But I can’t just walk through.
I’ll have to die first.
“Jasmine, I need your help,” I say.
“Anything.”
“You sure?” I lean in close and whisper, “I want you to give me some bruises on my face.”
“What? No.”
“Look, I have a plan and you have to trust me. No one gets out of here alive. I don’t even think we have the Fever. I think they’re giving it to us.”
Her eyes are fire. “And we can’t just wait to die.”
“Exactly. If I can get out, I can get help. I’m Red Hand . . . and I know people who can help. If I get out, then I can come back and help everyone.” I think for a second. I want so badly to reach out to her, to touch her, so I do. I hold her shoulders in my hands and press gently just for a moment.
She reads me. Takes in the surroundings. “Didn’t many die in the Narrows when they came for us? The mechas . . . I saw one of them use heat rays.” She shudders.
“Red Hand goes way beyond the Narrows. We are everywhere.”
I see the realization rise in her face. That there’s is no other way. I have to go.
I think of Ashiva and how many times she’s had to explain the impossible to me, to all of us, and how I’d done my best to fight her. And of how many more times she’s given up trying to explain. Her life is beginning to make more sense, the way she keeps things from me. It makes it easier. She was already in the Red Hand when she found me. She had no choice, but to stay. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t found me. Would I have died? Would I have been found by my family?
Before we can finish talking, a medical group comes to our unit and lines us up. Jasmine and I hold hands, and make a silent promise to each other. I’m at the front of the line. The doctor is different, not Dr. Qasim. A woman in a white coat stares daggers at me.
“You’re the lucky one. Come on.” She pulls me out of the unit.
“Where are you taking her?” Jasmine yells.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll be okay.”
The unit door slides shut, and I look back at Jasmine and my group as I march up the walkway toward the examination rooms.
The bed I sit on is cold, ice cold. The room is like most mediports, but with more computers and screens. The doctor sits on a chair and has her assistant connect me to the main system.
“Try to relax,” the doctor says. She hasn’t looked at me since she signaled me from the unit.
“What are you going to do to me?” I ask. Rao isn’t around either. I’m alone and begin to shiver. I realize that being brave is an act. I can’t hide my fear.
“We are running a few tests. That’s all you need to know,” the doctor says.
The assistant says, “We should begin with basic genetic sequencing and the polygenic scoring for a baseline.”
“Begin,” the doctor says.
The assistant moves close to me and tries to help me lay flat, but I jerk out of reach. “Don’t touch me.”
“Are you cold?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He puts a thick blanket over my body. So strange, making me comfortable now when I am a caged animal. But the comfort is welcome.
“Interesting replacement foot.” The doctor inspects my limb like it’s the newest designer mod. “So much talent wasted . . .”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Run the sedative. This one doesn’t like being touched.” The doctor ignores my question.
I fight the sedation. I want to know every single thing that happens in these rooms. My eyes feel heavier and heavier, like steel doors I can’t hold open.
When I wake, my vision is blurry and a voice is reading a report, “Healthy, twelve-year-old girl, no genetic diseases, strong bones, excellent cognitive function. Excellent host for the inoculation testing.”
“Huh, I wonder why she’s not in Central,” says a second voice.
“Solace isn’t perfect because it’s run by humans. Human error will always ruin everything.” They laugh.
“What do you mean, no genetic diseases?” My throat is hoarse.
“Why? Do you want one?” The doctor chuckles, like any joke in this place is humanly possible.
“I just thought—”
“You’re as healthy as they come. Good for you. Maybe you’ll survive this after all.”
I grow dizzy and my eyes close against my will.
When I wake, I’m back in my unit. My head feels swollen with pain, my throat hurts and my arms are covered in bruises. Jasmine is holding my head in her lap. The phrase “no genetic diseases” and their laughter echoes in my head. But how is it possible? I’m the glass girl. Could my tests have been wrong in the Narrows? My broken bones aren’t a lie. I felt every one of them. Maybe I don’t have a disease that appears on their tests. Maybe I was truly injured, but not sick. But some new hope fills me even in this dark place. It’s knife-sharp and fierce, like courage. And somehow, I knew it was inside me all along.
The boy with the raspy voice is pacing back and forth like an animal.
“I need all of your help now. We need to work together,” I say to the unit.
They crowd around me, the body the doctors had violated with their tests.
Even the raspy-voiced boy is interested. “What did they do?”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters now is that you help me.”
He nods. “Yes, anything.”
“Do you still have the ration? Spit on it and rub it on my face.”
“Are you insane? Did they loosen a few bolts in there?”
“Trust me. Make me look like that boy who was taken. The boy who died.”
“It’s okay? To touch you?”
I nod. “You won’t . . . hurt me. We need to get out of here.”
They all finally understand.
One stands guard, the others block me from view. They paint me with the ration pill, a sickly blue, which goes along well with the new bruises I received in the exam room.
When they are done, they lay me down on the ground.
I signal to Jasmine.
Her scream is terror itself.
As still as stone is my mantra and, in a matter of minutes, the medical janitors arrive, wearing clean suits, and pile me on top of a wheeled cot. They don’t even bother to check my vitals.
