by Kit Rocha
“I’ll talk her around to solar eventually.” Bryan grinned. “She did agree to barter a nice bunch of apples if I can get her truck running again. You know what that means?”
“More apple cider for me?” Maya let the crate drop to the table with a thump. “I’ve been craving it since last year.”
“I still owe you for the cyclepedia.” Bryan carried another three crates in and set them on the sorting table. “As soon as it’s ready, I’ll bring it over.”
Usually she would have waved off the offer—the practically ancient database of motorcycle engine and repair manuals she’d unearthed had taken her under an hour to convert to an easily searchable format—but Bryan’s apple cider was even better than his mead. Sweet, tart, and just enough buzz to make her tingly without fuzzing up her brain. “You know I won’t turn it down.”
“I know.” He placed the last box and winked at her. “I’m storing up credit for next time I need an obscure engine user manual.”
Maya waved him off with a laugh. “Go fix Becky’s truck.”
After she’d closed the door behind him, Maya barely had time to dash upstairs, rinse off an afternoon of sweat, and grab a sandwich for dinner before Rowan arrived with their latest recordings. Maya set her plate on the table in the warehouse and offered Rowan one of the icy sodas before dragging the new files down to her computer.
Across from her, Rowan settled on a stool and took a sip from the glass bottle. Their hair was a bright teal now, shaved high up their head in the back with chunky bangs framing their face. Teal and bronze eyeshadow completed the dramatic look, complementing Rowan’s green eyes and golden skin.
“I like the new style,” Maya told them as she pulled up the first track. “Did you do your own hair?”
“I wish I had this skill.” Rowan rolled the bottle back and forth between their hands. “There’s a new place on the perimeter. They have these heat wands. No dye, no mess. Just … boom. Teal hair.”
“Cool. I should see if we can get one of those.” Maya waggled her eyebrows. “Dani would love to have instant disguises.”
“Lord save us all.” Rowan made a show of crossing themself, then inclined their head toward Maya’s computer. “This is my first recording with the new soundproof room. Should make your job way easier.”
A few taps, and the first strains of violin drifted from the cleverly hidden speakers Maya had installed around the warehouse. The new song started slowly, each note piercingly clear as Rowan wove them together in a melody so yearning that Maya’s bones ached with it.
In past recordings, Maya had struggled to strip out the background noise. This one was close to clean, with nothing to distract from the haunting refrain as the song began to pick up speed. It built to a crescendo, and Maya’s breath caught as a low bass beat erupted beneath it. The violin split off and wove itself around the new rhythm, the notes dancing higher and faster as the accompanying beat gained in complexity.
Goose bumps rose on Maya’s arms, and she closed her eyes, savoring the pristine beauty of it. It was the opposite of the empty AI-generated pop she loved to listen to, overflowing with passion, with fire, with … life. Maya fell into it, bespelled by the sheer beauty the same way she sometimes felt ensnared by Gray’s voice. Like a sailor on the ancient seas, steering her boat straight to the rocks because the siren sounded just that good.
Why not? There were worse ways to drown than slipping beneath the waves of pure bliss.
“Maya?” Rowan’s voice was concerned. “You okay?”
Heart racing, Maya forced her eyes open and realized they stung with unshed tears. The warehouse had fallen silent, but the cutting beauty of Rowan’s music still wound through her memory, every bit as vivid. She swiped at her eyes and pinned Rowan with a glare. “Fuck you for being this good.”
Rowan’s worry melted into a cocky grin. “I can’t help it. Some people are just naturally talented.”
Rowan was more than talented. In a different time—a better one—they might have been famous. Wealthy. Showered with adoration for the way they could pick up an instrument and transport you to an altered state of being. Rowan should be selling out massive auditoriums and rolling in the credits. Instead, they performed neighborhood concerts for tips and struggled to book gigs at clubs that would rather pump mindless auto-generated noise through the speakers at maximum volume.
