Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

“Agreed,” Paul says. He’s doing the finger-ticking thing again. “It was reckless, it was irresponsible, and furthermore—”

“Oh come on .” I look between them. “This is not the first time we’ve been in trouble, and it definitely isn’t the first time we’ve almost had our cover blown. What about… what about that job at the hotel?”

“What hotel?” Annie says.

Paul frowns. “You mean Bell Gardens? Wasn’t that a casino?”

“Whatever. Yes, Bell Gardens. That cop wanted to arrest Carlos, and—”

“Yo, don’t bring me into this,” Carlos says.

“—we had to make a break for it. Imagine what would have happened if he really had managed to shoot our tyres out.”

Paul removes his glasses, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Got that right,” Annie says. “See, what I think? I think you wanted to do it.”

Silence falls on the room. Everyone is looking at me now. A hot flush creeps up from the collar of my uniform shirt.

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“I think you wanted to use your power. Your ability. Whatever the fuck it is. I think you were looking for an excuse. Tanner got you opening doors. Unlocking safes. I think you got bored, and you’re acting out. You ever pull that shit again on a job, you ever deviate from the plan even a little bit, I will throw you out a fucking window mysel—”

“Sounds like things went smoothly, then,” says a voice from the door.

Regina McCormick glides into the room, the motor in her wheelchair making an almost inaudible whine. The chair is a clunky black bulldozer with battery packs hanging off it and tyres that could take it off-road. She sits in it like it’s a throne, her good arm resting lightly on the control stick.

Reggie is in her late forties, with very thin crow’s feet radiating out from piercing brown eyes. As always, she’s dressed in thick grey sweats. She must have been tying up loose ends from the job, or she’d have been in the room with us already.

Reggie wasn’t the first black woman to fly an Apache helicopter, but she was one of them. She’s never told us much about her past, but I do know that after the crash in Afghanistan that left her an incomplete quadriplegic, she became very close to Tanner. Spent years retraining as a programmer too. When Tanner put me to work for her, Reggie was who she got to run point.

Behind her, just visible through the door to the back room, is what she calls her Rig. It’s a giant multiscreen system that she controls with a combination of eye movement, voice commands and a pair of giant trackballs. When she’s plugged in, she looks even smaller than usual, two huge water-cooled towers on either side of her chair, the screens towering above. But she is one monster of a hacker.

All the same, I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on Reggie. She doesn’t speak a lot about her life before China Shop, which I guess is understandable. There’s plenty online about her service record: her citations, the operations she’s taken part in, a few old newspaper stories from when she was a track star at her high school in New Orleans. It all ends about ten years ago with a simple story on a local news site headed: PARALYSED PILOT RETURNS HOME. After that? Zip.

She’s never told me much about her past, although God knows I’ve asked. She just smiles, then tries to talk about something else. The one time I pushed, she stopped me with a curt “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I don’t know this for sure, but on the one occasion where everybody at China Shop actually hung out together, it came up. A job we were supposed to run got postponed, and we ended up sitting around in the backyard waiting to hear if it was happening or not. Reggie was inside, working her Rig, and the topic of how she got the job here came up.

Paul swore blind that he’d heard that it wasn’t Reggie who owed Tanner for something, but the other way round. He wouldn’t say where he got the info, so none of us knew how seriously to take him. Then again, Paul isn’t a known bullshit artist, and I’m not sure he actually has a sense of humour. Even if it wasn’t the whole truth, there was a grain of it there.

As far as I can tell, she’s the only one of us who hasn’t been manipulated or coerced into this job. The rest of us? We work for Tanner or we’re fucked.

Maybe that’s a little harsh. We’re not slaves. We’re technically government workers, which I think is hilarious—salaried employees of the nameless agency Tanner runs. We get health benefits and dental, for fuck’s sake, run through the convenient cover of China Shop Movers. We can go anywhere we want throughout the greater Los Angeles area. But if Tanner decided one day that we weren’t worth protecting, that would be it.

“Carlos,” Reggie says. She grew up in Louisiana and has an accent thick enough to spread on toast. Her voice is slightly breathy and strained, thanks to a weakened diaphragm. “Why is every single cupboard in my kitchen open? Didn’t your mother raise you right?”

“Looking for the coffee. Teagan finished it.”

Reggie glances at me. “You should drink chamomile, dear. It’s much better for you. Speaking of which, Carlos, would you kindly brew me a cup? It’s been a long night.”

Carlos nods, earning a smile from Reggie. “Annie,” she says, manoeuvring her chair around the couch. “You seem upset.”

“Got that right. Teagan nearly blew the whole thing to shit.”

“I did not. That was—”

Reggie lifts a finger, silencing her. “That’s why we have these debriefings,” she says, looking in my direction as if she can sense that I wanted to head straight home. “So we can deal with problems to make sure they don’t reoccur.”

As Carlos makes her herbal tea—which of course there’s plenty of because nobody but Reggie actually drinks the stuff—she gets the story out of first Annie, then me. By the time we’re done, the tea is steaming by her left hand, and the room feels like it’s holding its breath.

A year ago this kind of post-mortem would have scared the shit out of me. Reggie was Tanner’s woman in LA, which meant that she was, in effect, Tanner herself. I didn’t know if she was on our side or not. But over the past year or so she’s put herself between us and Tanner, backing us up on the rare occasions when a job really has gone bad, like it did in Bell Gardens.

The debriefings we have tend to be pretty loose. Reggie and Paul might have a military background, but there are no acronyms here—no infil and exfil zones, no sitreps. Just us, Paul’s whiteboard and chamomile tea.

“Teagan,” she says when we’ve finished, turning to me with a faint engine whirr. “That wasn’t very intelligent. You put both your lives in danger, and you risked revealing your abilities. We’ve talked about this.”

I nod, reluctantly.

“The construction elevator would have been bad enough. It wasn’t a half-bad idea, as ideas go, but you should have cleared it with Annie.”

“We didn’t have time. There were—”

Reggie silences me with a look. “I expect better from you in the future. More importantly, I expect you to think before you act, which is something else we’ve talked about before. And you, Annie. Part of your role is to solve problems quickly and efficiently. When you’re on a job, Teagan is under your command. If she does something you do not agree with, that constitutes a problem, and you should have taken immediate control.”

Annie’s voice is brittle. “I didn’t head for the 50th floor. Or throw us out a window.”

“True.” Reggie inclines her head. “But you did make the decision to leave the server room and go up to Chase’s fibre hub. There were other options on the table for you too.”