Ink, Inc: a disturbing sci-fi novel

Chapter One

Taking Care

The shock zipped through his body, and Lukas awoke with the sheets clenched in his fists and a vice of panic around his lungs.

He rolled off his bunk and the buzzing in his skull stopped. He staggered across the concrete toward the rows of lockers. His heart hammered his ribs as he fumbled with the handle, wrenched the locker open and snatched up a pill bottle in a trembling hand. He wiped the grit out of his eyes and checked the label.

It was Sleep. He dropped the bottle and examined another.

This one was Awake. He would need that soon, but not now. It would make his anxiety worse.

Groans and sighs echoed around the dormitory as the others awoke. Sheets rustled. Rungs tolled under bare feet. Neon tubes sputtered and hummed, illuminating endless rows of bunk beds, stacked five-high. A few people stayed in bed, brows twisted, hands over their ears as though that would stop the fizzing in their heads.

There! Lukas prised open the bottle of Relax and dry-swallowed two of the powdery green tablets. He rubbed his eyes again, and sorted through the other containers. He took a Soothe to uncoil his stiff muscles, an Energise to top up vitamins and minerals, a Balance to offset the nausea from the Soothe, and a Care. Then he closed his locker and leaned against it, eyes closed, sucking in deep breaths as he waited for the chemicals to filter into his bloodstream. It was dangerous to take more than one Care, but he kept the bottle in his hand, just in case.

Someone pushed him aside. ‘Move, freak.’

Lukas shuffled sideways so the other boy – a hulking youth named Howard Gieve – could open his own locker. He opened his eyes a crack and watched Howard swallow an Awake and a Content. Hopefully the mood stabiliser would make him less aggressive.

As always, Lukas worried that the Care wouldn’t work. What if he had built up a resistance? What if he did something terrible before it kicked in? But the Relax was already dulling these concerns. His heart slowed. His breaths eased. He was increasingly certain that everything would be all right.

‘Are you okay?’

Lukas turned to see a girl with wide, clear eyes, a slightly bent nose and muscular arms crossed over her thin tank top. Her teeth were crooked and stubby. Lukas had never seen her before – she must be a recent transfer. According to her SIM, her name was Abbey Cane. She was staring at the droplets of cold sweat which clung to his brow.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Lukas said.

Abbey saw the bottle of Care in his hand. The colour drained from her cheeks.

‘I didn’t mean to bother you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go.’

She fled before Lukas could think of anything else to say.

Some of the teenagers were already on their way to the lifts. Almost everyone else was at the lockers, taking their supplements. Only one bunk was still occupied. Ben Wade was curled up beneath the sheet, valiantly ignoring the burning alarm. Only his stubby fingers were visible.

When Lukas was transferred to Mine R808, only Ben had bothered to speak to him. When the others saw his Care supply and started hurling accusations and fists, Ben hadn’t joined them.

‘Ben,’ Lukas whispered. ‘It’s 5:07.’

Ben didn’t open his eyes.

‘They’ll incentivise you.’ Even through the haze from the Relax, a little anxiety built up in Lukas’ chest. ‘You have to get up.’

Ben didn’t react. Lukas pulled off the sheet, and gripped Ben’s shoulder. ‘Ben!’

‘Lukas Taleb.’ The voice filled the dormitory, coming from speakers hidden in the shadows of each corner.

‘Ben’s sick,’ Lukas said.

‘You are eight minutes behind schedule,’ the voice continued. The patchwork of pre-recorded syllables had a disjointed melody. ‘Please proceed to…’

‘Ben’s sick,’ Lukas said again. ‘He needs to go to the first aid room.’

‘Ben Wade was pronounced dead at 2:49,’ the voice said. ‘He is scheduled for recycling.’

Lukas looked down in shock at Ben’s grey lips, his stiff limbs.

His throat was dry. ‘How?’

‘You are nine minutes behind schedule,’ the voice said. ‘Please proceed to the lifts to avoid incentivisation.’

Lukas should have stayed. He owed Ben that much.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

Then he ran toward the lifts.

***

The lift was big enough for five people, but was usually expected to hold ten. Today Lukas was the only occupant. He hoped he weighed enough to trigger it.

Poor Ben. Miners occasionally died – sometimes they ran out of air in the deepest tunnels, sometimes they were killed by falling rocks, and it wasn’t unheard of for them to die of exhaustion. But why did it have to be Ben?

The neon lights flickered above Lukas’ head. Gears rattled, chains clanked, and the lift began to descend. Lukas exhaled and unwrapped his Full. He wasn’t hungry, but it would be dangerous to work on an empty stomach. He needed the energy.

Most people would take a Taste before eating. The glycoproteins would stick to his tongue and make the bitter block seem sweet. But Lukas didn’t feel like he deserved that luxury. He took a bite out of the Full and tried not to gag.

After the first swallow, he could feel the fats insulating his body from the gnawing cold. The carbohydrates pushed some energy into his system, the proteins rebuilt his aching muscles, the minerals spiced his blood. A hefty dose of Vitamin D made up for the fact that he probably hadn’t seen the sun since he was a baby, if he ever had.

He stretched. Nothing like reconstituted food to make a guy feel human again.

The lift fell faster and faster. Lukas gripped the hand rail to stop his feet from lifting off the floor.

He knew he should be thinking about Ben, mourning him, but he couldn’t get Abbey Cane’s face out of his head. The way she had looked at him after she saw the Care.

Seeing himself through someone else’s eyes made the guilt even worse. Being stared at like a monster in a zoo made him feel like one.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He had to stop thinking about Abbey. If she got curious and checked his feed, he didn’t want her to see that she had been on his mind. That would scare her even more.

He focused on his breathing. Pictured the darkness inside his lungs, and imagined himself within them, standing on the spongy flesh, feeling the warm air swirl around his body. His exhalations roared like the wind tunnels near the surface.

He felt heavier. The lift must be decelerating. He opened his eyes and stared at the grimy doors, ready to face the glares behind them.

They are right to hate me, he told himself.

The lift arrived with a cheery ding. The doors rumbled aside, and Lukas stepped out.

No one was here. Lukas stood alone before ten black tunnels, sucking in lungfuls of thin, still air. A single backpack lay on the dirt, barely visible in the gloom.

He checked the clock in his SIM. 5:11. Wow. It was a wonder he hadn’t been incentivised yet. Was someone running even later than him?

Ben. Of course. The motivation system probably hadn’t been updated. Ben’s SIM would be zapping his dead brain over and over, encouraging him to get moving. To avoid getting zapped himself, Lukas would have to make sure he was ahead of someone else before the system was refreshed.

The letters R808G were stamped on the backpack. Lukas wasn’t surprised that this was the only one left. G was the deepest, darkest mine in the R808 complex, with thick layers of earth and stone packed impenetrably tight over the few remaining deposits of ore. Oxygen lapses were common. Miners had to inject themselves with Breathe just to stay alive.

Lukas picked up the backpack and ran into the entrance, bare feet sliding on the dusty rock. He sprinted through the darkness until he reached the cage, jumped in and slammed the door, so hard that the floor swayed disconcertingly beneath him. Then he pulled the dented steel lever.

The cage lurched downward into the shaft, stopped, and then started again. The pulley groaned up above as Lukas sank deeper and deeper until the last traces of light from up above were gone.

***

The cage hit the ground with a boom. The other miners ignored it. Lukas couldn’t see them, but he could tell from their feeds that they were Michael Miller and Cesan Lightfoot.

‘Why should they?’ Cesan was saying. Her mouth was half-full. Lukas could hear the resin handle of the pickaxe sliding against her leathery hands.

‘Because we’re only down here twenty hours a day,’ Michael replied. His voice was thin and scratchy, punctuated by ragged breaths. ‘We sleep for the other six. A machine could dig for twenty-six hours a day. It could break through the rocks, it could filter out the…’

‘You’re missing the point. What’s in it for the company? Why build that machine?’

‘Because it would bring them more ore per day. More ore means more ink. More ink means more money for the overflowing coffers of the great Ink, Incorporated.’

‘Wrong,’ Cesan said. ‘If they produce more ink, that will drive the price down. Don’t you know anything about economics?’

‘No one else sells it. Price competition isn’t an issue.’

‘Huh.’ Cesan sounded impressed. ‘Good point.’

Michael accepted the compliment in silence.

Lukas sniffed the air. Satisfied that there was enough oxygen to start work, he positioned his Breathe syringe where he could get to it fast, and pulled a pick out of the backpack. He walked past the other two miners to a clear spot and swung it.

The grip shuddered against his hands. He could tell from the sound that the rock hadn’t broken. He swung it again.

‘Still,’ Cesan said, ‘why would they want more ink than they could sell?’

‘Because if they had a surplus, they could assign us to something else.’

‘Like what? The wasters are already overstaffed.’

‘How do you know?’ Michael asked. He switched on his torch and examined something on the ground.

‘I just heard it somewhere.’

‘When I get out of here, I’m going to invent a digging machine. I’ll be rich.’

‘That’s not how it works up there,’ Cesan said. ‘You’ll design a digging machine, you’ll print it out. Then millions of other people will print it out. Everyone will have a digging machine, you won’t be any richer, and they still won’t let people like us use it down here, because they have no reason to make our lives easier.’

‘I still think…’

‘Oh, shut it. We’re going to fall behind.’

Lukas swung the pick again. The rock finally cracked. He swept the shards aside, and chipped away at the dirt beneath. He could tell from the sound that the metal content was too low to be useful. He kept digging.

Abbey Cane’s face popped into his head again. He shut his eyes to banish her, but in the darkness of the tunnel, the technique didn’t really work.

He could feel Cesan and Michael reading the feed from his SIM, wondering why he was thinking about Abbey. In the reflected light from Michael’s torch, Lukas saw them share a meaningful glance.

He gritted his teeth, dug some Focus out of his backpack and dry-swallowed them.

Moments later, he forgot about Abbey. He was still aware of Michael and Cesan, but they didn’t seem important. The only significant things were his hands, his pick and the dirt beneath his feet.

He dug and dug, ignoring his stiff back, his burning arms, the gulps of stifling air. He reached a viable deposit of ore, carved it out of the ground, and switched on his torch. The dim glow showed that he had dug all of it out. He dragged the deposit over to the rickety cart, dragged the cart into the cage, and sent it up to the top. Then he returned to the hole, switched off the torch so the LEDs didn’t drain the thin-film battery, and kept digging.

By the time the Focus started to wear off, he had sent up seven carts worth of ore. Five hours had passed. He stood straight up, stretching out his spine, and uncurled his sore fingers.

Something tingled inside his skull.

‘No!’ he cried. He grabbed the pick and slammed it into the dirt, desperate to get to another deposit. Too late.

The buzzing filled his head and stung his nerves, as though a nest of wasps had been teleported into his brain. He clawed at his ears, knowing that it wouldn’t help. The pressure grew until he felt like his skull would burst.

The pain vanished suddenly, leaving Lukas’ heart pounding and his breaths ragged.

A hand clamped over his face. He exhaled through his nose, tasting dirt and sweat.

‘You’ll use up our air, freak,’ Cesan hissed.

Lukas whirled around and grabbed her by the throat. Squeezed. The movement came so naturally that he didn’t even realise what he was doing until he saw Cesan’s eyes bulging in the dim light, her mouth stretched open in a gasp of horror.

Lukas let her go. Stepped back, heart pounding. Michael’s torch shone on his face, blinding him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t... I mean...’

The other two miners said nothing. Lukas could feel their stares. Their anger. Their fear.

He turned away, popped another Focus and kept digging.

In fifteen minutes, another incentivisation would be coming through for whoever had dug up the least ore. This time, it wouldn’t be him.

***

The beep from Lukas’ SIM was unnecessary. He had been watching his internal clock for hours. 13 AM, and sleep, was only ninety minutes away.

He jammed his pick into his backpack. This was his favourite time of the day. The work was done, the incentivisations were suspended and it was six and a half hours before he would have to get out of bed and do all this again.

Cesan and Michael shuffled into the cage. Lukas tried to follow, but they pushed him out.

‘No room,’ Michael said. He slammed the door shut, and the cage rose out of earshot.

Lukas waited in the blackness, claustrophobia gnawing at him.

Something scuffled behind him. He whirled around and clicked on the torch. The tunnel was empty. He kept the light on.

Lukas had never seen a non-human animal – they couldn’t be printed, and since the ink mining had destroyed most of their habitat, few mammals remained. But he had heard rumours of rats and worms, surviving down here in the gloom.

As much as the others hated him, he preferred their company to his own. With no one else’s voice to listen to, no one’s feed to push its way into his head, he was stuck with his own thoughts and memories. The only thing worse than the guilt was the fear that it would disappear. That he would become immune to the Care.

The empty cage rattled back down toward him. He took a last look back into the darkness, climbed in and pulled the lever.

When the cage arrived back up at the entrance to the G tunnel, Lukas was tempted to sprint. The sooner he got to the printer and grabbed his stuff for tomorrow, the sooner he would be in bed. He might be able to get an extra ten minutes of sleep on top of the mandatory five hours. But he was too tired to run. He dropped his backpack on the dirt and staggered into the lift. The grinding doors closed behind him.

Lukas leaned against the scratched steel wall. Maybe Ben had died of exhaustion. Lukas felt that he wasn’t far from that right now.

The lift arrived at the printing room. Lukas walked through the plastic archway, felt his SIM beep and heard the giant machinery start manufacturing his equipment for the following day. He joined the queue of soggy teenagers, shivering as he plodded forward through the soapy spray from the pipes in the ceiling. The girl in front of him was smeared with wet dirt. Brown water trickled down her clothes and pooled around her bare feet. Lukas scrubbed his arms with his palms in a futile attempt to get warm.

The line shrank as one person after another disappeared into the dispensary cubicle. Lukas rolled his head from side to side, neck joints creaking.

The girl in front stepped into the dispensary. The door slid closed, blocking Lukas’view as she peeled off her stained clothes. Aware that she could hear his thoughts, he concentrated on his numb toes.

By the time the door opened, the girl was gone. Lukas stepped inside, stripped off his clothes, and tossed them into the disposal chute. Hot air blasted him from all sides. Droplets fled down his body and crawled into the drain. His hair was still fairly short, so he didn’t pull the clipper helmet down onto his scalp.

Behind the plexiglass panel, hundreds of needles swivelled back and forth, leaving tiny beads of metal or sodium or rubber. Objects grew beneath them, mysterious until half-formed – drill bits, tank tops, power cables. Dabs of caffeine and CX-1739 were hardened into Awake pills. Oxytocin and methylone were squirted into the mysterious dark fluid which would soon be made into Care.

Lukas’ equipment was already waiting in the vending tray. Pills for tomorrow, a block of Full and a fresh set of clothes. He pulled them on, noting a small tear in the waistband of the shorts. Today the clothes had been washed, not reprinted. He slapped the door on the far side of the cubicle and waited for it to open.

He was last, just as he had been all day. The others must already be in the dorm room. Lukas shuffled over to the deserted bathroom, where he squeezed some toothpaste out of the dispenser, swilled it around in his mouth and spat it into the sink. The mirror was tiny – designed to show small parts, but not a whole person. Lukas stooped to look at his teeth, grinning alone in the cement wall. No dirt remained.

Seeing even this small part of his face made him uneasy. He always had the unnerving sense that the boy in the mirror was someone else. It didn’t help that he mostly saw himself in other people’s feeds, and each of them perceived him slightly differently. Some saw him as short and weedy, others thought him looming. His skin was varying shades of brown, his eyes a gradient of grey to blue.

He just rinsed his mouth, used the toilet and left the bathroom. He staggered back into the lift and waited for it to register his presence.

Just as he was resigning himself to sleeping on the floor of the lift, it lurched downward. Lukas shut his eyes and thought about clean sheets and a firm mattress.

The lift approached the dormitory. Lukas felt the muffled ranting of several dozen feeds. Why was everyone still awake?

The doors opened.

A forest of hands reached in and grabbed him.

***

Lukas cried out as he was dragged from the lift. His clothes tore around his body, leaving him mostly naked. The concrete floor scraped his skin.

‘Do it!’ someone hissed. ‘Do it quick!’

He tried to cover his face, but both his wrists were caught in crushing grips. A fist hit the side of his jaw with tremendous force, splitting his cheek against his teeth.

‘Stay down, killer.’ He recognised Howard Gieve’s voice.

Lukas rarely listened to SIM feeds intentionally – the river of images and sensations flowed too fast for clarity. But today he could hear some actual words in the consciousnesses around him.

He murdered Ben, Howard thought.

He’s picked his next victim, Cesan thought. A picture of Abbey Cane floated through her mind.

Kill him before he kills us, Michael thought.

Lukas’ heart thumped against his ribs. ‘I didn’t kill Ben! I don’t want to hurt anyone!’

Either they didn’t believe him, or they didn’t care. A steel bed post, hard and square, was handed to Howard. He lifted it above Lukas’ head.

Lukas’ desperation gave him strength. Still dizzy from the punch to his head, he rolled sideways wildly, twisting free of his captors.

‘Grab him, grab him!’ someone yelled.

Lukas spun on the floor, kicked a nearby ankle and heard it snap. The shockwave of pain from the victim’s feed rippled through the crowd, giving Lukas time to scramble to his feet.

He found himself opposite Howard, trapped within a circle of the other miners. Howard hefted the bed post again.

‘Please,’ Lukas said. ‘Don’t do this.’

Howard hesitated, uncertainty and fear on his face. This had probably sounded like a good idea. But could he really crush a human skull with a steel bar?

Lukas hoped not. But he knew what it was like to have a monster beneath the surface, and how suddenly it could take control.

His guts clenched. What if, while sleepwalking, he really had killed Ben?

The thought was ludicrous – Ben would have struggled, Lukas would have woken up – but as soon as it crossed his mind, Howard’s eyes widened and his grip tightened on the bed post.

A voice Lukas recognised as Abbey Cane’s shouted from the back of the room: ‘Kill him!’

Howard swung the bed post.

Lukas ducked. The steel whipped over his head and flattened the nose of whoever had been standing behind him. A spray of blood spattered the onlookers.

Half the crowd tried to back away while the other half pushed forward. Howard swung again, this time downward. Lukas sidestepped, but the post clipped his shoulder, popping the joint out of place. He howled, lost his balance, and collapsed to the floor.

Howard pressed the point of the post into Lukas’ throat. Lukas grabbed it just as Howard leaned on it, his arms quivering as they took Howard’s weight. His dislocated shoulder made it hard. If his grip slipped, the post would punch straight through his neck.

‘Someone get his arms!’ Howard roared.

Michael shoved through the crowd. Lukas’ biceps burned. He was going to die.

Maybe that was what he deserved. He could never make up for what he had done. There was no one he could apologise to. No one to repay, no one from whom he could seek forgiveness.

Michael grabbed his hands and tried to prise them off the bedpost.

At least there would be no more nightmares. No more guilt.

Lukas couldn’t hold on anymore. His hands slipped off the bedpost–

And Howard pitched over sideways. Lukas gasped through his bruised throat as the weight of the bed post was lifted.

Michael boggled at Howard, and then he too fell to the floor, shivering. All around the room, people were screaming and moaning and falling into limp, twitching piles. Then Lukas felt it – the tingling, the buzzing, the stinging.

He gritted his teeth against the growing pressure. If he blacked out, and the others woke before him, he would be strangled in his sleep.

‘Stay awake,’ he told himself. ‘Stay awake!’

The pain grew and grew, like a wrecking ball tearing through the soft flesh of his brain.

‘Stay awake!’ he screamed.

Then darkness crept in from the edges of his vision and swallowed him whole.

Chapter Two

Wasted

‘You,’ the fat man said, ‘have caused me a great deal of trouble.’

Lukas had been shackled to this iron chair for eight hours while he waited for the fat man to show up. He had begged the guards outside to bring him his Care, but they pretended not to hear him. In their feeds, he heard the echoes of their orders: No-one talks to him but me. Understood?

The fat man was thinner than when Lukas first met him, but compared to the skinny, muscled bodies Lukas saw every day, he still seemed like a huge, pale jellyfish. His jacket was closed around his belly by two neat buttons. His chin hung over his flat grey collar. His trousers had been pressed so firmly that Lukas suspected he could cut himself on the creases. He no longer wore a wedding ring.

‘Two miners are in the infirmary,’ the fat man went on. ‘It will be days before they can return to work. One of them – the one who can still talk – says you attacked him with a bed post. The rest of the miners have corroborated this.’

His feed was filled with numbers, multiplying as they marched across a three dimensional spreadsheet. They revealed nothing of his thoughts.

Even knowing it wasn’t his fault, Lukas felt guilty under the fat man’s stare.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need my Care. I should have had my last dose hours ago.’

‘The mine is very carefully balanced.’ The fat man leaned against the wall. Then he looked down, grimaced and stepped away, batting at his sooty sleeve. ‘Not enough pressure,’ he said, ‘and the kids wouldn’t be tough enough to survive on the surface. Too much, and they wouldn’t live long enough to see it.’ He glared at Lukas. ‘Fractured ankles and broken noses is too much pressure.’

He sounded as though he had rehearsed this speech. Perhaps that was how he could talk without thinking.

Life on the surface was a mystery to Lukas. The firewall stopped the workers looking up feeds from outside the mine. On any other day, he would have asked the fat man what it was like up there, and why the miners had to be so tough to survive it – but today he had bigger problems.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Arrest me. Lock me up forever. Just please, let me have my pills.’

The fat man’s lip twitched. ‘I’m not an enforcer. I work for Ink, Inc. I don’t have the power to arrest you.’

‘Then why was it you who showed up? I mean, three years ago.’

The fat man ignored his question. Numbers danced in his head. Lukas had never met anyone so good at keeping secrets. He wondered if that was why the fat man wasn’t married any more.

Whack! The fat man hit him – a meaty slap that left his cheek stinging.

Lukas loosened his jaw. The fat man’s hand was soft compared to those of the boys who had hit him the previous night.

‘But I do have the power to transfer you,’ the fat man continued, as though nothing had happened. ‘Which is lucky, because if you went back to Mine R808, the others would probably kill you. I’m concerned about similar situations arising in other mines. You’re not especially likeable.’

Lukas’ face became hot. The fat man’s level voice made it sound like a fact rather than an opinion.

‘But your four thousand days aren’t up yet.’ The fat man yawned, revealing the glittering wireless receiver buried in one of his molars. Perhaps he had been woken up for this. ‘So you’re being transferred. From now on, you’ll be a waster.’

Lukas’ mouth fell open. He would get to visit the surface. Was this a trick?

‘I thought the wasters were full,’ he said.

‘They were. I had one transferred down to the mine to fill your spot.’

The fat man pulled a mobile device out of his pocket and fiddled with the settings. Lukas’ SIM throbbed in his skull.

‘Do you remember the terms of the deal we made on your last visit here?’ the fat man asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t talk about what you did. You don’t even think about what you did. And most of all, you do not talk or think about me. Understood?’

Lukas nodded.

‘You know what I’ll do to you, otherwise?’

The sums disappeared from the fat man’s feed. Behind them, Lukas saw a vision of himself, screaming.

He trembled, rattling his chains. ‘Yes.’

The fat man pushed one more button. A humming sound filled Lukas’ ears, and he blacked out again.

***

The departure lounge was not so much a lounge as a huge underground warehouse. People milled back and forth, guided by instructions from their SIMs. Everyone seemed bigger and older than Lukas. Some of the boys had already stopped shaving their heads. Unlike him, they weren’t being transferred. They were about to be released, their four thousand days of service complete. The air quivered with excitement.

Something hissed and roared beneath the ground. A fine haze of dust fell from the ceiling. A row of small hatches popped open in the floor on one side of the warehouse. Teenagers hugged each other, waved goodbye and climbed down out of sight. Lukas waited for a notification that one of the departing pods was his, but there was nothing. A warning beep echoed through the warehouse, and then the hatches slammed closed.

A pair of girls lay on the concrete floor, at risk of getting trampled, giddy with the freedom to rest in the middle of the day. Nearby, a boy sobbed while a girl stroked his head and whispered in his ear.

Lukas scanned the crowd for miners from R808. But as far as he knew, none were due for release. He was probably safe.

He kept one hand in his bag, wrapped around the bottle of Care. It soothed his nerves to have it so close.

With another gasping, rumbling sound, another batch of pods arrived. The hatches above them clicked and swung open. Lukas’ SIM chirped. He pushed through the crowd toward his hatch. ‘Excuse me,’ he muttered. ‘Excuse me.’

When he peered down into the hole, the pod looked impossibly cramped. Would he even fit?

There was no time to think about it. The warning beep sounded. Lukas jumped down into the pod and lay down on the hard rubber floor. The hatch closed above him, leaving him in absolute blackness. His muffled breaths echoed around the chamber. Cold steel walls pressed against both his shoulders. With his feet resting on one end of the pod, his head touched the padding at the other. The pod must have been printed specifically for him, or for someone of identical height and size.

The pod accelerated smoothly through the tube, compressed air pushing from one end and a vacuum pulling at the other. A synthesised voice spoke in Lukas’ ear.

‘Oxygen levels critical,’ she intoned. ‘Please administer Breathe now.’

Lukas had assumed that the pods would have air recycling systems in them. The graduates had probably been informed that they would need a supply of Breathe, but no one had told him. Perhaps the fat man had forgotten. Or maybe he had hoped Lukas would suffocate in this airtight coffin – although he had gone to surprising lengths to keep him alive so far.

Lukas had packed a Breathe, but his hand was trapped beneath his bag. As he tried to lift his arm, he accidentally pushed the bag out of reach toward his feet. He tried to sit up and grab it, but there was no room.

‘Oxygen levels critical,’ the voice said again. ‘Please administer Breathe now.’

Desperate now, Lukas raised his knees as far as they would go, shifting the bag back toward his grasping hands. He grabbed it, fumbling with the zip and digging for the Breathe. He found the syringe, popped the cap, tapped the needle and rolled up his sleeve.

Unable to find the veins in the darkness, he clenched his fist as tight as he could. The air was already thin and hollow. No matter how much he filled his lungs, his dizziness never abated.

There. A ridge stood up inside his elbow. He pushed the needle through his skin and depressed the plunger.

Molecules of oxygen, coated in a protective layer of fat, swirled into his bloodstream. For a moment he thought it hadn’t worked. He still felt sick. He couldn’t raise his head.

Then his heart rate slowed, his shivering limbs steadied. His lungs still strained at the empty air, but he no longer needed them. His blood was oxygenated enough to last the trip.

He rested his head against the thin rubber pillow. Soon he would be on the surface.

***

He arrived in a warehouse much like the one he had left, except that the pillars were narrower. They didn’t have to support to weight of a kilometre of rock. A truck, black and square, idled near a closed roller-door on the far side of the warehouse. Rows of dark glass panels were set into the ceiling. Skylights? Or just lights, currently switched off?

Lukas stared up at them for a while, desperate to figure out whether or not this was his first glimpse of the sky.

The room was full of people, standing perfectly still, mouths open, eyes wide, all facing different directions. It took Lukas a moment to work out what had hypnotised them.

The firewall. They were outside it. They had access to everything. Trillions of memories from billions of people were suddenly available.

One boy seemed to be amazed by rooftops. The idea of standing on top of something, high above the ground with nothing over his head was too much to for his brain to take.

The one nearest Lukas – a girl with bare feet and scarred hands – was stuck in a loop. Her SIM was full of Where do I go? Anywhere you want. But what do I do? Anything you want. But... where do I go?

And soon Lukas got sucked in. In his mind, he saw costumes of every conceivable shape and colour. Beds five times as wide as his bunk in the mine. Museums full of strange objects from hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. Deep, dark canals, so long that one end wasn’t visible from the other. The ocean, impossibly wide and flat–

The trunk beeped. Lukas had never heard the sound before, but almost immediately knew it was a horn.

He jogged over to it as the rear doors opened, revealing a tall girl in elastane underclothes.

‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘We’re behind schedule.’

Lukas took a last look at the zombified occupants of the warehouse and climbed into the back of the truck.

‘I’m Jemima.’ The girl pointed. ‘Here’s your uniform.’

The outfit lay at his feet like a shadow, staring back at him through tinted goggles.

Lukas heard the warehouse door opening. The truck lurched into motion, probably on autopilot.

‘You going to put it on, or what?’ Jemima asked.

Lukas looked up at her. Her head nearly touched the roof of the truck. Her frame was roped with veiny muscles. If she turned on him like the miners had done, he wouldn’t last long.

‘What happened with the miners?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ Lukas said. ‘Why do I need a mask?’

‘All wasters wear masks.’

‘Yeah, but why?’

‘It’s got breathing apparatus built in,’ Jemima said. ‘A lot of what we collect will be emitting toxic fumes. And people don’t like seeing our faces – hence the goggles.’

‘Why don’t they like –’

‘Will you just put the damn suit on?’

Lukas pulled the padded trousers on over his shorts, and buckled the torso piece across his chest. The mask swallowed his head, and he could hear his own breath wheezing in his ears. But the glass of the goggles didn’t seem so dark from this side.

He turned to face Jemima, and gasped. She had attached her mask while he was distracted, and now loomed over him like a giant black praying mantis.

‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.

Her voice was uncomfortably loud in Lukas’ ears.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Good. Don’t try to talk to anyone else. They won’t be able to hear you, even if you can hear them.’

She rolled up the door of the truck. Lukas saw the outside world spread out before him for the first time. He crept over to the edge and looked out at the cracked asphalt. Parked cars shone under fizzing street lamps. When he looked up, he was stunned by the towering skyscrapers and the twinkling stars between them. The sight, beautiful and terrifying, left him dizzy. He staggered back into the truck. Back in the warehouse, he’d downloaded second-hand glimpses of the outside world to his SIM, but they couldn’t compare to the real thing.

‘Wow,’ he said. He could feel a tide of giggles struggling to break out.

Jemima clapped him on the back. ‘You can enjoy the sights while we work,’ she said. ‘Let’s go collect some garbage.’

They clambered off the back of the truck. Lukas wasn’t accustomed to wearing shoes. He marvelled at the crunching sounds they made.

I’m outside, he thought. Outside!

Jemima pointed at the nearest skyscraper. ‘This building’s ours. We’ll start on the roof and work our way down. We have twelve hours – and then another four at the refinery.’

‘I thought we finished at 10am?’

‘Like I said. Sixteen hours total.’

Lukas frowned. ‘Your time settings must be off. It’s 6pm now.’

‘We have twenty-four hour days on the surface, not twenty-six. No such thing as thirteen o’clock. You’ll get used to it.’

Only sixteen hours of work per day? Lukas couldn’t believe his luck.

‘Don’t get too confident,’ Jemima said. ‘That building has ninety floors. We’ll need every minute of those twelve hours.’

She jogged over to the skyscraper. Lukas followed her. Ignoring the polished glass entrance, Jemima slipped into an alleyway beside the building. There were no streetlights down here.

‘Watch your step,’ she said. ‘The street wasters won’t be here until midnight, so we don’t have a clear path.’

Her warning came too late. Lukas had already stepped on a scattering of batteries which rolled under his feet. He lost his balance, but grabbed the brickwork of the building with his calloused miner’s hands, and didn’t fall. The batteries skittered away into a pile of wilting papers and rotting food.

Jemima stopped when she reached a dented fire door. She hauled it open, revealing a dank stairwell.

‘Up you go,’ she said.

‘No lift?’ Lukas asked.

‘The lift is for adults.’

Ninety floors. Lukas sighed, stepped into the stairwell, and started climbing. Jemima followed him, and the door shut behind them with a boom.

***

1820 steps. Lukas pushed the fire door open, legs and lungs burning, and stepped out onto a flat square of dusty concrete, separated from the jagged city skyline by a safety rail.

Lukas stared at the distant buildings. He’d never tried to focus his eyes on something so far away.

‘The wind carries things up here,’ Jemima said, picking up some crumpled glossy papers and stuffing them into a bag. ‘Once we have them all, we can go inside.’

Lukas approached the rail and gawked at the drop. It must be hundreds of metres down to the street below. He backed away, suddenly afraid that he might jump.

‘We don’t have much time,’ Jemima said. ‘Get to work.’

Lukas picked up a spindly plastic thing – like an artificial tumbleweed – and dropped it into his bag. He found scraps of rubber, lumps of ash and empty bottles. The wind couldn’t have blown the bottles up here without shattering them, so people must come up here from time to time. Then he saw the woman.

She lay on her back in the shadows near the fire door, staring up at the night sky, her flabby limbs bare on the cold concrete. A bundled up jacket was tucked beneath her bald head. She spoke to Lukas without looking at him.

‘Have you ever looked up there?’ she asked. ‘Really looked?’

Lukas glanced up at the stars.

‘Don’t engage with her,’ Jemima warned him. ‘Just act like she’s not there.’

‘They’re just so quiet,’ the woman said, not hearing her. ‘Not up close – up close they’d burn your eardrums out – but from down here, you can’t hear a thing.’

