by Kate Moretti
Then the lights come on, throwing the damage into sharp relief. It’s worse now that I can see.
When the ARC medics get to me, the clock flickers back on. It projects benignly onto the wall, and it is with some bewilderment that I realize only fourteen minutes have passed since it all began. As I am lifted carefully onto a stretcher, I see Daine’s face hovering worriedly over me. He squeezes my good shoulder carefully, but he doesn’t look away from my eyes.
“You’re gonna be okay, all right? Just fine. You did amazing.”
I can’t really make out the words over the ringing in my ears, but the message comes through telepathically and is written clearly on his concerned face. He looks pretty wrecked, too, although he appears to still have all his limbs. Livid bruising is already forming down his right cheekbone, his nose is clearly broken, and one eye is an angry reddened slit from the beating he took to save me.
I cough, the painkiller being pushed into the veins at my elbow sending cool relief through my arm.
“I’m gonna join the trainee program.” The words surprise me. They definitely weren’t what I meant to say. I was going to say thank you or something—that I’d be fine.
Daine grins at me. His pale moustache is fascinating, with its golden sparkles refracting the light in crazy kaleidoscope patterns. Oh, I’m high. That explains that.
“I’ll sign you up. Be your TO, if you like.” He’s walking with me as the medics carry me on the stretcher.
I swallow. “No offence, but I’d rather have a TO with swing as well as guts. You’re brave, but you can’t fight for nuke.” I give him a shaky smile, and he pats my shoulder again.
“Yeah, I get that. You’ll be a wicked agent.” His voice is thick as he gives me a last meaningful glance before peeling away from the stretcher. As I’m carried out the door, I see him hoist a crying boy up into his arms. Hugging the kid, he walks away from a dead body covered in black plastic.
I wonder how many people died. I wonder if I’ll be able to use my arm again. Then the strip lights over my head blur as the medicine drags me down. Suddenly, Kion is there, leaning over me, haloed like an angel. The medics stop for a moment, and he touches my cheek lightly, leans down, and plants a light kiss on my forehead. It’s full of sadness, apology, and fear. I shake my head at him as best I can, and he presses his lips together, his features shadowed with pain.
The last thing I see before the medicine overwhelms me is his ARC operative badge: a twinkling silver arch like a shooting star’s trail.
I’m gonna get me one of those. I get it now. I get why we have to fight, and I’m going to take every one of those bastards apart, with my bare hands if I have to. This can never happen again. I’m not going to be afraid anymore. I’m only a coward if I don’t fight back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tash spends most of the time time falling in streams, out of trees, learning to juggle, dreaming about zombies, dancing, painting, learning/teaching Karate, reading, and of course, writing. Being raised by hippie feminists, child-Tash did not realise that some people believe that women are inherently less capable of certain things. Since this belief is quite obviously ridiculous, the chance to join in an anthology aimed at spreading awareness of how biological sex has no impact on one’s abilities was welcome.
THOUGHTS ON BRAVE NEW GIRLS
“I studied Multimedia Tech and Engineering at University, and there were huge and obvious gender imbalances in the student body. Kids can and will eventually not be programmed to believe that which bathroom they use has any effect on their future and careers. Hopefully this awesome project helps with that!”
Illustration for “Panic” by Tash McAdam
GRAVEYARD SHIFT
by Kimberly G. Giarratano
Philly Ramirez’s boots thumped against the pavement as she sprinted toward the wrought-iron gates of the Pine Barrens City Cemetery. She was late for work again, and if Ralph was in a foul mood—and he usually was—he’d make good on his threat to call her parole officer.
Philly wrapped her fingers around the gate’s thick black bars and pushed it open. She winced as the door squealed on its ancient hinges.
All of Atlantic City probably heard that.
Philly swiped at the specks of rust-colored dust on her gray coveralls before running toward the maintenance shed, pulverizing acorns with each step.
She had barely registered her thumbprint with the shift clock before Ralph called out from behind the desk, “You’re late, blondie.”
Philly slumped her shoulders and sucked in her breath. Dammit. Ralph was always sitting behind the desk. Why couldn’t he be cruising the Segway, managing the grounds like he was supposed to? Oh, right, because he’s a lazy slob. That’s why.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding apologetic. “There, uh, was traffic.” Sure, that sounded good, except even Ralph knew she walked the five blocks from the crappy apartment she shared with her mother.
Ralph shook his bald head. “Let’s not insult us both, sweetheart. Anyway, it’s not me you’ve got to answer to this time. It’s your parole officer, and she’s sitting in my office, waiting for you.” He crossed his fleshy arms and tilted his cleft chin toward the door.
Philly glared at him. “I was only ten minutes late. You couldn’t have let it slide?”
Ralph shifted in his chair. The wheels squeaked under his weight. “I didn’t call her. Maybe you want to tell me why she’s here?”
Philly shook her head. She had been violating her parole—but of course she wasn’t about to tell Ralph that.
Ralph jutted his thumb toward the back room. “I’d get in there if I were you.”
