by Julia Keller
Wonder.
Promise.
What a joke. These days, everything—everything—seemed to be part of the same general mess.
Exhibit A was the very document she held in her hands right now. It was a bill, a bill she couldn’t pay, and it squirmed with numbers that were stunningly ugly. They attested to the grim reality that Crowley & Associates Detective Agency was deeply, dismally, and perhaps irretrievably sunk in debt. Most bills were zapped directly to consoles, but when you didn’t pay on time, they came at you from another angle. And the paper parade started up.
“Hey, Vi!”
Jonetta Loring’s infuriatingly sweet-as-pie voice and that ridiculous nickname.
Enough already, Violet thought. Time to lower the boom. Time to head out to Jonetta’s desk and deliver the ultimatum: If she called her Vi ever again, that would be it.
So long.
Buh-bye.
Violet unpiled her feet and yanked them off the desk. She jumped up, side-arming the paper bill to her right. It fluttered to a landing in the corner, joining a pile of similar-looking documents with earlier date stamps that made the same general point as the one she’d been reading:
Girl, you’re dead broke.
* * *
“Hey, Vi?”
There it was again. Violet barreled into the outer office. She’d set up a wobbly desk for Jonetta and plunked a second-hand computer on it. The computer, like the desk, was a mostly broken-down piece of junk that Violet had foraged from the Refuse Sector over in L’Engletown, with a keyboard that occasionally delivered a mild electric shock.
Right now, Violet didn’t much care if Jonetta was electrocuted by the thing.
“I’ve told you over and over and over again,” Violet said in the meanest voice she could muster, her eyes focused on Jonetta’s, “not to call me Vi. Vi is not my nickname. It’s never been my nickname. It will never be my nickname. Never, never, never. And did I mention ‘never’? Because—never.”
A lot of people considered Jonetta, with her cascading corkscrews of black hair and twinkly smile and creamy brown skin, adorable. And sweet. For the record, Violet did not think of her sixteen-year-old secretary as adorable or sweet. She thought of her as flighty. And annoying. And a really bad listener.
“If you call me Vi one more time, I swear I’m going to—”
She stopped. Jonetta was pumping her eyebrows up and down, as if trying to convey an important concept without resorting to words.
“Uh,” Jonetta said.
“Uh?”
“Uh.” She gingerly lifted her right hand, using her index finger to point to the other side of the room, the part blocked from Violet’s view by the open door to her own office.
Violet peeked around the edge of the door.
A woman had stationed herself stiffly on the small blue sofa by the entrance. Her back was straight, and her hands were clasped tightly on her lap. Her body was so rigid that for a moment Violet wondered if she was a recently uncrated statue instead of a flesh-and-blood person. Her straight brown hair was combed harshly back from her face. That face was blank. She was, Violet speculated, around forty years old.
“Oh,” Violet said. “Um … hi. I mean, welcome to Crowley & Associates. Sorry to keep you waiting.” She gave Jonetta a sideways glare of unmistakable reproach.
“Tried to tell you,” Jonetta whispered defensively. “Called you a bunch of times.”
Violet ignored her. To the woman, she said, “Would you like to come into my office?”
“Yes.” The word was spoken with no inflection whatsoever. Some people might have described the visitor’s voice as robotic, but Violet had worked with a few robots during her years at Protocol Hall and generally found them to be warmer than this stranger. Some robots even had a decent sense of humor.
The woman nodded. Just once.
Later, Violet would look back on this seemingly ordinary moment as a hinge point, a perilous pivot. Because even though she didn’t know it at the time—and really, how could she have known?—she had just taken the very first step on a road that would lead her toward a startling revelation, plunging her and her friends headfirst into chaos and terrible danger, a danger that threatened the very existence of New Earth.
In just a few short days, Violet Crowley would get the shock of her life. The most important thing she knew about her world would be revealed to her as wrong.
And nothing would ever be the same again.
3
The Dare
Violet plopped down behind her desk, waving her visitor toward the chair that faced it at a slight angle. The woman still hadn’t officially made eye contact.
“Okay,” Violet said. “How can I help you?”
“My daughter.”
Violet waited.
“My daughter,” she repeated.
“Okay, but why are you—”
“My daughter,” the woman said yet again.
“Look, I’d like to help you, but I’ll need a little more informa—”
“She’s dead. I want to know why. I have to know why.”
The word dead made Violet sit up straighter in her chair.
“What happened?”
“They say she killed herself. She … she jumped from the tram track.”
Now Violet got it. She had checked the news update on her console that morning and saw the horrible story: Shortly after nine A.M., a sixteen-year-old girl had rushed out of a tram car and plummeted to her death.
The victim must have been this woman’s child.
“I’m sorry,” Violet said. “But the police already ruled it a suicide. So I don’t see what I can do.”
The woman’s response was quick and sure. “My daughter didn’t kill herself.”
“But the police say—”
“The police are wrong.” She looked at Violet—really looked at her now, seeking out Violet’s eyes and locking on, not just staring at the world in a glassy, abstract way. There was passion in her voice. It was almost as if someone had seen an unattached cord trailing from the heel of her shoe and suddenly plugged it into a power source. “I’m telling you. Amelia didn’t kill herself. She wouldn’t.”