It was like a spider made of ice was crawling down Lukas’ spine.

Jemima grabbed him by the back of the neck. ‘I said don’t engage.’

She dragged him back inside through the fire door and dropped him next to her full bag of garbage.

‘Listen, squirt,’ she said. ‘I know it’s your first day. But I am not going to let us fall behind. You did have incentivisations down in the mines, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, we have them up here, too. So you’d better start doing exactly what I say, as soon as I say it, because I am not going to get shocked because of you. Have you got that?’

Lukas nodded.

‘Have you got that?’ Jemima asked again.

‘Yes.’

Jemima started walking down the stairs. Lukas followed.

‘What was wrong with her?’ he asked.

He expected Jemima to tell him to shut up, but she didn’t.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Drugs, maybe.’

‘Why would drugs make her act like that?’ he asked.

‘Not the kind of drugs we take. Up here, they print and swallow drugs for fun. Some chemicals make people fascinated with boring things, like the sky.’

‘I think the sky is amazing.’

Jemima pushed open the next door, revealing a dim corridor with carpeted walls and polished doors. ‘In a few years,’ she said, ‘you won’t even glance up.’

Lukas pictured the woman sprawled out on the roof. Her pupils had been dilated, but not more than the darkness warranted. Her skin hadn’t been sweaty. Lukas thought maybe the woman had just been looking for some silence.

***

A small rubbish bin stood outside each door. Lukas upended them one by one into his bag, which stretched and stretched but never seemed to break. The bins held shoes with broken heels, torn clothes, scraps of food, balls of cling wrap, torn papers and various melted, shapeless things.

His fascination with the contents faded. After the fiftieth bin, he stopped looking.

Jemima worked like a machine. She wasted not a joule of energy as she moved, tilting each bin, tapping the underside and returning it at an extraordinary pace. Lukas felt crushed by the weight of his bag, but Jemima carried hers as though it were part of her body.

Something trundled past Lukas. Flat and square, like a set of bathroom scales on wheels. The name materialised in his mind – vacuum cleaner. Jemima snatched it up and prised a panel off the underside. The motor stopped whirring.

‘It picks up anything smaller than a coaster,’ she said, ‘and compacts it.’ She pulled out a sludgy grey-brown cube, and dropped it into her bag. ‘There’s one on each floor.’

A picture of a coaster appeared in Lukas’ head. People up here had little plates just to put their cups on?

Jemima replaced the panel and put the vacuum cleaner back down. It beeped and resumed its stealthy patrol.

‘I don’t think I can carry ninety more bags this big,’ Lukas said.

‘That’s pathetic. What sort of puny weaklings are the mines churning out these days?’

Lukas blushed under his mask. ‘I…’

‘I’m kidding,’ Jemima said. ‘Here.’

She walked over to a small steel door, recessed into the wall between two apartments. She hauled it open and pushed her bag into the blackness beyond. It rustled as it plummeted down the chute.

‘Now yours,’ Jemima said.

Lukas heaved his bag into the chute and watched it disappear. Jemima pushed the steel door shut.

‘When we get to the bottom floor, we’ll take all the bags to the truck,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll take the truck to the refinery. Got it?’

Lukas nodded. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was better than the mines.

‘Got it,’ he said.

‘Ninety floors to go,’ Jemima said. ‘Let’s move.’

They returned to the stairwell, descended two flights, and entered the next floor down. Lukas tried to copy Jemima’s movements as she tipped each bin into her new bag. With practice, he found he was able to empty the bins without spilling any garbage over the sides.

A few objects too large for the bins rested on top of them. Televisions. Computers. Electric frying pans.

‘How much room is in the apartments?’ Lukas asked.

‘We don’t go in there,’ Jemima replied.

‘But it can’t be much, right? If they’re throwing these things away?’

‘That stuff probably isn’t functional. Most templates are made by amateurs, so they have errors in them. When you print the object, it doesn’t work. So the owner throws it out and goes looking for a better template.’

‘Oh.’ Lukas dropped a microwave oven into his bag.

‘And sometimes there are printing errors,’ Jemima says. ‘A wire misaligned, or a battery leaking acid. Because the printers are based on bad templates, too.’

Lukas got the feeling she enjoyed showing off her knowledge. He wondered if he could encourage her to talk more by flattering her.

‘I heard that,’ she said. ‘Get back to work.’

***

By 5:30 AM, Lukas’ body was a mess. His legs felt like iron girders. His shoulder felt like one giant bruise where the bags had rested on it. He was accustomed to swinging a pick and hauling carts of ore, but being a waster – or wasting, as Jemima called it – seemed to require a completely different set of muscles. He had taken a Focus, but that was thirty floors ago. It had long since worn off.

This is the last floor, he told himself. Five bins to go. You can do this.

He lifted, tilted, tapped, dropped, pulled. Lift, tilt, tap, drop, pull.

Lukas had seen a few other residents wandering the halls. All of them were huge, but unlike the greying fat man, most of them had hair of vivid red, shining blonde or inky black.

He was too out of breath to ask the question out loud so, with great concentration, he thought it: What do they do all day?

‘Mostly nothing,’ Jemima said. ‘They eat, they sleep, they browse feeds.’

They don’t work?

‘They don’t need to. They have pensions from their four thousand days. And all manual labour is done by us, so even if they wanted to work, what could they sell?’

Whatever they want. They have printers.

‘Yeah, but so do all their potential customers. No-one needs to buy anything except ink.’

They could sell information.

‘No. There’s too much out there for free.’

Lukas stumbled, and almost dropped his bag. When he regained his balance, he gritted his teeth and pushed on.

He had always thought that the four thousand days of service were designed to toughen people up. But if life on the surface was so easy, then why would they need to be tough?

‘Because once you’re out and you stop working,’ Jemima said, ‘your muscles melt like butter. Your bones go soft. Your brain, too. The harder you work as a teenager, the longer you survive as an adult.’

It took almost an hour to drag the garbage bags out to the truck. Lukas carried one in each hand until his arms couldn’t take it any more. After that he dragged one at a time, moving slower and slower.

Even Jemima seemed to be affected. She walked as though on a planet with more gravity than Earth.

As they loaded the last two bags into the truck, a shout stopped them.

‘Hey!’

Lukas turned to see a man staggering up the street toward them. He was thinner than the other surface dwellers, with dark rings around his eyes. His scraggly hair hung around his shoulders. He was buttoning up his stained shirt and smoothing it with his palms, as though preparing for an unexpected job interview.

‘Are you my daughter?’ he called.

‘Get in the truck,’ Jemima hissed.

She circled around to the driver’s side door, while Lukas clambered into the back with the garbage bags. Even through the mask, the smell was overpowering. He reached up to close the roller door – and then saw that the street was empty. The man had disappeared.

‘Jemima,’ he said. ‘That guy, he’s…’

Jemima screamed.

Lukas felt the shock radiating from her SIM as she was grabbed from behind and dragged backwards out of the truck. He jumped back down onto the asphalt and ran around to the driver’s side. Jemima was on the ground, her foot caught in the door. The man scrabbled at her mask, trying to release it.

‘Get off me!’ She smacked his hands away.

‘Just tell me!’ the man roared. ‘Are you my daughter?’

Lukas didn’t have time to think. He ran over and punched the man in the head.

The man snarled and whirled around. Without releasing Jemima, he swung his fist at Lukas. But he was slower than the miners had been. Lukas ducked under the blow and drove an uppercut into the man’s ribs, twice, three times. He heard something crack.

The man let go of Jemima and lashed out at Lukas with both hands. Lukas danced around him, wrapped his arm around the man’s neck and squeezed.

The man gurgled in Lukas’ grip. His flailing limbs slowed. Lukas could feel his pulse weakening.

Then he realised that Jemima was shouting at him.

‘Let him go! Lukas! Let him go!’

Lukas dropped the man, who fell to his hands and knees, wheezing.

I could have killed him, Lukas thought. It would have been so easy.

He dug the bottle of Care out of his pocket and tipped a pill into his trembling hand. He ripped off his mask, wincing at his first gasp of the polluted air, and gulped it down.

Jemima was already climbing into the truck. ‘Come on!’

Lukas ran around to the back, jumped in, and pulled the roller door shut. The truck lurched into motion beneath him.

One day down, he thought. Four hundred and thirteen to go.

***

The truck drove itself, taking Jemima and Lukas past the creaking, hissing docks, where rusting boats floated on black water. Most of these, Jemima said, were printed in ambitious moments and never unmoored from their barnacled pylons.

Lukas sat in the cabin, hands pressed against the tinted glass, eyes wide. His SIM was downloading more information than he could absorb, telling him about every single thing which slid past outside.

They drove past the desalination plant, where the massive pumps rose and fell as the ocean was sucked in, the pollutants stripped out, fluoride added, and the resulting mixture pushed into the maze of pipes which covered the metropolis and fed the thirsty population.

They drove past the nuclear power station, where super-density metals were fed into the reactor core and turned into radioactive waste which was dissolved into a molten salt and fed back into the core and so on until there was no energy left to crackle through the spider web of cables above.

They drove past the prote-ink lab, where fungi grew in the wet darkness before it was pulped for glucose and fibre and protein.

They drove past a row of haggard men propped up against the old brick walls, naked from the waist up despite the cold, begging for ink capsules from rare passers by because they had lost or spent all they had.

They drove past whole blocks without seeing a single human being.

They drove past the Lavoisier Institute, where the smartest one per cent of teenagers were sent to spend their four thousand days redesigning the world around them.

‘The templates which actually work?’ Jemima said. ‘That’s where they come from.’

They drove past the hospital, where teenage nurses and doctors injected freshly-printed stem cells into bandaged adults who had crashed their cars, or been kicked in the face, or attempted suicide, or been burned when they printed something from a faulty template.

They drove past the hospital’s back door, where the bodies that had been mourned and hosed down and scrubbed dry were hauled out on wheeled trays and taken to the refinery to be recycled.

They drove past the enforcement headquarters – a polished white tower, tall enough that no matter where you were in the city, you could see it, and it could see you.

***

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ Jemima said.

They were at the refinery, turning the cranks which powered the centrifuges, and skimming valuable elements off the top in between rotations.

‘When their babies get taken away to become wasters, or miners, or whatever,’ she continued, ‘it hits a lot of people pretty hard. Some people lose it completely.’

‘So he wasn’t actually your father?’ Lukas asked.

She snorted. ‘Of course not.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Statistics. In the system, there’s probably a billion girls my age. That guy would have had no way of knowing what job I ended up doing, much less which sector I ended up doing it in.’

‘But it’s not impossible,’ Lukas said.

Jemima scooped some cloudy blue muck into a capsule, sealed it shut and dropped it into the chute. Lukas was starting to think she hadn’t heard him when she spoke again.

‘When I first became a waster,’ she said, ‘my partner was this grouchy, tough girl named Evie. She told me that we were supposed to clean all 91 floors of the apartment building, every day, in just twelve hours. I said it was impossible.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said that most things that seem impossible are just really, really unlikely. And then we worked like dogs until we got the job done.’

The word ’dogs’ brought up an image in Lukas’ SIM. A stiff, furry thing, held upright by wires in a glass case.

‘So yeah,’ Jemima said. ‘He could be my dad, but so what, if I never knew him? It’s just genes.’

A blast of steam from a vent made further conversation difficult, so Lukas stopped talking. He couldn’t remember ever being so tired.

But he would be in bed, soon. There weren’t many garbage bags to go. Most had been siphoned off into capsules, ready to be reformatted as ink.

He wondered why people threw this stuff away, instead of printing out their own ink recycling centrifuges and using them to turn their garbage into more ink. Then they wouldn’t have to buy any from the company.

‘A few people do,’ Jemima said, when the noise died down. ‘But they’re big, complicated machines, so you’d use up almost your whole yearly pension buying the ink to print one, with no way to tell if the template was good until you’d finished making it. So most people just take what they’re given, which is more than they need anyway, and throw away anything they don’t want any more.’

‘And we pick it up.’

‘Right.’

‘If Ink, Inc. gives the pension to the ex-workers,’ Lukas said slowly, ‘and the ex-workers give it all back to buy ink...’

‘Why use money at all?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Because if ink became an actual currency, no-one knows what would happen to the economy,’ Jemima said. ‘Even the geniuses at the Lavoisier Institute can’t figure it out. And the people up top – the ones in charge of the company – are terrified of change. You would be too, if you ran the world.’

Lukas’ head hurt. This was too much to take in on one day. He fumbled with the soldering iron, drawing a wonky line of metal around the seal of a capsule.

‘So,’ Jemima said. ‘What’s with the Care?’

Her voice remained casual, but he could sense that she had been working up to the question for a while.

He couldn’t tell her the truth. The fat man’s warning echoed in his head. But she would know if he lied.

‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ he said. ‘Someday.’

***

Two months later, she hadn’t brought it up again. She didn’t seem to be afraid of him, or to hate him. Lukas wasn’t sure what made her so different from the miners, but he was grateful.

Each day had been easier than the last. Grooves wore into his palms where the garbage bags fit. His shoulders grew broader, his legs thicker. The mask no longer seemed stifling – in fact, he felt naked without it.

‘Keep up,’ Jemima said, as she heaved a bin into the air. ‘We’re four minutes behind schedule.’

‘I’m pacing myself,’ Lukas said.

‘Well, pace yourself faster. I’m not going to do your job for you.’

Lukas had been distracted – the building felt different today. More residents wandering the halls. Doors opening and closing, lifts purring, scuffling noises in the stairwell. But he couldn’t quite pinpoint the source of his unease.

‘Maybe your meds are off,’ Jemima said. ‘You didn’t take too many Awakes this morning? That’ll make you twitchy as a broken vacuum.’

‘I’m fine,’ Lukas said. He tapped a bin, replaced it by the door, and dragged his growing bag to the next one.

Someone moved up the other end of the corridor. Someone wearing a black padded outfit, like his.

‘Do any other wasters work in this building?’ he asked.

‘You know they don’t. Why?’

The figure disappeared into a doorway. ‘I saw someone dressed like us.’

‘You wouldn’t believe some of the fashions they have up here,’ Jemima said. ‘Lots of people tinker with the templates of their clothes before they print them. And did you know that some of the women have hair?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Hanging over their eyes and around their ears, like men.’

‘How?’

‘What do you mean “how”? They just don’t shave.’

Lukas was silent for a moment.

Jemima laughed. ‘You thought women were naturally hairless?’

‘It makes sense,’ Lukas said defensively.

‘No it doesn’t. Why would hair grow on men but not women?’

‘It makes more sense than every woman in the world shaving their heads every day.’

‘Every two days,’ Jemima told him. ‘It doesn’t grow that quick. And like I just said, not all of them do.’

Lukas emptied the last bin. ‘How many floors to go?’ he asked, keen to change the topic.

‘Eleven. Come on.’ Jemima chuckled. ‘Naturally hairless. Wow.’

She stepped through the fire door. Lukas tried to follow – but someone else stepped into his path. The other waster had been hiding in the shadows of the stairwell.

‘Hey,’ Lukas said.

Jemima turned around – and the other waster pushed her down the stairs.

Lukas cried out as Jemima tumbled backwards, arms spinning. She grabbed at the stairwell and missed.

The waster pushed him back into the corridor and pulled the door shut. One gloved hand shone a blinding laser on the seam, fusing the door into its frame. The other hand pulled a heavy grey bag over Lukas’ head.

‘Hey!’ he yelled again. ‘Get off me!’

And then his SIM stopped working.

It was as though he’d been lobotomised. Half his knowledge was stored online rather than in his actual brain, and now he was lost in a swirl of blank spots. Who had been pushed down the stairs? A woman, he thought, but what was her name? And what building were they in? It felt like some kind of workplace. But didn’t he work in a mine? What were these strange padded clothes enveloping his body?

His vanished memories left room for the terror, the sense that he had been trapped and was now under attack.

Lukas flailed wildly, trying to break free of his assailant. But his meagre wrestling skills, those he’d used to protect himself from the miners – or was it someone else? – were gone.

‘Help!’ he screamed. ‘Help me!’

But he couldn’t hear anything through the mask and the bag. Probably no one could hear him, either.

Rage grew in his belly, too much for the Care to hold down. His hands shrunk into fists, whipped through the air with lethal intent–

And hit empty air. His attacker was faster than him. A hand grabbed Lukas’ forearm, and he cried out as his arms were wrenched back. He felt something snap closed around his wrists, tying them together.

He was dragged, screeching and struggling, up the corridor – or was it a corridor? Where had he been before the bag swallowed his head? He wasn’t sure. Who had he been with?

The floor shifted beneath him. A lift. He was somewhere with a lift. Back in the mines? Was this the moment right before the other workers tried to kill him with a bedpost? Why couldn’t he see?

Someone stabbed him.

He cried out as the needle sank into the back of his neck, narrowly missing his spine. He was being immunised. Inoculated. Indoctrinated. Intoxicated. He could no longer distinguish these words from one another. The online dictionary was ominously silent.

‘Why?’ he tried to say.

Then the blackness became a whiteness and he collapsed.

Chapter Three

Careless

‘Can you tell me how you got here, Lukas?’ the fat man asked. His wedding ring glinted under the fluorescent lights.

Lukas leaned back in his chair. Tilted his head from side to side, stretching his neck.

The fat man’s face could have been carved from stone. ‘Can you name anyone with whom you had a conversation yesterday?’

With great interest, he examined the seams of vulcanised rubber between the stained tiles on the far wall.

‘No? How about the day before?’

Still Lukas said nothing.

‘Did you know your name was Lukas, before I said it just now?’ the fat man asked.

Lukas shrugged. His handcuffs jingled around the arms of the chair.

The fat man stroked his chin. ‘I can hear your thoughts,’ he said. ‘Did you know that?’

Lukas found a small cut inside his cheek, and prodded it with his tongue.

‘Do you know why you’re here?’

Lukas swallowed the blood. ‘Because that guy hid something of yours.’

‘Did he?’

‘Why else would you care that I killed him?’

‘I care,’ the fat man said, ‘precisely because you don’t.’

Lukas didn’t understand. He said nothing.

‘I can’t have a murderer working alongside all my other employees. Not if he’s likely to kill again.’

‘So I don’t have to work?’

A thin smile. ‘If you don’t tell me why you did it, you’ll have to work under certain conditions.’

Lukas shrugged again.

‘Very well.’ The fat man put a bottle of pills on the table.

‘What are those?’

‘I want to make this clear to you. Most people would be locked up for what you did. They might even get an amputation. But these are exceptional circumstances.’

‘What are those?’ Lukas snarled.

‘They’ll make you understand that what you did was wrong.’

The fat man stood up, and smoothed down his shirt over his flabby belly. He looked like he was ready to go home after an unexpectedly long day.

Lukas eyed the long list of ingredients.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’ll find that feeling those words hurts a lot more than just saying them.’

‘I mean it.’ Lukas tried to make his voice waver. ‘I wish I could take it back, but…’

‘One pill per day. No more, no less.’ The fat man tapped a pill into his palm and approached Lukas. ‘Open wide.’

‘You’re going to try to force feed me every day?’ Lukas snorted. ‘Good luck.’

‘After the first pill,’ the fat man said, ‘I won’t have to.’

He punched Lukas in the stomach.

Lukas doubled over, wheezing, and felt the fat man push a pill into his open mouth. He tried to spit it out, but a fleshy hand had already covered his lips, while another pinched his nose shut. He could feel the pill fizzing on his tongue as it dissolved.

‘Stop struggling,’ the fat man grunted. ‘It’s too late. In an hour, you’ll be a new man.’

Lukas stared up at the pink, flabby face, filling his gaze with all the hatred he could muster. He couldn’t speak, but he guessed the fat man would be reading his mind.

You’re next, he thought. I know you can hear me. You’re dead.

‘No, Lukas.’ The fat man sighed. ‘In a way, it’s you – the idiot, the sociopath, the killer – who is about to be dead.’

***

‘Argh!’ Lukas’ eyes popped open and he jolted on the mattress, heart racing. It had just been a dream. He wasn’t a monster. The fat man wasn’t here. He hadn’t been attacked in the apartment building…

He looked around. This wasn’t the dormitory. The walls of the room were lined with overlapping white pillows, held in place by nails at the corners. They drew in all the echoes of his movements like black holes. The silence was overpowering.

He knew his name. He knew what he had been doing when he was attacked, and where he had been doing it. Did that mean his SIM was working?

No. It wouldn’t sync with the network. His brain had recovered from the shock and was picking up the slack, but something was blocking the signal. Perhaps shielding was built into the walls. He didn’t know what time it was, how long he had been missing, how likely it was that someone was searching for him. The GPS functions were also disabled, so he had no idea how far he had travelled.

And he couldn’t signal for help.

Yellowish light streamed down from a glass panel in the ceiling. The panel looked thick and dense. He wouldn’t be able to break it.

The door was barely wide enough to walk through. It, too, was covered by pillows, but for two iron keyholes and a small rectangular mirror, about the size of the rear-vision mirror in Jemima’s truck.

Jemima. Was she okay?

‘Jemima?’ he shouted.

The padded room swallowed his voice.

The mirror was probably one-way glass. For all Lukas knew, someone was watching him right now.

He reached for the Care in his pocket. But it was gone. So was the pocket. He wore a thin, filmy gown.

Lukas sat up on the mattress. The floor was carpeted with a bed of dense rubber. When he put his bare feet on it, they sank down a little. The rubber was thick and cold.

‘Meow?’

Lukas turned to see a small animal of some kind staring at him. Grey and black fur bristled across its back. Claws extended from four paws. Slit-like pupils glared at him from green eyes.

Lukas had once known the name of this animal. But without his SIM, he couldn’t recall it.

It must be mechanical – printers couldn’t make living things, so pets were rare. But it looked extraordinarily lifelike.

‘Hey there,’ he said, cautiously.

‘Meow,’ the creature said again. It sauntered up to him and rubbed its whiskered cheek against his leg. Lukas reached down to pat it…

And then he saw the body.

It was slumped face down in the corner, dressed in the same flimsy robe that Lukas had. Its massive hands and feet were devoid of colour. A purple burn marked the back of its neck.

‘Hello?’ Lukas said, his voice trembling like a violin string. ‘Are you alive?’

The body didn’t move.

‘I’m coming over now,’ Lukas continued. ‘Okay?’

Nothing.

Lukas crawled over to the body. Behind him, the animal jumped up onto the mattress and started prodding it with sharp claws.

Pressing a finger to the neck, Lukas felt no pulse. The flesh was cold and rigid to the touch. The pungent odour of aftershave masked any other smells it was giving off.

Gulping back the rising bile, he tentatively rolled the body over – and recoiled when he saw the dead man’s face. The mouth was wrenched open in silent rage, the bloodshot eyes wide with horror.

The expression was so arresting that it took Lukas a moment to recognise the fat man.

***

Lukas scrabbled backwards toward the mattress, startling the animal, which had rolled itself into a ball. He stared at the body, breathing heavily. How could it be here?

The fat man looked up at the ceiling, his pupils staying dilated even in the bright light.

Lukas wrapped his arms around his knees. He didn’t know where he was, or why. But he hadn’t been chosen at random, because the fat man was here. Lukas’ original idea – that someone had kidnapped him so as to make him clean an especially dirty apartment – seemed increasingly ludicrous.

He hoped Jemima was okay. It seemed likely that people would be searching for the two of them. Efficient, well-trained people. Lukas had never known anyone to be kidnapped during their four thousand days of service, so it was probably a big deal.

The enforcers might think he was a runaway. He had always been told that runaways were pursued by well-equipped teams, who usually tracked them down within hours. He hoped it was true.

But how would anyone find him? With his SIM blocked, he was even more isolated than he had been down in the mines.

Lukas stood up and walked over to the wall. He poked the pillows, releasing a faint smell of burnt plastic. Recently printed. The nails which held them in place were thick and rigid. Tugging on them was useless. Instead, he pulled at the pillows themselves, trying to tear the fabric.

At first, the task seemed impossible. But when he braced his foot against the wall for extra leverage, the fibres unwound and one of the pillows came loose, revealing a patch of bare concrete.

Lukas pressed his ear to the wall, hoping for some reception. But his SIM stayed quiet as ever.

He gripped another pillow and wrenched it off the wall, broadening the gap. When he rested his head against the wall, he heard nothing. Whatever was blocking the signal, it wasn’t in the pillows. It was sealed within the concrete, where he couldn’t get to it.

Or his SIM was actually damaged. He could be stuck like this – unable to send or receive – forever.

His fists made thin slapping sounds as they pounded the cement. He doubted the sound carried through to the other side, but he kept going, just in case. He hit the wall over and over until his flesh was red and raw. Then when he couldn’t raise his arms any more, he tried shouting.

‘Help!’ he screamed. ‘Somebody help me! Please! Somebody! Help!’

The lights switched off. Lukas found himself immersed in total blackness. Someone had heard him shouting. But not anyone who wanted to help.

***

Without his SIM, Lukas had no way of knowing how much time had passed since the light went out. The silence made the blackness all the more disorienting. Had it been an hour? A day?

He rubbed his chin, to see if his stubble had grown. But he wasn’t sure how rough it had been before, so that didn’t help. His only clue was his dry mouth and pounding head. He had been thirsty when he woke up, and now it was worse. But he must have spent less than 48 hours in here, or he’d have died of dehydration.

‘Don’t panic,’ he muttered. ‘It’ll be fine.’

The sound of his own voice made him feel more real. His captor was probably listening, but so what?

He couldn’t stop imagining the fat man’s body, turning its cracked head to face him in the darkness; rising like an unearthly puppet and walking toward him, drawn by the sound of his pounding heart.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he told himself.

Something shifted in the darkness. Lukas listened intently.

Silence.

‘Get a grip,’ he whispered.

A hand grabbed his ankle.

Lukas shrieked and scrabbled backwards. But it wasn’t a hand – the cat squeaked as it was dislodged from its momentary perch on his foot. Its eyes flashed, reflecting the faintest traces of light from under the door.

Lukas exhaled. ‘Sorry buddy,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

The cat glared at him and then went back to licking its paws.

Cat. He had remembered the word. Did this mean his SIM was working again?

He tried a practice search. What is the circumference of the Earth? Nothing came back. Perhaps his brain was learning to work around the SIM, accessing long forgotten data backed up within its fleshy folds. Was that how brains worked? Without his SIM, he couldn’t check.

Again he reached for his bottle of Care, and remembered that he didn’t have it. More than the dead body, more than the padded room, more than his captor, this terrified him. How long would it take for the Care to wear off? Would he feel himself becoming a monster, or would the change be so gradual that he would sense nothing?

He put his face in his hands. ‘Stay calm,’ he said. ‘Just stay calm.’

The lights came back on.

Lukas blinked in the sudden glare. The cat glanced up at the ceiling and then curled up into an even tighter ball. After checking that the dead body hadn’t moved, Lukas looked at the door.

No one came through. There was no sound from the other side, and no way to tell if he was being watched through the mirror.

Lukas stood and cautiously approached the door. Presumably it wasn’t made of concrete, but he didn’t tear at the padding to see what was underneath. He didn’t think he could take another hour of lights-out punishment. Instead, he examined the two keyholes. Both were large, one more so that the other. There was no handle, so Lukas guessed that one key would unlock the door, the other would open it.

Neither key was in the room, so if his captor ever came in, he would probably have the keys on him.

Lukas looked around the room. If the captor entered, how would he control Lukas? There was nothing to tie him to, and without his SIM working, an incentivisation device wouldn’t work...

Clank. Lukas jumped back from the door. A small panel slid open at the bottom of it, and a plastic tray was pushed through the gap. On the tray rested a plastic cup of water and a Full. It didn’t look like enough to ease Lukas’ raging hunger, but it was a start. The panel slammed shut.

Lukas grabbed the cup, finally able to soothe the dry scratching in his throat. He took one gulp, two, three – and then wondered if the water might be poisoned.

Surely not. If his captor wanted to kill him, he could have done it while Lukas was unconscious. Just the same, Lukas put the cup back down, still half full. He should save some for later.

There was no Taste pill to go with the Full, but he was used to the bitterness now. He bit off half the block and swallowed the whole chunk without chewing.

The cat mewed pitifully, circling him like a buzzard.

‘You’re hungry?’ Lukas said. ‘Here you go.’

He broke off part of the block and put it on the floor. The cat munched desperately until the food was gone. It was real, then – a mechanical animal wouldn’t eat.

He put his cup in front of it. ‘Save some of that for me, okay?’

The cat drank vigorously, stabbing the water with its tongue and then chomping the drips out of midair. Lukas watched, fascinated, until the cat wandered over to his mattress and fell asleep again.

Lukas examined the panel at the bottom of the door. It was too small to crawl through, but tall enough to accommodate his arm. Unfortunately, it was probably too far below the keyholes for him to reach up and twist the handle on the other side, and in any case, it seemed to be locked. Pushing and pulling it yielded no result.

The plastic tray was light and flimsy. He tried to break it in half over his knee, hoping to produce some sharp shards. He could use them as weapons when his captor eventually came in.

The tray bent in half without breaking. He threw it at the wall.

***

Lukas was in a maze. A shadowy labyrinth of padded walls. Every low-ceilinged corridor looked the same, except for the varying stains on the floor. When he scratched at one of the rust-brown patterns, he realised it was blood.

Someone was following him. He could feel them behind him, looming closer and closer. But every time he whirled around to look, no one was there.

If he could get out of the maze, he could shut the door and trap his pursuer inside. But he hadn’t seen the door in a long time, and couldn’t shake the feeling that he has moving further and further away from it.

‘Gregory.’ A voice echoed through the labyrinth. ‘I’m coming for you.’

It was a trick. Whoever was following him, they wanted him to shout out I’m not Gregory, and reveal his position. Lukas wiped the cold sweat out of his eyes and kept creeping through the darkness.

He rounded a corner, and then ducked back. He had seen someone. A boy.

Hearing no footsteps, he peeked around the corner again. It wasn’t another boy. It was a mirror at the far end of the corridor, reflecting his own terrified face back at him.

He ran up to it and pressed his palm against the cool glass. No good. It was solid. He wouldn’t be able to break through here.

But as long as he stood in front of the mirror, no one could sneak up on him. He could see the corridor behind him, long and empty. He glanced at his reflection. He didn’t look so scared any more. He looked…

His reflection reached through the mirror and grabbed Lukas by the throat.

Lukas tried to scream, but his windpipe was already crushed. His head throbbed, the blood unable to escape.

‘Who are you?’ his reflection roared.

Lukas tried to break free, but the icy grip around his neck was too strong. He was getting dizzy. He was going to die, he was…

‘Gah!’

Lukas woke up, breathing heavily, his heart pounding in his ears.

Just a dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

The cat meowed. Lukas looked around at the padded walls, the dead body, the meal trays.

Maybe he had been better off in the maze with the mirror and the monster.

***

The body hadn’t rotted.

Lukas lifted the dead man’s hand, let it go and watched it fall. Since waking up in the padded room, he had been fed six times. He had found a drain beneath the fat man’s body, and had urinated into it five times. This meant that at least three days had passed, and the body still showed no signs of decomposition.

‘Meow!’ the cat said.

‘Shut up,’ Lukas muttered. ‘I’m hungry too.’

Cats were carnivorous, weren’t they? Why hadn’t the cat eaten the fat man’s body?

Lukas leaned forward and sniffed the corpse. He prodded the fat man’s paunch. The chemical aftershave scent was still very strong. The body had been preserved. Pickled. The cat couldn’t eat it without poisoning itself.

But why go to the trouble of embalming the fat man after killing him? Lukas wiped his hands on his gown, which was increasingly sweaty after several days captivity. He had assumed the fat man was imprisoned in this room before him, and killed here. But he couldn’t imagine that the preserving equipment had been dragged into this room, where there were no power plugs – it would have been easier to haul the fat man out. Which meant that he had been carried back in for a reason.

This could be a hiding place. Perhaps the fat man’s body would have been discovered if it were left outside this room. This thought gave Lukas hope. It meant that there was a chance of help from outside.

But the killer could have printed out a mulcher and fed the fat man in, or made a barrel, filled it with acidic ink and submersed him until he was liquefied. Instead, he chose to put the fat man’s body in the padded cell and wait for Lukas to wake up. Why? Was it some sort of message? If so, what was it supposed to say?

The panel clanked. Another tray of food slid under the door.

The cat staggered toward it as though half asleep. Lukas got there first. He snatched up the Full and consumed it in two mighty swallows. The cat wailed pitifully. He hadn’t fed it the last three times he ate.

‘If your owner wants you fed,’ Lukas said, ‘he should be providing more food.’

The cat sniffed at Lukas’ water, but Lukas pulled it away. His only hope was to wait for his captor to come in, and then overpower him. He couldn’t do that as a dehydrated wreck.

The cat mewed a few more times. Lukas pushed it aside with his foot. It gave up and curled into a ball.

