The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  Maya had never really been on her own before. She’d be the front line for any crisis that came up in the community, the person expected to show up if there was trouble and put a stop to it. She’d be the boss.

  Her. In charge.

  Nina was clearly confident that she could handle it. And Maya wasn’t the sheltered, traumatized girl from the Hill anymore. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

  “Good.” Nina’s next instructions were for Conall. “Round up Rafe and Dani. Tell them to be ready for anything.”

  “Got it.”

  Conall rocketed out of the room, leaving Knox to stare at Gray. “No protest from you about staying here?”

  “I’m stubborn, not delusional. Besides…” He grimaced. “That stuff you squirted up my nose makes me woozy.”

  Knox squeezed Gray’s shoulder. “Get some rest. I mean it.”

  He flexed his legs and sighed. “I don’t think I have a choice, Cap.”

  “No, you don’t.” After a final back pat, Knox smiled at Maya. “Don’t let him give you any shit.”

  “I don’t let anyone give me shit,” Maya retorted. “I got this, Knox. Go. Be a superhero.”

  Knox headed out of the room, his fingers trailing over Nina’s as he passed. For all the time Maya had spent teasing Nina about those yearning stares—not to mention the couple’s tendency to make out in literally every room in the building—her heart still lurched when she caught those quiet moments of affection between Knox and Nina.

  Garrett Knox adored Nina with every atom of his being, and Maya adored him for it. Nina deserved to be loved.

  “Come on.” Nina bent and slid under one of Gray’s arms, wrapping it around her shoulders. “Up you go.”

  She helped him to his feet easily, as if he weren’t several inches taller and much bigger than her. To his credit, he didn’t protest her help, though the very tops of his ears did turn a little pink.

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “You’re welcome.” Nina raised an eyebrow, a gesture meant solely for Maya. “If he gives you that trouble Knox mentioned? You have my permission to recite something esoteric and terribly boring at him. For hours.”

  Nina left Gray standing under his own power, looking mostly steady. Maya braced her hands on her hips and ignored the urge to bundle him into bed and stroke his hair until the lines of pain etched into his face eased.

  Those were ill-advised urges that would end badly. For everyone.

  Instead, she gave him her best try me stare, the one she flashed at belligerent teen boys who returned tablets with cracked screens or precious books with creased or stained pages. “Are you gonna give me grief?”

  “Depends.” He squinted at her. “Are you gonna keep looking at me like that?”

  “Not if you behave.” She unbent and tilted her head. “Go hop in bed. I’ll bring you something to eat later.”

  His squint turned into a scowl. “No, you won’t.”

  She managed not to snap at him in reply, but those lines on his face were killing her. So was his unnatural pallor and the way he held himself, like everything hurt.

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “How long, Gray? How long has this been happening?”

  At first, she thought he might not answer. Then he slowly turned to her, his scowl melting away, replaced by an equally grave expression. “About a month. I thought my levels were just out of whack, and Luna would tune me up during maintenance. But when she said everything looked fine … That’s when I knew.”

  A month. Maya shut down the flood of research data that threatened to cascade through her brain like an avalanche, knowing she’d pay later with a worse headache than the one already starting to throb behind her eyes. She didn’t need to dive into her memories to know his situation was bad.

  Implant rejection was a slow death. Gray had a year if he was lucky. A couple of months if he wasn’t.

  Maya exhaled softly. “You should have told us.”

  “Why? So you could look at me like…” His voice trailed off, and he gestured impatiently in her direction. “Like that? No, thanks.”

  Ouch.

  But he was right. Maya didn’t even need a mirror to imagine the exact look in her eyes, the precise degree of concern and pity. It was the look on Nina’s face every time Maya descended the stairs after a sleepless night, the shadows deep under her eyes. The weight of all the words Nina held back, the pulsing need to help even though they both knew there was nothing to be done.

  Maya’s death sentence was hopefully still years away, but she too had been handed one the day the TechCorps had messed with her brain. No fix. No cure. Just the fight to hold on to sanity and her ability to function for as long as she could.

