Shatter City

by Scott Westerfeld

  “It confuses my father.” I fall into Rafi’s resting smug face. “She’s out in the wild with a rebel crew. If Diego Intelligence is worth anything, you must know that.”

  “There’ve been rumors.” Sinjean tilts her head a little. “But why was she in Paz yesterday?”

  “There’s a grubby little rebel crew in town. Frey was with them yesterday.”

  “Did those grubby little rebels give you that knife?”

  I can’t suppress a sigh. They’re never going to return Boss X’s present to me.

  “It was a gift. My sister worries about me too much. It’s in her DNA.”

  Sinjean stares into her coffee cup, thinking hard. Like she’s starting to believe me.

  Maybe it’s time to go on the offensive.

  “Let me ask you something,” I say. “Are there any new rumors on the feeds this morning?”

  “Always.” She narrows her eyes. “But you mean the Builder Virus, don’t you?”

  So Essa got away.

  But Builder Virus? Not Srin’s catchiest work.

  “It’s not just a rumor,” I say. “Start checking your spare parts. Or grab a Shreve fab and take its brain apart. Trust me—you’ll find the virus in there.”

  The woman leans back a little. “You’ve been in custody since before the rumor started. If you weren’t involved in the fabricator attack, how do you know about this?”

  Good question.

  More of the truth, then.

  “The night before I escaped Shreve, my father told me about his plans for Paz. He said something would hit this city, a force of nature, softening it up for a takeover. This whole disaster is because of him.”

  Sinjean hesitates again. But I’m telling the absolute truth.

  The usual confusion crosses her face. “Your father knew the quake would happen?”

  “He made it happen. I have no idea how. But you have to check every construction drone, every wall, every wire. Or you might as well let my father fill the air with dust!”

  Horror glints in Sinjean’s bland, pretty eyes—like she really will check. Maybe getting arrested was useful.

  As long as they don’t keep me here forever.

  “That’s interesting information. But in order to believe it, I have to be certain that you’re Rafi, not Frey.” Sinjean looks me up and down. “And you just don’t have the finish of a first daughter.”

  At those words, something bubbles up in me—an anger restrained by my feels, but now unchecked. A piece of Rafi buried deep inside me, a fury at being disheveled and hungry, mishandled and now, worst of all, disrespected.

  “A guest list of seven hundred and sixty-three. Seventeen bridesmaids in gorgeous ice-blue dresses, V-neck, floor-length, empire line.”

  She’s frowning, like she doesn’t get it. But I don’t stop. Let her check the details later.

  “Three days off for every worker in Shreve; double bubbly rations for a week. A million lilacs scattered by drones at the moment we kiss, captured by four hundred and twenty hovercams, broadcast in full VR.”

  Only Rafi would know all this—except that I was Rafi during the wedding planning.

  “The day we escaped,” I continue, “Col was wearing a mint-green shirt and rose jacket, chosen to match the extra rations.”

  “That was on the feeds,” she says. “Frey could have seen it.”

  “Frey wouldn’t have cared!” I cry. “Nor would she have known that you’re wearing a Rusty-style monastic dress, and you’re wearing it wrong. It’s supposed to have a belt.”

  “You’re really her,” Sinjean says.

  I put on my best imperious voice. “Of course. So let me go. I have things to do!”

  “More important things than staying alive?” She folds her hands. “As of this morning, we know of a dozen Shreve agents in Paz, sent here to kill you.”

  “They’re here to kill Frey,” I say.

  “Still, mistakes might be made. You requested asylum, after all.”

  “And you’ve treated me like a prisoner! I withdraw the request.”

  Sinjean sighs. “We can’t let you endanger yourself.”

  “When I escaped from my father, the whole Shreve army was chasing me! You think I’m afraid of a few lackeys?”

  The woman shrugs.

  “Maybe not. But the last thing we need is a firefight in the middle of this broken city. Or your sister and her rebel friends swooping in to extract vengeance. We have no choice but to protect you.”