I hold my breath.
“Just another dead kid,” says one janitor to the other.
“Yeah, would be easier if we could just send them all out to sea at once.”
“Then we’d be out of a job.”
“True.”
They push the cot over the doorway with a bump and into the world outside containment.
26 //
Riz-Ali
I wonder how long I can keep my identity a secret. Maybe they could run a trace, but Uplander security is pretty tight. What if they don’t care? Maybe it’s not about knowing what a computer thinks or thinks it knows, but about seeing what’s in front of you and trusting the human. If they know who I really am, that my mother is the monster communicating their narrative, lives and deaths, that she has President Ravindra’s ear, they’ll kill me.
Ashiva repeats herself. This time it seems she’s trying to smile and soften her hate of me and my kind. “Tell us what you know about Solace Corp’s plan for the Narrows.”
“I don’t know much. It honestly sounds like you know more than I do,” I say.
Ashiva leans back in her chair. “Yaar, don’t test my charity. We admire your work and we’ve had such a good beginning. If you go and tell lies now, it’ll ruin the whole thing. I won’t trust you. And I will just have wasted a day that I should have spent looking for an off-site containment and my sister, instead of fixing the health problems of an Uplander boy who had everything, but gave it up for a little rebellion.”
I watch the vein in her temple jump and her cyborg fingers flex around the arm of her chair, leaving the metal armrest bent and twisted. The arm wh
izzes and moans from the flex. Something isn’t right with it.
“The last thing I want is to piss you off. Trust me. You’re fierce.” I mean it as a compliment, but she’s got a short fuse, apparently.
Her arm moans louder as she rips the chair’s arm off and throws it against the wall.
“Shiv, you should let me take a look at that,” Saachi says.
“Don’t touch me,” she replies, but eventually gives in.
Zami approaches her, brave soul. “Why don’t you take a break? You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten. I know what you’re going through. I’m worried about Taru and Masiji too.” He holds her shoulders and leans his forehead against hers. A remarkable moment, a deep connection. I don’t think I’ve ever felt what they do right now, that closeness, that trust. Aside from a ghost in my past that I’m chasing.
She nods. “I am hungry. And, Saachi? Let’s fix my replacement, okay?”
Thank god. She leaves the room.
The boy, Zami, says, “We will get you home safe. Saachi will try to unearth whatever records or locations we can trace on your uncle’s last missions. If he was in the Red Hand, we’ll find the information on your uncle. But help us with one more hack. You work for Solace Corp, so you know how to locate proprietary information. All we want are the coordinates of the off-site facility where they’re keeping our family. How would you go about getting it?”
I think and think; the buzzing in my brain is gone, and it’s like all of a sudden realizing that there was a sound all the time. Thinking was never so complicated, and yet, I wonder if it is difficult now because I haven’t done it in a while—at least on my own.
“You’d have to be an insider to get proprietary information,” I say.
Zami leans in. “But you could, you know, get it.”
“Maybe. I assume info like that needs the highest clearance. It’s not like some dusty old data packet in storage. I’d have to be inside the firewall. And even then, I’m sure I’d set off a ton of alerts when I go poking around the wrong place.”
“You’re clever, though, aren’t you? You managed to nab some dark data packet for us already. You could set some distractions for Solace while you took a quick look at the coordinates, yeah?”
“Yeah, probably. It’s risky.”
“Man, it’s all risky. So where would you have to be to pull this off?”
“Inside Solace. I’d have to walk into Solace Corp, after missing the last day of my internship, like nothing happened.”
Zami smiles. “Like nothing happened. Exactly.” He snaps his fingers.
“You don’t understand. I’m not some grunt. They will have noticed my absence.”
“Sure, and you’ll make it right, tell a few lies, and get back into your office. Ashiva will come along as support. And since it’s the AllianceCon, everyone will be distracted by the noise and fireworks, so that’s cover.”
“And you’ll find whatever my uncle’s last mission was for the Red Hand?” He reaches his hand out to shake.
“I swear.”
They have no idea about my family. How connected they are. How my absence definitely is not overlooked. How Mother is probably looking for me already and monitoring Central.
I nod. Maybe I can get a connection with Solace and snag the info before the system reads my presence. They surely can’t do it. They need me. I see that now. Without my connection, they won’t stand a chance.
“Maybe. But Ashiva can’t come. She’ll blow the whole thing up.”
“I heard that!” She says from the other room.
Zami says. “Eh, she’ll be fine. We won’t let you go alone. You’ll return to your life back in happy land, with money and air and food, and life. I’m sure you can lie your way out of stumbling on a bit of old data. No big deal. Isn’t that what you want?”
Return? I must’ve smiled because he gets excited. “I . . . I don’t know . . .” I say. What will I do after all this? None of this was planned. But there’s no way but through.
“Yes, that’s what we are trying to do. Get you back home without a hair out of place. We fulfill our debt to Khan. Along the way, you do something legendary you can brag about on the underweb. Unless, of course, you want to make this difficult for yourself. Work with us and help us. We’ll help you.”
“Okay, then. Let’s get ready,” Riz says. “Maybe I can go back . . .”