Philly swallowed the lump in her throat before pulling open the steel door that led to Ralph’s office, which was nothing more than a glorified storage room. She stood in the doorframe and waited for Stacia to acknowledge her. Stacia didn’t even look up from her phone, an antiquated government-issued touch screen. Whatever personal information Stacia had stored on there could be hacked by a five-year-old in seconds. Philly knew this because she used to be that five-year-old.
Stacia cleared her throat. “Sit down, Philomena.”
Philly pulled a metal folding chair to the long table and slumped down. She avoided touching the table’s sticky surface and instead fussed with her black, work-issued wristband.
Stacia’s phone cast an eerie glow upon her brown skin. “You know why I’m here.” It wasn’t a question.
Philly kept silent.
“You were seen on the library’s security cameras using Computer Terminal Four,” Stacia continued.
“I was Googling,” Philly said flatly. “That’s not against my parole.”
“You were searching for information on your brother.”
“That’s still not against my parole.”
“It is when you type ‘Velocom’ into the search engine.” Stacia folded her hands and stared intently at Philly.
“I wasn’t trying to hack into Velocom’s servers.” Philly sounded defensive, but she wasn’t lying.
“What were you trying to do then?”
Philly glanced out the small office window. What had she been doing? “I was trying to find a trace of him.”
Stacia sighed as if she had been dealing with this exact situation among all her teenaged convicts. “I know you’re determined, but you’re not going to find out anything more than the US government or Velocom did. You know you’re not allowed to access the Internet except on your phone.”
“Where you can track it,” Philly pointed out.
Stacia shrugged. “We can track you at the library, too.”
More than two years before, Philly had been a dorky high school sophomore who spent more time in the computer lab than at parties. Then her older brother, Tonio, and his best friend, Aiden, had roped he
r into their elaborate plan to steal half a billion dollars from Velocom, the most powerful tech company in the world. At first, Philly said no. She didn’t think getting revenge on the company that ruined her father and sent him to an early grave was worth going to prison for. But Tonio said Velocom’s dealings were more sinister than just ripping off Carlos Ramirez. Velocom had also been hacking into bank accounts and selling the information overseas. Velocom never sold their rich clients’ information because that was too direct a connection. Instead, the company hacked into the accounts of the poorest families, those who lived on government assistance, and sold their information to the Ukrainian mob. The US government was powerless to stop the Ukrainian hackers and had to shut down their systems every time there was a breach, leaving countless families without support. And then Velocom did the most underhanded thing of all—they convinced the US government to purchase Velocom’s expensive security package to fix a problem they had manipulated in the first place.
Tonio and Aiden had a plan to hack into Velocom’s servers and transfer the money to an encrypted, untraceable offshore account. Aiden was supposed to collect evidence from the servers to give to the FBI. Philly’s job was to weaken Velocom’s security system by performing a series of hacks. “Like putting cracks in a dam,” Tonio had said. But the plan fell apart. Tonio wasn’t able to get into the system, but he was able to disappear before authorities could nab him. Unfortunately for Philly, she was arrested within hours and indicted. A jury sent her to Pig Pen, a prison for hacker girls, for two years while Tonio drank margaritas on some beach that didn’t have extradition laws. Meanwhile, Philly’s mother worked double shifts cleaning motel rooms on the boardwalk just to pay rent, scrambling to pick up the pieces, until Philly returned home. And Aiden? Well, Aiden was gone, too.
Stacia cleared her throat. “You with me, Philly?”
Philly emerged from her thoughts. “Yeah.”
“Ralph says you’ve been late a lot,” said Stacia.
“A few times. My mom’s not well.” Philly felt a bubble of emotion well inside her chest and burn her ribs. Her mother was far from well. The woman never ate; she just worked all the time, like a machine. The meager money from the cemetery job was barely keeping Philly and her mom from sleeping at the homeless shelter.
Stacia’s eyes softened. “I know what it’s like to not have food in the house. Or toilet paper. Fearing the electricity being shut off. Do you need help? There are resources available.”
Philly stiffened. “I know. I’d Google them, but then you’d show up.” Philly stared at Stacia for a moment before averting her gaze. She could tell Stacia was being sincere. She had dark circles under her eyes and frown lines. Philly wondered what she saw every day. Maybe one day, she could confide in Stacia, but not now.
“We’re okay,” Philly said finally.
Stacia nodded and held out her hand. Philly sighed before reaching into her coveralls and handing over her cell phone. Before she went to prison, she’d tricked it out with the latest software, but someone in the prison administration had wiped it clean. Everyone wore wristbands now anyway. “There’s nothing on there.”
“Just have to check,” Stacia said before handing the phone back.
“I know.” Philly put the phone back in her pocket. She could feel that anxious bubble expand in her chest—the bubble reminded her that this was her life now: being late to a crappy maintenance job in a cemetery, repairing Velocom’s hologram emitters, working on behalf of the company who was responsible for sending her to prison. She was always broke. Always scrounging and fighting to have anything. Always being monitored like a dog in a pound. Always being treated like a criminal even after she’d done her time.
Philly picked at a gouge in the table’s wooden top. “Stacia, do you think it’s possible to get out of this?” It was the first honest thing she had asked of anyone in a long time.
