Spill

In a new Little Brother novella, there is no security in obscurity. But there can be redemption in mutual aid.

For Clay F. Carlson, with thanks for his generous support of the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of Attack Surface, and for suggesting the prompt for this story.

Thank you to Michael Running Wolf and Suzanne Stefanac for their generous assistance in researching this story.

MARCUS

Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else.

Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t understand it, then your security system doesn’t work.

A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to move off the cloud. “There’s no such thing as the cloud, there’s only other peoples’ computers.” If you trust Google (or Apple, or, God help you, Amazon to host your stuff, well, let’s just say I don’t think you’ve thought this one through, pal).

I Am Good at Nerd, and managing a server for my own email and file transfers and streaming media didn’t seem that hard. I’d been building PCs since I was fifteen. I even went through a phase where I built my own laptops, so why couldn’t I just build myself a monster-ass PC with stupid amounts of hard drives and RAM and find a data center somewhere that would host it?

Building the PC was fun. It had been ages since I’d last done it and everything was so cheap and tiny, and as I mashed the order button to buy a stack of terabyte solid-state drives, I actually got goose bumps, a chill at the thought that I had just spent $600 to buy six million times the capacity of my first hard drive . . . which had cost $800. Then I saw the RAM prices and I actually started laughing.

I thought about the PC like a time capsule. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to afford to stash it at any of the data centers in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, so I figured it would end up so far away that I might not see it again for a year—or ever. That’s why I bought so many drives: I could arrange them in a fail-safe array, so if a couple of them died, the rest could pick up the slack. It was also why I stopped at six drives: more drives meant more heat, and more heat meant more risk of a meltdown.

All of this was the kind of warm, creative hobby project that had been in short supply since Ange and I got married. San Francisco had blown up right after our honeymoon, a string of uprisings for racial justice and economic justice that had us spending every spare minute either in the streets or organizing to help get people out of jail or running trainings on how to use cryptography to stay safe during, before, and after protest.

I got so engrossed in building my system and thinking about how I’d configure it and what data I’d preload on it that I forgot to look for somewhere to put it until one day—okay, one midnight—I found myself at our kitchen table with my one-rack-unit-high machine humming to itself amid a tangle of Ethernet and power cords while I logged into it from my laptop and put it through its paces and realized that I had built an amazing dream machine and had no idea what to do now.

Ange—leveling up a new character in the bedroom—heard me groan and shouted in alarm. After I reassured her I wasn’t have a heart attack at thirty years old, I switched everything off and went to the bedroom to confess my foolish mistake.

She finished her side quest and logged out of the game and patted the bed beside her. I stripped down to my underwear and crawled in and snuggled up next to her. “You’re overtired,” she said. “It’s no big deal. You know a million supernerds. Someone is bound to have some extra rack space. Just sleep on it and everything will be okay in the morning.”

I have such a smart wife.

I was halfway through my first pot of coffee and scrolling socials when I realized how right Ange had been. One of Jolu’s friends—an old cofounder of his—made a bunch of money selling cryptocurrency (ugh) and had taken the opportunity to upgrade all the machines in their private cage in the Presidio, an old-school data center that had been created as a cypherpunk co-op back in the day. The photos they posted of their new setup revealed that the upgraded machines only took up half the space of the systems they’d replaced, leaving behind these fat, dusty voids in the cage.

I messaged Jolu.

> I just saw timbit’s upgrade pics in your feed. I was shopping for a cage. You think they’d sublet some space to me?

> . . . probably . . .

> That’s a lot of dot-dot-dots. Something I should know?

> Just that timbit’s more or less what you’d get if you dipped a cryptographer in cocaine. They’re a little erratic

> Ouch. That’s good to know. But they’re good at this stuff, right?

> I guess so? I mean, yeah, timbit is crazy good at coding and security. I’d just be worried that they’d forget to pay their bills and your stuff would all get repoed

> Hahahaha. OK, I know the type. But they’ve had that cage for a long time, right?

> Years. Decades, maybe.

> So I guess they can get pay at least one bill on time

There was a long pause.

> Yeah, I guess. Or you know, maybe someone set up an autopay for them

Jolu is rock-solid. Of all our little group, he’s the one that went straight, doing a start-up, failing, doing another one, getting bought out by Google, vesting, then starting a nonprofit to oversee civic open-source projects. He got married at twenty, stayed married, and bought a little house in East Palo Alto next door to his aunt’s house, where his cousins still lived, and semi-adopted his niece while raising his own son, all without ever visibly breaking a sweat. Jolu played life on the hardest setting and made it look easy.

I probably should have been a little more worried about his misgivings, but all I could think of was the amazing serendipity of this centrally located, high-availability data-center slot falling into my lap mere hours after I finished building a new server that would fit in it perfectly.

And you know, timbit—real name Timor Botezatu—was a lot of fun. Jolu’s description—“what you’d get if you dipped a cryptographer in cocaine”—was spot-on, but well, that’s not a bad thing. Timbit was hyper and smart and happy to have someone who’d share the rent on their cage, and apart from their unwillingness to use Venmo, PayPal, or any other normal human payment system, they were the best sysadmin I ever worked with. Instead, I had to drive out to this sketchy fintech start-up and hand them $1,000 in cash, which they then converted to a “stablecoin” in a cryptographic wallet.

But once that was done, I was able to meet timbit at the data center, enter the cage, plug in the server—I’d named it “stochastic”—connect it to the Ethernet, tether my laptop to my phone, and log in to it, confirming that everything was working.

From then on, I was master of my own domain, literally, logging in to marcus.stochastic.blorp to get my mail, stream my massive collection of video rarities and audio bootlegs to whatever device I was closest to, and upload files that were too big to attach to emails. I gave friends accounts on the box, starting with Ange, and Darryl even printed up business cards with with stochastic.blorp email addresses and made sure I was the first person who got one. I felt like a frontiersman, like I’d hewn my own log cabin out of the untamed wilderness. Every time my calendar reminded me to log in to the janky fintech site and send timbit another $100 for the month, I got a little warm glow of self-sufficient smugness.

Timbit was weird and flaky, but they were a consummate hacker. It never even crossed my mind to think that they’d be prone to ignoring “There is no security in obscurity.”

I found out I’d been hacked the old-fashioned way: by getting a page at 2 a.m. I’d equipped stochastic with a little outboard monitor, an introspection engine on a stand-alone Raspberry Pi that had its own independent cellular wireless connection through a pay-as-you-go SIM that only cost $5/year to keep registered. The raspi’s job was to watch the traffic coming off stochastic and warn me if it looked weird—severely atypical when compared to the traffic of the previous twenty-four hours. The raspi—I’d named it Grass—was in my high-priority override address book and when I got a message from it, my phone chimed loud and long, even if it was in do-not-disturb mode.

From a sound sleep to wide awake in one second, I lurched out of bed and grabbed for my phone, silencing it before it could wake Ange. It was Grass, alerting me to the fact that stochastic.blorp was sending out a lot of traffic.

Thing is, timbit’s cage was in a very, very good data center. He had his own 100 mbps symmetrical fiber link to the main router, which had a bundle of equally fat pipes straight into the main trunks for AT&T, Cogent, Verizon, Comcast, and Spectrum. And stochastic was a very overbuilt machine, with fast drives, fast processors, and tons of RAM.

Someone had hijacked stochastic and was using it to distribute malicious software. Specifically, ransomware. Specifically, stochastic was hitting thousands of IP addresses per minute, scanning them for known vulnerabilities, and depositing an off-the-shelf, crime-as-a-service ransomware payload on each machine it penetrated.

I had a moment of absolute terror: thoughts of being arrested, of being sued, of destroying peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Then I forced myself to unfreeze and race to the kitchen, unlock my laptop, and log in to stochastic to kill it.

I was locked out. I knew it the first time my two-factor authentication code was rejected, but I kept trying three times, just to be thorough, even as I was finding timbit’s emergency number on my speed dial and putting them on speaker.

It rang to voicemail and I redialed, then did it again. On the third attempt, they answered in a groggy voice.

“It’s Marcus,” I said.

“Why?”

“Marcus Yallow,” I said. “I sublet some of your cage space in the Presidio and I’m a friend of Jolu’s and—”

“I didn’t say ‘who,’ I said ‘why,’ as in why are you calling me at this absurd hour?”

“Something’s wrong at the cage,” I said. “My server’s been taken over and it’s performing zillions of ransomware attacks. I can’t log in to it. I have to go physically disconnect it.”

“Yeah,” they said, sounding more awake now, and pissed. “I guess you fucking do. And I guess that means I’ve got to get my ass out of bed, too, and meet you there. Twenty minutes. Fuck.” They hung up.

I felt like six kinds of idiot and the feeling only got worse when I got to the cage and met timbit, who was in a pair of sweats and an old Hackers on Planet Earth tee, their sockless feet jammed into shower slippers. They admitted me to the cage in a wordless fury, glaring at me from beneath their epic bedhead as I pulled the plug on stochastic and slid it out of its rack and slunk out of the cage.

The last I saw, timbit was hunched over a laptop they’d brought and plugged into an Ethernet cable, presumably logging into their systems to make sure everything was okay.

I got home and set stochastic down on the kitchen table, glaring at it. Whatever stupid security mistake I’d made, it had cost me my server. There was no way I’d trust any of that hardware again. I’d bring it down to some forensics lab when I could and have them put it on a bench and pull the firmware from every subcomponent, the OS, and all the logs, see if they could get to the bottom of how I got pwned. But it was after 4 a.m. now and the cats would want feeding in an hour. I crawled back into bed.

Timbit wasn’t very good at apologies. When they videoconferenced me four days later, they barely spoke above a mutter and refused to make eye contact with the camera. It took me a couple of tries to even figure out what they were saying, but eventually I got it.

“You’re telling me,” I said, putting everything I had into controlling my temper, “that you had a secret open port in the firewall that would allow anyone into the network?”

“I know, it’s stupid. But it was a really big random number, and you had to try to initiate a session on the port above and below it first, twice, before it would let you in. I hadn’t used it in years, had forgotten it was there, okay? But I kept getting locked out because I’d forget my password and—”

“You’d forget your password but not this big random number?”

They looked away from the camera and mumbled.

“What?”

“I said, it wasn’t a random number. It was my birthday. But I subtracted one from each digit.”

“Oh,” I said. There wasn’t much more to say.

The ransomware creeps had penetrated timbit’s perimeter, found an insecure router, taken it over, and used it to probe all of the devices. It had cracked open stochastic with a vulnerability in my media server app, then had taken over the machine, installing a web shell that let the attackers use it as they pleased.

I should have patched that media server. I’d ignored an alert the week before. But if timbit’s router hadn’t been left in a deliberately insecure state, it wouldn’t have mattered.

They didn’t just get my machine, either: every system in that cage, everything timbit owned, got taken over and had jabbered away for hours, probing and infecting all the computers it could find. If it hadn’t been for my stand-alone raspi secure appliance, it might have gone on for days or even weeks before someone noticed.

“Anyway,” timbit said, “there’s a guy from the FBI you’re going to need to talk to.”

“What?”

“Sorry,” they said. “I just got off the phone with them myself. They think maybe the ransomware was state sponsored, and some of its targets were federal facilities, so . . .”

“So?”

“So it’s fed jurisdiction. Look, it’s just routine, okay? They just have to take a report. Like, for statistics.”

“I gotta go,” I said.

“Look, just don’t change anything on that box until you talk to the agent, okay? He might want to pull it in to look at it.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. “I’m not giving my server to the feds.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Marcus. They’re not after you. They just want to do some forensics, help them backtrack their attackers.”

“I gotta go,” I said again.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” they warned me.

That was the last straw. “Stupid? Stupid? Stupid is backdooring your own router. Stupid is talking to the FBI without a lawyer. Stupid is handing your servers over to the FBI. Jesus—”

But they’d hung up.

Look, it wasn’t such a big deal in the end. I asked around on a private mailing list, found a lawyer who’d do it pro bono. Young, but she’d gone from Stanford Law to EFF legal intern to a big firm to private practice. When the FBI agent called, I told him my lawyer would call him back. My heart hammered as I said it, but the Feeb was a total pro, said that would be fine and gave me his number.

The lawyer said she’d call first and then if needed she’d schedule a second call. I got all psyched for my big showdown with the Bureau, refusing to hand over my server and insisting I’d go to jail first, and then she called me back an hour later and said it was over.

“It’s over?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I told the guy that I didn’t think he had probable cause for a warrant and that you had confidential and personal material on your server and so you didn’t want to hand it to a third party. I also told him the drives were encrypted and reminded him of the Fifth Amendment difficulties in coercing someone into revealing their passphrase. He said that all sounded reasonable and asked me to pass on his invitation to contact him if your own forensics revealed anything you thought he should know, or if you’d like the Bureau’s technical assistance.”

“Seriously? That’s it?”

She laughed. “Marcus, for a change, you are not their object of interest. You’re just a bystander. It’s totally reasonable not to want to hand your servers over to a law enforcement agency. If your house got burgled, you wouldn’t offer to give the SFPD access to your personal journals and photo albums.”

I flopped onto the sofa and laughed. “I was so freaked about this—”

“Yeah, it showed. Plus I could tell that you were going to make a literal federal case out of this if they pushed it, and I know you know how hard that can be.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” She snorted. “Well, that’s all, unless—”

“Unless?”

“Unless you wanna file a Freedom of Information Access request for the Bureau’s notes on the case.”

“Should I do that?”

“Marcus, you made contact with a federal law enforcement agent. He made notes on you. Those notes are now part of a permanent record that both the FBI and other agencies will have access to, forever. Don’t you want to know what they say?”

“Well, when you put it that way . . .”

“I’ll send you a letter that you’ll need to sign and mail to the FBI.”

Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed.

Hackers practice security through obscurity—and even worse vices.

Another hacker truism: “Attribution is hard.”

When someone gets hacked, it’s often impossible to tell who did it. Even if you can backtrace the attack, you can’t know if you’ve found your attacker, or if your attacker compromised someone else and then used their computer to get to you. Even if you reverse engineer the tool they used to compromise you and connect it to other attacks, you can’t be sure that the same attacker did them all. Maybe they bought their hacking tools from the same toolsmith. Maybe one hacker stole another hacker’s tools. Maybe someone planted evidence that someone else’s tools were used to do the job to get an enemy into trouble.

Attribution is really hard.

The forensics on stochastic were inconclusive. Some of my old Noisebridge hackerspace friends had started a digital forensics lab and they gave me a bro deal, 90 percent off their normal price. Whoever hit me was a weird combination of highly specific—penetrating timbit’s network—and then utterly generic—sending out random probes, looking for any vulnerable system in the hope of infecting it.

At the end of the day, it could have been anyone: a sophisticated crime gang looking for a high-capacity launchpad for their indiscriminate attacks, a bunch of amateurs who got lucky and found their way into timbit’s network, even a fully automated system that some crime team had set up and walked away from, not even monitoring to see if they caught anyone.

Timbit was sure that it was a government. North Korea, to be precise. “Their entire economy depends on Bitcoin ransoms,” they insisted. “The North Koreans are doing ransomware at scale.” Timbit had cryptocurrency on the brain, though, and I didn’t take them seriously. After staring at stochastic on my kitchen table for a month, I taped a danger, possible low-level malware infection sign on it, then added this is not a joke and put it in a closet.

Attribution is really, really hard. But sometimes, that’s a feature, not a bug.

> Marcus, got a sec?

The encrypted text message came from Tanisha. We’ve known each other for years—met at a cryptoparty where I volunteered to do a training on secure device usage at protests—and I have a lot of respect for her. There are a lot of people who call themselves “organizers,” but I’ve never met one quite so organized as Tanisha.

> Course

> This may be easier by voice, is that ok?

I pushed the cat off my chest, eased out of bed, and shut the door without waking Ange before my phone rang.

“Hey, Tanisha,” I said, switching on my kettle and getting my coffee stuff out.

“Marcus, thanks for talking. There’s some wild stuff going on.”

I snorted. “Given all the stuff you’ve been through, I can’t imagine what kind of situation you could get into that’s wild by comparison.”

“It’s not me, thankfully. Friends of mine, First Nations people from the Black-Brown Alliance who went out to the Arapaho camp in Oklahoma to fight the pipeline.”

“Damn. That’s been an ugly scene. Are they okay?”

“Not really,” she said. “Not at all.”

Keystone XL—the pipeline that is supposed to someday carry the filthiest oil in the world, from Alberta’s tar sands, to Texas—has come back from the dead so many times, it should have its own schlock-horror series.

A couple years ago, it had been really well and truly dead, but then some private equity types calling themselves Keystone Energy Equity Partners bought its remains at pennies on the dollar and announced that they’d be completing the line within five years. They followed the announcement by floating futures contracts on the oil that was supposed to come out of that pipeline, using complicated financial instruments to “prove” that buying that oil was safe.

I don’t pretend to understand finance, but a friend of mine who does taught me a little trick: whenever you hear a finance word that you don’t understand, just replace it with “fraud” and you’ll be right the majority of the time. As in “the forward-option frauds were protected by a securitized default fraud that ensured that senior bondholders would get the first fraud from every fraud that frauded.” I actually checked on that one with my finance friend and he said that it worked perfectly and that my version was more accurate than the one I’d started with.

Whatever fraud these KEEP guys were selling, someone out there was sure buying. Only thirty days after they announced the deal, they announced that they’d doubled their money, which, if you ask me, is a solid sign that they were doing a big ole fraud.

If the only victims of that fraud were the investors they were taking for a ride, that would have been their business. But these guys and their pipeline had a little problem: Alberta is really far from Texas, and people live in many of the places in between. About half the pipeline had been built, on land that the earlier owners had either bought, stolen, or taken by force. There had been years of fighting over that half a pipeline, with Indigenous people and their allies putting their bodies between the heavy earthworks equipment and the water, forests, and ancestral, unceded lands that people risked everything to save. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

But still, the new owners got half a pipeline at pennies on the dollar and now all they had to do was figure out how to finish the other half. They were wise enough to skip any kind of city where white people, especially rich white people, might object to having this leaky poison-straw passing by, especially anywhere near their water sources. But the pipeline had to go somewhere and the lesson these finance bros had learned from earlier fights was that even though Indigenous people would fight like hell to avoid having their lands and bodies poisoned, the actual powers that be would always side with the pipeline in the end.

