by Beth Revis
I feel so helpless.
I hug my pillow to my chest, silencing the new programs so I’m alone in the darkness, the way I really feel.
“I wish you were here,” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination.
I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?
When I open my eyes, he’s not there.
Of course he’s not.
Sighing, I reopen the news scans. They all say the same thing, and soon, I notice a pattern. All the government sanctioned channels report first on the total damage, repeating that number—one hundred and four deaths—over and over. And then they zoom in on the little girl victim. They say things like, “dreamt of being a doctor,” and “favorite color was pink,” and then they all mention that the little girl had gone to see the Prime Administrator—as a prize for a re-envisioned flag symbolically encompassing the colonies—in her bright pink dress, but died in the plaza with her mother before she reached the offices. It’s all carefully composed, designed to pull on my heartstrings, and it makes me sick to see the threads of their manipulation so carefully woven around me.
I zoom in on the picture of the little girl, so large that it’s like she’s standing in my bedroom in front of me.
My heart stills.
I know her.
My interface zooms through information as I look up Representative Belles’s history on the interface. It doesn’t take long for me to find exactly what I’m looking for: a family photograph. In the reverie during which I spied on Belles, I saw his worst nightmare, his biggest fear. Two children, casualties of war, dead at his feet. And I saw the youngest, the daughter, today, earlier, laughing and playing with the representative before I collapsed.
Before she was killed by an exploding android.
I read what little information is on the interface. Her name was Estella Belles, and she was eight years old. I examine the photograph further—her mother is the same woman in the news reports now, another casualty of the explosions. Belles and his son, Marcos, a scrawny kid who might be fifteen, are all that remains of the family.
In the news, Estella has a bright pink dress on, with a chocolate stain on the front. Her image has been caught mid-spin. “An innocent victim of the terrorist attack,” the headline says as I look at the image.
This isn’t a picture of a girl walking into Triumph Towers. This is the representative’s daughter. She hadn’t gone to meet the Prime Administrator; she’d gone to see her father. And they were leaving, not arriving, when I passed out, which was quite a lot of time for them to get away. And the only image the news shows is of her spinning around when I saw her, long before the attack.
Because… because they don’t have any other image of her. I close my eyes, trying to think of the plaza just before the android blew. The little girl was definitely not there.
I wave aside the news reports, trying to think with a clear head. If Estella Belles’s death wasn’t an accident, it was certainly murder. PA Young knew that Representative Belles was considering rebellion, perhaps already working with the terrorists. They had no reason to kill his family… but maybe PA Young did.
I shudder at the thought, wrapping my arms around my body. Am I really contemplating that it was the government that killed Belles—not the terrorists? That would mean either the government was using the terrorist android attack to hide their own murder of two innocent people, including a child… or that the android attack itself was coming from the government.
My hand goes instinctively to my cuff, ready to call Akilah and discuss my fears with her, just as I have done with every problem I’ve ever had in my life. But I pause. Thanks to Jack, I don’t even know if I can trust my best friend.
A whiff of the acrid smell of burnt metal wafts through my room, coming from the remains of the other half of my home. Rosie didn’t blow up when the other androids did. She blew up later—because she was busy hacking into our interface system. Exploding androids all across the city would be an effective way to make everyone, including us, forget about how our interface system was hacked.
Was the android explosion a cover-up of the terrorists looking for a way to steal Mom’s information, or the government looking for a way threaten Representative Belles?
There’s a war going on, that much is clear.
And I’m no longer sure I’m on the right side.
twenty-seven
I pull my blue-and-brown damask covers up around my shoulders, despite the fact that it’s not cold. A flicker of movement flashes to my right, and I pick up the framed digi strip I keep beside my bed. In it, Akilah and I are swimming, the summer we turned twelve. Akilah had her mother record it because it was supposed to be a race, and she wanted a record of her inevitable victory over me. But it didn’t end up as a race.
We swam and swam, further into the sea than any of us had ever been before. Akilah was far faster than I, but I had more endurance, so by the end, we were pretty neck-and-neck.
“Wait, wait!” Akilah had called, treading water. We were so far out that the waves were just gentle little bumps. Akilah tilted her head back, closing her eyes against the aggressively bright yellow sun.
I swam up and bumped into her, sending her sputtering in surprise. We laughed and splashed, and then Akilah looked back to the shore.
“We came a long way,” she says. Water clings to her hair, little droplets like diamonds hidden in the tight curls. She sees me staring and shakes her head at me, spraying me with water.
I kick up so I can see the shore better. Her mom and my dad are barely visible in the rocky shoreline at the rubble of the area that was once famously called the Azure Window. One of them—Dad, I think—is waving at us.
“Let’s not go back,” Akilah says. She bobs in the water, stretching out and floating on her back.
