by James Wake
“High school feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it?” Tess said.
Nadia would hardly call it high school. It wasn’t just high school; it was one of the most prestigious, exclusive, and of course expensive private academies in the city, if not the world.
She remembered that day. Remembered telling Tess that it was people like her own parents, people who paid their way, who made it possible for charity cases such as Tess to be allowed to attend.
It made her want to vomit.
She zoomed out, seeing something else cringe worthy on the displays now. Tess had left a search page open, cataloging recent models of prosthetic arms. “Upgrading, are you?”
“Thinking about it,” Tess said.
“All those ill-gotten gains burning a hole in your pocket?”
Tess shrugged. “Have to spend it on something, don’t I?”
“And you would retire your homemade limb?”
“What? No,” Tess said. “I might buy a few newer models, strip parts out, and combine them. Use one as a base frame maybe. Or just scan the whole lot and fab the best parts with better materials…you know, really hot rod it up.” She held up her arm, her left arm, and stared at her fingers. “Lefty is gonna make righty look obsolete, for sure.”
A mouthful of energy drink choked Nadia, fizzling in the back of her sinuses. She ripped the goggles off. “I’m sorry, lefty?”
“Yeah, duh,” Tess said. “Aren’t you always going on about symmetry being the essence of beauty?”
Nadia trailed her hand down her partner’s remaining human arm, encased, as it always was, in a cheap purple hoodie. This one bore the slogan “STEMS from SEEDS! Young Genius Discovery Club!” across the front, with a cartoonish smiling motherboard. Nadia had seen this one before. She knew the back said, “Saving the World One Troubled Teen at a Time!”
“You would cut off this poor arm?” Nadia said. She felt the nervous tension in Tess’s arm, a slight pull, something her right arm would never give away.
Tess yanked her sleeve back. “Hey, it’s my arm.”
Like hell it is, Nadia found herself about to say. It made no sense.
“Would it make you feel better if I went less skeletal with this one?” Tess said, holding up the black bony mockery of her right arm.
“We can discuss this later. I have to get going,” Nadia said.
“More class?” Tess said. “Weren’t you there all morning?”
“You are of course still welcome to come along,” Nadia said, wandering around, looking for her gym bag.
“No, and thank you,” Tess said. “I’m busy.”
Nadia cocked an eyebrow at the tiny circuit board, dwarfed by the emptiness of the rest of the workbench. “Yes, you look positively overwhelmed.”
“Ha-ha,” Tess said, diving into her chair and sliding over to her desk. “I have plans.”
“Of course,” Nadia said. “Don’t let me keep you. I’m sure the latest trends in self-mutilation are fascinating.”
“Hey…” Tess shot her an affronted look. “I’m going out, actually.”
“Oh, really?” Nadia said, raising another well-practiced eyebrow. “And what lovely plans do you have?”
Tess shrunk into her hoodie, slouching low in her chair. “I don’t have to tell you everything.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Nadia said, confident in her victory. She grabbed her gym bag from where she knew it had been all along.
“Hey.” Tess’s tone caught her nearly at the door—very serious suddenly.
“I’m going to be late,” Nadia said.
“It’s your private lesson. Whatever,” Tess said. “I have to talk to you real quick. I’ve been digging through the files from that office and—”
“Later,” Nadia said.
“Really interesting stuff,” Tess said, as if Nadia hadn’t spoken at all. “Might have a line on—”
“Later,” Nadia said, making for the door again.
“Aren’t you even a little curious about this?” Tess called after her.
“Not in the least,” Nadia lied, not looking back.
* * *
There was a simple rhythm to it.
Strike, strike again. Block, block again. It felt stupid the first few times she had done it, slowly and carefully. How simple. Something anyone could do.
But she felt herself slipping the longer and faster they went, losing her form, losing her breath, sweat appearing out of nowhere all over her body. Valery stood a few feet away, watching with what could only be sharp disdain as Nadia traded blows with the younger female instructor.
