Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  That’s when I see the other kid, lying on the ground around back of the car. He looks even younger than the first one. He’s not moving. Blood runs out of his mouth.

  Then he’s gone too, vanished behind the concrete perimeter of the scanner field.

  I could have streamed that, I think, far too late. I could have put that online. I could have done something.

  The man sitting beside me notices me trying to look out his window. “Should’ve complied,” he says, and goes blank-faced as he returns his attention to whatever he’s doing online.

  “How do you know he didn’t?” I ask him, but he’s not listening.

  We pass through the scanner field without much incident. Just twenty minutes when the driver has to pull off to the shoulder so two passengers’ bags can be checked. The officers’ guns stay holstered for the most part. Nobody gets dragged off into one of the pods. One of the bag-search passengers starts crying because the officers have wrecked the toy solar glider she built for her grandkids. Snapped the fuselage in half to check for contraband.

  Should’ve complied goes rattling through my head. Except she did. I had my eyes on her the whole time, and all she did was answer questions—I made it for my grandkids, the guidance systems are extremely delicate, please be careful—and attempt to smile politely.

  The man next to me gets off before my stop. When I let him past I trip him, just a little. Just enough to spill his coffee down the front of his suit.

  “Sorry,” I say. He doesn’t look like he believes me. I don’t think I’d believe me either.

  “Stupid bitch,” he says, and flounces off the bus.

  Fine by me. Now I get my window seat.

  * * *

  I DON’T KNOW how to get to the coffee shop precisely. I don’t even know its name. It didn’t have a proper sign. Just some hole in the wall a few blocks from Prosperity Park.

  I disembark and bring up the map interface I saved. It marks out my route before me in glowing blue dots that trail away down the street to my right. I follow them for five blocks, then turn left and walk another two blocks, which puts me in sight of the park. I stop there and message Jessa a snapshot of the statue. almost there

  Delivery job or no delivery job, her response comes almost immediately. keep me posted

  copy that

  Here’s the tricky part. I found the park online, but I still don’t know the name of the coffee shop. We looked up “coffee shops near Prosperity Park” and got twenty results, although over half of those were company-store branches. We didn’t get further than that before power curfew, and the plan was to narrow down the list on the bus, but the thing with the checkpoint was just so lodged in my head the whole way here that I never got around to it.

  I pull the list back up. It’s overwhelming. I put it away.

  If we’d streamed the route before, I could play it back right now and follow it. If we hadn’t taken out our lenses. Oh well.

  Maybe my feet remember.

  We followed B past the statue, I know that much. I scan the storefronts, looking for landmarks. Then I take off walking.

  Half an hour of wandering and doubling back and cursing and retracing later, I’m standing in front of B’s sister’s coffee shop.

  Except I’m not.

  It’s gone.

  There’s a Comforts of Home in its place, an exact copy/paste of the one where I buy my worldly goods every day. They may as well have portaled it out of the hotel lobby and plopped it here.

  To the left of Comforts of Home is the same hair-and-nails place that had been to the left of B’s sister’s coffee shop. To the right, the same lens outfitters. I can even see powdery blue marks on the sidewalk where somebody stepped on a piece of the old-school chalk from B’s sister’s old-school chalkboard.

  But no coffee shop.

  Jessa’s next message comes while I’m standing in front of Comforts of Home gawking like a tourist who’s never seen a company store.

  coffee shop eta?

  I’m a moment in composing an answer to that. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. Something’s wrong, it’s saying. Something’s very wrong.

  hit a snag, I manage eventually. i’ll—

  what kind of a snag?

  Um.

  took a wrong turn out of the park. all these streets look alike That part at least is true. should be there in a few

  Then, because there’s a distinct chill settling on me that has very little to do with the cold and a whole lot to do with the cheery hologram of the Stellaxis logo exactly at eye level by the door: look i gotta take my lenses out, the air is gritty as all shit here and it’s getting caught in my eyes

  yeah, Jessa replies. i remember. ok. poke me the second you get them back in ok?

  of course

  B’s voice in my head: Hey. If I suddenly disappear, at least we’ll know I was right.