Saachi runs a flesh editing pen across the scar on Ashiva’s face while her replacement runs updates. Ashiva seems angry at having to undergo the genetic edit, but she looks different now, less volatile, more focused. She’ll blend in better in Central. But the fire in her eyes will be harder to disguise. There’s a wildness to her I’ve never seen in anyone in Central. So beautiful.
I know not to trust the surface of things. I’ve seen what she can do with her replacement arm and need no other proof of her strength. I admire her clear thinking, lack of doubt. It’s like the whole world is visible to her, and she knows exactly what her purpose is. And I am a mess. My body was hacked by my mother, and now by these Downlanders. I’ve been monitored since birth. My body rejected technology almost like it was allergic to it. Who am I in all of this?
Alive. Still alive. So, better than the alternative. And I’m one step closer to finding the truth about my uncle. I agree to go with her just to find the location of the dark off-site, but only if she gets info on my uncle. Ashiva promises, but I know she’d leave me to die if it came to choosing between her family or me. Who wouldn’t? Well, maybe I wouldn’t, but my circumstances aren’t normal. None of this is normal.
Saachi opens a large metal box and pulls out Uplander clothes: silks, tunics, long gloves, embroidered suits. I pull on a simple tunic and pants. I know Ashiva wouldn’t want the sari, so I push it aside in favor of simple and sharp black pants, and a long black tunic: slim, silk, simple and indescribable, forgettable, but nicer than she’s apparently used to. She, of course, scrunches her nose at me like she smells something rotten.
“How do you put it on?”
“The closure is here, in the back.”
She tests the fabric for elasticity and I stop her. “It’s silk. You’ll tear it.”
“Useless.”
But she puts it on anyway.
Her hair is another matter entirely. Long, knotted in small braids here and there, and shaved around her ears, it looks like chaos. I hand her a brush and she looks at me with daggers in her eyes. No matter. She is fire incarnate. I will not tempt fate. She twists all of her hair together instead.
“It’s great. You look great,” I say.
“I feel like I’m going to suffocate.” She pulls at the high collar of the tunic. She walks like she’s in costume and would give herself away any second.
“Relax, or you’ll come off as out of place,” I say.
She grunts and readjusts her fitted jacket, walks across the room again. “I can’t believe you wear clothes like this all the time. How can you stand it? I go undercover all the time and have never been uncomfortable.”
“So how exactly do you fit in with the Central elite?”
She stumbles. “Not the elite, but the first few Stratas are mine, easy.”
I laugh. “Can you try to be less . . .”
Ashiva snaps, “Less what?”
“Less like you are expecting to be attacked any second.”
She pauses, a hand on her hip, and says, “But I am. Expecting that.”
Zami steps in. “Pretend then. Or else you’ll look like you just don’t belong. I got you a new identity. You’re now a privileged Uplander transfer from the Eastern District who specializes in combat training. You’re considering joining Solace Corp as a combat tech.”
“Yeah, all right. So, how do we know each other?”
I swallow hard. “Friends. Old friends? But where have I been the past few days?”
Zami smiles. “You went to pick her up and travel back with her. These are dangerous times and you wanted your friend, Avni, to arr
ive safely.”
Ashiva says, “Avni. I’ve always liked that name.”
“Avni. There. Now you have a story. Stick to it and get inside.”
“Oh, one more thing. Here.” Saachi hands us both small cases filled with lenses. “They’ll block most cameras from scanning your retinas. Since there aren’t body scanners, all we have to worry about are your eyes.”
“Okay,” Ashiva says, then turns to me. “But if you mess up, I’ll—”
“Yeah, I know, slaughter me, toss me into the sea, I get it. Don’t mess up. Trust me, I don’t want you for an enemy.”
Still, she looks prettiest when she is herself. Alive, angry, fighting. I admire her fire. Because she is one hundred percent original, herself, even with the surface edits and an arm that squeaks and squeals. I know there is no one like her in this world.
27 //
Ashiva
It’s been two days since the raid and what do I have to show for my efforts? The worst part about it is he looks like he’s having fun. Yes, he says his uncle is dead, and that his mother is terrible. But he has to be the golden son of someone wealthy. Spoiled, lacking nothing, floating through life protected from any sort of danger. It amazes me that in this world, there are still people who have food in their bellies, cool air to breathe, a future. He still doesn’t know what our lives are like. His visit in the Unsanctioned Territory with us is only a temporary vacation. He can go home, even if he gets rebooted. He has a home. And a mother.
“What’s your deal, Riz?” We walk along the narrow streets of the Liminal Area. He’s skittish; this must’ve been where he was picked up.
“Deal? What deal?”
“You know. What do you want in life? Or don’t Uplanders have dreams?” I scan the area and see five sets of eyes on us, all daaku waiting for easy prey. I signal to them to stand back and flash my replacement in their direction. If they’re stupid enough to come at me, at us, it’ll be their mistake.
He stares blankly at me, unaware of the dangers around us. Maybe they don’t have dreams. It just occurs to me the neural-synch may have taken even those away.
Rise of the Red Hand Page 19