Maya had been fighting to help change that. A few judicious leaks on the Net—and a few far more subtle lures on the GhostNet—had begun to build a following. Most people in Atlanta had minimal disposable income, but credits had trickled in through Rowan’s netBusk account, enough to build the recording studio and keep food on the table.
It wasn’t enough, but it was something. Maya shook off her melancholy and moved the files to her priority queue. “It may take me a few days to turn these around, since I’m handling things on my own right now, but I’ll get them ready for upload. Have you thought about Conall’s suggestion?”
“The music videos?” Rowan ran a nervous hand over their hair, smoothing the bright strands into place. “That’s part of why I’m trying out the new style. I might be warming to the idea.”
Conall had become obsessed with Rowan’s music, convinced there was an untapped market there. His latest pitch had been to use his surveillance drones to film footage of Rowan playing music in various cinematic locations, complete with apocalyptic squalor and the Hill looming ominously in the background. “He knows what makes the stiffs up on the Hill spend credits,” Maya acknowledged. “But don’t go balancing on any collapsing overpasses for him unless you want to.”
“Deal.” Rowan slid off the stool with a wide grin. “I gotta bounce. I have an actual gig tonight. It’s paying real credits and everything.”
“Oooh, fancy.” Maya waved them away. “Go get rich. I’ll send you a message when the files are ready.”
“Thanks, Maya. You’re the best.”
It was a refrain she heard all evening. From people who needed books, or tools, or supplies, or just help. She heard it at maximum volume after a harried waitress showed up from Clem’s, begging her to fix the air-conditioning before the drunks rioted in the stifling Atlanta humidity.
That was the first thing she’d done after she realized how easy it was to listen to a product manual or mechanical guide and just … fix things. Maya had loaded her brain up with information on air conditioners and heaters—the two things people needed desperately when sweltering through the summer or shivering through the winter—and somehow all the disjointed data fell into her brain in neat, actionable rows. She could put down her earbuds and pick up a wrench and fix things.
Of course, the patrons at Clementine’s bar didn’t know that. They just thought she was a mechanical genius. And hell, maybe she was. The AC took twenty minutes to fix, and the first blast of cold air from the vents overhead resulted in cheers. Even guys she’d previously hustled at pool were so grateful they tried to cajole her into staying for a beer. One even offered to pay for it.
It was a tempting offer. Her home echoed with unnerving silence without Dani and Nina there. The gentle sounds of their daily routines were imprinted in her memory, and their absence grated in ways she hadn’t expected.
But knowing Gray was alone in the other warehouse forced her to demur. He might be fine for the moment, but she felt better being close.
Sleep, however, was out of the question. Adrenaline still buzzed over her skin, so Maya locked all the doors and retreated back to the warehouse, to the far corner, where her prize sat.
The 3D scanner was next-next-generation. Another of Ava’s guilt-assuaging gifts, it had probably cost as much as a reasonably well-off support staffer up on the Hill might clear in a couple of years. It could scan up to a thousand pages in under thirty seconds using terahertz radiation to process the interior layer by layer, and Maya had finessed the built-in optical character recognition process until the digital files it produced were nearly error-free. She’d even built a
program to extract visible and extrapolate inferred metadata, an adventure that had involved learning two new computer languages during a sleepless week spent in a programming frenzy.
The results were worth it. Maya pulled up her stool and lifted a book from the box at her elbow. The cookbooks were in high demand, but she always had to baby the conversion a little to get the images right in a digital version. In the first few trials, she’d excluded them, but it turned out people really liked pretty pictures of food, so who was she to deny them?
She lined up a book titled Twenty-Minute Bread with Clean Flour and started the scanner. The bright green cover was distinctive of the 2030s, when the Energy Wars had been raging and the environmental cost of everything from clothes to cars to flour had become a highly politicized battleground. No one even called the artificial stuff clean flour anymore—thanks to the TechCorps, it had become the norm. If you wanted real flour, ground from wheat or other grains, you had to dip into the black market.
