Tesla grinned as she turned around. “I was hoping you’d come after all. I’m so sor—”
Kiyo’s eyes met hers just as he kissed the beautiful girl in the slinky merlot dress. His pupils widened in surprise as he caught sight of Tesla, but the girl pulled him deeper into the embrace, drawing his attention back to her. Tesla felt as if minutes had passed before Merlot Dress came up for air and realized they weren’t alone.
“Kiki,” the girl pouted, pursing her lips like a child. “Do you know this... person?” She eyed Tesla with a growing sense of distrust. “Something about her seems familiar.”
Tesla tensed. Her father’s crimes had been broadcast station-wide. It wasn’t uncommon for people to recognize her from the headlines, although the frequency had faded as time had passed. Nevik Petrov’s death was old news, replaced by stories of richie weddings and accounts of plagues in the Gulch.
Kiyo’s eyes narrowed at Tesla, weighing her worth. “No,” he said a moment later, his tone darkening at the sight of the necklace around her throat. “I thought I did, but she’s no one to me. Now come on, Maeve, I want to see the fire breathers.” He took the girl’s hand, kissed her deeply once more, and strode away from Tesla, never once looking back.
FIVE
THE WORDS STUNG TESLA'S skin, leaving her exposed. Her hands gripped the staircase railing as she watched Kiyo laugh in a group of richies, his white teeth flashing at something the girl said. In her heart, she’d always suspected Kiyo cared about her beyond just friendship, but she never thought he would look at her as he just had—like she was nothing more than a disgusting Gulch rat.
As though everyone was right about her.
Another boom from the light-burst cannon brought her sharply back to the present, and her heart pounded from more than just the fear of being discovered as she ran up the stairs to the balcony. With shaky hands, she retrieved a knife from her satchel and pried open the main dataport access panel, following the tangle of wires until she located the correct auxiliary input.
“B1B0, execute specter protocol,” she whispered into her wristcomm. A small click sounded as a small, shiny object unfurled from the device. The hackchip hopped across her hand, vaulted into the control panel, jabbed two legs into the auxiliary input, and emitted a faint red glow. Tesla counted to ten and activated the dataport, but the screen remained dark.
At first, she thought maybe she’d broken the console, but a small light blinked in the corner of the screen, signaling a reboot. Relief crashed over her. She was almost certain the command center logs kept track of data searches, but the hackchip would allow her to wipe her entries as well as download any necessary files. At least, she hoped it would. She had yet to find anything worth downloading, so there was no way to be sure. But for the fee Bok had charged to acquire the device from a black market dealer on Level Six, the hackchip should be able to fly a transport.
The screen shifted, displaying the crest of the First World Union, the concentric circles rotating as the main menu buzzed to life. She hurried to type in the search criteria while listening for any footsteps up the staircase, anxious in case any of the bouncers spied her from the main floor. The music from the party below faded, and for a brief moment she thought she heard Kiyo’s deep voice calling out for the girl, but then the next song began, drowning out anything other than a deep, thrumming bass. She pushed the image of Kiyo kissing the girl from her mind. It wouldn’t do her any good to get emotional now.
SEARCH: NEVIK PETROV VID FILES
The system responded instantly. A list of videos filled the screen, and Tesla clenched her jaw.
MEDIA FILE: GULCH WELDER TURNED TERRORIST
MEDIA FILE: NEVIK PETROV—IS THE STATION SAFE?
CITIZEN VLOG: GULCH RATS NEED EXTERMINATING
COMMANDER STATEMENT: NEVIK PETROV ATTACK
She clicked on the latter video, even though she could almost recite his speech from memory.