  Yeah, she hated that look.

  It took effort, but she banished the concern from her eyes. “Fair enough. But when I put you to work chopping produce or sweeping floors, remember you could have had sweet sympathy and dinner in bed, and you’re the fool who asked for tough love.”

  A hint of a smile curved his lips. “That’s better.”

  It was practically a croon, his liquid-molasses voice sliding over her like an obscene promise. It was almost enough to distract her from the throb in her temples, a warning that she was headed straight for sensory overload—fast.

  She jabbed her finger toward the exit. “Fine, I’ll let you feed yourself. But get your ass in bed before I call Rafe back to put you there.”

  “Kinky.” The word drifted back over his shoulder as he headed out the back door.

  Maya held it together until he was gone. Then she just … let go.

  The cement floor of the warehouse was pleasantly cool in spite of the heat outside. Maya sprawled out on it and closed her eyes. A quick shake of her wrist primed her watch for voice commands. “Play Dance it Out.”

  Her FlowMac Pop playlist rolled over her, the perky tempo and throbbing beat perversely soothing. Her new ear cuffs were unobtrusive, stylish, and the absolute cutting edge in bone-conduction sound transfer technology. Maya wouldn’t have paid the black market asking price in a million years.

  Turned out, there were perks to your best friend having a literal evil clone.

  Nina was mildly exasperated by the fact that her sister kept trying to buy forgiveness for her past crimes with expensive gifts, but Ava was like a feral cat. She appeared sporadically, scratched anyone who tried to pet her, and vanished again without warning. But instead of dead mice, she left behind expensive technology and impossible-to-obtain weapons.

  Maya was perfectly willing to be bought off.

  The cuffs were better than her old earbuds. The music was a part of her, filling the inside of her skull. She breathed in time with the heavy beat and fought back the rush of memories, silencing the chaotic rush of overlapping voices one by one. Technicians, data scientists, administrators, even members of the TechCorps Board. They lived inside her, perfectly preserved, a thousand mundane moments and even more horrifying ones.

  That was what it meant to be a data courier. You were the receptacle for every dark secret your VP wasn’t willing to commit to paper. You were a day planner, a filing system, a living, breathing memo. Only, Maya’s boss hadn’t been content to advance the TechCorps’ bottom line at all costs.

  No, Birgitte Skovgaard had been planning a revolution. Maya had that in her head, too. Every secret. Every bit of blackmail that might put an executive in a compromising position or take down an enemy at a delicate moment. Maya knew everyone sympathetic to their cause within the TechCorps and every contact Birgitte had cultivated outside of it. All that knowledge was precisely why the TechCorps had put a two-million-credit bounty on Maya.

  Some days, Maya wanted to be anywhere but in her own damn head.

  The music helped. It didn’t stop the chaos, but it helped her breathe through it until it was locked back away. In for three throbbing bass beats, out for three more. Steady. Deep.

  Meditation. It was a gentler kind of dissociation, one with fewer consequ
ences. Maya could still feel the world around her—the slightly rough concrete under her fingertips, the soft fabric of her T-shirt. That had been one of the unexpected hardships about rebuilding a life off of the Hill—the clothing. For the first nineteen years of her life, she’d been able to step up to her wardrobe mirror, initiate a 3D body scan, browse through a catalog of fashion, and select exactly what she wanted, both in styling and fabric. Within twenty-four hours, a drone would deliver custom-fitted clothing tailored to her precise preferences—light and airy fabrics, no tags, no close-cut necklines, nothing that dug in or constrained or irritated.

  Salvaging clothes from secondhand shops was an entirely different experience. Nina had helped her find things that worked, like denim and T-shirts washed so many times they were soft to the touch, skirts and sundresses that flowed around her body, and cozy sweatshirts she could get lost in.