“Okay,” I say, mimicking her as I let my head fall back and my body float on the surface.
“I mean, ever.”
I crane my head in the water to see her. Akilah could switch from fun to solemn and dark without warning. Her father had just left her family, and her mother was talking about having to move to the Foqra District. I’d never been there, but the Foqra District was in the lower city, in the poor section. My parents had already told me that, if she moved, Akilah would have to come visit me. I would not be allowed to visit her.
“Close your eyes,” Akilah says. I do, without question. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Pretending that we can be safe out here. Nothing but saltwater and the two of us, forever.”
I peek back at her. In this moment, she looks free. My mother had already been diagnosed with Hebb’s Disease by this point, although it wasn’t bad yet. Even though I knew what fear was, and loss, I also knew the intense love and safety of my parents. I think it was that moment when I realized that Akilah didn’t have the same. Her father had left, and even before that, her parents fought a lot. Akilah was left with a worried, broken parent and a pile of debt that was forcing her to move away from me. After her girlfriend broke up with her, I was one of the few people Akilah had left.
“We keep sending colonies up into space,” Akilah says, “and we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the sea.”
“Yeah, we do,” I counter. “Fish and stuff.”
Akilah laughs. “We’ve barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light.” She sighs. “I would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what’s hidden at the bottom.”
The sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning sl
owly, so the island’s behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea.
And it is this place, as one tiny, barely-visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe.
Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.
twenty-eight
The next day, the city is solemn. Makeshift black bunting decorates many of the shop windows, and all around us is evidence of the attack, not just in the hole in my apartment or the scorch marks from other explosions, but also from the trash on the ground—no androids sweeping the streets; the lack of street vendors; the chaos in Central Gardens, where all the android vendors have been disabled. People mill around the central plaza, waiting for harried city workers to issue tickets for lift access.
Public access stairs are through a small gift shop at the edge of the plaza. Two men dressed in black military uniforms check cuffLINKs of people going to the stairs—many more people than usual are using them today, since the lifts are such a nightmare. One of the men stops me when he notices my green band, identifying me as a Maltese native.
“Why are you going to the lower city?” he asks gruffly.
I put on my most sympathetic face. “My mom works in Comino Casino,” I lie. “She’s been told she’s going to have a pull an all-nighter tonight since their androids are disabled.”
The military man shrugs. “Sorry for it, but there’s no reason for you to go down there. We’re trying to limit the access in the lower city. People should stay in their homes as much as possible.”
“But she needs her medicine!” I say. “She can’t work all night without it.” My hands grope in my pockets. I always keep a few mopheme pills on me in case Mom has an attack outside of her bedroom. It’s rare, but it’s happened before.
The military man snatches the small bottle out of my hand and scans the label. His face pales. “Your mother has Hebb’s Disease?” he asks gently.
I nod. The tears that spring into my eyes are genuine. I can think of nothing in the world worse than other people’s pity.
“I’m sorry,” the military man says, handing me back the bottle. “Go on ahead.”
I dart through the door, pocketing the pills and racing to the stairs. There are a lot more people here than I expected—the stairwell is dusty and dank from disuse, but people’s voices echo and footsteps thunder. After this morning’s attack, the tourists just want to get back to their hotels in the lower city.
The upper city rises nearly four hundred and fifty meters over the sea—about the same height as the recreation of the Empire State Building in Nouveau York. The largest tower in Triumph Towers is taller than that, even—standing in the observation deck at the top of that tower puts you nearly a thousand meters above sea level, so tall that you can see the coastline of Africa to the south if you use the metered telescopes or download amplifications to your eye bots. They say that the glittering tops of Triumph Towers are visible from the shores of Sicily.
Anyway, even though the lower city is so far below, going down the stairs to reach it isn’t impossible. But I can’t have gone more than halfway before my legs start screaming at me to take a break. All around me, tourists and others with me on this climb down are sitting on the steps, sprawled out and panting. I push through. I need answers.
The stairwell itself is built into one of the pillars that supports the bridge of the upper city, and while there are a few windows every other story or so, they do little more than filter in light from the solar glass ceiling of the lower city. While the top of the stairwell smelled of dust, I’m overwhelmed now by the scent of sweat. My t-shirt clings to my body, and I wish the Mediterranean was clean enough for me to jump right into it when I finally reach the bottom. As I spill out of the door and onto the docking station, I glance behind at the hundreds of stairs I just went down.
I really, really hope the lifts are fixed by the time I’m done with Jack, because there’s no way in hell I’m going back up those stairs to get home.
The stairwell deposits me on the western side of the docking platform, and the giant screen behind the platform flashes a constant stream of news, close-up images of victims before they were hurt or killed, analysts trying to figure out how the government will respond, mournful testimony from witnesses.
