Project Recollection: Book One of the Affinity Series

by A A Woods

  What I don’t say is that it’ll always be harder—and riskier—for her. Because, unlike me, she didn’t have a genius coder for a brother.

  “Show me,” Anubis says. Again, I tense against the order, bristling at the easy way she hands out commands. But I do.

  My IRIS cable slides in easily, welcomed into the familiar system of the bike. It hums to life between our knees. I flash the headlights into the crowd on level four, earning a reproachful glare from a mother tugging three children on leashes toward a level five daycare.

  “So you drive with your mind?” Anubis asks, her voice distant, muffled by the sound of the bike, the engine rumble that feels like it’s inside me.

  “Sort of.”

  “How helpful.” Her voice drips sarcasm.

  “You’re welcome to go home.”

  Anubis laughs, her breath warm against my ear. “So eager to get rid of me?”

  “You’re trouble.”

  “Of course,” she says and I feel her shrug. “But I’m paying trouble, which seems to be important enough to keep you around.” She shifts closer, one arm hooking on my shoulder and using it to lean around my other side. “Can I try?”

  “Don’t you want to watch me first?”

  “I prefer trial by fire.”

  My gut clenches at those words, but I can’t argue, not with her virts hanging heavy between us. Peeling my fingers off the handlebars and wondering if I’ll ever hold them again, I unplug myself. Swing my leg free and slowly dismount so that I’m standing where Anubis was moments before. I feel the itchy sensation of being trapped, marooned, knowing if she rabbits with my bike I’ll be stuck in the Sky Market with no way to get home.

  I keep one hand on the curved windshield for comfort as my heart tries to hammer its way out of my chest.

  “Ok, so plug in.”

  “Already have.”

  “Be careful, if you go too fast it might damage—”

  Her laugh cuts me off. “What are you waiting for, Tora? Get on.”

  I feel the bike’s engine through my feet, growling to life. It sounds like an animal, straining against the parking slot like a racehorse in a corral. It stutters as Anubis’s unpracticed brain tries to wrangle it into submission.

  Without thinking, I throw myself onto the back of the bike, fumbling for Anubis’s waist as the machine leaps, as she hoots with excitement, as we tumble into the cluttered, weaving, writhing traffic of the Sky Market.

  Raw terror clogs my throat. We cartwheel into the crush of early-morning commuters, flanked by a hailstorm of honking and shouting. Anubis drives like a drunk bird and we swing, tumble, drop, roll. She’s a howling creature, a wild thing, and I’m clutching her too-thin ribcage, pressed against the ridges of her spine, my eyes closed even though that doesn’t make a difference. My IRIS cable whips against my back, tangling in my hair. I want to scream but I’m frozen, petrified by how much danger I’m in and how I can’t even see it.

  Anubis seems to get a handle on the bike and we straighten. Curve up into a parabola. I smell the thickening smog, feel the sunlight grow stronger. Up here, the solar coating on the super-scrapers is newer, cleaner, powering the entire teeming city below. Their scorching reflection is enough to burn sensitive underground skin like mine in minutes. But I refuse to point that out as Anubis guides us closer to a heat source.

  We touch down on something flat and hard and the bike’s engine dies.

  “That was fantastic,” she says in an electric voice.

  I shove off her back in disgust, throwing one leg over the side, too shaky to get to my feet. I can’t move anyway. For all I know we’re on top of the ProRec super-scraper. One wrong step could lead to a long drop and a bloody end.

  I hate how vulnerable that makes me.

  Clutching the edge of the bike, I take deep, shuddering breaths.

  “What’s wrong, Tora? Too much excitement for you?”

  My temper bubbles like magma and for a moment I only gape at her, speechless. But that lasts about as long as it takes me to get to my feet.

  Damn the risk, I want to face her standing.

  “Woah there, watch out for the—”

  “The fuck is wrong with you?” I shout, throwing my arms up and not caring if I hit her. Something grabs my jacket and pulls me forward, but I slap it away. “What the hell were you thinking? We could have died!”

  “I take it you didn’t have fun.”