  It had been the first of a dozen things she’d had to relearn, bit by bit. Life down here could be so … much. Loud and rambunctious, bright and wild. She’d grown accustomed to it, bit by bit, adapting to the overwhelming scents and the tastes, the vivid colors and joyous sounds. Some part of her thrived on it, even, as if this was how she was supposed to be. Alive and surrounded by a whirlwind of sensation, not encased in sterile numbness.

  But still, too much was too much. And she never knew when it was going to hit her—or how hard.

  This time wasn’t too bad. As FlowMac Pop rolled over her, she settled into the music. Her breathing steadied, and the memories stopped trying to rush up to fill the silence in her head.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. Once she had her shit together, she’d see Nina off with a confident smile. And then …

  Then she would open for business. Prep food and package yesterday’s freeze-dried haul while the new batch was processing. Organize a schedule for the last harvest rush before winter. Check the budget to see if they could afford another freeze-dryer now that demand had skyrocketed.

  She would scan books, fight with file formats no one had used in fifty years, and update their catalog. She would figure out how the hell to organize the dozens of boxes of salvaged books that still lined the back wall of the warehouse. She would fix tablets, upgrade tech, and sort through a new tangle of donated tools.

  And she had to do it all alone.

  No, worse.

  She had to do it with Gray.

  Gray and his Gothic brooding eyes and his long, meaningful stares and his endless silences only interrupted by that smoky-smooth voice. His voice was like fine whiskey. Like sin. His voice was goddamn angels fucking.

  She was pretty sure she could tip over into full sensory overload just by listening to him talk. But every time she caught him watching her, she wanted more than sound. She wanted to drag the scent of him into her lungs and feel his hands on her body. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to taste him.

  She just wanted.

  Groaning, Maya covered her face with her hands. Then she pulled them away and forced her body to move. Upright, then to her knees, then to her feet. One boot in front of the other. She’d see Nina off, then indulge in a bath to soak away the rest of her jittery nerves.

  Then she’d square up and get to work. Just her and a random genetically engineered kid and Tia Ivonne with her dodgy heart and Gray with his angel-fucking voice, for who knew how long.

  This was going to be a disaster.

  TECHCORPS PROPRIETARY DATA, L1 SECURITY CLEARANCE

  Reminder to executives: unnecessary education for DC subjects compromises their long-term viability. Limit requests for additional course access to knowledge essential to your data courier’s specific job performance.

  Internal Memo, February 2074

  FOUR

  Gray shouldn’t have worried about being served food in bed like an invalid, because Maya didn’t even have time to consider it. Her luxurious soak turned into a hasty shower in between neighborhood crises.

  Okay, so crisis was probably overstating things, but the dust had barely settled behind the team’s van before Jacinth showed up, her rambunctious twins trailing in behind her. Her wavy, salt-and-pepper hair was caught up in a messy knot on her head, and she was still wearing a flour-dusted apron over her patched overalls.

  Jacinth leaned all six feet of her large frame against the table and slid a tablet across to Maya. “I’m back.”

  Maya flipped open her own tablet and pulled up the master inventory. “Is it the industrial mixer again?”

  The baker huffed. “No, I finally got that thing fixed, but now my oven is on the fritz! Burned two batches of loaves, and a third came out raw in the middle. I never should have upgraded from the damn brick. At least fire can’t malfunction.”

  Sometimes Maya heard people muttering that the tech that made its way off the Hill and into the surrounding neighborhoods was designed to fall apart. She knew the evil of the TechCorps was far more banal. The failed innovations they offloaded onto the gray market hadn’t been designed to fail. But when they did, the TechCorps had no problem selling broken shit to people who couldn’t complain.

  A few taps on her tablet pulled up her complete archive of appliance manuals. “It’s the TL-3700 model, right?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how you always remember.”

  Because I don’t have any other option. Maya forced a tight smile as she found the file. Jacinth’s tablet was already set to receive, so she swiped it over. “I’m going to do the same thing I did last time,” she said, popping open the GhostNet. She had a shortcut to the forum where people traded troubleshooting hacks for TechCorps hardware, and it only took a few quick searches to export all the notes on Jacinth’s oven. “Start with the official manual, but if that doesn’t work…”

  “Listen to the criminals?”

