by James Wake
Tess gingerly nodded. “Yeah. You’ll wanna save it, though. I’m not building more than one at a time. They could…react.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe, not fry you with a chain reaction.”
Normally Nadia would have made fun of what Tess had said, would have made some cutting remark to shame Tess out of showing any affection. But instead she just held the ice pack, not even moving when Tess brought up her hand—her artificial hand—and placed it shakily over Nadia’s.
“Thanks,” Tess said softly.
Nadia stared at the prosthetic hand—at the way it subtly, gently lay on top of her own; the fingers flexing slightly. Just like the real thing. Almost.
“It hurts,” Tess said.
“Well, yes, I think that much is clear.”
“No, my arm,” she said. “I had the surgeon add a bunch of structural implants in the shoulder to hold the weight better, to keep it from tearing out. The imbalance is already warping my spine.”
Nadia couldn’t see Tess’s eyes, hidden under the ice pack. “Pain-killers? In the needle?”
“And immunosuppressants.”
No wonder the girl had a runny nose all the time.
“If I get the left side done too, it should help,” Tess said. “Symmetry. If I stay like this, I’ll have to start wearing a back brace in a few years, best case.”
A small pit opened in Nadia’s gut. It would be childish to argue a point like that. Foolish. Selfish even.
“That’s a lot to put yourself through,” Nadia said.
“Still worth it. You know what my arm was like before.”
Of course she did. It was the whole reason they had become friends in the first place. That Nadia, what a lovely young woman, looking after that poor thing. That poor crippled reject. Born that way, wasn’t she? Such a shame.
So useful, to have a friend like that. So convenient for showing off what a wholesome young woman you are. So affirming to have a pimply-faced, anxiety-ridden ball of desperation to make oneself feel better, an adoring fan and pity project and willing lackey to do all your schoolwork for you. All wrapped up in one easy-to-manipulate package.
Tears burned Nadia’s eyes. She cleared her throat to cover a strangled noise lurking in the back of her mouth.
“Hey, listen,” Tess said, squeezing her hand. “I know you’re freaked out about me getting my other arm done. You’ve been weird about it ever since I mentioned it.”
Nadia looked away. She couldn’t even see Tess’s eyes, and she still had to look away.
“I know it’s a lot to deal with,” Tess went on. “But I kind of have to? So like…I know you’re upset, and I get it and I’m sorry, but it’s happening. Figured I’d get a more realistic-looking one this time, you know, easier to—”
“I know, Tess,” Nadia said. “I’m sorry.”
Tess just nodded and held up her left hand. Without even thinking, Nadia took it in her own—one hand in each of hers, one real, one fake.
Chapter Eight: Lab Raid
The next night, fetid wind whipped past Nadia’s masked face. She coasted her scooter to a stop, hovering over a blank space in the wireframe display in her goggles. Switching to light-amplified vision barely helped—there wasn’t much light to be amplified.
She slid her goggles onto her forehead but saw nothing. Not even the blue gloves on her hands. Beneath her, she knew there was a dark pool of water, even fancied she could feel its cool breath on her feet.
“Something wrong?” Tess said in her ears.
Nadia put her goggles back on. “Any idea where all this goes?”
“I mean, I checked some old maps, but it’s hard to line it all up exactly with how much the shoreline has moved,” Tess said. “I think that used to be a school ahead of you. Maybe.”
Nadia eased the throttle open and drifted into a shallow turn. Up ahead, Tess’s drone refreshed the map in her eyes with fresh dots: lidar reflection points filling in the gaps of the wireframe. Something large and flat popped out of the blank emptiness below her. It took Nadia a moment, but eventually she recognized it as the roof of a car.
The ground sloped up, filling in with points of light. Dry land. Well, perhaps not dry exactly. The whole place was damp. Nadia felt it in every breath.
“Getting close,” Tess said.
Nadia cut the throttle. Something was moving up ahead. The drone paused, focusing its scans on something rippling on the side of what used to be a street.
