming through them like a charging bull through tissue paper. She closed out of Bradley Industries, then out of The Cavern, fumbling against the keys. Her palms were all sweaty. She couldn't breathe. "Crap!" she shouted, and as Pater crushed her last firewall she bent down and yanked her extension cord free of the wall. The buzz of her computer went out with a low whine. The fan died.

Lan Fan stared at the black screen, trembling all over, and then wiped the sweat from her eyes.

The chatroom of The Cavern had been something that she'd stumbled onto accidentally when she was sixteen and bored. It had been right after the death of her grandfather. There had been nights—many, many nights—when she hadn't been able to sleep. Her arm had hurt too badly; she'd had too many nightmares; her new bedroom had smelled too much like paint and dried blood. She'd booted up her dinky laptop and started cracking. Easy stuff, then. Her high school intranet. Grades. Her psychiatrist's email, and then her hard drive. She'd stopped seeing Dr. Chen the day she'd turned eighteen, but she still had access to all of the files. Lan Fan is having difficulty accepting and processing the death of her grandfather. Shows minor signs of depression. ("Minor signs of depression" had gone to "moderate depression" had gone to "delusions of grandeur" had become "bipolar disorder," and now Lan Fan had a small pharmacy of half-empty bottles of pills on her desk and a water bottle that was almost perpetually full of soda.)

IronChild had sent her a message from a cycling IP in the week after she'd cracked her school district's shoddy financial records and posted them to the local news blog. Apparently he'd been watching her, though why, she had no idea. It wasn't as though she'd been a particularly benevolent cracker. Before she'd exposed the embezzlement scandal, she'd shut down a few porn websites and sent viruses to cyberbullies, but not much more than that. (Her favorite bully!virus had been the one that had set a GIF file of a baboon slapping its ass on repeat on the monitor while it steadily ate away at all the files on the computer. She still used that one sometimes. Just on government officials instead.) IronChild had disagreed. You don't like bullies, he'd messaged her, after tracking down one of her IM handles at the time, reaper553. Neither do we.

Bullies had a different definition where The Cavern was concerned. snipersight had a government position; she was best suited to spotting corrupt institutions. Marsh was upper class and hobnobbed with rich businessmen; he'd started scuttling their websites before he turned twelve. IronChild and MetKid were a bit more mysterious than that; they never talked about their past or their positions, but they always came up with the best intel. Lan Fan had picked the handle om3ga because it reminded her of her grandfather, dead in a car accident in the Proctors District, and she'd jumped in with both feet. There were a few other people who cycled in and out of The Cavern—heatcol came in sometimes, and so did WhiskerTeeth01. meatgrinder was a one-in-a-million chance, but the one time they'd done work for The Cavern, they'd slipped in and out of the government mainframe in minutes, and had never been detected. Lan Fan had harbored a professional crush on meatgrinder ever since. Mostly it was just the four of them—Marsh, IronChild, snipersight, and om3ga—and until three months ago, they'd never had any problems further than one or two little Trojans.

Pater was another story. IronChild thought it was a person; snipersight thought it was a program. Marsh reserved judgment aside from keep the hell away from it. Lan Fan herself had no clue. Regardless of what it exactly was, it was tremendous. It came out of the 'net like a monster, seizing and consuming whole gigs, whole terabytes of data, and as soon as it appeared it vanished again. Every time, a dozen more handles disappeared in its wake. WhiskerTeeth01 had blinked out without a word in the first week it had been lurking. heatcol had vanished too, but snipersight had told them that was intentional; not Pater's fault. And then Pater had hit snipersight. She'd heard chatter on other sights that Pater was after hacktivists, that it was a government program deliberately disarming all avenues of protest within Centralis' firewalls. Others scoffed and said it was just another hacker making an ass of themselves. No one claimed ownership of it, though, and no one denied that once Pater grabbed hold of someone's coattails, they never managed to get away.