Lukas swilled the water around in his mouth and swallowed it, looking at the fat man. Perhaps the dead body was a message. I know what you did, his captor was saying. I know what you are.

If that was supposed to scare Lukas, it wasn’t working. His fear had faded away over the last three days, leaving him angry and bored.

The tray was no more brittle than any of the others. It couldn’t be used as a weapon. He squinted up at the glass covering the light above. Perhaps he could use one of the trays to smash it.

He threw the tray up. It hit the glass with a crash, but did no apparent damage. He picked it up and threw it again, harder. The glass rattled in its frame, but didn’t crack. The tray was too soft.

If his abductor heard the noise, the lights would be shut off. Once that happened, he wouldn’t be able to see what he was aiming at. He ran over to pick up the tray again. The cat was in his way, so he kicked it.

It was limp. Lifeless. Not asleep. Dead.

It must have starved. He looked at the tiny, black body. He didn’t think it would fit down the drain. And it wasn’t pickled like the dead man, so the decomposing flesh could be a problem later.

Lukas pushed the furry corpse aside with his foot, picked up the tray and threw it at the light a third time.

The glass rattled. The tray fell.

The lights went out.

Lukas sighed and sat on the padded floor. He needed a new plan.

A grinding, shifting sound filled the air.

Lukas cocked his head. Silence had fallen once again, but he was fairly sure that he’d just heard the door opening.

He rose cautiously to his feet. The cat. It had been a test. By letting the cat starve to death, he had proven to his captor that the Care had worn off. Now his captor had opened the door. But why? More importantly, how could he use this to his advantage?

If his captor was coming for him, and not the cat, running straight at the door wasn’t an option. He’d run right into his jailer’s open arms.

Silently, Lukas walked sideways in a half circle around the room, then crept towards where he thought the door was, hands outstretched. When his captor reached out for him, he would find Lukas missing. He could tell when he was outside the padded room – the silence was replaced by the hum and whir of electronic devices, the padding vanished from beneath his feet. But still there was no light.

He tested his SIM. How many calories in a Full?

No results.

Lukas swivelled left, reaching for the wall. If he followed the walls, he was bound to find a door. Hopefully his abductor would keep searching the padded room, until…

Click. The lights flicked on. Lukas was momentarily dazzled by the sudden change. He got a quick impression of the room. A server tower, a dentist’s chair, a pile of dirty dishes.

Then he saw the man with the night vision goggles and the gun.

Lukas turned to run, but he was too slow. The gun crackled, and a burning sensation swept across his body as microwave radiation fried his skin. Lukas screamed, batting at the invisible flames, knowing it wouldn’t help but powerless to stop his flailing limbs.

He had heard stories about the use of microwave guns before Ink, Inc. started using SIMs for incentivisation. Supposedly the pain was so intense that the guns only needed to be fired for a second or two. The stinging went on and on. Lukas collapsed to the floor, shrieking as he rolled over and over. Every nerve felt cut and raw.

He was on the verge of blacking out when the pain stopped, as abruptly as it had started. He could hear little over the pounding of his heart. He barely felt the man drag him into the dentist’s chair and strap him down.

He blinked away the tears as his captor took off the night vision goggles. It was a woman. She had hair – a tangled mane of brown locks, like a man’s – but her arched eyebrows, her narrow chin and her slightly upturned nose marked her as female. She looked old. Lukas knew that surface dwellers were essentially ageless, but this woman looked like she hadn’t injected herself with Young in at least a decade.

And her eyes. They were brown.

Lukas had never seen dark eyes before. Infants’ irises were treated with lasers, which burned off the brown pigment soon after birth and left the eyes sky blue. The procedure was painful and fairly pointless, but few people objected since the experience was universal and they didn’t remember it in later life.

The woman’s eyes mesmerised him with their strange caramel glow.

‘You killed your cat,’ he said. If he couldn’t hurt her physically, perhaps he could hurt her emotionally.

The woman shrugged with one shoulder. ‘I can print another one.’ Her voice was rusty with disuse.

‘You can’t print living things.’

The woman tested the tightness of his straps. ‘This is going to hurt,’ she said.

Lukas shrank away from the microwave gun, but she holstered it and instead turned to the server. Rather than controlling it with her SIM, she used a panel made up of small blocks with letters printed on them. She depressed the blocks quickly with her fingers, one at a time. Data flowed across a screen, instead of through her mind.

‘What are you doing?’ Lukas demanded.

‘Making it fair,’ the woman said. ‘It has to be fair.’

Lukas was about to ask what she meant when she whirled around and shoved something into his mouth. A plastic object, hard but hollow, stretching his jaws open. He gurgled helplessly.

‘I fried your wireless transmitter.’ The woman picked up a spool of thin cable and connected one end to the server. ‘But a fibre-optic connection to your SIM should still work.’

She fed the cable into his mouth. Lukas gagged, panicking, knowing that if he vomited then he would drown, he would die here–

And then the cable touched the receiver embedded in his molar.

His SIM, inactive for days, was suddenly buried under a cascade of thoughts and feelings and sensations and memories and instincts and regrets and hopes and nightmares and the billions of other things that make up a human mind.

She was trying to force someone else’s brain into his.

He/she tried to pull the cable out of his/her mouth, but the straps still bound his/her wrists to the chair. It wouldn’t have helped. Lukas/Mishka’s brain was being violated, invisibly and unstoppably.

Mishka, he/she thought. My name is Mishka.

Her new identity swallowed him up.

Chapter Four

Fraught

Mishka ran.

It wasn’t easy. She could never have imagined that running could be so exhausting. In the months following her release from service, she used to jog from one apartment building to the next, then the next, then she’d loop back through the grimy streets and do two or three more circuits. Now it felt like she weighed as much as a car. Every time she looked over her shoulder, it slowed her down, threw off her balance. Her long, tan coat billowed around her legs.

But she didn’t have far to go. Just a few hundred metres, and she would be safe, she hoped.

The asphalt crunched under her cross trainers. Other pedestrians crossed to the other side of the street, eyeing her from beneath broad-brimmed hats and transition lenses. The sun bore down on her through a smear of brown clouds.

A hum from above. Mishka looked up. But if the sound had come from a drone, photographing her or scanning her SIM, she couldn’t see it now. It had disappeared behind one of the skyscrapers, which probably meant it wasn’t following her. Probably.

Two blocks to go. ‘Come on,’ she gasped. ‘You can do this.’

The apartment building looked the same as all the others – tall, broad, imposing. The only clue that Mishka was in the right place came from a van parked on the opposite side of the street. Either the driver was a lookout, protecting the occupants from an unexpected raid, or he was an enforcer, looking for a good opportunity to instigate just such a raid. Or perhaps he was just a guy with a van.

Mishka eyed him for a long moment. Was it too risky to go into the building?

But she had no plan B. And every second counted – she could feel it. She swallowed her anxiety and walked the last twenty metres to the door.

The foyer inside was the same as that of her own building on the other side of town. Black tiles veined with threads of bronze. A dim light burning quietly above. A polishing machine drove itself around in squeaking circles.

She took the lift up one floor too many, and then waited in a nearby doorway to see if anyone had followed her. After three or four minutes in which the lift didn’t open, she ran down to the stairwell, pushed open the fire door, and descended to the level she wanted.

Apartment 211 was fifth on her left. She listened at the door for a moment. No sound. No nearby SIMs, either – was her contact out?

Surely not. The apartment must be shielded, which made sense. A clandestine business like this couldn’t operate without such protections.

Mishka knocked.

The door opened immediately. Someone pulled her inside and then pushed the door shut behind her.

***

‘I don’t understand,’ the smuggler said.

He was short, with a ring through his eyebrow and a tattoo across the back of his wrinkled neck. His skin was a slightly paler shade of brown than Mishka’s, but the stubble growing across his recently shaved head was darker. His name was Josh Young.

Mishka clenched her hands in the pockets of her coat. ‘I thought this was what you do.’

‘I get people out of Australia,’ Young said. ‘Not in.’

‘I need to go there,’ Mishka said. ‘Surely it’s the same process.’

‘It’s completely different. An aircraft coming from within can temporarily disable one of the gun turrets on the wall long enough to get out of range, but anything approaching the wall from the outside will be shot down. Which isn’t usually a problem, because you’d have to be crazy to want to go there.’

He glared at her, as though she was asking for an unreasonable favour.

‘I’ve been saving up my pension,’ Mishka said. ‘I have almost seven months’ worth.’

‘It’s not a question of payment. No one can get across the wall. Not in that direction.’

‘That’s why I need to go. It’s the only place in the world where they won’t follow me. I’ll fly in while one of your other ships is flying out. That way it’s safe for both.’

Young threw up his hands. ‘And what are you going to do when you get there? They’ll kill you.’

Floral wallpaper lined the room. A plastic fern hovered in the corner. A framed photograph of a beach, deserted but for an umbrella, was mounted over the bright blue couch near the window. Mishka wondered if the cheery decor was intended to confuse investigators, or if Young was simply colour-blind.

‘The refugees have documentation. One of them is bound to look a bit like me. I’ll assume her identity once I’m there.’

‘None of them look like you. You’d need surgery.’

Mishka hesitated. ‘I don’t have time for that. I’ll wear make-up.’

‘Every day, for the rest of your life? Remember, you won’t be able to get the surgery once you’re over there. If anyone – anyone – finds out you’re not white, you’ll be deported. At best.’

‘I’ll do whatever it takes,’ Mishka said. ‘I can’t stay here. If the company…’

She grimaced, and put a hand to her belly.

Young looked at the bulge under her coat. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No, no. You can’t do this.’

‘I’m not due for another week.’

‘Stealing a baby is a serious crime.’

‘I’m not stealing her!’ Mishka growled. ‘She’s mine!’

The infant kicked inside her abdomen, as if agreeing.

‘You have to get out of here,’ Young said. ‘Right now.’

‘I have nowhere else to go. Please. I’ll give you everything I have. Just get me out of their reach.’

Young shook his head. ‘The things they’d do to me, if–’

Something beeped quietly. Young’s eyes widened.

‘What was that?’ Mishka asked.

‘Proximity alarm.’

Mishka listened. She couldn’t detect any nearby SIMs because of the shielding. But she did hear a soft footfall outside the door.

‘You have to give yourself up,’ Young hissed.

Mishka ignored him. ‘Is there anywhere to hide?’

‘Nowhere they won’t find you.’ Young paused. She could see his thoughts running circles around each other. If the enforcers found her in here, they would assume he was helping her, even if he wasn’t.

‘Out the window,’ he whispered.

‘We’re three floors up!’

Young was already pulling a coiled extension lead out of the cupboard. It looked too thin to support her weight.

‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Titanium core, heavy gauge, double weave.’

He approached the window. Mishka expected him to smash it – windows didn’t open in apartments like this – but he must have modified the frame, because it swung open on a hidden screw. The wind roared outside.

Someone knocked on the door. ‘Joshua Young. Open up.’

‘Coming!’ Young called. He gestured frantically at the window.

Mishka tied the power cable around the leg of the couch and leaned out the window. It was a long way to the street below. The fall would kill her.

But if she stayed, they would take her baby.

Mishka swung her leg out into the void. She kept one fist clenched around the cable. The other held the coil of slack as she pulled her other leg out and dangled, ten metres above the concrete.

‘Hurry!’ Young said.

Mishka loosened her grip. The cable burned her sweaty palms as she walked backwards down the wall. The loops of slack became fewer and fewer.

She ran out of cable about three metres above the ground. Cursing, she shifted her weight so as she was dangling from the plug, legs kicking in the air.

She didn’t have to let go. The cable went slack as Josh untied it up above. Mishka screamed as she fell, landing on one foot and twisting her ankle sideways before collapsing.

She couldn’t move her foot without aggravating the torn muscle. There would be no more running today.

It had been a hot, dry day, but Mishka had somehow landed in a shallow puddle on the concrete. She clambered to her feet, favouring her left leg, and wiped at the water on her rear as she hobbled down the street.

It was warm. Why was the puddle warm?

Mishka gasped as she felt another kick. It’s coming, she thought. Oh God, it’s coming.

She walked faster, wincing every time her injured foot touched the ground, but that was nothing compared to the growing pain between her legs. The pressure built up and up, as though someone had inserted a garden hose into her and was filling her to bursting point.

Mishka staggered around the corner to another apartment building and entered the lobby. Deserted, thankfully. There was no way she could hide what was happening to her, and no way to defend herself if anyone tried to overpower her and take her to the birthing centre.

She approached the row of lifts, pressed the call button and leaned against the wall. The fake marble was cold against her damp forehead.

Ding. One of the lifts opened, and she stumbled in. She pushed a button for the top floor. The doors slid closed.

Just after the light flashed for the sixtieth floor but before it flashed for the sixty-first, Mishka hit the emergency stop button. The lift jolted to a sudden halt between floors. Mishka slumped down against the carpeted floor, pulled up her skirt, tore off her underwear and let the pain swell into a throbbing ball inside her.

After a few hours, she stopped noticing the echoes of her own screams and moans, bouncing around the inside of the lift. The agony seemed to grow to jagged peaks, so intense that she felt sure the baby must be halfway out, but when she reached down to check there was no sign of it. Sometimes the pain almost disappeared entirely, leading her to wonder if the labour had been an illusion and was now over.

She became tired. Hungry. Thirsty.

Then, after eight hours in the lift, she felt it. A different sort of throbbing at her groin. This was it.

She crawled onto her hands and knees, remembering that her best chance was to work with gravity rather than against it. She bundled up her coat beneath her hips so as to soften the impact and then, concerned that the padding wouldn’t be enough, she peeled off her sweat-stained tank top and added that to the pile.

It was like being torn in half. She cupped her palms between her legs and screeched as something hot and wet and squirming forced itself out of her, slipping through her grasping hands and landing with a damp thud on the pile of clothes. She scooped them up and tried to examine the slimy thing within, but the tears blurred her vision and she was too dizzy to wipe her eyes. She collapsed sideways, the infant cradled to her chest, and blacked out.

***

She awoke, aching, cold, to find something sucking on her nipple. She looked down in amazement at the tiny creature, still slick with gore, curled around her breast. She had heard that some newborns were strong enough to find milk alone, but the idea was astonishing now that it was her newborn. Her milk.

The umbilical cord lay across her belly. Careful not to dislodge her daughter, her beautiful baby girl with tiny grasping hands and scrunched up little eyes, Mishka reached over and picked up one of her shoes. She unlaced it with trembling hands, looped the lace around the cord near the infant’s belly button, and tightened the knot until the cord was cleaved in two. Then she tied the lace around the cord near her groin, cutting off the flow of blood.

The baby made no sound while she was doing this. Mishka would have worried that it was unconscious, if it weren’t for the suction on her chest, and the sight of the child’s ribs heaving as she took her first few breaths.

His first few breaths. The baby was a boy, she saw. She wondered why she had felt so strongly that it would be a girl. It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that she had failed. She’d never be able to escape to Australia now. Having a child made what would have been a difficult journey impossible.

So she’d have to conceal the child here, until he was old enough to pass for an eighteen-year old who had completed his four thousand days service and was finally free.

The hardest part would be his lack of a SIM. Maybe she could print one and load it with falsified data which was convincing enough to fool the network, but she couldn’t conceal it within his skull. Even if she wasn’t caught downloading the necessary skills for brain surgery, she wouldn’t be confident enough to use them on her own child.

Perhaps the SIM could be sewn into his clothes. He wouldn’t be able to use it, but it would fool other people if they didn’t listen too closely.

Something thumped above her. Mishka held the baby tighter, wondering if the lift’s brakes had worn out and they were both about to plummet down the shaft.

A panel in the ceiling opened. A woman dropped into the lift.

She was thin, for an adult. Her eyes were almost luminously blue, even behind the frameless glasses. A dark blue shell of overlapping carbon fibre plates protected her from the neck down.

She was holding a gun, but as she took in the blood, the baby, Mishka’s sweaty, mostly naked form, she lowered it.

Mishka said nothing. What could she say? She was caught.

‘Ms Andrews,’ the enforcer said. ‘Give me the baby.’

Mishka’s eyes filled up with tears. ‘I can’t.’

‘Stealing a baby from the company is a serious crime. But it’s not as uncommon as you might think. Even those who go to the birthing centre like they’re supposed to sometimes try to take the baby with them when they leave.’

Mishka hugged the child to her chest, searching for options which weren’t there.

‘We take the children for their own good.’ The woman’s voice was quiet and even. ‘So no-one grows up with parents who are poor, or sick, or uneducated. Everyone gets the same start in life. It’s completely fair.’ Her eyes shone. ‘Don’t you want things to be fair?’

Mishka said nothing.

‘Under the care of Ink, Inc., he’ll become strong,’ the enforcer continued. ‘Smart. Capable. He’ll be the best that he can be.’

‘I can make him smart,’ Mishka whispered.

‘No you can’t. You’re not even smart yourself.’

‘I…’

‘As soon as you decided to keep the baby and flee to Australia, your SIM sent a warning to the enforcers. I’ve been watching your feed for months. It’s not illegal to think about committing a crime, but it would usually be enough for a warning. My superior told me to pay you a visit. I told him you were dim enough to lead me to Josh Young and his network of people smugglers. I was right.’

Mishka goggled at her. Could it be true? Had her escape attempt been doomed before it began?

The enforcer’s gaze softened. ‘You didn’t know you were pregnant,’ she said. ‘You were visiting a friend in this apartment building, but she wasn’t home. While you were outside her room, your water broke. You tried to get to the birthing centre, but the lift malfunctioned on the way down. You gave birth while waiting for rescue.’ She extended a gloved hand. ‘Give me the baby right now, and that’s the official story.’

Mishka looked down at her baby. His narrow shoulders, his strangely flat head, his ten tiny toes.

‘He gets to live a normal life,’ the enforcer continued. ‘And so do you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mishka whispered in the child’s minuscule ear. A teardrop splashed on his forehead. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Then she lifted him up, and held him out.

As soon as the enforcer took him – gently, as though he were made of hollow glass – the baby began to cry. His shrill squalls of desperation broke Mishka’s heart.

‘Wait,’ she said.

The enforcer turned a key in the wall, releasing the lift from the emergency stop. It started descending.

‘Stop,’ Mishka said. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

The enforcer removed a can from her belt. ‘This will help you sleep.’

She sprayed something on Mishka’s face, and Mishka slumped back against the floor, coughing. The last thing she saw was her baby’s open mouth, pink and toothless as it screamed.

***

Mishka awoke in a web of tubes, some thick, some thin, some transparent, some opaque, some draining her of blood and urine, some filling her with saline and other chemicals.

She tried to cry out, but couldn’t move her mouth. Something had locked her jaw open. Something else was depressing her tongue before snaking down into her oesophagus, or her lungs, or both.

A nurse wandered past – masked, because he was part way through his four thousand days of service. Mishka tried to get his attention, but succeeded only in rattling the network of tubes. He ignored the signals from her SIM.

Dim lights glowed in the plastic ceiling. Quiet beeps and whirs echoed through the chamber. Thin curtains separated Mishka from the patients on either side of her, but she could see their shadowy profiles, and hear fragments of their thoughts.

She felt lighter than she had in nine months. The baby had weighed only three or four kilograms, but without it, she felt withered and small.

An automated script responded to her mental cries of distress. It provided her with information about where she was – the Padal Recovery Unit – and how long she had been there – thirty-one hours. It also told her she would be free to check out in another seventeen hours, provided that her levels stayed steady.

Mishka didn’t ask what levels the script was referring to. Instead, she sent out a search query for her baby.

No results. It was gone.

The man in the next bed was awake. According to his SIM, he was ninety-eight years old, and he had been in that bed since a car accident almost a decade ago. His name was Jack.

It took a lot of effort to turn a thought into a coherent sentence before broadcasting, but Mishka managed it: Did you see the baby?

The old man struggled in his net of pipes. Mishka felt his confusion. His fear.

When they brought me in, she asked. Was there a baby? Where did they take it?

The beeping from the old man’s heart monitor accelerated. His thoughts grew louder, but no clearer. Get out I’m not I swear I promise I’m not crazy get out of my head get the hell out of my head you bitch you’re not there you’re not...

Mishka shrank back, blocking out his feed. She had heard that hospitals were full of people whose bodies were irreparable, but who hadn’t checked the euthanasia box, either out of fear or because they’d lost their minds before admission. This man was to be kept alive indefinitely in a world he didn’t understand.

Don’t worry, a woman in another bed told her. It’ll be different this time.

A quick scan told Mischa that the woman had spent all her savings, leaving her with no choice but to get pregnant and apply for the birth bonus. She had just produced her third child and was determined, this time, to budget her pension properly rather than having a fourth.

It gets easier, she told Mishka.

Mishka wept, unable to wipe away the tears as they cascaded down the sides of her head.

The machines around her registered the spent fluids, and patiently increased her dose of saline.

Chapter Five

Charged

‘They took our baby, Sean.’

‘Who is this?’

Mishka lay spreadeagled on thin, unwashed sheets, stretched across a dented mattress. She hardly left this bed, and never went outside the apartment. After hundreds of unanswered calls and knocks on the door, at first several per week, then one every few months, her friends had stopped trying to contact her. Now the only evidence that the world outside even existed was the occasional SIM, droning past in the corridor, never pausing. The curtains stayed closed and the television stayed on.

Of the few people who owned a television, most had printed it out and set it up to provide a kind of antique, classic vibe to their homes. Mishka kept hers switched on and turned up, the voices of the newsreaders and characters and narrators so loud that she couldn’t hear herself think. So she couldn’t hear the echoes of her baby screaming.

She had told herself that the sound would fade. But over the years it had only grown louder.

‘Who is this?’ Sean said again.

When making a long-distance call, SIM-to-SIM, it was polite to stand in front of a mirror. When the person you called looked through your eyes, they could see your face and read your body language. But Mishka had smashed her mirror, and never gotten around to printing out a new one. She was staring up at her ceiling, so Sean was, too.

Even if she had found a reflective surface, he might not have recognised her. Her frame was thin and bony. She had long since stopped shaving her head and injecting herself with Young. Wrinkles had grown across her face like fine cobwebs.

But her name would have come up when she called. Had he made so many women pregnant that he couldn’t remember her specifically? It had only been two months since Mishka last called him in the middle of the night – had he forgotten her already?

‘They took him away,’ she said, her voice deadened by the pills. Sleep. Awake. Content. Relax. None of them seemed to work. She lived in a grey dreamland, somewhere between alive and dead.

‘Who is it?’ A whispered voice. Female. Not here – in Sean’s apartment.

‘Nobody,’ Sean said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

‘He’d be eleven now,’ Mishka mumbled. ‘An eleven year old boy who looks a bit like me, and a bit like you, and doesn’t know anything about either of us.’

Sean said nothing.

‘Doesn’t that mean something to you?’ Mishka continued. ‘Don’t you care?’

‘Don’t call me again,’ Sean said. ‘I mean it.’

His presence vanished from her mind, and suddenly Mishka was alone again.

Rain spattered the window. Thunder boomed outside. It was what had woken her. It sounded like the enforcer’s boots, thumping across the roof of the lift.

She sat up slowly. Put her bare feet on the dusty floor. Laughter was a distant memory. Even bitterness and misery had faded away. Temperature was the only thing she felt for years. Maybe the cold rain on her skin would give her back something of herself.

Mishka left the apartment without changing out of the odorous pyjamas which hadn’t been washed in months or reprinted in years. The corridors were empty. Quiet voices trickled under the doors as she passed them. She summoned the lift and took it to the top floor. Then she wound her way through to the stairwell and climbed up to the roof.

The sky above was black with roiling clouds. Thunder crashed from somewhere on the horizon. Mishka’s bare feet sent ripples through the puddles that covered the concrete roof.

She looked out at the horizon, squinting against the rain. All those buildings, all full of people who had never known their parents. People who had been stolen.

Or given away.

Mishka walked to the edge of the rooftop and stared down at the lethal drop. Tiny cars cruised back and forth below. Stormwater circled toward the grated drains.

Just one more step and it would be over. No more nightmares. No more drugs. No more television, no more tears, no more echoes of her child’s voice.

Mishka shifted her weight, lifting one foot. Every instinct told her not to step forward, that there was nothing to stand on. Her heart rate climbed and climbed.

But she had never jumped before. There was no reason to believe that this time would be different.

She stood on one leg for what seemed like an age, daring herself to lean forward.

Then she was struck by lightning.

***

Mishka woke up some time before she regained consciousness. For several minutes she was aware but not self-aware. She could feel the rainwater pooling at the back of her throat, the stinging of her burned skin, the sensation of lungs filled with smoke. Her ears rang as if bashed with xylophone mallets.

But it took a while to wonder where she was, how she had gotten there, and what her name was.

These details did come back, but slowly and with great difficulty. When she cried out for help, no one came, and when she tried to send out a distress signal, she couldn’t. Her SIM had been shorted out.

Another flash of lightning arced across the stormy sky above, and Mishka scrambled backwards across the rooftop, terrified of another blast. She reached up with a twitching, disobedient hand and pulled the stairwell door open. Then she crawled inside to shelter and sprawled on the landing above the stairs.

She had been badly burned, and without her SIM, she had no idea how to treat her injuries. Nor could she call for help. She would have to climb down to the top floor, knock on someone’s door, and hope they would be willing to escort her to the hospital.

Where a web of tubing would be ready to embrace her. Where vats of chemicals were ready to be pumped into her arteries.

But without her SIM, what other choice did she have?

Without her SIM. The enforcer’s voice, flat and condescending, crawled up out of her memories. As soon as you decided to keep the baby and flee to Australia, your SIM sent a warning to the enforcers. I’ve been watching your feed for months.

If only she’d been struck by lightning eleven years ago. The enforcers wouldn’t have been able to read her mind, and she might still have her son. Instead, he was out there somewhere, and she was in here, separated from him forever.

Or was she?

Mishka staggered down the stairs and returned to the lift. But without her SIM, it wouldn’t register her presence inside, so she had to take the stairs down to her floor. She walked back to her apartment, rubbing her palms together.

A man in a luminous yellow smock stared at her soaked pyjamas as she passed. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

She forced a smile. ‘Fine.’

‘Your clothes…’

‘My printer’s getting fixed. I’ll make a new outfit soon. Thanks.’

It was the first lie she had told in her adult life. The man showed no suspicion. Without the shame or anxiety which would normally radiate from her SIM, he had no reason to doubt her.

She pushed past him, opened the door to her apartment and slipped inside.

Mishka had no medical training, but she had burned her elbow on a faulty heater as a teenage girl. Cold water had soothed the wound. She couldn’t see any reason that an all-over lightning burn should be any different.

She peeled off her pyjamas and stepped into the shower. Freezing water cascaded down her face, her chest, her legs, bringing up goosebumps wherever it went. Her head and the soles of her feet seemed to be the most badly burned. She bit her lip, trying not to scream as the water wore away her sensitive flesh.

If she screamed, no one would hear her. If she thought about screaming, no one would hear that either. Not her neighbours, not passers-by on the street, not the enforcers.

She concocted a criminal sentence, and thought it as loudly as she could. I’m going to rob the apartment next to mine.

Mishka turned off the shower and listened. No angry shouts came through from next door. As far as she could tell, her thought had gone unheard.

She tried again. I’m going to find my son and bring him home.

Silence outside.

A grin spread across Mishka’s face. She spoke aloud, thrilled to hear the forbidden words: ‘I’m going to bring him home.’

***

Mishka only had a glimpse of Josh Young’s face – now bearded, more gaunt, hair thinner, before he slammed the door.

She knocked again. ‘Let me in.’

His voice was muffled by the thick wood. ‘Go away.’

She could have threatened him. Told him that she had enough Full to camp outside his apartment for days. Said that the longer she stayed, the more likely an enforcer was to see her and make the assumption that Josh had resumed his old business.

But instead, she waited. Any moment now, Young would turn off his shielding – if he still had it – scan the corridor, notice the lack of nearby SIMs, and wonder if she was gone.

The door opened a crack. Mishka slammed into it, shoulder-first, knocking Josh over and leaving him with an angry red mark on his forehead. Mishka closed the door behind her while Young rolled, disoriented, on the carpet.

The apartment was showing its age even more than its occupant was. Some of the bright furnishings had faded, but most had been replaced with dull, functional items. Mishka noted that Young, like her, now had a television.

‘Please,’ Young said. ‘You can’t be here.’

Mishka crouched beside him. ‘Actually, I can,’ she said. ‘It turns out that I can be anywhere.’

From this angle, she could see that one of his hands was fake. A flesh-coloured plastic replica, with dark seams at each of the joints.

‘They did this to you,’ she said. ‘For helping me.’

Young smiled bitterly. ‘As you may recall, I didn’t help you.’

The amputation was a warning to everyone else he met – not that he couldn’t be trusted, but that agitators would not be tolerated. She wondered how long they had kept him and what else they’d done to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen to you.’

‘I helped a lot of people before they got me,’ he said. ‘It was worth it.’

It didn’t sound like he meant it.

The enforcers had done terrible things to Young, but Ink, Inc. was working her son to death. She couldn’t get side-tracked.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘now you’re going to help one more person. I need…’

‘I don’t want to know what you need. Are you an idiot? The enforcers are watching my every thought. I couldn’t do anything for you even if I wanted to.’

The enforcers were watching everybody. Mishka had learned that the hard way. She had come to Young because all her other contacts cared about her. They would try to make her go to a hospital and get her SIM fixed – and they wouldn’t have as much experience keeping secrets.

‘I’m not asking for anything illegal,’ she said. ‘I just want a new printer.’

Young’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s wrong with yours?’

‘It doesn’t have a keyboard.’

‘Why do you need…’ He paused. Mishka couldn’t hear his thoughts, but she saw them in his face. He looked at her belly, and then her eyes. He was wondering about her SIM.

She tossed him a pair of ink capsules. ‘It won’t cost you anything. But you’ll have to find the template yourself.’

He threw the capsules back at her. ‘Get out of here,’ he snarled. ‘Right now.’

‘Or what? You’ll drag me out single-handedly?’

Young swiped at her with his good arm, but Mishka grabbed his wrist.

‘Help me now,’ she said, ‘and you’ll never see me again. But if you don’t, I’ll keep coming back.’ She tapped her temple. ‘You’ll never hear me coming. And believe me, I won’t be asking so politely next time.’

She squeezed his hand, crushing his flesh against the metacarpal bones. When he cried out, she let go.

‘Make me a printer,’ she said. ‘You have until I count to a thousand.’

***

Mishka carried the printer in three pieces. One bag in each hand, a backpack on her shoulders. Some people looked at her strangely on the street, perhaps wondering if she was a waster out of uniform. But most didn’t seem to notice her at all. They were accustomed to hearing SIMs as they were approached. Without one, she was a ghost – rarely seen and never clearly.

She climbed the stairs up to her floor, counting the things she would need to make. A server, so she could process the data she stole from the company’s systems. A series of disguises to get her into their facilities. An artificial SIM to auto-generate banal nonsense so any enforcer who happened to check her feed would not notice that she had vanished. What else?

She held one of the bags in the crook of her arm so she could count things off on her fingers. A series of proximity sensors like Young had once owned, so she would hear anyone who approached her apartment. Weapons – preferably non-lethal, but she was flexible on that point. Transport, since her son may have been taken a very long way away.

These things would require a lot of ink. But Mishka could afford it. Her pension had been piling up for the last eleven years, mostly untouched. She could print almost anything she wanted.

When she arrived at her apartment, it took Mishka almost five hours to assemble the printer. The process would have been easier with a SIM, since she would have been able to look up the answers to the questions as she went. She told herself that once she had the printer running, the rest of the process would be easier.

It was late at night before she finished, but she didn’t feel tired. She hadn’t felt tired since the lightning strike. It seemed to have literally energised her.

Mishka plugged the final cable into the last socket and stepped back to study her handiwork. If she had set it up correctly, it would be downloading the template she had selected right now. When she inserted the ink pod, it should start making its first object.

No reason to wait. She opened the hatch, inserted the pod into the chute and locked it into place before closing the hatch again. An orange light glowed on a side panel. Mishka watched the needles swivel back and forth inside the glass box, dropping dabs of resin into the searing lasers.

How long would it take her to find her son? She knew his date of birth. She knew which child processing centre was closest to the lift he’d been taken from. She knew her own blood group, and Sean’s, which would help her eliminate most of the other babies taken to the centre on that day.

The printer beeped. Mishka sifted through the leftover powder and pulled out a handheld microwave emitter. A pain ray. If anyone came after her, she wouldn’t be defenceless. In fact, she would never be helpless again.

Six months, she decided. That was how long it would take to find her son in the company’s records.

It took five years.

***

Gregory Merchant. Mishka read her son’s name and then read it again, savouring each syllable. She knew that names were randomly assigned, but now that she’d read it, she somehow felt like she could see him in her head. He was dignified, but in an unassuming way. Hardworking. Not big, but strong, with a face people immediately trusted.

