by daisy harris
Shaniqua lay sideways across her leopard-print sheets, her legs dangling off the edge.
“Shani, wake up,” Kuri whispered. “I need your help.”
The other girl snarled.
“I… I screwed up again. I need you to get rid of him before Q-ter gets here. Frank asked me to get in by seven.”
Shani snatched a black satin pillow and wrapped it around her head. In a muffled voice, she said, “Get rid of him your own damn self. I was packing ’til two last night.”
“Please?” Kuriko pulled her robe more tightly around her shoulders. It wasn’t her fault the people who’d built her made Kuri incapable of defending herself, or that they programmed her with an inescapable habit of having sex with strange men. She was a stein, a reanimated human. And like all steins, she could only work the data already set in her head.
Shani looked up, pillow still against her face. “You could at least try, China Doll. Maybe it would, y’know…help your road to recovery.”
Kuri shrugged. She’d thought she was getting better, that her last reprogram would stop her from slipping into amnesia and turning tricks. “C’mon, Foxy.” She didn’t wait for Shani’s retort, instead slipped into the bathroom. “You’re not getting in until he’s gone.” Kuri shut the door.
The sound of a palm slapping the door echoed through the bathroom. “I have to pee, you bee-yotch.”
Kuri didn’t reply, instead she started the shower. She lathered her hair and smiled with relief as she heard the scuffle of Shani kicking the guy out. Kuri soaped and rinsed quickly, erasing every trace of her mistake. Then she wrapped a towel around herself a moment before she heard the front door slam. Kuriko turned the knob.
A seething Shani fell through the door. The girl lifted her teddy and sat down to pee, glaring up at Kuriko. “You’re just lucky Royce wasn’t here. He woulda kicked your ass.”
Kuri tugged at the hem of her robe. “For bringing the guy home?” She knew her roommates Barb and Shani wouldn’t pass judgment, but hadn’t known her roommate’s boyfriend long enough to be sure he wouldn’t rat her out to Frank.
Shani finished, straightening her skirt over her hips. “For waking us up, dumbass.”
“Yeah, right.” Her roommate’s boyfriend was the nicest guy Kuri’d ever met—Royce didn’t have a scary bone in his body. But she was grateful that Shani’d made light of her relapse. Kuri only hoped that Royce would be as willing to cover for her.
Knocking at the front door announced Q-ter’s arrival and Kuri rushed to don her designer jeans and layered Ts. She was working out in the field today. In other words, around humans. Frank seemed to think Kuri could pass for a lifer better than anyone else at the Zombie Underground, so most days Kuri ran around Seattle trying to look like a regular person and run the ZU’s errands. “Hold on a sec.” She tried to pull a sweater over her head, but the zipper caught in her hair. Throwing the offending top on her dresser, she grabbed a cardigan instead. Kuri snatched a comb off her desk while rushing into the entryway.
Her other roommate, Barbie, beat her to the door. “Hi, Q-ter.” The blonde girl’s breathy voice rose octaves above normal speech. Her high ponytail swung in wild arcs. “It’s nice to see you.” She batted her eyelashes.
Q-ter nodded nervously as he entered. Barbie’s face fell into a confused pout.
Kuriko felt sorry for the girl. At least the traffickers who’d built them made Kuri smart and Shani brave. After all the work Frank had done on Barbie’s system, the girl could barely read.
Their boss Frank loved to do that—reprogram and tinker, trying to make them something better than they’d been built. Kuri didn’t know why he bothered. It hardly ever worked. Not for long, at least.
“You ready?” Q-ter asked. He was the ZU’s lead hacker and designated chauffer. In the eight years since he’d come on board, Q-ter’d become Frank’s eyes and ears. Though Kuri tended to think that wasn’t healthy for either one of the men.
“Sure, I’ll do my makeup in the car.” Kuri tucked lip gloss and mascara in her purse and fastened her hair back.
Q pushed open the door. “Um, bye, Barb,” he stuttered, color creeping up his cheeks.