“What is it?” Nadia said.
“Eww, gooey,” Tess said. “Didn’t think anyone would be dumb enough to try hiding down here.”
“Am I clear?”
“Yeah, but…don’t linger. Probably don’t wanna look either.”
Nadia drifted past it, ignoring Tess’s warning. Her nose scrunched up on its own, recoiling from a rotten, sickly-sweet stench. The rippling was a ragged tarp hanging from the side of the tunnel, a pair of legs sticking out from under it.
“Bad way to go,” Tess said. “Plenty of water down here. Probably took him weeks to starve.”
“That's enough, thank you.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I’ll show you where to park.”
A faint sound echoed out of the darkness and grew louder. The roar of rushing water.
“I’m having trouble making sense of what the drone is showing me,” Nadia said.
“You’re right under the edge of the lab building. The pumps are here,” Tess explained, highlighting several sets of dots that formed cylinders. “Drain pipes, dumping out here. Stairs up to a door there.”
Nadia pieced it together, matching it all up to the pictures she’d memorized at the office. When she switched her goggles to normal vision, she saw faint red light and, barely, a concrete staircase that led up. Sets of pipes dumped out into the tunnel ahead of her, feeding a river that flowed away into black nothingness.
She parked before the start of the river then set her feet onto cold, damp stone. “You’re sure I’m alone?”
“Drone says we’re good.”
“You don’t have a cute name for that thing?” Nadia crept up to the corner of the stairs and peeked around it with her wrist camera. “That’s a shame.”
“It’s not even the same one. I have dozens of them,” Tess said.
“Still a shame.” A steel door waited, a red cage light glowing over it. No cameras, no signs, not even a keypad or a chip reader.
“Don’t even bother,” Tess said.
“I am at least going to look.” Nadia climbed up to it and leaned in close to the seam where the door met the frame.
“I already told you, welded shut.”
“Ugh,” Nadia said, still staring. “Didn’t you say that paste could melt through anything?”
“Yes, but you’d need pounds of the stuff.”
“Fine.”
She backtracked to the drainpipes and stopped at the one on the end. Instead of a rushing torrent of water, a slight steady drip fell from the end of it.
“You’d think they’d keep a better eye on these pumps,” Tess said. “Enough of those stop, and the whole building’s gonna come down.”
“Perhaps we should leave them a note.” Nadia stared at the mouth of the pipe—narrow and cramped and wet and probably cold and gross.
“Well?” Tess said.
Nadia sighed. Carefully, and making a few dainty noises at the ickiness of what she was doing, she clambered into the pipe. There wasn’t much space inside, only enough to crawl through with her elbows tucked in tightly at her sides.
“See? Not so bad,” Tess said.
Angry muttering snuck out of Nadia’s mouth. Up ahead, a stained mesh grate blocked the path. Out of her pocket, she snuck a small canister that looked for all the world like a bottle of nail polish. The cap even came out with a brush, coated in a sticky white paste.
“You’ve seen my nails. I think I can handle this,” Nadia said, brushing a thin layer of paste around the edge of the grate.
“A little more on the top.”
Nadia did so, then popped a small chip off the cap and pressed it into the thicker paste at the top of the pipe.
“All right, good. Now make sure you back out of the pipe before you—”
The panel on Nadia’s arm blinked red when she punched in the command. The paste ignited with a loud pop, flaring brightly and sizzling down the edges of the grate.
“I said back up!”
“I’m going,” Nadia said, worming her way backward. Yes, it was bright and hot—all right, very hot—making her duck her head and squint, even with the goggles on.
“Move!” Tess yelled. “When it hits that water at the bottom it’s going to—”
The pipe shook. Nadia’s ears stung, deaf but for a high ringing. She cringed, shielding her head with her arms. When she relaxed, she was excited to notice the bits of red-hot steel spattered all over her turtleneck.
Tess’s faded voice came in amid the ringing. “Hello? Hello? You alive?”
