by Tania Hutley
I roll over, trying to get back on my feet, expecting him to reach down and stick his blade into me. Instead he lunges at the girl and holds the sharp metal against her face. Her scream cuts off as though he sliced it.
“Five million credits,” he snarls. With his free hand he grabs her wrist, gripping her band. “Transfer it to me!”
She’s gasping. Her brown face has gone pale. “I don’t... I just... please...”
A fine red line appears on her cheek, under his blade, like he’s drawing it on with red pen. It feathers and blurs, becomes an ugly red streak that runs down and drips on the girl’s blue coat.
“Give me the money and I’ll let you live.”
Two more sharks are holding the boyfriend back, rifling through his pockets while he struggles against them. He shouts, “Stop it! She didn’t win the money yet. Don’t you know about the Skin Hunter contest? Let her go!”
I scramble to my feet. Stompers are coming, their heavy boots pounding over the floor. The shark hears them too. He strips the girl’s coat off, then yanks off her necklace. She’s trying to pull away as his blade stabs forward and her cry of pain turns into a moan. The shark shoves her and she slams into me. I stagger backwards, but she sags against me. My hands are warm and wet with her blood. It soaks into my jeans.
The girl’s limp, and though she’s smaller than me, I struggle to hold her up. As she slides downwards, I see how her perfect face has been ruined. All it took was a few minutes in this place, and now I’m watching the life drain out of her. Why did she come here? If I lived where she did I’d never leave. Never.
Five million credits.
The words ring in my ears as though her dead lips are saying them again. It’s a fortune. More than enough for a house for me, Ma, and William. And Tori, too. With that much money we could live together, all of us safe. No more double shifts. No more being transferred. No more shelter.
The sound of boots is closer. The girl’s blood is all over my hands. Her DNA. Without thinking it’ll work, I push the release button on the band around her wrist. The mechanism’s fooled. It reads her blood instead of my skin and opens. Jamming it onto my own wrist, I press it closed. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems to hesitate. I’m convinced it won’t be fooled a second time, but after a moment it locks. It’s a much nicer band than my plain one. A New Triton band with a golden sheen that’s all but hidden under a layer of mud and gore. It barely fits.
I can’t leave the dead girl with no band. The stompers will notice right away. Wiping my hand on my coat, I hold my thumb on the sensor to release my own dull, cheap band and lock it around the girl’s wrist. Then I lower her to the ground.
A stomper is suddenly in front of me. Did he see what I did? He’s got his gun out and I flinch backwards, my hands up, trying to make myself small.
The sharks have vanished. The crowd is pressed as hard away from me as they can get, so I’m standing in an empty circle that’s bigger than I’d have believed possible. At my feet are two dead bodies, the girl and the boy. Their blood feathers across the damp floor.
The stomper grabs my hands and twists them behind my back. I gasp with pain when the cold metal of handcuffs bites viciously into my flesh.
Craning my head around, I see him use his band to read the ID chip in my stolen band. “Rayne Walker,” he says, obviously reading the name that comes up. Though I’m covered in the girl’s blood, his lip doesn’t curl until his gaze settles on my scarred, ugly face. The way I look is what disgusts him most.
“That’s me.” I meet his cold eyes. With a sick feeling, I realize I’m betting my life on whether he believes me.
2
“You’re under arrest. Do you understand?”
Without waiting for an answer, the stomper pulls out a hand-scanner to give me the once over, and when that doesn’t flash up any hardware, he frisks me. His hands are even harder than his face. He searches through all my layers of clothing, as rough as if he’s punishing me for not having the blood-covered murder weapon tucked into my front pocket.
It’s only when I see the perfunctory way he logs the ID on the dead girl’s band that I let myself believe he didn’t see me switch my band with hers.
Even if he didn’t, I’m completely at his mercy. He can do what he likes with me. Especially if he thinks I killed the two people lying at my feet.
