by E. E. Giorgi
“I’m not sure they could ever make another brain exactly like mine.”
I sigh, not sure I get his point. Lukas can be so weird sometimes. We are what we are, and the truth is, we’re lucky to be alive and able to do all the stuff we do. The real problem, the way I see it at least, is: how long will we be able to go on like this? We depend on technology we cannot make. We need to either learn how to make the stuff or face our ruthless enemies: the Gaijins.
I take Kael’s hood out of my pocket and whistle his call. The falcon appears in the sky a few seconds later. “Let’s go back home,” I say. “We’re just wasting our time out here. We’ll never find all the stuff we need to make more batteries. And if our dads don’t come back…” I swallow and refuse to finish the sentence, refuse to even consider the possibility.
“Then we need to go look for them,” Lukas matter-of-factly ends the sentence for me.
“Yeah, but how? We don’t even know which way they went.”
Kael lands on my gloved arm and Lukas gapes at him, as though suddenly struck by lightning. I can almost hear the clicking of his neurons. “I think there’s a way to find out. It’s risky, but…”
My lips stretch out into a hopeful grin. “I don’t care if it’s risky. I wanna hear all about it.”
Chapter Five
Akaela
I spend the morning at the stables, keeping myself busy so I don’t have to think about what just happened. I don’t want to think about aunt Kara’s face lined with tears or Skip’s limp body as they pulled him out of the patch of reeds. My cat Ash follows every step I take as I sweep the floors, move bales of hay, and groom the horses. The wound where Uli implanted the chip looks clean and the kitten is already feeling stronger and better.
A message flickers on my retina. “Mandatory battery check. Please meet in lobby.”
It’s one of those official messages sent through the central system of the Tower. My last battery check was six months ago and I’m not due another one in a year and a half, so I decide to ignore it.
When I’m done feeding the horses, I sit on the lawn outside and watch Ash chase bugs. The sun is high and harsh, the smoke from the Gaijins’ firewall dissolved into layers of haze blanketing the forest on the other side of the river. The tall grass around the stables is vibrant with bugs, butterflies and grasshoppers that skip in all directions as Ash bounds awkwardly after them. The sight makes me smile.
Happiness, though, is a very precarious state of mind for the Mayakes.
Wes—a kid my age—comes running from the Tower and waves at me. I recognize him from the awkward way he runs. Wes doesn’t have legs and feet, he has titanium blades screwed into his femurs. He’s so fast he can cover a mile in under five minutes.
He doesn’t even need to catch his breath as he stands in front of me, his cheeks flushed. “Didn’t you get the message?” he asks. “They just issued a mandatory battery check. You need to come back to the Tower.”
I frown. “What’s all the fuss about? I had mine six months ago.”
Wes shrugs. “So did Skip. Yet he’d still be alive if his battery hadn’t failed.”
I pick up Ash and shoot to my feet. “What are you talking about? The droids killed Skip.”
Wes shakes his head and points to the Tower. “Let’s go. You won’t believe what they found out.”
* * *
The news spreads quickly, yet many refuse to believe it. Battery failure is a Mayake’s worst nightmare. We can confront the droids. We can resist the Gaijins. But until we are be able to make our own technology, our outdated batteries will keep failing and killing us.
The ground floor of the Tower—what used to be the main lobby back when the building was still a hospital—is packed with people. They cluster in groups, the adults animatedly talking among themselves, and the children huddled around them, clinging to their parents with a disoriented look on their faces.
I snuggle Ash to my chest, looking for familiar faces. I spot Yuri ogling at me and immediately look away. It’s hard not to, the kid’s got a metal jaw with no skin graft to disguise it, just raw metal sticking out of his face. He’s sixteen, one year older than me, and even Athel says he’s a freak of nature. I squeeze through the crowd, losing Metal Jaw Yuri in the sea of people. A moment later, he reappears right in front of me, blocking my way.
“What’s that?” he says, arms crossed over his chest and chin pointing to Ash.