  “But you can’t just lock me up. I haven’t done anything illegal!”

  “Maybe not.” The neutral smile again. “But someone with your DNA did—and that’s bound to cause confusion. Until we sort it all out, Rafia of Shreve, we’re going to keep you someplace very, very safe.”

  They put me in a room.

  Not a prison cell, exactly—bigger than my bedroom at home, the walls covered with screens. I can turn them into windows looking out on a simulated pre-quake Paz, or an alpine forest, or waterfalls in Brazil. The bed is comfortable, the food better than anything I’ve eaten since escaping my father’s tower.

  The soft tissue in my ankle is healing, because my own private autodoc comes in for an hour, twice a day.

  But there’s no way out.

  I’ve tested the walls, the vents, the door—all military-grade ceramics. My father could hit this building with a rail gun and I’d barely hear the thud.

  As promised, I am very safe.

  Sinjean visits me every day, asking questions for hours at a time.

  “How exactly does surveillance dust work? How is all that data processed?”

  “I don’t know. Daddy doesn’t bother me with technical secrets.”

  “How do you feel about privacy?”

  “I miss it. I’d have more if you’d let me go!”

  Sinjean ignores it when I snap at her. She has no feels on her wrist, but she’s as perpetually unruffled as a Calm addict.

  “Did you bond with your sister when you were young?”

  “She was my only real friend,” I say. “Have you heard anything about her?”

  A shake of her head. “Frey seems to have vanished. Your father is now claiming openly that she never existed in the first place.”

  That sends my hand to Languish, which makes me ask, “And Col?”

  “Increasingly irrelevant. Since the quake, Victoria is third-screen news.”

  “But is he okay?”

  Sinjean raises a perfect eyebrow. “Why do you care? You said he was a stupid boy, the engagement forced upon you.”

  “We had to convince the whole world that we loved each other,” I say, as lightly as I can. “Maybe that started to sink in.”

  “Interesting,” she says.

  It’s brain-rattling, using Rafi’s voice every day. But it’s worse when Sinjean leaves me all alone.

  The wallscreens will show me the feeds, but only boring ones. Not Srin’s network or the other conspiracy channels, no hard news. Just fashion and first family gossip, a few puff pieces on the aftermath of the quake.

  Nothing about the Builder Virus. I have no idea if our warning was heeded, or whether the new Paz is taking shape with my father’s eyes and ears built into the walls.

  My body’s going soft. There’s no way to train hard without them realizing that I’m Frey.

  The only thing I can depend on are the rows of little faces on my arm.

  I have Joy, watching feed stories about Paz’s brave survivors pulling their lives together after the quake. Timing my touch of Grief for the swell of background music that comes just before images of the Wall of the Lost. Looking for Essa’s face in the crowd shots, wondering if her resistance group is searching for me.

  Which leads me to righteous Anger that Col or X or my sister haven’t come. That they haven’t turned this city upside down to find me.

  But it’s easier to be Philosophical about my situation. No one knows where I am. Half a dozen buildings like this one must go up every day i
n Shatter City, as blank-faced and identical as bullets. Col loves me. Rafia of Shreve can take care of herself. The war can’t last forever.

  And I Cherish them all, setting the walls of my cell to show the Amazon jungle, pretending that Col is just out of sight. Or the desert wild near Paz, where Boss X has a home for me among his crew, more loyal than any blood.

  Which leads me to Languish, because my own sister abandoned me.

  I try to imagine her out in the wild. Hunting for food, making her own clothes, voting on the next rebel mission. Is pretending to be me still easy for her?

  I miss my big sister, even if I don’t know her anymore.

  When it all hurts too much, I weep everything away all with a long touch of Melancholy. Bring myself to that perfect, cried-out emptiness and then a dose of Stranger, which feels like looking down on myself from a thousand klicks above. The view from up there is epic.