  Realizing I should probably have done this a while ago, I take my lenses out and put them away. Then I take a deep breath, snug my backpack against my shoulders like I’m adjusting armor, and walk into the store.

  It’s any Comforts of Home. It’s every Comforts of Home. That’s the whole marketing gimmick. You always know what to expect. The coffee machine is in a certain place. The snacks are in a certain place. The company-logo t-shirts and company-mascot plushies are near the SecOps action figures, which are near the designer lens cases and cleaning kits.

  It’s the same deal with the Stellaxis coffee shops, fourteen of which were cluttering up the list I pulled up in the park. And the Stellaxis fast-food restaurants. And the Stellaxis vehicle dealerships. Everything in its place. Everything sleek and shiny and utterly devoid of anything remotely resembling B’s sister’s coffee shop.

  I go and make browsing body language in front of the display of lens cleaner. If I’m on record as having taken out gritty lenses, I may as well double down on it. Meantime I listen to the other customers. See if they have anything to say that might count as a clue.

  I get a whole lot of nothing. There are eleven other customers in here, and nobody says a word to anybody else. The cashier scanners don’t have the kind of small-talk AI that the screens at the company coffee shops do, so that’d be a dead end even if I wanted to openly interrogate a computer owned by the same corporation that disappeared not only B, but B’s sister’s entire place of business. Which I don’t.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, I tell myself. But it’s getting harder. It’s getting a whole lot harder.

  I buy a bottle of lens cleaner, a granola bar, a protein drink, and a pack of the disposable filtration masks I couldn’t find in the company-store branch back home. Then I shove it all in my backpack and head out into the street. There’s a bench a couple of storefronts down, outside a tiny laundromat not much bigger than a closet. I park myself there and try to look casual as I sip my protein drink and eavesdrop.

  It takes a long time. A couple of hours, probably. I’d know if my lenses were in. There’s something weirdly comforting about sitting here in utter anonymity, though. Nobody’s messaging me. Nobody’s talking to me. Nobody even knows who I am. In other circumstances it’d be pretty great.

  I’ve gone through the entire protein drink and also the granola bar and also just kind of sat there a while doing nothing, when what I’ve been waiting for finally happens.

  A woman walks past Comforts of Home doing a double take that almost earns her a sprained ankle. “I thought this was a coffee place,” she mutters to herself or someone online.

  A man on his way out of Comforts of Home with a couple of shopping bags stops when he hears this. “It was,” he informs her. “The building got trashed in an accidental drone strike a few days ago. No loss if you ask me. These things are so convenient. I was hoping they’d put one on this block.” Like there isn’t one on both blocks sandwiching this one.

  From the look on the woman’s face, she wasn’t actually after the free history lesson. She nods at him tightly and walks away.

  I
wait another few minutes, then get up and do a slow pass in front of Comforts of Home. I cross the street so I can look at it head-on from a distance. I take fifteen minutes circling around the back of the block it’s in to see if that helps. Then another fifteen minutes circling around the other side to check out the rest of the block. By that point I’m moderately freaked out enough that I just kind of keep walking. Away from the park and the bus stop and Comforts of Home. Nowhere in particular. Just away.

  Because here’s the thing. No matter which way I look at that building, I see no evidence of damage. At all. The outer walls of Comforts of Home and the sidewalk outside are pristine. The upper levels still look the same as they ever did. Apartments, probably, or maybe an extended-stay hotel. Lots of little windows with people’s stuff in them. There’s a pink plush dolphin hanging from a suction cup in a corner window, which I can’t be one hundred percent sure I saw before but certainly seems familiar.

  The storefronts to the left and right of Comforts: similarly untouched.