Lan Fan tossed back two sleeping pills and swallowed some of her soda before crawling into her unmade bed. Her pillowcase smelled like sweat. Laundry, she thought, and typed a note into her phone. Laundry, grocery run, and then a revamp of om3ga. That handle was dead. She'd have to build a new one, even on The Cavern. Maybe if they were lucky, her cyclical IP addresses had helped, and she'd be able to release all the Bradley Industries information before too much time passed.

She dreamed of the car crash. Her grandfather in the front of the taxi cab. Lan Fan in the back. The oncoming semi. The blood. Broken glass. Screaming. The twist to her arm. Oil and fire. Burns. Her hair gone. The hospital. Gunshots.

She rolled over, throwing her burned arm over the edge of the mattress, and fell deeper into sleep.

Sleeping pills always made her hit unconsciousness like a freight train. Her mouth was sticky and her eyelashes crusted shut when Lan Fan finally struggled back to reality. Light staggered through the crack in her curtains, and her room was sweltering. Sweat ran down her face in tiny rivers. She had just rocked to her feet and rubbed her hands over her face when she heard the knock at her door.

"Hold on," she said, and she put on a bra and socks before stumbling down the hall. There was another knock. "Goddammit, I'm coming."

She opened the door.

"Miss Zhang?" Lan Fan nodded, slowly. The man was wearing a suit, and sunglasses. Every hair on her body was prickling. She had to slam the door, she thought, staring at him—he was too big and burly not to be some sort of military goon, too prim and proper not to be government. She had to slam the door. Her fingers clenched hard around the knob as he pulled an ID from his pocket and showed it to her. "My name is Alex Louis Armstrong. I'm with the CIC. May I come in?"

Lan Fan licked her lips. Panic dropped into her gut like an atomic bomb. Her whole brain was screaming. CIC CIC holy damn it's CIC they must have seen something last night must have— "You have a warrant?"

He was digging into his coat pocket again to find it when she slammed her front door shut and locked all three padlocks. She didn't wait to hear him call her name again. Lan Fan bolted for her bedroom, slamming and locking that door too, before she seized her backpack off the floor. Underwear, pills, laptop, ID. No time for anything else. She pulled on her asura hoodie as outside her bedroom, she heard something hit her front door like a battering ram. She gave her computer one last glance—no helping it—and then slid open her French doors. No one was in the back parking lot, though she could hear sirens in the distance. She was on the sixth floor—they wouldn't expect her to be escaping this way. Lan Fan swung her legs over the railing of the balcony and scooted to the drainpipe, wrapping her hands tight around it, sliding down a few feet at a time. Rust crusted her fingers. She felt something slice her burned palm. Usually she wore parkour gloves for this, but those were in her backpack, and there was no time.

She heard her bedroom door crash open when she was only three storeys down, and she swore under her breath. Lan Fan pressed herself close against the wall, and hoped against hope that Armstrong, whoever he was, didn't have the brains to look down. She waited until she heard a soft curse and the slam of a French door before she scrambled down the remaining few storeys, dropping the last ten feet. Her ankles screamed as she hit the ground. She ducked through the hole in the chainlink—she was only just small enough to make it—and pulled her hood up over her head, charging at a fast walk towards Main Street, towards people, towards freedom.

Pater, she thought, and she hissed between her teeth.

Lan Fan walked faster.

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Welcome to The Cavern!

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Dum inter homines sumus, colamus humanitatem.

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Please enter a username, password, and the key phrase you have been issued.

Serva me, servabo te.

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Username: renegade_zeta
Password: screw223everything#4

Key phrase: transit umbra lux permanet

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Key phrase accepted!

Welcome, renegade_zeta!

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The dude next to her smelled like bad cologne and too much coffee, and he was pretty clearly watching porn. She only hoped he didn't start jerking himself off. Lan Fan drummed her fingers in a nervous rhythm as she waited for the chatroom name list to crop up on the right hand side of the screen, and hoped that no one was looking at her terminal. Nobody ever did, in a cybercafé, but she'd been cracking for too long not to have an unhealthy level of paranoia, and considering the CIC had been at her front door today, her paranoia was goddamn justified.

