The machine stared back at her. Orbs grown and shaped to look like eyes. Like her husband’s eyes. Cold and empty and cruel. The artificants had done too good a job. “All right.”
Not what Dan-Dan would have said, but she had no one but herself to blame. She had reset the programming. She kept staring, steady, until he turned and stepped back onto the elevator.
As the doors closed, Chloe emitted a low whistle. “The Vallejo runs strong in that one. Tell me he isn’t the scariest robot in ever.”
“Speaking of,” Kellen said, “exactly how long have you been spying on us?”
Chloe apparently lacked programming for shame. “Not long enough. I was about to go make some popcorn.”
“You don’t eat,” he reminded her.
“So what? I can still make popcorn. It smells good.”
“You don’t smell, either.”
“I mean, other people tell me it smells good. Like Garrett. He likes it.” Her edges fuzzed again, and just like that, she was gone. Only not. Her hologram was gone, but she could still somehow invade their in-ear communications devices at will. How mobile were her composite nanos? Did those little fuckers fly?
“He likes you even better,” Kellen said. “Now scat.”
“Okay, fine. Later, Senator!”
Trilling laughter faded, which was the only clue that Angela and Kellen were now alone on the rooftop. Well, alone except for the animals, but even Azul had long since given up staring. Some movement at the far side of the pens might have been more goats or even smaller animals. A squirrel maybe, or a rabbit.
“She’s a rascal.”
“Who is?” Angela turned and looked up at him innocently. Unfortunately, the movement shrugged his hand off her shoulder. She missed the contact.
“The scamp you just now swore to forget,” he said, but he was smiling.
A breeze ruffled his hair. Evening advanced over the desert, but the air was still breath-hot.
“Thanks for trusting me,” she told him solemnly. “And as for the rest of it, do we really need to talk about it?” Or we could just skip the talking. I’m okay with that.
The shadows that enveloped him had lengthened.
“Right. Our personal history. Talking it out.” He swiped a hand through his errant hair, shoving it out of his face. “You know what, I shouldn’t have brought it up. You came here for a serious reason—shit don’t get much more serious than an attempt on your life—and I treated you to an emo-soup pity party. Now I’m the one embarrassed. Would kinda like to drop it.”
Angela wouldn’t. She wanted to talk all the way through it. She wanted to relive every second, pick it apart, put it back together again. Rebuild that thing they had, the thing that had sustained her through some pretty rotten years. The thing that still throbbed like a new wound. But she held her wishes safe in her mouth, didn’t dare loose them into the air where they could dissolve to nothing.
“Fine,” she said instead. “So now what? Now that I know all about Chloe, do you have to lock me in my room again?”
He studied her face for a while. Then he swiped his cuff com in front of the elevator. The metal doors slid open. “Nah. Fan and Adele are settin’ out supper in an hour, but I need to check in on something before we go back down. Figure you’ll want to see this, too.”
• • • • • • • •
MUSTAQBAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 2045
The magical thing about the library was that no one ever needed to come here. Students could compile their audio-visual-sensory collage on a topic and feed it right into their coms. The cleverest kids double-booked their time, consuming lectures while they got in their daily ten thousand steps and five hundred calories burned. Bonus if they worked in groups, they could tick off their participatory classroom community requirement as well.
At fifteen, and after ten years of training at the academy, Angela was capable of such multitasking. Of course she was. Clean use of her time was an inherent gift, making such feats for her as natural as breathing. If she wanted to absorb information, she didn’t need to go to an old-timey library or page through buttery-smelling, soft-leather-swaddled paper books.
Which was exactly why she did those things with such frequency. She didn’t have to. She chose to.
Also, it didn’t hurt that Kellen Hockley came here a lot, the only other student who did. He was her best friend, despite the fact that all her other friends and peers dismissed him. They were all obtuse imbeciles as far as she was concerned. Plus he was her very own, her secret.
On an afternoon after scheduled activities were done, Angela sat in a window box at the library, her headset on and a lecture pouring itself into her brain folds. A book of tales by Charles Perrault was spread across her uniform-sheathed thighs, and she stared at the pictures while fundamentals of photovoltaics filled her mind. With all those inputs pushing data at her simultaneously, it was no wonder he had to poke her shoulder to get her attention. The second time, it even worked.
“Ow!” Too loud. Yikes, library! But she did look up.
Kellen loomed over her with the late-afternoon sunlight pouring through the window and washing him gold. Angela caught her bottom lip between her teeth and used two hands to lift off the headset.
“So this is what the smart kids do.” He gestured to her headset/book combo, somehow laughed without it sounding like he was making fun, and slumped down on the cushion opposite her. The reading nook had seemed cozy before. Now it didn’t have nearly enough space. It was too close, too intimate. And Angela had zero problem with that.
“You mean studying?” She felt her face set itself into a haughty expression. Which, like multitasking, was bred into her. She couldn’t do a thing to correct for these kinds of reactions, the ones he referred to as her creepifying blue-bloodery.