So the Army Corps of Engineers issued 17,513 permits: one for every point in the pipeline’s run where it would come within spitting distance of a watershed, stream, spring, river, pond, or lake. For complicated, stupid reasons the Army is in charge of these permits, and the fact that they granted every single one that KEEP applied for tells you how seriously they took that duty.

Now, if the Army Corps of Engineers had bothered to actually check, they’d have learned that many of these permits should not have been issued, because KEEP wanted to run its pipe through sovereign treaty lands, or unceded lands, lands that were not the Army Corps of Engineers’ to approve. Or maybe they did check and decide it didn’t matter. Certainly, they didn’t act like it mattered once the sovereign Indigenous nations whose land they had given away let them know.

KEEP hired consultants, people who knew how to divide and conquer between hereditary and elected chiefs, to play one band against another. It worked until they got to the Oklahoma Arapaho, a nation claiming sovereignty under the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, lands whose borders had been moved repeatedly since the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations had been moved into the same territory.

The Arapaho group was led by Virginia Thunder, a fully enrolled member of the Arapaho nation whose PhD dissertation had unraveled those land claims from old archival documents, oral histories, geological surveys, and other markers. Virginia Thunder made an unassailable case for sovereignty over land that included Guthrie Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi where KEEP planned to run its pipeline.

 Virginia Thunder and her supporters had gone to court to make these claims long before KEEP bought out the pipeline, and had faced endless delaying tactics from the feds. When the court threw out the case on a technicality related to the Army Corps of Engineers permit—saying, in effect, that the land claim was moot because KEEP now controlled that land for its pipeline—the occupation began.

This was not the Water Protectors’ first rodeo. Over the years, they’d been gassed, shot, infiltrated, and dirty-tricked. Organizers had gone to jail. Provocateurs had sown dissent and Water Protectors had been smeared to the public and their families. Astroturf groups of “concerned band members” and “local environmentalists” had denounced them, and their devices had been hacked and their private communications published—sometimes after being edited to create mistrust or make innocuous messages seem deeply sinister.

You know, the usual.

But then KEEP got hit with a ransomware attack.

“Whoever hit them wanted $20 mil in cryptos,” Tanisha said. “And they refused to pay it because the State Department told them they’d treat it as funding terrorism, so they said no. We always figured they were still going to find some way to pay it under the table, but if they did, it wasn’t enough, because the ransomware creep dumped a bunch of their data.”

I grabbed my computer and started searching. I had heard something about this, but hadn’t followed it closely. Anyone who hadn’t updated their logging software was getting hit, so there was a lot of breach news in the ether.

“They dumped the intranet password files,” I said, skimming an article. “Ugh, they weren’t salted.”

Thankfully, no one saves passwords themselves anymore. Instead, the passwords are hashed—pumped through a scrambling algorithm, and the scrambled version is saved instead. When you type your password, it’s scrambled again and the server checks to see if the two scrambled files match.

There’s no way to unscramble those files, but you can make a “rainbow table”—a giant file containing every possible scrambled password from aaaaaaaaaaa to ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Then you can compare any scrambled password you happen upon to the rainbow table and see if it appears.

Thankfully, there’s an easy way to defeat rainbow tables: “salting the hash.” All that means is that the before the passwords are scrambled, they’re combined with a random string. A rainbow table that hashes every possible password and every possible hash is really big, like, bigger than all the hard drives on Earth.

Salting your hashes is free, it’s a good idea, and it’s been basic security for a decade. Despite all of this, a surprising number of organizations don’t do it. I don’t understand it. At this point, I think you’d have to specifically turn salting off. If I had to guess, I’d say that they paid someone to set up their stuff, asked them to promise that they had checked off the security tick box, and assumed they were all good.

Now all of KEEP’s intranet passwords were online. They were hashed, but not salted, so they might as well have skipped hashing them.

“No, they weren’t,” Tanisha said. “Even I know that’s stupid. They’ve got a firewall and you need their VPN to login to their intranet—”

“Let me guess, a bunch of people recycled their main password for the VPN.”

“Exactly.”

Translation: to get into their server, you needed to access their network. But the same leaked passwords that connected to the server also connected to the network. It’s like having two locks on your front door that both use the same key. If someone steals that key, the second lock doesn’t add any new protection.

“Man, they’ve got to be shitting bricks.” I shuddered. Anyone who recycled their passwords once probably did so all over the place. Enterprising hackers would be trying those leaked user/pass combos everywhere—Instagram, E*Trade, Netflix, cryptocurrency exchanges. . . .

“They’re not just shitting bricks, they’re lashing out. They’re claiming the Water Protectors did it.”

“You’re joking.” Water Protectors got hacked on the reg by black-ops contractors who stole their data, leaked it to Fox News, gave it to cops, or selectively leaked it to discredit the Water Protectors and drive wedges in the movement.

“No joke. And some people are using the passwords to grab KEEP’s internal emails and publish them, including lots of embarrassing stuff, people complaining about each other or sounding off about their bosses.”

My first reaction was good. My second reaction was, damn. The FBI uses that kind of thing as a pretense for hard crackdowns. I mean, not like they needed a pretense to go after Water Protectors.

“That sounds ugly,” I said. “So, what can I do?”

“We need to figure out who hacked KEEP,” she said.

TANISHA

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.

My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.

The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.

It’s not like there wasn’t a lot to do in Oakland. OKPD tried to sneak in a contract for predictive-policing services and also hit Google with a bunch of “reverse warrants” demanding the identities of everyone whose phone was within a couple blocks of a robbery. A NIMBY group got an emergency injunction to stop a low-income housing project from going in near the Fruitvale BART station, and these “philanthropists” tried to convince our biggest family shelter to turn itself into a “social enterprise” funded by a charter school where none of the teachers could unionize. The usual.

I swear it wasn’t the romance that drew me out to OK. Yes, totally, those Zoom calls with the big sky and everyone in their outdoor gear made me jealous af as I sat in my tiny, stuffy apartment answering tech-support calls and watching my friends half a country away cook over camp stoves and sing protest songs.

But that’s not what brought me out to OK. I’m not that shallow. It was the mass arrests.

Or “arrests.” When you hear “arrest” you might think of cops handcuffing someone up against a cruiser, or maybe flat out on the pavement. Here in Oakland, we’re no strangers to “arrests” where half a dozen cops kick the shit out of some poor brown or Black kid while screaming “Stop resisting” and barely suppressing their giggles.

The cops doing the arresting at Guthrie Creek made the OPD look like nursery-school teachers. There was one night where six people showed up at the jail in handcuffs with their jaws broken, and word was one guy was responsible for it, a cop who’d been brought across state lines from Texas whose signature move was to handcuff people, force them to their knees, and then walk the line, smashing their faces with his baton. They called him “The Dentist,” the joke being that he was from Denton, Texas. After his victims got their faces broken, the Dentist liked to administer “laughing gas,” pepper spraying them as they lay on the ground, helpless and groaning.

The Guthrie Creek Water Protectors had a strict nonviolence policy. No guns, no booze, no drugs, no fighting. Despite this, the cops kept “finding” guns when they raided them. A recent OK law made unlicensed firearm possession while trespassing into a Class A felony, practically the only form of gun ownership in Oklahoma that the state placed any limits on.

Look, I know how things go for Indigenous activists. I’d seen the Water and Land Protectors in Canada and the USA subjected to the most vicious, savage violence and smears, locked away for years or maimed or killed outright. Even by those standards, Guthrie Creek was a bloodbath.

But the reinforcements kept coming. Indigenous people from all over the world—from Mexico and Honduras and Guatemala, from British Columbia and Saskatchewan, from New Zealand and Australia, from Greenland and Finland, from Hawaii and Alaska and every state in the lower 48.

They threw their bodies into the meat grinder of OK law enforcement, the out-of-state reinforcements, the private mercenaries.

The allies came. Politicos. Black Lives Matter. Democratic Socialists. The worse the fighting got, the more we showed up. Movie stars came, and with them, news crews. Progressive Dems hoping to primary sitting Congressjerks came, and then the sitting Congressjerks came to prove that they were just as progressive as their rivals.

Veterans came. Native people serve in the armed forces at five times the rate of the general population. Indigenous veterans came in uniform and made gruff speeches about the meaning of land and country while silent tears streamed down their cheeks.

The police beat them all.

I went to Oklahoma.

I thought I spotted a couple other people who might be headed to Guthrie Creek on the Oakland-Chicago leg, and I was right: both of them went to the gate for the Tulsa flight along with me. We weren’t the only ones there with camping gear and the look of habitual protesters. I’m not saying I can spot someone who can rhyme “one-two-three-four” at one hundred paces, but . . . well, actually, yes, that’s what I’m saying. We’re a type.

We made eye contact, smiled, sat near one another, struck up conversations, welcomed more people as they arrived. Soon the departure lounge was split into two groups: 20 percent normies going to Oklahoma for normal reasons—insurance, or maybe cattle?—and 80 percent Water Protector reinforcements. Though two of our group had guitars and at least two had drums, everyone had the good sense to keep those weapons sheathed. No one wants an unscheduled airport-lounge concert.

But we did whip out our bags of road food: jerky and energy bars, baked goods and trail mix, and shared it around, offering it to the insurance (or maybe cattle) people, and the mood got warm and friendly and there were jokes and that thing where you asked people if they knew your friends from their town and figured out who your mutuals were.

That’s when the undercover cop sat down next to me. I mean, he had paramilitary boots laced tight, a gym-rat bod underneath his motley patched jacket, and a half-grown-out Marine high-and-tight haircut. If that didn’t seal the deal, this did: “Hi,” he said, sticking out his big, strong hand for a knuckle-mashing shake, “I’m Brendan.”

I wriggled my hand out of his. “Tanisha,” I said.

“I am so psyched to go and get some shit done, man. No more fucking around, am I right?”

Look, maybe he wasn’t a cop. Maybe he was a private-security guy, one of those ex-cops or ex-military guys who goes private sector. What he was not was a protester.

“Have some trail mix,” I said, and handed him a sack and moved away.

Brendan was seated two rows ahead of me, in an aisle seat, and I watched him strike up conversations with all the people around him, performing a kind of sitcom version of a friendly dude. Mostly he got weird looks, but one guy either fell for his act or took pity on him or decided to take one for the team and leaned across the aisle to chat with him, tying him up for the whole flight.

At the airport, I met up with a group of three people—friends of friends—I’d made arrangements with online to split a rental car. We got our stuff off the luggage carousel and headed for the rental shuttle, and there was Brendan again, smiling. “Trail-mix girl!” he said with a big, goofy grin.

I had a moment of doubt. We’d had a comrade, Aniyah, a woman who didn’t quite fit in. She’d moved to Oakland from DC and sought us out, and at first she seemed really committed. But then she started picking fights, sometimes over political or tactical points, but sometimes over petty, personal idiot stuff. It seemed like everything she did turned into a “bun-fight” (a useful phrase I learned from Marcus’s Very English Mum).

Whispers started: maybe Aniyah was a cop, a provocateur, a corporate spy. We’d had those before, for years. Oakland’s activists remembered COINTELPRO—our elders had lived through it.

Gradually, word got around. Aniyah was not to be trusted. Isolate her. Leave her off the group chats, don’t invite her around to social outings. We can’t stop her from coming out to demonstrations, but we don’t have to let her on the committees that make up the signs or the leaflets. We were good at it, good at never making it explicit, but still putting her in her own little shit-stirring committee of one.

Okay, content warning. Self-harm. Suicide. Just so you know.

Because Aniyah wasn’t a provocateur. The reason she was so erratic was that she was bipolar, with long-standing, untreated mental-health complications. She’d been uninsured most of her life and in those rare moments when she’d gotten insurance, her doctors were more interested in drugging her senseless than they were in getting her counseling and helping her learn coping skills.

It made it hard to be her comrade and even harder to be her friend. Activism wasn’t just a way for Aniyah to live her principles, it was a way to cross that vast canyon that separated her from her family and all the people she’d grown up with, a way to regulate her moods and intrusive thoughts by using other people as sounding boards and brakes on her runaway thoughts. All that weird, belligerent stuff that she said to us? It had been 10 percent of the thoughts that wouldn’t stop circling around and around her mind, and she used us to slow them down and make them quiet enough that she could hear herself think.

When we isolated her . . . well, there wasn’t anyone around anymore to help her keep the bad thoughts at bay. They got louder and faster. They became too much. We read about it in her note, after. Here’s the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number: 1-800-273-8255. I wish she’d called it.

Everything about Brendan said cop, but that didn’t mean he was a cop. Maybe he looked and talked like an authoritarian goon because that’s who he’d wanted to be until he thought better of it. Maybe isolating him at this point would just drive away someone who was doing the hard work of deprogramming themself after a lifetime of Blue Lives Matter and Shining City on the Hill propaganda.

Or maybe he was a cop.

“Hi, Brendan,” I said.

“Look,” he said, “I couldn’t get a car from the rental place. I don’t suppose you guys have space for one more? I can trade: I’ve rented a hotel room near the protest and you can use it to crash and shower and whatever. We can grab some beer, too. I heard the camp is 100 percent dry.”

I looked at my new companions. There were four of us. The car—a full-size crossover with a big trunk—seated five. Slowly, we all nodded at one another minutely.

“Sure, Brendan, that’ll be fine.”

“Yeah!” he said and literally punched the air. “I can split the rental fee and cover the gas, too, of course. This is so great of you guys, seriously.”

We all caught one another’s eyes again. No one was happy with this decision.

Brendan was scarily good at packing the trunk, and I immediately wondered how many times he’d had to pack a lot of materiel into a transport vehicle for a long trip, say, through Kandahar Province or out of Baghdad. He joked and called himself “a born loadmaster,” but he managed to make five peoples’ luggage fit into the car, along with room for the groceries we stopped and bought on our way out of Tulsa.

In the car, he talked more than he listened, which was tedious, but also made me question my suspicions. If he was an undercover, then he wasn’t gathering much intelligence. If he was a provocateur, he wasn’t rallying us to do any crimes. Instead, he was telling us all about the awesome activist scene in Ann Arbor, and the great actions he’d done on everything from Flint’s water to school cutbacks to “defending the capital” against armed anti-maskers.

I drove for the first three hours, which meant I couldn’t disappear into my phone the way the other three did. But then we stopped at a farm stand for pie and I suggested that he drive, which freed all of us to pretend to sleep or lose ourselves in our phones. Brendan didn’t seem to mind—he just kept hunting up and down the dial for country music or right-wing blowhards to make loud, rude remarks about. I dozed with my head against the passenger-side window, half tuned in to his stream, thinking that if he was an undercover, he was really unsubtle about it, but maybe that was the fake out, because no one that obvious could possibly be an undercover, right?

The Comfort Inn where Brendan had a room booked was only half an hour from the camp. We pulled up after 9 p.m. and it was dark and raining. Between how profoundly tired we all were and how late it was and how miserable the weather was, we let ourselves get talked into bringing in our sleeping-bags and Therm-a-Rests and camping in the room, though we had to argue Brendan out of giving up his bed and sleeping on the floor so us “girls” could sleep two per bed in each of the queens.

After the hotel continental breakfast—conveyor-belt pancakes, bad coffee, Froot Loops, and heavily sweetened yogurt—we took turns in Brendan’s shower.

“Okay,” Emily said. She was a short woman from Iowa City who’d been the most openly skeptical of Brendan’s patter. “Okay, I think we’d better get a move on.”

“Gimme a sec,” Brendan said. “I’ll pack up and check out and meet you out front in fifteen.”

“No,” Emily said, looking pointedly at me and the other two women. “No, Brendan. It was nice of you to put us up and all, but we’re parting ways here. Maybe I’ll see you around the camp.”

He got this hurt-little-boy face and started to sputter, but Emily cut him dead with a look. “We’ll see you around, Brendan.”

He looked so hurt that I had a momentary flashback to Aniyah, but then his face twisted up into a deadass ugly snarl and any thoughts I had of not backing Emily’s play fled, and I fled after them, calling half a “thanks” over my shoulder before the hotel room door clicked shut.

We drove in silence for the first five minutes, then Emily spoke. “I’m not gonna say sorry. He’s not right.”

“Cop,” Leesa said. She was a Latinx kid, barely eighteen, who’d come from Austin, where she had already been arrested three times for blockading the State Capitol over the state’s abortion bills. She said the word like she was spitting it.

“I’m glad you said it.” That was Trish, an older white woman from LA who had this intense, good mom vibe, like she’d always have your back but wouldn’t put up with your shit. “I don’t like to make accusations, but—”

“He was totally a cop,” Leesa said. “I mean, come on, every single thing about that guy said ‘cop.’ And the way he just kind of . . . groomed us so that first we gave him a ride and then he was driving and then we were all sharing a room, the way he kept trying to pump us for information, biographical details. Cop, cop, cop. What a total, 100 percent utter fuckin’ cop that guy is. Coppy McCop-Face.”

That did it. I giggled, and then we all laughed, a relieved and sisterly shared laugh that made me realize how terribly awkward the drive had been, with none of the first-day-of-summer-camp energy of heading to a major demonstration, none of the reassuring bluster of getting ready to throw your body into a police meat grinder. Instead of getting to know one another, instead of giving one another bravery we didn’t feel ourselves, we’d poured all our energy into Brendan, into ignoring him or making plausible social noises at him.

“Emily,” I said, “thank you for getting us out of that bullshit.”

She nodded and gave me a thumbs-up and went back to driving.

“I swear,” I said, popping a coconut water out of the cooler we now had room for in the middle of the back seat, “the only thing that made me doubt whether he was a cop was how totally obvious he was.”

“Same,” all three of my car-mates said, in unison. That prompted more laughter.

“I mean, could any cop really be that stupid?”

Leesa snorted. “100 percent a cop could be that stupid.”