Barbie’s vacant blue eyes narrowed in confusion, and her frosted lips twitched into a frown. As they started down the hallway, Kuri saw Q-ter’s disappointment in the slump of his shoulders. It was hard to tell which of them was stupider.
Q-ter pressed the elevator button and looked at his feet. “So what did you do last night?”
Kuri bit back her lurch of nerves. There was no way Frank could know already. She stepped into the elevator, pressing the Close Door button, fixing her expression into a carefree facade. “You can tell Frank to stop checking up on me. It’s only been three months since my last reprogram.” She silently prayed he’d let it drop.
Since Kuri’d been rescued, Frank had done a soft-reset on her system twenty-five times, and reprogrammed her thirty-two. The new programs stuck sometimes, but never permanently. She always started glitching again after a few months.
“Frank says you need to let him know as soon as it starts happening. He says the more you repeat the initial patterns, the harder they get to undo. He says…”
Her fingers wound around a loose hank of hair, tugging a little too hard. She snapped. “I know perfectly well what Frank says.” Kuri didn’t even remember picking that guy up the night before, had no recollection of what he looked like. All she knew was that Frank and she had fought the day before—Kuri couldn’t remember why. “And you should tell him you’re not his damn messenger.” Her lips pinched tight. She really shouldn’t scold the kid for Frank’s stubbornness. Kuri wished she had the guts to tell Frank to stop trying to make her right.
The elevator door opened on the ground floor of her Capitol Hill building. She strode ahead of him, dragging on the building’s glass door. “And would you all please stop calling me China Doll? No one tries to use a call-sign with Shani.” Her heel slipped on the rain-slick sidewalk. Kuri looked at her feet. She’d accidentally put on clear plastic platforms. Again.
“We tried, but Shani kicked our asses.” Q-ter laughed as he unlocked the company hybrid. He noticed her trying to get her balance on the wet concrete. “Don’t you own any normal shoes?”
She hid her expression behind a curtain of damp hair. “I like these.” Actually, they dug into her heels and gave her blisters, but she couldn’t shake the programming that made her wear them almost every day.
They drove down Capitol Hill and through downtown. So early in the morning, only a few lifers trundled the streets. Some blocks smelled of food deliveries and others garbage pick-up. Kuri leaned into her seat. Not for the first time, she wished Frank ventured out into the world more often. Their boss had been built long before most steins, back in the 1970s when flesh preservation technology was in its infancy. Between his scars and his grafted body parts, he had a hard time passing as human. But Kuri knew that was only half of Frank’s problem. Over the years, he’d gone out less and less, until he lived most of his life in the tunnels under Pike Place Market.
Q-ter parked in the pay lot and they stopped below the market to buy offal from one of the more discreet butchers. Kuri waited by the car, watching the early-morning sun coat Lake Union from under the blanket of cloud cover. A couple of delivery guys nodded to each other, pointing in her direction. She knew what they were thinking. She’d been built to make them think it after all.
Leering, they started to approach, but Q-ter cut them off. “Lady’s with me, guys.” A cocky little smile played at his lips, and Kuri could see what Barbie liked about him. Then he ruined it by swinging the bag of brains and organ meats near her face. “Breakfast, anyone?” Like most of the recently acquired ZU staff, Q-ter had never lived in a cage, or had to eat brains straight from the source.
Kuri’s nose crinkled. “Smells stale.” Her mind flashed on Frank. If it wasn’t for his understanding, she might have lost her mind in those early weeks. The traffick
ers had tossed dogs, cats and beaten humans into cells with her and the other girls. Shani was always the first to go in for the kill.
She shook her head to clear the memory. “You got me liver, right?”
Q snickered and nodded, waving to the guys at a fish stand. “Sure, I got your back.” A short staircase led them up to a set of bathrooms, and to the near-hidden door beyond. Q turned the key and they slipped through. “Frank,” Q-ter called out to their boss. “Want some breakfast?”
“Where the hell have you put my football?” Frank shouted from the staff lounge a few doors down. He sounded grouchy, unsurprising since the entire office was full of boxes for the move.