‘Gregory,’ she breathed. ‘Gregory Merchant.’ Her son, almost reunited with her.

Her mind was like a freshly-sharpened blade. She hadn’t taken a Sleep, a Relax or a Content in half a decade. By the time she worked out how to make drugs with her new printer, she hadn’t felt like she needed them.

Her body, too, hummed with power. Years of assembling things with her hands and being ignored by lifts had turned her frame into a scrawny web of muscle. She had printed and installed a chin-up bar in her kitchenette, not so much to keep fit, but to burn off all the excess energy she suddenly had. When that was no longer enough, she had hung a punching bag from it and painted targets on the canvas skin. A weight and a hydraulic spring inside kept the swings erratic.

Mishka scrolled through the rest of the file. Gregory had started out as a Splitter, performing safety checks on one of the nuclear reactors. But after fifteen months he had been moved to the Lavoisier Institute, where exceptionally intelligence teenagers designed things to improve the world.

Mishka blushed with pride. She couldn’t tell exactly what invention Gregory had been working on – not without counterfeiting a higher clearance level – but he was clearly brilliant. Her son, a genius!

He had stayed at the institute until just a few weeks ago, when he was moved again, this time to the Van Gogh Centre. Mishka couldn’t find any information about what that was or what he was doing there, but she suspected it was a promotion. Her son must have proven himself to be even smarter than the other kids at the Lavoisier institute, and now he was working on something above top secret.

The Van Gogh Centre had an address. It was only a few hundred kilometres away. Mishka couldn’t ride the tube pods without a SIM, but using the vehicle she had printed, she could be there in a day.

A sudden swell of fear filled her up. Her son knew nothing about her, and he clearly had his own life. He only had nine hundred days of service to go before he was free. What if he refused to come with her? What if he was frightened of her? What if he raised the alarm and she was caught?

No. He was her flesh and bone, and he was fiercely intelligent. He would want to know her. Together, there was nothing they couldn’t do.

She downloaded some new templates and hit print.

***

Mishka sat in the car on the edge of the empty wharf. The soft roof was folded away. If this didn’t work, she didn’t want to drown. If it did work, she could be with Gregory by this time tomorrow. This was the last little detail.

The car had taken Mishka several months – and a lot of ink – to perfect. The windows were tinted enough to ensure that no one would get a good look at her, but not so much that people would assume she had something to hide. The bodywork was reinforced against bullets, microwaves and magnetic scans, but was coated in a flimsy plastic shell to make it appear cheap and fragile. It also had a few extra alterations of which she was particularly proud.

She patted the steering wheel, as though reassuring it. ‘Okay,’ she muttered. ‘Here goes.’

Small yachts bobbed gently on the murky water. Sails crackled in the faint breeze. Mishka started the engine. The electric motor hummed beneath her, sending minute vibrations through her feet. She put the car in gear and pushed down on the accelerator.

The car eased forward along the jetty, slowly at first, but picking up speed. It took all Mishka’s self-control not to hit the brake as she rocketed toward the end of the jetty, faster and faster.

Gravity vanished as the car hurtled off the edge, wheels spinning in the empty air. Mishka braced herself between the steering wheel and the seat as it fell, and fell, further than she had thought possible, and then…

Crash! The car hit the ocean, throwing Mishka around in her seat. The wheels churned the water into froth until she released the accelerator.

The car began to sink.

‘Come on,’ she hissed. ‘You can do it!’

A light flashed on the dashboard. The engine changed gear. The wheels retracted. The propellor whirred as it extended from beneath the boot. And suddenly the car – the boat, now – was accelerating again, carving a line through the ocean toward the horizon.

Mishka grinned against the icy spray. Once she had Gregory, they could ride this thing into the sunset. She had already tested the desalination pump and packed enough Full to last them a decade.

She twisted the steering wheel, and felt the propeller shift beneath her. The world rotated around the boat until she was facing land again. Just around the cove, there was a stony beach. In theory, she should be able to drive right out of the water onto it, and then begin her trek over land.

‘Hold on, Gregory,’ she said. ‘I’m coming to get you.’

***

Mishka was a little more relaxed now that the car was dry. She didn’t need to worry about pedestrians wondering why the car was wet on such a hot, dry day, and their thoughts triggering the attention of an enforcer. Perhaps she was being paranoid – but she was so close. She couldn’t get caught now.

A silent car, too, might attract enforcers. So she had hooked a car battery in the glove compartment up to her fake SIM, which was babbling nonsense for any busybodies who happened to listen in.

She had printed out several costumes, which lay in bags on the back seat. If she needed to dress as a miner, a splitter, a waster or a nurse, she wouldn’t have to rob anyone to look the part.

Another box contained climbing gear, diving apparatus and a diverse range of weapons. Mishka didn’t know exactly what she would be faced with, so she had tried to prepare for every eventuality. She had even printed out some static-discharge bags which could be pulled over someone’s head to block the signal to his SIM. This would stop him from sounding the alarm, and would probably disorient him for almost as long as the lightning strike had confused her.

Her printer was disassembled in the boot, with a crate of spare batteries. She hadn’t wanted to leave anything important at her apartment. For all she knew, she would never be able to return.

The car rumbled past building after building. The apartment blocks were of a uniform width and depth, but not height, since the tallest buildings towers could only be erected on bedrock. The cracked concrete around some of the shorter buildings told her that they were sinking. Perhaps only one centimetre per decade, but sinking nonetheless.

Mishka drove carefully. Enforcers were unlikely to be patrolling the streets, and there was very little traffic, but the few cars she did see were moving at reckless speeds. Unmuffled engines howling, they zoomed through intersections without braking and took corners fast enough that the wheels on one side almost lifted off the ground.

If someone crashed into her, Mishka would have great difficulty explaining the contents of her vehicle. So she moved slowly and precisely, giving the hoons a wide berth.

Other than for one quick restroom break, she did not stop, but kept moving tirelessly toward her destination, fuelled by Awake and Full.

Even after taking a Focus, she found her thoughts drawn toward Gregory. What would he say, when she told him who she was? What would it feel like, to see him for the first time in sixteen years?

She rehearsed her opening line. ‘Gregory. I’m your mother. I’ve been looking for you all your life, and now I’m here to free you.’

She thought about adding a choice – you don’t have to come with me, but I’d like you to. But what would she do if he said no?

A mushroom cloud of steam was released from the chimneys of nuclear power plant up ahead, staining the horizon. She wondered if it was the same plant Gregory had worked at. Perhaps he had invented a better way to turn radioactive waste into fuel. This might have been what led the Lavoisier program to notice him. Once he was recruited, he must have done something even more impressive to get promoted to the Van Gogh Centre. Mishka had so many questions that one lifetime didn’t seem long enough to ask them all.

She slowed the vehicle down to a crawl. The street address was just up ahead. She had planned to sleep in the car, making sure she was fully refreshed before the rescue. But now that she was here, she couldn’t bear to stop. Gregory was in that building, the flat slab of whitewashed stone, gridded with lit windows. She couldn’t wait any longer.

She parked the car, just close enough to read the sign. Fehr Medical. A smile split Mishka’s face. A doctor. Her son was a nuclear technician and a doctor!

The mask was tight. The nurse’s scrubs, designed for someone thirty years younger, barely fit. The Young had smoothed her face, but couldn’t shrink her frame. She felt a ludicrous moment of self-consciousness. The first time Gregory saw her, she would look like this – a middle-aged woman dressed like a teenage girl.

Still. He would understand.

She didn’t want to take the fake SIM with her. People would hear it coming. She checked it one more time. The Van Gogh Centre was on level B3, underground. If his last few postings were also beneath the surface, Gregory might never have seen the sky. She couldn’t wait to show him.

Mishka clambered out of the car, looked both ways, and approached the building, trying to look like she belonged.

***

The inside of the medical facility was dark and cold. Drug overdoses were the most common cause of hospitalisation, and sensitivity to light was one of the most common symptoms of a drug overdose, so Mishka guessed that the place was kept dim day and night. Some individual rooms were lit, leaving bright triangles on the tiled floor outside the doorways. Mishka circled around these halos, keeping to the shadows.

She expected the lift not to recognise her without a SIM, but it was weight triggered, and the steel box began to descend as soon as she touched the button marked B3. Perhaps malfunctioning SIMs were a common enough health problem that the lifts had been designed to accommodate it.

Mishka kept her face tilted away from the camera in the ceiling. The mask covered everything except her eyes, but even those might be enough to expose her identity in the company database. And if anyone figured out who she was, it wouldn’t take them long to work out why she was here.

The lift doors opened. She stepped out onto floor B3 – and nearly crashed into a nurse.

‘Oh! Sorry,’ the nurse said.

Mishka nodded and moved away, knowing that if she spoke, her voice would expose her as an adult. She longed to look over her shoulder and check if the nurse was watching her depart, but if so, the action would be incredibly suspicious.

Instead, she listened. She heard the lift doors slide closed. Had the nurse gone inside? No footsteps echoed through the corridor. But she could just be standing still, observing, wondering why she hadn’t heard Mishka’s SIM.

Mishka turned a corner, pressed her back against the wall, and kept listening.

No foot falls.

She peeked around the corner. The corridor was empty. The nurse had gone.

Mishka exhaled and kept walking, looking for a map or a sign. That’s the downside of being invisible, she thought. People bump into you, and…

There. A door, marked VAN GOGH CENTRE.

Mishka reached for the handle. Hesitated.

Her son had been moved here. He was on the other side of this door. She couldn’t afford to wait. Why was she so scared?

She swallowed her rising dread, twisted the handle, and pushed the door open.

For a fraction of a second she took in all the giant chrome trays, the balancing scales, the grid of small, square steel doors – and then she fell to her knees, unable to breathe.

She was in a morgue.

***

She didn’t remember standing up. She didn’t remember walking from one drawer to the next, checking the labels until she found the one marked GREGORY MERCHANT in bold, sans-serif letters. She didn’t remember hauling the drawer open and peeling back the sheet, but she must have done these things, because now she was standing over her son’s body.

And he didn’t look handsome, or trustworthy, or intelligent, or any of the other things she had expected. He looked like his nose had been broken and rebroken, lips split and resplit. The flesh around his eyes had puffed up, half-closing them. His cheekbones were cracked. His jaw was twisted sideways. Even if he had somehow survived the beating, he would have been disfigured for the rest of his life. Not only would Mishka never know her son – she wouldn’t even know what he had looked like.

The skin beneath his chin was purple, and though the blood had been washed from his hair, Mishka could see the hole where the back of his skull had caved in. The rest of his body looked unharmed, but for the Y-shaped scar on his chest, where the doctors had unzipped his body like a sports bag.

Her baby had been stolen from her for sixteen years. Then someone had beaten him, strangled him and bashed his head against the floor. Someone else had cut him open to examine his insides. And now, according to the paperwork – a single A4 sheet, neatly folded beneath the name label, he was scheduled to be recycled.

Mishka knew what that meant. The proteins in his body would be broken down, reconstituted and pushed through the city’s pipes as prote-ink, ready to be printed out as Full and consumed by the hungry populace.

In a cabinet beneath the morgue drawer, Mishka found a canvas bag filled with Gregory’s belongings. Some clothes, big and loose. Bottles of Relax and Focus. A capsule of ink with his name on it – perhaps one of his experiments.

The bag was stamped TO BE DESTROYED.

Mishka hefted it. Her son had owned so little. Now he had nothing.

The piece of paper also told her the weight of Gregory’s organs, the condition of his bones and the time of his death – everything she wanted to know, and some things she didn’t. Everything except for why. What demented, senseless series of events had led him to this slab?

The cause of death report was useless. It listed blunt trauma, intra-cranial haemorrhaging, and several other things that Mishka, with no medical training, could see with her own eyes.

There was a case file code. Her son’s life, reduced a fourteen-character string of letters and numbers. Mishka’s blood began to boil.

‘Oh!’

Mishka turned. It was the same nurse who had bumped into her earlier, standing in the doorway.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were in here.’ Then she looked at Mishka’s red, puffy eyes and the veins standing out in her neck. ‘Are you okay?’

Mishka knew she should try to think of some kind of clever lie, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. Her son was dead. Nothing was worth anything any more.

‘I need to be alone,’ she said.

But her voice only made the nurse more suspicious. ‘I can’t hear you,’ she said. ‘Why can’t I hear you?’

‘Please leave.’ Mishka turned back to the body on the slab. Gregory’s forehead was intact. She bent down and kissed it gently. His cold skin left a faint tang of formaldehyde on her lips.

‘I’ll give you some privacy,’ the nurse said. The words sounded stiff – she was almost certainly planning to raise the alarm. She was used to her every thought being broadcast, and had no experience with deception.

Mishka drew the microwave emitter and pulled the trigger.

The nurse shrieked and collapsed to the floor, shivering. Mishka knew what she was going through – she had tested the weapon on herself. She pulled a static bag out from her pocket and pulled it over the nurse’s skull, muffling her screams and hopefully silencing her SIM.

She took one last look at Gregory and felt her heart break. Then she slipped out of the morgue.

She could already hear voices and footsteps in the corridor outside. Backup was coming. Mishka turned away from the lift and ran toward the stairwell.

A voice, male, echoed from somewhere behind her. ‘There’s no one down here.’

‘One of the nurses is. I heard her.’

‘Can you hear her now?’

‘No. Spread out.’

Mishka crept through the shadows, invisible, inaudible, toward the fire door. When she looked back, she saw someone pushing open the door to the morgue.

‘She’s here! I got her!’

Mishka shoved the fire door open, wincing at the clanking sound, and darted through the gap into the stairwell. She climbed up three floors and escaped through a service entrance into the alleyway behind the building. Then she collapsed onto the dirty concrete and finally let the tears run free.

***

The new apartment stank. A few leaks in the ceiling had soaked the carpet on multiple occasions, leading to a gradual build-up of mould. The rubber seals around the fridge door had been eaten away by rats, several of which seemed to have died inside.

Mishka barely noticed. She dumped her bags on the floor and slid down the wall, chewing her cracked lips.

Gregory had been stolen from her again. And this time, she couldn’t tell herself that he was better off, that he was happy out there somewhere. The worst part was that the killer had beaten her by only a few weeks. If she’d worked harder, faster, been less cautious – if she hadn’t spent eleven years in a cocoon of her own self-pity before starting the search...

But not again. Mishka had endured enough sadness for one lifetime. Now she had decided to try rage.

Gregory was dead, and his killer was alive. That was a problem which needed to be remedied.

She reassembled her computer – thankfully, whoever had abandoned this apartment had forgotten to switch off the electricity – and booted it up. Then she performed a search on the fourteen digit code.

No results.

She activated a new keygen so the computer could mimic a SIM with a higher clearance level, and searched again. One result. ECI. Extremely Compartmentalised Information. She couldn’t open it.

Since the lightning strike she had wormed her way into hundreds of protected databases, but this was the strongest encryption she had ever seen. Her son hadn’t just been murdered. His murder had been covered up. Why? Had Gregory been killed accidentally by enforcers? Was he assassinated by a spy from overseas?

It took Mishka two days to program a higher-level passkey. She worked without food or sleep. This was the most sophisticated authorisation she had ever tried to fake. If it didn’t tell her what had happened to her son, she had no idea what to do. She hit search.

One result. ECI.

She pounded her fists on the floor and howled a desperate scream of fury. Her knuckles split and bled. She sucked on them, panting through her nose.

Then she saw the second line.

Contact: Trent Poken.

Even with the highest artificial clearance level, she wasn’t allowed to know what had happened to Gregory. But she was allowed to know who knew it.

She looked up some of Trent Poken’s details. After completing his four thousand days of service, he had volunteered to keep working. He had started out as an enforcer, one of the few careers that admitted adults and not children, and risen through the ranks over the decades and eventually been picked up by Ink, Inc.’s senior strategy committee. And now...

Chills ran down Mishka’s spine. Now, Trent Poken was Deputy Chief Information Officer of the company. There couldn’t be more than ten people in the whole organisation who outranked him.

What did the senior management of Ink, Inc. have to do with her son’s death? What had he gotten himself into?

Everything Mishka had done so far – hacking into databases, refusing to get her SIM fixed, attacking a nurse with a microwave emitter – could earn her a lengthy prison sentence or an amputation. But going after the Deputy CIO of Inc, Inc. was a different category of crime. If caught, she would be strapped to a chair and injected with Die – a mixture of normally harmless gases, supercooled into liquid form before it was pumped into her arteries. She would be alive and screaming until the cocktail reached her heart and froze it. When her dead body thawed, it would be non-toxic and ready for recycling.

Her son’s body – broken, limp – flashed through her mind.

‘Okay, Trent,’ she whispered. ‘Let’s get to know each other.’

***

The stadium looked like it hadn’t been repaired in decades. Grooves and scratches had worn into the stone steps so it was difficult to find a comfortable spot to sit. The artificial grass on the field was patchy, with black seams opening up between sections.

The band, a trio of women in sparkling dresses, stood on a black podium. Each held a square of plastic, about half the size of a tombstone, decorated with markers of various colours. Mishka knew that these weren’t instruments, not exactly – the music was synthesised entirely by the performers’ minds – but the movement of their hands on the plastic squares would help them focus the sound they were trying to create. Sean had used something similar, dazzling her with the beautiful harmonies he made. That seemed like a long time ago.

Now, of course, she couldn’t hear anything. The music was being broadcast wirelessly into the brains of the audience, but she had no way of receiving it. She turned back to her scrutiny of Deputy Chief Information Officer Trent Poken.

Poken had lost a little weight since his picture was taken, but he was still a fairly fat man, hair greying at the temples, skin warped between his eyebrows. He was either a middle-aged man who was behind on his Young injections, or a very old man who was up-to-date with them.

Unlike the rest of the crowd, his head wasn’t bobbing to the beat. He seemed to be on his own – the people on either side of him were turned slightly away. And he wasn’t watching the musicians. He was looking at the crowd. Mishka couldn’t read the expression on his face. Pity? Envy?

Perhaps he was looking for pregnant women, whose babies he could steal. Or freshly freed teenagers he could beat to death.

Mishka gritted her teeth and sat down a few rows behind him. Even knowing that the noise from all the SIMs must be deafening, that she was invisible here, it made her nervous to be surrounded. But when Poken moved, she didn’t want to lose him.

He held a giant plastic cup, less than half full of a grey, sludgy fluid. As Mishka watched, he took another sip. No wincing. He must have had a Taste recently.

All that liquid had to go somewhere. Nothing to do but wait.

Mishka couldn’t hear the music, but she could hear the echoes of it. Most of the audience was humming along with the tune. It was like hiding inside a bee hive. She hadn’t heard the songs before, but she could tell which parts where the choruses, because some people in the crowd started to mutter the words.

Poken gulped down the last of his drink, stood, and wove through the crowd toward the bathrooms. Mishka moved after him, keeping the back of his head in sight.

Two other people were following Poken. Big men with padded clothes, eyeing the crowd. Mishka recognised their vests from a template she had downloaded. Bullet-proof. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one planning something. If they got to Poken before she did...

Poken disappeared into the men’s room. One of the two men followed him in. The other stayed outside. Before Mishka could decide what to do, the first man came back out and stood beside the door, waiting.

Bodyguards, Mishka realised. They had checked that the bathroom was safe, and now they were waiting for their boss to finish up inside.

She didn’t have much time. A waste bin stood nearby, full of crumpled tickets and wrapping paper from greasy Fulls. She produced a cigarette lighter, reached into the bin, and set some of the paper alight. Then she walked away, strolling past the bodyguards without glancing in their direction.

‘Hey!’ someone yelled. ‘Look!’

Someone else screamed.

Mishka turned around. Everyone, including the bodyguards, was looking at the haze of smoke uncoiling above the bin.

If her SIM had been working, the two men would have heard her duck into the bathroom behind them. But it wasn’t, so they didn’t.

The men’s room stank of cleaning bacteria, yet somehow the floor still looked grimy. A cracked skylight illuminated the cubicles, the mirror, the wall plastered over with posters.

Poken stood at the urinal. One of the cubicles was closed, but probably unoccupied. Either way, Mishka doubted she would get another chance.

She walked up behind Poken and pulled a bag over his head.

He cried out, thrashing like a dog with a rat in its mouth. Mishka held him tightly, teeth clenched, dodging his flailing elbows. The bag was lined with chloroflurane. She just had to wait.

His movements became slower, weaker, then he was limp in her arms.

‘Hey!’

One of the bodyguards was standing in the doorway, holding a gun. Not a microwave emitter – this thing would spit out actual bullets.

Mishka dug a remote control out of her pocket.

‘Put him down,’ the bodyguard growled.

‘Duck,’ Mishka said. She pressed a button.

Boom.

She had expected the wall to explode, but the charges she had attached to the other side weren’t strong enough. Instead, a labyrinth of cracks spread across it and a few chunks fell out, revealing the car park outside the stadium.

The bodyguard pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening in the exposed space. The bullet missed Mishka – he had aimed wide, probably worried about hitting Poken.

Mishka ripped the bag off Poken’s head and pushed him toward the bodyguard. As the bodyguard stepped forward to catch him, she pressed the torn bag over his face.

The bodyguard staggered back, sneezing, and bumped dizzily into the cubicles. The gun clattered against the floor.

Mishka dragged Poken over to the cracked wall, kicked out a few more chunks and hauled him through the gap into the car park.

The boat-car was three spaces away from the wall. Far enough to be shielded from the blast, close enough that she could carry Poken to it in a hurry. By the time she heard the sirens, the car was on the highway with Poken’s unconscious body in the boot.

***

He was clever.

Mishka hadn’t expected him to be stupid. But when she cracked the smelling salts under his nostrils, his eyes popped open and he stared at her for a moment – realising that he couldn’t hear her, she couldn’t hear him, and she’d lined the walls of the apartment with disruptors so he couldn’t signal for help. Then he said, ‘You must be Mishka Andrews’. How could he possibly know?

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’ll save us some time.’

‘Time being in short supply,’ Poken said. ‘For you.’

Mishka pulled the microwave emitter out of a box and assembled it slowly. She let him watch her doing it.

‘It depends how long I was unconscious, of course,’ Poken continued. ‘But given how closely my colleagues have been following you and your little vendetta, I figure you have forty-five minutes at the most before they arrive.’

‘If that were true,’ Mishka said, ‘you certainly wouldn’t be warning me about it.’

‘I’m trying to get us both out of this alive.’

Mishka pointed the microwave gun at him. ‘You’re already dead, as far as the enforcers are concerned. Your SIM stopped transmitting at the same time as an explosion in your immediate vicinity at a stadium. They’re sweeping the rubble for your body now.’

‘No doubt. How pleased they’ll be to find me here, alive, in forty-four minutes or so.’

Mishka pulled the trigger.

Poken’s teeth crashed together and his limbs strained at the straps. When she lowered the gun, his brow was beaded with sweat.

‘That’s what happens when you lie to me,’ Mishka said. ‘No one else knows I exist. The only reason you know my name is that you murdered my son.’

She doubted that this was true – a fat middle-aged man overpowering a genius in his prime? But it provoked him.

‘That wasn’t me,’ he said.

She aimed the microwave gun at him again.

‘It wasn’t me!’ he shouted. ‘I swear!’

‘Then who?’

Poken hesitated.

She fried him again. His wails of agony were deadened by the padding in the walls.

‘Give me a name,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he panted.

She pulled the trigger.

‘I can’t!’ he screamed. ‘I can’t! Please!’

It wouldn’t be long before he realised he could give her a false name, sending her into a trap or forcing her to spend days tracking down a nobody. Perhaps it had already occurred to him, and he was exaggerating his pain and fear so as she would believe that the name was real.

Then again, maybe the name he gave her would be real, if she hurt him enough. There was no way to tell.

‘Okay,’ Mishka said. ‘Let’s try something else.’

It took her a few hours to set up what she wanted. A monitor, hooked up to her fake SIM, which had been reprogrammed to replicate Poken’s feed. Now his every thought would flash up on the screen.

At the moment, he seemed to be thinking only about numbers. Thousands of them, scrolling up the screen like ants escaping a flood.

A self-control technique, Mishka guessed. Poken had access to Extremely Compartmentalised Information, so he had learned some ways to keep his feed from revealing his thoughts.

Mishka swivelled the monitor so as only she could see it.

‘Time for a test,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Trent,’ Poken muttered.

The flow of numbers was uninterrupted.

‘What’s your name?’ Mishka asked again. This time, she zapped him with the microwave emitter.

Poken yelped, and some text flashed up on the screen. Trent Poken.

‘That’s more like it,’ Mishka said. ‘Who killed Gregory Merchant?’

She pulled the trigger. The numbers of the screen didn’t disappear at first. This information was more well defended in Poken’s mind. But she held the trigger down, deaf to his screams, until the words appeared.

Lukas Taleb.

Rage bubbled in Mishka’s stomach.

‘Where can I find this Lukas Taleb?’ she asked.

‘Please,’ Poken gasped. ‘You can’t hurt him. He’s too important.’

‘Why?’

Poken fell silent.

Mishka fried him again. He shrieked, squirming in his bonds.

But only numbers appeared on the screen. Whatever Poken knew, it was buried deep.

She released the trigger. ‘Why did Taleb kill my son?’

Poken didn’t answer. But the screen said Can’t tell can’t ever tell never no-one can ever...

Mishka pressed the microwave emitter against Poken’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. He screamed and thrashed and finally went limp.

She looked at the screen. Blank. He must have blacked out.

Then she checked his pulse.

He was dead.

***

Lukas opened his eyes.

He was still strapped to the dentist’s chair, but the cable had been removed from his mouth.

The sadness of losing Gregory, the elation of being so close to finding him, the pain of losing him a second time and the blazing rage which had driven her to hunt down the fat man – these sensations were already fading, although they had felt completely real as he experienced them.

He wondered how much time had passed. It felt like sixteen years, but the woman didn’t look like she had moved. Perhaps it was only a few seconds.

‘You hunted me down,’ he said, ‘just to tell me your damn life story?’

Mishka’s eyes were hard and cold. ‘I wanted to meet the monster who killed my son. That’s why I had to wait until the Care wore off.’

‘You seem like you need it more than me.’

‘You really feel nothing?’ Mishka said. ‘Even now that you know what it was like to love Gregory Merchant?’

‘Love him? You only met him once, just like I did.’

‘Yes, but I knew him. I know how his life began. I know where he spent his four thousand days of service. I know what he designed in the Lavoisier Institute – a new kind of ink which could print living things. I used it to make the cat.’

She pointed. Lukas saw that the cat he had starved to death was sniffing under the couch, as though nothing had happened.

‘And I know how his life ended,’ Mishka continued. ‘He’ll never invent anything else, because he was strangled and beaten to death. What I don’t know is why.’

Lukas tried to shrug, but his arms were still strapped down.

Mishka’s fist hit him like a wrecking ball.

Lukas cried out, as much from the shock as anything. He had expected the microwave gun. He had prepared for it. But she was willing to hurt herself to hurt him – the blow had left her knuckles cracked and bleeding – and this had caught him by surprise.

‘Why?’ she roared.

‘I don’t remember.’

She hit him again. The cartilage in his nose crumpled under her fist. Blood pooled in the back of his throat.

‘Why?’ She raised her fist a third time.

‘I don’t remember!’ Lukas screamed.

She hesitated and then punched him in the groin. He gagged, the pain rushing up his abdomen like bile.

‘How could you not remember?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t remember anything from before,’ Lukas wheezed. ‘It’s like he erased my memory as I killed him. I didn’t even know my own name, after.’

Mishka said nothing for a long moment. Then she said, ‘I believe you.’

Lukas’ heart rate dropped, just a little.

‘Which means you’ve told me everything you know,’ Mishka continued. ‘So I can kill you.’

Lukas pulled at his bonds, hoping the adrenaline would be enough to tear them. It wasn’t.

‘The enforcers will find you,’ he said.

‘I could break into their head office, confess everything and walk out again. They still wouldn’t catch me.’ Mishka tapped her head. ‘Not without a feed to track.’

‘They wouldn’t need a feed. They’d have a body. When unauthorised human tissue shows up in the centrifuge, the wasters…’

‘I can print animals much larger than a cat. Big enough to consume you in a matter of hours. Dead, or alive.’

‘You can’t print living things,’ Lukas said, because it just seemed so wrong that he couldn’t believe it was true. Mishka laughed.

‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you straight away. I’m going to put you back in your cell.’ She leaned over him. ‘Padded walls. Lights out. How long do you think your sanity will last? A week? Two?’

It would be hell, but Lukas could survive two weeks. And when she eventually opened the door to let the animals in, that would be his chance to escape. Maybe he could get out of this alive.

‘Absolute silence,’ Mishka said. ‘Absolute darkness. It will be a lot like how I lived, after Gregory was taken from me, before I found him again. And it will last just as long.’

Lukas stared at her, looking for weakness and seeing none.

‘See you in sixteen years,’ Mishka said, and plunged the syringe into his neck. The world went cold and black and silent as the inside of a coffin.

Part Three

Chantelle

Chapter Six

Reinforced

Chantelle Lowe swung from one bar to the next, triceps aching, palms hot against the cold metal, sweat pouring down her sternum and darkening the cloth beneath her arms. Her feet, poised over the gym mats, were swollen from almost an hour of hanging below her.

One more circuit and she would stop. But hadn’t she said that last time, and the time before? The gym had once been her safe place. She had looked forward to it, reminisced about it, even dreamed about it sometimes. But the same workouts which once invigorated her now left her slumping and sore. Her bed looked better each night, and every morning her body was a little more stiff. The Young kept her face smooth and the stubble on her scalp black, but couldn’t do anything about her stiffening joints and tightening muscles.

She fought it anyway. One more circuit. Perhaps two.

‘Lowe!’

She dropped to the floor, whirled around and snapped out a salute. ‘Sir!’

‘New case,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Homicide. Trent Poken.’ He was younger than her. She could tell because he looked older – he hadn’t started taking Young injections yet. His thin lips curved downwards as he watched the sweat drip around her bare, throbbing feet.

‘Intention alarm?’ Chantelle asked.

‘No.’

The dispatcher walked out without offering her any more information. It was a small department, always understaffed, the enforcers and dispatchers consistently overworked. He didn’t have time to tell her things she could look up in the file.

Chantelle pulled a microfibre cloth out of her bag and towelled herself off. Then she changed into her uniform as the details of the case started appearing in her head.

Trent Poken, forty-eight years old, divorced, last seen at Hailey stadium, where there had been a small, unexplained explosion.

Chantelle opened the cache of Poken’s feed, reviewing his last few minutes. Most people didn’t think in words most of the time and Poken was no exception, but all enforcers were trained to be able to sift through the tangled sensations and emotions, revealing the meaning beneath. Poken, it looked like, spent his last few minutes watching a concert, drinking, going to the bathroom, and then…

Nothing. His feed just stopped.

Chantelle loaded up some more data from the first responders’ feeds. Probably not an accidental death, since the body seemed to have been stolen from the scene. And one of Poken’s bodyguards reported seeing–

Bodyguards? Chantelle double-checked the information. Yes, Poken had employed bodyguards. He had been Deputy CIO of Ink, Inc.

A guilty thrill ran through her body. This could be the case of her career. Who would dare touch the upper management of the biggest and most important company in the world?

She popped a Focus into her mouth, swallowed, and tightened the straps on her armour. It would take a long time to go through the last few minutes before the explosion in the feeds of everyone at the stadium, but not longer than five and a half hours. She checked – yes, the first responders had tried that, and come up with nothing. Between that and the lack of an intention alarm, it sounded like the culprit had found a way to block his or her SIM from the network.

It was theoretically possible. It had always been possible. But nine out of ten people set off an intention alarm when they decided to try it. Out of those who made it as far as setting up a blocker, almost all became so disoriented that they immediately changed their minds, or were quickly caught.

She searched Poken’s feed for names. About nine thousand came up. Less than average – Poken was a solitary man. Chantelle cross-referenced these names with the department’s database, looking for connections to other cases. Nothing useful came up.

Chantelle climbed down the stairs – taking the lift was a sign of weakness, of age – and called up a car from the motor pool. It drove itself over to her, and by the time it stopped, Chantelle had already mentally programmed in the address.

Moments after that, she was slumped in the seat, watching the steering wheel turn back and forth as the car took her toward the apartment of Trent Poken’s ex-wife.

***

Victoria Poken reacted the same way that most people do, when they hear a knock at their door, approach it and sense an enforcer on the other side. She froze.

Chantelle felt her hesitation, and knocked again. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’re not in any trouble. I just have a couple of questions.’

Victoria opened the door. She was a statuesque woman with a gleaming, freshly shaved skull and vivid blue eyes, possibly enhanced by contact lenses. Her belly bulged with what could be too many Fulls and not enough exercise, or possibly a second trimester pregnancy.