The dead couple’s fancy clothes are gone. Covered in blood and mud from the floor, they look like ordinary grunts dead in an over-crowded shelter. Nothing we all haven’t seen before, and the stompers aren’t examining them closely. Why would they? Nobody’s stupid enough to steal someone else’s band, because without the owner’s DNA to activate its functions, it’s just a useless ID bracelet.
But she’s Milla now, and I’m Rayne. No time for second thoughts. It’s too late to change back.
I sway on my feet, my hands handcuffed behind me, as the stompers go around the crowd, asking those nearest what happened. Nobody saw anything, of course. I wouldn’t expect anyone to go against the sharks, but no one speaks up to say I’m innocent either.
“Please,” I mouth at a kind-faced woman. But she turns her head away. I can’t blame her, but with a band of ice tightening around my chest and terror making me breathless, I want to grab her by her coat lapels and beg her to help.
At least the stompers can’t find the blade. Without the murder weapon, maybe my fate’s not sealed.
Finally, two stompers take me out into the rain, and push me, still cuffed, into a car. They ignore me the whole way to the station, then drag me inside and sit me in a small windowless room with just a cold metal table and chair. Then they leave.
The room stinks with the pungent scent of ammonia, so strong it makes my nose burn. The hard floor is stained with dark splatters, and I try not to look down in case they’re what I suspect. Craning my head to stare at the closed door, all I can hear is my own panicked breathing and the blood pounding in my ears.
Time ticks by, stretching out into an agony of waiting that I’m sure is intentional. The cuffs dig into my flesh and my arms ache from being held behind my back. My throat and chest hurt too, from gulping down ammonia-filled breaths. I’m trying not to make a sound because I don’t want to attract attention, but I feel like I’m suffocating.
Tori’s voice is in my head. So stupid, Milla. What the hell were you thinking?
Dropping my forehead onto the table, I close my eyes. I wish I were back in the shelter, my mattress next to Tori’s, laughing quietly at how loud she snores while I take my turn lying awake to guard against sharks.
Stealing someone’s identity is a bad enough crime to be locked away for. And if the stompers decide I killed those two goldfish, they’ll never let me out. As bad as the shelters are, I’ve heard prison is worse. There are no bands in prison, just ID chips buried deep enough in your flesh that they can identify you when you’re dead, no matter how messed up your body is.
By the time two of the stompers come back, I’m sobbing with the pain of vicious cramps shooting through my shoulders and arms. They pace around, asking questions. I try to watch them both, but my cybernetic eye is playing up, my vision glitching out on that side. At first I try to hide how scared I am, but I can’t stop shaking and my throat’s so sore it’s hard to swallow.
I answer their questions in a scratchy voice, wishing for a drink of water. The girl fell against me. She was already dead. Three men did it. No, I don’t know their names and didn’t see their faces. They wore long coats. They had knives. I don’t know who they are. I didn’t do anything. Really, it was them. Please believe me. Please.
The stompers don’t say anything about Rayne’s name being announced on the holo. Guess they either didn’t see it, or they haven’t made the connection. I leave that part out and when they punch me I don’t change my story. Not even with pain exploding in my ribs, or when they hit me so hard my jeans flood with warmth and sharp-smelling urine dribbles onto the floor. For a while after that I can’t talk, only groan a
nd pant. The pain sucks all the air out of the room.
The stompers act disgusted that I’ve pissed myself, but it’s the last thing I care about. The warm liquid soaking my legs isn’t as bad as having Rayne’s blood all over me while she died in my arms.
When I can force words out, I beg them to stop. I swear over and over that I’m telling the truth. They tell me I’m lying and call me filthy names. Then one of them punches the side of my head and reality disappears. The world swirls violently as I gag up some thin liquid that must have once been stew. My ears ring, the sound unbearably loud. I feel like I’m falling sideways, though when my eyes manage to focus again they tell me one of the stompers is holding me onto the chair.
The other stomper’s face is close to mine and his mouth is moving, but I can’t hear what he’s saying over the ringing. Another wave of dizziness and nausea hits, and what’s left in my stomach burns its way up, dribbling down my chin.