She still didn’t know the name of anyone else here. Probably for the best.
Full-length mirrors ran down one wall of the studio, and in them Nadia saw the women at the other end of the floor. Graceful and strong, pirouetting with perfect poise. Her eyes were drawn shamefully to where she stood in the mirror, clumsy and frail and panting.
Weak.
She yelped as a palm slapped the back of her head, feeling her ponytail shoot skyward.
“Stop ogling yourself,” Valery said. “Focus.”
Nadia gritted her teeth to stop quite unladylike words from spilling forth. The nameless woman playing her partner seemed amused, a sly ghost of a smile hiding on her otherwise plain face.
Fine. Back to the silly little drill. Strike, strike. Block, block. As they had been doing all day. As they had been doing all day, every day, for a week now. She’d been so excited to start—actually excited—the first time she’d really been interested in something other than stealing for a long time now.
And then so bored, so quickly. Block, block again. Strike, strike again. Her dainty fists popped against the crude padded mitts the blonde across from her was wearing. Smack, smack.
Pathetic. An absurd thought, madness on every level. Tess, with two artificial arms? The first one was bad enough, but both? No human hands left at all?
Smack, smack. Something felt different this time, better. Nadia rushed the blocks, her body eager to throw her fists out again, the thud of her knuckles against the pad giving her a pleasant little rush.
So wrapped up in her toys. Bored with her own arm, after only…how long had she had that arm actually? But still, ridiculous, wanting to voluntarily have one’s arm just…removed.
The young woman in front of her darted an arm forward, breaking their rhythm with a light swat across Nadia’s temple.
“Ah!” Nadia wavered on her feet, more out of shock than injury. “What…why?” she said, looking over at Valery, who shrugged.
“You were daydreaming again.”
The younger instructor threw her scheduled strikes. Nadia swept them away with growls, throwing all her weight into her return strikes and tripping forward a step. Her fists sank into the pads that time, delightfully so. Her hands ached, jolts of pain shooting up to her elbows.
It took her a moment to regain her balance. It felt lovely.
Valery shook her head and barked something in a language Nadia didn’t recognize. The woman across from her stepped away, sighing in what seemed like relief and casting Nadia a nasty glare as she took off her mitts.
Nadia crossed her arms and reflected the glare right back. It was undercut a bit by how dreadfully sweaty and out of breath she was, but still.
The man from her first visit here—again covered from head to toe in bright-red foam armor—took the young instructor’s place across from Nadia. A Plexiglas gap in the helmet showed his dark skin and soft brown eyes peeking out, and Nadia felt a twinge of old tastes. Years ago, maybe. He wasn’t quite her type—she favored them lean, and this man was huge, thick with muscle and a bit of a gut—but he was easily a head or more taller than her, and black, and once upon a time that was really all it took.
She was yanked out of these musings when he raised his arms to strike her. At that moment, she realized he could very easily
kill her with his bare hands. Valery barked something different. Nadia’s entire body tightened with panic, arms raised and feet coiled, ready to jump away.
But instead of attacking her, he said, “Oi, there love. Sorry we haven’t spoke yet. Nice to meet you!”
“Er…a pleasure to meet you as well?” Nadia said. That accent. Not quite her beloved Oxford, more Cockney. Still quite enticing. She revised her earlier assessment.
His arms dropped, and he bounced a little on his feet, throwing her a dopey wave made all the more ludicrous by his bulky armor. Followed by an even more ludicrous bow.
She revised her assessment yet again.
Back where we started. A shame.
“No worries, love. I’ve seen you at it. Coming along nice, you are.” He raised his fists again. “I know you’re new; I’ll play nice.”
She felt her eyes narrow. That panic from before melted away—she was here to learn to fight, wasn’t she? She hadn’t heard him promise to play nice with the other girls.
“Don’t insult me,” Nadia said quietly, glaring as she raised her fists again.
His eyes widened a bit and glanced at Valery. “Uh…well, all right then. Let’s get on with it.”
