Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Without a word, Jessa slides a second syringe into the pocket of my suit jacket. Familiar tiny ping as the syringe lands in my inventory. Tension drops from my shoulders. “Thanks.”

  “I said I got you.” Jessa lifts her chin at the middle distance. “Lead on.”

  “Wait wait wait. I got six left on my thousand. Help me first and then we go.”

  “No chance. I just burned a suborbital drop getting to you. Do you know how long I’ve been holding on to that? Plus I just saved your ass. Those heals aren’t cheap.”

  I consult my kill counter, like it will have budged spontaneously from six shy. I look at Jessa. She looks back at me, eyes gleaming silver. I do a double take before I can stop myself. “Are you streaming right now?”

  “Of course I’m fucking streaming,” Jessa says. “What you think I’m out here for, a picnic? Say hi to Nycorix, guys!”

  A pause, which was probably exactly that, but I don’t know, because I have them muted. Not that I’m about to tell Jessa that. “Hi,” I say.

  Jessa leans in close to whisper. The illusion of privacy. “Look, we’ve got three minutes and change before they cut us off. I’ll make it up to you. Okay?”

  Besides, it might be 22, she visibly chooses not to say. I have ground rules about what can and cannot be said on-stream, and this would top that list. It’s nobody’s fucking business, not even Jessa’s really, but you try living and working with the same person in the same room for four years and see how many secrets you manage to keep.

  I sigh, which apparently stands in for an answer, because Jessa is already pulling her hoverbike out of inventory, already slinging a leg over it as it blinks into existence. She throws a glance back at me. “Then let’s go.”

  I’m torn. All my rational thought is still clawing after that thousand and the chance it represents. But I don’t want to look like an asshole in front of our nineteen hundred subscribers, and asking Jessa to stop streaming would be like asking a hurricane to detour around your town. I’ve already got a reputation as the uptight one. No need to prove that point for them. Not when I can multitask my way out of this instead.

  “Okay, but I’m driving. I’m going to try to run over a few more on the way.”

  Jessa pulls a face but scoots back. “No scenic route.”

  I raise my arms in a gesture at the blasted tarmac, now black with night, lit only by the smoking ruin of Jessa’s crater. “Do you see anything remotely resembling a scenic route.”

  “I just hope you’re right about what you saw,” Jessa says, as if I’ve said I definitively saw anything, and I hammer down a little spike of irritation and goose the controls, and we’re off, skimming over the peaks and troughs of the half-melted landing strip like a skipped stone.

  I take out nine hundred ninety-five as it respawns a few yards away from the edge of the crater, banking the bike hard right and straightening out just in time to run it down as it raises its blaster toward my face. It thunks under the platform and is lost. One down.

  It’s almost fun this way. I should have thought of this ages ago.

  We whir past Jessa’s crater and on into the dark.

  “Near those buildings?” Jessa yells over the onrushing of slag-scented wind.

  “Just past them,” I yell back. Then I spot a tiny cluster of mobs at maybe a hundred-yard diagonal from where I can just make out the thinnest silver needle of the beacon, meandering northeast. Jackpot. “Slight detour. Hold on.”

  “Make it real real slight,” Jessa hollers. “Two minutes forty.”

  “I see it.” I crank the hand controls and peel off eastward. When we’re within range, I draw the blaster, wrangling the bike left-handed.

  Behind me, Jessa is busily spouting reassurances to the ether. “Nyx is just finishing up her thousand, guys, be right with you.”

  “Four left,” I shout as an exosuit gunner drops to a lucky headshot. As that one falls, I light up the demolitions bot behind it. “Three.”

  A message from Jessa pops up in the corner of my visual field. keep doing that crazy shit, they love it

  you could be helping me shoot, you know

  i didn’t want to team in the middle of a shootout? remember that time we did that and the game bugged out and wiped my progress on my thousand? you’re sooo close, it’s fine, you got this

  Yeah. Sure I do. Two minutes.