“None of your business.” I try to shoulder past him, but he keeps his stance like a block of cement and doesn’t budge. Feeling the tension, Ash tries to wiggle away from my clasp and digs his claws into my flesh. Metal Jaw wraps his fingers around Ash’s neck and tries to pull him from my grasp. I bite his forearm, making him roar in pain. He slaps me in the face, and in the commotion Ash hops to the ground and runs away.
“Ash!” I scream, watching his little paws skid across the sea of shoes and prostheses.
I push through the adults, their loud voices ringing in my ears.
“Ash! Come back!”
So many people have gathered on the ground floor. They scold me as I force my way through. By the end of the hallway the crowd is sparser but I can’t see Ash anywhere. I spin on my heels, calling him. And then I hear a feeble mew.
A man on a crutch comes limping toward me. He holds Ash by the scruff, the poor kitten dangling in his grasp.
“He’s mine! Let him go!” I say.
The hallway falls silent. I feel the stares of the people. What I just did is wrong. This man is old, one of our Kiva Members. No child yells at a Kiva Member. Yet I hold my ground, refusing to back away until I have Ash back.
The man’s yellow eyes scrutinize the kitten. “Does it have implants?” he asks, his voice tainted by a sibylline lisp. He leans on his crutch and stares at the wound on Ash’s belly, where Uli inserted the chip.
“No!” I yell. “He doesn’t.”
The Mayake people don’t yell at their elders, they don’t challenge their authority. The Mayake people are loyal to one another. They don’t lie, they don’t disobey. Those who do are promptly punished. Wela for the lesser crimes, Niwang for the unforgivable ones: complete deactivation of all implants with no recharging. That’s why the Mayake people are compliant, their obedience ingrained through decades of fear.
Fear.
People tell me fear is a natural instinct, a warning for danger. Growing up, I’ve learned to see it in others, to recognize situations that would trigger it. But I never feel it, never experience it.
Whether the nanobots embedded in my cells erased it or I was born like this I don’t know.
So I step in front of the elder, stretch my arms up and try to get my kitten back.
“This cut on his belly—” he says.
“He got it in a fight. I rescued him.”
“Akaela!”
I turn and find Mom glaring at me in complete shock. She’ll give me away, me and my stupid little lie to save Ash’s life. I snatch the kitten away from the man’s hands and run. Uli catches me as I try to flee and embraces me in his wide arms. I hide my face in his chest and sob.
“Help me, Uli! Please!”
“It’s been a rough day for all of us,” Uli says in his deep, reassuring voice. Ash can’t breathe snuggled between my arms and Uli’s stomach, so I turn and let him climb up on my arm. They are all staring at us—the people clustered along the hallway, the Kiva Member still leaning on his crutch, and Mom, her face hung with shock.
The Kiva Member taps the floor with the tip of his crutch. “We need to keep going with all battery checks,” he says. “This little incident is just making us waste more time.”
“Yes, sir,” Uli replies. “Akaela didn’t mean any harm. The kitten—” He swallows, squeezing my shoulders with his wide hands. “It’s just a temporary thing. The cat was injured and Akaela rescued it. We will release him back into the wild as soon as his wounds have healed.”
The man’s brows come together in a skeptical scowl. “You better,
” he says, limping away. “Take her to recharge.”
“What?” I yell, squirming. “No, I—”
Uli covers my mouth. “Hush!” he says. Mom’s face is a mess of worry, concern, and anger. She comes over to take Ash from my arms. “Please don’t give him away,” I beg her.
“This has gone far enough,” she hisses, staring straight into Uli’s eyes.
Is she mad at him for not speaking up about Ash’s implants?
Ash mews and claws the hooks of her prosthesis hand.
Uli pushes me over. “Come on, Akaela. You need to recharge, now.”
And the way he says “now,” I know I can’t disobey this time. We walk silently to Uli’s workshop at the back, where five recharging stations are lined up—old dental chairs revamped to fulfill their new purpose. Uli motions me to take a seat and rolls over a cart carrying one of the TBCs—the transcutaneous battery chargers.