“At 0900 this morning, after a jury’s deliberation, station masterwelder Nevik Petrov was executed for treason against the crown.” Commander Grey’s brow furrowed, the lines of his pale skin deepening as he paused to answer a reporter's question. “Masterwelder Petrov stole data secrets from the station and planned to sell them to agents of the Restoration, the Earthen insurgents responsible for recent attacks against the First World Union. The data included schematic plans highlighting current weaknesses in the station’s hull, as well as schedules for expected maintenance. We believe he intended to use this information, with help from his allies in the Restoration, to plan a terrorist attack on the Atlas station. Rest assured, I have crews addressing the points of vulnerability. The station remains strong. His daughter, Tesla Petrov, has already been stripped of her rank and removed from flight train—”
Tesla swiped the image of the commander’s weathered face from the screen with her little finger. She needed to find the video taken that morning, in the moment security forces had charged their weapons before firing. The one that had been erased from the Gulch’s public records.
SEARCH: NEVIK PETROV EXECUTION VID
No files found.
Tesla pounded the sides of the dataport in frustration, thankful the sound was muffled by the party below. She knew what she had seen. Her father had whispered something into his microphone while the holovision recorders had broadcast his face stationwide. He’d looked right at her, his mouth moving, but she’d been so numb from the shock of it all that she’d missed every word. All she knew was that the information must be important. Otherwise why would someone go to the trouble to erase all video record of it?
She looked back down over the balcony at the party. Speakers nestled inside the ceiling vibrated with the force of the music. Far below her, the crowd stood mesmerized by the Karoff brothers—two Level Five entertainers known for their fire-breathing party tricks. In their daily lives, the brothers actually worked in the sewer systems flushing the waste pumps, but for the right price, they paraded in front of richies like trained animals in a zoo. That was the difference between the upper and lower levels—the deeper you lived in the ship, the easier you could be bought.
Holt Karoff took a mouthful of lux beer and spat it into a flame on the end of a staff. The audience lurched backward at the sight of the fireball, hesitantly laughing once the danger had dissipated from sight. From her vantage point, Tesla spied Kiyo holding Maeve protectively, his arm around her thin waist, shielding her from the flames. They cheered as an announcer introduced the next act, his voice booming from a hovering speaker gliding through the air.
The speaker. It operated independently from the main party. Tesla tried to staunch the hope swelling in her chest. She had an idea. Something she hadn’t tried on any of the dataports before. Someone must have erased all video feeds of the execution, but what about audio feeds? The microphone recordings would be stored on a separate drive. Only an expert, or someone who’d devoted months to studying and obsessing over the datasystems, would know that.
SEARCH: NEVIK PETROV EXECUTION MIC FEED
One result.
It was here.
After all her searching, she’d finally found it. Her fingers trembled against the dataport keys as she accessed the file. A thin green line spread across the screen, tracing sound waves as someone began speaking. Tesla leaned closer to hear.
“Masterwelder Petrov,” drawled a voice she recognized as Commander Grey’s, each vowel more pronounced than the last. “Do you have any last words before this jury carries forth your sentence on behalf of the Grand Imperator?”
Tesla inhaled sharply, every synapse in her brain firing. She could picture everything from that moment—her father kneeling on the floor, hands tied behind his back, his head hung low against his chest, his body slumped in defeat. Kiyo had stood next to her in the seats reserved for family as the jury had recited the list of charges once more for the cameras. Then her father had looked up, just for a second, dark lips moving deliberately, his eyes silently begging her to
comprehend.
She'd failed him once. She wouldn't fail him again.
Tesla swallowed the knot in her throat. Downstairs, the roar of the party surged, but the sound felt muffled and distorted, like a picture out of focus. Her ears strained to catch every syllable from the dataport speakers. The green line on the screen warbled as Nevik Petrov exhaled slowly, the microphone crackling from the force of his breath.
“Find the penny.”
There it was. A second-long audio byte had given her what she’d spent so many nights and so many botFights saving up to find. Tesla’s heart ached at the sound of her father’s voice. Her throat constricted in grief, and she touched the screen as if she could reach through and bring him to safety. Though she knew what came next, she still flinched as the shots from the firing squad rang out.