But everybody believes that, probably, when somebody they love commits suicide, right? That’s what Violet was thinking, but she might as well have said it out loud, because the woman had an answer ready.
“Of course that’s what a mother is expected to say. But you can check with anybody who knew her. Amelia was happy. She loved her classes. She loved her friends. She loved her life. She was very close to her little brother, Jeff. You should’ve seen her eyes when she learned something new in school—they gleamed. They actually gleamed. There’s just no way she would’ve done what they say she did.” The woman leaned forward, stretching her hand across Violet’s desk so that she could thump the surface with her palm, in time with her next four words. “It can’t be true.” With each word, she thumped harder. “And I want you to prove it. I want you to find out what really happened to my girl.”
The words my girl caught in the woman’s throat. Stricken, she swallowed hard. Her eyes instantly grew misty. She fell back against her chair, and as she did so her hand slid off the desk and came to rest in her lap. She bowed her head. It was as if the cord had been yanked out of the socket again.
“I can see you’re in a lot of pain,” Violet said.
Totally lame, but she had to say something. She’d never been very good at the whole sympathy thing. Even when Shura’s mother was hovering near death in the hospital two years ago, Violet had forced herself to hug her best friend and murmur supportive clichés. Feelings—other people’s feelings and her own, too—embarrassed her.
Back in the days of the Intercept, Violet had learned to keep a tight rein on her emotions, holding them in check, forcing herself to stay on an even keel so the Intercept wouldn’t have much to work with. It was a hard habit to break.
“Amelia,” the woman said, “was my life.” Her
chin quivered.
Violet resisted the urge to sneak a glance at the crook of her visitor’s left elbow. All she’d see there, of course, was a small scar. The same scar that everyone else had. No blue flash. No brief sizzle as the Intercept’s Wi-Fi signal scooped up the emotion and sent it off to Protocol Hall to be added to her file.
The only thing visible there would be a bruise. A slight discoloration that never glowed, never hummed.
“I’m really sorry,” Violet said. “But I’m still not sure how I can help.”
“I told you. Find out the truth.”
Violet decided to deploy what she thought of as her Warm Supportive Voice. It didn’t come naturally to her, but she’d been working on it. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing by not accepting the police report, but—”
“I don’t think it. I know it.” Abruptly, her visitor stood up. “Never mind. I can see you’re not the right person for the job. You’re too much like your father. I met him a few times, and everything they’d said about him was true. And now I can see it in you, too. You trust authority too much.”
“Hey,” Violet said. Now she stood up, too, energized by her umbrage. “I’m a good detective,” she insisted. “In fact, I’m a very good detective. If there’s anything suspicious about your daughter’s death, anything at all, I’m the one who can find it.”
“So you’ll take the job?”
The words popped out before Violet could stop them.
“Of course I’ll take the job.”
Her pledge had come from wounded pride, but maybe not only from wounded pride. Because a lot of things were happening all at once. Just as Violet was making her declaration, her eyes happened to slide over to the piles of unpaid bills in the corner. Even if the inquiry into the girl’s death was a pointless waste of time, she could charge the woman by the hour. Which sounded cold and calculating, but then again, there was nothing dishonorable about wanting to stay in business. Violet was more than a few months behind on the office rent. And there was also the teensy matter of the rent on her apartment. She was a couple of months late on that, too.
Not to mention tomorrow’s court hearing for breaking New Earth Statute No. 293874-A-392876, Subsection 39887-HYV, Article 983746. Even if she beat the rap, she’d have to pay her attorney.
For heaven’s sake, Shura had asked her last week, why don’t you just get a loan from your dad?
Shura should’ve known better. That, Violet had informed her friend with heat in her voice, will never, ever, EVER happen. Violet didn’t want anybody to think she depended on her family connections. Sure, her company name linked her to New Earth’s founder, but she still stood on her own. Essentially.
So Violet didn’t withdraw her offer. In fact, she doubled down on it. “I’ll find out what happened to your daughter,” she stated. “Guaranteed.”
A single curt nod was all she got in return, but Violet could sense the hot wash of relief and gratitude surging through Amelia’s mom. “I’ll send an initial payment to your console,” the woman said. “You have to start right way. There’s not a moment to waste.”
“I’ll need a list of her friends and classmates. And remote access to her console. And—”
“Already done. It’s in your console. Plus, I added your name to the list of approved contacts. The police department is authorized to speak with you about my family.”
Violet blinked. “When did you do all that?”
“Right before I came here.”
“You were sure I’d take the job?”
For the first time, the woman smiled. “I’ve met your father, yes, but I also knew your mother. Lucretia Crowley never backed away from a fight—if, that is, the fight really mattered, if it was about doing the right thing. I figured that if you were even half as decent and determined and wise as your mother, you’d try with all your might to help me find out who did this to my girl—and why. And bring them to justice.”
* * *
By the time Violet had escorted the woman out of the office and returned to her desk, Jonetta had the goods.
