by Harn, Darby
Who am I supposed to be?
I haven’t been back to the apartment since Ma.
I’ve been in the penthouse, or the garage, or out in the ruins, trying to piece together the rest of my life. Apparently that required scavenging the one I had for parts and now I don’t have anything. Do I even have the apartment? It’s been six months. Someone else must live here now. All my things probably went out on the curb, salvage for someone else. What do I think I’ll find here? A piece of who I was? Some spark? All the bulbs are broken. Nothing worked here, no matter how hard I tried. This was never my place, anyways. I never lived here. After Dad died, I was just existing. Running on auxiliary. Just trying to make it through the day. Living was for other people. Never once did I do anything outside the bounds of scrap and scavenge and soothe her storms. I just ran in the background, like the fridge or the stove, unnoticed save for when I stopped working.
I could never stop working.
I pocket my keys, and head back down the stairs. People ghost through the halls of the Halfway Hotel. They pass me on the stairs, creaking with age. No one recognizes me.
I finish another dime-sized sonic receiver, and embed it in what I had left of the sound-dampening material I used for the sonic suit. What I had before I nicked from the lab in Applied Sciences. I don’t know where I’ll get more. Birds rap against the basement windows of the garage, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. That soft but manic thud follows me wherever I go now, the birds like a mob of screaming fans stalking me from place to place. At least I have some fans.
A light knock rattles the basement door. Abi’s voice carries down the stairs. “You decent?”
The Myriad rattles inside the cage of my chest, drawn instantly toward the door. “Open for debate.”
Rusted steel groans as Abi pulls back the door. She comes down the steps a little, and then sits, about halfway up. “Hey.”
“I’m so sorry about the other night, Abi.”
She shrugs. “I’m not scared of you. I’m scared for you.”
“For me?”
Abi gestures to the patchwork sonic suit. “You literally didn’t miss a beat. Guess that answers your question.”
“My question?”
“If you’re still you,” she says.
I shimmer in the screen of my laptop. My face is my face, down to the acne scars, except it glows like someone is shining a flashlight through it. All my faults are exposed. My flaws. This hurt in me, deeper than scars. It’s like someone scanned me, and then printed a high fidelity cast of Kit Baldwin in glass. The likeness is eerie, but like with the reproduction of the Ever in the exhibit hall, it’s still only a likeness.
“I can still finish the suit,” I say. “I can save Valene. I can bring her back. I can make things right.”
“Yeah,” Abi says. “You’re definitely you.”
“The receivers I can replicate from things I can get at the swap, but the actual fabric for the suit is another story. All there is in spare is in the lab… Abi, do you think you could – ”
Her eyes bulge. “Steal GP property from the vault?”
“I can show you how to make it look like it’s still in the vault inventory,” I say. “It’s actually super easy.”
Abi cringes. “Is that what we should be focusing on, though? Like, I get it, and you deserve all the points for being like the best girlfriend of all time, but maybe let’s put a pin in Valene, ok? I’m worried about you. I’m freaking terrified.”
Her heart pulses in her chest, ba-dumm. Every beat is a homing beacon, calling me closer.
“I’m fine.”
“Kit, you’re the furthest from fine anyone has ever been. I can’t even imagine what’s going through your head.”
Makes two of us. Thoughts, feelings, if they can even be called that, surge through my all hours of the day and night. Few of them are my own. My thoughts are the rays of headlights, fighting through a thick, low fog and every moment of every one of these strange, myopic days, it’s both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, on my destination and nothing else.
“She needs my help,” I say.
“She’s got like all the help there is.”
“No, she doesn’t. They don’t – they don’t want anything to change, Abi. I know you want me to go to the lab, but I can’t. They’ll just box me away like they did her.”
Her nose wrinkles. “It’s the only place she can be – “
“I tried to tell them,” I say. “I had a plan. I had the suit. They didn’t want to know. They don’t want to help her. They don’t want to help anything, Blackwood said.”