Trish said, “LAPD won a lawsuit over disqualifying applicants for having high IQs.”

“Really?” Emily said.

“I’m not kidding,” Trish said. “IQ tests are utter junk science, but what’s it say that the cops think that they work and don’t want anyone too smart wearing a badge?”

“Checks out,” Leesa said. “Explains a lot, really.”

The entrance to the Guthrie Creek camp was marked by a forest of Indigenous flags from all over the world. I recognized a Maori flag, an Innu flag from Labrador, the American Indian Movement flag, and lots of tribal flags from all over America, from New Mexico to Hawaii to Alaska. The sight literally made me gasp, as I felt, for a moment, the vast web of support that stretched around the world. Beyond the flags was an expanse of tents and trailers, and everywhere I looked, I saw MNI WICONI and WATER IS LIFE.

We stopped the car and got out, not wanting to drive in without permission. I swiped away the tears pricking my eyes and Trish put her arm around me. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” I said. The feeling was so big. Joy. Fear. Sadness. Water. California had been in megadrought for years, my cousins in Flint lived with the nightmare of what the lead might have done to their little boy, and here were these people, defending their water. Why hadn’t I defended mine? What had I ever done to defend the water in California?

“Hoo, boy,” Trish said. “This is it.”

“This is it,” I said. I knew what she meant. The best time to start protecting water was twenty years ago. The second best time was now.

A young man and an older woman approached us from inside the camp. They were both Native, and she was wearing a beautiful beaded jacket. The young man, maybe twenty, was wearing a beat-up short winter coat and snow pants and big Kodiak boots.

“Hello,” he said. He had a friendly face, but it also looked older than the rest of him. Like he’d gone through a lot, but still come out of it on top.

“Hello!” we chorused, then laughed. There’d been a lot of laughter since we ditched Brendan.

“Welcome,” the older woman said. “I’m Lucy Thunder and this my nephew, Ryan.”

We introduced ourselves and Lucy Thunder gave us each a warm, surprisingly strong hug and welcomed us, and then Ryan shook our hands. People in the camp beyond them looked over at us being welcomed and nodded approvingly.

“Thunder,” I said. “As in—”

“ Virginia is my sister,” Ryan said.

“And I’m her auntie,” Lucy said. “We’re very proud of our girl.” Her smile was small and bright. “Thank you for coming to our camp. It is a sacred place and there are rules you need to agree to if you want to enter.” She nodded at Ryan.

“No drugs. No alcohol. This is a sober place. No weapons. No violence. No fighting. This is a place of peace.”

“Can you agree to those conditions?” Lucy asked.

It could have been a bureaucratic formality, but they made it a solemn moment. We all agreed and Lucy gave us another small, bright smile. “Welcome, then.”

MARCUS

It only took twenty-four hours after the KEEP passwords leaked for its internal emails to start showing up online. Unlike the passwords, this was a limited release. Specifically, it was a release that detailed how a couple of senior managers and the head of the company’s HR had agreed to pay off a VP who had been accused of persistent bullying, stealing his subordinates’ ideas, and forcing a mom to work during her sick kid’s emergency cancer surgery, on threat of firing her and canceling her kid’s health insurance.

The email dump was surgical: it included whole strings of messages from the CEO to the board and HR about what it would take to keep the VP in place because of “the value he adds” and how eventually it became too much and they let the guy announce that he was “leaving to start an exciting new enterprise” and gave him $12 million to go quietly.

He even got to keep his pension.

The email dump was big news, and it got picked up by everyone from union organizers to universal-health-care activists. But it didn’t change the narrative about the origins of the hack—the frankly stupid idea that the Water Protectors had hacked KEEP.

> Hey, Tanisha, can you talk?

> Yeah, gimme a second.

Ten minutes later, she called me on Signal. The connection was terrible.

“What’s that noise?”

The roar got louder, overwhelming her phone’s mic and its signal-processing hardware, becoming pure software noise. It receded, swelled, receded, swelled. Tanisha dropped the call. I stared at my phone for a while, then tried to go back to analyzing the leaks, then my phone rang again.

“Sorry,” she said. “DHS keep buzzing Facebook Hill with a chopper.”

“Facebook Hill?”

“The only place with decent reception.”

“I can see how buzzing that spot would be a pretty effective counterinsurgency measure.”

She snorted. “Officially it can’t be. KEEP’s deal with the state bans them from doing any ‘corporate counterinsurgency.’”

“What, seriously?”

“Seriously. Ever since Standing Rock, it’s been a way for state governments to sign off on pipeline projects without taking heat for the human rights shitshow that follows.”

“Well, that sounds good, but I’m betting there’s a catch.”

She snorted again. “Damned right. ‘Corporate counterinsurgency’ doesn’t have a legal definition. So proving that someone’s doing corporate counterinsurgency is impossible. Shit, here comes the chopper again. Call you back in a few, OK?”

“Sure!” I shouted as the chopper roar filled the soundspace.

> Ugh it’s circling. Sorry. 5 min

> No problem

I made an AeroPress and refreshed Twitter.

“Damn. They came really low that time. Don’t suppose I’ll need a facial peel anytime soon, feels like I got the top three layers of skin sanded off.”

“Jesus. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. They pulled the same trick last week on a group of Water Protectors who’d chained themselves to these bulldozers, just hammering them with rotor wash when they couldn’t get away. One of them had a really bad asthma attack. Compared to them—”

“Yeah, I get it. Look, I’m trying to figure out this KEEP hack. Did you see the email dump, the harassment thing?”

She made a disgusted noise. “Yeah.”

“Well, it’s pretty incriminating, but I think it’s weird that there’s nothing about the Water Protectors.”

“You noticed that, too, huh?” There was commotion in the background. “Sorry, one sec.” I got put on hold. I stared at my phone. “Back. Sorry. Some personnel problems.”

“Huh?”

“They kicked out a provocateur. Undercover guy. He was incredibly obvious about it, right from the start, but so long as he stuck to the rules, he got to stay.”

“So what happened?”

“He broke the rules. Brought in some weed. Tribal cops just cuffed him and they’re gonna turn him over to the sheriff.”

“Well, that sounds, uh, paradoxical.”

“Tribal cops collaborating with the sheriff? Paradoxical is a good word for it, especially when you realize that this guy was probably on the same payroll as the sheriff’s deputies.”

“How’s that?” I’d known Tanisha for a long time, and she was one of the smartest organizers I knew. Part of that was not making other people feel stupid because they didn’t know the same stuff as you. Now I was feeling stupid. Either that meant she was struggling under a heavy strain, or things were so complex that everything she said about them would sound like a riddle.

“KEEP is on the hook for the sheriff’s costs. It’s another way the state legislature sold this to the people, promising that no taxpayer dollars would go into security for the pipeline project. But of course, that just means that the sheriff is now working for KEEP.”

“You’re kidding—how the fuck is that okay?”

She laughed. “Marcus, they all work that way, every pipeline project.”

“Man. I mean, it’s not surprising, but it should be. Do you know what they’re spending and how?”

“In theory. We file regular FOIA requests to get access to that stuff and break it down, and there are researchers who buy a single share in the company just so they can attend the shareholder meetings and get all the notices. But the categories are really broad, like ‘physical patrol’ or ‘recordkeeping and administration’ with no further details.”

“Look, I called you because these leaks felt off, like we were learning all about the way KEEP screws over its workers but not much about how it screws over Water Protectors and the environment. It sounds like there should be some pretty juicy stuff about how the company’s execs boss the sheriff around, but none of that has come out yet. Does that strike you as weird?”

“100 percent weird, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Something was teasing at the edge of my comprehension.

“I wish someone would hack and dump all that stuff. Especially the orders they’ve given the sheriff’s department. Anyone drives around here, they get pulled over and given a bullshit ticket or just a warning, but every time, the cops make sure to collect IDs on everyone in the car. They’re obviously building up their intelligence files on everyone here.”

“Creepy.”

“Very creepy.”

The idea was very close. I just couldn’t get ahold of it. I looked at stochastic, a seven-pound box of compromised e-waste I couldn’t bring myself to recycle, which had been sitting next to the living room sofa for weeks, like the world’s worst side table.

“And they’re still saying that the Water Protectors are behind the hack, huh?”

“That’s still their line. There’s a whole campaign here, ‘Oklahoma Strong,’ that’s all these ‘normal citizens’ making videos and Facebook posts about how they need the new pipeline, how it’s safer than the old, rusted-out ones, how KEEP provides jobs and buys things from local merchants. After the hack, they all started posting videos about ransomware and identity theft and how cyberattacks are a form of terrorism.”

“So, Water Protectors are behind the hack, hacking is terrorism, therefore Water Protectors are terrorists.”

“Bingo,” she said. She sounded tired.

“And no one is asking why the Water Protectors would hack KEEP and then go after some gross HR dispute rather than stuff related to the pipeline?”

“That would require rational analysis. The stuff these Oklahoma Strong fools get up to barely rises to the level of a meme.”

“Damn.”

“That’s how we feel, too.”

“Well, I’ll keep working on it,” I said. “Stay safe. Thanks for being out there.”

“Thank you, too. Give Ange my love.”

TANISHA

Water Protectors aren’t protesters. They aren’t there to “raise awareness” or “speak truth to power.” Water Protectors protect the water. It works like this: KEEP has giant earth-moving devices like bulldozers, diggers, drills, and cranes. Water Protectors prevent KEEP from using them to poison the water.

The details vary based on KEEP’s tactics. Sometimes it means half a dozen Water Protectors chaining themselves to cement-filled barrels on the spot where KEEP wants to sink an augur. Sometimes it means blocking a road so a 18-wheeler can’t get through with a giant backhoe on it.

Our role, as supporters and allies, was to keep cops and private security forces from moving the Water Protectors on the front lines. Sometimes that could look like a protest—there were signs and chants and often some First Nations people would perform a dance or ceremony—but the point of it wasn’t to attract attention or make a spectacle. It was to keep the Water Protectors in place for as long as possible. If we could keep them in place until it was too late to start work—some technical processes needed to be done with good daylight, without interruption—we protected the water for another day.

It took me a while to get my head around this. I’ve been an organizer for a long time, and I’ve put together my share of demonstrations, but they were usually about achieving some kind of structural goal, like “making the police more accountable.” Even the more concrete goals, like make a specific change to police use-of-force rules” was still not something we thought we’d directly achieve through protest. We never thought that if we chanted long enough, the Mayor would take to the steps of city hall and declare that he was going to defund the Oakland PD.

It’s not that we were doing something “symbolic,” but the point of the exercise was to create political change by changing peoples’ minds.

Water Protectors want to change peoples’ minds, too—but mostly they just want to protect the water.

The rhythm of life in the camp veered between coziness and intensity. One day I’d be helping kids with their homework after open-air classes with one of the community teachers, the next I’d be joining arms across a four-lane highway as part of a five-deep first line of defense between cops and six of the elders—aunties who’d barricaded themselves inside the portable pump houses that were supposed to keep the under-creek earthworks dry. We’d hold the line until they arrested or kettled enough of us to get past, and then the next line would block them, and the next, until finally they came to the pump houses, which had been locked tight with U-locks and contact cement, the serene aunties inside, knitting and waiting while the police cutting torches and angle-grinders peeled open the doors.

There was always an air of triumph and sorrow in the camp the day after an action like that, as people who’d been injured by police nursed their bruises and broken bones and the legal teams scrambled to get the arrestees bailed out. But alongside that injured and anxious mood was the sense that we’d done something: we’d protected the water. Thanks to the police torches, KEEP’s pump houses were out of commission and would need extensive servicing before they could reopen again. We’d bought another week.

Kicking Brendan out of the camp was a repeat of the experience of ditching him at the motel. Brendan had been ubiquitous at the camp, always pushing the limits. In planning meetings, he’d be the one calling for “radical direct action” whenever someone talked about ensuring that we could never be accused of violence. Between meetings, he always seemed to be in the middle of any squabble, turning it into a full-blown argument. He griped about the camp being sober and boasted about the great booze and weed stash he had off-site—in his hotel room, then in his rental car (which he got after moving into the camp, parking it off-site in a long-term lot).

Having him in camp was this low-level stressor. Wherever he went, he left behind simmering upsets and bad feelings. Even after he was gone, these stayed behind, like the smell of burning plastic—alarming and unpleasant.

Everyone thought he was a cop or a rent-a-cop, but no one could prove it, and Brendan was such a lightning rod for drama that it was clear that any accusation would just turn into a massive fight that would make life even worse.

So he really did us all a favor when he hid out behind that tree on Facebook Hill and lit a spliff, and I did not feel the least bit guilty when I snuck back down the hill, found a tribal cop, and ratted him out. They hauled him away while I tried to get on the phone with Marcus, and while I’m sure that the helicopter harassment was just a coincidence (there’s no way they could have gotten it in place within seconds of Brendan being turfed out), it sure felt like retribution.

But in the days that followed, the mood in the camp was unmistakably superior to life with Brendan. Winter was deepening and the survival challenges were getting more intense, but without Brendan’s sabotage, we rose to the challenge. After the first big snowfall, the adults pitched in to clear snow off the trails, and then the resulting pile turned out to be too tempting and a massive kids-vs-grown-ups snowball fight broke out. Lucy Thunder and the aunties watched from the sidelines, pointing and hooting with laughter, and somehow, they never got caught in the crossfire.

Winter may have made life in the camp harder, but it also made life harder for KEEP. People in the know figured they had another month to make progress before it got too cold to dig efficiently. They might try to work through it, but that was a lot more expensive.

So it felt like there was a reckoning coming: if they didn’t kick us out, they’d be beached for the winter, and that was months where we could go to work on them in the courts and the press. Plus, oil prices were yo-yoing all over the place and they needed to keep it up over $67 a barrel before they would start losing money.

Alberta tar sands are expensive. A tar sand isn’t oil, it’s a layer of water and oil wrapped around a grain of sand. To get the oil free, you have to heat the sand so the water boils and the steam forces the oil off, and the best way to heat that sand is . . . to burn oil. That’s where tar sand’s sky-high carbon footprint comes from. Even if you don’t care about the planet, or water, or our species, or Indigenous land claims, tar sands are still a stupid idea, the kind of thing that is only profitable if someone is willing to pay top dollar for it and no one makes them clean up after themselves.

Meanwhile, I was getting rides into town three days a week so I could pull a tech-support shift inside a car, parked outside the library or the Starbucks. My boss was okay with the short shifts—it was our slow season—but he’d told me that he expected me back full-time after New Year’s, when demand spiked.

I’d just wrapped up my Wednesday shift when Trish came back from her grocery shopping. The car windows had gone opaque with frost, and she tapped on the driver’s side window, then squeakily wiped a little clear patch with her mitten and smiled at me. I’d become a kind of camp car service, taking people on supply runs. I liked the company.

I popped the locks and she opened the passenger-side door, admitting a rush of frigid air. She handed me a coffee and then opened the back door and loaded several bags of groceries and a sack of library books onto the back seat.

“Did you see the latest?” she asked, sliding in beside me and buttoning up the car.

“I didn’t see anything. It was a crazy shift.”

“Look,” she said, and shoved her phone at me.

I scrolled.

There’d been another dump of KEEP’s internal files. They’d been happening regularly, every couple of days. Mostly it was just personally embarrassing stuff, like emails between male junior executives about which of their female subordinates they’d like to “bang.” There was also a dump of expense reports showing those same dudes charging strip-club excursions and family vacations to the company. Heads rolled. No one cared.

But this new dump was a lot more significant: it contained memos about a subcontractor who’d cheaped out on leak and flow sensors for feeder segments of the pipeline, leading to 20,000 barrels worth of “wastage” (that is, environmental catastrophe) with a $10 million cleanup bill. Not just any subcontractor: it was a company that one of KEEP’s VPs had founded and sold before jumping ship to work at KEEP.

This was a different kind of leak. Not because it embarrassed a KEEP exec, and not even because it revealed a horrible, secret environmental disaster. It was different because it had security implications: if the pipeline sensors didn’t work, then someone might be able to sabotage the pipeline without being detected immediately. That could cost the company a lot of money and set back its build-out by weeks or months.

“This is ugly,” I said after reading a statement from the DHS about the “domestic terrorism” risk posed by the breach.

Trish took her phone back. “I know it sounds paranoid, but this feels like a setup.”

“I don’t think it’s paranoid,” I said. “I mean, it is paranoid, but it’s not paranoid in an unjustifiable way. Remember that week when all of our phones started rebooting every time we went up Facebook Hill? How many times have the sheriff’s deputies stopped one of us for not signaling our turn early enough, just so they could take our IDs and add them to a database? And remember that creep Brendan?”

She snorted. “How could I forget? Okay, yeah, it’s justifiably paranoid. But I can’t quite make it jell—are they going to blow up their pipeline and blame it on us? How does that help them?”

I drank some of the coffee, thought about it. Shrugged. “Maybe they make it look like someone tried to blow up the pipeline and then they blame it on us and the FBI or DHS or whoever come along and just bulldoze us off the land, send us all to prison for twenty years for ecoterrorism.”

She shivered. “I don’t like the way you think.”

“I don’t like the way I think, either. You got any more errands to run? I feel like we should gas up and go back to camp.”

I wouldn’t call the camp “fun” (okay, the snowball fights were fun) but there were times when it was magic. After years of pursuing activist causes with distant goals—demanding social change may be urgent, but it’s slow—there was something so immediate about protecting the water. We had a defined, concrete objective.

Weirdly, part of that magic was the stuff the other side did to us: the traffic stops and chopper torture, the wild accusations and the checkpoints, the all-out blitz of gas and water cannons and dogs whenever there was a blockade. It was validating, somehow. They were wetting their pants all over the place, and it was because of us, and that meant that we were doing something right.

The feeling that we were striking terror in KEEP’s heart was truly magical. Going out to Guthrie Creek had seemed like a hopeless gesture, the kind of thing you did because you had to, not because you thought you could win. And here I was, months into what I’d assumed would be a weeklong trip, and we were still standing, and KEEP’s pipeline was going nowhere fast, and winter was coming on faster.