  Now I don’t know a whole lot about drone strikes, accidental or not, but this seems just the tiniest bit off.

  It’s past midday now, the winter sun already beginning to lower itself between the buildings, so I have to squint where the late light caroms off the glass. It’s cold and I’m cold and I can’t stop walking. I don’t know what to do. The pocket screen and the 08 file are burning a hole through my mind. I keep having to stop myself from adjusting the backpack, like passersby can see the secret thing I’m carrying.

  I have to process this—however I can, as much as I can—before I bring it to Jessa. I have to figure out how to present the facts in a way that seems the most rational. I don’t want to scare her over nothing. But I’m no longer entirely sure I would be. The not-understanding is an itch in my brain that will only get worse and worse until I hammer out some kind of answer. Some way to move forward from here.

  I could go home and forget about all of this. Stream the game for other sponsors, walk other people’s dogs, try to grind away a daily thousand once in a while. Live my quiet little life. The loss of that five gallons a week would be a hit, of course, but we never really had it in the first place to lose. Here we are, surviving all the same. We just picked up three hundred new subscribers. We find 28 again, or do something else that grabs their eyeballs, we’ll pick up more. Slow and steady. Heads down. Keep the peace.

  There’s a jagged edge to that plan, though, and I keep tripping over it.

  Sure, B was a convicted anticorporate terrorist on a lockout. Any number of reasons she could’ve skipped town. Weird to do it right after taking me and Jessa on for this project, but not impossible.

  But.

  If B was right.

  If B was right and they got rid of her because she was right.

  If they got rid of B because she was right about something Stellaxis wanted hidden.

  That means a couple of things.

  One. It means that Stellaxis lied about the operatives. The real ones. The real ones that weren’t grown in tanks in the lab at all but were actual children from actual families who were stolen from the wreckage of their lives and transplanted into some lab somewhere in Stellaxis HQ and changed and kept. Children, if B is right, like Elena.

  The official line is that the operatives are the intellectual property of Stellaxis Innovations. That’s in the small print of every backing card of every SecOps action figure in existence. It’s in the end-user license agreement of the game. It’s on the tags of the goddamn t-shirts. It’s known. The operatives were literally numbered fresh out of their growth tanks. The company did everything short of stamping a logo on them. Unless they did that, too.

  But how can a stolen child be corporate intellectual property? The game, sure. The copyright on the action figures, probably. But people?

  I mean, I remember when I lost my family. I remember being taken into a big bright room full of other kids who’d been recently orphaned by the war. I remember my leg was bleeding where a piece of our building had fallen on it. I remember my head hurt from the loud noise of the transport full of crying kids. I remember being asked a lot of questions, although I have no idea what they were or what I answered. And I remember they gave me orange juice afterward. Orange juice and a cookie. And then they handed me off to an overseer who gave me a toothbrush and a jumpsuit and a cot in the camps, where I stayed until I was old enough to enter the housing lottery and move into the hotel on my own.

  I try to imagine, if B is right, what would have happened to Elena instead when her backstory unraveled along the same route as mine. Where she got taken. Where exactly her path began to diverge from mine, or Jessa’s, or everyone’s. How exactly you go about taking an eight-year-old kid and transforming her, like some kind of beautiful, terrible, fucked-up butterfly, into something that can take on a mech in single combat. How exactly, among all of those kids from all of those busted buildings and obliterated families, you choose.

  Again I try to picture 22 as a kid in an apartment with parents, a sibling or two. Maybe a pet dog like Mr. Assan’s Flora. A show he begs to stay up late to watch. A birthday cake he asks for every year. I don’t get very far.

  It could have been Elena in the hotel and Jessa in the field. Or me. She might have been in that bright room, right next to me. I might have been one of the last people on earth to see her—the real her—alive.

  But all that, all that mess together, is only the first of the two things that are colliding in my head, raising alarms that wind up and up, louder and shriller, the longer and farther and deeper into the descent of the evening I walk.

