Heir Ascendant (Faded Skies Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Metal bumped at the door. Maya hauled herself over the sofa back and crawled under the blanket again, hiding the knife. Diego pulled the door open and crept in, trying to be quiet. Maya pretended to be asleep. Get closer.

  “Hey kid. I know you’re awake. I saw the door wobble. Sorry about that.”

  Maya pushed herself up to sit, scowling at him.

  “I didn’t know who might’ve heard what. Didn’t want anyone grabbing you in the night.”

  Maya nursed a nugget of anger to conceal her panic. “Little warning would’ve been nice. You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Can’s over there if ya need it.” He pointed at the little door past the enormous TV. “You’re probably hungry. Be right back.”

  As soon as he walked out of sight, Maya crawled over the sofa and threw the knife in the drawer before running to the bathroom. By the time she returned, he’d heated up another batch of pseudo-chicken. Maya accepted the plastic plate and sat on the musty couch to eat.

  “Okay. Got good news and I got, uhh, news.” Diego handed over another bottle of water. “Oh, here.” He put a folded lump of black cloth on the cushion next to her. “Alls I got, but you look like you need it.”

  Maya set the plate down and picked up the fabric, which unfolded into a plain black tee shirt. Sized for an adult man, it would fit her like a shin-length dress. Thrilled, she put it on over the nightie and resumed eating. “Okay, you’re forgiven for locking me in here. What’s the news?”

  “I got you a way into the city, but there’s a price.”

  “I am not doing anything disgusting or messed up.” She shoved an entire nugget into her mouth. “Exepfft eaffing thiff.”

  “Nah, nothin’ skeevy. Your way in is smuggling some Prime12 to a buyer inside the Sanc. Drugs are comin’ from Missy Hong.”

  “Ascendant doesn’t make that one. How dangerous is it? Will the Authority send me to a work camp if they find it?”

  “Not really. It’s illegal, but it’s not a narcotic. It’s a cortical stimulant used by net pirates to speed up their brains. It’s not chemically addictive, but users tend to get hooked on feeling like a digital superman when they’re on it.”

  “Okay.” She ate another nugget. “I’ll do it. Do I have to walk back to Missy?”

  Diego shook his head. “Nope. It’s all taken care of. They’re sending it here inside the head of a doll, so no one will think anything about you carrying it.”

  “They’re still going to recognize me at the checkpoint.” She glugged water.

  “You’re not going to use the checkpoint.” He grinned. “You afraid of heights?”

  Maya swished her feet back and forth. “Umm. Not really. Well, maybe a little. Why?”

  “The buyer is going to hijack an Authority patrol drone and fly it out here. You’re so damn little you can ride the thing and glide in straight over the wall. He’ll land you in a back alley somewhere out of sight, and then you drop the doll off at the Emerald Oasis. The guy you’re bringing it to will probably even give you a ride to wherever you want to go after that.”

  “What’s that? Emerald Oasis? Sounds like a prostitute club.” She bit the front end off another nugget. “Or like a place dosers go to get high.”

  “As far as I know, it’s a motel.” He cringed. “Probably similar kinds of stuff going on there, but all the place itself does is rent rooms. What the people do in ‘em isn’t their concern.”

  She huffed. “Fine.”

  “Great.” He patted her on the head twice. “I’ll go finish setting up. I know you’re in a hurry, so I told them to hustle.”

  Maya stared at the last three nuggets, unsure if she wanted to eat them. Somehow, Missy Hong got her wish and she wound up couriering drugs anyway. Maybe the woman had no idea who was doing it? She hugged her new shirt tight, counting on Genna being alive and able to deal with any complications that might come out of her working for organized criminals.

  She took her time with the last of the food, still having half a nugget left about ten minutes later when Diego walked back in with a doll in a pink dress. It had a somewhat oversized plastic head, glittering blue eyes, and blonde hair down to its butt. Like Maya, it looked like it had rolled in dirt.

  “Here you go.” He tossed it onto the couch next to her. “All our man needs is what’s inside the head. If you wanna keep the doll afterward, I don’t think he’d care.”