I was having a magic evening when the other shoe dropped. There’d been a big community dinner that I’d helped cook, including some venison that local hunters had donated to camp (I’m a vegan but I make exceptions). I’d been seated next to a visiting Water Protector from outside of Montreal, and she’d spent the evening telling me about her father’s role in the standoff with Quebec police in 1990 in the village of Akwesasne, a story I’d never heard, somehow. It was easy to forget that Canada is a nation founded on racist genocide. They make such a big deal out of being nice.

The story was incredible, and Marianne told it very well. There was sponge cake for dessert and people drifted away from the table to help with the dishes and to take leftovers to volunteer sentries who hadn’t been able to get to the dinner.

Marianne spotted some friends from Alberta, Cree landbackers she hadn’t even known were in camp. They all made delighted noises and went off to catch up.

Eventually I was alone at the big communal table, my belly full and a warm feeling all through my body. I put on all my winter layers—I hadn’t brought nearly enough, but allies had donated winter gear by the bagload, with more arriving every week from across the country—and stepped out into the night.

A light snow was falling, crystals caught in the blue-white starlight. The moon was a sliver, the Milky Way as bright as a neon sign, the sky stretching forever, disappearing into the silhouettes of distant mountains.

The RVs and mobile homes and tents around me were mostly dark. A few glowed softly with lights from inside as their residents got ready for bed. Murmurs of conversation drifted by on the night wind with the snowflakes, as well as the rustle of wings from birds overhead and small critters in the brush.

I stopped for a moment and took it all in. I had to work the next day, and I really should be getting to bed, but I could spare five minutes for this. Did I mention it could be magic there?

Magic.

I was just about to head back to my tent when the night turned to high noon, a hard white light that came from all directions, accompanied by shouts and dogs barking from every direction. Between the barking and the overlapping shouts, the words were impossible to make out, but the meaning was clear: the cops are here and they’re going to kick the shit out of you.

As many things as were happening around me, even more things were happening inside me. Being Black in San Francisco, you learn that sound: it’s the sound of someone about to get beaten, arrested, maybe shot or choked in front of you. The first time the cops stop-and-frisked me was a week after my fifteenth birthday. They threw me on the ground on Valencia, just blocks from my high school, tore my shirt while they “patted me down” because I couldn’t move my handcuffed arms out of the way of their searching hands. Afterward they took my ID, told me I fit a description, and let me go. No one said sorry.

No one said sorry either when Oakland PD grabbed me less than a week after I moved into my first grown-up apartment all on my own in the East Bay. Not one apology, even though it left my mouth bleeding. Not when I went to the station house to lodge a complaint. Not when I went to the Community Police Review Agency after the desk sergeant somehow lost my paperwork. Not when my video about the violent “frisk” went viral—not because I showed how much pain it left me in, but because I forced myself to be icy cold, and laid out the truth so anyone could see it.

I have seen so many of my friends and comrades take hits from guys with badges, sometimes in broad daylight on a public street, sometimes in the night at a protest that’s been fenced off from the public and the press.

I don’t need to have police lights in my face, the bark of police dogs and their handlers in my ears for my breath to catch and my heart to race, for my thoughts to be overtaken by the overwhelming need to get away, get my friends away.

I know those feelings. They’re old friends. I’ve spent a lot of hours working on those feelings, recognizing the way they manifest in my body, teaching myself to consciously undo them as fast as they automatically manifest themselves. 

So even as I consciously slowed my breathing and relaxed my butt and shoulders, I was also taking stock of the situation, my organizer brain kicking in and going to the friends in the tents around me, how to make them safe and hold the people who’d come to hurt them to account.

I wanted to bring up my phone and start recording, but a little voice in my head reminded me of all the dead people whose phones had been “mistaken” for guns. I kept my hands where they were and moved slowly and deliberately back toward the nearest trailer. I strained to make out words amid the shouts, listening for someone to order me to freeze, fully intending to obey that order if it came. Blinded by the lights, it was impossible to tell if any of the shouts were directed at me.

I moved slowly, taking small, deliberate steps, raising each foot high and slow so I wouldn’t startle anyone. As ever when dealing with cops, it was the unarmed person, facing overwhelming force, who had to be careful not to scare the armed, armored, burly guys behind those spotlights.

I made it to the trailer. No one shouted at me. I sidled behind its corner, out of the light, and, keeping my hands at the same height, thumped on the door.

“Please, can I come in? It’s Tanisha from Oakland. I’m staying three tents down.” I said it loud, to be heard over the thumping. The trailer rocked a little as someone moved inside it. I was about to thump on the door again when it opened. It was dark inside the trailer, but I recognized the face that came into the light: it was Lucy Thunder, the first person I’d ever met in camp.

I felt a huge rush of relief just seeing her. She was such a rock, so calm, such a goddamned boss (in a good way), plugged into all the interpersonal relationships in camp, able to cool out arguments one minute and tell a story that reduced everyone who heard it to giggles the next. There were a lot of aunties in the camp, older Indigenous women whom everyone deferred to, but Lucy Thunder was the auntie the other aunties looked up to. It was irrational, but I really felt like if I was around her, I’d be okay.

Her trailer was homey and crowded, with framed family photos, neat stacking tubs of documents and clothing and ceremonial items, a couple of comfortable chairs, and boxes of extra food. Everyone knew that Lucy Thunder was the person to go to if you needed help with groceries, and also that she was the person to drop off an extra bag of groceries with if you could afford it.

She wasn’t alone in there. Her nephew Ryan was there, looking wide-eyed and keyed up, and so were two of the guys I often saw him with around camp, young Indigenous men who were always around, helping out in one way or another, vibrating with the need to just do something.

“Come in,” she said, closing the door behind me quickly and locking it. Ryan and his buddies shuffled around the little kitchen table so there’d be room for me in the tight space. “Are you hurt?”

I almost said no, reflexively, but then I actually took inventory of my body. I’d seen so many people get hurt and not know it, insisting that they were fine, just fine, right up to the moment when they fell down. I was okay. Shaken—shaking—but physically unhurt. The thunder of my heart and the overwhelming need to run away were still there, but I hadn’t been injured. Not physically, anyway.

Ryan’s buddies had their phones in their hands and were texting intensely. I thought about all the Cryptoparty trainings I’d attended, first as a learner and then as a trainer, and worried about what app they were using and who might be listening in on it.

One of the buddies—a guy in his late twenties who was very pretty but didn’t act like he realized it—looked up from his phone. “Rod says they’re making arrests. They brought buses. They’re grabbing everyone.”

Lucy Thunder clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Is Virginia all right?”

“She isn’t checking in,” Ryan said. His eyes and mouth were tight at the corners. “No one has seen her.”

Lucy Thunder closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them. “What about lawyers? Journalists?”

Ryan’s other buddy—much younger, with frightened eyes and a squeak in his voice—said, “ACLU and National Lawyers Guild are heading to the courthouse. But all the reporters from the big outfit left yesterday, looks like. There was a big press conference in Oklahoma City yesterday, something from the Department of Natural Resources.”

Lucy Thunder clucked her tongue again. I tried to set aside the itchy, buzzy, panicked feeling in my stomach and hands and think about this. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but this feels bad.”

“It does,” Lucy Thunder said.

“Internet’s down,” Ryan said.

My stomach hurt. It was getting harder to ignore the panicked feeling. I knew what happened after they turned off the Internet.

“We have to get out of here,” I blurted. I could tell I was hyperventilating. I made myself slow my breathing. It was so loud in my ears.

Lucy Thunder gave me a long, searching look, then squeezed around the table to my side and put her hand on my forearm and rubbed it a little. Once she had my attention—once I was looking into her eyes—she said, “It’s okay. It will be okay.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners, distorted by the thick lenses of her bifocals. “This isn’t the first time they’ve come for us and it won’t be the last. The calmer we are, the better we’ll be prepared for those people.” She handed me a banana. “Eat,” she said. We could still hear them barking, and their dogs barking, and none of it made any sense. “Those aren’t calm people.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re right.” Ryan and his friends unclenched their shoulders and fists and managed tight smiles at one another.

“Ryan, could you get that box down, please?” She pointed at an old cardboard box on the top shelf that ran around the little living room/kitchen. He put it on the table, and she opened it and produced a piece of electronic gear, as big as a dictionary, with a mic clipped to it, dangling a curly cable. She plugged the cable in and Ryan’s younger friend plugged in the power and Lucy Thunder turned it on and pressed some buttons. I heard the crackle of static and put it together: CB radio. She must have seen me figure it out, because she nodded at me and said, “Us old-timers were using these years before you could carry a phone in your pocket.”

I half expected her to break into CB jargon out of an old movie, but she held down the talk button and said, “Good evening, friends. This is Lucy Thunder. We are experiencing mass arrests here in the main Guthrie Creek occupation, and we don’t know if it’s state or local or federal. The police have dogs and helicopters and they have cut off our Internet. My niece, Virginia Thunder is missing, and I guess a lot of other friends and family are, too. We’re okay for now, but expecting trouble soon. We are nonviolent and unarmed. I hope you’re all okay. Over.”

She took her finger off the button and the static came back. “Hello, Lucy,” said a man’s voice, mixed with distant shouts. “This is Bob Murray, down here in Thacker Springs. If the cops you’re dealing with are the same ones passed through here about an hour ago, they’re county, but there were a lot of unmarked cars with them, fancy ones—black Escalades with dark windows. Got some pictures with my license-plate camera. You want me to put ’em on Facebook? Over.”

Lucy smiled. “Bob’s nosy, but he’s nice. Claims he’s descended from the first governor of Oklahoma and takes it personal when bad things happen in the state.” She held down the mic’s talk button. “That’d be nice of you Bob, thank you. I don’t know that it’ll make much of a difference to us right now, but if someone can figure out who they are, it might help our lawyers when we come up for bail in an hour or two. Over.”

“I’ll do it right now, Lucy. You stay safe, okay? Over.”

“I will, Bob. Over.”

The minute her finger came off the talk button, another voice burst in, male, angry, just saying as many swear words as he could come up with. When he ran out, he switched to slurs. Lucy calmly turned the volume down and waited for him to finish. “FCC are supposed to track down people who do that kind of thing, but they never do, not when it’s like that. That joker’s been on our band for months, ever since the Oklahoma Strong ads started running.”

Those were astroturf ads, featuring videos of “regular Oklahomans” talking about how important oil was to them, and how much they just loooved pipelines. We found videos in which these same people said the same things, but in ads for Texans for a Smart Energy Policy, and again in Michigan Strong ads. Those everyday Oklahomans sure got around—but it didn’t matter to some people. They shared and liked the ads like crazy, and the fact that this was obvious paid political disinformation didn’t seem to matter to the guy with the CB radio or his friends.

The guy wound down and a new voice came on the radio—another older woman’s voice, an Indian Country accent. “This is Angel Halftown. We’ve got some hurt people here. Dog bites and a broken arm, and a lot of trouble breathing. One person with a bad asthma attack from gas. Are there any medics on the channel? We could sure use some help. Over.”

The older of Ryan’s friends held out his hand. “Angel, this is Bobby Montour. I can come to you.”

Lucy Thunder took the mic back from Bobby. “Bobby is here with me, Angel. I can tell him where to find you. Are you at home? Over.”

“No, I’m at—” She stopped herself. “Do you know where we held school when it was still a little warmer? The little place? Over.”

“I know the place,” Lucy said. “I’ll send Bobby by. Do you need anything else? Food? Water?”

“We’re okay for now. Thank you, Lucy. Thank you, Bobby. Over.”

Bobby pulled out a backpack that had been wedged between the two-seat sofa and a little end table while Lucy gave him directions. He unzipped the pack and did a quick inventory of his medical supplies, then zipped it shut and struggled into his coat, tube scarf, goggles, hat, a vest with a red cross on the back and over the breast, and then a pair of heavy-duty snowmobile gloves. Ryan doused the lights and then opened the door, and Bobby shrugged on his pack, bent low, and scurried outside. Ryan closed the door quickly but quietly, his breath fogging in the cold air that rushed in.

When the lights were back on again, we all looked at one another for a moment in silence. The barking dogs and shouting from outside had been fading in and out as the cops moved in on the camp, breaking up their lines. I thought about Bobby dodging them in the snow, and how frightening that must be, then realized that being trapped in the trailer with nowhere to run when the cops came banging on the door would be just as frightening.

The CB crackled again. “Lucy, Bobby just arrived safe and sound. Thanks for sending him. Over.”

Lucy smiled and we whooshed out the breath we’d been holding. She held down the talk button. “Thank you, Angel. Tell him we love him and good luck.”

MARCUS

The paradox of being a privacy freak is you have to understand how surveillance works. How can you protect your privacy if you don’t know how it gets violated?

But knowing how privacy violations happen isn’t the root of the paradox. The real paradox is the temptation to violate other people’s privacy, for what always seems like a noble cause.

I knew the police had moved in on the Guthrie Creek camp about ten seconds after the people in the camp did, thanks to the livestreams, and I was watching when the feeds went dead. I picked up and signal boosted the alt feeds that came in over Facebook (ugh) from the CB relay, and I followed and boosted a couple of independent journalists’ drone feeds until they, too, went dead.

Then I fretted.

Being on the sidelines is hard. The only thing worse than watching your friends get brutalized is knowing they’re being brutalized, but having no way to know where or how. My imagination has a much higher polygon count than the highest-budget torture-porn CGI, and I’m much better at coming up with horrifying scenarios than the most demented writers’ room. When I do nothing, my brain fills the emptiness with a lot of bad things that don’t do anyone any good, especially me.

I dug. The local law were blaming the raid on “vandalism” and “ecoterrorism” on the pipeline, citing massive spills and leaks in the pipeline’s tributaries, which they said were only possible because of the sensor leaks from the previous week. They blamed the Water Protectors for millions in lost oil and habitat damage. It was bullshit. Water Protectors don’t commit ecocide. That’s kind of the whole point. And I knew it was bullshit, but I also knew that there were plenty of people who just needed any excuse to justify rounding up the whole camp, throwing everyone in jail, throwing away the key, and scraping the camp to the dirt.

I knew it was bullshit. I even knew how to prove it.

Here’s a thing you might not know unless you’re a privacy freak: your phone doesn’t just leak your data to the phone company, or Apple, or Google. Your apps gobble up your location like crazy, from Tinder to that app that connects to the no-name fitness tracker you got for Christmas and never wear.

Some of these apps are in the location-selling business. They suck up your location data and sell it to brokers, or marketers, or cops who don’t want to hassle with a warrant.

But many apps aren’t even in the location business! They were written by coders who downloaded a “free” development kit that made it a lot easier to write an app that doesn’t crash and passes all the app-store quality tests. The catch is, these toolkits suck up location data as fast as you generate it and send it back to the toolkit developer, who packages it up for brokers, marketers, and cops.

And then there’s your phone company. Supposedly, all the U.S. carriers have gotten out of the location-selling business. That’s what they told Congress and the press after the last scandal, when they turned out to be selling the data they collected for billing and network management—about who was connected to which tower, and when, and for how long—to marketing companies, brokers, and cops.

They got busted and they promised they would stop. But that’s what they said two years before, when they got busted doing the same thing. And the time before that. Like the old comedy sketch goes, “We’re the phone company, we don’t have to care.”

You will not be surprised to learn that they never stopped.

They say location data is “anonymized”—that when you get a spreadsheet whose first column is a random number (an “identifier”) and the rest of the rows are latitude/longitude pairs and timestamps where the person whose name has been replaced with that identifier was seen.

But that’s not really “anonymized.” It’s “de-identified.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the random identifier that goes from your home to your office and back every day is you. It’s not much harder to map one identifier from one dataset onto the corresponding identifier in a different dataset. It takes about fifteen minutes to write a program that compares two spreadsheets to see if any of rows share three or more place/time combinations. You can even do it as an Excel macro.

If you must.

Recap: your phone carrier, the company that made your phone, the company that made your ‘OS, the companies that make your apps, and the companies that made the tools those apps were built with are all collecting your location, pretty much all the time, and selling it for cheap to whatever scumbag presents themselves. The market for location can be place-based (“give me the location history of everyone who was at this place”) or person-based (“give me all the locations and times this identifier is associated with”). It can be both (“tell me everyone who was at this place, then tell me all the places they went”).

The datasets are cheap as hell. Whatever one set doesn’t cover, a different one probably covers. It’s super easy to merge datasets.

Got that? Oh, one more thing: your location history is incredibly compromising. It can reveal your substance abuse, extramarital affairs, medical conditions . . . and your criminal conspiracies.

Here’s the thing.

Someone sabotaged KEEP’s feeder pipelines, around the time that the data about the busted sensors leaked. Attribution is hard. I might never be able to figure out who leaked that data.

But I could probably figure out who sabotaged the pipelines, assuming they took their phone with them when they did it.

TANISHA

Lucy Thunder worked that CB like a maestra. She coaxed the people holed up in other trailers and cars into producing cogent, factual accounts of what the cops were doing, and then made sure the people off-site, like Bob Murray, were getting it all for Facebook posts. She cleared the air so the people off-site could read important replies from the comments.

I don’t know what I’d have done if not for Lucy Thunder’s calm voice in the trailer and the crackling replies from the radio. Every time I got that gonna-puke shaky feeling of being locked in a flimsy building surrounded by angry, armed, and armored men, I just focused in on that voice. We could hear people screaming outside—people being sprayed or dogbit or just armlocked and dragged through the snow, close and then distant, and the dry pop of gas grenades, and without the voices from the radio narrating what it looked like, my imagination would have run wild with horrors.

But then the voices started to disappear, one at a time. They’d say something, give us an “over” and then . . . not come back. Finally, we heard a raid come on-air: we were talking to Zacu, a Bolivian guy, over the radio, calling in from the trailer of a tribal administrator, the bookkeeper for the band. Zacu had the presence of mind to hold down the talk button while the cops broke down the door and burst in, screaming orders and smashing things. We heard it all, including the thump of flesh on flesh and the sound of a woman’s voice calling out in pain. Everyone on the channel heard it. Someone in the police organization must have been listening in, because one of the cops shouted, “He’s on the CB, get the CB,” and the channel went dead. Bob Murray’s voice came over the channel a minute later: “Officers, I’m uploading that audio to Facebook right now. Just so you know.” He sounded shaken.