  Maya snorted and sent over the file. “They’re all criminals. Some are just legal ones.”

  “Fair enou—hey!” Jacinth lunged fast enough to catch her son’s hand before he could sneak one of the spare tablets off the table.

  “I was just looking!” he protested immediately.

  “Look with your eyes, not your fingers.” Jacinth offered Maya a frazzled smile. “Sorry, their grandma usually has them now, but she’s sleeping off a cold, so Nick and Tilda are making the afternoon deliveries with me.”

  “That’s a big responsibility,” Maya said solemnly to the kids as she deftly moved her stack of loaner tablets out of the way of curious little fingers. “Since you’re helping your mama out with her work, maybe I have something special for you here…”

  Two pairs of eyes lit up with anticipation as Maya lifted her tablet and flipped back over to their main inventory. She’d rescued a treasure trove of 2040s media off one of the RLOC servers a few weeks ago, and she knew exactly what would earn Jacinth—and Grandma Linda—a few hours of much-needed peace.

  “Here you go,” she told the twins, flicking a series of files to their mother’s tablet. “Nick, I found you a series on the Second Dust Bowl and what life was like in the Deadlands back when you could grow things there. And Tilda…” Maya grinned. “Ready for the third season of Teen Witch?”

  “You found it?” Tilda gasped.

  “Of course I did.” Maya winked at her. “I can find anything. Now you two listen to your mother and help her with the deliveries, and go easy on your grandma, okay?”

  When the twins’ overlapping promises of good behavior faded, Jacinth straightened. “Have I mentioned lately that you’re a saint?”

  “You want to say thanks, send Linda around with some of those soft pretzels once she’s feeling better.”

  “A bucket of them.” She swept up the tablet. “Thank you, Maya.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Maya replied, smiling.

  She sent them off with a wave, but the door had barely swung shut before someone else showed up looking for more math books to challenge their brilliant teenager.

  Math, Maya knew. She also knew Shakira would outstrip the
limitations of their current collection before winter. A few weeks ago, she’d talked Conall into using his backdoor TechCorps access to pirate their entire math curriculum, so she sent Shakira’s father off with a course on integral calculus and instructions to send the girl along if she got stuck.

  Next in was Cheryl, who brought her client schedule for the week. Sex work in Five Points had gotten a lot safer once Cheryl implemented her check-in system. Maya had helped them improve upon it with refurbished smartwatches she’d hooked into a database hidden in an anonymous corner of the GhostNet. Failure to mark themselves safe—and fully compensated—at the end of an appointment triggered an alert … and a swift follow-up. Usually by Dani in full-on murder mode.

  Problems had decreased rapidly after that, even for people who weren’t part of the network. Maya was pretty sure the potential troublemakers of Southside told each other scary bedtime stories about Dani showing up on their doorstep like an avenging angel. Whatever the reason, everyone gave their manners a firm polish before paying for sex in Dani’s territory. Just in case.

  Maya almost got the warehouse door locked behind Cheryl, but then someone showed up needing to borrow tools for home repairs, and by the time she was shuffling them out, a familiar truck was backing up to the door, its bed loaded down with crates of shiny, red apples.

  “Bryan Barnes.” Maya braced both fists on her hips. “You been poaching apples from Becky?”

  “Nothing so criminal.” The driver swung out of the truck with a grin. Bryan was a big, burly, bald man with a red beard, scars on his hands and arms, and an air of effortless competence. He hefted three crates at once as if they weighed nothing and carried them through the door. “Becky’s engine finally crapped out, so I told her I’d bring in her haul and pick up what I need to fix it.”

  Maya propped the door open and went to retrieve another crate. The deeply colored apples were massive—a credit to Becky’s skill at coaxing her orchard to its fullest potential—and the thought of taking a bite of one set Maya’s stomach to rumbling. “She still insisting on running that piece of shit on pure biofuel?”