  “Why does everyone assume I want a doll?” She picked up the toy under protest. “Genna didn’t play with dolls when she was little.”

  “Whatever.” He held his hands up. “Show time, kid.”

  She got up and followed him across the bar and out the front door. Already, she adored the new shirt. The wind didn’t go through it as much.

  He tromped over the plywood porch and down the steps, continuing for about twenty yards west from the Devil’s Hangover before pointing north.

  “You see that pile of cargo boxes with the sorry-ass excuse for a ladder thing sticking off the left side? Top one’s bright orange?”

  She held a hand over her eyes and squinted. The not-quite-noon sun created a lot of glare and made everything that far away dim and the same color. “I… think so.”

  “It’s the tallest pile in the area. Thirteen boxes. You can’t miss it. Bright damn orange with Chinese writing on it. Should be a ladder going all the way up the side. Make sure you’re on top of that thing in two hours. That’s where the drone is going to go.”

  “‘Kay. Uhh. Is it safe?”

  “Probably not.” He chuckled. “Probably about as far from safe as you can get.”

  Her teeth chattered as a shiver of fear slammed into a wall of determination to get her mother back.

  “Oh, it shouldn’t be that bad. Those things are pretty stable. They fly flat, like riding a magic table or something. Up to you. No one’s going to give you a hard time if you don’t want to do it.”

  Genna could be in the middle of an interrogation right now. She could be getting beat up or starved or whatever they do to make people talk. “I’m going. Can you give me any shoes?”

  “That shirt’s one of mine. Got an old pair of sneakers, but they’re way too big for you. Don’t keep an inventory of kid clothes. People out here tend to make for themselves.”

  Maya sighed.

  She clung to the doll as if it might offer some protection and walked deeper into the Spread. Once she left the clearing around the settlement, it became more difficult to keep track of the specific pile she was supposed to climb. Fortunately, miles and miles of abandonment with few people surrounded her. Chances were high that, except for the settlement, she’d be the only person there. Bad people had no reason to go places where victims didn’t live.

  The cargo box canyons and debris-packed passageways mutated into a living video game in her head. She’d spent so much time playing games, she’d wound up bored and started hunting down schoolwork over her age rating to have something different to do. She got herself worked up to the point of tears again thinking that the reason Vanessa had never arranged for her to go to school wasn’t that Maya sought out e-learns on her own, but that the woman honestly didn’t care. She didn’t need to be smart to smile for a camera, and not-Mom had already decided her too soft to ever run Ascendant.

  Stop it. “That’s not true. The house computer made me take schoolwork. Vanessa never mentioned it because the computer did that. She probably paid extra to make me have smart genes. How many kids my age pass high school math? She wouldn’t waste it.” Smart genes are no guarantee. Maybe she didn’t know. Not like she was around much. “Argh. Stop.”

  She marched forward, unconsciously clinging to the doll while she focused on her need to find her real mother. Groaning metal towered over her on every side, slowing her pace to a hesitant walk. She crushed the doll into her chest with both arms, shivering at the sound the wind made among the precarious stacks. Every scrape, every clank, every slam as the wind played with container doors made her jump
. All the stacks looked the same.

  Step by step, she made her way among the refuse of a prior age, navigating the cool dirt trails. A cat walked by, keeping a wary distance. She offered a halfhearted smile at it, though the animal darted off as soon as she took a step toward it. Perhaps forty minutes after she left Diego, Maya came to a halt in the shadow of a gargantuan tower of oceanic shipping containers. The top two glowed in the noon sun, so fluorescent orange they hurt her eyes. At the near corner along the broad side, a crude ladder made of welded rebar zigzagged its way to the top.

  The end looked so high up it probably counted as being on a different planet.

  Maya sank into a squat and hugged her doll. The thought of what she was about to do sent shivers down her spine. Her toes dug in to the dirt and she hid her face in the mass of fake blonde hair. Marcus… or was it Anton… had joked about riding an Authority drone, and in an hour, she’d be doing it for real.

