Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  A stalemate, 22 called it. Stellaxis’s and Greenleaf’s control of New Liberty. What exactly, in the face of that stalemate, in the one supercity in which they both still had influence, did they agree on? If I were a major corporation, which would be the least of evils to my mind? To keep on fighting, throwing money down the pit of this war, at the risk of losing tens of millions of customer-citizens if I don’t eventually manage to win? Or to make a deal with a fellow corporation with similar goals, and periodically knock down just enough low-priority buildings to keep up appearances? Would that deal look maybe a bit like the Neutralities Accord? Might keeping up appearances look a bit like the SecOps program and its resulting multibillion-dollar marketing campaigns?

  I can’t help but think that if I were a corporation like Stellaxis or like Greenleaf, this would all look like a pretty sweet deal to me. I can’t help but think of these data points like an unfamiliar constellation: once you know what to look for, impossible to unsee.

  The SecOps program is dead, but that’s only the beginning. A symptom addressed, but the disease remains. Stellaxis took our water. At the very least we have to make enough noise to get it back. Or better yet, think bigger. Remove the water readers. Deactivate the accounts. Let it come out of the tap for free, just like the old days. If it works in New Liberty, it can fucking well work elsewhere.

  Has it ever, in my lifetime, been anything but lies? The resource scarcity. The operatives.

  I’ll probably never live to see these answers. And that’s okay. There’s no hospital or clinic that will take me. My lenses are locked out, and I won’t be able to sign in to the system. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to pay. Even if I had the cash, I’d be arrested on sight.

  This is my message in a bottle. Somebody, somewhere, please: use it. All of it. 06’s death. 22’s death. Mine. Politicize the shit out of us. What we did. What was done to us. To the operatives. To old town. To B’s family. To ours. Let us mark the line that others will go on to hold.

  But.

  If 22 managed to save my life out there—twice—and the field surgery and smart bandages are somehow enough to see me through this? I won’t ever stop. I’ll keep making noise, keep pissing off the people in power, keep exposing every secret I can get my hands on, keep yelling until they come and shut me up for good. I’ll find somewhere beyond New Liberty, beyond old town, and I’ll make my way there. I’ll keep walking until I find it. If I don’t find it, I’ll make it myself, and I’ll tell Jessa and Keisha and Tegan and all the others where to find me whenever they’re ready to try something new. I’ll find a house like that one in the woods. I’ll hang the sword above the mantel, plant a garden, share my rainwater with anyone who asks. I probably won’t heal, not in all the ways I need to, but I’ll live. And I’ll remember.

  I’ll tell 06’s story, and 22’s, to anyone who’ll listen. I don’t know these stories, not really, and they’re only mine to tell because there’s nobody left to tell them. A woman like a burning ember. A dead man running on borrowed time. Both heroes, in the end, of nothing they were expected to be. The last of their kind. The beginning, I hope, of the changes to come. A spark that starts a fire of our own.

  It’s a nice thought anyway.

  For now, I’m walking. Falling. Standing back up. Time stutters around me. No 22 here to wake me if I black out. But it’s precisely because there isn’t that I can’t. I’m dragging this sword, and I’m putting one foot in front of the other, and I’m coming home. The skittering of that blade point on the pavement is the only thing keeping me awake.

  One street, then another, and I’m rounding the last corner that brings me within sight of the hotel, and—

  —it’s different. There’s a crowd. They’re surrounding something. Some kind of light? It’s like an in-game SecOps NPC beacon, only dimmer, with less upward reach. I stagger closer, through the crowd, and even up close I have no idea what I’m looking at. A huge array of flashlights, headlamps, candles, handheld lanterns. Anything with enough charge. All pointing at the sky.

  It is like a beacon. But also like a remembrance flare. At the base of it, people have put flowers. Photos. A mountain of SecOps merch. Lists of something. Names. Not only of the forty-eight that would have been in the Director’s video, though those are probably in there too, but hundreds more as well. Thousands. Missing families. Dead friends. The collateral damage of New Liberty’s profit margins.

  And standing to the sides: reporters. Talking into microphones and cameras, some of them, and some narrating over their implants. They must have brought their own power supplies, their own broadcast capabilities. They certainly brought water. I can see it, a literal bus full of it, pallets of bottles with people handing them out at the door. One of those people is a company guard, helmet off. Ex-guard, I suppose.

  I glance down, and there’s a water bottle in my hand. When did that get there?

  Then I see who’s talking to the reporters, standing in a semicircle of them, holding court. Keisha. Suresh. Tegan.

  Jessa. Raising her eyes across the crowd toward me like I’ve called her name aloud.

  Time skips and Jessa’s beside me, both hands on my shoulders, and the reporters have followed. I catch the words medical attention, and thought you were dead, and a fucking doctor. But it’s hard to connect those things together. Thoughts drift apart like continents. Darkness edges in.

  “—hell have you been all this time?” Jessa’s asking me, and everyone is staring and there are microphones in my face and I don’t quite know how they got there.

  But it’s a question I know how to answer, a question I was maybe born to answer, a question that I owe it to the dead to answer, a question that every step along my path has brought me here to answer.

  So I do.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I don’t even know where to start with this one. Way back in 2015, just after Archivist Wasp was published, the concept for this book landed in my head almost fully formed. I then proceeded to spend the next three years refusing to let myself write it. Telling myself I wasn’t good enough to do it justice. It was too complicated, it had too much stuff going on, I’d probably screw up the characters, it’d comprehensively suck, etc. Maybe someday I could manage not to ruin it, but not yet. So I pushed it to the back and tried to ignore it while I wrote other stuff instead.

