“Weren’t we planning on hiking this way?” I ask lightly.
“You mentioned hiking,” the city interface cuts in. “I’m afraid all trails are closed in this valley.”
No one says anything. Boss X is being held on the other side of that column of machines.
Our rescue is scheduled for three nights from now. The free cities’ diversionary strike, our spy crashing the dust at the head of Security’s house, it’s all carefully timed.
And we have no way to postpone it, no way to get any signal out of the city.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say. “How many merits would it cost to hike on a closed trail?”
The Shreve AI pauses, long enough that I wonder if my words were taken by the breeze.
But then it says reproachfully, “Islyn, that doesn’t sound like you.”
“I know, sir. But we’ve been planning this for months.”
“Hiking is healthy and fun, but construction zones are dangerous. We can’t allow you to compromise your own safety. It’s not a question of merits, but of mindset.”
I’m not sure what that last part means, but it sounds like I’m at risk of being flagged. Shreve is at war with the whole world, but the dust is worried about someone hiking on a closed trail.
“Sorry, sir. We’ll go back into the city.” I put on a pouting face, like a scolded child. “Maybe we can catch a train to the other side of the valley.”
“That’s the spirit, Islyn!”
I turn back to the others, scanning for any disagreement.
Zura is gazing through her field glasses at the column of machines. To skirt this valley, we’ll have to go into Shreve itself. A million people, thicker dust, endless chances to give ourselves away.
“Back to Shreve, then,” she says. “So much for taking time off from the crowds.”
The nearest train station is an hour’s hike away.
Col—of course—spent last week memorizing the Shreve rail system. He draws it for us in the dirt, a wheel with ten spokes.
“We have to ride all the way into Central to switch trains. We can eat lunch somewhere near the station. You know a place, right, Islyn?”
I don’t know any places, of course—he’s just reminding everyone to let me do the talking in town. The city AI has our new voices on file, but real people might wonder why everyone but me has a foreign accent.
They’ll stumble over etiquette and rules, like any tourists in a foreign city. Except Shreve doesn’t have tourists anymore.
Fooling algorithms is tricky enough, but in the city, we’ll have a million pairs of eyes watching us.
Being reported is dangerous in Shreve.
When Rafi and I were little, we used to watch a show called Shame-Cam on the local feeds. Every week, someone who’d been reported for bad behavior would have it revealed to the whole city. Mostly it was simple callousness, like mistreating a pet, breaking a promise, or kissing the wrong person.
But the hate was real. I still remember a woman who shoved a hesitant child aside to get on a slidewalk. For a week, she was the target of all my training moves—every punch, every kick, every thrust of my pulse knife aimed at her face.
Until the next episode, when someone new came along.
Rafi loved the show, but it always made me queasy. I wasn’t sure if being an impostor, a liar, would one day mean I would be on Shame-Cam.
As we pack up our gear, the trembling earth feels fragile beneath my feet. The sunrise is swallowed by dark clouds in the distance.
The free cities are trying to make it rain while we’re here—heavy downpours to sweep as much surveillance dust from the air as possible. It looks like the cloud seeding is already working.
We start the hike. From our path along the ridge, the skyline of Shreve splays out before us. Solid buildings of steel and glass, no floating hoverstruts, nothing taller than my father’s tower.
Closer to the station, power lines and windmills start popping up against the gray sky. It’s been months since I’ve lived in a normal, functioning city. I’ve gotten used to sleeping in a cave, to waking up every day surrounded by the wild, by crew.
Maybe Boss X was right, and I was always a rebel at heart.
But Diego and the other free cities think I should be the leader of Shreve, someone who settles the world’s conflicts.
How can I be both those things?
We reach the station, and a train pulls in after half an hour.
It’s a single car, empty except for a few hikers and a couple of crumblies with bags full of shopping from the city.
All of them stare at us as they get off the train—for a moment, I think they’re looking at me.
For years, I pretended to be the first daughter of Shreve. A hundred cams, a thousand faces watched me wherever I went. But now their eyes slip from my boring new face to our duffel bags.
We’re carrying too much stuff, of course. Shreve’s greenbelt isn’t very big, and the wild beyond the border is off-limits. Even disguised as tents and camping gear, our bags of weapons and equipment look suspicious.
We’re pretty weird too.
Zura and Lodge with their imposing builds, Riggs and Charles with their rebel air.
In Shreve, reporting anything suspicious is a citizen’s duty. It’s as easy as opening your mouth and saying three magic words …
This looks wrong.
I wait for one of the passengers to speak up, to accuse us all of looking like foreign spies. But they have bigger things on their minds, and soon disappear into the countryside around us.
We get onto the empty train and take our seats, spreading out so it won’t be so obvious that we’re all together. When Riggs leaves her duffel bag in the walkway, the city AI docks her five merits. She sighs and puts it on the overhead rack.
She slumps in her seat, daring the dust to correct her posture.
Riggs has never fully invested in creating a new self for this mission. She didn’t let the surgeons change her gait; she’s even using her real first name. That made the rest of us nervous, until a search of Shreve public records found 247 people called Riggs.