Finally, there was no one on the air except for Bob Murray and us, and Ryan and his pal kept looking at each other.

“Auntie,” Ryan said at last, his voice soft. “Auntie, I think it’s time to go.”

Lucy Thunder looked around the trailer, and then at each of us. “You’re right,” she said. “Dress up warm, all right? Thick layers.” Unsaid: to protect you from blows and dog bites.

We put on our winter gear, layer upon layer. I was soaked with cold sweat and as I pulled on my thermal top and then my coat, scarf, and hat, it heated up into a hot, slick mess. The dim light in the trailer made it all feel like a dream and, for a moment, it was like I was floating up on the ceiling, looking down on us as we suited up in the crowded trailer. Then Lucy Thunder took my gloved hand in her small, wrinkled, calloused one and squeezed it through the fabric of my glove, and I returned to my body. She smiled at me and I smiled back. “Thank you for letting me stay here with you tonight,” I said.

“Thank you for being here,” she said, and let go of my hand so she could put on her gloves. She turned to Ryan and his friend, who were completely covered in layers of snow gear now, no skin showing except the slit around their eyes. “Are you ready?” she asked them.

They nodded. Ryan gave her a brief hug.

“Peaceful, now,” she told us all and we nodded back.

She opened the trailer door.

MARCUS

The location data came as a bunch of spreadsheets that I had to munge to make sense of. First, I eliminated the identifiers of people who hadn’t been to each of the sabotage sites within two weeks of the report. Then I cross-referenced the different sheets to eliminate duplicates, assuming anyone who had six or more identical time/location fixes was actually the same person with a different identifier.

That narrowed it down to just eight people. I sorted that list by people who’d visited all the sites within a forty-eight-hour window, and now there were just two names. I bought their full location history for six months back.

The total bill was under $100. I put it on a prepaid Visa card I bought at a Walgreens. I mapped the two location histories. They went from a Residence Inn to a KEEP drilling office, then to a state trooper outpost. A couple of times, they went to the camp. Those times coincided with police raids.

My two guys—I was betting on guys, given the composition of the security forces I’d seen on the videos—were living in company housing, probably with a bunch of other guys. I could buy location data for the Residence Inn and find people who also went to the KEEP drilling office if I wanted an accurate count of how many people were working for KEEP, how often they changed shifts, and whether they were adding personnel or sending them home.

But I didn’t care about these guys’ coworkers right now. I wanted to know more about them. I bought more data, data on their location going back six more months. One of my guys just bopped around from Residence Inn to Residence Inn, except for a three-week stretch when he went to Chicago O’Hare and disappeared and then popped back up again at Dallas Fort Worth, which I guessed was an overseas trip.

The other guy, though, had flown to Oklahoma City from a Maryland suburb, where he’d pretty much stayed put for months, going back and forth from a house—Google Street View showed it to be a McMansion with a basketball hoop over the garage and a Hummer parked out front and a lawn flag reading happy st. patrick’s day!, which gave me an idea of the image’s vintage—and an office building with a whole bunch of small LLCs headquartered in it.

I used a reverse phone book site to get the names associated with that address, then punched the two adults—one man, one woman—into LinkedIn, and confirmed that the man was in “private security” and “domestic counterinsurgency” and that he had a history in oil and gas engineer support and a degree in mechanical engineering from UNC (class of 2007).

Gavin Nixon was my guy, Pipeline Saboteur #1.

What about the other guy? He wasn’t much harder. He’d been on the road for six months, but a year ago he’d spent four months in a Houston suburb, leaving town only for short domestic flights, mostly to Dallas. The house he returned to every night had two adult residents, a Dale Ridenhour, and a woman. The man’s LinkedIn profile had him working in “domestic counterinsurgency” and “pipeline security” and sharing several job-history overlaps with Nixon. They were partners. Out of curiosity, I looked up both Ridenhour and the woman at Ridenhour’s old Houston address on Facebook. She gave her relationship status as “divorced.” His was “It’s complicated.” I guess it’s hard to maintain a good marriage when one partner’s on the road all the time.

Or maybe he was just a sociopath and being married to him was a living hell.

TANISHA

We filed out of the trailer. Lucy Thunder insisted on going first, pushing Ryan behind her.

“What if they attack you?” he hissed, his breath fogging in the cold air that filled the trailer.

“I’m an old lady. They don’t think I’m a threat. But you young guys—one look at you and it’ll be open fire, gas, and beanbag rounds and the dogs. So I’ll go first.”

But what if they attack you anyway? We were all thinking it, me and Ryan and his bud. But none of us said it because of course, Lucy Thunder understood that possibility, too, and she was willing to take the risk, and none of us were going to tell her not to.

We formed up in the snow outside the trailer and Lucy Thunder carefully reached back in and turned off the last light and then locked the door, like she was stepping out for an evening in town. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a flashlight, aimed it at her stomach, and turned it on, creating a bright ring of light. She swung the light in front of her, projecting a long beam through the light flurries of snowflakes, arcing twenty yards ahead of her before it painted an elongated white oval on the snowy ground. She swept the light back and forth, back and forth, and began to crunch forward in the snow.

We followed her, a step behind her. Our boots crunched and our breath rasped. Far away, we heard a dog bark, heard a policeman’s yell. The light swept: side to side, side to side.

We turned the corner around the trailer and the main circle of the camp came into view, empty, with trampled footprints in the new snow and a pair of state trooper cars and three more unmarked black SUVs flashing in the slow sweep of Lucy Thunder’s flashlight. There came a series of metallic clicks that I initially took for a firing squad’s worth of guns being cocked, but I realized that it was the door latches on those cars popping all at once, and then an instant later, a dozen men were standing in the snow in front of the cars, facing us down.

“Evening, officers,” Lucy Thunder said, mild as milk. I almost laughed. The cops clearly had no idea what to make of this. One of them grabbed for his sidearm—I flinched involuntarily—and then left his hand on the holster. Two more snapped flashlights off their tactical belts and stabbed us in the face with ultrabright cones of light. We all squinted and shaded our eyes.

“Hands where I can see them,” one shouted, just as another shouted, “Hands on your head,” and a third shouted, “Get on the ground, now!”

Lucy made a snort as soft as a kitten’s sneeze and said, “Which one is it, officers?”

The cops held a muttered conference and one of them stepped forward. He was in body armor and thermals, with nightscopes on his helmet, a bouquet of restraint straps on his hip, and a bandolier of pepper spray across his chest. “You all just stay there and stay still,” he said, and led a squad of five men to us. They took us in twos, patting us down and strapping us up. The pair that grabbed me was rougher than they had to be, and the one who did the thigh sweep made a point of punching me in the crotch. Even through snow pants and thermals, it made me yelp. I saw one of our guys start toward me out of the corner of my eye and the next thing I knew, he was face down in the snow with three guys kneeling on him. One had a can of bear spray out, pointed directly into his face. “Stop resisting,” they shouted, right on cue.

I froze up. I’d been through this too many times and I knew what would happen next, the cruelty and the spectacle. The point wasn’t just to maim the person they beat up, the point was to make the rest of us watch, so we would know what was coming to us if we were unlucky enough to end up on the ground and under their knee ourselves.

“Stop resisting,” the one with the bear spray yelled, thumbing the lid off the canister. My tongue was so big it filled my whole mouth and my throat was so perfectly dry that I could only sip tiny amounts of air. I couldn’t possibly shout and tell them stop. Not with my body shaking the way it was.

“That’s quite enough,” came a loud voice. Surprisingly loud, loud enough to carry over the men’s voices. Or maybe it was just the quality of that voice, the authority. It was Lucy Thunder’s voice.

“That’s enough,” she repeated. She’d pulled her tube scarf down around her chin so that her face was visible, every wrinkle shadowed by the harsh beams of the SUV headlights. She knew how to project. I had friends in high school who could do that, theater kids; it was like a party trick for them, sending their voices across the lunchroom without ever straining or shouting. It stopped everything.

The guy with the spray cannister looked at her. Everyone looked at her, even Ryan, turning his face in the snow, straining against the knees in his back.

“Let him up,” she said. “He’s not resisting. He’s just a boy. You don’t spray a helpless boy in the face. No one should do that.” She stared at the men who were holding Ryan down, locking eyes with each of them in turn. “Let him up,” she said again.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” said the guy holding the spray cannister. He leaned over so that the spray was pointed directly into Ryan’s face, just a few inches away from it. I couldn’t see his expression under his balaclava, but the way his eyes lit up made me sure that he was about to enjoy this. Ryan flinched back, squeezing his eyes shut and squinching up his face in anticipation of the agony about to come.

“Come on, Dave,” one of the other men said. Dave shrugged and pressed the trigger. Ryan’s howls were terrible, and they turned into choking, tortured gasps. I was shaking so hard that the guy who’d cuffed me and punched me in the crotch grabbed me by the arm to keep me from falling to my knees. I almost thanked him by reflex, because I really would have gone down without his bracing me. I bit it back and looked at him and he was wide-eyed, even scared-looking. None of these guys liked what Dave was doing, but they weren’t going to stop him.

Lucy Thunder was, though. The cop who’d been holding on to her must have been distracted by the chaos, because she was able to break free and race three steps through the snow, hands cuffed behind her back, and body-slam Dave, sending him sprawling and his bear spray skittering across the frozen ground.

The other cops weren’t willing to stop Dave from spraying Ryan in the face point-blank, but they knew what to do when an old lady laid out one of their own. In an instant, Lucy Thunder went down under a pile of writhing, punching men. An instant later, I wrenched my arm away from the cop who held me and ran to the pile-on, blindsiding a cop as he reared back to punch her.

I got a knee in, and then wound up for a kick, and then I was tackled to the ground. As I opened my mouth to grunt, I got a point-blank stream of pepper spray right down my throat.

MARCUS

The thing about righteous surveillance is that it feels great. I should have been horrified by how easy it was to backtrace and identify Ridenhour and Nixon, but instead, I felt like an avenging angel.

The only nag of conscience I felt was, What if I’m wrong? Was I really sure that these were the right guys? After all, they were corporate spooks working for KEEP, so they had cause to go to KEEP’s pipelines.

But these were the only two people who’d carried switched-on mobile phones to the sites where the sabotage had occurred, and they had traveled to the sites together.

But I had to be sure. Really sure. If I doxed these two and it turned out that they were just the guys who’d had the rotation to inspect those sites that month, it would just look like some Water Protector–sympathizing hacker had set them up. It would look like that happened because that would be what happened.

I had to do more spying.

I traveled through time, back a year, then eighteen months. I pulled the identifiers for every person who’d been at those sites. It was a bigger file, but not a much bigger file. Once those pipelines were laid, they didn’t see a lot of traffic. I checked to see whether there was anything like a regular maintenance roster that these guys could have been a part of. I checked to see whether anyone went from any of KEEP’s offices to the pipelines on the reg. Nope, nope, and nope. Nixon and Ridenhour were an anomaly. They went out to the pipelines, the pipelines leaked. Just to put a button on it, I checked to see whether they ever went to other feeder pipes for the KEEP pipeline, places that didn’t spring mysterious leaks, and nope, these guys were not pipeline enthusiasts who spent a lot of time visiting pipelines and taking pictures for their scrapbooks.

And then I did the other thing.

Nixon made a lot of one-hour visits to a specific massage parlor. It had been years since SESTA/FOSTA had shut down Backpage.com but I was able to find reviews of the place that made it clear what kind of massage place it was. He also spent three hours every Sunday at the nearest Church of Latter-day Saints, without fail.

Ridenhour, meanwhile, was awfully fond of Indian casinos, and he had a fascinating pattern. Before heading out, he’d visit a strip mall store where they advertised secure safe-deposit boxes. Some nights, he’d leave before midnight. If it was one of those nights, then the next day he’d head out to the safe-deposit box first thing in the morning. Other nights, he’d stay until dawn, five or six in the morning. He wouldn’t visit the safe-deposit box the next day.

Nights when he won, he quit early and deposited his winnings. Nights when he lost, he stayed at the tables until he was completely cleaned out. I wondered if the IRS knew about whatever was in that safe-deposit box of his.

Kompromat is like Pringles. Once you start, you can’t stop. Nixon liked to visit a neighborhood known for its meth epidemic. Ridenhour really liked a certain diner. Reviews said it made the best apple pie in the state. Nixon visited a grave twice a year.

Almost by accident, I figured out where Nixon’s parents and sister lived. I was checking out where his older son went to school when I made myself stop.

I looked at my screen, at my file of notes, at my hands on the keyboard. Whose hands were those again? Who had been typing all those commands and clicking all those links? I rewound my memory of the last few minutes (jolting when I realized it was actually the last few hours) and realized I’d been humming and chortling under my breath.

I had an overpowering urge to leap back from the computer, knocking over my chair and flipping the table. Instead, I very carefully stood, put my lid down, and listened for the sound of the fans switching off that told me the disks were parked and encrypted, and then I left the house and went for a long, long walk.

TANISHA

There were a lot of us in the cells. I wasn’t the only one whose lips and eyes were swollen to comical proportions. Some people had it worse. One woman couldn’t open her eyes at all, and was sipping air through a windpipe that had all but swollen shut. Two women sat to either side of her, taking turns holding their ear to her chest and gently pinching her noise and blowing into her mouth when she stopped breathing.

It was terrifying the first time it happened, but the fifth or sixth time, it became routine. You know how they say, “Don’t normalize this?” It’s bullshit. Everything gets normalized. You talk to prisoners in solitary, hostages, women trapped in violent marriages, they’ll all tell you: it gets normal. Normal is whatever happens normally. Normal doesn’t mean good or acceptable, but no matter how bad it feels, it’s gonna feel normal, too. That lady who kept nearly suffocating to death? It got normal.

That was what broke me, when I finally got a bail hearing and got released into the cold dawn light and the steaming cloud of supporters and recently sprung jailbirds outside of the sheriff’s jail: the realization that the thing I felt like I’d forgotten was to check whether that lady was about to die.

God damn it, normal isn’t the same as good. Normal can be terrible.

I looked and looked for Lucy Thunder, or Ryan, or his friends. They weren’t anywhere. Maybe they’d been sprung earlier. Maybe they hadn’t been sprung yet. No one knew, not the lawyers who’d descended on the courthouse next door, not the protesters who’d showed up in solidarity, not my fellow ex-jailbirds.

Trish found me wandering from group to group, trying to find Lucy Thunder. I couldn’t let go of the idea that it was my job to find her.

The third time I asked Trish about it, she said, “Tanisha, girl, look at me. You’re in shock. I promise you I’ll make sure people are looking for Lucy Thunder, if you promise you’ll come home and eat and drink something and then get some sleep. Deal?”

I focused on her. She looked really worried. I felt bad for her. I was really worried, too. I could sympathize.

There were tears in her eyes now. “Tanisha!” she said, giving me a little shake. The world seemed to come into better focus. I understood what she was asking of me because I understood how I’d been acting—what had been normalized for me. I closed my eyes and breathed in for a four count, held it for a four count, and exhaled for a four count. Again. Again. I opened my eyes.

“Thank you, yes. I want to rest. Thank you.”

MARCUS

I had that file sitting on my screen for the longest time. I’d started compiling it because I knew that no Water Protector had sabotaged the pipeline, and I knew how to prove it. I’d kept going because the more I got to know Nixon and Ridenhour the more I wanted to fuck them up. Now I felt dirty and ashamed.

The Water Protector Legal Collective web page directed me to a small firm in Tulsa that was doing pro bono defense for the Guthrie Creek defenders. Darwin Skinner’s bio said he grew up on a reservation in North Dakota, had gotten his JD at Brooklyn Law, and was accepting donations to help cover the costs of his defense of an ever-growing roster of clients charged with an ever-growing list of crimes.

He also had a SecureDrop address.

SecureDrop is tricky to set up and maintain, but done right, it lets people like me send documents in ways that can’t be intercepted or traced. Mostly it gets used by newsrooms, but a few of the smarter lawyers—the kind of lawyer who understands that their threat model includes police, government, and private surveillance—have stood up servers like this. I had no way to know whether Skinner’s was actually doing all the SecureDrop stuff you’re supposed to do, like keeping the decryption keys on a separate computer with no Internet connection that only trusted people can physically access, but the mere fact that this guy had figured out what SecureDrop was, that he needed it, and that he should set it up put him in the top 0.01 percent of the lawyers I’d ever dealt with.

I spent a lot of time pondering my dataset. I’d bought all my location data with burner credit cards over Tor links, and I’d done all my searching the same way, using a laptop I’d booted into Tails, a privacy OS that saves no trace of your activity after you shut it down. Someone trying to figure out where this data came from might be able to figure out who sold it to me, and piece together a profile of their adversary as someone who used about a dozen specific services. I wondered how many other people used exactly those dozen services. Would it be enough to fingerprint me? In retrospect, I wished I’d bought redundant datasets from multiple providers, every one I could find, just to blur that fingerprint a little. Woulda-shoulda-coulda.

The data was all in spreadsheet form. I exported it to plain text, comma-separated values. I took all my free-form notes and ran them through a translation tool to convert them to Russian, then German, then back to English, then cleaned up the syntax enough to make the meaning clear, if not perfectly grammatical. I have a pretty distinctive writing style and there are a lot of freely available samples of it online for anyone who wanted to automatically fingerprint it.

I checked over my document one more time, opening it in a text editor to make sure that there were no hidden characters or other potential identifiers left over from exporting it. Finally, I changed the file’s timestamp to midnight on January 1, 1970—the earliest time that Unix systems could use.

I looked at the clock. It was three in the afternoon, which made it 6 p.m. in New York, 11 p.m. in the UK, midnight in most of Europe and, uh, let’s see, 7 a.m. in Japan. That was a little too specifically west coast. I set an alarm for midnight, which is a more Eurasian time, far, far from me. I’d send the file then.