‘I’m already booked in at the birthing centre,’ she stammered. ‘You can check.’

‘I’m not here about that.’ Chantelle didn’t envy her. The vomiting, the endless exhaustion, the constant hunger, the knowledge that there was a human being inside her who she would never get to–

Chantelle tipped another Focus into her mouth, warding off an unproductive line of thought. Victoria looked uneasy, but not guilty. It seemed unlikely that she had killed her ex-husband.

Her mouth fell open. ‘Trent’s dead?’

‘Murdered,’ Chantelle said.

Victoria staggered back into her living area, eyes wide. Chantelle entered, and closed the door behind her.

There had probably been a gentler way to break the news. Focus always made her a little insensitive. She usually didn’t take it before interviewing suspects, but this time–

‘I’m a suspect?’ Victoria demanded.

Chantelle sighed. ‘Here.’ She held out a Relax and a Content. After a moment’s hesitation, Victoria took them and dry-swallowed them. Her eyes were filling up with tears. Chantelle could feel her calling Trent’s SIM, over and over again, getting an error message each time.

The apartment was tastefully furnished, with enough mirrors to make it seem spacious and enough bright photographs to make it seem cheerful. The legs of the synthetic wood chairs were all longer than average – Victoria must have modified the templates to accommodate her lanky frame.

‘Please, Trent,’ Victoria whimpered. ‘Pick up.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Chantelle said. ‘But he’s not there.’

Victoria squeezed her eyes shut and collapsed into one of the chairs. ‘What happened?’

‘He was killed in an explosion, we think.’ Chantelle sat down next to her. ‘I’ve checked his feed – it was quick. He wouldn’t have felt any pain.’

Victoria stared at the mirror, as though she didn’t recognise herself.

‘When did you last see your ex-husband?’ Chantelle asked.

‘I don’t know. Two years ago? Three? No, two. Six months after the divorce.’

Chantelle grunted. If it had been that long, Victoria was unlikely to know anything relevant to the murder. But since she was here...

‘Did Trent have any enemies?’ she asked.

Victoria’s features slackened as the drugs started to take effect. ‘How would I know?’

‘He was a quiet man?’

‘I suppose so. Towards the end.’

‘Tell me why–’ Chantelle broke off, resisted her instinct to be brutally direct. ‘If I may ask, Ms Poken, what were the circumstances surrounding your decision to separate from Trent?’

Victoria hung her head. ‘He came home late one night. Wouldn’t tell me where he had been, or what he had been doing. I didn’t push him. But after that, things weren’t the same. There was a part of him I couldn’t get to, and that part just got bigger and bigger.’

‘When was this?’

Victoria stared into space, digging through her archived feed posts. ‘June 10^th,’ she said.

‘Two years ago?’

‘Yes.’

Chantelle scrolled back through Trent Poken’s feed. But the whole day was missing. It had been erased. Whatever secret Poken had uncovered, he hadn’t wanted it found out even after his death.

‘Do you remember anything he said to you that night?’

‘Not really. I asked if everything was okay, he said he couldn’t talk about it. Then we went to bed.’

‘Did you hear anything in his SIM? Anything unusual?’

‘Numbers,’ Victoria said. ‘Lots of numbers. I remember thinking that he must have been dealing with an accounting problem. And then he thought, This could change the world.’

Chantelle’s spine tingled. ‘Did he seem excited?’

‘No. No-one at Ink, Inc. likes change.’

‘Was there anything else unusual that you saw or heard in the following days and months?’

Victoria shook her head. ‘Not that I remember.’

‘Okay.’ Chantelle stood up. ‘Thanks for your co-operation.’

Victoria caught her arm on her way out the door. ‘Can I see him? Before they...’

Trent Poken wasn’t scheduled to be recycled until the investigation was concluded, and if Victoria were still married to Trent, she would have been allowed to see his body and say goodbye. But she had forfeited that right when she divorced him.

Chantelle could have requested an exception. But the rules were there for a reason. Things had to be fair.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. Then she walked out, leaving the ex-widow to grieve.

***

Grey sheets of rain poured down outside, droplets exploding against the concrete like tiny fireworks and drumming noisily against Chantelle’s carbon-fibre armour. A headache was taking shape. She had already been awake for twenty-eight hours when the dispatcher assigned her to the case.

She popped a Soothe and a Focus into her mouth, and turned her face to the sky, letting the slightly acidic water pool in the back of her throat. Then she swallowed the mixture and grimaced.

Her mind became as clear as freshly-printed glass. She had been doing this backwards. Looking at who Poken knew, instead of who knew him.

The first responders had already searched for any mention of Poken’s name in any feed over the last few days. Chantelle extended the search to a week, and references to just his last name.

She found lots of conversations at Ink, Inc. headquarters, none of which looked threatening. She found an administrative error with his electricity account, which had been corrected before Poken even knew about it. And she found a guard way down in mine R808 who had checked Poken’s ID before letting him interview a prisoner.

What?

Chantelle dug deeper. There had been some kind of fight in the mine dormitories – several injured, no-one killed – and the deputy CIO had gone down there personally to question one of the miners, Lukas Taleb. Immediately afterwards, Taleb had been transferred. He was now a waster. According to his SIM, he was currently at work, less than fifteen blocks from here.

She tried to access some more details about this Lukas Taleb, but the archives of his feed seemed to have been deleted. There was nothing older than two years ago.

June 10^th, two years ago. The same day that had been erased from Poken’s feed. The same day he come home with a secret that could change the world.

Chantelle wiped the rainwater off her face and clipped her helmet back on. She turned East and broke into a jog. It was time to talk with this Lukas Taleb.

The tower, when she found it, looked familiar. It stood between an even taller building and a shorter one, with only narrow alleys between. Chantelle remembered gazing up at the three towers on the day she was released from service, marvelling at the way they looked like a giant staircase to the sky.

The dispatcher was calling her SIM. She answered. ‘Sir.’

‘You’re looking for a Lukas Taleb, is that right?’

Chantelle’s pulse accelerated a little. She hadn’t realised that the dispatcher was following her feed so closely.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘His SIM has just gone dark. Looks like another homicide.’

Chantelle was already sprinting toward the building. ‘I need backup,’ she yelled. ‘Tell them to seal off the front and rear exits to the apartment block. No-one gets in or out. If Taleb is dead, then the killer is still inside.’

She ran into the foyer and entered the stairwell. The wasters wouldn’t have been using the lifts, so the killer probably wasn’t either. She ran up the stairs three at a time. At each landing she shoved open the fire door to check the corridor.

No wasters. No sign of a struggle. A quick scan of nearby residents’ SIMs showed that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Chantelle kept climbing, hating her throbbing feet, her thundering heart, remembering the first ads for Young – back when ads still existed – and their promise to make her "Feel twenty-five forever!" But the younger she looked, the older she felt.

More civilians. Still no wasters. She was more than half way to the top, and the day was two thirds over. If they were still above her, they were running behind. Had she missed them somehow?

She was wondering whether or not to turn back when she tripped over a body.

A waster, slumped against the wall on one of the landings. Lukas.

Chantelle ripped the helmet of his head. Her head. The waster was alive, but it wasn’t Lukas. It was – Chantelle checked the feed – Jemima Fogherty.

‘Uh,’ Jemima said. ‘What...who are you?’

Then she tilted sideways and vomited onto the landing.

Chantelle stepped back just in time to keep her shoes clean. Jemima must be concussed. But if she was talking already, then she had been unconscious for a few minutes at the most.

‘Where is Lukas Taleb?’ Chantelle demanded.

‘What happened? Where…’

Chantelle slapped Jemima, just beneath her cheekbone. Jemima’s pupils shrank and her body language tensed.

‘Your partner,’ Chantelle said. ‘Where is he?’

Jemima pointed up the stairs. Chantelle ran up to the next landing and crashed into the fire door when she tried to open it. The handle was still warm from some kind of sealing agent.

‘Someone pushed me,’ Jemima mumbled. ‘Grabbed Lukas. I don’t know what happened after.’

Chantelle was already running back down the stairs. The killer would be trying to leave the building, and if they had sealed themselves out of the stairwell, they were probably taking the lift. If Chantelle could get to the ground floor first...

She jumped down from landing to landing, her legs aching as she composed a mental message to the backup who must surely be nearly here. The message took her eight floors to complete, not because she had much information, but because she was afraid to take her attention away from her flying feet. One misstep could leave her with a broken neck.

She reached the bottom floor and hit the door running. Back in the foyer now, looking at the lift. The metal sliding doors stood open. The car was empty.

Chantelle ran out onto the street. She spun 180, 360, 720 degrees.

Nothing and no-one. The killer was gone.

***

‘New case,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Vehicular homicide.’

Chantelle was sitting in her apartment, still bleary-eyed from the Sleep, staring into the dirty living room mirror so the dispatcher could see her reflection. She tossed back an Awake and a Focus.

‘I already have a case,’ she said.

‘I’ve given the Trent Poken murder investigation to O‘Malley.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you solved it,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Poken went to visit Lukas Taleb, a youth with a history of violent behaviour. He transferred Taleb to a work detail on the surface, not far from his own home. Shortly after that, he was murdered. Taleb is now on the run. All that remains is to track him down. O‘Malley can handle that.’

Chantelle couldn’t believe she was hearing this. ‘What was Taleb’s motive? How did he block his SIM without disorienting himself? Taleb didn’t miss any shifts before he disappeared – how did he find the time to rig up explosives at Hailey stadium? What did he do with Poken’s body? Why does his co-worker say there was a third person?’

‘These are all questions that will be answered when we find him.’

‘But–’ Chantelle hesitated. The pieces started coming together in her head. ‘Oh. You don’t want this case solved.’

The dispatcher said nothing.

‘Poken had a secret,’ Chantelle continued. ‘Something that got him killed. Something to do with Lukas Taleb. Something that you don’t want out in the open.’

The dispatcher didn’t deny it, which made Chantelle think that it probably wasn’t his idea to cover this up. It was someone with far more power. Perhaps someone in the upper echelons of Ink, Inc.

‘You have a new case,’ the dispatcher said finally. ‘Get to work.’

He disappeared from her head.

Chantelle gritted her teeth, and waited for the data about the vehicular homicide to download. It didn’t take long. The victim had been on a call when she walked onto the road without looking and was struck by the bumper bar of a four wheel drive. She bled to death in minutes.

It was definitely an accident, but the driver had been speeding. None of the witnesses had gotten a good look at the car or scanned the SIM within.

In a case like this, most enforcers would scan the network of feeds for feelings of guilt, and sort through the results to find the perpetrator. But Chantelle’s theory was that those who felt guilt were less likely to commit crimes like speeding and fleeing the scene of an accident.

Instead, she searched for fear of getting caught.

She found a woman who had dreamt about kissing a close friend, and was terrified that her husband would see the memories of the fantasy in her feed. She found a man who had made a bet on the outcome of a boxing match, and now owed more than he had. She found a woman who was still driving her four wheel drive at a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, hands trembling on the wheel, a dull ache in her guts, hoping to get far enough away before–

Bingo.

Chantelle sent the driver’s details to the nearest enforcement office and went back to bed. If the dispatcher was trying to get her mind off Trent Poken, he could at least have chosen a more challenging case.

She lay on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if she would ever know what had happened. How many other times had someone’s SIM just winked out like a blown light bulb, with no body ever found?

The network gave her the answer instantly. Just once, to a woman named Mishka Andrews.

Chantelle sat upright so fast that her head spun. Mishka Andrews. The woman who had tried to escape to Australia before giving birth in a lift. Chantelle had gone up to the roof and climbed down the shaft to get to her, taken the baby, and let her off with a warning.

According to the records, she had disappeared eleven years later. Gone up to the roof of her apartment building and vanished, as though abducted by aliens.

That was five years ago, so it seemed unlikely to be the same killer. But it couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?

Chantelle paced from one end of the apartment to the other and back again. She could call the dispatcher back, or O‘Malley. The connection to Andrews could be the clue that solved the case.

But they wouldn’t want the extra details. This case wasn’t supposed to be solved.

Chantelle remembered Andrews’ eyes, lit up with desperation and grief. She wasn’t the first woman to try to keep her baby. Even Chantelle herself had thought about it, just for a moment. Before she reminded herself that her baby would be better off in the company’s care. Before she remembered that the rules applied to everyone. That was the only way things could be fair.

Chantelle grabbed a Focus and swallowed it, trying to get her brain back on track. The point was that Andrews had made it a lot further than most women. Perhaps Chantelle had underestimated her.

She searched the network. Andrews’ old apartment was currently leased to a young couple, freshly released from service. She hadn’t rented or bought a replacement, at least not under her own name. She sometimes showed up in the feeds of a few old friends, but only in an absent, nostalgic way. It seemed like no-one had seen her in the flesh since she disappeared–

Except for one person. Someone Chantelle had met, long ago.

***

Chantelle stared at the speckles of mould on the ceiling, wondering why they were so far from the shower and deciding that it probably didn’t matter. Young wasn’t here, which gave her an opportunity to search his apartment. But there wasn’t much to see. Battered furniture, worn carpet. The shielding in the walls had been stripped out after his arrest. His printer looked like it needed cleaning.

None of this told Chantelle anything she didn’t know from Young’s feed. He was a sixty-one year old single man who had spent decades helping international refugees escape persecution before Mishka Andrews walked into his home and destroyed his life.

Her SIM registered a presence outside the door. It was him.

Young hesitated, realising that someone was in his apartment. Then he realised who it was. Chantelle could feel his terror radiating through the door.

If Young ran, she would have to arrest and charge him. She yanked the door open and pulled him inside before he had the chance.

He cowered, shielding his face with his artificial hand. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he cried. ‘You have to believe me!’

‘You provided equipment to a terrorist.’

Young’s eyes got even wider. ‘What? No! Never!’

‘Mishka Andrews blew up a stadium,’ Chantelle said, exaggerating slightly. ‘You gave her the printer which she used to make the explosives. That makes you an accessory.’

‘I didn’t know she was going to…’

‘But you don’t deny meeting with her.’

‘She broke in, just like you. What was I supposed to do?’

Chantelle cracked her knuckles. ‘You were supposed to report it. You knew she was a criminal, you knew she was blocking her SIM somehow, you knew…’

‘I thought you’d be aware of her. I half expected you to barge in and rescue me while she was here.’

In the early days, enforcers had come running whenever a SIM was broadcasting fear. But there were too many false alarms. People were too cowardly. Now the enforcers only came for guilt, or fear of getting caught.

‘You’re a convicted people smuggler,’ Chantelle said. ‘Do you really expect me to believe that you needed rescuing from a lone, brain-damaged woman?’

Josh sat on the couch, his head in his hands. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to describe her clothes, her body language and every word she said to you while she was here. Your SIM’s record of it is hazy, but if you lie, I’ll make you regret it.’

Young began his account, his voice shaking, his words tumbling over one another. His story didn’t tell Chantelle very much, except that she had underestimated Andrews. Where had this determined, self-assured vigilante come from? What had happened to the shivering woman in the lift?

‘Okay,’ Chantelle said, when Josh had finished talking. ‘I want you to make me exactly what you made her, down to the last detail. Do it quickly, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll never see me again.’

Young gulped, and got to work.

Chapter Seven

Carefree

Had it been sixteen years yet?

Lukas tried to open his eyes and discovered that they were already open. The blackness was so complete that he was becoming disoriented, unsure whether he was asleep or awake.

Meals kept sliding under the door, but he had long since lost count of them. He knew he had made it to eighty. Or was it forty?

The darkness and the silence had heightened his other senses. The rubber matting felt velvety beneath his bare feet. When he touched the walls, it seemed like he knew exactly how many fibres made up the casing of the pillows.

And the smell of the dead man – like bleach and alcohol – was impossible to ignore, stronger even that the stench of his own waste in the drain in the corner. It was like rotting Full, floating in a glass of mouthwash.

‘You must be feeling pretty stupid,’ the dead man said.

Lukas knew the voice wasn’t real. It was a hallucination – deprived of stimuli, his brain was inventing something to fill the void. Just the same, he couldn’t help but respond.

‘It’s you who got me into this,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s stupid.’

The dead man laughed, a rasping, throaty chuckle. ‘Was it me who killed Gregory Merchant?’

Until his head was stuffed full of Mishka’s memories, Lukas had never known the name of the boy he killed, nor that of Trent Poken. But without any Care in his system the titles had no meaning for him.

‘You told her who I was,’ he said. ‘You told her where to find me.’

‘I know how you think, Lukas. Anything good that happens to you is your own doing. Everything bad is someone else’s fault. So why feel remorse?’

‘Shut up,’ Lukas said. Even the silence was better than Poken’s company.

‘So you don’t feel guilt, you feel rage,’ Poken continued. ‘You fantasise about murdering your captor. Choking her until she passes out, waking her up, choking her again and so on until you get bored or she gets too brain damaged to breathe on her own.’

It unnerved Lukas that the dead man knew exactly what he was thinking. But of course he did – he was inside Lukas’ head.

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Poken asked, ‘that this is what she wants? You, sitting here, dreaming impotently for sixteen years about killing her, but powerless to act?’

‘I said shut up!’ Lukas scrambled over and punched the dead man in the face, over and over and over again, the fleshy cheeks splitting and wearing away until his knuckles were slamming into a human skull.

But the whole way through the beating, the dead man never stopped laughing.

Eventually Lukas slumped against the floor, breathing heavily. The exertion had left the taste of blood at the back of his throat.

‘Did you never wonder why you can’t remember anything?’ Poken asked, his voice warped by his rotting tongue. ‘From before you killed Merchant?’

Lukas said nothing.

‘Of course you didn’t. While you were taking Care you were too busy feeling guilty. And when you weren’t taking Care – well, you didn’t care.’

‘Why?’ Lukas demanded. ‘Why can’t I remember?’

The dead man said nothing.

‘Tell me!’

Silence. Poken knew only what Lukas did. He couldn’t answer the question.

Ka-chunk. A deafening noise. A blinding light. The meal slot under the door had opened.

‘I’ll kill you!’ Lukas screamed. ‘I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill–’

The meal tray slid through, and the slot slammed shut.

***

Mishka frowned at the screen. The enforcers would keep looking for her and Lukas until they found their bodies. No problem. She had scanned herself and Lukas too, while he was unconscious, so she could use Gregory’s special bio-ink to print out a pair of bodies for them to find. But the enforcers might conduct a DNA test, so the blood and saliva had to be exactly right – and because of some kind of software bug, the computer was having trouble differentiating the two samples.

She wasn’t sure what the problem was, but maybe one of her old de-interlacing algorithms would fix it. She made some quick modifications to the script, activated it, and pushed her chair away from the computer.

Lukas’ screams were barely audible through the door. They weren’t as satisfying as she had expected. Kidnapping him, microwaving him, hitting him, making him experience her memories – if she was being honest with herself, none of it had really helped. She had given him all her pain, but somehow she still had it.

She yanked open the fridge, pulled out a water bottle and took a sip.

What else could she do to Lukas?

Something beeped. Mishka froze, the bottle of water half way to her lips.

A proximity alert. Was someone here?

She crept over to the door. Listened.

Footsteps.

Headed toward the lifts.

Mishka exhaled. Could she really tolerate another sixteen years of looking over her shoulder, while she waited for Lukas’ torment to bring her some satisfaction?

I could kill him, she thought.

The idea hadn’t appealed to her a few months ago. Death had been too good for her son’s killer. But now...

She imagined telling him, seeing the fear in his eyes, and then beating him to death, exactly as he had done to Gregory. She pictured herself disposing of the body and being free of him forever. More free than she had ever been.

Just the thought of it left her feeling light. As she moved back to the door to Lukas’ cell, her feet scarcely touched the floor.

Now? she thought.

No. Not now. But soon.

She pressed her hand against the door.

‘Feel that, Lukas?’ she whispered. ‘That’s me coming to kill you.’

***

Chantelle sat down in front of her new printer. It was a primitive thing, with only three syringes, just one laser and barely enough space in the tank for five or six litres of ink. Could someone really orchestrate two murders with this?

I’m Mishka Andrews, she told herself. For some reason, I’ve decided to kill Trent Poken and Lukas Taleb. What do I need?

Chantelle downloaded a template and printed out a pistol. She didn’t need an extra one – all enforcers carried ceramic handguns loaded with .45 calibre hollow-point rounds – but it helped her get into character. As the laser chiselled the barrel and the chamber out of the freshly-poured ink, she thought about what else Andrews would have needed.

A waster’s uniform. A getaway vehicle. An artificial SIM so she could find Poken at the stadium. Some explosives, to break out with his body.

Chantelle searched the network for printers which had downloaded all these templates, and found tens of thousands. Even after they were released from service, many people still liked wearing their old uniforms – and for some reason, it wasn’t uncommon for them to start printing guns and bombs as soon as they had the free time to do so. Fortunately, few of these weapons were ever used.

Why had Andrews – if it was Andrews – stolen Poken’s corpse?

Chantelle shut her eyes. Waited. And the answer appeared as though she had known it all along: Because Poken wasn’t dead.

Chantelle had assumed that Poken, deputy CIO of Ink, Inc., was the main victim. But for Andrews, he might have been just a stepping stone on her way to Taleb. She could have taken him alive, so as she could interrogate him.

Why would Andrews want to kill or abduct Taleb? Chantelle searched for the two names side-by-side, and found the link almost immediately. Gregory Merchant. The baby Chantelle had taken away had been murdered by Taleb on June 10^th, two years ago. There was that date again.

Chantelle looked up the original crime scene file, which had eyewitness footage of the murder. But the file was highly classified, and protected by several layers of encryption.

Chantelle had spent her whole career tracking down hackers, and she knew a few things about how they operated. She opened up a confiscated keygen from the virtual evidence locker and set it to work on the file.

But it would take time to unlock and it might not reveal anything useful. She needed a plan B.

She paced back and forth across the living room. Taleb killed Merchant, Poken covered it up, Andrews tracked him down. Connections were forming, but they weren’t helpful. She had no way of knowing where Andrews or her two victims were now.

She batted her palms against her helmet.

‘Think,’ she hissed. ‘Think!’

And then she had it.

Chantelle pecked at the keys with her fingers, unable to control the primitive printer with her SIM. It took an infuriatingly long time to find the template she was looking for, but there it was – a static bag. Just big enough for a human head.

She searched the network again, looking for other printers which had downloaded the same template. She ruled out any which hadn’t also printed out explosives and a waster’s uniform.

About a hundred printers came up.

One of them was inside Taleb’s building.

Chantelle’s jaw dropped. Andrews must have acquired an apartment in the building in which Taleb worked. No wonder Chantelle hadn’t caught her leaving – she never left.

‘Found you,’ Chantelle said. ‘I found you.’

It only occurred to her now that if Andrews had taken Poken alive, she might have done the same thing to Taleb. She knew from his file that he was a Care user. If he was alive, and deprived of the drug, he could be extremely dangerous.

Chantelle was wondering how to prepare for this when the file was finally unlocked.

The video of Gregory Merchant’s murder started buffering in her head. At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then her heart rate accelerated and her eyes widened as she realised what Poken had known. The secret that could change the world.

‘My God,’ she whispered.

***

‘Imagine what you’ll be like when you get out of here,’ Poken said. ‘Assuming that you do. How will you feel about your sixteen years in captivity? How will you feel about your life before it? Will you even remember what the world is like outside?’

‘Quiet,’ Lukas said. ‘I’m thinking.’

‘By the time she’s ready to kill you, you might not even remember your own name. You won’t know who she is, or why you’re here.’ Poken chuckled. ‘Not that you seem to grasp that now.’

Lukas ignored him. Mishka had spent months designing this prison. He knew – he remembered. She thought there was no way out.

She was wrong.

He crawled over to the dead man. The smell told him he was getting closer.

‘What are you doing?’ Poken asked.

Lukas didn’t respond. The voice wasn’t real.

He stuck his fingers into Poken’s mouth.

Poken hacked and gurgled, but his imaginary protestations couldn’t distract Lukas from the dry, squashy texture of his tongue. Wincing, he reached further back until he felt the dead man’s molars.

‘Where is it?’ he muttered.

There. The wireless receiver. He had one of his own, of course, but couldn’t remove it without causing himself an unendurable amount of pain.

He picked at it with his fingernail, trying to prise it loose. But it was embedded deep within the cavity. When Lukas pinched the molar between his thumb and forefinger, trying to hold it still, it popped right out of the dead man’s mouth with a sound like a rotting cork removed from a bottle.

Lukas shuddered and tried to dig the receiver out of the tooth. But it was impossible without something small and sharp to dig with. And if he had something like that, he wouldn’t need the receiver in the first place.

‘Ow!’ He had pricked his ring finger on the roots, which protruded from the bottom of the tooth like tusks.

They were sharp. Maybe he didn’t need the receiver at all.

He had stacked his meal trays in the centre of the room. It was hard to count in the darkness, but he was felt like the stack was about thirty trays high – as tall as he was willing to risk.

He put one foot on the stack. It seemed steady enough. He climbed onto it, reached up, and…

There. The ceiling. He could touch it.

He felt around, but the light was nowhere to be found. He must have put the stack of trays in the wrong place.

Lukas climbed back down and paced the room. It was five steps wide and four steps deep. He picked up the trays, took them to the corner, and then walked two and a half steps parallel to the wall and two steps perpendicular to it. Then he put the trays down and climbed up again.

This time he could feel the glass directly above him. He drew a series of shapes into it with the sharp end of the dead man’s tooth – a large half-moon, and several misshapen five-pointed stars.

‘You’ve lost your mind already,’ the dead man said.

Lukas ignored him. He kept scratching away at the glass until his arms and shoulders ached and then, finally, it cracked. Very carefully, he levered out the shapes he had made, exposing the light bulb, which flickered with the faintest of ghostly sparks. The light was off, but the power was still on.

Lukas hefted the glass tools he’d made. A moon-shaped blade for cutting, jagged stars for throwing. They didn’t weigh much, but would be difficult to carry because of all the sharp edges.

He fumbled through the darkness until he found Poken’s body, and then he used one of the stars to slice through his gown, freeing a ragged strip of cloth.

‘Do you mind?’ Poken demanded. ‘I was wearing that.’

Lukas wound the cloth around one end of the half-moon and knotted it tight. Now he had a handle – he clenched the piece of glass in his hand and swung it, marvelling at the whooshing, zipping sound it made as it cut through the air.

He took another piece of cloth to serve as a pouch for the throwing stars, and bundled them up in it.

‘Great,’ Poken said. ‘When she comes to get you in sixteen years, you can throw broken glass at her. Assuming you haven’t cut yourself and bled to death by then.’

‘Shut up,’ Lukas said. He wouldn’t have to wait sixteen years. She may have lined the walls with something to block signals from SIMs inside and out, but he knew from her memories that she hadn’t tampered with the smoke alarms. If he could set one off, enforcers would be summoned. She would come in here and try to finish him off, for fear of losing her last chance.

Lukas cut another strip off the dead man’s gown and stood on the stack of trays. He pulled out the last few pieces of glass and tossed them into the corner. The light bulb – a rod about a metre long and four centimetres thick – unscrewed easily enough. He jammed the cloth into the socket and waited for it to catch fire.

It didn’t.

Lukas didn’t know much about electricity, now that his SIM was blocked. Was there some kind of safety mechanism which turned off the power whenever the bulb wasn’t plugged in?

He screwed it back in and once again saw the ghostly sparks. Electricity was definitely flowing.

Lukas unscrewed the light bulb and climbed down. He carried it into the corner where he’d thrown the rest of the broken glass, treading very carefully, and swung the light bulb like a baseball bat.

It shattered against the wall, leaving Lukas clutching a jagged stump. He tiptoed back to the tower of meal trays, climbed up and screwed the broken end of the light bulb back in.

More sparks. Power.

Lukas stuffed the rag into the end, hoping to set it alight…

And instead felt a buzzing, as though his body were filled with bees. His joints locked together and he fell backwards off the meal trays. His head thumped against the floor and a swell of dizziness rushed up his neck and into his head.

The burning piece of cloth, danced through the air above him, writhing as it tumbled toward the floor, illuminating Poken’s body and the glittering shards of glass around it.

Light, Lukas thought. At last, light!

Then he blacked out.

***

Mishka was fiddling with the restraining table when she smelled the smoke. It took her less than two seconds to work out a few key facts.

One: Taleb had started a fire somehow.

Two: Her nose was less sensitive than the smoke detectors, so the alarm would already be going. If her SIM still worked, it would be screaming FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE at her.

Three: enforcers would be en route.

Mishka snatched up the microwave emitter, ran over to the nearest smoke alarm and took aim. She kept squeezing the trigger until the blinking light went out and the plastic started to melt at the corners. Then she ran over to the other one and overloaded it as well.

Smoke leaked out from the seam above the cell door. Mishka didn’t want Taleb to suffocate – at least, not yet – but stopping the enforcers from showing up here was more important.

She raced over to her monitor and keyboard and brought up the conversation that the artificial SIM was currently having with an enforcer.

We’ve dispatched a team to your residence, the enforcer was saying. Can you get out of the building?

Team building is important in my residence, the SIM blathered.

Mishka groaned. She shut down the artificial SIM and took over the conversation.

Oh, I see what you mean, she typed. Don’t worry, there’s no fire. Just a cigar that got too close to the sensor.

It seemed unlikely that anyone had smoked a cigar in fifty years. She hoped the enforcer would know what she was referring to.

The amount of smoke detected…

I’ve put it out now. Are the sensors still picking up any smoke?

A pause.

No, the enforcer admitted.

That’s a relief, Mishka typed. Thanks so much for your concern. Sorry about the cigar – it won’t happen again.

She left the keyboard, gambling that there would be no further questions. Then she covered her face with the crook of her elbow, unlocked the cell door and hauled it open.

Her initial fear, that Taleb would be waiting to jump out at her, proved to be unfounded. There was too much smoke – he couldn’t possibly be conscious. She crouched down and spotted him, sprawled on the floor, illuminated by the burning pillows on the walls.

Her eyes stinging, Mishka crawled into the haze. The skin on the back of her neck blistered as she grabbed Taleb’s ankle and dragged him back out the door. Then she slammed it shut, hoping to cut off the oxygen to the flames.

Something was clenched in Taleb’s hand. A large piece of broken glass.

Mishka wanted to find something to put out the fire, but not if Taleb was going to stab her as soon as she turned her back.

She kicked him in the face.

His head flopped sideways, but the rest of the body didn’t stir. He wasn’t just pretending to be unconscious. Perhaps he was already dead.

Mishka ran into the other room. She had printed out a fire extinguisher as a precaution before she started experimenting with the bio-ink. It should still be in the box behind the server.

She hauled out the box she needed and rummaged through for a moment. Where was it?

There! She grabbed the extinguisher, pulled out the pin, and ran back toward the cell.

Lukas’ body was gone.

Mishka flattened herself against the wall. Without a SIM, she couldn’t hear him sneaking up on her. But he wouldn’t be able to hear her, either. And he would still be disoriented from the smoke. It was amazing that he was even conscious.

She hefted the fire extinguisher. She might get to beat him to death after all.

The wall was hot against her back. All the padding in the cell must be ablaze. Sparks spat out from beneath the door, spreading the fire into the rest of the apartment. The carpet was turning black. If she didn’t do something soon, she and Taleb would both die of smoke inhalation.

Very well. She was willing to make that sacrifice. Was he?

She moved sideways across the wall, scanning every shadow. Was that him? No, just her coat. How about over there?

Mishka was peering into the inky blackness beneath a cupboard when something moved in her peripheral vision. A teenage boy, dressed in rags, charging at her with a blade of glass in his hand.

Mishka danced aside, feeling the shard catch on the back of her shirt and tear it. She whirled around and raised the fire extinguisher, shifting it left and right, hoping to deflect the next stab.

Their eyes met. Two killers face to face, both armed, both desperate.

This is how it should be, Mishka thought.

Taleb lunged at her. Mishka tried to block his thrust with the extinguisher. He drove the glass into her hand.

A spike of hot, wet agony zipped up her forearm. She shrieked and dropped the extinguisher.

Taleb drew his arm back to slash the blade sideways across her throat, but the extinguisher landed on his foot. He yelped and jumped back.

Not far enough. While he was distracted, Mishka punched him in the face with both fists in quick succession, left–right.

As he staggered back, disoriented, his face covered in a mixture of Mishka’s blood and his own, Mishka picked up the fire extinguisher.

He swiped wildly at her. Missed. The second time he tried, Mishka blocked the blow with the extinguisher and the glass blade shattered in his hand.

The room was getting smokier. The sparks from under the door had ignited the dust, which in turn was setting fire to Mishka’s possessions.

She drove the extinguisher into Taleb’s sternum and heard ribs crunch before he collapsed backward onto the ground next to her computer, dazed and broken, blinded by the blood. She raised the extinguisher over his face, ready to deliver the killing blow.

Her computer beeped.