Energy radiated off him, like he had a zillion things more important to do than hang around here on Earth. Like he had some cosmic adventure to light off on. Every cell in her body screamed, Take me with you. Wherever you’re going, I want to go, too. Because clearly he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t like any other boy at the MIST, and all the students accepted that as fact. They laughed about him, actually, how odd he was. Only Angela thought his differentness was pretty fantastic, not something to tease or exclude him over.
He shrugged, tacking on a roguish half-smile. “I guess. But clever me for sussin’ out yer secrets. Now I too can take over the world with mah deep, data-filled introspection, bwahaha.”
Angela pressed her lips together to contain the burble of laughter. “Stop it. Your accent isn’t really that horrid. Besides, you spend just as much time here as I do. Case in point, right now.”
“Yeah, but I ain’t hiding in a corner underneath a mountain of equipment. How can you even see this pretty place with all that shit piled on your head?”
She loved that he said the expletives out loud, the same ones that littered her private thoughts. Shit shit shit. She said it silently, three times, and it tasted scrumptious.
“I will have you know that I see lots of things,” she said archly.
“Really? You seen Faiz’s granny and her cat?”
That word, for instance. Cat. It had several meanings. Angela had looked it up on the idiomatic dictionary. It could mean sly, sneaky, or genitalia. Or a small furry almost-domesticated mammal popular as a luxury item earlier this century and throughout the last.
“I, ah, haven’t.” She thought longingly of the headset next to her with its built-in cloud connection. She also wanted to look up the word granny. She didn’t think he was saying something salacious about the assistant librarian, but one could never be certain with Kellen.
“Well, come on, then, princess. Have I got a treat for you.” He popped up, and without asking for permission to touch her, no less invade her personal-space perimeter, he reached and grabbed both her hands
, pulling her to her feet. The fairy book tumbled to the floor, its first-page folio splashing the synthetic carpet in gaudy color.
He let go of one of her hands but held on to the other as he led her through the stacks toward the curator’s office, itself a tiny, dark hovel near the emergency stairs. Kellen pushed a book-filled cart aside, revealing a passage Angela had never noticed before. Come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed much about this area of the library before. She’d been so focused on the books, the sum total of her interactions with the assistant librarian had been asking for location markers and firewall access passwords. Kellen had been the one to goad Faiz into showing them the rare volumes case, including that stunning blue-parchment Qur’an, the kind of object she knew she would always hold in her memory.
The passage was narrow and led to a room unlike the rest of the library. A hot little room with a slick tile floor and bare plaster walls. A refrigerator hummed in the corner, a small electric oven perched on a rickety table, and one red-and-gold-patterned curtain angled across an otherwise austere window. There were no cushions here, no details meant to evoke luxury or the vieille noblesse background most of the students would find comforting. A faint odor of cassia and cloves pervaded, like in the caravan market that sometimes set up outside the city walls.
A chair had been arranged against the wall by the window, drenched in sunlight, and in it slept an ancient woman in a dove-gray khimar. She snored. On her lap, beneath one frail boney hand, lay a cinnamon-and-white-striped beast.
There wasn’t really another good word for it. Tiny, fragile, but with potential energy blazing off it like a coiled spring. Clearly this thing was a predator, even though it reclined in perfect stillness and didn’t seem ready to rip anybody’s throat out. Its green eyes locked on Kellen. An ear twitched. It opened its fang-filled mouth and emitted…a heart-meltingly adorable little mewl.
Epic adorable. Angela struggled to keep herself from answering with an awwwww.
“You pushy little thing,” Kellen said. For a half second, Angela thought he was talking about her. Then he crossed to the old lady and the cat. “Of course I didn’t bring you no food. Granny’d tan my hide if I fed you treats. She’s got you on a strict diet—you don’t run around so much anymore, and you are looking a bit tubby round the middle. We’d best be good.”
Without opening her eyes, the elderly woman uttered something in a low, melodic voice. Angela tapped her cuff com, and it translated the woman’s words out loud. “I’m not sleeping. I am only resting my eyes, child.”
Kellen tossed a grin back at Angela. “Well, aren’t you clever as a hoot owl. Why didn’t I think of using a translation app before now?”
“Because you are an ignorant western infant.” The computer voice coming from the tinny com speaker didn’t have much inflection, but the woman was smiling. Still with her eyes closed, but her face was content. She didn’t mean her words as an insult, and Angela suddenly realized that Kellen and this woman had talked before. Or, well, communicated. Even without speaking the same language and with no translation. Library magic? Or Kellen magic?
“Ah, Granny might talk trash, but she don’t mind it when I come bother her,” he said.
“The ignorant boy is right. I enjoy his company. He feeds my old Ghufran until she is fat and in love with him.”
Angela kept her gaze locked on the cat, but the skin around her eyes felt hot, and she was pretty sure she was blushing. Not because of the L word. Or because he was looking right at her and grinning that sly, deep-dimpled grin, like he knew every thought in her head.
Definitely not because the granny lady punctuated the awkward moment with a low chuckle. “Girl, Ghufran especially likes to be rubbed between the ears.” She moved her creaky hand, leaving the path clear to all that thick, strokable fur.
