Jaesin rubs the back of his neck and grins. “Busy times, you know. We all graduated, so we’ve been making plans and getting things ready. That’s part of why we’re here.”
He pauses for dramatic effect, cutting his gaze away with something like shyness.
“Remi and I are moving. To Jattapore. We’re leaving in six days.”
It’s only when Ginny’s face crumples with fond emotion that I realize it really is part of the reason we’re here. Jaesin wants to say goodbye. My throat goes thick as Ginny bustles around the counter and wraps Jaesin in a floury hug, heedless of the handprints she leaves on his black T-shirt.
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so happy for you. Get out of this city while you can. It’s not nearly as bad in cities where they didn’t lose so many to the plague. You’ll do great.”
A shadow passes over her face, as it always does when something brings the memory of her late wife to mind, but she forces a smile and pushes on. “And how is Remi? They’re still so young, they should have a few years before the illness really starts progressing, right?”
Jaesin nods. “The doctors always say they’re one of the strongest patients they have. Remi’s totally on point with their exercise, eating, treatments, all that. It used to be that surviving plague patients started to decline around nineteen, but now it’s more like twenty-two or twenty-three. Remi’s hoping if they can keep up with the doctor’s recommendations, MMC’s research will turn up something before—”
And that’s when I tune out. I just can’t.
I turn to the case beside the pay terminal, with sweet and savory goods laid out in neat labeled rows, though she’s baked less than usual due to the lack of crowds. Buns sticky with thick white icing, tarts piled high with berries, slices of pie with candied nuts, savory mini quiches with mushrooms and greens. It smells heavenly. I can still recall the exact taste and flaky texture of the almond tart I had here last time. But even with the pity discount she normally gives us, I can’t justify the cost. Maybe after we pull this job and get paid the full amount.
“And what about you, little cactus? You’re back early. I only saw you two months ago,” Ginny says, raising her voice to draw me back into the conversation. “Are you off to Jattapore as well, then?”
I glower at the pastries. I hate that nickname so. Very. Much. Almost as much as the assumption that I’ll be trotting after Jaesin and Remi like a loyal puppy.
“I’ve got plans of my own.”
“Well, don’t be coy,” she says. “What are you doing? Putting those computer smarts to use?”
She just can’t take a hint, can she?
“I’m staying in Kyrkarta. Taking a job with Davon over at MMC.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Jaesin’s look of surprise as he whips his head around to stare at me—and I realize my mistake. I told them I wasn’t sure. That I hadn’t made up my mind. Crap.
“I mean, I’ve had an offer,” I blurt. “Of a job. Thing. At MMC.”
Jaesin’s eyes go narrow. I backpedal furiously.
“Nothing’s firm yet, though. You never know. Jaesin, we should get to our meeting. It’s almost noon.”
Ginny’s face does the pity thing again, and she goes back around the counter and fishes four pastries from the case: one each for me and Jaesin, and a box with two more for Remi and Ania. Our favorites. She always remembers, even though I’m only there twice per year. My stomach twinges with a blend of guilt and hunger as she hands me an almond croissant.
“I’ve made way too many today,” she says, waving away Jaesin’s attempt at payment. “I expected at least a few of the factories to be operating, but the damage must have been worse than I thought. Don’t let me keep you. If I don’t see you again, I wish you the best of luck in Jattapore, Jaesin. Dizmon, don’t be a stranger if you decide to stick around Kyrkarta after all, okay?”
I nod, glaring at the ground, and Jaesin raises a hand in farewell as the door’s bright chime signals our exit. His curiosity about my job outburst radiates in waves I can actually feel as we walk down the block to the end of the long building the bakery lives in. The alley behind it holds the sewer access we need to get at the pipes, but there’s no way I’m taking my precious rare treat down there with only a napkin to protect it. At least Ania’s and Remi’s are in a box. I nibble slowly at my almond croissant, savoring its flaky, nutty, buttery sweetness, stretching it as far as it can go.
Until we turn the corner around the back side of the building and come face-to-face with a group of workers in full nullaz suits.
A sparking maz barrier blocks the alley off from the rest of the street. The workers haul huge piles of rubble away from a long fissure running straight down the alley, while a techwitch and a spellweaver work to stitch the crack back together bit by painstaking bit.
“Oi, this area’s off limits, kids,” a woman wearing a foreman’s colors says, stepping up to the barrier.
Jaesin turns on the charm. “Sorry, our bad. Just wandering around while we eat,” he says, hoisting his sugary fruit tart for her to see. “We’ll go.”
The woman nods, but her gaze follows us all the way down the road until we turn a corner, then collapse against the side of a greasy gray factory.
“Well, that plan’s screwed,” I say, licking the last of the almond cream from my fingers. “This job just got a lot more difficult.”
“Maybe not a lot,” he says. A link request pops up in my lenses, and I accept so we can study the map together again.
He continues. “If we think there’s just the one pipe, then theoretically any well-hidden location with underground access along this path should work, right? We just need to get down there relatively close to where we were before.”