“Check your console,” Jonetta said. She was blowing on her fingertips after enduring a brief but vicious electrical charge from short in the keyboard.
Violet tapped her wrist console. Five iridescent dots—green, blue, black, red, yellow—rose an inch above it like a synchronized dance of fireflies. Each dot contained a cache of messages, sorted by sender and subject matter, viewable only from the console-wearer’s perspective.
She touched the red dot. The other four sank and faded. She read Jonetta’s report. It was impressively thorough, and it reminded Violet why she kept Jonetta around, even though she couldn’t really afford her, and even though Jonetta never seemed to get her name straight. She actually did a very good job.
Violet skimmed the report a second time, making sure she had all the facts straight. Amelia’s mother was named Charlotte Bainbridge. She was forty-three years old. She lived in Higgsville. Her husband, Frank Bainbridge, had been a member of the original team of engineers who created New Earth to Ogden Crowley’s specifications. Frank had been in charge of the transport system connecting New Earth to Old Earth, a collection of pods and docking stations at both ends. He was killed a year ago in an accident when a decommissioned pod exploded on one of the abandoned tracks.
First her husband dies, Violet thought. And now her daughter. No wonder she’s a little strange. She’s got to be out of her mind with grief.
“Get me the police report on Amelia’s death,” Violet called out to Jonetta.
Then she shot a quick text to Kendall. Having your second-best friend be a top officer with New Earth Security Service was a definite advantage when you were a professional detective.
She wouldn’t hear back from Kendall right away. He was on duty. That meant she had some time to think, and so she sat back down, turned around in her chair, and gazed out the window.
New Earth was laid out in a rigorously symmetrical grid that gleamed smartly in the morning sunshine. Broad white boulevards replicated themselves until they merged with the honey-colored blur of the horizon. Beyond the downtown area and its soaring silver towers, neighborhoods bloomed into view; from Violet’s window they showed up as pale pink smudges.
It was a warm, luscious day. But then again, it was almost always warm and luscious on New Earth. The only time it wasn’t that way was when the weather algorithm dialed up a brief spike of rain or a quilt of fog, just for contrast. Too many warm, luscious days in a row could be as oppressive as gray, chilly ones, or so the psychologists hired by her father in the early days of New Earth had advised him. People needed variety. They craved it. And so even an atmosphere maintained by the computers that ran the mammoth magnets over in Farraday occasionally included some less-than-ideal conditions.
The analogy occurred to Violet in a sad flash. What if Amelia Bainbridge’s mood had been like the weather on New Earth? Most of the time, it was sunny; most of the time, it was sweet and mild. That’s what Amelia’s mother saw. But occasionally something else might have crept in: gloom, anxiety, doubt. Maybe Charlotte Bainbridge never saw that part. And maybe it grew inside the girl. And maybe today, Amelia hadn’t been able to fight it off anymore. Maybe it just got the better of her. So even though she was generally happy and positive, the truth was that a different kind of mood, coming at the wrong moment, might have been enough to …
“Hey, Vi! Vi?”
Jonetta again. And again with the Vi business.
“Look,” Violet snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me by that stupid—”
“Line two. It’s Rez.”
All at once Violet forgot all about what Jonetta did or didn’t call her. She forgot about Amelia Bainbridge. She forgot about how much she owed which creditor. She forgot about the Headache and the court date she faced tomorrow and the fact that none of her office furniture matched and that the case she’d just let herself be bamboozled into accepting was, in all li
kelihood, a lost cause.
She was happy. Because whenever Violet got the chance talk to Steve Reznik these days, she got something else, too. She was gifted with a glimpse of another world—a world that was the opposite of New Earth and its studious beauty, a world that was frayed and dangerous and bleak and broken down, a world that was toxic and tattered and teetering on the brink of ruin but that still enthralled her, captivated her.
It had been her mother’s birthplace. Her father’s, too. And so it was a place that perpetually featured in Violet’s dreams.
Old Earth.
4
Home Is Calling
“Try again, Rez,” Violet said.
“What?”
“TRY AGAIN!” She was shouting, hunched over her console, trying to force her voice through the dense atmospheric interference that could make communication between the two worlds a challenge.
The fuzzy gray blob on her screen was Rez. Now the blob seemed to be trying to say something. She assumed he was asking, “How about now?” but it came out sounding like bow-wow-wow.
“Huh?” she said.
“I can see you, but I can’t hear you!” Rez yelled. “Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, but I can’t see you.”
“Let me try another channel,” he said. At least that was Violet’s speculation, because all she could make out was a series of beeps, squeaks, and squawks that indicated a console-channel change.
Finally, a clear channel emerged, wicking up through the writhing vapors in Old Earth’s atmosphere, punching through the thick, sticky goop of pollution into the clear, pure air that swaddled New Earth.
“Gotcha,” Violet said at last, nodding emphatically because now she could see Rez’s face and hear his “Roger that!” loud and clear.
She adjusted the image on the feed by touching the shimmering purple dot that hovered above her console. His face emerged with an even crisper clarity.
“Can I see where you are, Rez?” Violet said. She was trying not to sound too eager. “Please? Just for a second?”