Stacia stood and hoisted her leather bag onto her shoulder. “You’re a seventeen-year-old convicted hacker. You won’t likely be admitted to college, not without money or a connection. Of which you have neither. So…”
“No.”
“No.” Stacia sighed and tapped some keys on her phone. “Texting you my business card again in case you need it. Try not to be—”
“Late, I know,” Philly said.
Stacia pursed her lips. “I was going to say careless. You know better than to be Googling Velocom’s name. I thought you had better sense than that.”
Philly shrugged. She was going to tell Stacia that when you’re desperate, you do stupid and careless things. Instead, she said, “I’ll be smarter next time.”
Stacia looked pointedly at Philly. “There shouldn’t be a next time. Because if there is, I show up with an FBI agent.”
Philly smiled weakly. “Funny, when I tried to get an FBI agent to pay attention to Velocom’s thievery, all I got was a dial tone.”
Stacia shook her head in defeat. “See you next week.”
Philly waved goodbye without getting up from the table. “Not if I can help it.”
Ralph wiped his hands on his jumpsuit before handing Philly an old tablet with the list of the day’s assignments. Philly could see the residue of his greasy fingerprints all over the touch screen, evidence of the half-eaten meatball hero still lying on his plate. She cocked her eyebrow.
“My wife likes me chubby,” he explained.
Philly’s expression soured. “I don’t want to know why that is.”
Ralph loosened some stuck food with his tongue and said, “You ever think your problem is that you’re afraid of hard work? This wasn’t exactly my dream job, but I made do. I raised a family on this salary. You kids are always looking for an easy way out.”
Philly leaned over the counter and said, “Stealing money is hard work. Anyway, we were attempting to steal it back.”
Ralph just rolled his eyes and swiveled in his chair. “So you say.” He tilted his chin toward the tablet. “The stiff in B12 is all wonky. I need you to take care of it. According to the schedule, he’s expecting a visitor this evening, and that visitor is going to want to see the hologram. We can’t afford to have anyone complain.”
“What’s wrong with the holo emitter?” she asked.
Ralph shrugged. “Taft thought some animal might’ve gotten to it.”
“That’s weird.”
“There were deep gouges on the panel.”
“Did Taft try to fix it?” asked Philly. “Wasn’t he on shift?”
“Taft is daft,” Ralph scoffed. “I can’t trust that kid to fix the thermostat on the cryofreezer, let alone touch the holo emitter at a gravesite. And this isn’t just any stiff. I need someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Call a Velocom tech,” Philly said, but she already knew the result of that call. If Ralph called Velocom, he’d hear a pitch about parts and warranties, and then the tech would try to sell Ralph an expensive insurance plan.
Ralph scratched his cheek with a dirty fingernail. “Best you just take care of it.”
Decades before, Velocom had been nothing more than a mortuary company that made headstones. They specialized in shiny, black granite monoliths for the wealthy until Alexander P. Tonkin announced he had an idea to install holograms into the base of the headstones. This way, when people came to visit the cemetery, they could see an image of their dear departed and hear a personalized message. Usually, those messages were about secret safe deposit boxes and passwords to accounts. There were messages of love and regret, too. Unfortunately, this only worked for those who saw the end coming: people sick with cancer, stuff like that, and of course, only those who were rich enough to afford the hologram recording. Tonkin quickly realized he could make more money building the holograms than the headstones. The newspapers said Tonkin changed the mortuary business, but Philly knew they had only revolu
tionized the theft business.
Philly wondered what it would be like to see a hologram of her father. He had died ten years before, from lung cancer cause by asbestos from his job. She felt an ache in her chest when she tried to recall his voice. A hologram would surely fix that. Except Philly didn’t think a hologram of her father would comfort her at all. It would just remind her how alone she and her mother truly were.
“Don’t make me call them,” Ralph said sternly.
“Fine,” she huffed before tucking the tablet under her arm, picking up her toolbox, and skulking off toward B12. Her boots made a crackling noise as she pummeled the dried twigs that littered the gravel path. The setting sun cloaked the headstones in a blood-red hue, and she shivered. She hated working the graveyard shift.
Philly headed toward B12. She nudged the toe of her steel boot against some weather-beaten stuffed animals and faded homemade crosses. She ran her fingers over the engraved name.
Aiden Tonkin 2020-2038.
Aiden hadn’t been just Tonio’s friend; he had also been the son of Alexander P. Tonkin, Velocom’s ruthless CEO.
She remembered Aiden’s golden-boy good looks. Every girl in her school had wanted to date him, and yet Aiden had never bothered with them. He was the kind of guy on a mission—to end poverty, to fight diseases, to support migrant workers. He was a man of causes. It was hard to believe he had been the heir to Velocom.
She glanced at the dry earth. Six feet under, there was Aiden. The blogs said he died of an overdose. “Rich kids and their pills,” the bloggers decried. But Philly knew it wasn’t like that with Aiden. He hadn’t been just some rich kid living off his father’s wealth. In fact, he seemed to have been actively fighting against it. He’d even run his own blog, where he’d told off his father on more than one occasion. But Philly had to remind herself, you never really knew someone.