  I’ve got a good two hundred yards of straightaway in front of me, so I take my driving hand off the controls to prop the blaster on the bent elbow of that arm. As I take aim, the bike skids over something and unbalances, whipping in a full, loose, wobbling one-eighty. I miss my shot, wasting seconds as I wrestle the bike back around. I can’t see for shit now—it’s fully dark—so I pull up a minimap and start firing in the direction of the nearest enemy dots. I luck out, and my counter goes up by one.

  Too slow. Behind me, Jessa’s clandestinely tugging on my sleeve.

  just two left, I tell her.

  no time

  i need these last two

  nyx there’s just. no. time. ok? we have people watching. we land this, it’s more important than your thousand and you know it

  I think about chaoslogic and 42. By the end of that spree, he was streaming to over five million followers. By the end of that spree, he’d been hanging out with 42 for two days.

  “More important to you, maybe,” I whisper aloud, because I know Jessa can’t hear me over the bike and the wind and the voices in her head. But there isn’t time for both this potential footage and my thousand anymore—there really isn’t. I rolled the dice on that one and I lost, and now it’s time for damage control.

  As always, I shut my mouth and keep the peace. I holster the blaster, angle the bike toward a slot between buildings, and jam both controls forward.

  It’s dark. So dark. The buildings we’re between now look like some kind of warehouses, and if the lights are on inside, they don’t make it through the windows. A crash would wipe us both, and then when the power comes back on tomorrow, we’ll respawn here. We’ve fought our way out of worse together, but the bike’s power cell is running low, my blaster is almost dry, and the syringe in my back pocket is the only worldly possession to my name. Unless Jessa has another power cell that I don’t know about, or we score some footage in the next two minutes that by some miracle earns us one, we’ll be slogging out of here on foot. We’ll—

  “On your three!” Jessa shouts, and I snap out of it and turn my head fractionally to see. A glint of something to the northwest, a spire of light stabbing upward from the field beyond the airstrip, half a mile off, easy. You always forget how fast they can move until you’re tailing one. “Oh shit,” Jessa is breathing. “Oh shit. You guys see that? Ninety seconds, Nyx, you gotta punch it.”

  I punch it. The hoverbike slingshots over the edge of the airstrip and into the weeds beyond. There’s some junk here mucking up any chance we had at clear terrain. The ruins of a building, maybe, or some dead mech rusting in the tall grass. Whatever it is, it’s annoying the hoverbike’s delicate calibrations. The whole platform wobbles like a spinning top that’s just been nudged.

  Visibility is nil. Odds of a wipeout are escalating rapidly. But I race the clock toward that spike of light and, with thirty-six seconds left before cutoff, dump the bike into a skid that brings us within kissing distance of the figure’s boots.

  Jessa doesn’t even seem to care that I’ve just dumped her bike, or that the power cell is now screeching angrily as the calibration systems try to get a grip on empty air, or that a third of her health bar has vaporized in the fall, and we have no back door out of this shitshow. She’s scrambling up and tilting her silver eyes right into the glowing figure’s face. “Guys,” she’s hissing. “Guys, you’re not going to believe this. Look who we found.”

  It isn’t, I tell myself, it isn’t, it isn’t. Hoping that what I see when I look up from the controls will prove me wrong.

  It doesn’t.

  It’s a young woman in a
dark uniform, brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. On her face is an expression of vague bemusement. The number 28 floats above her head in the place where a name would be if she were a player character or a standard NPC. Below that her health bar is full and so red it’s almost black. I realize that she hasn’t just been aimlessly walking, she’s been reading meanwhile. Some comic book she must have picked up in one of the in-game vendors, or else, more likely, some player must have given to her for laughs. She pockets it without taking her eyes off us. I only catch the barest glimpse of the cover before the book vanishes into her inventory: several figures on a city street, their backs to me, facing down the vanishing point between two buildings and an unrealistically large mech emerging there. One of those figures is probably her.

  28’s eyes track back and forth between Jessa and me and the wreck of the hoverbike, and that is the only part of her that moves. Then she huffs out an amused little breath and leans in like she’s going to tell me a secret. Jessa hustles out of the way and shoves me into her spot, eyes wide like that’ll give our subscribers a better view of whatever comes next.