She followed Q-ter down the hallway and then watched as the kid snagged the remote control out of their boss’ scarred hand. Q clicked through the screens, an impatient look on his face. He’d been built to interface with cutting-edge networks from 2065, not the sluggish reception from their local cable company. “It’s channel 3-0-7-6-2.”
When Frank grimaced, Q-ter pulled the remote from his grip, clicking through a few more screens. “Here. I’ve saved it to favorites. It’s number seven now.”
Frank looked up from his spot on the couch and his scarred gaze fell on Kuri. Wide criss-crossed stitches circled the stein’s tan head and neck. His arms didn’t match, and his hands didn’t match those. But a kind expression softened his rough-hewn features. “Hi, doll.” He scrubbed his hand through his gray and brown curls. “Thanks for coming in so early.”
Frank bounced up off the couch with more agility than one would expect given his size. Six-foot-two and packed with muscle, he normally lumbered rather than walked. He kept his strength tightly in check, though—only unleashing it on the set of old-fashioned weights he kept in his cave-like bedroom in back. Frank gestured for her to follow him out of the lounge and toward his office.
“Where should I start?” Kuri marched ahead and grabbed the coffee he’d poured her. Every day, he set a full mug of her favorite brew on her desk by the window. It was sweet—though she wondered if he did it to be kind or because he worried about her malfunctions.
Frank said, “Our lease paperwork fell through for the house in Shoreline. An alert got out on the alias we used.” He scrubbed his face, a scritch-scritch-scritch across his short beard. “I should have had Q-ter use a newer identity for the paperwork.” Frank stared around the box-strewn office, looking desolate. They had to move. The tunnels were being remodeled into an underground shopping mall.
Kuri checked her purse, made sure she had her company credit card and fake ID. This one had an alias Q-ter only cooked up a few days earlier. “Sure thing. Do you have locations already researched?” She flipped on her computer, the last remaining piece in her workstation, and scanned her emails while listening for Frank’s answer.
“Yeah. I haven’t sent them yet though. They’re on my machine.” Frank walked to his office and Kuri followed through the tinted-glass doorway. His old-school metal desk looked like something out of a last-century cop drama.
Frank clicked on his home screen. “We need somewhere we can move in tomorrow if possible.”
She lingered in the doorframe. “I’ll do what I can, Frank, but that’s going to be difficult. The landlords might assume we’re drug dealers or something.” Behind her, Kuri heard the noises of more steins arriving at the ZU office. Josie’s and Bane’s voices echoed down the hallway.
“Well, fine. Just do the best you can.” Frank’s graze traveled the length of her body, lingering below the knees. “What the hell are you wearing on your feet?”
She dragged one foot behind the other. “I wore the wrong ones this morning. It’s no big.”
He folded into his office chair and frowned. “You say that every damn time. It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
She fisted her hands and placed them on her hips. It was bad enough she kept taking home random strangers and then forgetting, but Kuri hated having to admit it. If she didn’t think too hard, she might have been able to ignore the glitch altogether. Most nights she kept her mistakes out on the streets. “It’s a tiny bug. Why do you even care?”
Frank ran both hands through his hair. His eyebrows lowered in angry suspicion. “Did you turn a trick last night?”
Kuri summoned her coolest tone. “As I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again. It’s none of your business.”
“The hell it isn’t. I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me.” Frank stood and leaned over his desk. He towered over her five-foot-two frame.
She felt her lip start to tremble. All the sadness and horror she’d kept bottled inside, pretending she didn’t care about that morning, floated to the surface. “You tell us you can change us, but you can’t really.”
“I can. We can try something different this time.” Frank waved his hands around as he argued. Then he started clicking on his computer, as if he could find something that would convince her anything was ever going to change.
Kuri bent to unfasten her sandals, releasing her feet from their strappy prisons. Then she started for the door. “Email me the locations, Frank. I’ll use some petty cash for a taxi to check them out.”
When she was at the door, Frank shouted her direction. “So you’re just gonna give up? You can be anything you want to be, Kuri.”
In a fury, she rounded on him. Kuri sent a plastic platform sailing at his belly. “I can’t even stop wearing these stupid shoes.”