It had taken her three hours to walk to the only cybercafé in Centralis that she had any modicum of trust for, Fotset's Comps, and the only shoes she'd been able to get a hold of in her wild flight were a size too small. Her toes were pinched, her bloody hand had a gash in it the length of her middle finger, and in her rush she'd grabbed her crappy backpack, not her nice one. She'd have to be careful her laptop didn't just fall out onto the sidewalk. Lan Fan made a mental note to buy duct tape and then realized that a drug store would mean surveillance cameras would mean CIC. Maybe she could go into a hardware store. Or a mall. Or something.

She thought she was going to puke.

No one was online in The Cavern. Even MetKid, who could almost always be relied upon to be online every moment of the day, was marked as offline. She licked her lips, and then opened a private message to Marsh, IronChild, and MetKid.

renegade_zeta (16:32:12): it's om3ga. pater hit me. centralis information coalition came to apartment. probably all over news. officer's name alex louis armstrong. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONTACT ON THIS HANDLE. public terminal, one-off. need safe place. please respond asap.

She chewed her cuticle, and then added a phone number—she'd bought a disposable cell phone a week ago, the only thing she could afford phone-wise, a really bad one that was charging at her feet—and hit send. She logged out and left Fotset without looking back.

Were they following her? She wasn't sure. She kept her hood up—thankfully, the asura hoodie was light enough that people weren't giving her too many looks for wearing a sweater in July—but sooner or later someone would catch her face on a monitor. CIC surveillance was legend. She was honestly surprised she'd managed to fly under the radar for three whole hours already. Unless she wasn't, and they were following her. Lan Fan turned at the nearest corner, mounting the steps up into a train station. She had a metro pass, but she left it in her wallet; she purchased a ticket to some random station in East District, and boarded, passing through three compartments until she finally found a seat near a group of teenage boys. If she kept her hair up and her jacket zipped, she could pass as one of them. One of them, with a trio of studs in his right ear, gave her jacket an appraising look before turning back to chat with his friends. Lan Fan stuck her earbuds in her ears—no music, just a block against the world—before she pulled her laptop free of her backpack.

She'd been very careful not to do any of her cracking on her laptop. The computer she'd had to abandon in her apartment had been her baby; she'd been moding it since she bought it, and it had been top of the line then, a sleek Automail with password protection on every file. Some of them had been location locked. If they took her computer out of her apartment, it was set to automatically delete her most sensitive files. At least they wouldn't be able to find all her psychiatric information from her, but if they dug deep enough into her past, they'd probably find Dr. Chen and all her prescripts in no time.

In comparison, her laptop was dinky and useless, three years old and barely working, but at least she could program on it. She bit her thumbnail and kept her laptop on airplane mode, opening up one of her new firewall drafts and reading through the code. Without her old computer, she couldn't possibly find the hole that Pater had ripped apart, but coding soothed her. More importantly, she was pretty sure that going through her firewalls would be the only thing that could keep her from throwing up all over her shoes.

Pater had broken through her firewalls and into her main computer, and the next day the CIC was knocking on her door? It couldn't have been a coincidence. Had the same thing happened to snipersight? Is that why she hadn't been in The Cavern in days? What about WhiskerTeeth01, had he been taken by the CIC? Her stomach churned. She'd heard stories from people who were imprisoned by the CIC; kept in cells that were too small to even stretch in; interrogated for hours; denied food, water, sleep, light. Ever since the Army had taken control of Amestria, Centralis had turned into a chaos of rifles and mass arrests. Her hands were shaking as she adjusted a line of code. People weren't even outright arrested anymore; they just disappeared, and most times they never came back.

