What Happened in Strasbourg

Chapter ten: A new job, a new report

The next afternoon I convinced my mom to bring me to see Imogen at her flat. She walked out to the car with her usual quiet reluctance but told me she was at least happy I didn't want to go back to the mall.

I wished I could be like Imogen, getting around town by myself on a bike, but I'd never had a good sense of balance. Gripping the handlebars worsened the pain and tremors in my hands, and Ginger, who was getting older, wouldn't be able to keep up with me.

. . .

The convenience store beneath the flat was already in the process of being emptied. I didn't see Imogen around so I walked up the stairs to the loft where I found her sitting at a cluttered table with her little sister, Nell. Nell's face was scrunched up as she stabbed the paper with a marker, so hard it ripped up and sprayed her fingers with blue ink.

"No, don't waste it," Imogen sighed. "We don't have a lot of good markers left!"

I noticed she was wearing a green apron that smelled like pine shavings and catnip. "I didn't know you'd started working there, already," I said. "How was it?"

"Great!" Imogen said as we walked up the stairs. "My manager's really nice and lets me listen to music while I work, and it's pretty great getting to hang out with animals all day. I mean what else could you want from a job?"

Nell held up the picture she had been drawing -- an open Acheron shipping box with a doll, a bag of candy, and some books inside it.

"What's Nell doing?" I asked.

"This shit Acheron sent," Imogen said. "They're sending it out like a census to Acheron pro members... some sort of drawing and writing project where little kids say what they like about Acheron. Roping them into the propaganda early, am I right?"

"Why were you making her do it then?"

"If you win you get a lot of coupons."

"I didn't know your parents even bought from Acheron."

"It isn't like they have a choice do they?" Imogen said. "It's either Acheron or Mir-Tek, and you can't buy from Mir-Tek around here without becoming an outcast... unless you're Russian or something..."

She reached her hand into the pocket of her apron, pulled out a dog biscuit, and gave it to Ginger as we got up and walked into her room.

"Speaking of Russia," I said. My eyes darted around to make sure there wasn't a smart speaker listening in on our conversation. "I'm on Trench now."

"You're what?"

"I bought one of those login codes from Russell."
"No you didn't.... You said--!"
"I changed my mind," I whispered. "You can see it if you like."

I took my computer from my backpack and after a few minutes was able to pull up Trench again. It felt odd, seeing a site as sketchy as that in the daytime.
"It's so... ugly!" Imogen said. "It looks like it's from the 90s and it could give you a virus at any second -- I love it so much! I just can't believe you actually did it. You've just always seemed, no offense, like the person who'd rather die than break any rules."

By this time Imogen had taken my computer from me and was scrolling up and down, getting a feel for Trench. "Trench Chat... Trench Reports... This place looks great!"

"It wasn't like Russell said, though," I replied. "He said all the stuff on there was super believable, but so far they all sound like complete hoaxes, at least the one I heard about."

"What was it about? Reptilians?"
"No, it just blamed Landry for the death of Vitaly Morozov, you know, the CEO of Mir-Tek before Evgeny Dimetriev."