  The second is this.

  If B and her sister and her sister’s coffee shop are all gone because she met with me and Jessa, or because I opened my idiot mouth and asked 08 about Elena on livestream for the potential entire internet to see, or even because she lied and she’s actually paying us in illegal water, poached or hacked or collected or however she got it—how long is it going to take the people who somehow erased a coffee shop and installed a company store in the span of days to decide to come looking for me?

  It’s evolving into real fear now, coiling down inside me, icy and slick. I have to get home. I have to talk to Jessa. Not online. Not where it can be traced. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere private. Somewhere like the hidden corner of the greenhouse where she showed me the cleaned-up 08 file, which feels like weeks ago.

  But I’m way deeper into the city now than I ever intended. I have no idea where I am. It’s less crowded here, and there’s evidence of recent fighting. Scorch marks on the buildings, though whatever burned them has gone. Bullet holes. Up ahead there’s the remains of a barricade, foot and bike traffic parting around it like water around a rock. A building to the diagonal of me really has been clipped by a drone strike or something. An entire corner of its roof has broken off and crushed a parked car that nobody has since bothered to move.

  I scan the storefronts, looking for a place that’s likely to have a public restroom I can use. I have to find somewhere to put my lenses back in so they can show me the route to the bus. I can’t do that out here, I’ve walked too far and ended up in an actual no-shit war zone, there’s who even knows what in the air. If I had my lenses in, they’d tell me if it was clean. At least nobody around me is wearing masks, that’s probably a good—

  Out of nowhere, maybe three blocks ahead of where I’m standing, a helicopter slews sideways between two buildings and cannonballs into the glass face of a third. It hangs there for a few long seconds and then drops, trailing fire. The explosion when it lands sounds like the end of the world.

  People run past me, going as fast as they can back the way I came. Away from the fireball and the panes of glass still dropping out of the broken building and the deep steady concussions in the ground that at first I think are maybe aftershocks of the explosion and then realize are something utterly and completely else.

  Preceded by the blue-lit barrels of its gun-arms and a sound like
ten trillion mosquitoes, far too smoothly for something of its size, stepping across the sun and throwing the whole street into shadow, a citykiller mech stalks into view.

  0009

  FOR LONG, LONG SECONDS I’M FROZEN TO the spot, every higher order of my brain trying to convince me that what I’m seeing isn’t real. I’ve seen them on the newsfeeds, of course, and in the game, but not like this. Not anything like like this.

  I have no choice now. I’m cut off without my lenses. I have to know.

  I flatten myself into the recessed doorway of a vacant storefront and pop them in with shaking hands. Immediately my implant tells my lenses where I am and the alert pops up: PHASE ORANGE—MODERATE THREAT DETECTED—PLEASE REMAIN INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE—IF UNABLE, REPORT TO NEAREST AUTHORITY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTION

  “Moderate,” I say through chattering teeth. “Right.”

  Nothing about the air quality being compromised. But maybe it’s different here in the actual city than in old town. Maybe a place that classifies exploding helicopters and fucking citykiller mechs as moderate threats doesn’t bother telling people when they’re breathing in necrotizing nanoparticles or hallucinogen bursts or any of the thirty-four other bioweapons on the safety announcement symptom-checker FAQ, any of which could be floating around in what I’m breathing right the hell now.

  I unsling my backpack, grab a mask, peel back the strip, and wait while it adheres to my face. Then I creep out from my hiding place and into the street.

  The crowd is rushing past me now full bore, some shrieking, some shouting, some silent. I don’t know who they are or where they’re going, but it’s away from the monstrosity up the street, which sounds like exactly where I want to be.

  If I streamed this, it’d give Jessa a heart attack, straight up. So I don’t. But if I survive the next few minutes, I’m going to want to pore over the details of them later. It’s like I’m in the game. It’s unreal. And yet it’s one of the realest things I’ve ever seen.