  “You think that was fun? To not be able to see where we’re going, to hold on helplessly as you throw us around like a pinball? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be blind?”

  “I will soon,” she shoots back in defense, her coy laughter evaporating against the heat of my anger.

  “Good. Then maybe you’ll think next time before you pull a goddamned stunt like that.”

  I plunge my hands into my pockets and yank out my PAP. Plug myself in.

  As the world materializes in that tiny cone of vision that my PAP provides, the Cheetah Bar I had for breakfast threatens to claw its way back up my throat.

  We’re on the top of a super-scraper, but not just any super-scraper. I recognize the dream-like tower in front of us, the way the ground beneath our feet is painted bright yellow, the wall to our side streaked with top-notch solar plates cooking my skin even as I stand there.

  Anubis has landed us on the gilded tip of Nova Solar, the second-tallest building in the city.

  I force myself to take another deep breath. When I feel centered—or at least less unsettled—I turn my PAP toward the bike. Toward Anubis. She’s still sitting there, plugged in, her expression lost as she stares at the handlebars. It’s strange to see her this way, slumped in all her bright colors and big lips and dark-chocolate hair.

  My fists clench.

  “Unplug,” I snap. “If this is your idea of a lesson—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I freeze. Months with Damien have taught me to be wary of those two words, knowing they usually precede something I don’t want to hear. But when Anubis looks at me, her face isn’t cocky arrogance covered by a thin veil of apology. It’s real, vulnerable, and echoing with the kind of loneliness that stabs right into the center of my heart.

  If I could see myself in the mirror, I wonder how often I would wear the same expression.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again. “Really. I forget sometimes that other people aren’t dying.”

  I snort. “We’re all dying.”

  Her lips twitch and her eyes flick up to my face, away from the PAP clenched in my fist. “You know what I mean.”

  I can’t help but see the way her illness coats her like heavy wool, shedding on everything in her life.

  “Can’t they do anything?” I ask, my anger still simmering, growing hotter as sympathy blends in against my will. Against my better judgement.

  Anubis’s breath comes out in a half-laugh. “Can’t they fix your eyes?”

  “The nerves are beyond repair.”

  “Exactly.”

  Her eyes are glassy but her smile is real. She slides her IRIS cable out of my bike and gets to her feet. “I feel like I’ve made a shit-pile of things. Let’s start over.” I tilt my PAP up to see her hold out one hand. “My name is Khalidah. Call me Khali.”

  For a moment, I stare at the hand, wondering what it implies. Friends? Partners? What am I committing to? What danger lurks in the shadow of that innocent offering?

  But she’s waiting and something inside me, something stronger than my guarded paranoia, surges into my limbs. Forces me to take the hand and shake it.

  It’s the first time I’ve initiated human contact since Zhu disappeared.

  “Call me Tora,” I say.

  Anubis—Khali—laughs. “Okay then, Tora. I’m sorry for almost killing us. I promise, I’ll be on my best behavior from now on.”

  “Do you have a best behavior?”

  “It’s all relative,” she says and from my other hand I can see the underside of her grin. “Will y
ou still teach me your ways, oh great master?”

  I can’t help the snort. It comes out of me involuntarily, a ghostly reaction of my former self. The prickling, distrustful side of my brain is whispering warnings, cataloguing threats, screaming at me to run, hide, break off this growing and dangerous familiarity.

  But I can’t.

  In the cold and darkness of my life, I can’t help but be drawn to a fire.

  “Fine,” I say, withdrawing my hand. “But we do it my way.”

  Khali snaps into a mocking salute, but somehow, I can’t find my anger. It seems to have leaked out, like water from cupped palms.

  From the corner of my PAP, I glimpse ProRec’s super-scraper, looming like a god over the tangled smoke of the city. It pulls at me with its own gravity, tugging at my mind. I can’t be near it without looking, without wondering.

  Is the answer to my brother’s disappearance somewhere inside, buried in their mainframe like the code in my cable?

  “Quite the fortress, eh?” Khali’s beside me, standing on the edge of the city’s second-longest fall, staring at the seat of a technological empire. “Imagine what kinds of toys they have in there.”