  I don’t wanna.

  Closing eyelids squeezed tears out. She pined for Genna. In a daydream, she cuddled with her mother and listened to the woman promise her Mr. Mason would never touch her. Still shaking, Maya opened her eyes and looked up. The woman who would protect her, who almost died to do just that, needed her.

  Yes, I’m only nine… but I’m Maya Oman.

  She stood and stared at the ladder.

  “I’m coming, Mom.”

  shift in the wind carried the brackish smell of low tide in from the east. Maya stood stiff as a board, feet together, clutching the doll to her chest while studying the path upward. It looked as if someone had welded multiple separate ladders each about eight feet tall together into the sort of off-kilter backdrop they used in quirky cartoony movies made to scare children. No two sections seemed to line up, each varying a few degrees from straight up.

  She crept up to the bottom and grabbed the rung at eye level. Going barefoot up a ladder made of rusting rebar amounted to one of the dumbest things she’d ever considered, but she was short on time, money, and shoes. Diego would have offered if he had any to give her. Though, how many people had she met who hadn’t bothered even to give her a spare shirt?

  Everyone’s out for themselves, said Pope’s voice.

  Maya again thought of the dozens of pairs of tiny high-heeled shoes sitting in a closet somewhere, waiting for Maya II to reach nine years of age. Was Vanessa serious? Would she ‘have another one made’ or would it be cheaper to recycle old video of her? Any random girl or even a synthesizer could provide the voice. A sudden thought almost stopped her heart. The marketing team said ‘juvenile female’ was best. What would Vanessa have done with her when she wasn’t small and cute anymore? Would she have become a real daughter then, or been thrown out and replaced?

  Stop it. Why make me smart if she was going to just throw me away? Vanessa has no patience for kids. She’d have talked to me if I was grown, probably given me a crappy low-level job or something.

  Pissed, Maya forgot her worry and set her foot on the first rung. She tucked the doll in the front of her shirt, hanging out of the neck opening with its head under her chin. Diego said two hours; by her guess, she’d taken less than one to get out here. No need to rush. Rocking her weight into the ladder resulted in no motion at all. Despite the cobbled-together appearance, it seemed solid enough.

  She grunted and pulled herself up. The ladder had not been designed with someone her size in mind. Advancing each rung proved to be a gymnastic task as the spacing put the next one at the level of her collarbones while she stood on the one below it. She set both hands on top of the rung and pulled herself up. As soon as she could get her leg up, she braced one shin next to her hand and steadied herself with the side bar before pulling her feet underneath her again. It hurt, both her feet and her legs, but she repeated the process thirty-nine times, keeping count to distract herself from the increasing wind and from any temptation to look down.

  Once she reached the top of the thirteenth box, she crawled forward and rolled flat on her back, out of breath. A few minutes later, she got to her knees and looked around. The end opposite the ladder had a metal folding chair behind a barrier of quarter-inch thick steel plate. Spent rifle brass littered the area.

  She didn’t trust standing on such a high place, and crawled closer to the eastern edge. The Sanctuary Zone jutted out from the middle of an open field that bore the squarish scars of razed building foundations, many of which looked like pits in the earth. Exposed basements collected rusty rainwater, pre-war boilers, and all manner of junk and debris no one bothered to clean up. A veritable moat of open nothingness surrounded the place where Citizens lived. The numerous patrol drones in the air would surely shred anyone or anything trying to cross that field. Even if a person could make it through that, they’d encounter a twenty-foot wall of smooth steel, no doubt packed full of sensors.

  The cleanliness of the city mocked her. White buildings with silver windows glowed in the glare of millions of lights and advertisements along with the cyan light radiating down from the pyramid atop the Ascendant tower, which hid behind a murk of gloom in the air. The headquarters of the richest corporation in the world (at least according to the AuthNet) stood at the center of the Sanctuary Zone.