“At the speech, you mean?”
I sigh. “I met him one night. In the exhibition hall.”
Abi’s eyes bloom. “You bury the lede a lot.”
“I bury everything.” I clutch the zipper of my jacket, fighting the power desperate to escape me. “Nothing will change. Nothing will get better. Not unless I finish the suit.”
Abi comes down the stairs. Ba-dumm.
“Kit, I know you feel alone…”
I drift back, behind the suit. “She’s alone.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s what she needs. Maybe she has some peace and stuff. Maybe she doesn’t want to come back.”
“Of course she wants to come back.”
“Kit… I didn’t mean what I said, at the gala.”
I look away. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, really. I just open my mouth and stuff comes out.”
“You just say what you feel.”
Abi’s eyes bulge as she nods. “I think they left the filters at the hospital when they brought me home.”
I think I have too many. Before, I never thought. Never said. I bit my lip, I twisted a curl of my hair around my finger, I pinched the impulse right out of myself but now I see me as I see everything else: plans. Specs. Diagrams. I see me as the alien sees me: something constructed. Engineered.
“I don’t have that, Abi.”
“You can have some of mine,” she says. “Or most of it, actually. Probably evens out that way.”
She reaches for me, her fingers glancing the sleeve of my jacket, energy pulsing within me to her beat, ba-dumm. I take another step back, stuffing my hands in my pockets.
“Don’t touch me, Abi. It’s not safe.”
She closes the distance between us. “I’m not afraid.”
“I am,” I say, and it just comes out. “I’m so afraid.”
Her hand rests on my arm. “I know.”
“I don’t know what’s happening, Abi.”
“I know. It’s going to be ok. We’re going to figure this out. We’re like the smartest women in Break Pointe.”
That’s up for debate, too. Abi’s pulse ebbs through my jacket, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. I want to hold her hand. I want to consume the galaxy of energy into mine, scattering her stars through my dark until there’s no telling the difference. I want to bury this basement in cement, with me inside.
I step back from her. “But if I could just get some of that sound-dampening material from the lab.”
“Kit.”
“I have to do something. I can’t just sit here. Or – do you think we could get a message to Valene?”
Abi clenches her smile. “I don’t see how. All communication with the Laputa is routed through the Command Center at the tower. We don’t have that kind of clearance. Even if we did, I feel like there’s a conversation with security we’d have first.”
“I could access the communications array, remotely. I can do it from anywhere. An empty office. Conference room.”
“How?”
I touch the laptop. Instantly, the energy of the device arcs into my bare hand, into the rivers of magenta swirling beneath my skin. Not just its energy; code. Data. Information. Everything on the laptop, and everything it connects to on the Wi-Fi signal I boosted from the gas station down the street courses through me, like I’m a computer, on the same network.
“I just nee
d to log on to the company mainframe,” I say.
Abi steps back, eyes fixed on the crackle between me and the laptop. “Maybe if we talk to Piller, we can work on making you ok and he can get you a video chat with her or something.”
A magnetic-like force holds my fingers to the computer. I leap like a virus through the Wi-Fi signal to every computer connected to the router, to the fiber optic cable connecting the city and I can penetrate the GP mainframe from right here.
“Valene needs my help.”
Abi’s smile isn’t so easy now. Patient, maybe. “You’re not going to do Valene or anyone else any good in the vault or space prison. You’re in trouble. Let’s get you out of it and go from there.” She puts her hand on my arm again. Unafraid. “Ok?”
“Ok,” I say.
She winces, like she didn’t think I’d agree. “Ok. Well. First things first. We need to figure out what happened to you, and if we can reverse it. You’ve got a pretty good operation going here, but I don’t see any of the equipment we’ll need to make a proper determination. So, we’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way and rely on visual analysis. Ok. Strip.”
“What?”
“Submit for inspection,” she says.
I grasp the zipper of my jacket. “That’s kind of you, but…”
“It’s for science.”