  “I’m going to find out,” I whisper. “In the tournament.”

  “What tournament?”

  I tilt my PAP back at her, but there’s no deceit there. Her head is cocked, wind-blown hair tumbling over one shoulder, the question pure in her eyes.

  I frown. “What do you mean, what tournament?”

  “ProRec’s having a tournament?”

  “That’s what the key was for,” I say, incredulous. “That was the prize of last night’s fight.”

  Khali shrugs.

  “I thought it was just for fun.”

  I can only gape. Who is this girl who goes on kamikaze bike rides and risks her brain in a cage match just for fun?

  “You didn’t know about the tournament?”

  “No,” she says with another shrug, but something passes over her face. A flicker I recognize, that cornered animal look of someone realizing that their enemies are growing closer. “What is it?”

  “Project Recollection is hosting a Gaming tournament with their own technology. They say they’re looking for the face of their new line, technology to replace Yuri Gamen’s Obaki Mats. Those memory-fingerprinted keys are the only way in.”

  “And of course, everyone’s competing for the chance at riches and fame?”

  Khali looks casual, her hips and smile cocked at the same angle. But her eyes speak differently. I try to decipher what she’s thinking, but it’s hard to see her expression from my hip.

  “Not everyone,” I whisper.

  “The plot thickens,” she says, waggling her eyebrows.

  I turn away, back to ProRec’s super-scraper. Khali is still chuckling, but suspicion has bloomed in my chest. She didn’t know about the tournament, but somehow the news of it bothers her. Strikes some chord in her chest, different than my own.

  Something tells me I’m not the only one on this rooftop with secrets.

  “So you want to be one of those champions, then?” Khali asks in a would-be casual voice.

  My PAP takes in ProRec’s tower, all seven-hundred stories of it. Somewhere in the Tunnels, far below these topside offices and labs, a line of doors is being coded. Ready to accept fifteen gamers with the right memories in their brains. I think of the match tonight, the last key, my last chance. My fists clench and I forget Khali’s recklessness and coy mockery of everything I’m fighting for. The world narrows to her question, a simple thing that has become the black hole in the center of my life, the void I orbit.

  My answer comes as a growl.

  “I plan to.”

  Tora

  Wednesday, September 19th, 2195

  9:29 P.M. EST

  Kitzima’s ring bubbles with energy, crackles with the feel of a big match, and I’m back in a storm. Back where I started.

  Standing alone on the edge of a crowd, waiting for someone who isn’t coming.

  God dammit Damien, I think, clenching my fists.

  My anger is a living thing, crawling through my veins, twining around my bones. He was supposed to meet me on the corner of seventh and forty-seventh, supposed to be standing next to the remnants of an old theatre when I arrived. When I’d left the Gaming House yesterday, he’d promised not to let me down. Swore with all his honor as an eagle and a Gamer and an ‘internet celebrity’.

  I was a fool to believe him.

  Now, I hover in exile, blind without the use of my PAP, lonelier than I’ve ever been. I stand next to my bike, one hand wrapped around the handlebars like a shield. As the noise washes over me, familiar and foreign all at once, I feel like a swimmer in a vast ocean. An insect scraping against the side of a super-scraper. I’m so small and ProRec is so big and there is so much in my way. Kitzima. Damien.

  Myself.

  People move around me like water around stone, whether avoiding the radiating pool of my anger or just skirting the poor blind girl, I can’t be sure. Either way, they infuriate me. I want to challenge them all, force them to face me, show them what I can do. Prove that I’m not as small and helpless as I feel right now.

  I think of Khali, wonder if she’s somewhere in this crowd. But, of course, Kitzima wouldn’t let us fight one another again. Because that would bore her adoring audience.

  It’s all about entertainment. ProRec. Gaming. Memories. All of it, just a myriad of saccharine escapes.

  “Welcome, Gamers!”

  Kitzima’s voice rolls over the crowd and I don’t hesitate. I step forward. Crash into the back of a Gamer and stumble, ignoring the shout that dies off as quickly as it comes.

