Little Brother

look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska.
    I'd call Barbara, and I'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so that the inevitable CCTV wouldn't get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it.
    I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the payphones there. I made it to the trolley-car stop when I spotted the cover of the week's Bay Guardian , stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at me. "Go ahead and read the cover, it's free — it'll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though."
    The headline was set in the biggest type I'd seen since 9/11:
    INSIDE GITMO-BY-THE-BAY
    Beneath it, in slightly smaller type:
    "How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our doorstep.
    "By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian"
    The newspaper seller shook his head. "Can you believe that?" he said. "Right here in San Francisco. Man, the government sucks ."
    Theoretically, the Guardian was free, but this guy appeared to have cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn't bother polishing the fingerprints off of it this time.
    "We're told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be resting in the city's harbor.
    "But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the bombing..."
    I sat down on a bench — the same bench, I noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we'd rested Darryl after escaping from the BART station — and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe a year old, but I looked so much younger in them, like I was 10 or 11. I'd done a lot of growing up in the past couple months.
    The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about me . Zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few miles from their parents' doorsteps.
    I dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. What was the chance that Barbara's phone wasn't tapped? There was no way I was going to be able to call her now, not directly. I needed some intermediary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. So much for plans.
    What I really, really needed was the Xnet.
    How the hell was I going to get online? My phone's wifinder was blinking like crazy — there was wireless all around me, but I didn't have an Xbox and a TV and a ParanoidXbox DVD to boot from. WiFi, WiFi everywhere...
    That's when I spotted them. Two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at the top of the stairs down into the BART.
    What caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. Each had a hand in his pocket, and whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered. They couldn't have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. Being down in that neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you don't make eye contact, don't look around at all if you can help it.
    I sidled up to one. He seemed really young, but he couldn't have been any younger than me.
    "Hey," I said. "Hey, can you guys come over here for a second?"
    He pretended not to hear me. He looked right through me, the way you would a homeless person.
    "Come on," I said. "I don't have a lot of time." I grabbed his shoulder and hissed in his ear. "The cops are after me. I'm from Xnet."
    He looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving toward us. "I'm serious," I said. "Just hear me out."
    His friend came over. He was taller, and beefy —