Faces twisted with contempt, the stompers pull me roughly to my feet. Standing, straightening my body, hurts almost as much as their punches did. I still have that sickening, falling sensation, like I’m spinning sideways, about to hit the floor.
As they drag me into the hallway, a single terrified question cuts through the fog of confusion like a bucket of icy water. Will they kill me or lock me up?
Then we’re through the front door, and fresh air blows against my face. After the harsh white light of the room I was in, my eyes can’t adjust to the dimness of the New Triton street. When I blink, dozens of lit-up signs and banners advertising tiny stalls all run into each other, painting bewildering streaks.
The cuffs loosen from my flesh, and my arms are suddenly free. It feels like someone’s stabbing my hands with hundreds of knife cuts as the blood rushes back into my fingers, but the relief of being able to move my arms is so intense I don’t care about anything else.
They’re letting me go.
My brain shies away from the suggestion. Too much to hope for. It could be a trick.
Then the stompers push me down the steps of the police station. My broken body collides hard with the sidewalk and reality disappears into pain.
I don’t know how long I lie moaning, too sore and disorientated to move. But eventually my thoughts straighten out into some kind of coherent order. First priority is to get as far away from the stompers as I can.
Forcing myself up, I manage to stagger only a short distance before collapsing again. But at least now I can lie tucked against the side of a building, eyes closed, pressed into as small a space as possible. Hot tears spurt from my good eye, so much force behind them that they burn. I’m so desperate for water to soothe my burning throat that I angle my face to make my tears run down to my lips. It takes a while, but the ringing in my ears gradually fades, and the dizziness, the feeling that I’m falling sideways, does too.
I’m alive, and free. They let me go.
But if they notice me lying here, they might change their minds.
Get up, Milla. Focus.
Wincing, I try to work out where I am. I don’t recognize this street or its ramshackle stalls, but Old Triton is an immense city, overflowing with millions of people. Our streets are always dark because New Triton sits over the top of us and blocks most of the sky. Their walkways are like a giant spider web overhead, and their scrapers loom over our streets.
Trickles of sunlight do manage to get through. Right now, narrow shafts of light are slanting in, hitting the sides of the buildings, and catching the laundry that’s been hung from windows around twenty stories up and higher. The sun’s angle means it must be early morning. Just before day shift, judging by the number of people on the street. And if I’m right, Ma will be getting off night shift. I need to call her.
My hand goes to the band on my wrist before I realize I can’t. Unless the band’s sensor detects Rayne’s DNA, it’s effectively dead. I can’t operate it. I can’t call anyone, or connect to my account.
I have no money.
Desperately, I rub the bloodiest bits of my clothing against the sensor, trying to get it to read Rayne’s blood, now dried and stiff. Nothing.
What the hell have I done?
I squeeze my eyes shut, cursing myself. Stupid! Why didn’t I think about what I was doing before I gave away my band? This one may be prettier than mine was, but unless I can fool the DNA sensor again, it won’t even let me open it to take it off.
Rayne’s body will have been taken for disposal, my band on her wrist. Everything I had, gone. It wasn’t much, but enough to keep me alive. And for what? Some girl said the words five million credits and I grabbed at it, not even knowing if it was true. Did I really think that by taking her band I could swap my world for hers, somehow transport myself to a better, fairer place?
I can’t get my band back. What’s done is done. Better stop whining about it and get up. If Rayne’s name is all I have left, then I’ll try to use it. The Morelle scraper was on the holo. How far away?
My hand goes to my band before I remember I can’t look up where the scraper is. All I know is that it’s somewhere in the city above, in New Triton.
Before I go anywhere, I need a drink of water. Perhaps I should find a shelter so I can sleep and recover. I’ll have to ask someone where the nearest shelter is, except everyone’s hurrying past without more than a glance in my direction. The way I look, I can hardly blame them.
A woman comes by. Her tired, sagging face says she probably just finished night shift. Just like Ma. Even looks a little like her, in the gloom anyway. I wish it were Ma. I’d give anything to have my mother here with me.