He has a point, and there are plenty of sewer access points along the way. I’ve always found it a little weird that we carry something as powerful and valuable as maz in pipes running right alongside the ones that carry our sewage, but so it is. Made sense to use the existing infrastructure in the wake of the plague, I guess.
“Do you have your baby with you?” Jaesin asks, circling a few points along the projected path of the pipe, voice neutral. Good. Focus on the job and not my awful slip. I may have made up my mind about the job in my own head, but he doesn’t need to know that. I don’t even want to think about it right now, considering I’ll be tasked with protecting these pipes in a few weeks. At least I’ll have a thorough knowledge of all the vulnerabilities, right?
“I do, yeah.” I reach into my pocket and withdraw a tiny drone, a custom model I built for a school project two years ago. I got a perfect score on the project and a private email from my teacher praising my work. I also got a referral to the headmaster for a week’s suspension and a stern warning that building tools of espionage was highly frowned upon at Kyrkarta Memorial Polytechnic. Like it’s some kind of sacred institution for supporting the learning of Kyrkarta’s youth, rather than mass schooling for the city’s orphans. There were always lots of teachers from outside cities, here on some kind of grant program. Go work with the sad orphan children and have your student loans forgiven! They were always obnoxiously sincere and patronizing.
Regardless of its troubled origins, I love my little drone. At the time, it was a way of getting past my issues with maz, figuring out how to work with it without being paralyzed by fear or disgust. Building machines to control and contain it definitely helps. I’ve tinkered with my drone a lot more since its original creation, and it’s better than anything out on the open market now, in my totally humble opinion. It has a tiny maz port that can accept the smallest maz cartridge available to the general public, and I load it with raw obscuraz when we can spare it, to help it conceal itself. It’s nearly invisible unless you’re looking for it.
I subvocalize a command to my deck to bring up the drone’s operating console and share the drone’s cam feed with Jaesin, then toss the little guy into the air. It takes right off, four times faster than a fly, zipping through the alleys a
nd blocked streets we don’t have access to. I bring up its GPS tracker and overlay it on the map we’ve been using to plan our job, then direct it to fly along the projected path of the pipe.
So many of the underground access points, whether they’re sewer holes or MMC’s cleaner, security-heavy access hatches, are right out in plain sight in this district. Not as much need for aesthetics in this part of town. Obviously not a great choice for us, and another reason we never pulled jobs here. With a frustrated growl, I get rid of the cam feed and map and let the drone’s vision completely overtake my contact lenses, so all I see is what it sees. It’s a bit like being strapped to the nose of a rocket, way disorienting, but I have a much better feel for the space around the drone and where the potential sight lines might be. As the drone draws nearer to the junction station, I begin to despair. If we have to hit the station itself, this job will be twenty times harder, enough so that it wouldn’t even be worth the credits. But then—
“There!” I command the drone to slow and hover. There’s a park a few blocks from the station, a wide, mostly cleared greenspace with markers for earthquake wards, but with a few rare trees standing around the edges as well. And near those trees is a little bump in the terrain. I zoom the drone in closer, circling around to see . . . yes. The bump is a slight ridge to conceal an MMC maintenance hatch, and it’s near enough to the trees that we’ll have a bit of extra concealment. I check its location against the map, and unless someone was drunk-designing when they planned out the sewer system, it’s definitely on the same pipeline.
“You know anything about this park?” I ask Jaesin. He shifts uncomfortably beside me.
“It’s a bit out in the open, but if we hit in the middle of the day, we should be fine. This place really fills up at night, though.”
“Spelldealing?”
“A bit. Hooking up, mostly. A few stimmers here and there. Some harder stuff.”
I bite my lip and restrain myself from asking further. He had a bad year when we aged out of the group-home system and moved into our first flat at fourteen. We don’t talk about it.
“Maybe they’ll be too distracted to care about us, then,” I say instead.
“You wanna risk all those eyes seeing us slip into the sewers? All we need is for one person to call the badges, or for them to discover the missing maz later and have someone call in a tip on us. Day is our best bet, around ten thirty in the morning, when even the late folks have gotten to work, but enough time before lunch for us to get in and out before the crowds. Done with half a day left before the deadline. Extra two thousand creds, banked.”
I shrug. All good points, I know, but going during the day feels like waving a giant flag to announce our activities. We’ve always hit at night before. We’ll have Ania and Remi and their misdirection spells to help us slip by unnoticed, but it won’t stop anyone particularly observant. Or anyone looking for us specifically.
I bring the drone back a few streets and find a sewer cover with a finger gap it can duck through, then fly quickly back to the access point at the park to double-check there won’t be anything in our way underground. Once I hit the hatch, I turn back around and trace the pipe back to the valve we tapped last night, counting intersections against the map to make sure I’m in the right place. Straight shot, no blocks, no extra security, no issues. Looks like we have a plan.
“It’s dangerous,” I say, because I have to. If Jaesin’s going to have a dad crisis about it, better for it to happen now.
Jaesin nods, and the corner of his mouth twitches up into the faintest grin.
