by Julian North
“And that’s what ArgoGood does? Makes fabricated food for Bronx City?” I remembered Jalen’s story about what his mother had bargained for in exchange for letting Landrew Foster-Rose-Hart have Rose-Hart. I’d been eating blood money for most of my life. We all had.
“ArgoGood fabricates things for everyone—not just food. Clothes, tires, duraglass, you name it. It’s all ArgoGood. Their fabrication centers are the biggest, the most versatile. And rumored to be based off a single, stolen technology breakthrough developed out in Silicon Valley. They’d been fighting out the patent dispute in court for years, until succession happened. Very fortunate for them.”
“I never gave much thought about the business behind it.”
“That’s the way Orderists want it.” He sounded bitter.
“You sound like Mateo.”
Nythan was quiet. The sounds of the road outside rumbled in the silence. Finally, he spoke. “I’ve been coming here a lot.” Simple words, but they had a deeper meaning.
“I’m sure Kortilla is okay,” I said, as much to myself as to Nythan.
The truck rattled violently.
“Pothole,” I commented. “We must be getting close to BC. Manhattan streets usually don’t have them.”
“Time to pretend we’re some cheaply fabricated slop. Shouldn’t be too hard. Be sure to shut down your viser too. Not sure how good that lining is, but electronic signals are going to be more visible than body heat.”
I flicked off my viser and waited, alone in the darkness. The vehicle stopped, then moved ahead for a few seconds before stopping again. Waiting in line for inspection before crossing into BC. I tried to think about the Authority stormtroopers outside with their scanners and other machines. Instead, my thoughts lingered on Kortilla, and Mateo, and Aba. Mateo had started all this. Or at least he’d been the willing spark on the tinder. Someone else had brought in the force weapons, though. Someone who wanted chaos. I was sure it was Virginia Timber-Night.
The transport jerked forward and then stopped again three more times. I heard voices outside the vehicle’s thick metallic skin after the last stop.
“Jackin’ machine drivers!” The shout echoed through the vehicle’s walls. The speaker must be right beside the transport. “This one isn’t taking the navigation override.”
“The uplink isn’t working. No manifest available. Do we just turn it back?” said another voice. His tone indicated that he hoped to do just that.
Deuces. I needed to get into BC.
“Sounds right to me. These corps know the rules. Restricted zone. Itemized manifest required.”
I closed my eyes, seeking my inner strength as I did so. The cold came to me, anxious. I drank in the chilly embrace. Then I pushed my mind outward, beyond the walls of the transport, toward the men I knew stood just outside. I had trilled through walls before, but I’d never tried my power on someone I couldn’t see. I found the mind of the speaker. I probed his defenses. The Authority officer was a bitter man. Bile seeped from his thoughts. He resented his superiors. He wasn’t overly fond of his fellow officers either. But he hated the people across the river in BC. Those were the men and women who kept him out in the cold, who wouldn’t do as they were told, who disrespected him. The memory of searing pain flashed in my head—a projectile striking the armor of the officer’s helmet during the unrest two nights ago. Agony, dizziness, and the sounds of laughter as the perpetrators fled. I shivered, hoping this man didn’t get assigned to another incursion into BC. He wanted blood.
I trilled, my voice, mind, and genes forming the attack. “You must conduct a manual inspection. Do not anger ArgoGood.” I whispered the words, but they weren’t important. They just helped me channel the power, the trill. My will reached out for that angry man outside. His mind was protected by a shell of thick glass—tough but rigid. I hit it, hard. My hands tingled. His defenses cracked but didn’t break. I came again, even harder. This time the barrier shattered. A searing pain jabbed inside my head: rage, loathing, and fear flooded my mind. I twisted in pain, struggling for breath. So much anger. Blackness.
The clanging of the metal door jerked me back to the conscious world. Beams of light flashed on the ceiling above my hiding place. The low humming of a scanner mixed with the thumping of my heart.
“Jackin’ corps—always get what they want,” muttered the angry man.