Most people didn’t bother. The fake shit worked fine, which would make this book very popular.
Maya tapped her fingers as the pages began to appear on her monitor. She was skimming the images when the softest scrape of bare feet on concrete sounded behind her.
Panic jolted her, but her training under Nina had been intense and her instincts were well-honed. Also, Dani hid guns everywhere. The closest was under the table, and Maya had it in her hand a second later as she spun toward the noise.
Huge, dark eyes stared at her from a pale face under brutally short hair. The kid was frozen in the middle of the warehouse, her unblinking gaze fixed on Maya’s pistol with a calm acceptance that ripped her up.
Babies shouldn’t look so unsurprised to see weapons pointed at their damn faces.
“Sorry,” she said, engaging the safety again and sliding the gun onto the table. “You startled me. I thought you were upstairs with Tia Ivonne.”
The kid blinked again. Maya didn’t even know her name. Hell, Maya didn’t know if she had a name. Or if she spoke English.
Or spoke at all.
Moving slowly, Maya walked over to the cooler they kept stocked with bottled water. She always kept a few soft drinks tucked in the back, their carbonated sweetness one of the few guilty pleasures she’d been unable to give up from her cushy life up on the Hill. Luckily, she still had some left over after Rowan’s visit, so she retrieved two chilled glass bottles and offered one to the kid. “Try this. It’s sweet and bad for your teeth, but I love it anyway.”
After an endless moment, the young girl reached out and took the bottle. Her brow furrowed as she stared at the top, and Maya demonstrated twisting the cap off. “If it’s too tight—”
The girl twisted effortlessly, and the top came away slightly bent. Concern shadowed her eyes, but Maya just laughed. “Okay, so you’re super strong. Don’t worry, Nina is, too. She gets frustrated and breaks things more often than we admit.”
Understanding sparked in the girl’s eyes, followed swiftly by relief. So she did understand English. That was something. Maya tilted her head toward the scanner and nudged a second stool toward the table. “Want to help me? I’m scanning books.”
Another hesitation. A nod. The kid carried the glass bottle over to the stool with painstaking gentleness, then sat the same way, as if she really was concerned she’d destroy it. A suspicion kindled in Maya’s gut, but she settled onto the stool and watched the kid take her first tentative sip. “It’s okay, you know. If you broke something upstairs in Tia Ivonne’s apartment.”
Startled green eyes met hers, and Maya knew she’d guessed right. “Hey, as long as you didn’t break her, things are just things. We can replace things, okay? No one’s going to be mad at you.”
An endless pause. Then, in a voice wrapped in a dread that settled in Maya’s bones, she whispered, “I pulled the handle off the faucet. I didn’t mean to. Please don’t punish me.”
It took everything in her for Maya to keep her smile steady and easy. The rage crawling under her skin needed an outlet, but not here. Not with her. “No punishment, kiddo. We’re not even going to get mad. You might get teased, though. I teased Nina for a week last time she twisted so hard she broke a handle off something.”
“Teased?” The voice was a little louder. “Does it hurt?”
Fuck.
“No, honey.” Maya didn’t reach out. She didn’t try to hug the kid. That would have freaked her out at this age. “Teasing’s just … being silly with someone you care about. No one is going to hurt you. I promise.”
After a moment, the girl nodded and took another sip of her drink. “Do you need to know my designation?”
The ghost floated up through her memory, Birgitte’s cool voice. She’ll need a name.
Her designation is DC-031.
A name, Ms. Linwood. Every person deserves a name.
I know you’re supposed to bond with her, but … Well, this might be easier if you don’t think of her as a person, Ms. Skovgaard.
It might also be easier if you were unemployed.
My apologies. Would you like us to provide a name?
No. She’ll take care of it.
The kid’s intense gaze was still fixed on her face, so Maya shoved back the memory of a conversation she wasn’t supposed to have heard and answered the question carefully. “Only if you want to share your designation with me.”