She couldn't go to any of the other Cavern Children; if they caught her, then she'd get IronChild, MetKid, or Marsh in trouble. She could only hope that The Cavern firewalls were still good enough for Pater or the CIC not to have hacked her message yet. Her best bet was to get out of the country somehow, where the CIC couldn't get its hands on her anymore. But where could she go? The borders were too tight for her to make a run for it, even if she tried to wade through snow, and she didn't have the money to pay for a forged passport. She didn't have any friends or relatives she could crash with, and even if she did, she wouldn't have risked it. She chewed on her cuticle until it began to bleed, and then wiped the blood on her torn jeans. Next to her, one of the teenagers laughed loudly, and when he whipped his head back hair stung at her face. Lan Fan flinched and refused to meet his eyes. Even if she had been able to pay for a passport, she wouldn't have dared do it. All the contacts she had were digital; none of them would dare stick their necks out that far for her. If she was lucky, she had enough money from all of her freelance work to live in hiding for a while, especially if she withdrew it all from her accounts and broke up her cards; that is, if they hadn't already frozen her accounts. Didn't they have the right to do that, if she was a fugitive?

Her phone buzzed. Lan Fan jumped again, and the teenager sitting next to her scooted as far away as he could without ramming into the old lady on his other side. "Tweaker," he hissed under his breath, and Lan Fan flipped him off before digging her disposable cell phone out of her pocket. It was a blocked number.

Forsan miseros meliora sequentur. Kanama Station, East Gate. Get rid of your phone, it can be tracked. Meet you under the Marcoh ad.

Kanama Station was on a different line. Lan Fan left at the next stop, took the phone apart, and tossed it in three pieces into three different trash cans before paying for another ticket in cash and heading east. She took the SIM card with her and broke it into three pieces under her combat boot before flushing them down the toilet.

She'd never been this far down the East Line before, and Kanama had never been on her list of places to visit. Centralis would never admit to having slums, but she couldn't think of anything else to call this place. Even the train station had tarps set up for the homeless. The sign for Dr. Marcoh's Emergency Clinic (No Insurance? No Charge!) was just beyond the turnstile, and she waited across from it, her back against the wall and her hood lowered, fiddling with her music player and pretending to look normal. Even with her torn, ratty backpack and dirty jeans, she stood out here in that she actually had semi-clean clothing, no matter that she'd bought it all for less than five dollars from a charity store. Most of them were Ishvali, and she thought they were watching her. Until her grandfather had died, she'd never seen an Ishvali person before. Their red eyes still unsettled her, even if she no longer believed the government propaganda about them. It had been an Ishvali who'd helped her run from foster care, after all.

It was nearly six pm now. Her sleeping meds had kept her out until nearly noon, and then she'd been running and on trains for hours after that. She finally just kicked her shoes off, giving them to the next slum-person walking by—he took them with a glare and scuttled faster to get away from her. She stood in dirty, torn socks on dirty, torn linoleum, and bounced on the balls of her feet. No one was standing under the Marcoh sign.

She'd been there for ten minutes and was ready to bolt when someone finally came to a stop under the word Insurance. Male. Young. Maybe younger than her by a year or two. Ponytail under a black bandana. His clothes were torn and dirty; his skin was clean underneath. A disguise, maybe. He was wearing heavy boots and didn't seem to be carrying anything. He glanced around, tugged at the knot on his bandana, and then turned to set his back against the sign, crossing his arms over his chest. He was wearing tattered fingerless gloves, and there was a long scar along the back of his right arm, like a cut from a knife. Lan Fan watched him for a minute or two. He didn't look like a Kanama slum-boy, but from some of the waves and nods he was getting, he definitely knew people down here. Was this really who she was supposed to meet?

She licked her lips. Then she padded across the passage, leaning next to him, about three feet away. He didn't look at her. If he wasn't someone from The Cavern, then he'd assume she was getting out of the setting sunlight. If he was, then he'd try something. After a long breath, he said, in a low voice, "Ubi concordia, ibi victoria."

Her heart clenched. "Timendi causa est nescire," she said. Her public school Xerxian had been many, many years ago, and she could barely remember how to pronounce it. This person, whoever he was, had lovely Xerxian, all plummy and academic, like he was going to university. She hated him a little for it. He cocked his head at her and grinned, his smile crooked. His teeth were straight and clean. There was no way he was part of the slums.

"Hey, Omega," he said, and clapped her on the shoulder like they were old, old friends. "Let's get you out of here, shall we?"