  It didn’t listen.

  In spring of 2018 I realized it’d just been getting louder and more insistent the longer I tried to put it off. Further, my kid was very close to being out of school for the summer, and I know from experience that I am really unpleasant to be around when I have an idea chewing a hole in my brain and no time to let it out.

  So over the next five or so weeks I panic-drafted this book. I’m used to being a lot slower than that, and to have a hundred and ten thousand words just fall out of me with zero prompting in a little over a month was a really strange experience.

  My thanks go first and foremost to Navah Wolfe, who first decided to take a chance on a book I should by no means have gotten away with and then gave me latitude to double down on a lot of plot elements I had initially glossed over for fear the draft was too long. (I have heard so many horror stories of writers receiving edits along the lines of ok, cool, now chop out twenty thousand words. Navah told me to add that many. Almost every single scene in this book got stronger because of it.) Her edit letter was the most thought-provoking, thorough, incisive, yet somehow non-despair-inducing one I’ve ever received. Navah is, and I do not say this lightly, the ideal editor. Working with her on this ridiculous labor of love has been an honor and a privilege.

  Big thanks also to Joe Monti and everyone at Saga for doing such a great job shepherding this book into the world. I’ve loved Saga’s books for a long time and it’s a pleasure to be part of their lineup.

  Kate McKean, best agent, not only found me a dream home for this one, but put up with a truly heroic amount of my bullshit throughout the process. Turns out that after you spend th
ree years talking yourself out of writing something and then finally let yourself do it, you get really attached, and every little bump in the road looks like apocalypse. Everything I write is personal, but I gave this one everything I’ve got, and having Kate there as the voice of reason was more helpful than I can articulate. She is the greatest and I almost certainly don’t deserve her.

  My five-week panic-draft would have crashed and burned if it weren’t for my amazing neighbor, Margaret Stevens, who let my kid hang out at her place after school for a couple of weeks when I was in full-on antisocial up-to-my-eyeballs-in-a-project mode and really, really, really needed that time. Thank you.

  Thanks also to my first readers: Caitlyn Paxson, Ysabeau Wilce, Tiffany Trent, Patty Templeton, Grey Walker, and Autumn Canter. You guys made some great points that made the book a lot stronger, while also being really reassuringly encouraging that the plot made any kind of sense to anyone who wasn’t me. Gili Bar-Hillel read it later and gave me some really useful insights into the ending, which is one of the few things that’s been entirely restructured since the first draft and I needed an outside perspective. I owe you all drinks.

  I’d drafted this entire book with Stellaris as the company name before I bothered to google it and realized that it was already the name of a video game and mine would need to be changed. Dan Stace suggested Stellaxis, which was an immediate keeper. He also remains scarily good at finding all the typos and things when I’m too close to a project to make out those details. I probably owe him drinks too.

  There’s a lot of myself in a lot of my characters, and Mal has all my awkward antisociability. Antisociableness? Being bad at people. I’m writing this deep in coronavirus lockdown, and I can honestly say Leitha Ortiz and Jon Pesner are two humans who aren’t related to me that I actually miss hanging out with. Thanks to them and also to my family for the support, game nights (wistful sigh), etc.

  When I realized I needed a lot of gamer handles for BestLife, I knew I didn’t want them all to sound like they came out of the head of one person. I wanted stylistic variety. So I crowdsourced them. Thanks so much to Eric Henn, Jessica Wick, Reina Hardy, Anthony John Woo, Shawna Jacques, Karina Sumner-Smith, Jeanine Marie Vaughn, Sita Aluna, Robyn Egwene Young, Lori LoSchiavo Canter, S. Brackett Robinson, and Zhi Zhu Saathoff! I tried to fit in all your suggestions, but believe me when I say I loved them all.

  Big thanks to my Patreon subscribers, who are helping me get away with writing exactly what I want to write, which is honestly everything I’ve ever wanted. Your support is so extremely appreciated.

  Also to all the librarians and booksellers and bloggers and enthusiastic readers who’ve championed my earlier books so loudly, both online and in real life. Word of mouth can make or break a novel, especially a small press one, and if you’ve heard of my previous books, it’s probably because of amazing people like these.

  This was the first time that a book has made me feel like I had to really do a deep research dive into some aspects if I had any hope of doing the story even the tiniest bit of justice. Some books that were instrumental here included: No Logo and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, both by Naomi Klein; Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva; Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century by Jonathan D. Moreno; The Future of Violence by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum; and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking. I recommend all of these wholeheartedly.

  And thanks most of all to you for reading. Honestly. Writing this book felt like letting out a scream I’d been holding in for years, which sounds obnoxious but is true, and I’m still a little stunned I got away with it. I can’t even tell you how much it means to me that you’ve stuck it out with me this far.

  I wrote this book in solidarity with all who struggle against oppression, corruption, fuckery, and greed, whatever face it wears. Let’s never stop fighting for a better world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NICOLE KORNHER-STACE is the author of the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and its sequel, Latchkey. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, and Fantasy Magazine, as well as many anthologies. She lives in New Paltz, New York, with her family. She can be found online at NicoleKornherStace.com, or on Twitter @WireWalking.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Nicole Kornher-Stace

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  First Saga Press hardcover edition May 2021

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  Interior design by Michelle Marchese

  Jacket design by Amanda Hudson/Faceout Studio

  Jacket photographs by Shutterstock and Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-9821-4274-2

  ISBN 978-1-9821-4276-6 (ebook)