Indeed. She was ready. She’d been training for days now. This was a bigger body throwing a bigger punch, yes, but it was a punch all the same.
Valery barked again. He launched his fist forward. Nadia was nowhere near ready, her meager block folding utterly before the man’s strength. Her head snapped backward, pain exploding out from her left eye.
“Jesus!” he yelled.
“Brutus!” Valery snapped. “Step back. Give her room.”
Breathe. Nadia slowly, in parts, felt her senses return. She was down on one knee, yes. Her hands clasped tightly around her face, something warm and wet leaking out of her brow and between her fingers. Someone was wailing like a child. Her face flushed even hotter when she realized they were her own gasping yelps of pain.
“Nadia?” Valery said, sounding bored again. “Nadia, say something.”
Breathe. Keep breathing. She stopped yelping. Improvement.
“Oi, gods. Don’t know me own strength, love,” Brutus said. “My fault. I started too fast. Dreadful sorry.”
Pitiful. Feeble little girl, thinking she could fight with the real ladies. Nadia gritted her teeth, her breath coming back to her in ragged growls. That sharp bite in her mind woke up again, snarling at the fat old guard to let her wrist go before she ended him, taking the glass cutter and sinking it into his flesh.
She tried to stand, failed, felt that bite grow louder, then rose to her feet. Her left eye refused to open, but her right gave her something blurry through standing tears. Brutus hovered near her with his helmet under one arm. His face was pretty, she thought, probably. Too pretty.
“Put your helmet on,” Nadia said, swaying on her feet.
Brutus blinked at her. “Uh…what?”
“Put your helmet back on.”
“Nadia!” Valery said, sharp as a drill sergeant.
That snapped her out of it. Her fists unclenched, hovering right back to her throbbing eye.
“Come. Locker room,” Valery ordered, leading Nadia past the temporarily halted class.
* * *
It had been a busy night. Jackson was up way past her bedtime again, had wearily watched the sun peek out then rise high above the city. Being busy always helped.
Finishing up a few more sections of her report, she attached video her goggles had taken hours ago of dozens of homemade firearms. Semi-translucent rifles home-printed by an uppity young man on his way downtown in the back of a squad car.
Her goggles highlighted her typos, clicking through and fixing them before she even had time to realize what they were. A final passage was highlighted in red: “Class A felony.” She sighed as she clicked “Accept” and watched the phrase change to “Licensing violation.”
Old habit. Outside the walls, they would have put the guy in cuffs. Several years’ jail time easy. Here, in the city, he’d walk free as long as Auktoris got their cut.
The light changed. She revved the throttle, her heavy bike lifting and hovering ahead of traffic, roaring a few feet above the cars behind her. No one even glanced up. Several calls for assistance popped up in the corner of her goggles, but nothing urgent. Her shift was long over. At least on paper.
She swooped right, drifting a little lower and cutting the throttle. This shortcut back to the station took her through one of those dingy little markets that popped up anywhere the streets were closed to cars. No fancy signs or impeccably dressed holograms here—just throngs of people coursing through the narrow space between city blocks, tarps and cables and homemade flashing signs crisscrossing above the mob.
Her bike barely fit under the awnings—still hovering, low enough that the exhaust was ruining hairdos. Most of the people beneath her still didn’t bother looking up; they just ducked their heads lower and parted to either side.
Jackson cut the throttle entirely and hovered in place. Drones flitted around her head, carrying parcels or insulated food deliveries. Steam and noise and the smell of spicy meat cooking over trash barrel grills wafted up to her.
Almost like home. This alley was close to a dead ringer for the markets she’d grown up in, scraping by outside the city walls. Too clean, though.
A notification blinked in the corner of her goggles. She followed it down, seeing a police hoverbike outlined, parked between two tarp-covered stalls. Ortega’s bike. Her brow pinched as her fingers punched out a GPS lookup. All that came back was an error code.