  Miles to the southeast, the bulbous white shapes of six inflatable greenhouses rippled in the wind, surrounded by three concertina-wire tipped fences and a dense layer of drones. They resembled gargantuan maggots, and looking at them brought back the stink of chemicals and soil from one of Vanessa’s ‘meet the little people’ tours on which she’d been dragged. After two hours walking around tanks and planting beds, Maya sat in the same limo as Vanessa. She’d tried a new ploy―suggesting they eat together like a tiny adult expressing interest in a corporate meeting. It had worked; though they didn’t talk much during the meal, the woman had tolerated being there for the duration. Alas, acting all grown up didn’t convince Vanessa to live with her.

  She huddled out of the wind behind the hunter’s barricade and pulled her new tee shirt down over her knees to her ankles. A shell casing rolled in a clattering circle as the breeze picked up. The sense that the entire stack of cargo containers swayed caused her stomach to do a backflip. Maya glanced down when the empty brass bumped into her foot. She hoped whoever had built the perch used it to hunt deer or some other target that walked on four legs rather than two.

  Maya clung to the doll for a while, feeling foolish and lost. Eventually, the idea of sitting here felt stupid. She crawled left and peered around the steel plate at the city she’d spent her entire life minus about a week in. Somewhere in the haze, hundreds of drones whirred about, ‘protecting’ the Citizens from crime. One of them would be on its way here, broken from routine. The others shouldn’t notice her. No programmer would ever anticipate someone riding a drone. A person’s weight would probably keep them grounded or make them uncontrollable and obviously compromised. She gazed down at her spindly arms and legs. The machine wouldn’t feel her. It would fly normally.

  The anticipation of waiting caused chicken nuggets and fake cheese to bubble up in her throat several times. When the whirr of fans emerged from the silence, she had to re-swallow her breakfast again. She buried her face against her knees.

  “What am I doing? This is so so so so so stupid.”

  A blast of wind scattered the spent casings and sent them rolling off the side. Maya looked up at the blinking red and blue lights of a hovering Authority drone. Most of her attention went to the .50 caliber cannon underneath, though fortunately, it remained locked forward and offline.

  “Greetings, princess. Your coach has arrived.” A man’s voice crackled out of a speaker.

  The drone glided to its left, centered on the cargo box, and touched down on a quartet of unfolding legs. Two seconds later, all four fans stopped dead.

  “Do you have the baby?”

  Maya held up the doll. “Yes.”

  “Did you bring anything to tie yourself on with?”

  “No. No one said anyth
ing about that.”

  “Uhh, I guess it won’t be a problem. Hop on the main body and grab the spars. I’ll keep it flat and steady. It’ll be like riding a flying bike.”

  “I’ve never ridden a bike.”

  “Whoa, kid, really?”

  She grumbled while walking over to it. “Yes, really.”

  With too much time to consider it, she’d chicken out. Somehow, the thought of riding on top of a drone scared her less than going down that ladder. She felt a bit like a treed cat. Easy to get up, but petrified of going the other way. Maya stuffed the doll into the front of her shirt again before climbing up on the main body the way Marcus had. A moment of wiggling around found the spot that felt the most stable, and she bent forward to grab on to two metal struts that braced the forward fan shrouds.

  “Ready?” The speaker hurt her ears that close.

  “Yeah.” She blinked. “Wait!”

  “Waiting. Hurry up.”

  She reached up and gathered her hair into a ponytail, which she also stuffed into the neck of her shirt/nightie. The last thing she wanted was for her hair to get sucked into a fan in midair. Her hair wasn’t anywhere near long enough to reach the blades, but strange things happened when people did stupid things. With no way to tie it, she pressed herself down in hopes of pinning it, and the doll, in place.

  “Ready.”

  Maya hadn’t prepared herself for the loudness of the fans that close, and screamed when the drone sprang to life. They went from off to full speed in the blink of an eye. Aside from a faint sense of increased weight, she didn’t feel much different from being stationary on the ground. Watching the cargo box tower fall away below did more to prove she’d gone airborne than any sense of inertia had. As the initial fear of doing something so ridiculously dangerous that the Authority hadn’t even come up with a plan to stop it faded, she grinned at the awesomeness of flying.