“Yes, fine,” Nadia said, slapping burning bits of metal off her body. Up ahead, the mangled remains of the grate lay in pieces.
“Duck low,” Tess said.
She did, pressing her body as flat as she could, the feeble stream of cold water soaking into her sweater. Above her, Tess’s drone squeezed by, flitting ahead.
“Safe to proceed?” Nadia said.
“Looks good.”
Her HUD lit up with beacons that led her farther down the pipe. A small feed from the drone appeared in the corner of her vision, panning through a large room filled with pipes and conduits and more pump-looking things. Nadia crawled on, easing herself over the still-glowing remnants of the grate. In seconds, she was clambering out the other end of the pipe into a grimy basin.
“Welcome to the sump room,” Tess said.
A ladder led up. Nadia climbed out, surrounded by sloshing basins and a maze of pipes, and headed to another door with a red cage light. A panel next to it held a display with an inspection log, displaying marks for the first of each month.
“Try the door?” Tess said.
Nadia waved her wrist at the chip reader next to the display, but nothing happened.
“Hmm,” Tess said.
The display drew Nadia’s eyes, the one new, shining thing in the whole room. She reached out to it.
“Don’t touch that!” Tess said. “Try the door again.”
The scanner blinked red this time. “Is that good or bad?”
“Bad. Uh. Hmm. Hang on.”
Nadia obliged, crossing her arms and cocking her hip to convey maximum impatience. Her eyes wandered, stopping when they crossed over a camera in the corner of the ceiling.
“Tell me you disabled that,” she said.
“Yup. Already zapped it with the drone.”
“Thank you for the warning.”
“Hey, I know you have plenty of other stuff to worry about. The ugh level of that pipe. Attempting to burn yourself to death. And that’s just off the top of my head.”
Nadia ignored this. What she didn’t ignore was the slatted hatch covering a vent near the camera. Waving her wrist at the door again gave her another blinking red light.
“Sorry. This one’s taking me a bit,” Tess said. “This system is using some really interesting algorithms. Can’t wait for you to get in there so I can dig—what the hell are you doing?”
Nadia had climbed onto a newer-looking pipe near the vent. She was pulling out her explosive nail polish, ready to go to work.
“I don’t think you can fit through there.”
“I’m not waiting around all night to see if you maybe can open that door,” Nadia said.
“Okay. Fair,” Tess said. “I still don’t think you’ll fit.”
Nadia jumped down and gave the paste a wide berth this time. It lit up and burned through in seconds, dumping what remained of the cover onto the pipes with a series of loud clangs. She barely heard them over the pumps’ constant loud whirring.
Tess’s drone sped into the vent, with Nadia trailing behind. After lifting herself up with a minimum of grunting, she peered into narrow darkness. Much narrower than the pipe.
“All right, I know you keep a trim figure, but still…” Tess said. “That’s a little too…Okay, I guess we’re doing this.”
Nadia was already scrambling in, only slightly singeing herself on the cover’s burnt edges. Unable to move her arms, she was forced to inch forward until she felt her toes clear the entrance.
Et voilà.
“Wow,” Tess said. “Can you even breathe?”
“Barely.” Nadia forced out her breath and sucked her stomach in. “For once I’m quite happy not to be as well-endowed as you.”
“Hey! Rude.”
“It’s a compliment, dear. Just because you try so hard to…” A quite unladylike grunt came out of her mouth as she turned her body to the side. “…hide them doesn’t mean…”
“How about let’s just focus, hmm?”
Nadia snaked her way forward, arms in front of her. Trapped in a cramped, dark space, hot wind blowing past her, nostrils stuffed with the thick scent of stale, dry dust. A quick fumbling of her hands later, and the darkness became a blurry gray tunnel in her goggles, leading to more darkness.
“Any idea where this leads?” Nadia said, testing her weight on the thin metal of the vent. It bowed beneath her.
“Working on it.”
Nadia tried to move and was happy to find that she could, if only a little at a time. She wormed her way down the vent, streaking her blue gloves with dark grime, following the trail of the drone in her HUD.