  I spare a glance for the timer. Nine seconds. Eight. Seven. I look up into the amused set of 28’s mouth, 28’s single raised eyebrow.

  “Someone should really teach you how to drive that thing,” 28 says with cool derision, and I open my mouth to say something probably extremely ill-advised, but the cutoff alarm trills and everything goes dark.

  0002

  WHAT I REALLY WANT IS TO RIP the blackout mask off my face, fling it across the room, and lie here in my bunk in the dark in this murderous mood until sleep takes me. But I can’t afford a new mask if mine goes missing, and I really can’t afford to miss my place in the water line, and I need to find Jessa at some point so we can strategize how the hell we’re going to get off that airstrip and back to civilization when the power comes back on.

  Besides, some of the other bunks are occupied. Tegan’s, Talya’s, Jackson’s. I can see their still shapes in the moonlight across the room. Maybe people below me too. I’m in no mood to talk to anyone, and if I walk past them, they’ll start asking how I did today, if I squeaked my thousand in before cutoff, whether I finally made the boards, and so on, and I’d really rather stay right here. Two seconds of shitty footage of 28 might net us a few more subscribers, a few more credits dropped into our accounts, but it isn’t what I burned an entire evening for.

  THANK YOU FOR DOING YOUR PART TO CONSERVE ENERGY, the display is flashing. It’s the last thing it’ll show me until the power curfew lifts in the morning. WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. SEE YOU SOON!

  So I put the mask away on the shelf, glance at the wall clock—the water line doesn’t even open for another forty minutes yet, the cutoff ran early today—and lie there a moment in the comparative silence, mentally replaying what Jessa and I just did, or failed to do. Trying not to think about what might have happened if I’d cut my losses on the thousand just a few minutes sooner. Pursued that beacon when there was still time to get enough footage to be valuable. Here’s the thing. 28 is a massive pain in the ass to find. She’s easily in the top five for staying out of sight when she wants to, and arguably top three. Just now, out on that airstrip, I was the only fucking one there. I could have been streaming 28—exclusively, lucratively streaming her—for nearly twenty minutes.

  Or I could have made my thousand and had a chance at the boards tomorrow. Like I’d come out there for in the first place. Instead I split the difference and managed to accomplish jack shit. For a reason that I fully realize makes zero sense to Jessa, or our viewers, or anyone but me.

  And now I’m stuck until curfew lifts in the morning, and then it’s off to work, and even if I make a thousand tomorrow, I have no chance to climb the boards before the grace period expires.

  I know there are people who manage to sidestep power curfew. On the surface it’s easy: you just figure out which neighborhoods go offline when, and you bounce back and forth staying ahead of the blackouts. But I don’t have that information or the credits to make use of it. I can’t even afford a hoverbike in-game, what chance do you think I have of one out of it?

  I’m so thirsty. So, so thirsty. Hungry too, but that’s a dull ache compared to the ashen wasteland of my mouth, the pounding behind my eyes.

  I’m too tired to be properly angry, but that’s there too. I lost my thousand. I haven’t made a thousand since last month. And now my chance of climbing the boards tomorrow is shot. Instead I get to spend the afternoon trying to get out of that field where the game dropped us. Briefly I entertain the idea of letting something kill me out there, respawning at a save in the city proper, but nobody’s going to sponsor our stream, Jessa’s and mine, if we start taking the easy way out. It’s just not interesting enough to watch, let alone pay for.

  We fight our way out, though, me with my one heal and Jessa with her busted bike, dragging ass those overland miles back to the city? That’s drama, and drama sells. It beats working the plastic digesters, anyway, or getting caught up in a blood-donor loop the way Allie did last year.

  Small noises around the room as the others peel their masks off and climb out of their bunks. I close my eyes and pretend I’m taking a quick nap before heading down to the water line. One by one, they take their turn in the bathroom, collect their cups and bottles, put on their coats—an hour past power curfew in this weather, it gets like a refrigerator in here, especially down in the lobby—and leave, talking quietly among themselves.