The boy was Marsh. He was nineteen. Lan Fan, all of twenty-three, felt very old when he told her. She'd been expecting one of the others, IronChild maybe, or MetKid, but Marsh—"Ling," he told her, when they'd forged out into the Kanama Slums and turned towards the west again—had been in the midst of dismantling The Cavern on IronChild's orders when she'd dropped her notice. He'd been the only one who'd been free to collect her. "Plus, I'm the only one that has enough room," he added, as Lan Fan pulled her hood further over her eyes and tried to keep up with him. Her feet were blistered from her now-gone shoes, and Marsh—Ling—walked as if he was plunging into battle. "My parents have been abroad for months, and our apartment's big enough for twenty. I can smuggle you in easy. And even the CIC will have trouble getting into the Imperial Wing."

Her hand was throbbing under her gloves. Blood was crusting on her wrist. She needed to peel the glove away and wash the rust out of her cut, but she wasn't about to do that until she knew she'd be safe. She hid it inside her jacket pocket, and hoisted her backpack higher up on her shoulder. "No," she said, and Marsh blinked at her. "I'm not getting you in trouble. Not with the CIC."

"You need somewhere to stay," he said, too reasonably. "I have room, and they don't know who I am. You disconnected from The Cavern before Pater could get in, and with your cycling IP they couldn't track your exact location. The info we collected from Bradley's all over the net now, by the way. I didn't get as much as you did, but there's enough for them to be scrambling."

She wasn't sure how this was supposed to be reassuring. "You're a kid," she snapped, her voice very hoarse. She couldn't remember speaking aloud in days before Pater had hacked her system last night. "You're nineteen. I'm not getting you stuck in this. If they get me, fine, they caught me clear, but you're—you're a kid. I'm not doing that to you."

He stopped in the middle of the street. The crosswalk light flickered to red. Lan Fan seized him by the wrist and yanked him back onto the sidewalk before a passing car could turn him into paste. It was only once the crosswalk had blinked white again that he spoke. "I'm not a kid, Omega," he said, as people jostled around them. "I know what I'm doing. I've known what I was doing for years." His eyes ghosted down to her feet, and then back up to her face. "You're my friend, anyway. And friends don't let friends go on the run barefoot."

She gaped. He tapped the bottom of her chin, smooth as anything, and she snapped her mouth closed again with a click of teeth. Then he grabbed her hand, lacing their fingers together, and pulled her onto the crosswalk. "They're looking for one person," he said, when she went to pull away. "A woman on her own, single. Not a couple. Don't look behind you." He glanced at her with a quirk to his lips. "This isn't my first rodeo, Omega. Gimme some credit, will you?"

Lan Fan went to bite her thumbnail, and found her good hand trapped. She bit her tongue instead.

They walked for forty minutes to the next train station. Marsh revealed a metro pass for her that had a name that didn't belong to her—Mei Chang—but when she quizzed him about it, he only said that the actual owner wouldn't mind. She bought a new pair of shoes at the in-station mall, and then boarded the North Line to Dublith, where they caught a cab. Lan Fan kept her face turned towards the window. Dublith was one of the richer districts in Centralis, hours away from where she'd lived, in South Horace, or from Kanama in the east. Maybe it would through the CIC off her tracks a little.

She could only hope.

Lan Fan glanced at Marsh out of the corner of her eye, and then slowly took off her left glove. The scab lifted away in one great blaze of pain, and she hissed as it began to bleed again. Rust was smeared over her wrist and across her palm. She couldn't remember if she'd ever had a tetanus shot. Ling glanced over at her hand, and his eyebrows lifted, but he said nothing. As the taxi made a hairpin turn at a four-way stop, he pulled his kerchief off and handed it to her without a word. Lan Fan studied him, but he just turned his face back to the window.

She wrapped her hand in silence, and stuck her glove into her back pocket.

