Chaos on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

“You want to open it up and check, feel free,” he says, edging away slightly.

The handles don’t want to turn, and I almost give up, but I eventually wrench one open and reveal a shelf full of mouse poop and too small an interior space for anyone to be crouching in.

After checking the basement thoroughly, we come upstairs. His mother meets us at the top of the stairs with a burst of some language I don’t know.

“I’m giving her a tour,” he says defensively. “Also, we did the light bulb audit. There are eleven fixtures that don’t work.”

More of the other language. He rolls his eyes and says something back. Whatever it is seems to mollify her, and we troop up to the second floor.

“Your friends definitely aren’t hiding on the first floor,” Bijan says. “That’s the main place my parents are working right now.”

“What language was that?” I ask.

“Farsi. My grandparents are from Iran. Mom’s actually from California, but she wanted to make sure I spoke the language, so she speaks it to me a lot. It comes in handy if she wants to say something like ‘Have you offered your friend a snack, what’s wrong with you?’ in front of said friend. Did you want a snack? I said you weren’t hungry because I figured you’d rather finish searching now, eat later.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s stick with the tour.”

The second floor is bedrooms and bathrooms and closets. Bijan and his parents are using two of the rooms as actual bedrooms, and the rest are in various stages of disarray. We open every single closet and find clothes hangers, peeling paint, and—on the back of a shelf in one of the closets—a fur.

“Can’t believe my parents missed this,” Bijan says, and picks it up a little bit gingerly. I thought it was a scarf, but once it’s in the light, I see it’s like some sort of extra-long weasel with the actual head still attached. “Help, help, I’m being oppressed!” he says in a squeaky voice, holding the head like it’s a puppet.

“Repressed,” I correct him without thinking.

“You’re even more of a dork than I am,” he says, sticking the fur back on the shelf. “Let’s try the top floor.”

The next floor up has four small bedrooms and then doors that open into two enormous unheated attics that are—I’m not expecting this—full of junk.

“What’s in these?” I ask, looking around at the boxes.

“Could be anything,” Bijan says. “But lest I get your hopes up, the odds that it’s anything at all valuable are extremely low. We looked in a few right after closing. Two were boxes of invoices and taxes and stuff from the 1980s. One was full of old newspapers, also from the 1980s.”

“There’s probably something from the 1980s that would be interesting to find,” I say.

“If there’s a box up here that’s, like, vintage 1980s comic books or something, that’ll be one of the ones that got chewed to pieces by the squirrels.”

It is frigid in here. Warmer than outside, but still extremely cold. Just in case, I raise my voice a little and say, “Nell, Glenys, if you’re here, it’s me, Steph, and I need to find you. Please come out?”

I hear a banging, but it’s coming from outside the house.

“That’s the gutter,” Bijan says. “It’s coming off that corner, and it bangs against the house in the wind.”

No wonder everyone thinks this house is haunted.

The other attic is a little less cold. Tucked behind one of the boxes, I see a splash of red and move in closer to investigate.

There’s a sort of nest of blankets, and the red is a stripe on one of those very rough wool blankets. It’s in disarray. Someone was here, though. I feel the blankets, and there’s a faint lingering warmth. Someone was here recently.

Bijan is staring at the blankets with a look that’s triumphant with a side of creeped out. “Someone was here,” he says. “Was it your friends? Can you tell?”

I pick up the blanket, smell it, and then shake it out. In the bright sunlight that makes it in even through the grime on the windows, I see an extraordinarily long blond hair caught on the edge of the blanket.

“They were here,” I say. But they clearly aren’t anymore.

36•  Nell  •

“Go, go, go,” my phone urges me as I drag Glenys by the hand down the block.

“Where are we going?” Glenys asks me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“A new safe house,” my phone answers her. “But hurry! Hurry! Where you were is no longer safe!”

We’re in a neighborhood filled with enormous mansions like the one we’ve been lurking in, and I think maybe we’ll sneak in through another unlocked back door, but the app tells me to keep going. “How much longer?” I ask.

“Not far now!”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s the answer you’re getting!”

“Who are these people?” Glenys asks me, struggling against the wind. “The ones in the phone, the ones who told us to leave?”

“It’s an app,” I say. “Like the Catacombs, but secular.”

I look at my phone. A map has popped up, and I try to suss out how much farther it’s going to have us walk. Too far in this weather. We need somewhere to go inside and warm up, and I look around for ideas. It’s daytime, and stuff is opening up, but the historical James J. Hill House tour we’re passing right now is probably not a good option. We keep going.

Up ahead is a huge and extremely fancy church, and looking at the map, I’m pretty sure it’s the Catholic cathedral. Which means it’s probably open and probably free. “In here,” I say to Glenys. “We can sit in here for a few minutes and warm up.”

Glenys mumbles a protest—the Remnant says the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon—but I would sit in a fully operational actual whorehouse right now if the door was open and the inside was heated. Glenys doesn’t resist as I