Little Brother

said.
    "We going to talk or we going to win?" Van said. After me, she was hands-down the most hardcore player in our group. She took winning very, very seriously.
    We struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game — and lose everything we cared about, forever.

    The physical component of today's clue was a set of GPS coordinates — there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun Madness was played — where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal. That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi point that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range of someone's open access-point, which you could use for free.
    We'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. There we'd find another clue — last time it had been in the special of the day at Anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the Nikko hotel in the Tenderloin. The Nikko was owned by Japan Airlines, one of Harajuku Fun Madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. They'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. But it tasted really good. Or so Darryl told me. I wasn't going to eat that stuff.
    I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.
    "If it's in there, I'm not going," Darryl said.
    "You all got your wifinders?" I said.
    Darryl and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob.
    "OK, fan out and see what we see. You're looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it."
    I took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. A female voice said "oof" and I spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels.
    Instead, I found myself face to face with another kid my age. She had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. She was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little Japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it — anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop.
    She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.
    "Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam."
    "No way," I said. "You wouldn't —"
    "I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more than fair."
    I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb — one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?"
    "We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble —"
    Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off.
    Then the world changed forever.
    We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively — earthquake . My first inclination, as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling mortice could brain us.
    Earthquakes are eerily quiet — at first, anyway — but this wasn't quiet. This was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything I'd ever heard before. The sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and I wasn't the only one. Darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the