I climb into the recharging chair, cross my arms, and refuse to lie down. “I don’t need recharging,” I challenge. “Why are you all freaked out yet nobody wants to talk about what happened to Skip?”
“Skip is the reason why we are doing this,” Uli replies, unwinding the cable from the TBC.
“But—“
Mom leans closer and puts a finger on my mouth, pain still fresh in her eyes. “That’s enough, Akaela. Lie down and let Uli insert the USB port. The battery check is mandatory. Everybody’s recharging and you are no different than everyone else.”
I don’t get this obsession over recharging. I can go two years without recharging and I’m fine. I guess I use less Watts than other people. So what? I’m lucky that I need less. Yet my parents still make me recharge every six months like everybody else. I hate it. Most of all, I hate lying on the chair and being deactivated.
All Mayake people come with a switch. It’s the price we pay for the life we couldn’t have otherwise. We have transistors and nanowires and artificial immunity that protect us from mutated bugs. And a built-in deactivation switch, a preventive measure our fathers established after the Astraca incident in 2110, when a handful of out-of-control A.I. units wrecked the city, killing thousands of people.
Deactivation switches became mandatory, as a safety measure should nanobots spread virally inside our brains and turn us into killing machines. Now they’re used when we need to recharge or as a punishment for crimes.
Once the switch is flipped, your body goes limp and your brain shuts down. It’s not like falling asleep, when you’re still free to move and your mind wanders and dreams.
Deactivation turns you into a dead person, locked in a vegetative state with no memories or feelings until somebody brings you back.
This is the kind of dread that knots my stomach every time I climb on a recharging station.
“I can check her levels,” Uli says. “If she doesn’t feel that she needs it—”
Mom shakes her head. “No. I’m not taking chances after what happened to Skip.” She holds Ash close to my face so I can pet him. I pull up my shirtsleeve, exposing the flap on my forearm.
“You’ll see,” I say. “Won’t take long. I’m already charged.”
“It’ll be shorter, then,” Mom says then kisses me on the forehead. And with that, Uli slides a finger behind my head and puts me out.
Chapter Six
Athel
Day Number: 1,530
Event: Went to the landfill to find stuff.
Number of Mayakes left: 432.
Goal for today: Make new batteries.
Changed to: Record a map of the mesa.
Yuri sits on top of Skull Rock, his hair spiked up and a penknife in his right hand. He sharpens a wooden stick and glares in our direction, his metallic jaw twisted in a smirk.
I don’t like that kid. He’s trouble. He and his brother Cal think they have a right to boss around all the other kids just because both their parents are Kiva Members.
I tell Lukas to move right along, but Yuri hops down the rock and follows us.
“Hey, freaks.”
“Look who’s talking,” I snarl. “Go away, Yuri. Nobody wants to see your metal face.”
“Oh yeah? What if I told you your baby sis got busted for her cat?”
I freeze. “What cat?” I know he’s just making stuff up to provoke us. We’re late, after spending the whole day at the landfill. Kael’s probably home by now, and if we don’t show up soon after him, Mom’s going to throw a fit. We spent too much time looking for stuff we couldn’t find and then another good hour plotting something we’ll never be able to achieve on our own. I need to find somebody who can help, but I don’t know whom to trust. And I don’t want to get in trouble with Mom once I get home. If Metal Jaw is right about Akaela, it sounds like she’s the one who got in trouble.
Yuri tosses the stick on the ground and brushes a finger along the blade of his penknife. The sun is setting and it shines an eerie light on his metallic jaw. He could have it fixed with skin grafts, but the kid wants to pretend he’s die-hard and prides himself in all those screws poking out of his jawbone. Every single Mayake I know has some kind of prostheses—some more conspicuous than others—but Yuri’s are the only ones that repel me. Maybe because he’s so brazen about them.
“Oh come on,” he teases, walking to the Tower with us even though we didn’t invite him to. “Like you know nothing about her cat. I bet you even helped her put implants in the furry thing, though neither of you will ever admit it.”