She glanced over at it instinctively and then looked back at Taleb. He hadn’t taken advantage of the momentary distraction. He was still disoriented from the blows to the head, and struggling for breath.

She raised the fire extinguisher again…

And then looked back at the computer screen. Surely it didn’t say what she thought it had said.

It did. It had uncovered the problem. The reason it was having trouble differentiating Mishka’s DNA from Taleb’s was that they were almost identical.

Mishka stared down at the bloody mess beneath her feet.

‘You’re my son?’

***

Chantelle ran through the quiet, black streets. She knew everything now. She could have told O‘Malley, or the dispatcher, but they wouldn’t act. Not unless she forced their hand by arresting Andrews herself. Only then could justice be done.

The video played over and over in her head. She couldn’t stop it repeating, so it must be stored in her brain rather than on her SIM. As she ran, she watched Gregory Merchant fiddle with the printer. She heard his voice: ‘Okay, test number eight. I think I’ve got it, this time.’

She watched him clamber inside the scanner and wait as the magnetic sensors swirled around him. When they stopped moving, he climbed out, returned to the printer, made some adjustments and stepped back.

In real life, Chantelle saw the apartment building in the distance, one of the windows lit up with a flickering glare; in her head she was watching the syringes build a human body, drip by drip. She watched the blobs of pink and red and white coalesce into bones, lungs, a sticky red heart. She watched skin stretch out over the flesh and suddenly she was looking at an exact copy of Gregory Merchant, laying slack inside the printer.

She watched the original Gregory Merchant lean over the top of the printer, fascinated.

She watched a jolt of electricity kickstart the duplicate’s pulse.

She watched the blue eyes pop open, wide with terror, before fixing on Merchant. A hand shot up out of the printer and grabbed Merchant’s throat.

The video had no sound, but the words were clear on the copy’s lips:

‘WHO ARE YOU?’

The duplicate had been made with language but no memory. Rage but no identity – until Poken christened him Lukas Taleb.

Merchant went purple in his replica’s grip. His flailing arms knocked over his carefully assembled equipment, sending motherboards and vacuum tubes skittering across the floor.

Chantelle circled around to the back of the building, the fire door, wanting to shut her eyes but knowing it wouldn’t prevent her from seeing Merchant’s death, again and again. He had made a living copy of himself and it had beaten him to death in a panicked rage.

If his bio-ink formula got out, people could make new people – without giving the enforcers nine months warning. They could print extinct plants and animals, which would reproduce on their own and repopulate the earth. People could even make templates for entirely new species, which could fulfil the functions normally performed by machines.

Victoria Poken’s voice echoed through Chantelle’s head: No-one at Ink, Inc. likes change.

No wonder they covered it up. Chantelle wondered why Poken had protected Taleb instead of simply killing him. Perhaps he had wanted to see how well Merchant’s invention worked – how long an artificial person could keep functioning.

She pushed open the fire door, ran into the stairwell and started pounding up the steps. She was six floors up when she heard the sirens. Other enforcers were on their way. To stop her from arresting Andrews? No way to tell.

There were two killers upstairs. Chantelle had come prepared, but just the same, backup was probably a good thing.

She barely noticed the aching muscles in her legs as she reached the 14th floor and ran out into the corridor. She could smell something burning. A fire had started in one of the nearby apartments. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Chantelle slammed into the door of Mishka’s apartment, smashing the lock on the first try, and recoiled from the blast of hot air. The furniture was on fire. A server tower was popping and fizzing. But through the smoke, she could see Andrews, standing over Taleb with a fire extinguisher in her hands, staring at him as though she had forgotten that the room was burning around her. She didn’t turn around when the door burst open.

Chantelle had already drawn her gun. ‘Freeze,’ she roared.

Andrews didn’t react, but to be fair, she already seemed to be frozen.

Taleb looked over at Chantelle. ‘Shoot her!’ he shouted.

Andrews followed Taleb’s gaze and saw Chantelle standing in the doorway. She looked at the gun, apparently without fear.

‘Put your hands up,’ Chantelle said. ‘You’re coming with me.’

Andrews threw the fire extinguisher at her and turned to run.

At almost the same moment, Chantelle pulled the trigger. The bullet punctured the flying extinguisher, which spat out a swirling ribbon of grey mist as it spun toward her. She dived aside just in time and it skimmed her shoulder before clanging against the wall behind her. But she could no longer see Andrews through the clouded air.

She moved forward, eyes stinging, trying to hold down a coughing fit for fear of giving away her position. She couldn’t hear anything over the crackling of the flames.

Something moved.

Chantelle turned, gun-first but it was just Taleb, his bloody face a terrifying mask.

He pointed. ‘She went into the printer room!’

Chantelle wanted to follow, but she didn’t want to turn her back on Taleb.

She pulled a syringe out of her pocket. Taleb’s eyes moved to the label: Intensive Care.

He snarled, and lunged at her. She fired the gun one handed. Missed. Taleb wrenched it out of her hand and took aim at her face.

Chantelle punched him in the gut and sidestepped out of the firing line. Even as Taleb doubled over, wheezing, Chantelle was popping the cap off the syringe. She drove it into the side of his neck and depressed the plunger all the way.

The effects were immediate. Taleb’s hands began to tremble, and he dropped the gun.

‘Oh no,’ he gasped. ‘Oh no!’

Chantelle dropped to her hands and knees, beneath the worst of the smoke. She picked up the gun and crawled further into the smoke, leaving Taleb to his guilt. She wasn’t leaving here without Andrews.

Her face was smeared with involuntary tears. Her lungs burned. She was starting to get dizzy. If she lost consciousness, she would die here.

She felt something in the darkness. An ankle. Limp.

‘You’re coming with me,’ she said again, and pulled.

***

Every time Lukas thought he had remembered the worst of it, something else appeared in his head. He had murdered Gregory Merchant, which had gotten Trent Poken killed. He had tried to cut his mother’s throat. He had attempted to kill the enforcer who came to save him. He had even starved a cat to death.

He smacked himself in the head with an open palm, over and over, as hard as he could. He was a monster. He deserved those sixteen years of captivity that Andrews had promised him.

He wouldn’t get them now. But maybe he wouldn’t have to live with the guilt, either.

Lukas stumbled forward into the flames, arms outstretched, looking for a smoky corner where he could breathe deeply and drift off to sleep.

But hands grabbed him. Four hands. Two people, behind him.

‘Who else is in the apartment?’ someone shouted. A male voice.

Lukas turned to look at the enforcer. ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Two women. Help them.’

The enforcers carried him back toward the door.

‘No!’ he cried. ‘Help them! Not me!’

He struggled, but they were too strong and he was too disoriented. They hauled him out into the corridor, where cool, clean air washed over his face.

‘Two women?’ one of the Enforcers asked.

‘Yes,’ Lukas choked. ‘Go!’

The two men moved back toward the burning apartment.

The female enforcer, the one Lukas had tried to kill, was blocking their way.

She staggered out into the corridor, dragging Mishka by her ankle, and collapsed onto the floor beside her.

One of the enforcers opened the apartment door and started spraying with a fire extinguisher, much bigger than the one Mishka had tried to use as a murder weapon. The other loomed over the female enforcer.

‘Chantelle Lowe,’ he said. ‘You’re under arrest.’

Lowe pointed at Mishka’s limp form.

‘Arrest her,’ she panted. ‘She’s a killer.’

The enforcer touched Mishka’s neck. ‘She’s dead,’ he said.

Lukas looked at Mishka’s empty, sagging face. The woman who’d lost her son twice.

It was his fault. He had started the fire. He had told Lowe to shoot.

He closed his eyes, trying to wish himself out of existence.

‘Sorry,’ the enforcer said. ‘But we have to take you in.’

He pulled Lowe away from the corpse and tightened some plastic cuffs around her wrists. She shut her eyes and let him carry her down the corridor out of sight, leaving Lukas to watch the fire die.

Chapter Eight

Intensive Care

‘We have a problem,’ the dispatcher said.

Chantelle said nothing. The paralytic hadn’t quite worn off, so she didn’t trust herself to make decipherable sounds.

‘You committed a crime,’ the dispatcher continued. ‘You disobeyed the orders of a superior officer, and hacked into classified files. You should be imprisoned for that. Anything less would send a bad message to the other enforcers.’

Chantelle still couldn’t speak, so she thought as clearly as she could: I was trying to do my job.

The dispatcher didn’t seem to hear her. ‘However. You may not have tracked down Mishka Andrews in time to capture her alive, but you saved Lukas Taleb’s life. With all due respect to my other operatives, I’m not sure any of them could have done that.’

Chantelle tried to read his feed, but found that she couldn’t. She opened her mouth and uncurled her rubbery tongue. ‘What have you done to me?’ she slurred.

‘I’ve temporarily disabled your wireless receiver.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not authorised to hear some of the things that you now know.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’re going to meet with O‘Malley. He’ll train you to keep secrets, so no-one sees any classified data in your feed.’

Chantelle frowned with stiff eyebrows. She had never thought of O‘Malley as especially capable or intelligent.

The dispatcher saw her surprise. ‘As you can tell, O‘Malley himself is good at keeping secrets. After your training you’ll either be locked up, or given your old job back, depending on one very important question.’

Chantelle waited, her heart in her mouth. It wasn’t being an ex-enforcer in a prison that scared her – it was being an ex-enforcer anywhere. She had hunted criminals sixteen hours per day for twenty years. If she couldn’t do that any more, who was she?

‘Can I trust you?’ the dispatcher asked.

‘Yes,’ Chantelle said.

The dispatcher watched her thoughtfully.

‘I’ll prove it,’ Chantelle said. ‘Just tell me what to do.’

The dispatcher nodded. ‘Okay then.’

He sprayed her with something – microdots, she guessed, to track her while her wireless receiver was turned off.

‘You’ll go to O‘Malley’s office today,’ he said. ‘Arrange a meeting, out of hours, somewhere private. When you finish your training, I expect twice-daily updates on the cases you work on for a period of three months. Is that understood?’

‘Yes sir.’

He handed over some pills. ‘These should counteract the paralytic. But you’re likely to dribble when you try to swallow them.’

He passed her a napkin.

***

You may not have tracked down Mishka Andrews in time to capture her alive...

Why did the dispatcher think Andrews had been dead when Chantelle arrived?

She pondered this question as she walked toward O‘Malley’s office. The dispatcher would have read her feed, or parts of it. He would have known that she saw Andrews, alive and conscious, standing over Taleb, only minutes before Chantelle dragged out her body. So why had he doubted this?

It could have been a slip of the tongue. It could be that Taleb had lied in his account. It could be a lot of things.

Chantelle turned around and started walking back toward the lift. Before she arranged the meeting with O‘Malley, there was no harm in asking a few quick questions.

She rode the lift down to the basement and walked into the morgue.

It was a long time since she had entered this refrigerated room. She wasn’t squeamish about blood or gore – she could look at a human brain in a metal pan without flinching – but the looks on the faces of the dead, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, unnerved her.

The only thing she knew about the future was that she would someday end up here.

It didn’t take long to find Andrews’s drawer. When she opened it, the body was paler than when she had last seen it, and latticed with scars from the autopsy.

‘Officer Lowe.’

Chantelle turned around to see the coroner, standing in the doorway with a trolley filled with hoses. He was a young-looking man with thick sideburns and a faint limp from an accident in his childhood. A mine cart had run over his leg.

‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, ‘but I thought this case was closed.’

Chantelle smiled. ‘I hope it is. I just wanted to confirm a few final details. Do you have a moment?’

The coroner looked up at the ceiling, perhaps checking the time on his SIM, and then said, ‘Sure. What do you need?’

Chantelle pointed at the body. ‘Anything unusual in the autopsy?’

‘They didn’t tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘I couldn’t pinpoint the cause of death,’ the coroner said.

‘Smoke inhalation, surely.’

He shook his head. ‘No smoke in the lungs. I know she was found in a burning apartment, but it looks to me like she must have been wearing some kind of breathing apparatus when the fire started.’

It had been a very smoky room and Chantelle hadn’t had a good look at Andrews’s face when she walked in. But she certainly hadn’t been wearing any breathing apparatus when Chantelle dragged her out.

‘So what killed her?’ she asked.

The coroner shrugged. ‘Exactly. No damage to the brain or heart. No toxins in the bloodstream. Some minor burns, but nothing fatal. It’s a mystery.’

‘What about the time of death?’

‘Based on lividity and rigor mortis, I’d say it was a couple of hours before you got there.’

‘Except that I saw her moving around only minutes beforehand.’

‘So I was told.’ The coroner pushed his trolley into the corner of the room. ‘The human body is an incredibly complex system. It would be unusual for a fresh corpse to be so decomposed, but I’d be reluctant to call it impossible.’

Chantelle lifted one of Andrews’ hands, then the other. Hadn’t she been bleeding from a cut on one of her palms? But the skin was pristine.

And suddenly she knew.

She nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Anything else you need?’ the coroner asked.

‘No. Thanks very much for your time.’

The coroner nodded and pushed Andrews back into her drawer. Then he dug a Full out of his pocket, unwrapped it and started chewing.

Chantelle disappeared out the door without another word.

***

Lukas opened his eyes, and reached for the bottle of Care beside the hospital bed. He had taken much more than the recommended dose of Sleep, but had been rewarded with a dreamless slumber. The risk of overdosing and never waking up was better than the alternative – nightmares in which he ran out of Care and stalked the hospital corridors with a blade of glass in each hand, slicing open nurses and cutting the limbs off bedridden patients.

The bottle wasn’t there.

A cold lump of panic rose up his throat. He had put the Care within reach. He knew he had. Where was it?

He blinked a few times, trying to focus his eyes on the bedside table. The bottle came into view – in someone else’s hand.

‘Good morning,’ Chantelle Lowe said.

Lukas reached for the bottle. She withheld it.

‘Please,’ he said.

He couldn’t hear her thoughts. But he hadn’t had any trouble with the doctors. So it must be something wrong with her SIM rather than his.

Lowe sat down on a plastic chair and leaned back. ‘It’s my understanding that Mishka Andrews gave you some kind of feed-transplant – put her brain into yours.’

Lukas didn’t take his eyes off the Care. ‘I’ll do anything you want. Just please give me my pills.’

‘Mishka Andrews isn’t dead,’ Lowe said.

‘What?’

‘She faked it.’

Mishka’s serene, unseeing face flashed through Lukas’ head. ‘I saw her.’

‘You saw a copy,’ Lowe said. ‘She knew she wasn’t safe until the enforcers thought she was dead, so she used her son’s bio-ink and printed out a body for us to find. She probably didn’t expect you to set her apartment on fire before she had a chance to plant it, but actually you did her a favour. While I was dragging the copy out the door, she was probably climbing out the window. Or hiding in a corner with an oxygen mask on. Whatever. The point is, she’s out there.’

Bio-ink, Lukas thought. Just like with the cat. And with–

‘Why did she say I was her son?’ he blurted.

Lowe tilted her head sideways. ‘I think you already know the answer to that.’

He had wanted to hear it out loud, but the way she was looking at him was all the proof he needed.

He was a fake person. A copy. An experiment gone wrong.

‘No one’s looking for her,’ Lowe said. ‘When she decides to come back and kill you, it’ll be easy for her. Unless you help me find her first.’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘No, but you can figure it out. You know everything she knows.’

‘She had no friends,’ Lukas said. ‘Nowhere else to go except that apartment.’

‘But she was smart. She had a getaway plan. Somewhere to hide, until–’

‘She didn’t expect to get away. She was ready to die.’

‘Not when she thought Gregory Merchant was still alive.’ Lowe held the Care over Lukas’ face, just out of reach. ‘She must have had somewhere for both of them to go.’

‘No, she–’

Lukas hesitated. He felt Lowe’s gaze bearing down on him.

‘Tell me,’ she demanded.

‘I know where she is,’ Lukas said.

Chantelle passed him the bottle of Care.

Chapter Nine

Absolute

The rope was as thick as Mishka’s arm. She lifted the last loop, freeing it from the ancient wooden pylon, and threw it into the boat.

And it did look like a boat. Now that the seats were folded down, the roof was open and the wheels were underwater, it didn’t resemble a car at all. It bobbed on the gentle swell, no different from the speedboats and catamarans moored to the jetty around it.

It didn’t feel like a victory. She had intended to take this voyage with her son. Instead, her only crewmates would be regrets and painful memories.

‘Where are you going?’

She whirled around. The jetty had been deserted a few minutes ago, but now a boy was standing there in a broad-brimmed hat, squinting against the rising sun.

For a fraction of a second, she thought Gregory’s ghost had come to join her on her journey. It took her a moment to recognise Lukas Taleb.

‘How did you find me?’ she demanded.

‘You told me where you’d be.’

‘I don’t–’

Taleb tapped the side of his head. Mishka’s eyes narrowed.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I escaped from the hospital. It’s surprisingly easy, when no one can hear your SIM.’

‘But why come here? To kill me? You don’t look armed.’

‘I’m not,’ Taleb said. There was a sadness in his eyes. A longing?

‘You’re back on the Care,’ Mishka said.

He nodded. ‘I’m me again.’

‘Are you, though? Are you a good guy with a bad disease, or a bad guy on a good drug?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

Mishka knew Carefree Taleb, but not Careful Taleb. If he wasn’t here to kill her, then why had he come?

‘You want me to kill you,’ she said. ‘You can’t live with what you’ve done.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s not it.’

Mishka wondered if he was lying to her. He didn’t look like he was. But in that case, why was he here?

***

Chantelle eased along the dock, wary of every creaking board. Mooring point T7U1 was just around the corner, obscured by the massive square base of the watchtower.

She knew she should be back at the enforcer headquarters. She should be arranging a meeting with O‘Malley. She was risking her freedom to be here.

But Mishka Andrews had killed someone, and now she was going to get away with it. That was against the rules. It wasn’t fair. Chantelle had to intervene. She was an enforcer – and nothing else.

She crept closer to the corner. If she moved too fast, Andrews would hear her coming. Chantelle could be shot as soon as she came into view. But the longer it took her to get to the mooring point, the greater the risk that Andrews would be gone. According to witness feeds, the car/boat had been picked up almost two hours ago. Perhaps long enough to get to the docks, launch, and disappear over the horizon.

The gun was cold and heavy in her hand. The safety was off. Her finger was inside the trigger guard. This time there would be no talking. No warnings, no negotiation. Taking Andrews alive was an unacceptable risk. Chantelle wouldn’t believe she was dead – not unless she had been the one to put a bullet through her cunning, SIMless brain.

One step after the other. The water, grey from decades of toxic dumping, lapped at the barnacled pylons beneath the dock. She thought she could hear voices, but no SIMs. Then again, she couldn’t make out any words. Perhaps it was just the wind.

She flattened her back against the corner. Listened. Nothing but the hiss of distant waves.

Chantelle gritted her teeth. It was now or never.

She whirled around the corner, raised her gun, and scanned the jetty.

It was empty.

A row of boats rocked back and forth beside the mooring points. Number T7U1 corresponded to a small yacht. Not the watertight car she was looking for.

She kept her gun up, as though Mishka Andrews would materialise in front of the sights. But after a minute of frozen contemplation, she realised that Andrews was gone.

Chantelle lowered the weapon. If this was Andrew’s mooring point, who owned the yacht?

Perhaps she was in the wrong place. Perhaps she–

Chantelle saw the spray of blood before she felt the bullet punch through the back of her skull. The world went two-dimensional as she lost sight in one eye. Her heart stopped beating instantly. She swayed, tried to right herself, and toppled over – her arms and legs wouldn’t obey her.

Her SIM still functioned, but her brain was dead, leaving her unable to feel. So she watched, without fear or curiosity, as the shooter entered her field of vision. An enforcer, his gun still trained on her head. O‘Malley.

The dispatcher’s voice echoed through her mind. You’re going to meet with O‘Malley. He’ll train you to keep secrets.

Perhaps this had been the plan all along.

The SIM’s battery went dry, and then nothing of Chantelle was left.

***

‘Lowe knows you’re not dead,’ Lukas said. ‘But don’t worry. I sent her to the wrong docks.’

Mishka’s eyes narrowed. Lukas noticed that they were now blue, not brown. She had shaved her head, too.

Without her brown contact lenses and her long hair, she looked just like any other citizen. No wonder she had been able to make it to the docks unnoticed.

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because...’ Lukas swallowed. ‘Because I took something from you. I took Gregory. So I wanted to give you something.’

Mishka said nothing.

‘You’re free,’ Lukas said. ‘If you go now, they’ll never catch you. I know you have enough Full on that boat to last twenty years.’

Mishka didn’t take her gaze off him. He felt like a virus under a microscope.

He blinked back the tears building up behind his eyes. ‘I know it’s not enough,’ he said. ‘It will never be enough. But I’m just trying to say...’ It felt like a rock was climbing up his throat. ’...that I’m sorry.’

Mishka looked at him for a long time. Then she said something so quietly he didn’t hear it.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Thank you,’ she said again. He thought her eyes were wet, but she turned around before he could be sure.

She threw one more bag into the boat, stepped in after it and started winding up the anchor.

The mere act of saying it out loud – of having someone to say it to – buoyed Lukas. For the first time in his life, the Care in his system didn’t cause him any pain.

The anchor came up out of the darkness. Mishka lifted it into the boat and rested it on a waterproof cushion.

‘I killed Poken,’ she said. ‘I was going to kill you, too. Now you’re letting me go.’

Lukas nodded.

‘How do you know you’re doing the right thing?’ Mishka asked.

‘I don’t,’ Lukas replied.

‘But you’ve thought about it.’

‘Yes.’

Mishka looked out at the rising sun. ‘Well. Maybe that’s good enough.’

She started the engine. The roar drowned out the sounds of the water.

‘Can I come with you?’ Lukas asked.

She raised her eyebrows.

‘You broke my SIM,’ he said. ‘I don’t fit into this world any more.’

‘Then change it.’ Mishka pulled a canvas bag out of the boat and tossed it to Lukas. It was marked TO BE DESTROYED.

Lukas watched as she gunned the motor and pulled away from the dock, easing the boat out on to the waves. He didn’t take his eyes off her until she shrank into a tiny speck on the horizon, and was gone.

***

It didn’t take Lukas long to type the email, but it took weeks to find something to type it on. No matter how many apartments he broke into, no-one seemed to have anything resembling a keyboard.

But everyone owned a printer and a scanner. He had started out with just the one capsule of bio-ink from Mishka’s bag, but since then he had made hundreds. That was what impressed him most about Gregory Merchant’s formula – that it could be made from normal prote-ink. He had left capsules behind in lifts, in bathtubs, on the back seats of unlocked cars.

And now he was in the museum, tapping away at an old keyboard hooked up to a stolen transmitter. He was surrounded by broken glass, but the alarms had stopped. A security guard had walked right past him in the dark, unable to hear his SIM.

It’s not up to me, Lukas typed. The power to make living things is so big that I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

I’m just sharing the formula. What happens next is up to you.

In the address field, he hit select all. Thousands of names filled the screen.

All around him, dead animals hovered in their glass prisons. Motionless, watchful. Waiting for their chance to live again.

Lukas hit send.

Acknowledgements

After the collapse of several major book retailers, I was one of many authors struggling to find a publisher for his manuscripts. Over a few years I wrote and rewrote five novels, all of which were rejected everywhere they were sent. (I owe a tremendous debt to my agent, Clare Forster at Curtis Brown Australia, for not giving up on me during this time.) I might have thrown in the towel and gone looking for another profession, except that I kept getting emails from readers who wanted to know when my next book would be out.

So I decided to give it one last try. Three novel ideas had been troubling me for a while – a story about a bad boy with a chemically induced conscience, another about a world in which teens were taken away from their parents in the name of fairness and forced to do all the world’s labour to toughen them up, and yet another about an economy destroyed by everyone’s ability to make anything with a 3D printer. I resolved to merge these ideas together, pitch the book directly to the readers, and see if they were willing to help me fund it.

I’d like to thank my wonderful wife, Venetia Major, who heard this crazy idea and said, ‘Go for it!’ I’d also like to thank Megan Hoult and the students of Montrose Bay High in Tasmania, who helped me make the video pitch.

I pre-sold 156 books, plus posters and other rewards, such as naming rights to characters. I’d like to thank the real-life Mischa Andrews, Chantelle Griffin, Josh Young and my old friend Tobias Holm (who requested that I name a character after his buddy Jack Heath, hence the scene in which I appear as a confused old man in a hospital bed).

These supporters pledged more than five thousand dollars, enough for me to hire a copy-editor (the extraordinarily thorough Lucy Mackay-Sim, who made Ink, Inc. much more coherent, consistent and compelling), a graphic designer (the amazing Andrew Neilen, who’s responsible for the cool artwork you saw on the cover) and Amelia Waddell from Make Your Day, who is putting together what will no doubt be an unforgettable book launch.

This wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for the amazing supporters who not only pledged funds, but made it their mission to ensure lots of other people did too! My heartfelt thanks go to Ashley and Lindley Arthur, Adrian Beck, Maria Bernardi, Justin Bush, Barbara Davidson, Jesse Everett, Mitchell Gall, Katherine Gilks, Kerri Gleeson, Billy, Kate and Tom Griffiths, Helen Holm, Catherine Johnston, Alex and James McPherson, Bruno and Georgina Panetta, Libby Robin, Raquel Solar, Belinda Tomov, Ian and Tom Heath, Reuben Ingall, Venetia Major (again), Angela Nguyen, Keith Russell, Alex Schinzinger, Hannah Selmes, Hazel Shemshedin, Raquel Solar and Brett White, who also showed me his 3D printer and got me thinking.

The readers didn’t stop at funding the book – they also read works in progress, providing much needed feedback along the way. Special thanks to Katie Dunn, Ian Heath (again), Paul Kopetko, Venetia Major (yet again) Kyna Reddan, KJ Taylor and Maddie Wilson, whose suggestions were extremely helpful. I should also thank Dr. Adam Keighley, who cheerfully helped me out when I asked questions like, ‘What’s the medical terminology for ‘beaten to death?’’

Lastly, a big thanks to you, the reader. In a way, you’re my co-author, since your imagination has customised the setting and characters to suit your tastes. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Keep reading for your bonus novella, Crossover!

Crossover

by Jack Heath

Dedication

To all the readers who recommended my books to others. You made this possible.

Prologue

The flash grenade was cold in Agent Six’s hand. A plastic bulb, filled with gunpowder, magnesium dust and a loop of copper wire. Having been so silent for so long – swimming through the maze of storm water drains, crawling slowly through the rubble-strewn courtyard – it was hard to convince himself to throw it.

But stealth had taken him as far as it would. A ring of soldiers surrounded the facility, goggled eyes sweeping the darkness, gloved fingers trembling on the triggers of Eagle automatic assault rifles. If Six was going to stop Soren Byre from activating the machine, he was going to need a distraction.

The grenade had no pin. Instead there was a switch – when it was flicked, the wire would heat up and up until it was hot enough to ignite the powder. It would take about three seconds.

Six adjusted his anti-flash goggles, inserted his moulded earplugs and pulled on his gloves. He removed the cap from a syringe, steadied his thumb on the plunger and tapped the chamber to remove the air bubbles from the grey fluid inside. Then, with his other hand, he hit the switch on the grenade.

He held it tight for one second. Two. Then he swung his arm and hurled it as far as he could.

The bulb sailed through the black fog over the heads of the soldiers, none of whom seemed to notice it until it blew apart at the apex of its trajectory. A flash rippled out across the sky, as if lightning had struck the compound. A tremendous crack left Six’s ears ringing, even through the plugs. The sound doubled the adrenaline pumping through his system as he scrambled out from behind his hiding place and sprinted to the nearest soldier at a superhuman speed.

The young man was staring up at the sky, just like all his colleagues. At the last second, he saw Six in his peripheral vision, or perhaps heard his footsteps – but he turned too slowly. Before he had a chance to cry out, Six jammed the syringe into his neck and depressed the plunger.

The soldier shuddered as the paralytic pumped through his veins and leaked into his brain. By the time he stopped quivering, Six had already dragged him behind a mound of broken cinder blocks and wrestled the rifle out of his twitching hands.

Another soldier turned back to look at Six.

‘Where did that come from?’ he demanded. ‘Do you see anybody?’

Six kept his face impassive behind the goggles. ‘No-one,’ he said. As a sixteen-year old, he stood slightly shorter than the soldier he’d poisoned, and his voice probably had less depth. Hopefully the other soldier was too disoriented and deafened to notice. ‘You keep watch. I’ll warn them inside.’

He jogged over to the facility door – a thick rectangle of steel, framed by reinforced concrete. Without giving the other soldiers the time to wonder why he wasn’t using his radio, he heaved the door open, slipped through, and pulled it shut behind him.

* * *

The inside of the facility reminded Six of a submarine. Narrow, damp tunnels ringed with piping. Metal grates underfoot. The Deck hadn’t been able to recover any blueprints for the building, so he would have to navigate the labyrinth on his own.

‘Hey!’ A muscular soldier stood beside the door, a Hawk 9mm pistol in his hands. ‘What are you doing inside?’

‘Sorry,’ Six said. ‘I only brought one syringe.’

‘What–’

Six lashed out, thumping his boot into the soldier’s belly. The soldier doubled over, wheezing. He swiped his clumsy fists through the air, but Six sidestepped around him. He clapped his palm over the soldier’s mouth and wrapped his other forearm across the throat, and squeezed.

The soldier gurgled helplessly as the blood flowing into his brain slowed to a trickle. It only took a few seconds for him to go limp. Six waited a moment longer to be certain, and then lowered him to the ground.

The others would be coming after Six soon. He turned back to the door, grabbed the two heavy bolts, and slid them closed. He thought about bending the metal so as the door couldn’t be opened even from inside, but the risk was too high. He might not be able to find another exit.

Six moved through the tunnel as silently as a ghost. Neon lights buzzed and flickered above his head. According to Kyntak, this facility was radiating rising levels of electromagnetism. Kyntak had assured Six that the radiation was harmless, but it meant that Soren Byre had already switched on the machine. If it reached full power before Six could shut it down, the resulting explosion would leave a smoking crater several kilometres wide.

Six didn’t need to check his watch to know how much time he had left. Twenty-eight minutes. He didn’t doubt that he would be able to find the machine in time, but working out how to switch it off was another matter entirely.

One empty corridor after another swept by. No soldiers, no machine, no sign of Byre. Six added each intersection to his mental map, ensuring that he missed nothing.

A hatch in the floor caught his eye. He kicked it up and stared down into the darkness. Even with his superhuman eyesight, he couldn’t see more than a few metres deep. A flashlight was bolted to the barrel of his stolen assault rifle – he switched it on and took aim.

The beam sliced through the shadows, revealing a rusted ladder which stretched down to another metal floor about ten metres below. The facility was much deeper than Six had guessed.

He had no time for ladders. He turned off the flashlight, stepped into the hatch and plummeted like a glass bottle.

The floor hit him hard. He had kept his legs bent, but his feet stung. The impact rang out through the maze of corridors, coming back as wet, distorted echoes.

Nothing moved in the blackness. He had hoped the sound would elicit a gasp, giving him some clue to Byre’s whereabouts. But there was no indication that anyone had heard him.

His eyes were adjusting, but not fast enough. Instead, he used the echoes of his footsteps to judge the positions of the walls.

He could smell something familiar. Six had once tried to repair the navigation systems of a concorde as it spiralled toward the ground, shortly after an attack drone struck it with a MASER cannon. The burning circuitry had filled the air with this same tangy scent.

Up ahead, light streamed under a closed door. A low hum filled the air. Six cradled the rifle in one arm while he reached out with the other and pushed the door open.

A starscape of illuminated switches and buttons covered the far wall. A grid of LED televisions were mounted on the opposite side of the room, graphing rapidly-changing various metrics.

A woman stood in the centre of the room, her bare feet on a plate of glass. She was clutching a pair of metal canisters which dangled from the ceiling.

Her grey hair was wound into a tight bun. Six could still see the scar tissue from the bullet wound in her neck. Her caramel eyes fixed on his.

‘Six of Hearts,’ Soren Byre said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve arrived too late.’

* * *

‘Let go of that,’ Six said, ‘and take three steps back.’

Soren Byre didn’t move. ‘Or what?’

Six had thought that was obvious, given the rifle. ‘Or I’ll shoot you.’

‘You wouldn’t kill an old friend,’ Byre said.

‘I don’t have any friends.’

‘Colleague, then.’ Her voice was rougher than Six remembered. She spoke as though her throat were full of pebbles.

‘You don’t work for the Deck any more,’ Six said.

‘That doesn’t mean we’re not on the same side.’

The humming grew in volume. The metal ceiling creaked above Six’s head. A mysterious breeze washed around his ankles.

He moved his finger to the inside of the trigger guard. ‘Step back,’ he said. ‘I won’t ask you again.’