  Suresh pokes his head into my bunk. “Hey. Mal. You awake?”

  For a second I consider doubling down on my fake sleep, but it’s Jessa I’m annoyed with, or the game, or myself, and Jessa must have scooted off to the company store or wherever while I lay here pouting with my mask on like an asshole, and annoyance with myself is kind of my baseline. I open my eyes. “No,” I say.

  “I can see that,” he says. “Well, if you feel like doing some sleepwalking, we’re headed down to get early spots in the water line. They ran out yesterday, and I only got half ration.”

  I make a face. “Again?”

  “Third time this month. I think it’s a ploy to get us down there to buy shit in the company store while we wait for the line to open.” Six floors up from the water line, he still says that part quietly. You don’t usually see the water-line guards pull their guns on anyone, but then again, when they do, you can never quite tell the reason.

  Just in case, I force a laugh, like I think for one second he was joking. “Well, don’t wait for me. I’ll meet you guys down there in a minute. Thanks for the heads-up, though.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and leaves me alone in the dark.

  Jessa’s messaging me again, this time on the local channel and whatever power’s left in her emergency backup battery, just tiptoeing around the razor edge of curfew violation. I’ll deal with her in a bit. For now I pretend not to notice. I roll my head sideways toward the stack of bunks that goes: her on top bunk, then Keisha in the middle, then Jackson on the bottom. Jessa’s bunk is empty, all her collector crap staring sightlessly back at me in the moonlight as if it’s giving me both middle fingers and an I-told-you-so on her behalf.

  Really, it’s amazing how much kitsch she can cram into her regulation ninety-six cubic feet of personal space between her mattress and the ceiling. She’s got posters on top of posters: 08 with 21, 05 with 11, 06 with 22, 28 alone, and so on, and then one with all twelve of them posed together, the living and the dead. She’s got printouts of news headlines. She’s got action figures stacked two deep on her little plastic shelf. She’s got promo soda bottles and coffee cups and cereal boxes, and enough keychains and statuettes and god knows what that she could make a good-sized shrapnel bomb. She’s got stickers plastered pretty much anywhere you might have otherwise glimpsed a wall or part of her bedframe through this forest of stuff, the jacket draped over her top-bunk footboard is encrusted in patches and buttons so thick it’s like she’s wearing armor when she puts it on
, and she used to have a no-shit actual body pillow of 08, but that disappeared a while ago, either because someone stole it or sold it (likely), or she sold it (less likely) or threw it out (which I would personally bet my life against). She’s even got this ridiculously detailed 1:6 model of 33 on a Parallax Instigator that’s the newer, sexier real-life version of Jessa’s hoverbike in-game. It’s not even a smart model, just regular plastic, but it’s got to be worth something anyway, because 33 has been dead in the ground since November ’29, and the way Jessa tells it, she’s been lugging this thing around with her from settlement to settlement since she was younger than 33 had been when he died. It’s a miracle nobody’s walked off with it by now.

  28 locks eyes with me from the ensemble poster. It doesn’t help that this particular poster was made in such a way that all their eyes literally follow you back and forth across a room. Normally I tune it out, but today, in the blue of the moonlight, it’s getting under my skin a little. The look of contempt in 28’s eyes is too much like the one she gave me in the weeds outside the airstrip when I dumped Jessa’s bike at her feet.

  “I lost my thousand because of you,” I inform her. The moonlight ripples under thin cloud cover, doing weird things to her face. I don’t let myself look at 22.

  Whatever. Right now I have thirty-seven minutes until the water line opens, and it wouldn’t kill me to have at least some faint idea of how I’m getting back to in-game civilization after work tomorrow. Jessa and I could pool our resources and replace the bike’s power cell, or get a stack of heals and speed boosts and slog out of there on foot. We could—

  The door crashes open in the dark. I shoot upright, startled, but I know it’s Jessa because she’s already running her mouth a mile a minute. She’s out of breath. I can barely make out what she’s saying. She clicks off her solar headlamp and flops down in the room’s one chair.