TANISHA

I woke up in a strange bed, surrounded by strange people. The cops had destroyed most of the camp’s tents and wrecked several trailers and vans. Everyone who came back to the camp ended up piling into the remaining trailers, sleeping on air mattresses or pillows or bare floor, sharing blankets.

The blinds were drawn but I could see weak light peeking through them. The air in the trailer was hot and stifling, a space heater laboring in the corner and making the room as arid as a desert. I stood up and found my boots and jacket (rolled up as a pillow) and carried them to the doorway, picking my way carefully over the sleeping bodies, then shrugged on the jacket and stuffed my feet into my boots, and let myself out quickly.

It was twilight; a whole day come and gone while I slept, and the cold was so sharp and sudden that I gasped and the air got stuck in my throat for a second. I hurriedly fished in my pockets for my wool hat and my Gore-Tex gloves and then fumbled my boots’ zippers until they were snug. Properly attired, I took another deep breath and this time, the cold was bracing, a relief from the trailer’s stifling closeness. As my chest expanded, I stretched my arms out, then over my head, and worked the stiffness out of my neck, which made satisfying crackles as I rocked my head from side to side.

“You look well rested,” said a voice from out of my past. I forced myself not to jump, but rather, to turn slowly, eyes narrowed.

“Hi, Brendan,” I said. “I thought you weren’t welcome here anymore.”

He’d changed his tight-laced paratrooper boots for salt-crusted all-weather versions, and he’d swapped his motley, patched jacket for a $1,000 Canada Goose parka. He’d grown a short, precisely trimmed beard and he was holding a fancy metal vape pen with a gloved hand, an oversized, ostentatiously tactical watch strapped to his wrist.

He vaped and expelled a fat cloud, then shrugged. “It’s a free country,” he said. “No one stopped me.”

“I think you’d better go,” I said. “I’m stopping you.”

He snorted. “You gonna throw me out? Get a couple of your antifa super-soldiers to give me the bum-rush?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to pretend you don’t exist.” I stepped down off the trailer’s stoop and

set off. I was disoriented—so much of the camp had been destroyed that it was hard to get my bearings—but I eventually figured out where I was and set off for the mess hall, figuring there might be people there who’d want help with dinner and who might also help me evict Brendan.

Brendan, meanwhile, stuck close.

“Where you going?” he said. I ignored him. I did not pick up my pace. Just pretended like he didn’t exist, exactly as I’d promised.

“I think you want to talk to me, Tanisha,” he said. “I really think you do. I have an offer for you.” I kept moving. The mess hall should be right around this corner and—

“I know where they’re holding Lucy Thunder. Heard you asking about her when they sprung you. She’s a friend of yours, huh?”

I turned the corner. The mess hall—a double-wide with a couple of lean-tos attached to it for storage and prep space—was gone. All that remained was a ruin, the double-wide’s walls buckled and broken by a battering ram, the lean-tos smashed, the food stores scattered.

I stopped, and Brendan caught up with me. “I got Impossible Burgers in the car,” he said. “You’re a vegan, right?”

I looked at him. He was grinning. He was really enjoying this, bouncing a little on his heels, puffing out more huge vape clouds. His vape smelled like butterscotch. I wondered what kind of crystalline structures the volatile organic compounds were creating in his lungs.

“You don’t have to get in the car. I get it. I’ll set up a picnic on the tailgate.”

“I don’t want your food,” I said. My stomach rumbled. I saw a few people moving in the twilight distance. I wanted to go talk to them. But I wanted to know where Lucy Thunder was. And I was hungry.

MARCUS

I set an alarm for myself to check into the lawyer’s SecureDrop again at midnight, to keep the time zones consistent.

I was doing some contract work, a penetration test on a homeless advocacy nonprofit’s new intranet. Normally, they weren’t the kind of organization that could afford to pay me to do that kind of work, and I’d offered them a steep discount, but they’d gotten a grant to ensure their security and it was paying for my work. “A lot of our clients are abuse survivors, and we want to make sure their private information doesn’t leak.”

I wanted to make sure of that, too, so after I did all the usual things I’d do to test a site’s integrity—basically running through a checklist of known vulnerabilities for their software and OS—I got creative with it and came up with a bunch of ideas, some of them truly clever, some just harebrained and weird, to see if I could make something break in a way that I could exploit. None of it worked, which meant that they were secure against anyone stupider than me.

I was writing them a report explaining this when my Signal notifier pinged. Ange was in Sacramento doing some security trainings with community groups and I assumed it was her, so I unlocked my phone.

> can i talk to you f2f

It was timbit. I hadn’t heard from them in months, not since we’d had that fight about talking to the FBI. I considered muting them, but when someone uses an encrypted messenger to ask for a face-to-face meeting, it usually means they want to talk about something important and sensitive, the kind of thing that you wouldn’t even send over an encrypted channel.

> today?

> if possible

> can you come to me?

> where

> outer sunset

A long pause. I decided that if they weren’t willing to come to me, I’d blow them off. Getting from the Outer Sunset all the way to the Presidio on transit was a giant pain in the ass and a taxi would cost $40. This was their deal, let them cross the whole city to do something about it.

> yeah ok

Even without punctuation, I could tell they weren’t happy about it.

I met them at a coffee shop near my house where the staff knew me well enough to serve me a cold brew without my having to ask. I had barely had a chance to sip it when timbit came through the door, looking even more squirrelly than usual—they were an old punk, now in their sixties, with a thinning gray floppy mohawk, semi-healed piercings, and a habitual sour expression that was overlaid with a coating of fear and guilt. They spotted me from the doorway and crooked their finger at me and backed out again. Real subtle, timbit.

I followed them out into the street, and they walked off a distance from the cafe entrance before whispering, “Did you bring your phone?”

“Yes,” I said. Out of deference to their paranoia, I whispered. I have asked plenty of people to indulge my paranoia over the years, it would be unfair not to take theirs seriously.

“Do you have somewhere you can leave it?”

Ugh. “We can walk over to my house and I’ll lock it inside.”

“Perfect,” they said. We walked in tense silence and he waited at the curb while I ditched my phone and came back out.

“Let’s walk,” they said, and we set off. The ocean is only three blocks from our place and I naturally steered us in that direction, both because looking at the ocean chills me out and I needed chilling out, and because the sound of the ocean made a good white-noise confounder for any mics.

We took off our shoes at the beach’s edge and walked out into the sand.

“Look,” they said, “I want to start by apologizing for being so dismissive the last time we spoke, about that FBI thing. It was a bad time for both of us and I wasn’t thinking about what it was like for you. Plus I was incredibly pissed off at myself because it was my own idiot fault.”

I snorted. “It was your fault, and it was idiotic.” They didn’t say anything to that. Which was good, because if they’d defended themselves, I would have blown the fuck up. I would say that I was surprisingly angry about the whole thing, except I wasn’t surprised by it. They’d made a stupid mistake and never even apologized, and then acted like I was overreacting. Worse still, I was right—no one should talk to the FBI ever.

“But it’s okay,” I said. “I do stupid shit, too. Everyone does.” I didn’t mean it, but I wanted to mean it, which is almost as good.

“Thanks,” they said. We trudged down the beach, the sand in our toes. They opened their mouth and closed it a couple times. Finally: “You know those ransomware attacks.”

I got a sudden attack of the cold grue, that feeling like all the blood in my head rushed into my stomach. Before they said the next thing, I knew what it would be.

“You know the KEEP pipeline?”

TANISHA

Brendan’s car was a salt-spattered black Escalade. He popped the hatchback and unpacked a hot box, breaking out paper plates and piling them with sweet potato fries and steaming burgers on brioche rolls, and a little mountain of condiment wrappers.

“I stopped at the Whole Foods on the way,” he said, grinning. “They got ’em everywhere now. It’s pricey, but I’m on an expense account.” He passed me a paper plate so laden with food that it sagged in the middle. My mouth was flooded with saliva. I took the plate in my gloved hands, then worked one glove off with my teeth, balling it into a pocket and then taking a cautious bite of the burger.

It was soggy and lukewarm, and the fake meat had started to turn into slime. There was too much sweet ketchup—it oozed out of the burger and turned the snow at my feet into a messy crime scene—and there weren’t any onions.

It was amazing.

I hadn’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, and I’d been through a hell of a lot since then. Stress burns calories; I’m sure I read that somewhere. Even as my body experienced a head-to-toe moment of food-induced bliss, a little voice was nagging me that it didn’t take a genius to figure out that plying someone who’s been beaten, sprayed, locked up, and traumatized with food is a great way to get them to put their guard down. I reassured the voice that I was capable of both keeping my guard up and finishing this burger, and the fries, which were also cold and soggy and indescribably delicious.

I licked my fingers clean and instantly regretted it as they went icy cold. I hastily retrieved my glove and stuffed my hand back in it, swiped at my face, and pulled my tube scarf up to my nose. I looked at Brendan. Beneath his beard, his face was ruddy, and he grinned broadly as he took a hit off his vape pen. I smelled skunk. Sure, why not. He’d already been kicked out for smoking weed and told not to come back, and he’d come back anyway. Why not smoke weed again?

He offered me the vape and I pretended not to see it.

“Thanks for lunch,” I said, and started to walk away. I didn’t want to be around this guy, his grin, his beard, and especially not his drugs.

He slipped in front of me. “Look, Tanisha, don’t be like that. I came here to find you, specifically, because I think you’re better than the people you’re throwing in with here. They’ve done some bad shit. I don’t want you to go down with the rest of these savages.”

I should have kept walking, but it was such a ludicrous thing to say, so totally offensive, that I rose to the bait. “Brendan, you were here as an undercover provocateur. An obvious one. Everyone knew. I knew ten seconds after I met you in the airport. Sabotage? You were the one trying to convince people to commit sabotage—worse than that. You kept telling people that we should bring weapons to protests and ‘fight back.’ If I was ‘kind’ to you, it’s only because my mother raised me to have manners, not because you deserve kindness.”

He took another hit off his vape, put his hand up. “Fair. But I didn’t make anyone do anything, I just suggested it. I’m not the only one, either. The savages here—”

“Use that word again and I’ll slap it out of your fool mouth.” I said it without intending to, but to this day I’m proud I did. He snorted and rolled his eyes. But he didn’t say the word again.

“The people here don’t care who they hurt, who they put in danger, just so long as they get their way.”

I was tired. I shouldn’t have risen to the bait. I did anyway. “Are you joking? Brendan, if there’s anyone in this whole fucked-up situation who has demonstrated that they don’t care about public safety, it’s KEEP and every psycho who comes out here to defend them. Jesus, how can you stand there, your pockets full of money from a company that’s running a leaky-ass oil pipeline through other people’s homes, through the river where they get their drinking water, through old-growth forests and grazing lands? A company that sends armed thugs to beat the shit out of us, gas us, and trash our things?”

He shook his head and he vaped and his expression was pure, smug dismissal. I wanted to smack him.

I didn’t.

“That’s all bullshit. No oil, no energy. No energy, no civilization. KEEP knows what it’s doing, it’s got permits, it’s got engineers, and it’s doing what needs to be done to keep the lights on. Everyone’s lights. What are you and these—” I could see the word “savages” start to form on his lips and then watched him suck it back. “—these people going to do if all the oil shuts down?”

“If this is all so safe, why aren’t they running it through a city where rich white people live? Why don’t they ever run it through a nice white suburb? Where do you live, Brendan? How many pipelines run through your backyard?”

He rolled his eyes. “Race, race, race. White people white people white people. Jesus, it was so boring here. Slavery ended more than a century ago. Get over it.”

I didn’t rise to the bait this time. “You changed the subject. When slavery ended has nothing to do with whether it’s safe for KEEP to run its pipeline through unceded Indigenous lands. When slavery ended has nothing to do with whether it’s ‘nonviolent’ to maim people and jail them. When slavery ended has nothing to do with whether taking people’s land and destroying their stuff when they try to reoccupy it makes you someone who ‘respects property.’”

He vaped again and chuckled. “Fine, you got me. So what. I’m not going to switch sides and you aren’t, either.”

I opened and shut my mouth. “Did you just say that you’re wrong and you’re going to keep doing what you’re doing anyway?”

Another eye roll. “Yeah.”

“Don’t you think that’s kind of fucked up?”

He waved an expansive arm at the landscape. “Everything’s kind of fucked up.”

I looked around. “Brendan, I have no idea what to tell you. This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. These are some of the kindest people I’ve ever met. You lived with them. You lived here. You know that. How can you say everything’s fucked up?”

“I know. It’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” He giggled. I realized he was stoned. I realized I hadn’t gotten stoned for months, not since I’d come out to Guthrie Creek.

“It’s not really funny, Brendan. In fact, it’s kind of sad.”

“Sure. Like you never make any compromises in your life. I’m sure you’re so pure your shit doesn’t stink.”

I gave him my coolest look. I was done, but I needed an exit line. “Brendan, I’ve done things I’m not proud of in my life, but you do things worse than anything I’ve ever done, six times before breakfast.” I turned on my heel and began to stride away.

“You’re leaving?” he called after me. He sounded stoned.

I didn’t answer.

“But you didn’t even ask me about Lucy Thunder!”

I stopped. Turned around. He took a huge hit off his vape and blew a dragon’s cloud out that finished with a wide grin.

MARCUS

It was easy to forget that timbits was actually very competent. Like, scarily so, and well connected, too. They’d made such a monstrous fuckup with their back door, and been so defensive and useless about talking to the feds, that I had literally forgotten how respected and accomplished they were.

But they were. They’d grabbed some forensics people who owed them a favor and done a deep dive on the hack and now they had the receipts, literally.

“I don’t think I want to own that,” I said, refusing the thumb drive they’d tried to press into my hand under guise of a handshake.

“It’s got everything. Look, most of the attacks came from my servers. It looks like yours was doing orchestration and load balancing. And it’s a hundred percent clear that this was an attack on us, too—we were just a staging server for the KEEP attack. It didn’t originate with us.”

Man, I really didn’t like the word “us” in that sentence.

“Okay, but I still don’t want to own that data. If my server was used to hack an oil pipeline, I don’t want anything lying around that suggests I knew anything about it.”

“Even if it exonerates you? I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be a suspect to begin with. I just thought you’d want to have this in your back pocket in case a day ever comes where you need to clear your name.”

It’s not like I’m going to be a suspect. Except that I’d just doxed a couple of KEEP security guards moonlighting as saboteurs and sent the information to a lawyer defending Water Protectors. There must have been some other way I could help Tanisha out. I’d just fallen prey to the everything-looks-like-a-nail syndrome, and hacking was the biggest hammer I owned. The sand was cold and wet between my toes and the spray off the ocean was numbing the exposed skin on my face and hands.

“Fuck it,” I said, and let him slip the drive into my hand. “Thanks, timbit. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I shouted at you for talking to the FBI.”

“Yeah,” they said. “I’m sorry, too. The whole thing was my fuckup and I shouted at you because I was angry at myself.”

“I just remembered that my lawyer helped me file a FOIA request for the file from that call and I never heard back,” I said.

“Huh,” timbit said. “You should chase that. If it’s juicy enough, you can have it framed and start a trophy wall. It’d be seriously great to have a whole wall of your house dedicated to nothing but framed police files you dragged out of assorted fed cops. The redactions would really pop, just make any room.”

I actually laughed. Timbit had done important privacy and hactivism work when I was a mere larva, and despite the fact that they’d fucked up and then tore me a new one I didn’t deserve, they were a pretty impressive sort of person and funny as hell.

I pocketed the drive. “You should FOIA your record, I bet it’s fascinating.”

They shrugged. “I might just do that. I’m thinking of retiring.”

“Seriously?”

They smiled and suddenly all their veneer of cynical seen-everything/done-everything slipped away and I was looking at an old person, not a stretch-lobed, faded-tatt punk-rock cypherpunk. “It’s not fun anymore. The stakes are too high these days. It used to be hackers versus corporate IT people and spy versus spy. Now it’s cyber-mercenaries versus dissidents and cyber-militias versus whistleblowers and so many very shitty dudes versus women who dare to have opinions about anything. It’d be stupid, if people weren’t getting killed.”

I understood, but also I didn’t. For me, this hadn’t been a game since I was a teenager, but somehow timbit had kept it light and easy. Maybe because they just did corporate consulting and never got too deep into the technopolitics stuff. For them, it was just a series of technical puzzles, not a bunch of human beings. For timbit to have spent as many years in the industry as they had, and done all the things they’d done, it must have required a heroic effort. I wondered if my life wouldn’t be better if I’d made the same effort.

TANISHA

I like to think I would have swallowed my pride, turned around and gone back for anyone who was in custody, but because it was Lucy Thunder, there was no question, and Brendan clearly knew it. His grin was awful. I walked back slowly and kept my face wooden.

“Where is she?”

“The feds have her,” he said.

“Which feds?” The number of three-letter agencies at Guthrie Creek was beyond counting—it was like a fed/cop zoo. Usually when they grabbed someone, they turned them over to the sheriff for lockup.

“The FBI,” he said. “Extortion across state lines is a Big Girl Felony.”

“Extortion?” He wanted me to say it and I hated that I did, but I had to know.

“The ransomware attack. The dox that got dumped. They got a sealed indictment from a grand jury in Michigan where KEEP is headquartered, naming about half a dozen of the Indians here. Once the sheriff took her in last night and logged it, the FBI came in and took her away. She’s in a U.S. Marshals lockup in Tulsa waiting for her arraignment hearing.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said. “Lucy didn’t hack anyone’s computer. Anyone with half a brain can see that the whole KEEP hack-and-dump is internal—it’s all employee grudges, you can tell.”

He hit his vape again. “That was a much easier sell before the sabotage. That got the FBI’s attention, you betcha.”

His awful cutesy phraseology notwithstanding, he was probably right.

“Shit,” I said, and spit into the snow. It was all going to come apart. We’d done everything we could to call attention to Guthrie Creek and still almost no one knew or cared about it. Once the story got out that people who called themselves “Water Protectors” had trashed a pipeline and poisoned thousands of acres of earth, we’d be pariahs.

