SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

I moved it. “Three, right?”
“Right, but you got the two on the way.”
Homeland
I bit my tongue and started to count in my head. When I got to twenty, she said, “Okay, it's
reset.”
It took six tries. After the fifth try, the phone locked itself and we had to wait for ten tense
minutes until it unlocked itself. Security is awesome.
“Okay, you've done it,” she said. I could barely feel my hands.
“Who do we call first?”
“My mom,” she said. “She knows a crapload of lawyers.”
It took more fumbling to press the button that brought up the dialer and then an eternity to
get her mom's number keyed in correctly. At least the dialer let me press the backspace
button when I screwed up.
“You've done it!” she said, loud enough that people in the other seats shifted and looked
around. I closed my hand around my phone, trying to hide it without inadvertently pressing
any of the buttons. We waited until everyone had gone back to their solitary misery and
then I said, “Okay how do we do this?”
“Do what?”
“I'm going to call your mom, right? How are you going to talk to her from up there, when
the phone is down here?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“How high can you get your arms?”
I tried. It actually felt good to lift them some, working the kinks out of my shoulder blades,
but I was left wishing I'd gone to more yoga classes with Ange. The woman -- I still didn't
know her name, isn't that funny? -- shifted behind me, and I felt her prod the call button
with her nose or tongue, and then my fingertips tingled with the sound of the phone ringing.
From where I sat, I saw several of my fellow prisoners watching with expressions ranging
from bemusement to delight to fear. I heard/felt someone answer, a kind of buzz-buzz?
that my fingers translated as Hello? and then the girl whispered, “Mama,” and started to
talk in a low, urgent whisper, speaking a language I didn't know -- Arabic, I guess? Is that
what they speak in Egypt?
The bus was brightly lit, but we had been locked in it for ages -- hours, it felt like -- since the
last prisoners were brought in. Surely the guard at the front was half asleep or bored stupid,
or maybe he was stupid to begin with. Either way, I felt a welcome sense of superiority.
They might be heavily armed, they might be able to arrest us and stick us in their plastic
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