“Excuse me.” I make it onto my feet without staggering too much, and amazingly, the woman stops. I’ve got blood and puke and piss all over me, and I must stink. My face is always an ugly mix of cybernetics and scars, and after the beating I took, it’ll be an even worse mess.
Bless her, she doesn’t run away screaming.
“Yes?” Her voice is wary and my ears are still ringing, so I need to strain to hear her.
“My band’s glitching. Could you tell me where the nearest shelter is?”
She doesn’t need to look it up. “There’s one along that way, a thirty minute walk.”
Thirty minutes. Shit. I’m still dizzy, so even standing still without swaying takes effort.
“Do you know how far it is to the Morelle scraper?” I ask.
She doesn’t get too close, but looks it up then holds out her arm so I can see the map, a glowing 3-D projection emerging from her band. Closing my cybernetic eye to read it, I see the Morelle scraper’s quite a distance away, close to the Deiterran wall. I’m too weak to walk that far. The shelter it is.
“Thank you.”
The woman’s nice enough to wish me luck, and that small bit of kindness makes me want to grab hold of her and not let go. I stare after her, wanting to beg for help. But from her patched coat I can tell she hasn’t got enough for herself, let alone to offer comfort to a stranger.
Besides, haven’t I learned the hard way that it’s a bad idea to rely on others? The only kind of help that sticks is the kind you scrounge for yourself. If I can’t survive on my own I won’t survive at all, and if I want to make it to the shelter, I’d better start putting one foot in front of the other.
I don’t walk so much as shuffle. My head swims, and with every step, sharp pain shoots up my side. The stompers must have cracked my ribs, and my throat feels raw from throwing up. All night in the station without a drink has made me so parched that each time I pass a hawker selling drinks, it gets harder to swallow.
The seething city crowd keeps clear of me. Nobody tries to hustle me or sell me the latest pirated band app. I struggle along past hole-in-the-wall stores, black market tech traders, and ramshackle fried noodle stalls, with vendors tossing noodles in frying pans over flaming gas bottles set up on the sidewalk. The bright blue light from their gas flames is all the signage their stalls need, and the smell of frying noodles makes me salivate.
The main streets of Old Triton are always crowded, but there are hundreds of dark, narrow side streets where most people don’t linger. I get to the base of a scraper, and the rough concrete wall seems to go on forever. High overhead, the scraper soars up into New Triton. Up there, it’s probably filled with fancy apartments. Down here, the Old Triton base of the building holds a factory. Light shines from its windows, illuminating the graffiti scrawled underneath it. There are lots of drawings of a stylized fist, and the Fist’s slogan, What’s buried will rise. But there are other slogans too. Two cities, one people. Underneath & overlooked. The strongest fighters grow in the dark. NT Sucks.
Some of the graffiti is so old that mold has grown over it. Leave anything for too long here, and it’ll go black. Sunlight never reaches down this far, not even at midday, and the darkest parts of the sidewalk are dangerously slippery.
Once I’m back on the main street, cabs centipede past, flowing soundlessly in endless, joined-up strings, like beads on a necklace. Occasionally one pulls away from the string and stops to let someone off or on. I wish I could get in and stretch out on one of the comfortable seats, but without a working band I can’t get one to stop, let alone pay for it.
Just ahead, the base of a massive New Triton walkway forms a roof over Old Triton that covers several blocks. Underneath it’d be pitch black, except the stalls that line the sidewalks are lit up with colored lights. Puddles of blue, red, and green reflect onto the sidewalk, glitching out my bad eye and making my dizziness worse. The stall’s owners call out to the people walking past, urging them to buy a bottle of street brew, or a sweet snack. None of them call out to me.
There are public bathrooms here, and I think longingly of gulping down some water from the faucet, until I see the line of people waiting. The shelter will be quicker.
But when I finally reach the shelter, I realize how bad a mistake I’ve made. It’s well past the start of the working day, and inside there are only night-shifters, already fast asleep. Not like when Rayne turned up at my shelter on a rainy night at dinnertime, when the doors were jammed open and there were too many grunts coming in for the scanners to work.