And, every few seconds, a picture of Estella Belles. No one’s said yet that this is the daughter of a representative—that would be huge news, but it’s glossed over. I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the plan. Keep the little girl who died in the attack anonymous, keep her hidden. She could be any little girl. She could be yours.
Isn’t that what terrorism is? Making people feel terror? It’s all manipulation. Like war propaganda.
The lower city is far emptier than it was earlier. I imagine most people are going home—although flights and boats are delayed—but there are some people milling about the docking station, heading into the false façade of the city. Vacations are not to be interrupted. There’s still time for shopping.
I pick up my pace, and by the time I reach the main plaza, I’m jogging. It’s weird to see no androids. There have always been fewer androids in the lower city—tourists want an authentic experience—but it’s strange to see none.
Mechanical pigeons fill the empty spaces once occupied by the androids and the emptying crowds of tourists. The UC has many ways to track the safety of its citizens. There are cameras high above us, in the solar glass ceiling. Recording devices smaller than the eye can see are in every single streetlamp. And, of course, there’s a tracker in my own cuff. The government knows where I am at all times. The mechanical pigeons are designed to make the city feel like Old Venice, but their eyes record everything they see, another cog in the UC’s attempt at security. They’re more focused than typical trackers and scanners. If there looks like trouble—a too-big crowd, a disturbance, a series of thefts—the mechanical pigeons flock to the area. Their presence is just as much a threat as their recording devices. They are a perpetual reminder that the government is watching.
I slow to a walk. A dozen, two dozen—forty mechanical pigeons all twist their metal necks to look at me. I think the pigeons on the roof far above me are real, but none of these are. They’re watching. Recording. Me.
I try to tell myself I’m being paranoid. With the recent attack, of course there’s more security. But their reflective eyes are zeroed in on me, and I can’t shake them.
I curse under my breath. I’ve not done anything wrong… but I have a feeling Jack has. Not only is he a deserter, but if he’s tied with the terrorists that made the androids explode, then he’s a serious threat. And I don’t want the government to get to him before I can, and I certainly don’t want the government to think I’m involved with him if he is the terrorist I think he might be.
I slip into the nearest building. A glassblower is giving a demonstration to a small group of tourists who apparently don’t mind that the entire android system in Malta is down right now. It’s amazing how quickly people can ignore the threats of the outside world by simply pretending they don’t exist.
I can’t help but look at them in disgust. How can they just… stand here? It seems so wrong.
One of the tourists, a woman, seems to feel my contemptuous gaze on her, and she turns around to look at me. Our eyes meet. And I see within her a fear that belies her actions. Her hand drops to a young boy’s shoulder—her son. She holds him tight—tight enough to make him squirm away.
She knows about the attack. Of course she does; by this point, everyone does. But she has to keep pushing through, she has to keep living her life. She has to pretend, for her son. Maybe if she just pretends hard enough, she can make herself believe this world is still safe for him.
I d
uck my head and leave the demonstration room. It’s connected to a gift shop—of course it is—and I bypass the tourists to go through the shop. There are a few pieces here that are real art—swirling twists of colored sparkling crystal. But there are shelves and shelves of the same thing: a glass rose, a glass horse, a miniature glass version of Triumph Towers. This is what most people buy, and all of this was made in the factories on the southern tip of Malta, far away from the tourists’ eyes, cranked out by androids and machines.
“Hey,” one of the shopkeepers says as I rush past her, barely missing the shelf of breakable figurines as I head to the exit. I step outside in time to see three mechanical pigeon heads twist toward me, then I slip into the next shop. Several women sit in chairs by the windows, tatting delicate lace. Another show for the tourists—the stuff on the tables in this shop is all factory-made.
“You don’t sell jumblers, do you?” I ask the manager, bumping my hip painfully against the corner of one of the display tables as I maneuver around the crowded show room.
The manager raises her eyebrow.
“I just… I’m trying to meet this guy, and I don’t want my mom to know,” I add, casting my eyes down and hoping that I look romantic. One of the great disadvantages of cuffs is that parents have access to the geo-locator until you’re of legal age. My mother would hardly care to look, but it’s a good excuse.
The manager’s lips quirk up. “I can’t sell those; they’re illegal,” she says, moving behind a counter. She opens a panel behind the display case and slides out a thin tray hidden under a black cloth. “Even if I could sell them, they’d be crazy expensive,” she adds, lifting the cloth and showing an array of jumblers. I point to one of the cheaper ones, one that will only scramble the geo-location services of my cuff. The manager types a number into her scanner—250 credits—and then slips the jumbler to me. Without another word, she slides the tray back into its hidden compartment, and I slip out the back exit of the store.