“This was your idea, Lukas,” said the other. “We could’ve turned it around—”
A light beam danced frantically on the ceiling above me. “I told you, ArgoGood is dangerous. Don’t mess with them. Let’s just get this thing scanned. We’re holding up the line.”
There was more humming. I wondered what Nythan was thinking. Did he get nervous in his little dark box? Or had he already done all the mathematical calculations and was resigned to his fate? Most likely he was thinking about some twentieth century celluloid flick. Damn him.
“Got anything?” asked the angry man.
I could’ve fallen to my death in the gulf of silence that followed. My heartbeats were so quick they had practically joined together.
“Well?”
“N-no. Nothing. Forget it. Let’s just get these transports moving.”
The doors slammed shut. Somewhere in the ether, electronic signals were exchanged and the transport started moving. I exhaled a long, slow breath as the distinctive sounds of tires on a bridge filtered through the container.
“We made it in,” I whispered, as much to myself as to Nythan. “Now we need to start fixing the world.”
Chapter 19
“I don’t hear anyone outside,” I said after the truck had been stopped for several minutes.
We must be at the ration dispensary.” Nythan glanced at his viser. “It’s getting late—almost nine o’clock. Curfew is in effect, and the dispensary is closed to everything except deliveries.”
I nodded, thinking about Aba’s many late nights. It was indeed late, but not for her. She’d still be here. “We should get out of here. There are no autoloaders in Bronx City—just plenty of humans who are cheaply and desperately available around here.” I listened for a few more seconds. “There’s no street noise. We must be inside the fence. Let’s go before anyone comes.”
I had to help Nythan down from the crate stack. But he hacked the digital lock to get the rear hatch to open, so we were more than even. The odor of explosive residue assaulted us as soon as we stepped into the chilly night air. A thick ceiling of heavy clouds hovered above us like a disapproving parent, the flashing lights of Authority drones buzzing beneath them. We stood outside a battered five-story warehouse, its windows barricaded with dented durashields. Immediately in front of us was an empty parking lot surrounded by a barbed wire-topped metal fence. An enforcement drone squatted on the middle of the street just beyond the perimeter. Several burnt-out car wreckages clogged the street.
“Do you know where you are?” Nythan asked me.
“I do,” I whispered. I’d been here often as a child. Even if there was a curfew, the dispensary would probably be exempt. The BC government was a joke, but they kept the ration centers open and functioning. I glanced at the nearest drone and the lights of another a few streets away. I counted the surveyors above. I bit my lip in frustration. There were so many.
The noisy clattering of a hard plastika wheel over uneven ground erupted from the far side of the truck.
“They’re coming to unload the truck,” I hissed, grabbing Nythan’s hand as I spoke. I yanked him around to the other side of the transport. I ducked my head beneath the vehicle and saw a quartet of legs pulling the noisy flatbed cart.
“Where the hell are you going?” Nythan whispered. “We should head for the streets.”
“We’ll never make it across town on our own tonight. The enforcers are everywhere.”
“We can’t go inside,” Nythan said. “We’ll be seen. Even I know the ration centers have armed guards.”
“It’ll be okay,” I assured him, a pit of worry
in my gut. But I wasn’t concerned about being shot. I feared something far worse: my grandmother. “Trust me.”
Nythan shook his head, but stopped his protests. I led him toward the old warehouse. There were two crumbling loading docks connected to the oversized concrete bunker of a building. Urban legend had it that the ration center had once been a personal storage building—back in a time when regular people had so much stuff they actually needed extra space to keep it all. That might’ve been a joke. I’d asked Aba once if it was true. She’d scowled and told me, “Agua pasada no vuelve más.” Once water has passed, it won’t come again.