No one was watching her. A good sign usually. She parked next to his bike, letting her goggles read the storefront hidden behind the bustle of the alley market. It was registered as an apartment building with no commerce license. Didn’t need the goggles to guess that.
The doorway was a curtain of faded multi-colored beads, the inside thick with the acrid stink of burnt metal. Electronics scrap crowded every inch of every shelf on every wall, erupted out from the counter, dangled from every inch of the ceiling. Perched in the mess, a white metal Chinese lucky cat waved at her, calling out, “Irasshaimaaaaaaaaaaasu” in an annoying, high-pitched little girl’s voice.
“Jackson?” Ortega was slouched over the counter, poking at a piece of circuit board. “Terrific timing.”
“Your beacon is down again,” she said.
“Ay, this thing,” Ortega said, slapping the housing on the back of his belt. “Don’t beep me in yet.”
“Thought you were going home on time?”
“I was. Doing a little extracurricular. On your account. You’re welcome,” he said, shoving the board back into a pile of scrap. “You got a scan of that thing you found, right?”
Jackson didn’t like him speaking so freely. She locked eyes with the guy behind the counter, a scrawny Asian teenager perched on top of a stool. He met her stare with a very unfriendly nod. His hair had been shaved in a zigzag pattern, one of the gang cuts from outside the walls, but she guessed it had been a month or two since he’d kept it up.
She’d seen bodies strung up from lampposts for not keeping their cut trim, the skulls scalped clean. He wore a sparkling RFID-blocking bandanna tied around his face, keeping her goggles from giving her any more information about him. But she was almost certain she knew the story.
“Nice place,” Jackson said, her eyes wandering over a set of prosthetic legs hung against the wall. “I shoot by here almost every day. Never stopped by.”
“Is that right?” Ortega said, not looking over.
The kid behind the counter put a finger to his ear, then said something in what Jackson guessed to be Japanese. Text printed out in her HUD.
ANOTHER [SLANG, DEROGATORY: POLICE OFFICER] HERE NOW. WHAT’S TAKING YOU SO LONG?
Jackson snorted a quiet laugh.
“She’s coming. One minut
e,” the kid said after a pause.
The synthetic muscle fibers in the fake legs caught Jackson’s eye, exposed through gaps in the white molded shell that passed for skin. Probably not so different from the ones buried in her still-human muscles.
“You got scans of it or not?” Ortega said. “I was about to call you. No lie.”
Ortega had a big mouth, but he knew when to keep it shut. And Jackson wasn’t about to judge another cop for the company he had to keep. Lord knew some of her informants could raise eyebrows. Slowly, grudgingly, she lowered her guard.
“Better than scans,” she said, patting one of her pockets.
“Fuck off,” Ortega said. “You’ve been carrying it around?”
“Sorry for the delay,” a young woman said, stepping out from the back room. She made a show of stopping when she saw their badges and hovered near the counter. Jackson guessed mid-twenties, mostly white but a bit of Asian for sure; she saw it in the eyes, accentuated by thick-framed glasses. Her purple hoodie read, “I’m Behind 18 Proxies, Bitch.”
“How can I help you, Officers…?” she said.
“Ortega,” he said, then nodded to his partner. “Jackson.”
“Charmed. I’m told you have something neat for me to look at?”
The thinking dots at the top of Jackson’s HUD disappeared, replaced with “Classified Auktoris Personnel” in tiny text over the woman’s face. Not likely.
“How long have you been working for AGF?” Jackson said.
The woman blinked a few times, smirking in a way that showed she wasn’t even trying. It was undercut a bit by her loudly sniffing and wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Oh, I contract for them here and there. Just paying bills.”
“Sure you do,” Jackson said.
“Hand it over, Jackson. I’m sleepy,” Ortega said.
She reached for her pocket but froze when the woman gasped and reached out to her.
“Oh! Sorry. Ha-ha. It’s just…wow. May I?” she asked, reaching for Jackson’s hand.