Still, it seems like tempting fate.
A screen on the wall counts down the minutes till the train’s departure. Maybe we’ll have the whole car to ourselves …
But with thirty seconds to go, I see someone out the window.
He’s a middle pretty, his temples graying. He wears a raincoat and carries an old-fashioned overnight bag with no hoverlifters. He’s hurrying, carried by long athletic strides.
Col turns to me. “The next train’s not for three hours. It’ll be pouring by then.”
I shake my head a little.
The fewer people who get a look at us, the better. And keeping to schedule is sacred here in Shreve.
Model citizen Arav would know all this, so I don’t say it aloud. Col reads my expression, frowns, and looks back at the hurrying man.
It’s going to be close. As the man reaches the station path, a sequence of beeps sounds. The air tingles, the train’s magnetics coming to life.
The doors start to close—
Col sticks his foot out, catching them just in time.
An angry buzz shakes the train car as the doors halt and rebound.
The man slides through the gap. He’s out of breath, and drops his bag on the floor with a nod of thanks to Col.
Col smiles back, pulling his foot away.
The doors close, and the train glides into motion.
Col is muttering into his comms. “Sorry, sir. I know, sir. Sorry—I won’t. Thank you, sir.”
It takes a slew of apologies to the city, but the conversation finally comes to an end.
“Be good, Arav,” I tell him.
He shrugs, attempts a Shreve accent. “Just thirty demerits.”
“Happy to reimburse you, my friend,” the man says from across the aisle. “That train platform suffers from a lack of diversion. Three hours might’ve been a trial.”
Col
shakes his head. “You don’t have to pay me back.”
“Something more interesting than merits, then?” The man leans closer to us, quickly scanning the car before speaking again.
When he takes in the rest of the commandoes, he hesitates.
“Ah. You’re an intriguing assemblage, aren’t you?”
In a single glance, he knew we were all together.
“Just hiking with friends,” I say.
“Which is healthy and fun, I’m sure.” He hands me a small rectangle of paper. “My calling card.”
The card looks like something out of a pre-Rusty drama. There’s nothing on it except a name in very small letters.
JAXON ALLIFLEX
“Nice to meet you, Jaxon,” I say.
“Perhaps the type is too small.” He hands me a pair of eyeglasses, like you’d wear if your vision implants were fritzing.
“I can see fine,” I say.
“Are you sure? Have you been to the eye doctor lately?”
“Um, no?”
Jaxon gestures to the glasses. “Then I insist.”
Without any change in tone, those last words sound almost like a threat. He knows there’s something off about us, and that we don’t want trouble.
So I obey, slipping the glasses on my face to look at the card again … and somehow, there’s more.
JAXON ALLIFLEX
PRIVATEER
(CALL ME JAX)
“Did that help?” he asks.
I blink, turning the card to different angles. The extra words fade in and out, a little unsteady on the paper.
“It did.” I look up at him. “Thank you, Jax.”
He smiles.
Then I see the rest, revealed on the walls of the train around us—symbols, printed text, graffiti, and drawings scrawled across the bland pastels of Shreve Rail signage. A layer of meaning invisible to my eyes, even with my military-grade vision implants, suddenly visible in the eyeglasses.
It must be invisible to the dust as well.
For a moment, Jax watches my eyes dart about the train. Then he plucks the glasses from my face, a gentle reminder not to react too obviously.
“Nice to meet you too,” he says, handing the glasses to Col. “You look as though you could use my professional assistance.”
Jax gives Col a look through the eyeglasses, and amazement flickers across his face.
He hands them back to the man. “Please, join us.”
“An excellent idea,” Jax says, standing. “But I must warn you, I am spellbinding company.”
As he gathers his bag and raincoat from the overhead rack, my eyes scan the walls of the train again. All those words and symbols are gone, leaving no trace. I wonder how the glasses work, whether the trick was in the lenses or some kind of transmitter hidden in the glasses.
Did they do something to my vision implants?
Or my brain?
“I make my living as a widget,” the man announces once he’s settled. “I was doing an overnight, out here in the greenbelt.”
Col looks confused, but I nod to show Jax that I understand.
In Shreve, when you leave your house empty, any homeless citizen is allowed to move in while you’re gone. The dust watches them extra carefully, of course. Widgets make repairs, clean up, water your plants, and feed your pets, accumulating a few merits if the algorithm deems fit. The dust tells them when you’re headed back, and they disappear, like helpful elves.
In the stories Rafi and I watched growing up, widgets were always kind and wise and even a little magical. But Rafi’s friends made jokes about them. They’re my father’s solution to poverty—turning homeless people into repair workers, moving parts that can be slotted in anywhere. They’re also gentle reminders that in Shreve, not even your home really belongs to you.
“Has widgeting been tricky, since the war?” I ask.
Jax nods. “Not many people traveling, thanks to the embargo. Fewer empty houses to go around.”
“That’s rough,” I say.
Jax doesn’t look poor, though. His bright green suit and red raincoat are patched in a few places, but also made with skill. An average citizen of Shreve might not spot the quality, but living in Paz taught me to appreciate handmade things.