Whatever the building had once been, it, together with the three others like it spread across the city, was the decaying heart of Bronx City. Without the cheap rations distributed at these places, people would be hungry, they would be sick from drinking dirty water, they would be even colder than they were already. The people who worked at the ration centers earned a pittance from the city—less than a domestic servant in Manhattan. But it was steady and essential work. Many took bribes or stole food or both. Mateo cursed this place as being no better than a free hit of Z-pop. He said it kept people staid and dependent. He might have been right, but it had also put food on our plates for most of our lives. I was used to waiting in the endless lines at the front of the center. It had been ten years since I’d snuck in through the back. I was out of practice.
“You there—stop!” The voice was shrill, angry.
Nythan and I turned to find two men outfitted in the formless beige work clothes of the dispensary. The younger one was fumbling for his stun wand while simultaneously trying to flick an alarm signal on his viser. He wasn’t doing either particularly well. He must’ve been new. His companion wasn’t moving. He was staring at me.
I lowered my chin and met the dour gaze. It emanated from a dried weed of a man with cracked lips and a frown so deep that it may have never faded. He reached out with a bony hand, grabbing his companion’s visered arm and holding him still.
“Santi, what ya’ doin’, man?” asked the younger worker. “They’re looters.”
That worn hand didn’t move. Its owner didn’t blink as he addressed me. “Is young Paco right? You here to loot? Steal food from your brothers and sisters?”
“Of course not, Uncle Santiago,” I said.
The old man grunted, harsh and skeptical. “Ain’t your uncle. Not sure I’ve seen you in five years at least, Daniela.” His eyes softened, but the frown remained. “You’ve grown quite a bit. Saw you run on the net, though. Yes, sure did see that.”
The younger worker’s eyes widened. “You’re her? Daniela Machado?”
“Yeah, that’s her.” Nythan’s amused grin was bright enough to penetrate the night.
The young man smiled as well. “Santi said he knew you. Said he knew you since you were little. Said you’re old lady Rayneli’s grandkid.” It took me a moment to realize he meant Aba. It was strange to hear her first name. “But I thought he was just telling stories. Whoa. Yeah, I saw you on the net, for sure. Heard about what ya did to that clanger too. Jack-A, girl, you’re rockin’ it. You really showed ’em.”
My chin fell as I gaped at this strange, awestruck boy. My words failed me.
“What did she do to the clanger, exactly?” Nythan asked, far more calmly than I would have. He sounded like he was enjoying this.
“Blasted the thing with a force rifle, I heard.” He nodded his head vigorously, as if confirming his own fantastic story. “Just stood right in the middle of the road, stared down the jackin’ thing. Then blasted it right between two of its bleedin’ electronic eyes with one of the black boot’s own guns.”
Santiago chuckled—a dry, cynical thing that let us all know what he thought about his companion’s fantasy. But Uncle Santi knew me—or at least he used to. People on the streets, like this boy, they could believe anything. I shook my head with disbelief, anger. The barrio loved a story, and they grew in the telling. My damn brother.
“I shot no clanger, Paco,” I told him. “My brother did that.”
“Your bro, Mateo? He and the Corazones, they givin’ out weapons, teachin’ people to fight. Even in Chicago and Atlanta I hear they been fightin’. Corazones toasted dozens of ’em clangers around here. You can see the hulks smoldering—”
Santiago silenced his young apprentice with a squeeze of his hand. Paco winced. “Why don’t you go tell Ms. Rayneli that she has a visitor. I’ll bring our visitors up the side stairwell to auxiliary storage. Ask her to meet us there.”
“Uh, sure, Santi.”
“Be quick and quiet about it. Don’t go blabbing, you understand? Plenty of government monitoring devices inside. Some of them might even still work. You got it?”
Paco nodded like an excited puppy.
Santiago took a long glance at Nythan. His frown deepened. “Follow me closely. Keep your head down, gringo. Try not to attract any more attention than you already do. We’ll only be inside on the ground level for a few seconds before we reach the stairs.”
