Page 87 of Exit Party

“Everyone else in my life calls me Kareem.”

“I already have a friend named Kareem,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment. I’d been up all night and I wished I could rest here for longer, perhaps doze off for a while in the dappled shade.

“He’s still alive?”

“He died a few hours ago.”

Fayed was quiet for a moment. “Strange life,” he said finally.

“What happened to your face?”

“Minor disagreement,” Fayed said.

“I have something for you.” I took off my jacket, and pulled a thread on an inside seam. It came apart quickly. I retrieved my Service phone, in a double layer of waterproof bags, and gave it to him.

“Your phone?”

“It used to be. I retired from Service this morning.”

“Then how do you still have this?”

“I carried a burner phone into my resignation, and then invoked the right of incineration,” I said. “I threw the burner in the furnace. I was escorted out of the building by a guard, and I made him carry my jacket so I’d be clean when I walked through the exit scanner.”

“So the scanner would’ve registered a Service phone on the guard,” he said, “and not necessarily raised any alarm bells.” He was removing the phone gingerly from the plastic. “What’s on here?”

“Everything.” I opened it for him—the screen unlocked with a satisfying click—and gave it back to him. “All the secrets I know. I’ll stay here while you transfer the data,” I said. “In case it locks again.”

“That phone’s still connected? Someone going to come here now that you’ve switched it on?”

“No,” I said. “I made offline copies, then disabled all the network connections. I downloaded everything I could. Just make as many copies of the files as you can. Distribute them widely.”

“Thank you.” He took it, and disappeared into his little house.

I settled into the lawn chair, and let my thoughts drift. Back in the office I’d recently left, my computer was transmitting State secrets to the open internet. I’d written the code with a built-in timer and given myself an hour’s head start before the secrets began pouring out of my office, but surely well over an hour had passed by now. I was drowsy. It was peaceful here. There’d been another fire three years ago, the shantytown burning along with the hills. But the scent of ash was gone from the air now. The shantytown had been rebuilt. I expected to be arrested soon, but prison felt like a distant thought, like something that was going to happen to someone else.

Fayed returned with the phone. “I copied it,” he said. “I’m transmitting other copies. Tell me what I should be looking for.”

“Internal decay is setting in,” I said. “The highest levels of government are corrupt beyond a point where they can continue to function. There are almost as many ghosts as citizens now. If we understood how many of the people around us were ghosts, on any given day, there would be an uprising.”

“You’ve always been such a delightful conversationalist,” he said. “Buoyant.”

“You asked,” I said.

“What can you tell me that won’t make me want to drown myself in the Pacific?”

“Service is everywhere, but Service is failing. A decade ago, I would never have been able to get that phone out of the building.”

Someone was approaching. A girl, jogging swiftly toward us, passing through areas of sunlight and shade. I watched her, and made the calculations. She couldn’t be older than fourteen or fifteen, which suggested she’d been born to ghosts. A girl with no social security number and officially no existence, raised in the burn zone. How many were like her? There were no official numbers, but one of the secrets I knew, one of many, was that there were thousands upon thousands in Los Angeles alone.

“Someone’s looking for you,” the girl said to Fayed.

“Who?”

“A woman. She’s down on Corona del Mar.”

“She got a name?”

“Marlowe,” the girl said.