  My voice rises before Kitzima can begin her speech. “I’m playing.”

  I’m moving like a shark toward her, toward the Mat, leaving waves of fury and frustration in my wake.

  “I haven’t invited you to challenge yet, Tora,” Kitzima answers, her girlish voice scratching against my frayed edges. Pulling them looser.

  “Well I do. Do you deny me?”

  Kitzima’s laugh rises over the disbelieving titters of the crowd. I ignore them, let their scandalized voices roll off me. I’ll fight them all if I have to. There is only one key left and the ProRec tournament is two days away.

  Fuck secrecy, I’m getting that invitation.

  “Of course not,” Kitzima answers, her voice musical. Giddy. Dread wells in the pit of my anger. “But you’ll be fighting one of my Vixens tonight.”

  The crowd reacts around me, but I hardly hear them over my own heartbeat. Everyone in the ring knows that the games are always stacked in favor of the Vixens. Kitzima can’t afford to look weak, and those under her must always support that image. Bolster her ego and her status as the queen this underworld.

  So they win.

  Every time.

  But I have a secret that none of them know about, a cable that allows me to slip behind the holographic façade like a leech. Like a ghost. It will be hard—the hardest match I’ve ever fought. Kitzima will perch on the edge of her throne, doing everything she can to make me lose. The mat itself will be my enemy, tag-teaming with the faceless Vixen to crush this upstart Gamer who thinks she can challenge the system.

  Well, I was made in this system. Sharpened by it. Forged by the cruelties of this world and the one above. Kitzima thinks she can lord over everyone else in this room.

  Perhaps it’s time for someone to prove her wrong.

  “Fine,” I say, elbowing through the crowd, making my way to the center. I’m moving from an unfamiliar angle, shuffling my steps, hating how weak I look as I toe my way closer to the mat. Whispers eddy as I move through them, swirl like fog, but I force myself not to hear the words. Not to feel the slice of their judgement, their pity. I clench my fists and the skin of my knuckles pulls taut.

  This is for Zhu. It’s all for Zhu.

  My shin hits the hard edge of the Obaki Mat and I swallow a breathless cry of surp
rise. Ignoring the bruises even as they form, I step up onto the stand, using the railing to pull myself up and find the center. I brace myself, boots spread wide, body angled toward Kitzima’s dais.

  “Well?” I say, reaching up and sliding the tip of my IRIS cable out of my hair. Silky threads tumble around my shoulders. “Who am I fighting?”

  “Hebi, would you do me the honor?”

  “It will be my pleasure.”

  A new voice finds me, this one filled with sharp haughtiness. I know this Vixen. She was the one who slammed into me when the police raided the last match, the one who sent my Fuzz Specs flying. I haven’t seen her face, but her voice echoes back at me, her halfhearted sorry as fresh as if she’d just thrown it my way.

  You aren’t yet, I think savagely. But you will be.

  “Tora, signing on,” I say before Kitzima can prompt me. It’s a small and petty display of insolence, but it bolsters my flagging courage.

  Kitzima’s laugh harmonizes with the crowd as I plug in. The room comes into focus as my Yokai materializes on the mat. All around me, wide eyes blink, flickering uneasily between Kitzima and me. They are incredulous, stupefied by my disrespect. The last Gamer to personally challenge the Vixens was dragged into Kitzima’s underground lair, never to be seen again. There were rumors about ripped-out cables and illegal memories of torture. Nothing certain, just enough to chill the blood and keep the rest of her ring in line.

  But above my head dangles the key, the memory that will grant me access to ProRec, that will unlock the secrets my brother left behind.

  I may be nothing more than an insect in the vast machinations of this city, but even insects can do damage if they get inside.

  “Hebi, signing on.”

  As my opponent plugs in, I scan the faces for something, anything, to dam the lake of my terror and frustration. Damien, of course, isn’t here. But still my eyes search for a specific face, hunting for those wide lips quirked in a coy smile, that shimmering loose hair the color of polished leather. I don’t know why I want to see Khali in the crowd. But when I can’t find her, something inside me teeters, a hidden fragile part of me threatening to break.