  But Essa was right—feels can’t fight loneliness forever. Inevitably, emotions without human context turn into smoke and ashes, nothing but noise in my head.

  Each day Hope grows hollower inside me.

  Then, twenty-seven days into my captivity, they give me a roommate.

  He’s from Paz—I can tell from his handmade clothes, his feels. The way he paces the dimensions of the room, hands gesturing like he’s having an argument in his head, ignoring me at first.

  So I give myself a dose of Patience and wait for him to talk.

  It’s half an hour before he even notices my famous face.

  “Huh,” he says then. “Why’d they put me in with you?”

  His English is excellent.

  “Depends,” I say. “What’d you do to get arrested?”

  He gives me a wary look. “Interfering with the relief effort.”

  That sounds promising. “You don’t like Shreve?”

  “I don’t trust any of them,” he says. “A construction drone was working on my house—without my permission! I told it to go away, and it didn’t.”

  I nod. “So you’ve heard of the Builder Virus.”

  He frowns. “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you? Everyone knows about the virus—just nobody seems to care. All that matters is getting out of the tents before the rainy season starts.”

  “Roofs are useful in the rain,” I say with infinite Patience.

  He turns away in disgust. “Keeping dry isn’t worth giving our freedom away. You of all people should know that.”

  “Indeed.” I extend my hand. “Rafia of Shreve.”

  He looks up at my ragged hair, roots creeping up from the dye. “Thought you were the other one.”

  “We get that a lot,” I say.

  “Hang on.” He pulls away. “If you’re the first daughter, what are you in here for?”

  “Blowing up a fab.” Our hosts must be listening, so I add, “Allegedly.”

  A glimmer of admiration crosses his face.

  “You blew one up? All I did was block a few exhaust intakes. Took the thing three hours to overheat. Where’d you get the explosives?”

  “Used a pulse knife. Allegedly.”

  His eyes widen.

  “I’m Primero,” he says, and shakes my hand at last.

  All at once, his suspicion is gone, and he catches me up on a month’s worth of news.

  I hear all about the Builder Virus—how the other relief forces discarded every spare part, then brain-wiped all the Shreve fabs. Everyone thought they’d stamped it out, at first. Until a rumor started.

  Some locals salvaged an electron microscope from a ruined high school, and started looking at their walls. They found things that looked like sensors hiding in the insulation, the fireproofing, the paint.

  What if the virus wasn’t just jumping from construction drones into buildings, but also the other way? So if any construction drone worked on an infected building, the contagion started spreading again.

  The only way to wipe it out completely would be to stop work for months while every wall, every wire, every speck of plaster in Shatter City was checked. The relief forces might as well start over, with no guarantee the infection wouldn’t crop up again.

  I have to admit, that sounds like a trick my father would pull. But it also sounds like a rumor he’d start, just to throw everything into chaos.

  “Some of us want to rebuild from scratch,” Primero says. “Using the old ways. No drones. No smart materials at all, just dumb stone and steel.”

  “Won’t that take … forever?” I ask.

  “Privacy has always been inconvenient.” Primero sighs. “That’s why most people don’t bother with it.”

  “Most? Is it even close?”

  He shakes his head. “Our side’s got a majority of residents in a few buildings. They’re starting over. But everyone else …”

  I turn away from him. Four weeks of waiting for news, and it’s this: My father keeps winning, even when the whole world knows what he’s up to.

  With that flash of panic, my Patience starts to wear thin. I touch Steadfast and remember Boss X’s words.

  You can’t shame dictators—you have to crush them.

  I lean close to Primero and speak softly, my lips barely moving.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  He holds my gaze for a moment, then reaches into his mouth and pulls out … a tooth.

  “No kidding,” he says. “That’s why I brought this.”

  The tooth is moving softly in Primero’s hand, like a tiny white slug.

  “You know they’re watching us, right?” I ask.

  “They think they are.” He smiles a gap-toothed smile. “The rest of my teeth are surveillance blockers—this one’s a way out.”