“Right. I was thinking more on the technological side. I’ve performed spectral analyses on the Myriad before in the lab, so I pretty well know what I’m dealing with there – ”
“You took the Myriad to the lab?”
“I might have,” I say.
She nods, slowly. “Who are you?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“Well… there’s nowhere outside the lab that has the equipment GP does. And we’re not going to find anyone smarter.”
A familiar diesel rattle shakes the dust loose from the basement ceiling. I head up the stairs, Abi close behind, and come out of the garage just as the mobile medical clinic Vidette Rizzo operates rumbles down Dickens, toward Six Corners.
“Actually,” I say, “We might.”
A line stretches from the clinic, around the Halfway Hotel. Wednesdays and Sundays. Always the same. No one has insurance, money or ready access to an emergency room. Most come for colds. Spider bites. Lingering injuries that never get the proper care. The most effective treatment on offer is always Vidette Rizzo’s smile, so contagious it erases the sad line people draw down Shelley as she goes person to person, asking what hurts.
Abi’s eyes bug out a little. If I had to bet, I’d wager most people react this way to Vidette. This is the woman who on a dare threw a rock to the moon? She’s not big or muscular, but petite, girlish even now with her long, dark hair and that shimmering smile. Her strength is deceptive. Intrinsic. I sensed that even as a girl, playing with Vidette’s action figure. Didn’t matter what anyone else had playing on the stairs in the apartment building, or out in the courtyard. I had Vidette in my pocket and that made me the strongest. I didn’t have to be normal or work the same as everyone else; nothing could stop me.
“Can we trust her?” Abi says. “Like, what if she dimes on us to Piller? They were a thing, right?”
At the gala, I told Abi I wasn’t sure why Vidette left Great Power. That’s not entirely true. I don’t know the details, but Val had told me Vidette grew discontent with the direction of the company, though I got the sense the feeling might have been mutual. Her leaving happened right after the earthquake in San Francisco, when Valene disobeyed the law and her father to do the type of thing Vidette does all the time here in The Derelicts: just help people, with no expectation of reward.
“We can trust her,” I say.
Down the line, Book waits, flipping through the pages of his omnibus. The grime on his face disrupted by a mare of dark, dried blood above his brow. Corner boys again. The crueler boys in the neighborhood make a habit out of mocking him. Have for years. The endless heckling he can take. The rocks. The snowballs. He can’t do with is losing his pages, and he didn’t. Still no coat. Winter like an ex-lover who keeps coming back. Six months. Nothing’s changed. Nothing is ever going to change.
The line creeps forward. As it rounds the curb on Delaney, the NOW News truck comes into view. Frankie sits on the bumper, smoking a cigarette, like she’s been waiting the whole time.
A smile bursts open like a loose suture on Frankie's lips. “Anything you’d like to tell me, Kit?”
Ten
What do I do; what do I say? There’s nothing I can say. Frankie knows it. The power she holds blazes in her eyes. A report. A whisper. That’s all it takes, and the story becomes what she wants it to be. I don’t even know what kind of story this is. Myth. Tragedy. Comedy. I don’t know whose story it is. None of this is about me. All that matters is Valene, her being the hero the city needs, but Frankie sent that draft back with edits. She sent Valene packing to the space station, and me down a fool’s road, desperate to do anything to get her back. The zippers on my jacket flatten against the magnetic hunger of the monster inside me, a little looser on its chain.
“Abi,” I say. “If I tell you to run, run.”
Abi hooks her arm in mine. “I’m not leaving you.”
Frankie flicks her cigarette at Abi’s feet. “Beat it, Rebound Chick. Unless you want to become famous, too.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Abi mad before. Kind of scares me a little. Her eyes thin. Abi looks at Frankie the same way Frankie does me; looking for where she’ll break.
“It’s ok, Abi,” I say.