My answering smirk is automatic. Adrenaline and hot blood race through my veins, making my skin tingle, my fingers twitch with anticipation. Getting away with eighteen thousand credits’ worth of maz in broad daylight?
This is going to be the greatest last score of all time.
Seven
KYRKARTA CITY IS MUCH MORE beautiful at night and from a distance. The darkness hides all the people, though many of them are still out and about, seeking their poison of choice. If only you really could dance, screw, or drink the last ten years since the spellplague away, I would be right there with them every night. As it is, I only join in on the really bad nights.
Most nights I keep to watching from my rooftop perch. If it wasn’t near the highest spot in the city, my vantage point atop the Cliffs would be useless. Our building is less than half the height of the steel spires that make up the downtown business district.
As it is, I have elevation on my side, and the city sprawls out before me, each section divided by invisible but firm borders. Rich assholes pretending nothing bad ever happened, next to gentrifying assholes who consider themselves saviors, next to oblivious assholes who just want a big house. Shopping, shopping, shopping! Trendy cafés full of well-paid young MMC employees. Shiny bland newness constructed after the spellplague. Nightlife with drugs, bordered by nightlife with moderately less drugs. Strip clubs and by-the-hour motels. Abandoned “memorial” neighborhoods overtaken by maz-mad squirrels. Bad places to be in an earthquake. Bad places to park your car. Bad places to be alone.
Much of it glows with neon, with maz, with money and desperate forward-looking optimism. The parts that don’t aren’t parts you want to visit anyway.
I never look to my left or rear from our roof. The Cliffs are on the southeastern edge of town, part of the orphan district. No one who doesn’t live here calls it that out loud, but they might as well. The neighborhood is roughly divided into thirds: the Cliffs (plague orphans who try hard), the Caves (orphans who don’t care), and the Badlands (orphans who really lean hard into the whole FML vibe).
We never go near the Badlands.
We cut stop number two of our grand farewell tour short in light of the job tomorrow morning. We went to Barret Tower, the tallest building in the city and the ultimate tourist destination, inasmuch as there is such a thing in post-plague Kyrkarta. Only Ania had been there before, so she insisted on dragging the rest of us “before the family broke up,” as she put it.
Admittedly, the view was spectacular. Possibly better than my own favorite spot. It put us that much closer to the stars. We spent most of the evening pointing out constellations, rattling off schemes to get selected for the lunar living program, imagining ourselves as movie heroes who get to steal spaceships and gallivant across the stars, far away from this place. It was a gorgeously clear night, worthy of basking. We left early (for us, at least, meaning before midnight) so we could get some sleep.
Well, so the others could sleep. Sleep and I aren’t on speaking terms.
A notification pops up in my vision, the green border around Davon’s photo melding with the lights of the business district on the horizon. I open the message, and the words spill across my lenses.
Davon: Will you talk to me now?
I close my eyes, cutting off the retinal projection while I take a moment to become a human capable of holding a conversation again. I’ve avoided him since receiving his gift and telling the others about the MMC job offer. Telling my friends is one thing. If I talk to him about it, I’ll end up telling him I plan to take it. Telling him is effectively accepting the job offer for real, since he’ll practically be my boss. That is a whole other thing that my brain shies away from like a stray dog from loud noise.
I’m a terrible cousin. Davon’s known me longer than anyone else still alive in Kyrkarta, but the thought of having to look him in the eye, even over video, makes my palms sweat.
You: Can’t vid right now. Everyone’s asleep. Text ok?
Davon: Fine by me.
I was worried when I didn’t hear from you after the quake.
You: Sorry. I was really focused on getting home. The wards on the cliffs failed.
Davon: I figured. I heard wards were failing all over the city. I’m sure your datemate had it under control, though.
You: They’re not my datemate.
Davon: They would be, if you’d let them. You know that, right?
You: Hell of an aftershock this evening. Shook me right out of my bed.
Davon: Dizzy . . .
I almost wish I had a physical deck and screen under my hands instead of using finger tracking on a virtual keyboard with my lenses. It would feel so very satisfying to chuck the thing over the edge of the rooftop, sending Davon’s words flying away with it.
You: They’re not and never will be. I don’t date.
Davon is typing. . . .
I very nearly go stealth mode to duck what I know is coming next. Davon is persistent, though. Best to get it over with. I start typing my reply before he even sends the message.
Davon: Fine, have it your way, as always. Have you had a chance to think about my offer?
You: Just give me one more day. I need to get through a big thing tomorrow, then I promise I’ll tell you my decision.
Davon: Big thing? Everything okay? You’ve been kind of mysterious lately. Hell, for the last few years. I just assumed it was you growing up, but is there something else?
You: Everything’s fine. I just need to tie up some loose ends and see how a few things fall before I commit.
Davon: They won’t hold the job forever, Diz.
You: I know. I’m not asking for forever. I’m asking for one more day. Can you live with that?
Davon starts typing, then stops, then starts again. I catch myself clenching my teeth and force my jaw to relax. Come on, please, don’t force the issue right now. Is one more day so much to ask?
Finally he replies.
Davon: Yeah. I can live with that.
Not that I have a choice, you brat. :P
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