Angela hesitated. Sure, the cat looked impossibly soft. But also fangy and predatory and annoyed. And it was sitting on a person’s lap. Definitely within a personal-space sphere. No touchy. These things were drilled into all kids whose mentors didn’t want them to die an early viral, communicable, and hemorrhagic death.
Kellen apparently felt no compunction. Angela tried not to think what that said about his upbringing. He leaned in and rubbed Ghufran, not on her dome-shaped head but beneath the chin. The cat snuggled its head into his touch and purred so loud, the sound was almost mechanical.
“See?” he told Angela. “It’s okay. She won’t hurt you. She digs the attention.”
It…did. Angela took her time, but her hand did eventually find its way to the cat’s head. The fur felt amazing, like the best and most expensive synthwool, only made better by the warmth and purring vibration and…breathing. The cat was breathing. Angela wasn’t sure why this fact should so surprise or affect her. Respiration was one of the eight basic functions of living organisms, a component part of the definition of life. But words in a lesson had nothing on literally putting her hand on such a creature, feeling it doing all that living right there, with her and beside her.
“Wow.”
The com translated her one-word reaction, and Granny laughed. “She likes you, girl with no name.”
“Apologies. My name is Angela Neko,” she said, flushing at Granny’s implicit rebuke. First impressions, oops. She should have introduced herself right off. A mistake like that could cost a corporation its contracts, a country its peace.
“You are a MIST student?”
“We both are.” Angela, not wanting to stop her petting, indicated Kellen with a tip of her head.
“Where in the world makes a name like Neko?”
“She means are you another Texas redneck like me,” he joked, but there was an edge, buried deep. Most of the time it seemed like he took all these slights in stride, but Angela fancied she could see through his humor and thick skin. Every barb imbedded. Deep. She wondered what that did to someone, day after day, in a kind of enforced solitude. Clearly, it made him seek connection with strangers, like the assistant librarian’s granny. Maybe also with her?
“It’s a portmanteau name,” she said. “My parents are internationalists, Neeraf and Himiko. The phonemes Ne and Ko become Neko, since I, of course, am neither Bengali nor Japanese. I was born in Minneapolis.”
“You were born to the MIST.” That was exactly how people in her world said it: born to the MIST. Not born with talent or destined to be accepted to the academy but born to the MIST. As if the Mustaqbal Institute was mythological Avalon or something. As if she were magical or preordained just because of her DNA or her parents’ ambitions.
Correction: her ambitions. She hadn’t seen her parents in ten years. This was all on her now.
The old woman turned to Kellen. “But you were not.” She clucked behind her teeth and then spoke several words beneath her breath. The com didn’t register them, and they weren’t in any language Angela knew.
Granny leaned her head against the chairback. “The two of you must come and care for Ghufran any time you wish. It is good for her to know human touch.” She sighed heavily and closed her eyes. “Now, let me sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kellen said in a low voice. He gave the cat one last chuck under the chin, and after Angela stepped back obediently, he lifted Granny’s hand and placed it back on the cat’s flank. On the edge of sleep, the old woman smiled. She covered his hand with her other one and patted it warmly.
Quietly, as if their own feet were furred paws, the two of them crept from the librarians’ break room. Angela couldn’t in later years remember what they did with their free afternoon after that. Probably ranged all over the campus, reliving the games they played when they were younger. Or climbed up the giant air circulator in the plaza and talked about whatever they spent hours upon hours discussing back then.
What she would remember forever, though, was that the day after she met the cat, she kissed Kellen for the first time, behind the electrical engi
neering Snead stack.
One month later a tearful Faiz arrived at her dorm unit with a carrier in hand. His grandmother had passed peacefully, he said, but instructed him before she died to deliver her beloved pet to the girl with two names, Ne and Ko, and her ignorant cowboy.
These two events were meant to change Angela’s life irrevocably. They were magic and the library. And she had defied them both.
Chapter 7
PENTARC ARCOLOGY, UNITED NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS, 2059
He took her down to the skywalk, second-guessing himself the whole dadblamed time. Nothing was tidy about having Angela here in the Pentarc. Angela who now knew Chloe existed and could definitely do something about that if she chose to. Angela whose mech-clone assistant scared the shit out of her, probably for a very good reason, which he was going to get to the bottom of sooner rather than later.
Angela who he wanted very much to take back to her room, as she’d suggested. He happened to know that unit contained a giant bed and locks to keep the whole rest of the goddamned world out.
It wasn’t like showing her his global critter network was going to unhook any of those complications. Was more likely to knot them up further. But he had said he’d help her get the information she wanted. Well, this was his best way of fulfilling that swear.
She chatted as she walked. About the scenery, about the on-again, off-again drought that plagued this area, about some of her buddies from school who she insisted had also been his. They hadn’t. Nobody in the entire hoity, posh academy had welcomed the hick kid from Texas who didn’t even know what a quinoa was. Nobody but her.
He knew she nattered on because it brought her comfort, probably because there were other things on her mind, and he knew he ought to halt her ramble, make her welcome, settle her. But damn, he’d missed her voice. Not the public voice but the one she’d saved for him, laden with expletives drifting downward from contralto.
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