A ragged sob escaped her chest as she said, “Copy audio file and cease specter protocol.” The red glow grew brighter as the hackchip downloaded the necessary data. Its threadlike legs crawled through the nest of dataport wires and squeezed itself back into the band of her wristcomm.
She needed to leave. Needed to return to the silence of her apartment so she could think, think, think without the raging music pounding against her ears. But her legs felt disconnected from her mind.
Maybe it had been stupid to come upstation to search for the file after the fight with Minko. She was suddenly bone-tired, exhaustion seeping into her core. She managed to take a few steps away from the dataport before a wave of dizziness caused her to sit down, her feet draping through the balcony railing.
Once again, the view of Earth through the synth-glass took her breath away. The Gulch had little beauty and nothing like this. To her knowledge, her parents had never been to the planet surface, but her father had managed a trip to the moon’s science outposts just a few years before his death. Tickets for moon jumps were far more costly than anyone in the Gulch could afford, and a flight to Earth was impossible for citizens other than the richest of richies. Tesla had begged to tag along, but it was a work trip requiring him to fill in with a masterwelder while the outposts expanded a new hydroponic garden laboratory. When he returned, he told his daughter it had been his greatest adventure since the day she was born.
She’d never even seen the moon, because of the Atlas station’s orbit. She’d seen pictures, of course, in the school datatexts and the rare science fiction holodramas that sometimes played in the decrepit Level Six theater, but never with her own eyes. The station orbited Earth at Lagrange Point Three, meaning it circled the planet exactly opposite to the moon at all times. Seeing its dark craters and chalky surface had been a dream. When she’d pinned on her wings, her father had promised to take her for her graduation. Now, she’d never get to go.
Find the penny.
What did it mean? To her knowledge, her father had never collected coins of any type, and pennies had been removed from the circulated currency even before the fall of the former United States. Terra Financial Corp, based out of Cape Town Proper, held all the First World Union’s gold reserves. Everything else was traded with either cryptocurrency or corpCredits. Physical money hadn’t been used since Bordeaux’s Rebellion, the ill-fated attempt to rob the First World Union banks nearly three decades ago.
A thread pulled at her memory, something she ought to recall, but she couldn’t quite grasp it. Why had her father used his dying breath to send her such a cryptic message? And why did his words make her feel so uneasy?
SIX
FOOTSTEPS ECHOED ON THE LANDING behind her. She turned, expecting Kiyo or one of the bouncers, but instead there stood a tall boy who seemed to be roughly her age. He held a jacket in his hands, but tossed it to the side in frustration. The lights from the party grew brighter, illuminating his sharp jaw. His turquoise eyes made her think of the bright blue ring around Earth’s atmosphere just as it met the blackness of space.
“Can’t get away from the richies,” she muttered to herself.
The boy froze in surprise, his head snapping toward her with an air of being caught. He looked... guilty. Well, this is interesting, Tesla thought as she cocked her head with growing curiosity. Just what was he up to?
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t think anyone would be up here.”
She took a closer look at his clothes. The stitching of his trousers wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen, even in the higher levels of the station. And the material of his loose shirt... no fabric on the Atlas was that lux.
“You’re from Earth,” she blurted out.
He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. His eyes met hers, searching for something she couldn’t quite place. In the end, he simply nodded.
“Royal Air Force?” Tesla guessed. She’d seen several First World Union pilots unloading a diplomatic ship last week upon the arrival of the royal family. Their crisp green flight suits had stood out against the dull khaki uniforms worn by the station’s shipping bay workers.
The corner of his lips quirked upward. “Is it that obvious?”
His voice was warm and calming, an interesting blend of authority and empathy. She’d wager he was a junior officer. At least a lieutenant, but maybe a young captain if he’d gone to the RAF Academy although, truth be told, she wasn’t quite sure how rank worked in the Earthen military fleets. The boy looked over the balcony railing and scanned the floor below, hesitating for a moment before making his way back toward the stairs.
He’s hiding from someone, she realized. Was he somehow crashing the party, too?