“That’s easy to test,” Lukas says. “Just take a Geiger counter. Lithium-ion radiation will emit in the micro-Sievert range—”
“Lukas!” I scold him. The guy’s such a geek he doesn’t understand when to keep his mouth shut.
Lukas looks down and mumbles, “Sorry.”
There’s a lot of commotion outside the Tower. Kissed by the dying sun, the gray façade looks pink and beautiful despite the cracks and open holes on the higher stories. People have gathered outside, talking loudly and gesticulating among themselves.
“What’s going on?” I say.
Yuri snaps his penknife closed and drops it in his pocket. “It’s that girl who was supposed to get Skip’s mechanical heart,” he says. “She’s dead.”
The statement, pronounced so coolly and voided of any empathy, makes me want to sock him in the face. How dare he joke about stuff like that?
“What are you talking about?”
He shrugs, the metal in his face glistening almost sadistically. “Open heart surgery with a failing heart to boot. The surgeons did whatever they could. She didn’t make it.”
“You can’t be serious!” I insist, refusing to believe he’s telling the truth.
“The odds were totally in her favor,” Lukas chimes in.
“Oh please,” Yuri snarls. “Those are just numbers.”
“Shut up!” I yell. “Both of you!” My hands are shaking. I shove them in my pockets and tell Yuri I don’t believe a word he’s saying. I know the waiting list for a mechanical heart is relatively long, with young children at the top of the list, but surely I would’ve heard something if the surgery had been planned for today. Yuri’s a filthy bastard who enjoys other people’s pain. I storm away, not bothering to wait for Lukas to catch up on his skinny legs.
Mom spots me from the main entrance and comes running. She hugs me in a way that’s almost embarrassing and makes me hope everybody else is too distracted to notice. When she finally lets go, she cups my face in her hand and hook—even more embarrassing—and says, “You damned fool! Where the hell have you been all day?”
Mom talks like that only when she’s really angry. So maybe Yuri wasn’t lying about a girl being dead. I’m about to ask, but Mom lowers her voice and says, “I need you to keep an eye on your sister, Athel. I’m really worried. Things just aren’t right. And what Uli did, with the kitten… it’s bringing even more attention. We don’t need this.”
“Did Akaela get in trouble again?” I don’t like being the big brother responsib
le for his baby sis. Especially when said sister is too stupid to be afraid.
“Ten more spots open!” somebody yells from the main entrance. “Who’s next?”
Mom wraps her prostheses around my arm. “Come on, now. We need to check your batteries. Mandatory call, everybody’s being tested.”
Whatever happened, I’m about to find out. I slide my arm out of Mom’s grasp and follow her inside the Tower.
* * *
By the time they wake me up, my retina display reads 8:24 p.m. It took less than an hour to fully recharge me. Akaela’s still out in the recharging chair, her breathing slow and steady. I sit up and roll my sleeve back down, covering the flap on my forearm.
Uli crosses his arms and leans against the white workbench. “How are you feeling, Athel?”
“I’m good,” I say. “But I never felt bad. Can you finally tell me what’s going on?”
Mom looks down the hallway, then closes the door. Uli wraps the TBC cables around the cart spools and rolls it back into the storage room. His office is on the ground floor, at the end of a long hallway that used to connect various medical labs and waiting rooms.
Mom slumps in one of the empty recharging chairs and sighs. “They’re all back to their quarters.”
Uli scratches a brow and nods. “Over two hundred battery checks performed in under five hours. That’s a record.”
“Now you’ll tell me what happened?” I ask. “I’m almost seventeen. I may be too young to participate in the Kiva, but I deserve to know what’s going on.”
Mom and Uli look at one another, as if deciding how much they should share.
Uli inhales. “Skip’s artificial heart was perfectly fine. So were his nanobots, wiring, and chips. Everything looked in working shape, however…” He sighs, rasps the stubble on his chin with the black index finger of his mechanical hand. “He was completely wiped out. There wasn’t a single joule left in his system.”
Mom lets out a whimper and nibbles on the tip of her hand hook.
I frown. “And you’re absolutely sure it wasn’t the droids who killed him?”