  I stare closer. “That’s supposed to get us out of here?”

  “Six grams of smart matter, military-grade.” He looks around the room. “It’ll burn through these ceramics like they’re paper.”

  “Military smart matter? In the city of peace?”

  He looks me up and down. Deciding if I’m worth trusting.

  Finally he shrugs. “Got this stuff a long time before the quake, in a place you never heard of, where people make things for themselves.”

  I take a long look back at him. That’s when I realize that his handmade clothes might be threadbare, but they’re the quality Rafi always taught me to look for. The silk on his tie shines like metal; his shoes are made of real animal leather.

  He’s either very rich, or …

  “Are you a crim?” I ask.

  “Used to be, back before. Now I’m a freedom fighter.” He smiles, showing the gap from his missing tooth again. “All us Shatter City crims are, these days. Can’t afford your dad taking over and putting his dust in the air. Bad for business.”

  I frown—that was always one of my father’s arguments for the dust. That without it, crimes could go unsolved, even undetected.

  Freedom has a way of complicating things.

  Primero’s watching me consider all this, amused. “Never met a crim before?”

  “We don’t have them in Shreve.”

  “Right. You traded us for secret police and dust and a dictator.” He snorts a laugh. “How’s that working out?”

  “It wasn’t my call. So why should I trust you?”

  “Your dad’s a dictator, and you were ready to marry a dangerous revolutionary boy.” Primero shakes his head with a sigh. “But an honest crim …”

  “Those two words don’t even make sense! You take other people’s money, right?”

  “Money was a Rusty thing. The pretty regime didn’t even have it. So all the money in the world is new, my dear—barely as old as you.”

  “I guess. So?”

  “It’s a fiction. Like deciding that a number is yours and no one else gets to use it.” He looks straight at me. “Or a first family pretending a whole city belongs to them.”

  “Granted, first families are weird. But money seems like a pretty useful fiction, at least.”

  “To you,
” he says. “Because you’ve never been without it.”

  I almost laugh. He thinks I’m Rafi, of course, a mind-bendingly rich girl. He doesn’t know I’ve never really owned anything that I couldn’t hold in my own two hands. That I don’t legally exist.

  So I keep it simple. “You lie for a living. How am I supposed to trust you?”

  “Because we’re in here together, and we want the same things. Not just to get out, but to fix what the people in charge have decided isn’t broken.” Primero smiles. “That’s what makes us allies.”

  That word sends a sharp little ping through me, like the first moments of Morning Buzz. Allies is what Col and I called each other at first.

  Primero is fighting my father. Maybe that’s enough.

  Besides, he’s my only chance of escape.

  More Steadfast, and I hold out my hand.

  “Okay. Allies, then.”

  He solemnly shakes.

  I look down at the smart matter in his other hand. “After we get through the wall, we’ll have to punch our way out of here. Can that thing build us a weapon?”

  “It’ll be exhausted. And hand-to-hand combat was never my specialty—I’m more of a gentle persuader. I don’t suppose a rich girl like you knows how to fight?”

  I hesitate. But we’ve decided to be allies, so …

  “Here’s a secret for you—I’m really the dangerous sister.”

  That gap-toothed smile again.

  “Had a feeling. Takes one to know one, after all.”

  The smart matter takes its time.

  The reaction starts up like a stomach-soother in a glass of water, bubbling where Primero stuck it on the wall. The fizzing grows outward in all directions, always a perfect circle.

  I’m pacing, trying not to hit Patience again. I’ll need an undiluted jolt of Courage when we get through.

  Primero reaches for his own feels. He has them on both wrists—six extra rows on his right arm, mostly calm faces.

  “Are those for your … job?”

  He nods. “Pays to keep a cool head in my line of work.”

  Criminal feels. Of course.

  The smart matter reaction has warmed the air in our cell. I wonder if our hosts will spot it before we’re out.