‘I can stop ChaoSonic from ever existing,’ Byre said. ‘Imagine – no more massacres, no more checkpoints, no more toxic fog, no more Seawall. I’ll save more lives than you have in your entire career.’

When Six joined the Deck, a secret group of vigilantes, he had sworn an oath to protect the City from ChaoSonic’s destructive greed. Byre made the same vow. Perhaps he could convince her that defending the citizens was more important than destroying ChaoSonic’s corporate empire.

‘You weigh about sixty kilos,’ Six guessed. ‘The amount of energy required to send you back that far will kill everyone within the eight-kilometre blast radius–’

‘Only temporarily. After I’ve hunted down the original board members and changed history, the explosion will never happen. Everyone will survive – except you.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? If I stop ChaoSonic from forming, they won’t be around to engineer you.’

Six hesitated. He hadn’t realised that Byre knew the truth about his birthplace – a jar in a ChaoSonic laboritory. Kyntak had told him that time travel was impossible, so Six wasn’t worried about Byre’s plan succeeding. He was much more concerned about the impending explosion.

‘Anyway,’ Byre said. ‘It doesn’t matter. As I said, you’re too late. The countdown can’t be stopped.’

When she worked at the Deck, Byre had been fond of mind games. Six suspected she was lying, but he was running out of time to prove it. The cylinders in her fists were starting to glow. The barrel of his gun kept jerking downward as the giant electromagnet powered up beneath the floor.

‘Your machine won’t work,’ Six said. ‘You need ununoctium.’

Kyntak had told him to say this. Ununoctium was a super-heavy element, the last stockpiles of which had been missing since the 21st century. It could theoretically make Byre’s machine work, but it was extremely unlikely that she had any.

For the first time, he saw doubt in her eyes.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘My calculations–’

‘Are flawed,’ Six said. He pointed to the control panel. ‘So, are you going to pull the shut-off switch, or am I?’

He didn’t know which switch was the right one, but just as he’d hoped, Byre glanced at it. Her eyes rested on the rubber-handled lever for only a fraction of a second, but Six saw.

He dived toward it.

‘No!’ Byre shrieked.

Six grabbed the lever and pulled it downward. Something groaned beneath the floor, and a shower of sparks blasted out from the control panel. The graphs disappeared from the televisions, and a warning appeared: CRITICAL ERROR.

Something slammed into the side of Six’s head. He dropped the gun and staggered sideways, his brain wobbling in his skull. As he tumbled to the floor, he saw Byre clutching a fire extinguisher, her face twisted into a mask of fury.

‘You’ve ruined everything!’ she screamed.

She raised the extinguisher, ready to crush his face–

And then it flew out of her hands, slamming into the glass panel in the centre of the room.

Six reached for the gun, only to see it skittering out of reach. The magnet is still on, he realised. It must have a separate switch.

The metal ceiling groaned.

Six tried to stand up, but his limbs still wouldn’t obey him. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said.

Byre ignored him. She was fiddling with the control panel like a concert pianist. ‘Come on, come on!’

Six pressed one palm against the floor, rising to his knees. The world was still spinning, but more slowly. He was confident that he had prevented the explosion, but the building was full of metal – he had to get as far away from the magnet as possible.

‘Byre,’ he said. ‘We need to–’

Then the lights went out, and the ceiling collapsed above him.

* * *

Six rolled aside just in time. The metal grate slammed into the floor where he had been kneeling. Another blast of sparks lit up the room, revealing a mountain of twisted metal in the centre. Six couldn’t see Byre anywhere. He guessed that she had been crushed.

The door had been ripped off its hinges. Six scrambled to his feet and stumbled through the doorway. Even through his earplugs, the rattling and groaning of the building was deafening. It felt like being trapped inside the bottom level of a sinking cruise ship.

He ran through the darkness, arms outstretched, hoping the ladder was still where it was supposed to be. The greater the distance from the magnet, the less pulling power it had, but the bolts which fixed the ladder to the wall hadn’t looked sturdy.

Six crashed into the ladder hard enough to bruise his shoulder. It was closer than he had expected, and it was no longer straight – it spiralled upward like a strand of DNA. But there was no other way out of here. He grabbed the bent rungs and started climbing.

Something crashed up above. Perhaps the magnet had knocked something over, perhaps the soldiers were coming in. A flickering glow illuminated the top few rungs. Six heard the crackling and spitting of flames.

A chunk of metal piping tumbled through the hatch and plummeted toward Six. He swung sideways. The fragment barely missed him as it whistled through the darkness and clanged into a rung somewhere below.

The ladder rattled in his grip. A hailstorm of bolts and screws fell from up above. Six shielded his face with one hand, put the other on the side of the ladder, and climbed using only his feet.

When his head emerged through the hatch, he immediately felt the flames nearby, drying out his skin. A power point on the wall was spitting sparks, and it looked like the oil stains on the floor had caught alight. If he hadn’t been up here only minutes ago, he would never have been able to find his way out through the thick smoke.

He clambered out of the hatch and started running. The pipes shook above his head as he turned corner after corner–

Until he bumped into Soren Byre.

Her clothes and hair were blackened by soot, but her eyes were bright as ever. An unbalanced grin split her face.

Six stared at her. How had she gotten up here before him?

‘It works,’ she hissed at him. ‘It works!’

Then a shard of metal erupted out of her face.

Six gasped and jumped back as the blood sprayed his clothes. Byre slumped to the floor, the piece of magnetised shrapnel skewered through her head. The body shifted, and for a moment Six though she was trying to get up, but he soon realised that it was just the metal, dragging her obscenely across the floor.

If he didn’t get out of here quickly, the same thing might happen to him.

He sprinted through the flickering shadows, trying to avoid the burning patches of the floor. A knotted electrical cable flew through the air towards him, and he sidestepped around it – only to nearly collide with a hurtling pipe. The metal ceiling was ripping apart. The whole facility was imploding like a black hole.

Six had almost reached the exit. The guard he had knocked out was nowhere to be seen. As he watched, the bolts snapped and the door lurched out of its frame. It rocketed toward him like a bullet train. He flattened himself against the wall as it sped past.

Five more steps. Three. One.

He dove out the door and skidded across the dirt. Behind him, the facility folded in upon itself like an oragami house crushed in an enormous fist. The girders squealed as they bent. Glass exploded outward from the barred windows as the frames shrunk.

The implosion stopped abruptly, leaving the building silent and still but for the roiling smoke above it. Six guessed that the generator must have finally shorted out.

Looking around, he saw the soldiers from earlier, lying on their stomachs with their hands cuffed behind their backs. A group of Deck agents stood nearby, faces inscrutable behind their black masks. Six was too far away to read the ranks stitched into their uniforms, but one of the agents was shorter than the others.

‘Kyntak,’ he called.

The short agent looked over, muttered something to his colleagues, and approached Six. ‘I should have known you’d show up,’ he said, ‘once the hard work was over.’

Six didn’t laugh. ‘The machine is destroyed.’

Kyntak nodded to the collapsed building. ‘Yeah, I figured. And Byre?’

‘Dead.’

Six didn’t meet his brother’s gaze. Kyntak knew him too well to ask if he had killed Byre, but he would be wondering what had happened.

‘That might be for the best,’ Kyntak said finally. ‘If she’d survived, she would have tried again.’

Six said nothing.

Kyntak gestured at the prostrate guards. ‘We’ve got a bit of cleaning up to do here. The gates are unlocked – you should go home.’

Six had already started to walk away.

Chapter One

The Taur

The cars grumbled past, the sterilised rain poured down between the skyscrapers and the fog swirled around Six like ghosts of the millions who had died breathing it. His superhuman lungs were less susceptible to the toxins than most, but he wore a filtration mask like everyone else.

He was ChaoSonic’s most wanted. Standing out was a sure way to be killed.

Almost two months had passed since Soren Byre’s death. Six had completed several missions since then, but he still found himself scrubbing his face harder than he needed to each morning – he could still feel the droplets of her blood on his skin. Six was no stranger to death, nor to failure, but this event had stayed with him, perhaps because he had known Byre when she was a Deck agent.

By the time he spotted the razor wire of the ChaoSonic checkpoint up ahead, it was too late to turn back. Unmanned aerial vehicles would be circling above, armed with thermal cameras and ready to follow those who ran. Instead, Six joined the queue of shuffling pedestrians, hoping his fake triple C – ChaoSonic Citizen Card – would fool the armed guards.

The checkpoint hadn’t been here yesterday. It was very close to the Deck. Six hoped this was a coincidence, but he made a note to plant some decoy data in ChaoSonic’s network, leading their search teams further away.

Three of the four guards had standard cockroach armour – gleaming shells of interconnected carbon-fibre plates and proboscis-like breathing tubes. They trained heavy eight-gauge Vulture shotguns on the ambling line of citizens, waiting for someone to flee.

It was the fourth guard that caught Six’s eye. He was twice as tall as the others, with impossibly broad shoulders and meaty, three-fingered hands. He was naked but for a bulletproof apron and a giant helmet of tinted glass. A patchwork of greyish pink skin and short black fur covered his bulging muscles. He looked like a visitor from another planet.

A Taur, Six thought. They have them at checkpoints now.

Six had heard about Taurs, but had never seen one. They were violent, hulking creatures grown from human embryos infused with cattle DNA. Fewer than one hundred had been made, and all were sent to the mines on the western side of the City, where they ripped out the remaining coal and oil at depths the human body wouldn’t withstand. Their skin was fireproof and probably bulletproof. Six guessed that the earth must finally be empty, and the Taurs who had survived the fumes and pressure had been put to work elsewhere.

ChaoSonic’s promotional material said that they were three times as heavy as "purebred" humans, but twice as fast and four times as strong. Six had also heard that they were fairly stupid, but he had never been able to confirm this.

If his triple C was rejected, his usual backup plan was to beat up the guards and run to the nearest subway entrance, where the drones wouldn’t be able to follow him. But he couldn’t outrun or outfight a Taur. He could only hope that the card would work.

Only eight people stood between him and the checkpoint. He would find out soon.

Someone shouted up ahead. Peering over the shoulder of the person in front of him, Six saw that the three cockroaches had aimed their shotguns at a wiry, dark-haired man.

Six gasped. It was Agent Two of Hearts.

* * *

‘Wait,’ Agent Two said, his hands raised. ‘There must be some mistake.’

‘Counterfeit identification is a serious offense,’ one of the cockroaches said.

The Taur growled. Twin streaks of steam appeared on the inside of its helmet.

Six watched the commotion, heart pounding. If he did nothing, Two would almost certainly be arrested, tortured and executed. But if he tried to intervene, they might both die.

‘If you’ll just check again...’ Two began.

‘Lie down on the ground,’ the cockroach said. ‘Now.’

Two fell to his knees, defeated.

I can’t let them do this, Six thought.

He drew a Hawk 9mm semi-automatic pistol from under his trench coat. The woman behind him screamed. He ignored her, taking aim at a dark shadow in the foggy sky, and pulled the trigger.

The gun kicked in his hand, over and over until only one bullet remained. The shots echoed around the street as the other pedestrians ducked and shouted. The cockroaches whirled around to face Six. The Taur raised its giant arms like a weight-lifter. Six could just make out a pair of giant black eyes behind the tinted visor.

Two was quick. He launched himself at the nearest guard, fracturing the proboscis with a brutal head butt even as he wrestled the shotgun out of his hands. The other cockroach took aim at Two, but couldn’t shoot him without hitting his colleague.

The aerial drone wheeled down out of the sky, smoke puffing from the bullet holes, and slammed into the road on the other side of the checkpoint. The impact distracted the second cockroach, but the Taur didn’t even look. It thumped toward Six like a rampaging elephant, shoving people out of its way with its mighty paws.

Six turned and ran back the way he had come. He caught up to the rest of the crowd without difficulty, but he wasn’t fast enough to outrun the Taur. He could hear its massive feet thudding across the asphalt toward him, closer and closer...

He had one bullet left. He trained his pistol on the third-floor window of a nearby office building, and pulled the trigger.

A spiderweb of cracks spread across the glass. Six sprinted toward the building, taking longer and longer strides, and then he launched himself into the air.

The wind blustered in his ears as he sailed through the fog, keeping his feet forward and shielding his face with his arms. The window was too high for the Taur to reach – he hoped it wasn’t also too high for him to jump to.

Smash! Six plunged through the glass and tumbled onto the plush blue carpet. His clothes jingled as he stood and shook the broken glass out of them.

A forest of desks and chairs surrounded him. The office was deserted, but the computer monitors were all switched on. A few half-empty coffee mugs decorated the desks. The employees must have fled when the bullet struck the window.

Six ran over to the polished titanium door, and pulled on the handle. Locked. A swipe card reader was mounted on the wall. He would need an access card to get out this way. But there must be a fire exit somewhere.

Something metal shrieked outside the window. By the time Six worked out what it sounded like – a skip bin being dragged across the concrete – the Taur’s enormous hand had already appeared on the window sill. It was climbing up after him.

Six looked around for something he could use to fight the monster. The chairs and desks would bounce off its flesh without slowing it down. The kitchen had a kettle, but there was no steam above the nozzle. Burning it wasn’t an option.

A second three-fingered hand gripped the sill. Six was running out of time.

A brown leather jacket was draped over a nearby chair. Six shrugged off his trench coat, unhooked his respiration filter and threw them both across the room. Then he pulled on the jacket and hid behind one of the desks.

He heard the Taur haul itself through the window and stand up. The floor creaked under its weight. He could hear its helmet scraping the ceiling as it walked.

It won’t see me, Six told himself. It’ll walk right past.

The beast shuffled closer and closer. Broken glass crunched under its feet. Six could hear it snuffling like a bloodhound.

Suddenly the desk Six was crouched behind vanished, swept aside so fast that Six didn’t know where it had gone until he heard it shatter against the far wall.

The Taur loomed over Six, peering down at him like a child inspecting an ant. Six didn’t need to hide his terror.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I just work here. Please don’t hurt me!’

The Taur squeezed the hem of the stolen jacket between its massive fingers. Then it looked at the trail of broken glass, leading all the way from Six’s feet back to the window.

It’s smarter than it looks, Six thought.

The Taur looked back at Six. Its wet black eyes met his.

It gave him a barely perceptible nod.

Then it let him go and walked away.

Six watched the Taur rip through the titanium door as though it were made of rice paper. It disappeared through the doorway.

It saw the jump, he thought. It knew what I was – and decided to let me go.

He listened as the Taur stomped away through the corridors of the building. Then he clambered to his feet and returned to the window. The two cockroaches lay unconscious beside the razor wire. Two was nowhere to be seen.

Yes, Six thought. Much smarter than I realised.

Chapter Two

The Index

‘Everything?’ Six repeated.

Kyntak nodded.

‘Everything,’ Six said again.

‘That’s what I said.’

They were in Kyntak’s office at the Deck, hundreds of metres below street level. Kyntak sat in one of four swivel-chairs, his feet resting on another. Six remained standing, as usual. Years of unexpected flights from sudden dangers had left him feeling vulnerable whenever he was seated.

The office was decorated according to Kyntak’s unusual sense of humour. A tattered poster read You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps to have a rocket launcher. Most Deck agents mounted old photographs of landscapes on their walls to take their minds off the fact that they were underground, but Kyntak had hung a picture of tightly packed dirt instead.

Six still wasn’t sure he understood. ‘Hoth Amet wanted to make an index of everything.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Every place, every person–’

‘Every book ever written, every advertisement ever broadcast, every sentence ever typed,’ Kyntak said. ‘Everything.’

‘Why?’

‘Some people said he was trying to make a point about the information age. Others thought he was just crazy. I suspect we’ll never know.’

‘But the index of everything already exists,’ Six said. ‘It’s called the internet.’

‘You’re only sixteen, so I’ll forgive that remark–’

‘We’re twins.’

’–but Amet’s index was way, way bigger than the internet,’ Kyntak said, ignoring him. ‘It covered all aspects of everyday life, including–’

‘Wait. He actually did it?’

‘Yep. He programmed what might be the most successful computer virus in history, which turned more than ninety-four per cent of the world’s electronics into 24-hour recording devices. He was able to catalogue almost everything which was transmitted through cyberspace, anything which went near a camera lens and every word spoken within range of a phone. No-one even noticed what he’d done until the early 20th century.’

‘The early–’ Six broke off. ‘So this guy’s been dead a long, long time.’

‘Oh, yes. He was assassinated in 2029. Several governments still existed then, all with secrets to keep, so any one of them could have been responsible. But no-one ever found the server farm which hosted the index itself.’

He looked at Six expectantly. Six said nothing.

‘Until now,’ Kyntak added dramatically, not bothered by his brother’s lack of input.

‘So where is it?’

‘A fallout shelter in the City North East.’

‘Who found it?’

‘No-one. It switched itself on. We detected it when it tried to index our employee database.’

Six exhaled. ‘So you want me to go out there and destroy it?’

‘Destroy it?’ Kyntak looked horrified. ‘It’s an important historical artifact! Just disconnect it from the internet before ChaoSonic finds it. We don’t want them to know what it knows.’

‘Which is?’

Kyntak smiled. ‘Everything.’

* * *

It didn’t look like a fallout shelter. The crumbling walls were dotted with holes. The gate had rusted away to almost nothing. It looked like the ruins of a toilet block, an artefact from when the City still had trees and camping grounds.

Irradiated dust swirled in the headlights. Six pulled up the handbrake and shut off the engine. If he was in the wrong place, he would know soon enough.

The silence was overwhelming. As crowded as it was, the City still had deserted spots, usually because of a bad smell – or, in this case, the half-life from a long forgotten nuclear test.

Six got out of the car, closed the door, and moved quickly toward the shelter. The index had probably tried to break into the systems of various other organisations. There was always a risk that someone else might show up. He had to move fast.

The gate screamed as he pulled it open. A startled rat darted between Six’s feet and scuttled away into the fog. He hesitated for a moment, but heard no other movement. So he slipped through the gap and crept down the concrete steps toward the shelter.

A titanium door stood at the bottom of the staircase. It looked thicker than Six had expected. He hoped there was enough gas in his cutting torch to slice through it.

But when he got closer, he realised that he wouldn’t even need the torch. The bolts weren’t engaged. He gripped the handle and heaved, dragging the door open centimetre by centimetre.

The darkness loomed before him. He could hear hundreds of tiny fans whirring, keeping the servers cool. The building wasn’t connected to the power grid, so he could only assume that a reserve battery had somehow kicked in. If he waited long enough, the index would probably switch itself off.

But he didn’t want to give ChaoSonic the chance to find it. So he crept forwards, eyes adjusting to the blackness–

Click. A harsh neon glare filled the room. Six ducked, looking for the motion sensor which had triggered the lights. There could be an alarm, he thought. I have to shut it down.

He didn’t see a sensor or an alarm panel. Instead, he saw row after row of server towers, connected to the concrete ceiling by a coloured web of cables. And he saw the person standing in the shadows – but not before she saw him.

Two barbs punched through his clothes and dug into his skin. He didn’t have time to feel pain. Suddenly his limbs were shivering, his fists clenched, his teeth rattling in his mouth as thousands of volts ran up the wires and darted through his body.

He couldn’t move as the woman approached him. He couldn’t avoid the approaching syringe. He couldn’t even widen his eyes as he recognised her.

‘Agent Six,’ Soren Byre said. ‘You’re right on time.’

The syringe plunged into his neck. Everything went black.

* * *

When he woke, the cuffs were so tight around his wrists that his hands had swollen up. His ankles were chained. He couldn’t lift his head to look at the restraints – a metal band around his forehead held his skull to the operating table – but they felt strong. He wouldn’t be able to break free.

The ceiling was made of pockmarked concrete. He could still hear the servers running, so he hadn’t left the fallout shelter. How long had he been unconscious? Long enough for Kyntak to come looking for him?

Soren Byre’s face floated into view above him. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I did need ununoctium.’

Six stared at her as though her presence were an astonishing magic trick. There was no sign of scarring on her face. ‘How did you survive?’

Byre scoffed. ‘You should know better,’ she said. ‘We were trained by the same people. It takes more than a collapsing building to kill me.’

‘I watched you die,’ Six insisted.

‘It doesn’t matter what you saw, or what you think you saw. What matters is that the machine has been rebuilt. My work can continue, and this time, you won’t be able to screw it up.’

‘Byre,’ Six said. ‘Time travel is impossible.’

‘Just because we can only perceive one moment at a time, that doesn’t mean that the past is gone. Every particle in your body is entangled with every other object that has ever existed or will ever exist in the universe–’

‘Listen to me. If you try to send yourself back in time–’

‘Myself?’ Byre smiled. ‘I’m sending you.’

‘Me?’ Six’s heart accelerated in his chest. ‘Why?’

‘Because I know the machine will work, but I can’t calibrate it without a test subject. I don’t know if it will send me back ten seconds, or a hundred years. And you owe me, after making such a mess last time.’

‘You’ll kill us both,’ Six said. ‘The machine won’t work.’

‘It will, now that I have the ununoctium. Thank you for the suggestion, by the way.’

‘The last stockpile of that element disappeared a long, long time ago,’ Six said. ‘I don’t know what you have, but it’s not ununoctium.’

‘You think I tracked down Hoth Amet’s index of everything just so I could hack into the Deck and lure you here?’ Byre smirked. ‘No. I used it to locate the missing stockpile. And once I’ve sent you into the past, I’ll use it to determine when and where you showed up, and whether or not you survived the journey through spacetime.’

She pressed a cylinder into one of Six’s hands. By the time he realised what she was doing, she was already duct-taping it to his palm. He kept his other fist squeezed shut, but she just taped the second cylinder to the back of his hand. Apparently it didn’t matter which part of his skin the machine touched.

‘You’ll cause a massive explosion,’ Six cried. ‘You’ll die before you get the chance to see if it worked.’

Byre shook her head. ‘I fixed that bug. You’re not going to explode. Like I said, using ununoctium was a really good idea. It solved all sorts of problems.’

She left Six’s field of vision. Her footsteps became more distant.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘Okay,’ she called. ‘You caught me. I’m only ninety-nine per cent sure you won’t explode.’

A heavy door creaked open, then slammed closed. Six heard an electric lock engage.

‘Byre,’ he yelled. ‘Byre!’

There was no reply.

Something hummed and whirred beneath Six. The electromagnet. He struggled against his bonds, but they were too firmly fastened. Even the duct tape around his hands was painfully tight. He couldn’t shake off the cylinders.

The humming was getting louder. Six threw his body sideways, hoping to tip over the table. But he could tell from the sound that it was bolted to the floor.

‘Byre!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t–’

A deafening roar filled the air. The lights went out. A sickening dizziness flooded through Six, and suddenly he felt himself spinning down, down, down into the icy darkness of a bottomless pit.

Chapter Three

The Heist

‘So you’re telling me,’ Benjamin said, ‘that you can’t play the drums at all.’

Ash gritted her teeth. ‘I wasn’t supposed to have to. Tognetti was supposed to be on before me.’

‘Then what were all those lessons for?’

She was about to reply when the stage door swung open. Applause echoed through the halls of the conservatorium. A man with an earpiece and a lanyard leaned through the gap. ‘You’ll be on in two minutes, Miss Burnett.’

Ash tried to look confident and aloof. ‘Thank you.’

The man disappeared and the stage door swung shut, muffling the claps and whistles of the audience. Ash put the phone back to her ear.

‘What am I going to do?’ she hissed.

Benjamin sounded amused. ‘My guess is, you’re going to go out on stage and play the drums.’

‘But I don’t know how!’

‘Then do what you do best,’ Benjamin said. ‘Fake it.’

‘Thanks. You’ve been really helpful.’

‘Any time.’

Ash looked up at the TV, which displayed footage from inside the auditorium. Her drum kit had been set up by the backstage crew. The master of ceremonies was speaking from behind a podium. Ash guessed he was introducing her.

The stagehand opened the door again and beckoned silently. Ash followed him into the wings, dread curdling in her guts.

From her spot behind the thick velvet curtains, she could see the stage but not the audience. The drum kit gleamed, alone in the centre of the stage.

The master of ceremonies’ voice boomed through the auditorium. ’...headlined at the Tokyo International Arts Festival,’ he was saying, ‘featured at the Sunset Celebration of Percussion and named best new female artist at the New Jersey Soloist Music Awards – please join me in welcoming to the stage Daniella Burnett!’

The audience started clapping.

Ash looked back at the stagehand. He made a shooing gesture. ‘Go!’

She walked out onto the stage. A spotlight fixed upon her as soon as she emerged from behind the curtain. She walked out to the drum kit, trying to look like she knew what she was doing.

She sat down on the foam rubber stool and looked out at the audience. A sea of expectant faces stared back at her.

Ashley’s eyes widened. There must be a thousand people in here, she thought.

The drum sticks rested on the largest tom. She picked them up and twirled them in her fingers. A hush fell over the crowd.

From the three lessons she had taken, Ash knew how to produce a rock beat and a swing waltz. But she wasn’t very good at either of those things, and if she attempted them now, she would surely be exposed as an amateur.

She raised one of the sticks high in the air.

Hesitated.

Here goes nothing, she thought.

She brought the stick crashing down on the snare drum. The crack echoed out across the auditorium. She was relieved to discover that although the drum was stuffed with her escape equipment, this wasn’t evident from the sound.

Ash slammed the stick into the high hat twice before hitting the snare again. Then she tried some quiet taps on the floor tom before hitting the splash cymbal with all her strength.

The audience remained in a state of silent hypnosis.

They’re buying it, Ash thought.

She went all out, bashing the sticks against every drum and every cymbal. With her foot, she stomped on the kick drum pedal to make what she hoped sounded a bit like a heart beat. None of the strikes seemed to fit with any of the others. She hoped this would be mistaken for complex rhythm, rather than no rhythm.

Abruptly she switched from using the whole kit to using just one drum – the smallest tom, which she bashed at as quickly and loudly as she could. After almost a whole minute, she swapped back, tapping all the other drums and cymbals quietly and unevenly.

When it felt like seven of the allotted eight minutes had passed, she started getting louder. She struck the hat louder and louder, more and more quickly. Sweat poured down her face. She tried hitting the drums near the edges of their skins, and then moved back to the middle. When it felt like she couldn’t strike them any harder or faster, she stopped.

The last echoes died away, and the auditorium was silent.

Ash put the sticks down.

Someone clapped. Someone else joined in.

The claps coalesced into applause. Ash realised she was still sitting down. She rose and bowed stiffly. The clapping became louder. Someone whistled.

Ash walked off the stage in a daze. In the wings, the stagehand was holding the door open for her. A distinguished-looking man with a high widow’s peak and short, wavy hair stood next to him, holding a violin.

‘Very well done indeed,’ he said, in a way that suggested he thought she would need the encouragement.

Ash nodded modestly and slipped back out in the corridor. The door slammed shut.

He seemed like a nice guy. She almost felt bad about her plan to steal his violin.

* * *

As Ash had hoped, the green room was deserted. Tognetti was the last act, so there were no other musicians warming up.

She took the phone out of her pocket, checked that the call to Benjamin was still connected, and pressed it to her ear.

‘Benjamin,’ she said. ‘I’m inside the green room.’

‘That was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said. ‘If you die before I do, I’m going to make sure someone brings a drum kit to your funeral and replicates that piece, note for note.’

Ash smirked. ‘I think the other mourners would be less than impressed. But hey, it’s your funeral.’

‘Were you even listening? I said it was your funeral.’

‘Figure of speech.’ Idly, Ash wondered if there would be any other mourners to upset. Her father, her school librarian and Hammond Buckland would probably die before she did. Benjamin might be the only attendee.

‘Anyway, shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’

She scanned the variety of black instrument cases, some hard, some soft, scattered around the room like the shadows of the instruments they were designed to carry. They were shaped like guitars, double basses, tubas, xylophones – and violins.

It didn’t take her long to spot the case she was looking for. She had studied it at length the last time she slipped backstage at one of Tognetti’s performances.

‘Found it,’ she told Benjamin.

‘Work fast. Six minutes until he comes back.’

Tognetti’s violin was two centuries old and worth $11 million. It was never separated from him by more than a metre – when he boarded a plane, he wouldn’t even put it in the overhead locker, and kept it on his lap instead.

But whenever he was on stage, he was more than a metre away from his case.

Ash opened the case and tipped some handwritten sheet music and a spare block of rosin onto the floor. Then she took it over to the giant nylon bag which had held her kick drum.

When she unzipped the bag, she found a steel box, roughly forty centimetres tall with a lid which was about eighty centimetres square. A violin case, exactly like Tognetti’s, was fixed to the top of it at a slight angle.

She put the real violin case into her bag and closed it. Then she placed the box on the floor where the real case had been. She opened the fake case on top, put the rosin and sheet music inside, and closed it again.

She stepped back to examine her handiwork. When Tognetti entered the green room, he would see that someone had placed his violin case on top of a box. He would open it, see his rosin and sheet music, and put the $11 million dollar violin inside. Then he would close the lid and lock the case.

When he engaged the lock, the bottom of the fake case would open, dropping the violin through the hole Benjamin had cut into the lid of the steel box. When he picked up the fake case, it would detach itself from the box, closing both the hole in the box and the underside of the case. Then Tognetti would leave, carrying the weighted but empty case under his arm, and leaving the expensive violin in Benjamin’s box where Ash could later fetch it.

There were several ways the plan could go wrong. The box was padded, so Tognetti was unlikely to hear the violin falling, but he might hear the mechanism which opened the bottom of the case. Or he could attempt to move the fake case before he opened it. Or he could decide that he wanted his sheet music after all, and open the case to find that the violin was gone.

But this was the best plan Ash had been able to come up with. And Benjamin’s box functioned so beautifully that she was feeling very confident.

‘Hey Ash,’ Benjamin said. ‘If something really bad happened, and there was nothing you could do about it, would you want to know?’

‘Yes,’ Ash said immediately. ‘Why?’

‘Really?’ Benjamin sounded surprised. ‘I wouldn’t. Ignorance is bliss, I say.’

‘What’s happened? Tell me.’

‘You know that party at the building next door? It turns out to be the State Police Christmas Party. Half the cops in the city are within two hundred metres of you right now.’

Ash’s stomach lurched. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do about that.’

‘Exactly. That’s why I thought you might not want to know.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ash said. ‘I’m all done here.’

She turned to walk toward the green room door–

And bumped into somebody.

Ash squeaked and stumbled backwards, dropping the phone. It felt like she’d hit a stone wall. The boy – a pale, dark-haired youth of about sixteen – didn’t react to the impact.

‘Sorry!’ Ash stammered, wondering how he’d gotten so close without her hearing him. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

The boy said nothing. His blue eyes were wide with horror, fixed on something behind Ash.

She looked over her shoulder, and saw nothing but instrument cases.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked, turning back. ‘I hope I didn’t – oh my God!’

The boy had no legs. But he wasn’t in a wheelchair. His upper body hovered in the centre of the green room, as though he were simply invisible below the waist.

‘Wha...’ Ash began. ‘What... how...’

As she watched, the boy’s legs materialised beneath him. Slowly. Ash felt like she was trapped in a photograph as it touched the developing fluid.

The boy still hadn’t moved. Ash suddenly got the impression the he was frozen, a hologram, part of some elaborate security system.

‘Ash!’ The phone was still on the floor, but she could still hear his panicked voice. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I have no idea,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a–’

‘Argh!’ The boy’s scream was brief and anguished. Ash got the sense that she was hearing only the second half of it. Suddenly mobile, he turned to face her. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. His voice was cold and deep.

Ash boggled at him. ‘Who am I?’

‘Where am I? What is this place? What–’ The boy’s eyes fixed on hers. ‘What year is this?’

Ash raised her hands, as though he had pointed a gun at her. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if this is some kind of joke–’

‘It worked,’ the boy whispered. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘How did you get here?’ Ash snatched up her phone. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I...’ The boy hesitated. He looked around the room, wild-eyed, before turning back to Ash. ‘I’m from the future. And I need your help.’

There was a pause.

‘I stand corrected,’ Benjamin said, his voice tinny in the phone’s speakers. ‘That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all day.’

Chapter Four

Escape

‘You’re from the future,’ Ash repeated.

‘I need to talk to someone in charge,’ the boy said. ‘There’s not much time. No!’ He hesitated. ‘Wait. There’s lots of time. There’s decades. I’m in the past.’

‘The past? Decades? In charge of what?’ Ash was aware that she sounded ridiculous, but she was faced with a ridiculous situation. Surely the boy was insane – but how had he gotten here? He had appeared right in front of her eyes.

‘In charge of radioactive materials,’ the boy said. ‘Rare ones. If you don’t know who that is, perhaps you can tell me–’

‘I can tell you you’ll get arrested by the TRA if you ask anyone in charge of anything about radioactive materials,’ Ash said. ‘Who are you?’

‘What’s the TRA?’

Ash was a very, very good liar, and she could usually tell when someone else was. The boy looked completely honest. But if he hadn’t heard of Terrorism Risk Assessment, then where had he come from?