“We’re going to figure this out, Kit.” Abi doesn’t take her eyes off Frankie. “But we can do it after you test some hypotheticals out on this bitch. I’ll just be down the line.”
Her hand trails down my arm as she walks down the line, toward the clinic. The instant she’s gone, the sound of the crowd harasses me. The throbbing hurt. The trapped energy, bristling inside them like fireflies trapped in pop bottles. Birds streak across the sidewalk, twisting around in nonsense lines only I can see, streaming from the birds, the mites in their feathers, the people, even the ruins, etching strange silhouettes in the dusk. Everything compels me. I’ve never known how to connect to any of this and now I don’t know how to stop.
“How we doing there, Kit?” Frankie says. “You look pale.”
“You do make me sick,” I say.
Frankie’s smile warps into a bogus frown. “Are you mad?”
The zippers on my jacket rattle with magnetic agitation. “You told me leaking the truth about the station would keep Valene here. But Blackwood used it to spin the whole thing so people are sympathetic to him. You knew that would happen.”
Frankie shrugs. “I expected it. You should have.”
“I don’t understand. You hate GP.”
“I’m impartial.”
“Fuck off, will you. You’ve got an interest in this, but I don’t know what. I thought it was for the good of the city, but you just want bleeding ratings. You just want the story.”
“That’s all there is,” she says.
“You used me, and she’s gone. I’ve lost everything.”
Frankie stalks toward me. “I was sure they packed you up and shipped you up there with her, and you know, I kind of rooted for you. That would have been a story. Not as good as this one, though. Where you been, Kitsie?”
“Walking it off.”
She smiles. “What’s under your jacket?”
I clutch it tighter. “I’m maintaining a look.”
Frankie grips the shivering zipper of my jacket. “I have so many questions for you. But honestly, I’m more interested in theories. Would you like to hear mine?”
I grip her hand. “No.”
She fights me for control of the zipper. “So here goes my theory. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I know someone neck deep in the black market. Who was – I’m pretty sure – building something with all the alien tech she was acquiring. This see
med awfully reckless for this particular person, considering she was the lover of the most famous woman in the world. Why would this person risk everything on something so dangerous? But then, it came to me. Valene, she’s suffering. She needs help. The kind of help that’s beyond science. So it starts to make sense. This person at the center of my theory – SPOILERS, she’s you – she’s doing this to help Valene. But then, she disappears. Same day Valene leaves for the space station. Strange. Or maybe not.”
My laugh comes out stilted. “So NOW is one of these fake news sites? I know you’re struggling in the ratings, but wow.”
Frankie smiles. “I’m not done. Six months later, I find her back in The Derelicts, one night after this happens.”
She touches the screen of her cell phone. Video of someone – the camera was too far away for the zoom to be effective – flying away from the patio of an apartment building across the river plays on the tiny screen. The person glows magenta as they rise into the clouds, across the river, over the wall.
“Someone sent this to me the other day. What do you think? Kind of looks like an alien, doesn’t it?”
“Probably a Responder,” I say, measuring my tone.
Frankie takes the phone back. “Pretty sure there aren’t any Responders that glow bright red stationed here in Break Pointe. And certainly none that live in that apartment building. I checked. But you know who does live there?”
Frankie turns and casts a long, bruising glance down the line at Abi, waiting for me near the mobile clinic.
“And you know, there were a few alarms activated in that building the other night. Strange noises. Problems with the electricity. Light bulbs just burst, all over the place.”
“Frankie,” I say.
“Six months you’ve been gone. Six months I’ve been looking for you, in every nook and cranny of this city.”
“You didn’t look in my garage?”
“I turned that place over.”
I squint. “Did you go in the basement?”
“I did,” Frankie says, squinting as well.
The Myriad cocooned within the ship for a long time; I don’t know. My assumption was something similar happened to me over the six months I’ve been gone. Even if the Myriad had been hidden beneath something else, a speaker, a mattress, Frankie would have found it. Where did it go? Where did I go?