Little Brother

pretty acceptable, I think. She dressed well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her.
    "A pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yallow," she said. She sounded very confident and self-assured. Much better than I had when I'd met her mom.
    "It's Lillian, love," she said. She was taking in every detail. "Are you staying for dinner?"
    "I'd love that," she said.
    "Do you eat meat?" Mom's pretty acclimated to living in California.
    "I eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said.
    "She's a hot-sauce junkie," I said. "You could serve her old tires and she'd eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa."
    Ange socked me gently in the shoulder.
    "I was going to order Thai," Mom said. "I'll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order."
    Ange thanked her politely and Mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted any tea. I squirmed a little.
    "Thanks, Mom," I said. "We're going to go upstairs for a while."
    Mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "Of course," she said. "Your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then."
    I had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. I let Ange sort through it while I went through my clothes. I was only going as far as LA. They had stores there, all the clothing I could need. I just needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss.
    "Money!" I said.
    "Yeah," she said. "I was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at an ATM. I've got maybe five hundred saved up."
    "Really?"
    "What am I going to spend it on?" she said. "Ever since the Xnet, I haven't had to even pay any service charges."
    "I think I've got three hundred or so."
    "Well, there you go. Grab it on the way to Civic Center in the morning."
    I had a big book-bag I used when I was hauling lots of gear around town. It was less conspicuous than my camping pack. Ange went through my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites.
    Once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down.
    "We're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said.
    "Yeah, big day."
    The plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake VampMob locations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes' walk of Civic Center. We'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said VAMPMOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> that I we would spray-paint at those spots around 5AM. That would keep the DHS from locking down the Civic Center before we got there. I had the mailbot ready to send out the messages at 7AM — I'd just leave my Xbox running when I went out.
    "How long. . ." She trailed off.
    "That's what I've been wondering, too," I said. "It could be a long time, I suppose. But who knows? With Barbara's article coming out —" I'd queued an email to her for the next morning, too — "and all, maybe we'll be heroes in two weeks."
    "Maybe," she said and sighed.
    I put my arm around her. Her shoulders were shaking.
    "I'm terrified," I said. "I think that it would be crazy not to be terrified."
    "Yeah," she said. "Yeah."
    Mom called us to dinner. Dad shook Ange's hand. He looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see Barbara, but on meeting Ange, a little of the old Dad came back. She kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him Drew.
    Dinner was actually really good. The ice broke when Ange took out her hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about Scoville units. Dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. Believe it or not, Mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. Mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural.
    Before she left, Ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on Mom. "I have a spare at home," she said. I'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "You seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these."

Chapter
19

    This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world,