* * * * *
An hour later, Kuri stepped out of the taxi in front of a small office building. She didn’t know how Frank thought they could work the ZU in the space. The ad boasted 1700 square feet, but the location was nestled in a homey neighborhood, in the same little strip as a coffee shop, dry cleaners and pub. Kuri felt certain every person on the block knew everyone else—at least by sight. No way could their little group of steins stay hidden for long.
“You must be Miss Chan?” The middle-aged landlord hurried down the street. “Thank you for being on time.” He reached out to shake hands.
Kuri flinched, wondering how she might be able to get out of making physical contact. After her fight with Frank, she felt on the verge of glitching. The whole cab ride there, bits of code and data flicked on the edges of her mind. At one point, Kuri thought she’d blacked out entirely. Though perhaps she was being paranoid.
“You’re very welcome, Mr.…?” Gah, she should remember his name. She’d memorized the list of landlords in the taxi. But bits of the ride were too fuzzy for her to recall.
The man ran his gaze over her body, lingering at her breasts. Funny, really, since Kuri hardly had any boobs to speak of.
“Call me Larry.” He closed his hand over hers, not letting it go for too long.
“Thank you, Larry. Shall we go see the space?” Little dots drifted across her line of sight and Kuri felt lightheaded.
“Of course.” His smile frightened her—all sharp teeth and greasy hair.
The gray crept into her brain, fogging the outer edges. Kuri tried to blink it back, fight the darkness. But as Larry placed a hand on her lower back and steered her into the building, her mind went completely offline.
* * * * *
The day passed in a flurry of bubble wrap and packing tape, but as the team started to wrap up the day’s work, Frank retreated into his office to watch Kuri’s GPS signal dance around his computer’s map.
Kuri’s flickering dot traveled along his computer screen from Shoreline, west to the docks of Ballard, and then south to Renton. He clocked her time, wondering what was taking so long. Only when the dot started traveling back toward downtown and the ZU, did he cross out of his office and into the room full of cubicle panels and dismembered desks.
Q-ter sat in the middle of the room in a small clearing, his laptop perched on his crossed legs. He was surrounded by cans of energy drinks and wore one set of glasses on top of another. The larger of the two pairs perched on the very tip of his nose.
“Why are you
still here?” Frank searched the room for a clock, since the wall-mounted one had been packed. Not finding one, he stepped behind Q-ter to read the time from his computer. “It’s half past midnight, kid. You need to get to sleep. I’m going to need all the muscle I can get to load up the truck tomorrow.”
“Um, right.” Q-ter gave him an exasperated look and an eye-roll. “Shani’s stronger than me. The most I’ll be doing when we pack up the truck is showing you how to maximize your space and speed up your loading time.” Q rubbed a knuckle into one bloodshot eye and then the other, his face puffy from lack of sleep and too much screen time.
“I’m putting someone else on surveillance for tonight. Bane and Josie can alternate watches at their place.” When Q opened his mouth to argue, Frank held up a palm. “Don’t even say it.”
“But I can process more than the rest of the ZU put together.” Q-ter’s voice took on an irritating grate, reminding Frank of a little kid.
Sometimes Frank felt as if all the steins were his children, needing to be taken care of and watched. Not that he minded. If anything, Frank generally enjoyed the feeling. “Enough. I’ll disconnect your batteries if you don’t go home, or to a bar, or somewhere that’s not here.”
Q-ter’s mouth dropped open. “You wouldn’t.”
Frank smiled. He saw the fight draining from the younger stein. “Go visit Barbie if you need something to do.”
The kid’s eyes widened in panic and he bit at the edge of a fingernail. “I’ll just go home.” He stood and pressed past Frank.
“No TV.” Okay, he was pushing it, but the kid was going to go blind.
The younger stein rounded on him, took a step forward until he was uncomfortably close. If Frank didn’t know better, he’d say the boy was growing a pair. “You may be my boss but you’re not my parent…or my maker.” Q lifted his chin, clearly expecting Frank to snap back at him.