“Are you looking for a place to stay?” Col asks. “We’re headed back into the greenbelt for a few more days. My apartment’s free.”
I resist the urge to glare at him. The apartments assigned to our fake identities aren’t just free—they’re empty. Jax has already noticed something off about us. The last thing we need is him seeing empty closets and drawers where a life should be.
With those glasses, he’s an outlaw of some kind. But that doesn’t mean we can trust him.
“A kind invitation,” Jax says. “But I have business today on the farthest outskirts of this metropolis.”
I wonder what kind of business he means.
His card said privateer—a term I remember from military history. Privateers were sort of pirates, licensed by one nation to make war on another and keep any spoils for themselves.
But I don’t know what the word means in Shreve.
“I’m looking for a construction site,” Jax continues. “Something on the water.”
I frown. “You mean the city reservoir?”
Since the war began, Shreve’s main water supply has been surrounded by defenses. Every time the Vics or rebels have gone after it, they’ve been repulsed.
You can’t even hike there, much less build a house.
“Not as good as the sea,” Jax says. “But water is still the birthplace of life. Our blood is as salty as the ocean. And our tears, expressing the emotions that make us human, a reminder of where we hail from.”
Col smiles, like all this makes sense. “So you want a house on the beach?”
“Not a mere house,” Jax says. “As a widget, I’ve stayed in more houses than I care to count. What comes next must be magnificent, a means of connection. An expanse between two anchorages!”
I stare at him. “You mean a bridge?”
“You seem astonished, my dear. Don’t you have bridges where you come from?”
I’m speechless for a moment, captured by Jax’s smile and the gleam in his eye—and his implication that we’re outsiders.
Maybe the man is simply sense-missing. His brightly colored, handmade clothes are oddball enough, but building his own bridge …
I wonder why the dust isn’t correcting him—you aren’t allowed to say things that aren’t true in Shreve. Maybe he’s being vague enough that the dust doesn’t understand.
“We’re from here,” Col says.
The man lights up. “Yes! But in the springtime, it’s Paris that sizzles. Wouldn’t you agree?”
He gestures out the window, as if the Eiffel Tower were passing by instead of the glum low-rise housing of the outer suburbs. The tallest things are occasional dust chimneys, spewing their haze of nanomachines into the air.
“I’ve never been to Paris,” Col says in a gently humoring way, like Jax is an older relative who’s forgotten to take their Alz-blockers.
For moment, I doubt what I saw on the walls of the train.
“If you ever go, look me up.” Jax’s eyes twinkle again, and he says with perfect clarity, “I am an excellent tour guide. Especially if you want to see the places no one ever shows a visitor.”
I tense. He’s calling us outsiders again.
But the city interface stays silent in my ears. Somehow its algorithms haven’t been triggered. As if the AI doesn’t pay attention to anything this man says.
Maybe his sense-missing talk is a strategy. Out of two million citizens, a few thousand must have untreatable disorders of the mind. They must say odd things all the time, things that get flagged by the algorithms—but when Security investigates, it’s just babble, full of overblown words and logic-missing ideas.
The AI would eventually learn to disregard those people, wouldn’t it?
Jax is une
rringly polite, and useful with his repairs and house-sitting, so his odd behavior might not even cost him any merits.
It’s a way around the spy dust that I’ve never considered before.
“Next time I’m in Paris, I’ll ping you,” Col says with a gentle smile.
The train slows, the signposts for the next station gliding past the windows. More passengers are waiting here, and our conversation changes distinctly as they get on.
Jax tells us about the houses he’s stayed in, the dogs he’s made friends with while their owners were away. If there’s any hidden meaning in his stories, it’s too subtle for me.
Maybe having all these people around makes his act trickier. The city’s algorithms might have trained themselves to ignore Jax, but humans are relentless at sniffing out meaning.
At least the presence of a loud, brightly dressed widget on the train distracts the other passengers from us—the group of oddballs with strange accents and too much camping equipment.
Zura keeps staring across the car at me and Col, wondering why we’re talking to this eccentric stranger. Without that glimpse through the glasses, I’d be wondering myself.
As the train gets closer to the city, more cars are added, more passengers get on. A few tip their hats to Jax or give him a smile. Do they know him? Or do most citizens feel kindly toward widgets?
Then I realize that some of them are wearing eyeglasses.
How big is this conspiracy of hidden signs?
I remember when Col’s Victorians and the rebels attacked Shreve, shutting down my father’s dust for a few hours. Rafi and I went on the feeds and told the whole world our secret, the way our father used us.
Within minutes, thousands of people were on the rooftops, celebrating, thinking his regime was over. Maybe they were already connected, already part of some kind of organized resistance.
But how would it get started, in a city where everyone is always watched? How do people write messages without the dust noticing?
If I’m going to understand my own city, I need to find out how it works, and whether these privateers are rebels, criminals, or something else entirely.
I make a show of squinting at the screen listing the upcoming stops.
“Jax, I think you were right about my vision implants. You don’t have any of those glasses for sale, do you?”
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