We shuffled along behind Santiago, staring mostly at our feet. We passed through the loading dock door into the dispensary. It couldn’t have been more different than the ArgoGood facility where we had boarded the transport. Here, there were no conveyor belts, no automated loaders, no sensor-tracked inventory control. The warehouse floor was worn and stained from countless years of pounding from men and machines. Hand-drawn carts stacked high with supplies were hauled across the floor by sweating men and women, then unloaded into numbered piles that were scattered everywhere across the vast interior floor area. Aba was somewhere among those boxes, tallying items on her list, making sure everything was where it should be. There was theft in the dispensary, but not of any items Aba was responsible for.
We hurried up two flights of stairs, onto a dark floor. Santiago fiddled with an ancient wall switch, which eventually resulted in a few dusty sodium lights flickering reluctantly to life. The soft glow revealed seemingly endless corridors with nearly identical storage rooms on each side. Santiago led us down one of the passages. We kept close. Busted machinery, most of it rusted beyond recognition, spilled out of several of the storerooms.
“Lovely,” Nythan commented. “Reminds me of the Death Star’s garbage compactor.”
Santiago gave him a sharp look and a snort, but didn’t stop walking. Finally, we came to a storage room with slightly better lighting than the others. Two gigantic steel-plated freezers occupied the rear of the room, and the last vestiges of olive-shaded paint peeled from the ceiling.
“We used to store frozen goods in here, back when there were such things. Make yourselves at home.” I looked around. There wasn’t any place to sit except the floor, with years of dust accumulated on its surface. We stood.
Santiago turned to go.
“Uncle Santi,” I said. He stopped but didn’t turn. “Are people really saying that I blew up a clanger. That… that I started this?”
He turned slowly to face me once again. “People around here say what they say. Barrio folk say they hate highborn, hate Manhattan, but truth is they love to hear about a girl who went there, took their best shots, is living their dream, but is still a barrio girl.”
“But I didn’t do those things. And I didn’t start this.” I didn’t want this weight on my shoulders. I had enough to worry about.
“Even if it ain’t all true, people want to believe. Especially now. Not much you can do about that.” His frown twisted into a reluctant smirk. “Besides, I think at least some of it is true.” Then he was gone.
“That’s your uncle?” Nythan asked. “I see easy charm runs in your family.”
“He’s a friend of Aba’s. Not even a friend of hers, really. They’re both from Hispaniola, both exiles. Mateo used to come here when we were little, and I tagged along, of course. Back then there was even less to eat than now. We were hungry kids. Aba never openly broke the rules, of course. But Uncle Santi always snuck us something—a piece of dried f
abri-fruit or a cracker. Something. Aba must’ve known, but didn’t stop him.” I pursed my lips as I sorted through those old memories, about how precious a bite of a fabricated apple was versus the abundance I had access to in the Tuck dining room via my student account. I’d forgotten about hunger. About not being able to get medicine if I got sick. Was I really still a girl of the barrio?
Footsteps echoed in the hall. Four legs. Getting closer. My throat tightened. I squared my shoulders. “Let me do the talking,” I whispered to Nythan.
Paco appeared first, an eager grin on his face. He kept looking back at the unseen figure in the corridor, who was taking her own time getting to where she was going.
“They’re in here, Ms. Rayneli. Santi thought bringing ’em up here was a good idea, out of the way. You know, in case the black boots are looking for her. Which I think they might be, considering. He thought they might even have cameras in the dispensary.” Paco was talking too much, too fast.
“You can leave us now, Paco.” It was Aba’s voice. Low. Brittle. Paco’s grin vanished.
“But, if you need anything—”
“I won’t.”
Paco gave me a puppy’s disappointed stare, then sulked off. Two ominous footsteps later, Aba appeared in the doorway, her eyes impenetrable, her countenance severe. She wore the same beige fabricated clothes as the rest of the workers, but somehow her outfit clung to her tiny form. Aba regarded Nythan momentarily and without warmth. Then her attention fixed upon me, the wayward cub. She came into the tiny room, and I felt like those giant freezers behind me had clicked on.
“You’re a hero now, eh?”