“It’s pretty slick,” he said. I glared at him. Then I saw something in his face. I wasn’t sure what, but a little bit of doubt or shame or something.

“Why are you telling me this, Brendan?”

He took another hit off his vape. “Shit. I don’t know. Let’s say I lost an argument over tactics and I think the guys who won it are assholes and deserve to have their pants yanked down.”

I found I couldn’t keep up my glare. “Seriously? This is more infighting? You don’t like that your side trashed the pipeline and blamed Lucy Thunder so you’re outing them?”

He shrugged. “You’re not the only one with a conscience, you know.”

“I don’t think this is your conscience, dude. I think you’re butthurt because they wouldn’t listen to your ideas. That’s totally on-brand for KEEP and its goons, for this whole thing. Not a shred of honor among thieves. Not one fucking shred.”

That landed. His face closed up. He vaped and tried to play it cool, but I could tell he’d felt it. He pulled up his tube scarf and then tried to suck his vape through it, fumbled the vape, and dropped it into the snow. He picked it up awkwardly with his gloved fingers and stuffed it in his pocket.

“You go help your friend now,” he said, and walked away.

MARCUS

My alarm went off at 11:55 p.m. Ange groaned and rolled over on her side of the bed as I got up and found my robe by touch. I used the bathroom, made a cup of coffee in the AeroPress (I’d ground the beans just before bed so I wouldn’t wake Ange up with the grinder), and fired up my laptop, logged in, mounted my disks, launched Tor Browser, and navigated to Darwin Skinner’s SecureDrop instance.

There was a message for me.

> Thank you for this. It’s very clearly laid out. I’ve asked my forensics specialist to look it over. My first reaction is that I need more than these assertions—I need to know how to verify this data myself. I’m sure that if I were to show these records to KEEP they’d just insist I was making it up (or that you were). And then maybe they’d figure out how to make the source of these records disappear.

> I’ll be straight with you: my second reaction is to ask why you’re getting me this data. The KEEP mess is full of backstabbing and intrigue and you’re a random stranger on the Internet. Maybe you’re working for one KEEP faction.

> I can appreciate that there isn’t necessarily an easy way to answer my questions—either of them. But I’m up to my asshole in alligators here, wildly outgunned by some powerful enemies and if you’re really doing this to help, this is how you can help.

So I did. It was easier now that I’d done the detective work, because I didn’t have to include all the stuff I’d tried that hadn’t worked. Like a mystery novelist, I could start with the crime and work backward to the clues.

So: here’s how you can buy location files. These are the files to buy. You will see that only these two phones are present at every sabotage site. You will see that they are going back and forth to the KEEP offices. You will see that they go home to these other addresses. You will see who owns those houses. You will see that they work for KEEP. Laid out that way, it was chillingly efficient and simple.

I ran it all through my translation routine, and this time I had to spend a lot more time going through the text it produced to make it clear. When I was done, I felt both proud and ashamed. How could it be this easy to spy on people? I’d made it look easier than it was, but even knowing about all the extra work I left out of the file, it was far too easy.

It made me feel powerful and helpless at the same time.

I hit send.

TANISHA

I got back to camp to find people busy with salvage and repair, gathering usable tables and chairs under a large EZ-UP with tarp walls to cut the wind, and cooking over propane stoves in a tarp-and-rope shelter. I drifted over to them, scanning the crowd for people I knew. I spotted Leesa driving stakes into the frozen ground with a little sledgehammer and I knelt in the snow next to her to help her, holding the spikes gingerly while she whacked at them with the hammer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. Her voice was tense, though I couldn’t make out much of her face what with her hood and scarf. “I’m mostly okay. I spent the night hiding in the bush. They had nightscopes; I don’t know how they missed me. I’m pretty frozen, though.”

“You should get checked out for hypothermia,” I said. “That’s serious, Leesa.”

She shrugged. “I saw a medic, got warmed up in someone’s car, and I’m watching my fluid intake and logging my piss-calls. Not much else to do.”

“You could go inside.”

She shrugged again. “This needs doing. We’re shorthanded. People are coming back as they get released, but there’s plenty in worse shape than me. It needs doing.”

I wanted to hug her, but she was focused on clobbering that spike and I didn’t want to distract her. Thankfully, it was now far enough into the ground that she didn’t need me to hold it for her, so I switched to holding up my phone, using its flashlight to help her drive it all the way down. She picked up her bag of spikes and we stood, stretching the ache out of our backs. We had an eye-to-eye moment and I saw how stressed and hopeless she was, saw that she was barely holding it together by distracting herself with the labor. We moved around the structure and drove another spike.

I gave Leesa a long hug and made her promise to go inside the structure and get something hot to eat. I had been turning over the news Brendan had given me, trying to think of who I could call or speak to. We had a legal committee, but their trailer’s door had been smashed in and everything inside had been stomped into a mess of papers, broken computers, and slashed furniture.

Standing inside the wrecked trailer, I realized how lightheaded and cold I was—a cold that went all the way to the pit of my stomach. I needed to pee, and I remembered that holding a full bladder made you much colder, as your body tried to keep a half quart of piss at body temperature so it didn’t freeze your internal organs.

The portas had been mostly toppled, but I found one that was still upright and intact with a short line of shivering people with headlamps or phone lights. I joined the line and realized I was only two yards away from Ryan Thunder; I’d missed him in the dark.

“Ryan?”

He turned around. In the dim light I could see that his right eye was swollen nearly shut and one of his lips was split and swollen, making him look like he was grinning half a sardonic smile. He squinted at me and I pulled down my scarf and shone my light on my face.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, hey.”

“Tanisha,” I said.

He mimed smacking himself in the forehead. “Sorry, I’m not good with names.”

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s been a seriously messed-up twenty-four hours.”

He smiled, wincing as his lip twisted around. “Yeah. Are you okay?”

I shrugged. “I did okay. They kept me in lockup overnight and I then got bailed out. I gotta go back in a couple of days for a hearing.”

“Don’t count on it,” he said. “Mostly they just drop the charges. That way they don’t have to worry about doing good arrests—they can kick you around, not give you any food, no phone call, whatever it takes to make you think twice about getting arrested again.”

“I know that trick,” I said. “I guess the Oakland PD didn’t invent it, then.”

He shrugged, smiled, winced. “I think they all know that trick.”

We’d moved up in the line and he was next. “Look,” I said, “after you’re done in there, wait for me, okay? I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. The porta’s occupant stepped out and the door banged shut behind them. Ryan let himself in. I felt like I was going to burst. I held it and distracted myself with figuring out how I could explain what Brendan had told me to Ryan without sounding like I was a narc. By the time I squirted some hand sanitizer into my palms, rubbed them together, and then jammed them back into my gloves, I decided the best thing to do was just tell it like it was.

After all, I’m not a narc.

Ryan had found another friend in the bathroom line, a woman in a heavy parka and balaclava. They made space for me to join them.

“What’s going on, then?” Ryan said.

“Did you ever meet that Brendan guy, the one who got kicked out? People thought he was an undercover, but he got turfed because he kept smoking weed in camp.”

He cocked his head. “I know the guy,” he said.

The woman he’d been talking to nodded. “What an ass that guy was.”

I swallowed. “I met him on the way here. In the airport. We’re not friends or anything, but he probably knows me better than anyone here. At least, I figure that’s why he found me when I got back here from jail.”

“He did,” Ryan said. It wasn’t a question.

“He did.” I drew a breath. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with him, or with KEEP, but he made it sound like he’d had some kind of big fight with the other KEEP contractors.”

The woman snorted. “Not surprised. Can you imagine going to work with those guys every day? Eating lunch with them?”

Ryan shook his head. “It’s a painful thought.”

“Brendan told me something. About your aunt. About Lucy Thunder.”

It was like I’d stung them. From joking and tired to full alert in an instant.

“What about her?”

“He told me that the FBI took her from the county lockup to the U.S. Marshals in Tulsa. They charged her with extortion. They’re saying she was behind the ransomware attack on the KEEP pipeline and all the leaks since.”

Ryan emitted a string of low, rapid fuck words. The woman put her arm around his shoulders. “This is bad,” she said. “Dammit. This is bad.”

“We need to talk to Darwin,” she said.

“I’ll call him,” Ryan said.

“No,” she said. “No calls. If the FBI is involved, we don’t want to go near our phones. We go in person.”

“Virginia, there’s no time—” I realized then that this was Virginia Thunder, the woman whose work had started the occupation. Ryan’s sister. Lucy’s niece. Of course.

“Ryan, this is too important not to do right. Better to use the extra time than to screw it up.”

I felt the need to state the obvious. “Brendan might be lying. He is—was—a provocateur. Maybe he told me what he did because he knew it would create a lot of chaos here, send you two off on a wild-goose chase—”

 Virginia silenced me with a gentle hand on my arm. “That’s very possible, but this is my aunt, so we’re going to do it this way. I know he would know that, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need to do it.”

Ryan hissed out something between a sigh and a frustrated groan. “You’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” she said. “And it’s my turn to pee. Go figure out a car and grab something to eat on the road and I’ll meet you at the main gate in five?”

I volunteered to visit the new mess hall and pack up some peanut butter sandwiches and managed to snag a bonus Tupperware of leftover fragrant venison stew (more selective veganism), the broth studded with small, tender potatoes and topped with sour cream.

Ryan borrowed someone’s crew-cab pickup truck, its bumper festooned with Water Protector stickers and Arapaho band flags. I loaded the food into the middle seat and waited in the passenger seat, warming up with the heater while we waited for Virginia. She arrived a few minutes later and I got out of the truck.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Uh,” I said. “I don’t know. Back to camp, I suppose.”

“If you want to do that, of course it’s fine, but you actually talked to this Brendan creep. It’d be great if you could come to Tulsa with us.” She looked at the package on the middle seat. “Looks like there’s plenty of food.”

“I’d love that,” I said. A road trip with Virginia Thunder? Are you kidding? I got back into the car, transferring the food to my lap. Virginia got in and buckled up, then nodded at Ryan. “Let’s go,” she said. He put the truck in gear and aimed it at Tulsa.

MARCUS

Once I started getting up at midnight to talk to Skinner over SecureDrop, my sleep schedule slid over to nocturnal. Maybe it was the coffee. I finished composing my message at 2 a.m., but stayed up until 4:30 a.m. tossing and turning until Ange grunted and got out of bed, saying she might as well get her day started because no way in hell was she going to get back to sleep with me keeping her up. I felt bad, but not so bad that I didn’t drift off about 5 a.m.

I woke at noon. Ange had sent me a couple of texts: the first suggesting that I consider sleeping in the spare room if I was going to flip to an EU time zone, and the second reassuring me that she wasn’t (that) mad at me but she needed to sleep, dammit.

After eating breakfast or brunch or whatever you call the first meal of the day when it’s eaten at noon, I answered email and read the news and tried not to think about KEEP, but I kept being drawn back into it, reading the accounts of the people who’d been released from jail, describing their condition, the condition of the people still inside, the savage violence of the arrests.

I went for a walk around 5 p.m., and I was just coming up on the beach when my phone rang. It was my lawyer, or anyway, the lawyer who agreed to do that FOIA request for me after the FBI called about the hack on timbit’s cage.

“Hi, Candas,” I said. “How are you?”

“It’s crazy, as always, which is why it took me until now to call you. The FBI responded to your FOIA request yesterday, Marcus, and it’s a doozy.”

“I can’t tell if ‘doozy’ is good or bad.”

“It’s a little of both. I think they had some redaction failures: there’s a lot more in this than I expected to see.”

“Yeah? Good stuff, or bad stuff?”

“Like I said: a little of both. They never fully cleared you of suspicion but they agreed that there wasn’t sufficient grounds to pursue your hardware. They had all kinds of outlandish theories about the KEEP hack: Russians, of course, but also an inside job.”

“Duh,” I said. “Everything since points to insiders. Anyone can see that.”

“Anyone except them. They discarded that theory and decided it was Water Protectors, pretty much because they just don’t like them and wanted an excuse to harass them.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Ugh is right. I’m going to Signal you the PDF unless you’d prefer to get it some other way.” I heard some muffled speech. “Dammit, another emergency’s breaking out. Sorry, Marcus, I’ve got to go. Let’s make a time to go over this in detail, okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you, Candas. This is really wild.”

“Isn’t it, though?” More muffled speech. “Okay, okay. Sorry, Marcus—later!”

“Bye.”

By the time midnight had rolled around, I’d had a chance to digest the PDF. It was indeed wild.

TANISHA

Ryan drove us straight through to Tulsa, though it took all night. I don’t know how he did it—he had to be as underslept as I was and he had a face like six pounds of raw hamburger. Virginia Thunder and I fell asleep after the first couple of hours. I woke up once when Ryan pulled off at a truck stop for a piss-call and a coffee top-up. He saw me crack my eyes and asked if I wanted anything but I shook my head and went back to sleep, using my rolled-up coat for a pillow and gently adjusting Virginia Thunder’s rolled-up coat, which was wedged between her head and my shoulder.

I woke with the late winter dawn turning the slushy streets of Tulsa pink and orange as Ryan crawled along the blocks in low gear, gingerly tapping the brakes to avoid colliding with early morning commuters as they slipped on the overnight black ice.

“Morning,” he croaked. “Keep your eyes peeled for a good-looking twenty-four-hour diner. I need breakfast.”

My stomach rumbled. “Excellent plan,” I said, and straightened up. Virginia Thunder had flopped over in the other direction overnight, propping her coat up on the truck’s door.

We prowled farther and farther into town, following a salt truck for ten slow blocks that gave us lots of time to scout for breakfast joints. Finally, I spotted a place, windows fogged with the exhalations of the diners within. We parked up and shook Virginia Thunder awake.

The food was . . . adequate. But there was a lot of it and a bottomless pot of coffee, which Virginia and I did our best to drain. Ryan refused, saying he’d had too much the night before. He had deep eye bags and ate like a zombie and as soon as he pushed his plate away, Virginia ordered him back into the truck to get a couple hours’ sleep. He stumbled twice on his way to the cab and Virginia got up to help him into the truck, got him stretched out full-length across the front bench, and spread her coat over him as a blanket, then locked him in and ran back to the table, shivering and hugging herself. She slurped down the rest of her coffee and wrapped her hands around the mug, absorbing the residual heat.

“When does this lawyer’s office open?” I asked.

She checked her watch. “9 a.m. We’ll go in two hours.”

“You think they’ll let us sit here that long? The place is pretty busy.”

“They will if we order a second breakfast,” she said. “You still hungry?”

I smiled. “I’ve got a hollow leg for diner breakfasts.” I squirmed a little. “But not for diner coffee. That, I’ve got to get rid of. I’m going to go find the bathroom. Order me scrambled eggs and rye toast with a side of breakfast links?”

“I like how you operate, girl.”

 Virginia Thunder liked how I operated! I had managed to go the whole trip without fangirling, but that fact gave me a little perk as I threaded my way through the close-set tables to the bathroom at the back of the diner.

MARCUS

> I have some materials I’d like to send you

I wrote. I didn’t bother to run it through the double-translate wringer. That was about to be null and void, anyway.

I hit send. I waited. Would Skinner be staying up until the middle of the night to pounce on new documents from his mysterious “European” informant? He was pretty busy there (“up to my asshole in alligators” wasn’t a phrase I’d forget in a hurry). I rejected my impulse to make a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to screw up my sleep schedule any more than it already was. Instead, I went through my Twitter DMs and manually deleted them, one at a time, saving anything that I wanted to refer to later to a folder on my desktop. I don’t like leaving things in the cloud. I mean, Twitter has a perfectly good security team, but they’ve been hacked before and they’ll probably get hacked again, and they’ve had insider attacks before and they’ll probably have insider attacks again. The best way not to have your cloud data stolen is to have no data in the cloud.

I tabbed back to the SecureDrop, logged in again, and checked my inbox.

> If you have some things you’d like to send, I’d like to see them, of course.

> Problem is, these documents will identify me. I think that means you have to be my lawyer so we can have attorney-client privilege.

I reloaded my inbox a couple times. Did he just fire off that message and go to bed, or was he standing by? Reload. Reload.

> It’s true that we don’t have attorney-client privilege right now, and that making you my client would create that privilege. But I can’t be your lawyer without knowing a little more. I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me anything more without me being your lawyer, but I hope you understand why I can’t be your lawyer until you’ve told me what I’m your lawyer for.

> I understand perfectly.

I did. But I hated it. I gave it some thought.

> How about if I ask you to keep it in confidence and we turn on disappearing messages? That way it’ll delete after you read it and you can honestly tell anyone that you have no record of our conversations?

There was a long pause.

> I can do that

I was trusting him. He could take pictures of his screen, after all. He could save the documents I sent him. And, of course, he could just choose to tell people stuff I told him. He’d have to, if he was called upon to testify under oath. It was a law thing, not a tech thing. I hate problems that you can’t solve with tech.

> OK

I typed. I took a deep breath. 

> Here they come

I sent him my FBI files.

Time crawled by.

> These will take me a while to look at. Give me an hour?

An hour? An eternity.

> OK

I typed. I put on my shoes and jacket and went for a walk by the ocean. I tried to listen to podcasts, but I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t find music that sounded right. Eventually I gave up and listened to the music of the slap-slap of my shoes on the sidewalk and the waves lapping on the shore.

The water sounds found something inside of me and loosened it. Water is life.

TANISHA

 Virginia Thunder ruled that Ryan was too groggy to drive, so she slid behind the wheel and he nodded off again with his head against the passenger-side window. I sat between him and Virginia Thunder and navigated using the OpenStreetMap we’d downloaded in advance—everyone in the camp had sworn off Google Maps and switched to OSM because you could download them and use them offline without having to leave your phone connected to the rest of the world and potentially generating a real-time, traceable beacon of your location.

Darwin Skinner’s law office was in a run-down, three-story building ringed with downtown parking lots, the last survivor of a bonanza of teardowns, surrounded by signs promising new high-rise towers.

