The only phone calls Kandi's picked up in six years are ones that pop up triple-checked and out-of-band crypto handshake verified from contacts she knows, ones from a pre-shared number pre-scheduled to the second, and ones from her idiot sister out East; so she picks up.
The weird series of switching clicks is enough to send her heartrate skyward.
"Don't hang up," Whisper rasps.
Whisper took some kind of throat injury at some point, and the handle — well. Partial laryngectomy'll do that. Whisper handles the bandwidth-and-bits-flavoured bullshit; she's showed for team drinks a couple of times, but falls into the body langage of an ears-flattened terrified cat if she doesn't have eyeline on a door every single second. Not a fun time.
"This said it was my sister," Kandi says, in the deeply reproachful way of someone who's used to lying fuckery from corporations, or spammers, or the oppo, but thinks this was a fucking low ploy to get a teammate to pick up the phone.
"She's talking to your voicemail. Waited four days for her to call, to bump it. Don't hang up."
Kandi heaves a sigh and reaches for her hipdeck. "Lemme negotiate up to a crypto call," she says.
"Don't," Whisper says. "Don't touch anything. I'll lose the diversion."
When the tech turns down secure end-to-end, things have got weird. Kandi swings her legs off the bed that's the only place in her rathole one-room to sit, and jams her feet straight into her boots, hoping the reglued left sole stays put another day. "What," she says flatly.
"I'm hacked into the soft PBX of a roach motel on Sixth," Whisper says. "Don't try to call Eigen or Sammy; if they're not already blackwiped, it'll get one or both of you done hard."
"The fuck," Kandi says, holding down the inset wrist button combination to reboot her spinal armature and quad-limb package into the firmware selector. A chunky text-mode menu, upstretched from some bizarre legacy output aspect ratio, blinks into her vision; she toggles down to the mojibake-laden gibberish title of the bootleg combat firmware, and waits for her elbows to spasm through the startup sequence.
"I don't know, Kandi," Whisper says. "But I know it's time to bug out, and you're the only one I can reach any way. Run 'til you can't, then regroup and do it again."
"Who'd we waspnest?"
"I don't know." Whisper hisses through her teeth in a familiar not-good way. "I need to get off the line before they clock me."
Kandi swallows. "Keep your ass in one piece," she says.
"Yeah. You too," Whisper says, and the line clunks and crackles repeatedly, then cuts abruptly to Brenda rattling on, stoned, about her HOA; not even noticing Kandi hasn't said a fucking word so far.
"Ain't that something," Kandi says, when Brenda pauses for breath, so that if the cops ever ask, Brenda will remember they had a whole conversation where Kandi was totally attentive and sympathetic to her problems. She tucks the phone in the crook of her neck, untapes the riot shotgun from the underside of the bed, and thumbs shells into it.
"Mhm, sure, sure," as she checks over her boot knives, the cheap composite nine-mil in its shoulder holster, the shock baton.
"Well, fucks-a-daisy," as she swings her leg over the hybike and checks the tank pressure on the hydrogen turbine.
It'd be a real dipshit move to create a target-rich environment by swinging over Sixth and making sure someone who can fire a gun without locking up tharn-style has Whisper's back.
But Whisper didn't say not to.