That earned her a considering look, as if the kid wasn’t sure what to do with having a choice. When she finally answered, it was with dull acceptance. “I’m JHX-7.”
In the Franklin Center, where Nina had grown up, designations had indicated genetic lineage. The Professor had also given them the initials JH, an indication that they actually might share the same DNA. The seven could mean there were seven of her or she’d been the seventh try. Either possibility churned horror through Maya.
But at least she knew how to handle this. “That’s not who you are, you know. Mine was DC-031, but it’s not who I am.”
“You have a designation?”
“Had.” Maya said it firmly. “A designation is something they give us to define our place in their world. A name is something we take to define ourselves.”
After a moment of fidgeting with the glass bottle, the girl peeked up at Maya. “I can pick a name?”
“Hell yeah.” Maya smiled around the ache in her throat. “We’ll call you anything you want.”
“What if I choose wrong?”
“There is no wrong. If you try a name and decide it doesn’t work…” Maya shrugged. “You pick a new one. And then we call you that.”
The girl’s mouth formed a silent O of wonder. Her brow furrowed a moment later. “How did you decide?”
“Wait here.” Maya hopped off the stool and crossed to the bookshelf where she’d been hoarding her special finds. The Rogue Library of Congress bounty had created something of a logistical nightmare in the best possible way, leaving Maya hip deep in a barely organized tangle of ancient treasures. But she knew exactly where the box filled with dozens of brightly colored children’s books was, and right there at the top …
The cover was still surprisingly vivid, showing a young girl in a spacesuit against a background of stars. Maya had stared at a digitized version of this book a thousand times, imagining that this girl with her glowing, brown skin and determined eyes and softly curving face and world-saving brilliance could be her.
It almost had been. Unfortunately, taking down the bad guys was easier in stories.
Maya carried the book back to where the girl sat watching her with wary eyes. “Put the drink down first. No spilling on this.”
Obediently, she set the bottle aside. Maya extended the precious book, feeling like she was exposing a vulnerability. “It’s a story I loved when I was your age. It’s about a girl named Marjorie. She lives on the moon, and she uncovers a conspiracy where evil grown-ups are doing terrible things. She and her friends figure out how to stop them, even though they’re just kids
.”
Maya watched as the girl turned the book over, her gaze skimming the text on the back in a way that made it clear she knew how to read, at least. Maya didn’t need to read it. She could close her eyes and recite the book cover to cover from memory. She’d read about Marjorie and her misfit gang of friends compulsively, even though books about space travel were spurned by the TechCorps, whose company policy was that reaching for the stars had been a barbaric selfishness when there was so much suffering that needed alleviating on Earth.
As a moral stand, it sounded good on paper. Unfortunately, barbaric selfishness was alive and well on Earth, and the TechCorps had refined it to an art form.
But as a child, she’d believed. When Birgitte had recruited her into the simmering internal rebellion, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Of course it was Maya’s responsibility to help Birgitte carry the burden of dismantling a broken system of greed and exploitation. She had been determined to live up to the example of her namesake. Marjorie Starborn, genius rebel, defender of the moon.
It had taken Maya a long time to get mad at Birgitte for putting that on a child.
It would take a lot longer for Maya to forgive herself for failing.
“Did this really happen?” the kid asked with wide eyes, back to staring at the cover.
“No, it’s a story. Fiction.” At the unblinking gaze, Maya frowned. “They taught you to read, right?”
“We read tactical manuals,” she replied. “Military history. Combat strategy. Physiology. PsyOps.”
“Sounds like what Knox reads to relax.” Maya retrieved one of the loaner tablets and started loading age-appropriate books off the server. Not that she was the best judge of age-appropriate—she’d been reading books on physiology and psychological warfare at eight, too. But she knew which types of stories the kids in the neighborhood devoured.
“I’m going to give you some books,” she said. “These are just about fun. You read them so you can imagine having adventures or falling in love or all sorts of things. If there’s any you like, I’ll get you more like it, okay?”