She'd never been in this part of town before. Marsh paid the taxi driver an exorbitant fee that he didn't even blink at, ignoring the sniff of condescension at the sight of his clothes and Lan Fan's hair, and then bundled her out of the car. They stuck out like smudges on white marble, Lan Fan in her tatty clothes, Ling in his workman's disguise. He tucked her arm through his without flinching, cast a one-fingered salute at one of the nearest doormen, and marched them down an alley. Lan Fan struggled to keep up. It was only once he'd come around to the back of one of the larger buildings that Ling pressed his thumb to a fingerprint scanner on a door marked Private and it flashed green, sliding open to reveal an elevator. He hit a button marked Penthouse, and it flashed green again. DNA, she thought, and her stomach churned. Marsh had mentioned once or twice that his parents were well off, but DNA scanners in private elevators? She felt all churny inside. If she didn't get to a toilet soon, she really was going to vomit.

Ling bounced on the balls of his feet, and then turned to look at her as the elevator doors slid open again. "Hey," he said, and when she looked up at him, he knocked her burned shoulder with his. She bit her tongue, but said nothing. "You never said your name."

Lan Fan bit her thumbnail. "Omega's fine."

"I told you my name," he said, his stupid grin widening. "Is it really all that secret?"

She bit down harder on her thumbnail, and when it cracked under her teeth, she scraped it off with another fingernail. Her cuticle was still bleeding a little. "It's my name," she said, a little harsher than she'd meant to. "I picked it. It's mine."

He hummed under his breath, and nodded. "Okay," he said. "Omega." He clasped her elbow and drew her forward into a dark entryway. Judging by the way her soles were slipping against the floor, it was either made of polished wood or very glossy stone. Lan Fan tightened her hold on her backpack. "Kitchen's through there," Marsh said, gesturing randomly towards the east wall. "Take whatever. You're staying in one of the guest bedrooms. Make it as dirty as possible; it'll piss the Atomic Mom off, and that's my goal in life."

Lan Fan's throat tightened. "I thought you said she was away."

"Oh, she is. She'll probably be away for months. But this way I can say I had someone come over and wreck her furniture."

In spite of herself, her lips twitched. She bowed her head to hide it as Ling hit a lightswitch, revealing a gorgeous painting of some kind of landscape on the wall. It looked like a snowcapped mountain.

"There'll be clothes in the guest room by the time you're done showering." He gave her a considering look. "We're about the same size. You can borrow some of mine until you get your own. You have money?"

"Some." She cleared her throat. "I don't want to try and check my accounts. They've probably shut them all down by now."

He nodded, as though this was obvious. "We'll share for the time being. Maybe after a few days you can go out with Mei and get some new things, if wearing someone else's clothes bothers you. Mei's my sister," he added, and a whole new stone plunged into her gut at the thought of her using Marsh's sister's train card. Now she's in danger too. She pressed a fist tight into her stomach and pretended not to feel guilty. Marsh didn't notice. "There's a first aid kit under the bathroom sink," he added, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. She realized, now that he'd given her his kerchief, that he had piercings in his ears. Studs and cuffs. The stone in his earlobe looked like a diamond. Her fingers twitched a little. "If you want help with your hand, tell me. I'll be down the hall."

Lan Fan nodded. Marsh didn't seem to have anything else to say. She had just turned on her heel to go find the shower when he cleared his throat, and said, "I'm glad you're all right, Omega."

She glanced over her shoulder at him, pulling her hood off her head. She couldn't quite think what to say in response. Finally, she just nodded.

By the time she'd found the bathroom, he'd vanished into his room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

A/N:

I have so many WIPs that I have no idea when I'll be able to update this, but since I REALLY LIKE IT, it'll probably be soonish. Plus the world just needs more LingFan.

Basically this whole AU came out of me reading Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson, and my obsession with the Glitch Mob, Daft Punk, Blue Stahli, Fox Stevenson, and Gemini. Thanks a lot, Ivali.

I'm not much of a computer tech, but I'm describing things as best as I can manage with the knowledge I have. If anything is glaringly, obviously wrong, please let me know and I can fix it.

Obviously, I've changed Amestris to Amestria, Central City to Centralis, and Ishvalan to Ishvali; these things are all mostly the same. Since it's a modern AU, technology has leaped forward. All of the 'net handles will be explained and identified as the story goes on. Feel free to guess who they are if you like. All the Latin/Xerxian phrases will be translated next chapter.