* * *
Ortega punched a few keys on the machine’s display, swiping his fingers past the scanner. It hummed for a few seconds, then popped two foil-wrapped packets into the tray below.
“On me, kid,” he said, handing Jackson one of the packets. “Christ, you look fucked up.”
She took the food but didn’t open it yet. The sign out front read “Cultured Charcuterie” but the food in her hand had different words printed all over it. “Omniplant Manufacturing Services” in severe letters. Just like the letters on her recliner—hell, on all her furniture—and half the things she was wearing.
“You know you’re supposed to sleep when you’re off duty, right?”
Jackson didn’t answer right away, letting her eyes wander up and out, at anything but the sad excuse for a burrito in her hand. Downtown was settling in, that long part of the shift after most of the bar hoppers went home to pass out or fuck and the rowdy ones had finally gotten everything out of their system. Her bike rested a few steps away anyway. Just in case. This was also the time of night everything could go to hell in a hurry.
Ortega was already half done with his burrito, tearing big hungry hunks out of it. “If you’re not hungry I’ll take that,” he said through a full mouth.
She sighed and tore it open. Tasteless. Damn near odorless too. She remembered the smell of spicy meat over trash-barrel grills.
Almost like home.
“You a rata or perro man?” she said.
“Huh?”
“Tacos.”
He blinked at her a few times, his mouth slowly falling open. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
“Thought you said you grew up outside?”
“Not like, outside outside. Jesus, Jackson.”
She shook her head as she handed the rest of her burrito to him. Her eyes wandered again while Ortega attacked the food. Should’ve figured. Anyone who ate like that, without their eyes up and wary—you knew they hadn’t really grown up in the slums.
A billboard above them played the very same recliner ad that had be
en haunting her off and on for weeks now, with a cheery jingle that invaded whatever small amount of sleep she managed. It flickered—thankfully—then blacked out.
A half second later, Cheshire smiled down at her. REMEMBER VOTING? appeared underneath, scrolling and followed by BE CITIZENS, NOT CUSTOMERS.
Jackson braced herself for static in her ears, but nothing came.
“Not that freakin’ cat again,” Ortega scoffed, popping the last bite of burrito into his mouth. “So sick of that thing.”
“Has he,” Jackson started to ask, stumbling a bit on the pronoun, “has it ever talked to you? I mean, like, by name?”
Ortega stared at her again, almost as dumbfounded as he was over the taco question. A shadow of something flickered in his eyes, a moment Jackson would pull from her goggle feed and replay for herself later, over and over and over.
Gone, just like that. Ortega laughed and shook his head. “You need to sleep, girl. Come on. Let’s ride.”
Jackson shrugged and smiled back. Tired, that was all. Sure. But not so tired to have missed Ortega’s hand slip onto the grip of his gun when she’d asked.
* * *
The vent was opening up, growing wider, bit by bit. Though not by much. At least it allowed Nadia to draw a full breath.
Tremors shook the steel surrounding her. “Can you hear that?”
“Yeah, you’re almost there.”
Tess had already said that several times. “Very helpful of you, thank you.”
“No need to be snippy.”
“Forgive me.” Nadia squinted at a slightly different patch of darkness farther ahead. “You know how I get when I’m crammed into a sweltering vent in a highly secure research facility.”
“Just a little farther.”
“I would like to point out,” Nadia said, sweat drenching her mask, “that the last place did not require me to crawl through quite so much dirt and darkness.”
“Wow,” Tess said, the word soaked in a roll of her eyes. “Fine. Next time you can break into a five-star hotel. Or a spa. Would that be better?”
“I don’t know why you sound so sarcastic. That would be lovely.” The slightly different darkness ahead turned out to be open space. Nadia poked her hands and then her head out—still pitch-black. Something swooshed down past her camera, led by loud buzzing. A second later, something even bigger blew past, rising with a sudden draft of warm air.