Tesla cleared her throat. “If you want to stay up here until the coast is clear, you’re welcome to sit.”
The boy let out a long sigh of relief, and Tesla tried not to laugh. She nodded to the view outside the synth-glass. “Is it so different from the Atlas?”
“Earth?” he asked. At Tesla’s nod, he crouched down beside her, dangling his feet above the heads of the partygoers, his gravity boots just inches from her own. “Crowded. Busy. Complicated.” He swallowed hard, and Tesla noticed his eyes avoided the view. Was this his first time in space?
“It doesn’t look like any of those things from up here. It looks... quiet.” She reached for her necklace, again finding comfort in the feeling of the raised surface against her thumb. “I’ve never left the Atlas.”
“No?” the boy said with a bit of surprise. “I suppose you’re not missing much. Everything seems simpler here.”
Tesla snorted. “Maybe upstation.”
“What do you mean?”
She immediately realized her error. Most richies only knew about the Gulch from stories, having never seen the slum conditions with their own eyes. “I just mean that I’ve heard things below the deimark can be dangerous,” she amended.
“We don’t hear too much about this place back on Earth.”
“Sometimes I think Earth forgets we’re here.” She brushed an errant curl of milky hair from her face. “I’m Tesla.”
“Like the scientist?”
Tesla laughed. “Exactly. My parents loved me so much they named me after a dead guy with crazy hair and a wicked mustache.”
She waited for the boy to give his name, but instead he crossed his arms over the bottom railing, his eyes still fixated on the view of Earth. “Why aren’t you down at the party?”
Her gaze flickered to the floor below. “It’s not really my thing.”
“Yeah, you don’t seem the type to fit in down there.”
Tesla felt herself bristle at the comment, but the boy must have realized how his words sounded, because he quickly held up his hands in apology. “I didn’t mean any offense. I just—” he gestured to her slacks and boots. “All the other girls are wearing evening gowns.”
“Pants are more comfortable,” she muttered. “Besides, not every girl owns a dress.”
A loud wave of delighted shouts rose from the party, and Tesla looked down to see a gargantuan cake being wheeled out from behind a half-wall. A girl in a gown made to look like computer circu
its beamed an artificially enhanced smile as the guests crowded around to watch her blow out rows and rows of sparkling candles.
“What about you?” Tesla asked. “Why aren’t you in the middle of the party sweeping some RAF groupie off her feet? There are plenty of upper girls who would love to bat their eyes at an Earthen. Women love a man in uniform.”
“Do they?” he teased.
The way his gaze flickered over her face made her cheeks flush, and she turned away. “I’d rather wear a uniform than date one.”
His eyes flashed to the base of her neck, spying her bioNexus with a sense of appreciation, surprise at her answer written all over his face. No wonder, thought Tesla. He was probably used to most girls looking at him like a meal ticket. Being a member of the RAF held a certain level of prestige on Earth, attracting richie daughters and their power-hungry fathers alike. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was already betrothed.
They both stared down at the party for a few moments. “So?” Tesla finally prompted again. “Why’d you decide to leave the party and come up here?”
“I was... looking for someone. I thought I might find some answers here, but I was wrong.”
“But aren’t you here to guard the royal family? I’m surprised you’re not on duty night and day.”
He leaned back and chuckled. “Are you going to report me?”
Again, heat rushed to her face. It was nice, she realized, sitting here next to someone from the outside. Someone who didn’t know her past, didn’t know her father, and didn’t look at her with a mixture of pity and suspicion.
He pointed to her bioNexus, interrupting her thoughts. “So, what do you fly?”
Her brain fumbled for an answer. She had to lie. If she confessed and told him she was a welder, a Level Eight nobody, he might leave—maybe even report her to the bouncers. “I’m still in training,” she shrugged, hoping the slight waver in her voice didn’t betray her. “But I hope to drop a reactor-powered starcraft. They’re my favorite.”
Atlas Fallen Page 4