We rang the buzzer at 9 a.m. sharp and when no answer was forthcoming, we rang it again. “I hope we don’t have to call him,” Virginia Thunder said. We’d avoided using phones the whole way. She leaned hard on the buzzer again and after a long pause, it clicked.

“Hello?” The voice was sleep-fuzzed, and crackled over the intercom.

“Darwin? This is Virginia Thunder. I’m sorry to drop in unannounced, but we had something important to talk to you about in person.”

“Virginia?”

“Yes. We drove all night.”

“You drove— Oh, man. Sounds serious. Come right up.” The door buzzed open. The building didn’t have an elevator, so we hiked up three flights of stairs to the top floor and then past a series of doors with no nameplates until we got to the sole occupied office, with a scratched plastic sign proclaiming Darwin Skinner, Esq, attorney-at-law in small type.

 Virginia rapped at the door and it opened, revealing Skinner, a tall Indigenous guy in a gray Brooklyn Law tee, track bottoms, and stocking feet. His long hair was in a half-undone ponytail and there was toothpaste at the corners of his mouth. He waved us inside and shut the office door.

“Virginia,” he said, and they shared a long hug. “Ryan,” he said, and collected another hug. He turned to me. “Hello, I’m Darwin.”

“Tanisha,” I said. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”

He seemed to realize what a state he was in, and glanced around at his cramped office with its overflowing bookshelves and mussed sofa and blanket. He smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been working late. I’ve got a new pen pal and they’re only online at late hours, so I’ve been sleeping in the office.”

He folded up the blanket and stashed it, then cleared a couple of chairs and wheeled his own battered chair out from behind his desk.

“Darwin,” Virginia said, with mock sternness, “are you getting romance-scammed? Do we need an intervention?”

He snorted. “Nothing so pleasurable, I’m afraid. My friend has some very specific information. It pertains to you and your camp, as a matter of fact. But before we talk about that, I think you’d better tell me what you’re doing on my doorstep looking like you drove all night to get here.”

“Like Virginia said, we only look that way because I drove all night to get here,” Ryan said.

“Take the couch,” Virginia said, moving to a chair. “Darwin, can we borrow your blanket?”

She tucked Ryan in and he pulled the blanket around himself and rolled over to face the sofa back. He was out in seconds. Poor guy.

“All right,” Virginia said, settling in. “Tanisha here heard something scary about Aunt Lucy, something happening in Tulsa.”

That was my cue. I had run down the most efficient way to tell the story, starting with meeting Brendan in the airport, and it was a good thing I’d mentally rehearsed it, because days of brutalization, arrest, and incarceration and a long road trip had fried my brain. It was like my mouth was on autopilot and there were times I wasn’t sure I was making sense, but Darwin Skinner had his yellow pad out and his pen scraped along as he filled page after page of notes.

The more I spoke, the faster his hand flew over the page. He had the weirdest facial expression, somewhere between a smile and a grimace, and a couple of times he stuck his pen between his teeth and shook a cramp out of his hand.

“Well,” he said, “that is a hell of a thing.”

 Virginia said, “Darwin, I’m trying not to worry unduly here, but my aunt is in federal custody somewhere around here, facing serious charges. What are we going to do about that?”

He looked at her, massaging his writing hand unconsciously. He looked down to his yellow pad and flipped back through his notes, starting right at the beginning. “Give me a sec,” he said, and traced a finger down the page, then the next, then the next.

“We’re going to call the FBI,” he said, “and they are going to meet with us. That’s what’s going to happen.” He looked from Virginia to me and back again. Ryan groaned from the sofa and said, “I know I’m just the driver and all, but it sounds like you think the FBI are going to help us?”

Skinner smiled. He looked tired but triumphant. “I’m pretty sure they are. Let me tell you about the person I stayed up all night to talk to, and what they told me.”

MARCUS

Candas woke me up at 9 a.m. Hers was one of a short list of phone numbers that was allowed to break through my Do Not Disturb. I cleared my throat and rubbed my eyes before answering and did my best to sound like I hadn’t been fast asleep when I said, “Good morning.”

“That FBI agent isn’t happy with you,” she said.

“It’s not my fault he sucks at redaction,” I said. “No one made him send me a file that said that they were pretty sure that the attack was an inside job but were speaking to me to rule out every other possibility.”

“Well, I got the impression that it made him look like an asshole in front of the Tulsa field office agents and he’s pretty pissed.”

“Tulsa, huh?”

“Marcus, I know this is fun and all, but remember that federal agents don’t like feeling foolish and they nurse long grudges.”

“I know it,” I said. “I mean, I really, sincerely know it.”

“I know you do, young man. And you’ve got my number, and I know you’re smart enough to refer any federal agents who come calling to your attorney.”

“I promise you I’ll lawyer up before I open my big mouth.”

“I’m going to hold you to that promise.”

I really needed a lot more sleep, but I wasn’t going to get it. I made coffee and walked to the beach. I needed to hear and smell and see the water.

TANISHA

The Tulsa field agent agreed to see us after lunch. That gave Darwin time to print out and organize copies of all the relevant documents: the phone location records that showed KEEP contractors going to the leaky pipelines; the forensics that backtraced the KEEP ransomware attack from a data center in San Francisco to a server on the same IP subnet as KEEP’s own head office network; and finally, my affidavit swearing to what Brendan had told me. I had a moment’s anxiety about that, because I knew it would get him into trouble and he’d gone out of his way to help me—but he’d also gone out of his way to destroy the Guthrie Creek camp and get as many of us arrested as possible. I just told myself that I didn’t owe him for spilling his secrets; rather, he owed me and all the rest of us for what he did and tried to do.

It still felt weird.

Darwin spent twenty minutes in the shared bathroom down the hall, coming back with a clean shave, combed hair, and a neatly pressed suit and tie he’d taken out of a dry-cleaning bag hanging in his office closet.

 Virginia Thunder and I took turns in the bathroom, washing up and putting on fresh makeup. Virginia loaned Ryan a hairbrush and Darwin loaned him a disposable razor and he came back from the bathroom looking a little more presentable—as presentable as anyone could after the beating he’d taken. Darwin found him a shirt and tie from a stash of thrift-store shirts he kept around for clients’ court dates, and they fit reasonably well.

By the time we all piled into Darwin’s road-salt-crusted RAV4—after shifting several boxes of files from the back seat to the trunk—we looked, well, we looked exhausted and road-worn, but at least we were tidy.

The Tulsa Federal Building looked like federal buildings everywhere: an imposing box ringed with fences and crash barriers, in a sea of parking. It was wider and shorter than the Oakland equivalent, like someone had squashed it flat.

We went through a metal detector and showed IDs to a receptionist. Virginia and Ryan firmly informed the security guard that their tribal IDs were REAL ID compliant, and Darwin backed them up with a reference to the specific regulation, which he quoted from memory. The security guard actually smiled at that, but he still double-checked.

We’d barely sat down in the lobby when another security guard came out and brought us through a door he had to badge through and into an elevator and up to the sixth floor. We walked a maze of hallways and then were shown into another waiting room, windowless, with a door that locked behind us and another locked door opposite that one, each with a place to tap a badge. It was small and airless, with five rigid chairs all crowded together against one of the walls without a door.

“Nice place,” Ryan said as he settled into one of the chairs.

Darwin nodded. “I know, I know. But this is actually pretty good by federal police standards. Most people who come in here walk right through it, accompanied by an agent. For the few weirdos like us who walk in on our own, the wait’s almost always just a few minutes.”

We took our seats. A few minutes ticked by, then a few more. I became acutely aware of the cameras watching us from three angles, and then I realized that I kind of needed to pee, and the passage of time dilated to match my bladder: the more full my bladder, the slower the minutes ticked past.

I was just about to go and thump on the door and demand to be taken to the bathroom when there was a click from the inner door and it opened. The FBI agent who stood behind it was a no-nonsense white woman, tall with short hair, wearing a skirt suit with a clipped-on ID tag.

“Mr. Skinner, Mr. and Ms. Thunder, Ms. Sams?” She had a New Jersey accent and a deep voice, and she looked at each of us as she said our names. “I’m Special Agent Halstead. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

We all stood. “I need to use the bathroom, please.”

“Sure,” she said. “Of course. There’s one on the way to the conference room.”

A moment later, peeing in a Midwestern FBI toilet, I had a shaky moment as I processed all that had happened—from the comfort and camaraderie of that last supper in camp to the horror of the police raid, the tense hours in Lucy Thunder’s trailer, the police beating, the nightmare of the cell, the fever-sleep back at camp, the strange and bitter meeting with Brendan, the long overnight ride with Virginia and Ryan, the steamy diner, Darwin’s paper-strewn office and now . . . this.

A female FBI agent came in while I was washing my hands. She was an older lady with a suspicious face, and she sized me up for a long moment before going into a stall.

No one said a word as we made our way past a cubicle farm and then a row of offices and finally into a small boardroom. As we sat down, two more feds joined us: an older white man who had a yellow pad, and a younger Asian man with a laptop. They introduced themselves and their names went right out of my head.

“All right,” Special Agent Halstead said, “we’re all here and ready to go. What have you got to tell us, Mr. Skinner?”

“Oh, a lot, Agent Halstead. A lot.” He dug a couple of yellow pads out of his backpack and paged through them, nodded a few times, and then let fly.

He was a storyteller. He started with the ransomware attack, which had impacted some nerd’s personal data center in San Francisco, using it as a staging point for a wider attack. He described how the attackers took over the network there, then attacked KEEP, and how the FBI itself had investigated the hack, and that there were new forensics linking the attack back to KEEP itself.

He reminded them of the breaches that came on the heels of that attack, and how weirdly specific they were, “Almost as though disgruntled KEEP employees themselves were tactically leaking information that embarrassed their rivals in the company.” The older white guy grunted when he said that and he and the younger guy locked eyes for a moment and nodded minutely at each other.

He pulled a rabbit out of his hat (or briefcase, anyway): a sheaf of printed Google Maps overlaid with routes. He walked the agents through the travel on the maps, explaining that “open-source intelligence” established that the only mobile devices that visited the pipeline sabotage sites belonged to known KEEP security contractors.

The agents were getting a lot more interested now, and Darwin knew it. He finished his description of the mobile-data analysis and folded his hands and looked at each of the agents in turn.

“Now,” he said, “there’s this.” Once more, he dipped into his briefcase and then produced three sheets of paper-clipped paper, which he unclipped and spread out in front of him like a magician doing a card trick, turning them upside down so that they were easier for the agents to read.

They were printed out, smudgy scans with big black redaction bars, and lines of highlighted text. I started to read through them, but then Skinner was talking again. “Special Agent Ruch in the San Francisco Field Office and his colleagues did a lot of redaction work on these FOIA documents,” he said and couldn’t quite keep the smirk off his face, “but they must have been in a hurry.” He tapped his finger on the yellow highlighted passage.

I blinked. “Yallow?” I blurted. “Marcus Yallow?” My eyes leapt to the running headers on the top of each page, where, yes, I found the name “Marcus Yallow” on each one of them. “No way.”

Three federal agents, two Water Protectors, and a hard-fighting lawyer all stared at me. “It’s just . . . I know that guy. I mean, we go back years. I had no idea. Small world.”

Darwin shot me a shut-up look and I shut up. The feds were still staring at me. Darwin cleared his throat.

“Folks, you’ve got Virginia Thunder locked up in a federal holding cell downstairs for masterminding a sabotage attack that I think we can all agree was actually committed by KEEP contractors as part of an internal power struggle. I mean, that’s the Bureau’s own assessment. My understanding is that you don’t like being made patsies by corporate stooges looking to sideline their internal rivals.”

Though none of the feds spoke, all three of their mouths tightened in unison.

Special Agent Halstead looked at her colleagues, at the papers, then at us. She had a good poker face but if I had to guess, I’d say she was furious. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t furious at me, and I was pretty glad that was the case.

The older agent tapped his index finger on the table, then did it again. He opened his mouth, looked to the other two agents. “Seems to me,” he said, then tapped his finger again. “Seems to me you should really be talking to the district attorney.”

Darwin grinned. “We’re seeing her in—” He checked his watch. “—thirty minutes. Want to come?”

Special Agent Halstead cleared her throat softly. “I believe I do,” she said.

MARCUS

Ange and I had been planning a camping trip in Yosemite. We’d had to book the campsite six months in advance, and even then, the best we could get was a late-winter reservation. Part of me regretted canceling it, but I consoled myself with fact that I’d get to try out some really exciting winter camping stuff I’d borrowed once we got to Oklahoma.

Ange drove. I hate driving. I navigated, which was mostly about working my network for coffee-shop recommendations between the Tulsa airport and Guthrie Creek. I was able to brew a pot and refill my thermos at Thacker Springs while Bob Murray showed us his CB rig. I’d met Bob through Tanisha, and he’d dragged me, once again, onto Facebook. I hated it, but I liked Bob, and I was working on getting him to try out zuckerveganism with me in a Signal group.

Guthrie Creek had just experienced a week of torrential rains and it was a muddy mess, and we had to stop the rental car halfway up the access road when the mud got too deep. We humped as much gear as we could carry for the final mile to the gate, where some friendly people offered to help us go back for the rest. Ange took them up on it, sending me to find Tanisha and our campsite, which she said she’d be saving for me.

I found Tanisha digging drainage trenches alongside the trail that cut through the middle of camp, piling the dirt into the middle of the trail to give it a slight hump that would channel the water into the trench and down to a marshy area that bordered the creek itself.

She gave me a muddy hug and stuck her shovel in the ground so it stood straight up and down and showed me to our campsite, right up alongside her tent.

“We got a load of shipping pallets yesterday and I snagged a few to make us both platforms that’ll keep our tents out of the mud,” she said, kicking one of the pallets for emphasis. “This isn’t Guthrie Creek at its prettiest, but we’ll show you a good time, have no fear.”

She looked good. She looked like she was at home. I’d known Tanisha for years, known her as an activist and organizer and a friend. She’d been an integral part of the Oakland scene for all that time, and I guess I’d assumed that there was something about Oakland, the place and the people, that just vibed with her. That might have been true, but seeing her there in her muddy rubber boots, face sheened with sweat from digging, I realized that the main reason Tanisha vibed with Oakland was because she was Tanisha, not because she was in Oakland. Tanisha cared about the people around her and, wherever she was, she could build a community.

She helped me put up the tent and we got it standing just as Ange and her helpers arrived and then, a couple moments later, two more people, clearly Indigenous, who greeted Tanisha warmly. They were a man and a woman, the woman a little older, and they looked enough like each other that I guessed they were sibs.

“This is Virginia and Ryan,” Tanisha said. “Guys, these are Ange and Marcus, my hacker-activist homies from the Bay Area.”

“Marcus-Marcus?” Virginia said, raising her eyebrows. She had a commanding presence, that warm feeling you get from some people that make you want to help them with whatever they ask you to do. “Like at the FBI office?”

Tanisha laughed. “That’s the one. Marcus, these two were there when Darwin Skinner showed those G-men the files you’d sent him, and I just about flipped out when I saw your name on the paperwork.”

“Ah!” I said, then “Ah! You’re Virginia Thunder! And Ryan Thunder!”

“And now we all know who we are,” Ryan said. He gave off a vibe of supreme relaxation, like he was someone who knew he was exactly where he was supposed to be. I liked him on the spot. He was a handsome guy and he knew it, clearly. Ange’s type, for sure. I’d tease her about it later. It was a thing we did, just to let each other know that we both knew that being married didn’t mean that our attraction for other people got switched off forever.

“We brought stuff for you,” I said. “Here, give me a sec.” I looked through our piles of stuff until I found my backpack and then I got out the two plastic document folders I’d put together before leaving. I gave one set to each of them. “Those are your sets of all my docs on this—the forensics on the hack of my server, the location data on those KEEP creeps, and that FBI guy’s screwed-up FOIA files. I thought you might want to do a little light reading.”

“Thank you, Marcus,” Virginia Thunder said. She took Ryan’s set from him and stashed them both in her backpack. “It’s quite a souvenir.” She looked to each of us and smiled a little. “Are you guys busy?”

Ange surveyed our gear. “Not really. It’ll take us about ten seconds to throw everything in the tent.”

“Are you sure?” Virginia Thunder asked. “You don’t need a break after your travel or anything?”

Ange and I checked in with each other, nodded. “No,” I said, “not at all. I think we’re both excited to be here and want to see the sights.”

“Great,” Ryan Thunder said. “We’ve got something really good for this afternoon.”

Tanisha giggled. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virginia Thunder said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Lucy Thunder was as impressive as I expected, though a lot shorter. She gave us both hugs to welcome us to the camp, then directed us to pick up a giant plastic tub from the stack on a pallet outside of her trailer, which had a fresh coat of paint and a neatly reframed door.

“Everyone take one. They’re not that heavy, but we’re going a long way. Don’t kill yourself. If you need a break, take it. We’ll wait for you at the gate.”

The walk to the KEEP security lines wasn’t very far: just over a ridge and then down a road that took us to a chain-link perimeter fence with a guardhouse at the front.

As we slowly worked our way down to the guardhouse, nervous KEEP security people got wind that we were on our way and began to form up at the gate. They were all bearded guys in tactical gear with Oakleys and big biceps, their belts slung with pepper spray and some scary-looking batons.

We formed up our own line, about ten paces from the gate, each of us holding our plastic tubs at chest height.

Lucy Thunder stepped in front of our line.

“We saw your latest Facebook video, complaining that we had all kinds of food donations from supporters around the world while you were eating cold rations ever since KEEP filed for bankruptcy.” She gestured at us and we began to stack our tubs up. “So we thought we’d share,” she said.

It’s hard to read the faces of a line of men with big beards and wraparound shades. If I had to guess, I’d say the dominant emotion was shock, with hints of bemusement and maybe a little anger.

Lucy took a pinch of food, an offering to the spirits, and set it safely nearby. “Eat well,” Lucy Thunder said, and led us back up the ridge.

“Spill” copyright © 2024 by Cory Doctorow
Art copyright © 2024 by Will Staehle

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Spill

Cory Doctorow

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Cory Doctorow

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