The green room door creaked open. Tognetti stepped in, holding a bow in one hand and the $11 million violin in the other.

He smiled at Ash. ‘Hello again.’

Ash’s heart kicked in her chest. ‘Hi – how was the performance.’

‘Fine, fine.’ He looked at the boy. ‘Who’s this?’

I wish I knew, Ash thought.

‘Are you in charge here?’ the boy demanded.

‘Mr Tognetti, this is Quentin James,’ Ash said quickly. ‘He’s my driver. I’m afraid we really must get going.’

The boy frowned at her. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Straight to the hotel tonight, thank you,’ Ash said, herding him out the door. ‘Lovely to meet you, Mr Tognetti.’

‘Wait.’ The boy stepped around her and walked over to the far side of the room. Ash was horrified to see him stop right next to the fake violin case, and pick up a small canister with a pointed nozzle mounted on one end.

Tognetti frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘My cutting torch,’ the boy said.

Tognetti’s eyes went back to the fake case.

‘Gotta go,’ Ash said. She grabbed the boy’s arm – which felt like an iron bar wrapped in thin silicone – and dragged him out the green room door. It fell closed behind them.

‘Why do you have a cutting torch?’ she hissed.

‘I had it with me when I was captured,’ the boy said, frowning. ‘Byre must have left it on me when she sent me through time. I don’t know why she would do that – or why it appeared all the way over on the other side of the room.’

Stagehands, musicians and audience members bustled back and forth through the corridor, chattering excitedly. Their voices bounced off the high ceiling, magnifying the din. Ash wasn’t sure what was causing the commotion, but she figured she could use it to escape.

‘Okay,’ she told the boy. ‘Wait here. I’ll find someone to talk about radioactive materials with you.’

To her relief, he nodded. She threaded through the crowd, looking for a way out. She had planned to leave by the main exit, but the rest of the audience was going that way, and they might slow her down, particularly if they recognised her. Instead, she headed for the rear loading dock.

As she passed another television screen, something caught her eye. A metal table stood on the stage, adorned with nylon straps, designed to restrain someone. The wood beneath it was cracked, as though the table had been dropped from a few metres up.

I had it with me when I was captured. I don’t know why it appeared on the other side of the room.

Ash stared at the screen, transfixed. Was it possible that the boy really had travelled through time, and that some nearby objects had made the journey with him?

And that one of them had appeared on the stage after Tognetti left, starting a panic?

She turned back toward the loading dock–

And saw a group of police officers swarming up the corridor. Officers from the party next door. They wore civilian clothes – suits and ties – but they had badges attached to their belts and guns holstered under their jackets.

She put the phone to her ear. ‘Benjamin,’ she said. ‘We have several very serious problems.’

* * *

‘Talk to me,’ Benjamin said.

Ash pushed through the crowd, back toward the green room. The pale boy was still hovering beside the door. She ducked so as he wouldn’t see her in the throng.

‘I think a table appeared out of nowhere and landed on the stage,’ she said.

‘At about the same time as the weirdo showed up in the green room?’

‘Irrelevant. The point is, it brought the cops here. They’ve just come in through the rear loading dock.’

‘Can you go out the front?’ Benjamin asked.

‘If they’re at the back, they’ll be at the front too. My guess is, they’ve got the building surrounded.’

‘You have nothing to do with the table or the mystery man. They can’t hold you. Right?’

‘No,’ Ash said. ‘But–’

Tognetti burst out of the green room, holding his violin in one hand and the fake case in the other. The false bottom flapped open wildly.

Ash paled. ‘Oh no.’

‘Officer!’ Tognetti shouted.

One of the cops – a hulking, square-jawed blond – turned to look at him.

Tognetti pointed the case at the pale boy. ‘Arrest him!’

The cop moved closer. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.

‘He’s a thief,’ Tognetti said. ‘He planted this contraption as part of a plot to steal my violin.’

Pretty smart for a musician, Ash thought.

The boy stared curiously at the fake case. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

‘What’s happening?’ Benjamin asked.

‘They’re arresting the guy from the green room,’ Ash hissed. ‘They think he was trying to steal the violin.’

‘Okay – problem solved. Right?’

‘I told Tognetti he was my driver. If either of them see me, I’m done. I need a distraction.’

‘No problem. At the front, or the back?’

Ash hesitated. ‘The front. Something which will make people panic.’

‘Can do.’

The cop was looking at the cutting torch, still clenched in the pale boy’s hand. ‘Can you explain why you have this?’

‘No,’ the boy said.

‘All right.’ The cop pulled out a pair of hand cuffs. ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of–’

The boy ran up the wall.

Ash blinked. One moment he had been standing still, the next he was sprinting up the concrete as though gravity didn’t apply to him. Soon he was clinging to invisible hand holds in the ceiling high above.

Someone screamed. The cop drew his gun. Tognetti vanished back into the green room.

‘Come down from there!’ the cop ordered.

The boy ignored him. He moved across the ceiling like a monkey swinging from branch to branch, leaving the cop struggling to keep up as he pushed through the crowd below.

‘I don’t think I need that distraction any more, Benjamin,’ she said.

There was no reply.

‘Benjamin?’

* * *

Benjamin was no kind of athlete. He had a weak, skinny frame and hair that always seemed to be in his eyes. He usually left the physical stuff to Ash. But he could sprint for short bursts if he had to, and tonight, the adrenaline pumping through his body made it easy. A chilling wind blustered in his ears as he dashed through the car park and ducked down behind the car closest to the conservatorium.

Puffing, he listened for a moment. No approaching footsteps. When he peeped over the bonnet, he saw that the police had set up a makeshift checkpoint in front of the main door. They were taking driver’s licenses, and shining torches in faces to check that they matched the photographs. The civilians babbled amongst themselves, as though they’d seen something unbelievable.

Something like a table appearing out of nowhere, Benjamin thought.

The car was a four-wheel drive, grey, with plenty of room underneath. He sniffed – no sign that the engine was leaking oil, or petrol, or anything else flammable. Perfect.

No time to waste. Ash was counting on him. Benjamin unzipped his backpack and took out a plastic tube.

The sale of fireworks was restricted. The buyer needed to have a special license except at certain times of year, and even then, they needed to be at least eighteen years old. But sparklers, the kind used in birthday cakes, were available all year round from Benjamin’s local supermarket. He kept a stockpile for occasions such as this.

He cracked open the tube and pulled out a bundle of about eight hundred sparklers, fixed together with duct tape. It took him a few tries to grab one near the centre of the bunch – his fingers were clumsy in the cold. Once he had a firm grip on it, he pulled it out about half way. It would be his fuse.

The cheap plastic cigarette lighter clicked uselessly in his hand. It wouldn’t ignite.

‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘Come on!’

On the fifth try, the flame exploded into life. He held the extended sparkler above it until the magnesium caught, spraying light into the air and stinging his hand.

He rolled the bundle of sparklers under the four-wheel drive. It stopped under the drive shaft, crackling. Anyone who looked over at the car would see it. And when the rest of the bundle caught, Benjamin was pretty sure they would all be looking.

Nothing more he could do. He zipped up his bag and sprinted away into the darkness.

* * *

‘Ash.’ Benjamin sounded puffed. ‘Your distraction will be live in about about forty-five seconds.’

Ash had the phone to his ear, but Benjamin’s voice didn’t register. She was staring up in amazement, along with everyone else, as the pale boy clambered across the ceiling toward the rear loading dock. When he was almost there, he let go, and fell what looked like it should have been a lethal distance before landing in a crouch on the cement floor.

He didn’t give the cop time to catch up with him. Immediately he was running again, faster than Ash had ever seen anyone move, weaving through the crowd toward the back door.

‘Ash! Are you there?’

Ash blinked. ‘Uh, yeah. What did you say?’

‘I said you’ve got forty-five seconds before your distraction. But now it’s more like thirty.’

Ash whirled around and started running toward the front door. A few people stared at her as she pushed past – ‘Hey, I loved your piece,’ someone said – but most were looking toward the other end of the corridor, where the boy had disappeared.

When she emerged through the front doors, she found herself trapped in a police cordon with several other audience members. Cops were checking IDs all around her. Ash had none. She had bluffed her way in. She didn’t like her chances of bluffing her way out.

‘Excuse me, Miss,’ a burly police officer said. ‘I’ll need to see your driver’s license.’

‘Hey!’ An elderly man rapped his walking stick on the ground behind Ash. ‘I was here first!’

Ash stepped aside. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘After you.’

The old man looked disappointed, as though he had been looking forward to an argument. He held his senior’s card out with a trembling hand–

And in the nearby parking lot, a car exploded.

Ash ducked as a flash lit up the air and a blast of heat washed over her. The cops all whirled around to face the grey four-wheel drive, which had disappeared in a sudden glaring haze.

Ash didn’t stop to wonder how Benjamin had managed to blow up a car on such short notice. Instead, she slipped behind the back of the burly policeman while he was distracted, and sprinted across the courtyard to the cover of the nearby trees.

Her bicycle was chained to a sign post. As she fiddled with the combination lock, she glanced back the way she came. The flames had died away, and somehow the car was unharmed. Benjamin must have rigged up some kind of flash grenade beneath it.

But she didn’t have time to wonder how. A police officer, female, athletic, was sprinting toward her. Another cop wasn’t far behind.

Ash ripped the combination lock open, jumped onto the bike and started pedaling across the stony dirt. She could hear the policewoman’s frenzied breaths. Her thudding footsteps grew louder as she caught up.

‘Hold it right there!’ the cop roared.

Ash didn’t. She pumped her legs as fast as she could. The spokes rattled underneath her. The slight uphill slope made it hard to accelerate.

She was riding parallel to a storm water drain. It was currently dry – if she twisted the handle bars and rode into it, she would probably have a clear path all the way to the lake. No more dodging trees and parked cars.

But first she would have to survive the landing. And the drain was deep, with steep concrete walls.

She could hear the cop catching up to her. I don’t have a choice, she thought.

She took a deep breath, and–

Something slammed sideways into her. She gasped and shielded her face as she was thrown off her bicycle – but somehow she didn’t hit the ground.

It took her a moment to realise that she’d been hit by a person and not a train. Someone had crash-tackled her, caught her and was now carrying her in unbelievably strong arms toward the storm water drain.

She didn’t have time to look at his face before he jumped.

Ash screamed as she found herself suddenly in flight, sailing all the way over the drain. Her stomach churned in her belly and her heart thudded in her ears.

Her rescuer crashed into the dirt on the other side and, before she had time to find her balance, dropped her.

She thumped onto the ground and looked dizzily up at him.

‘You?’ she said.

‘Can you run?’ the pale boy asked.

Ash scrambled to her feet. On the other side of the drain, the cop was shouting rapid instructions into her radio. Sirens wailed on the breeze.

‘I think so,’ Ash said.

‘Then run,’ the boy said, and he sprinted into the trees at an incredible pace.

Ash hesitated for a moment. He was crazy, or a liar, or at least dangerous. But he had saved her, and she wanted to know why.

She ran after him.

Chapter Five

The Deal

‘So who are you?’ Ash demanded.

The boy said nothing.

They were a few kilometres away from the conservatorium. Ash had no idea where the boy was going, but wherever it was, he was taking a roundabout route to get there.

She guessed he was trying to mislead anyone who might be following them. But Ash was a professional thief, and her finely honed intuition told her they’d gotten away cleanly. The only cars which passed them were traveling the opposite way. The towering oaks which lined the street were silent. The streetlamps left few shadows for anyone to hide in.

‘You won’t even tell me your name?’ Ash said.

‘Anything I say to you could change the course of history,’ the boy said. ‘It’s safest if we don’t talk.’

Ash wasn’t sure if she believed him, but she had to act as though she did. ‘You dropped a table into the middle of a concert. You caused a panic and started a manhunt. You’ve already changed the course of history.’

‘I can’t do anything about that. But information about the future could wreak havoc on the past.’

‘Anything you say to me stays a secret,’ Ash said. ‘I can’t even tell anyone that I was at the conservatorium. I was there illegally.’

The boy glanced over sharply. ‘Why?’

‘Why should I tell you? You’re not giving me much in return.’

‘I saved you from the police.’

‘If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have needed saving.’

They walked in silence for a moment.

‘My name is Six,’ the boy said.

‘Uh-huh. People in the future have numbers instead of names?’

‘No. Just me. All Deck agents use numbers to hide their true identities, but I have no real name to conceal.’

‘Right. Your parents never got around to naming you?’

‘I was grown in a jar,’ Six said. ‘I have no parents.’

Ash rubbed her temples. She was getting nowhere. ‘You said something about radioactive materials.’

‘I’m looking for a stockpile of ununoctium.’

‘That’s clearly a made-up word.’

‘It’s not. It’s a superheavy element which doesn’t occur in nature. A small group of scientists has managed to stabilise it.’

‘Why do you need it?’

‘I don’t need it.’

Ash clenched her teeth. ‘Listen,’ she began. ‘I can’t help you, if–’

‘Sorry.’ Six turned to face her. She noticed that his pupils were unnaturally large, as though he had taken some kind of drug. ‘The time machine runs on ununoctium. A woman named Soren Byre is going to use it to assassinate some people in the past. But if I can find and destroy the last stockpile of it, she’ll never be able to build the machine. Problem solved.’

He started walking again. Ash ran to catch up.

‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘If she never builds the machine, how will you get back here to destroy the unobtanium?’

‘Ununoctium,’ Six corrected. ‘And I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. But I’m stuck in the past, and I can’t think of a better plan.’

‘It’s not the past,’ Ash said. ‘It’s the present.’

‘That’s semantics.’

‘No it isn’t. The past has already happened. It’s immutable. But since you’re here–’

‘Don’t look around,’ Six said, ‘but someone’s following us.’

‘What?’ Ash fought the instinct to look back. ‘How do you know?’

‘I can hear footsteps. She’s about three blocks behind.’

It seemed impossible for him to hear footfalls at that distance, but Ash didn’t object. ‘She?’

‘If it’s a man, he doesn’t weigh very much. Turn here.’

Ash turned in to an alley between two tall buildings, her heart pounding. Six pressed his back against the wall.

‘Keep walking,’ he whispered.

Ash didn’t. ‘We should run away.’

‘One woman, on foot. Therefore, not police. Therefore, we need to know who she is. Go!’

Ash walked into the alley, keeping her footsteps loud and crunchy. She still couldn’t hear anyone approaching. Perhaps Six – if that was actually his name – was just trying to get rid of her. But there were easier ways to do that, especially since he was able to run much faster than she could.

A puddle splashed beneath her shoe, and soaked through it almost immediately. She shivered in the cold.

Perhaps it was just a random pedestrian. It wasn’t inconceivable that someone else might be walking at the same speed in the same direction. She should have asked Six how long this person had been supposedly following them. Perhaps she should go back, on the off-chance that he was about to hurt an innocent person.

‘Hey!’

Ash spun around. Six had grabbed a teenage boy by the throat, lifted him up and pressed him against the wall.

‘Who are you working for?’ he demanded.

The boy gurgled, a vein bulging on his forehead.

‘Six!’ Ash yelled, sprinting back up the alley toward him.

‘I’m not going to ask twice,’ Six growled.

‘Six! Put him down!’ Ash tried to pull Six away, but he felt like a stone statue. ‘He’s with me!’

‘With–’ Six dropped the boy, who slumped to the ground, wheezing. ‘Who is he?’

Ash crouched down next to her friend. ‘Benjamin,’ she said, ‘meet Six.’

* * *

‘You said you were alone,’ Six said.

‘I never said that,’ Ash said. She clenched Benjamin’s shoulder. ‘You okay?’

He nodded, still coughing.

‘You said you couldn’t tell anyone you were at the conservatorium,’ Six insisted.

‘Benjamin was there too,’ Ash said. ‘He started the fire to distract the cops.’ She hauled Benjamin to his feet. ‘Good work, by the way.’

‘You too,’ Benjamin panted.

‘Why were you following us?’ Six demanded.

‘To protect Ash.’ Benjamin dusted himself down.

Ash’s phone was still in her pocket, and she had hoped that Benjamin was listening. But she hadn’t realised he would be using the GPS to follow her.

Six looked Benjamin up and down. ‘You’re no protection for anyone,’ he said. ‘I could flick your arm and your ulna would snap.’

Ash doubted that this was an exaggeration. But Benjamin was the smartest person she had ever met. If she was in danger, he would think of a way to keep her safe.

Benjamin was clever enough to say nothing.

Six looked at Ash. ‘Why were you at the conservatorium?’

‘I was stealing a violin.’

‘Why?’

‘It was worth $11 million.’

His face was impassive. ‘Is that a lot?’

Ash raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t have money in the future?’

‘We have ChaoCredits.’

‘Right. Well, yes – eleven million is a lot. But you screwed up our plan.’

Six’s pale eyes scanned the darkness around them. ‘Why did you need the money?’

What kind of dumb question is that? Ash wondered.

‘For food,’ she said. ‘Shelter. Medicine.’

‘You’re sick? Malnourished?’

‘Not right now. But I might be in the future.’

Six’s incisive gaze made her feel uncomfortable.

‘The violin is stolen,’ Benjamin said.

‘You hoped to return it to the rightful owner?’ Six asked.

‘The theft took place a hundred years ago. The owner, and his descendants, are long dead.’

Six was silent for a moment. His fingers twitched at his side as though he were operating a calculator.

‘This was a mistake,’ he said finally. Then he turned and walked away into the alley.

Ash and Benjamin looked at each other.

‘Does he expect us to follow him?’ Ash asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ Benjamin replied. ‘I think he’s just leaving us here. Thank goodness.’

Six was already nothing more than a distant silhouette.

‘Wait!’ Ash shouted.

‘What are you doing?’ Benjamin hissed.

Ash suspected Six could still hear them, so she couldn’t say what she was thinking. ‘Trust me,’ she said. Then she ran after him.

Her shoes slapped the asphalt. This time she sidestepped around the puddle. She found Six standing at the far end of the alley, watching her as suspiciously as a cat.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘You need us,’ Ash said. ‘You can’t go around talking about ChaoCredits and being grown in a jar. People will take notice, and you’ll change the course of history in unpredictable ways.’

Abruptly she realised she believed what she was saying. Six really was from another time.

‘I’ve spent my whole life blending in,’ Six said. Ash thought she detected an echo of a wound in his voice.

‘Amongst a different kind of people.’ Ash stuck her hands in her pockets. ‘Here in "the past", you’ll need help. Especially when it’s time to steal the ununoctium.’

Six said nothing.

‘We’re professional thieves,’ Ash said. ‘We can find out where it is – and get it out – with much more subtlety than you can.’

‘Why?’ Six asked. ‘Why do you want to help me?’

Because I bet the ununoctium is worth more than $11 million, Ash thought.

‘Because you’re right,’ she said. ‘Me and Benjamin, we’ve done some bad things. But if we can help you destroy the ununoctium, maybe we can make the future a little better for once.’

Six held out his hand.

Ash hesitated.

‘You do shake hands in the past?’ Six asked.

‘We do,’ Ash said, and reached out. His grip was hard and cold.

‘We have a deal,’ Six said.

My future, Ash thought, is about to get a whole lot better.

Chapter Six

Tracking

Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

‘Pick up, damn you,’ Kyntak muttered. ‘Are you trying to stress me out?’

The phone kept chirping in his ear. Eventually Six’s voice came on the line:

‘You’ve called Vornan’s AC installation and consultancy,’ he said. ‘All our operators are currently busy, but we will return your call shortly. You’re welcome to leave more details after the tone.’

The phone beeped.

‘You should have been back hours ago,’ Kyntak said. ‘If you don’t call me before eight PM, I’m sending a team to look for you.’

He hung up, and resumed pacing around his office in tight little circles. Six must have run into a complication. Perhaps ChaoSonic had gotten there first, with enough soldiers to capture him – or worse.

Kyntak woke up his computer and activated the tracking beacon in Six’s phone. It took a few seconds for the Deck’s satellites to pinpoint its location. The phone was inside the building to which he had sent Six. It wasn’t moving.

If Six was there, what was holding him up? And if he wasn’t there, why had he left his phone behind? And if he had been abducted by ChaoSonic troops, why had they left his phone in one piece?

Kyntak leaned back in his chair. Two likely possibilities. One: Six had been captured, but had secretly planted his phone with a clue to his current whereabouts. Two: ChaoSonic had left Six’s phone behind to see who would come after him.

Kyntak stood up and pulled on his coat. If it was a trap, ChaoSonic would have listened to his voice mail message. They would expect a team after eight PM. What they wouldn’t expect was him, alone, right now.

* * *

‘So you don’t know who they are, how many of them there are, whether you’ll have to fight them or sneak past, or even what they’ll be armed with?’

Kyntak nodded.

Jack beamed, showing slightly crooked teeth. ‘I have just the thing.’

‘I thought you might.’ Kyntak scanned the walls of Jack’s workshop, admiring the gadgetry. There were Tasers which looked like phones, phones which looked like glasses, climbing ropes as thin as blades of grass and parachutes concealed in wallet-sized packages.

Jack dug a floppy bundle of glistening rubber and tossed it to him. ‘Your second skin,’ he said. ‘Covered in tiny reflective panels, each of which hangs vertically so they don’t reflect the sky or the ground – only the surfaces around you. So long as you stay still, no-one will see you from further away than a few metres. The suit will also conceal your body heat from any infrared cameras.’

Kyntak stripped down to his underwear and started stretching the rubber over his limbs. ‘This is amazing,’ he said. ‘Does Six know you have this?’

‘He refuses to wear it, because it’s so flammable.’

Kyntak froze.

Jack laughed. ‘Just kidding. He hasn’t seen it yet – it’s a prototype. I’ll give it to him next time he’s on a mission and none of the other agents is using it.’

‘You had me going there for a second. Anything else you can give me?’

Jack tossed him a small tube. ‘If you need to open a door, just squirt this into the lock, wait fifteen seconds and turn the handle. Faster and easier than picking it. Don’t get any on your skin or your suit, though.’

Kyntak found a small pouch in the rubber skin, and deposited the tube inside. ‘Got it.’

‘Can you see through walls?’ Jack asked. ‘Or am I thinking of Superman?’

‘Who’s Superman?’

‘A religious figure from pre-takeover times, I think. I was joking.’

‘Oh. Well, I can’t see through walls.’

Jack tossed him a collapsible telescope. ‘Now you can. Press the lens against the wall and extend it to turn it on. The battery’s good for twenty minutes.’

‘How does it work? X-ray?’

‘I tried that, but my test-subjects kept getting eye-cancer. So this one uses magnetism.’

Kyntak hoped Jack was kidding again. ‘Thanks. Is that everything?’

Jack ran a hand through his curly hair. ‘That’s all I got,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

The Deck wouldn’t be much without Six, Kyntak thought. ‘For both our sakes,’ he replied.

* * *

Kyntak parked the sedan on the shoulder of a highway about two kliks from the building. He figured that was safe. Other cars rumbled past from time to time, headed for various destinations at various speeds, providing his vehicle with a certain amount of camouflage.

He stepped out of the car and pulled off his coat, revealing the reflective skin. Then he scrambled down the concrete embankment toward the endless fields of rubble and debris below.

When he reached the flat surface, he started running. Kyntak could sprint at almost 40 kliks per hour, but here the broken bricks and crooked shards of plastic slowed him down. He kept his head low, partly to reduce his visibility from the road, partly to sweep the ground for hazards as he ran.

After about two minutes he skidded to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dust. The dust drifted past a dark metal cube, illuminating a spiderweb of laser tripwires. Perhaps the cube was rigged to explode if the beams were breached. Maybe it simply sounded an alarm.

Six would have spotted this, he thought. Therefore it’s new. Set up to catch whoever came after him.

The laser beams faded from view as the ashes settled, but Kyntak had already memorised their positions. He hopscotched from one safe patch to the next until he was clear of the trap. Then he kept running through the broken rocks.

His gaze stayed low. There could be inner rings of security.

The building appeared up ahead, a square silhouette in the swirling fog. Six’s phone was inside. Probably some ChaoSonic soldiers, too. Possibly – hopefully – Six himself.

Kyntak stopped moving. He crouched in the fog for a few minutes, just watching.

No-one left the building. No-one came in, either.

He crept closer, willing himself to believe that the rubber skin made him invisible. The silence was overpowering. Under different circumstances, Kyntak would have bet a hundred credits that the building was empty.

He circled it until he reached the back door and flattened himself against it, listening. No sound.

Stretching out Jack’s telescope, he pressed the lens against the door. The eyepiece gave him a grainy, monochromatic view of the empty corridor behind it.

Kyntak tried the handle. Locked. He squirted some of Jack’s lock-picking liquid into the lock, and listened for fifteen seconds as the acidic gel ate the tumblers. They crackled as he turned the handle and pulled.

The corridor wasn’t much different in colour than it had been in black and white. Dirty, but not disused. Kyntak could see patterns in the grime beneath his feet – some parts had been more recently walked on that others. He followed the most recent trail, as quickly as he dared.

It led through the dirty shadows to another door, bolted shut from the outside.

Who locks a room from the outside, Kyntak thought, within a locked, deserted building?

Someone who’s keeping a prisoner.

He extended the telescope and pressed it against the door–

And froze.

What the hell was that?

Chapter Seven

The Plan

The building wasn’t what Six had expected. For one thing, there was an incredible amount of space around it – two, perhaps even three metres. In Six’s time, adjacent buildings were never further apart than the width of a motorcycle.

The second thing to surprise him was the impracticality of it. The windows on the street-side wall looked too clear to be bulletproof. The front door was wooden, and even if it concealed steel panels, it had been hung crookedly in the frame, leaving gaps through which gaseous neurotoxins could easily be pumped. The dented sedan rested on the driveway rather than behind the bars of the car-port, where it could be easily sabotaged.

What kind of operational headquarters was this?

‘Welcome to my humble home,’ Ash said, as she walked up the front path toward the door.

‘You live here?’

She shot him a defensive look. ‘You got a problem with that?’

‘Me? No,’ Six said. ‘But you should.’

‘The best security isn’t obvious to casual observers,’ Benjamin said. He sounded like he was trying to protect the girl’s feelings.

‘Wrong,’ Six said. ‘The best security is obvious, so as to deter intruders. And by the way, I’m no casual observer.’

Ash twisted the key in the lock. ‘Take it from a thief,’ she said. ‘Ostentatious security draws us in. Gets us wondering what might be inside. Shut your mouth for a minute, would you?’

She pushed the door open. ‘Hi Dad!’

Dad? Six thought.

There was no response from inside the house. Ash beckoned. Benjamin followed her into the house, with Six trailing reluctantly behind.

He found himself in a dusty living area. A plastic-rimmed clock ticked on the wall. Some kind of qualification had been framed and placed upon a scratched wooden side-table. The cream carpet was thin and grey in certain pathways, indicating to Six that people usually passed through this room without sitting down.

Today, however, a middle-aged man with faded corduroy trousers and a vaguely bohemian air sat cross-legged on the couch.

‘Hi Dad,’ Ash said again.

The man’s hazel eyes swivelled behind thick glasses. ‘Oh. Hi.’ He cleared his throat, as though he hadn’t spoken in a while. ‘Hi Ash.’

Benjamin raised his hand. ‘Hey Mr Arthur.’

‘Benjamin.’ The man turned to look at Six. ‘Hello there.’

‘Dad, this is Quentin,’ Ash said. ‘He goes to school with Benjamin. I’m helping them with their group project.’

Six frowned. Quentin?

‘Nice to meet you, Quentin,’ Arthur said. Something caught his eye on the street, and he turned to face the window.

Six looked back at Ash, who was already moving deeper into the house. Apparently, the conversation was over.

Ashley’s bedroom was spare compared to the rest of the house. She had a bed, and a desktop PC which looked like it had been custom-built from outdated components. Besides a few books on an unpainted shelf, she seemed to have no other possessions.

Six entered the room, and shut the door behind him. ‘What’s wrong with your father?’

Ash’s voice was icy. ‘Nothing’s wrong with my father.’

Six let it go. Antagonising his hosts further would serve no purpose.

‘So I’ve got good news and bad news,’ Benjamin said.

‘Bad first,’ Ash prompted.

‘Uh... it doesn’t really work that way around.’

‘Fine. Good first.’

‘I’ve found the ununoctium.’

Six turned his head toward Benjamin fast enough to give whiplash to a human. ‘Where?’

‘Yeah, that’s the bad news,’ Benjamin said. ‘It’s at the top of Vepa Tower.’

Ash swore.

‘What’s that?’ Six asked.

‘A trap, is what it is,’ Ash said. ‘Seventy floors high. Only one entrance, protected by a military checkpoint. The scientists live on-site, so there are hardly any comings or goings. Anybody who tries to get in will be scrutinised for hours. And the computer systems are impenetrable, so we can’t authorise ourselves to get in.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’

‘We cased it once before. The world’s biggest uncut pink diamond was shipped there for verification before it was purchased by the museum of natural history.’

‘And you couldn’t get in?’

‘We didn’t try. It’s impossible.’ Ash turned back to Benjamin. ‘How do you know it’s up there?’

‘Stabilising ununoctium is really, really complicated and difficult.’ Benjamin sat down on Ash’s bed. ‘A journalist asked the defense minister what precautions had been taken to prevent an explosion. The minister gave the usual speech – a very safe procedure, several layers of security, blah, blah, blah – and then said the tests were being done on the top floor of Vepa, so as even if there was an explosion, the civilian population had nothing to worry about. It’s a long way away from the nearest town, and it’s too high up to risk causing an earthquake.’

‘How do I get there?’ Six asked.

Benjamin stared at him. ‘Did you hear anything I just said? It’s impossible to get in.’

‘For you, maybe. Do you have a map?’

‘You’re not going without us,’ Ash said.

Six raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you going to stop me?’

‘The soldiers will.’

‘Unlikely.’ Six turned to leave. He could find a map elsewhere.

‘Wait.’

Six looked back. Ash’s brow was furrowed in furious thought. Her gaze was on Six, but he didn’t feel like she was seeing him.

Why is she so desperate to come with me? he wondered.

‘Benjamin,’ Ash said. ‘Did you ever finish that microwave emitter?’

Benjamin shook his head. ‘I never got it working. The amount of heat required to melt a padlock–’

‘Forget the heat. Can it transmit microwaves over, say, four hundred metres?’

‘Sure. Weak ones.’

‘That’s all we need.’ Ash pulled a screwdriver out of her handbag, opened the cupboard door and started unwinding the bolts which attached the coat hook to the wall.

‘What are you thinking?’ Benjamin asked.

‘I’m thinking we’ll need rope.’

* * *

‘You’re sure this won’t give us cancer, or something?’ Ash asked.

‘What?’

She raised her voice to be heard over the drumming of the wheels. She’d borrowed her Dad’s car, which wasn’t well insulated for sound. ‘You’re sure this won’t give us cancer?’

Benjamin chuckled nervously on the back seat as he adjusted the settings on the tubular machine. ‘On the electromagnetic radiation spectrum,’ he said, ‘microwave radiation is about as safe as visible light.’

‘So why are there all those warning labels on the back of my microwave oven?’

‘Because you’re likely to get electrocuted if you fiddle around back there. And I should know – I made this out of bits of an old microwave. But there’s no need for you to worry about cancer or electric shock. We’re far more likely to get blown up.’

The steering wheel shuddered in Ash’s hands. She knew he was only half kidding. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

The boy from the future sat in the passenger seat, watching the desert crawl past behind the window. ‘This was your idea,’ he said.

‘Using the emitter? Yes,’ Ash said. ‘Doing it tonight? No. That was your idea.’

‘The longer we wait, the more the past is influenced by my presence,’ Six said. ‘And we don’t know how long the ununoctium will be in Vepa Tower. Waiting could have catastrophic consequences.’

‘I just like to be careful,’ Ash said. ‘That’s all. I triple-check things.’

Benjamin said, ‘Does that mean you’ll be asking twice more?’

‘Pedant.’

Six leaned forward, and pointed. ‘There. The tower.’

Ash peered into the blackness between the stars. ‘You sure?’

He nodded.

Ash turned off the headlights. It was unlikely that anyone would be looking in their direction with a pair of binoculars, but she didn’t want to take the risk.

‘Benjamin,’ she said. ‘How close do you need to be?’

Benjamin consulted his GPS. ‘Another three hundred metres would do it.’

After a few seconds, Ash lifted her foot off the accelerator and let the car roll to a gradual stop so the brake lights didn’t flash.

Benjamin opened the door, climbed out, and pulled the microwave emitter after him by its rubber handles. He leaned back in. ‘Keep the radio channels open.’

‘Got it.’

‘Good luck. Both of you.’

‘You too,’ Ash said. She couldn’t meet his eye. If she saw that he was scared, she would get scared too.

Six said nothing.

Benjamin closed the door. Ash drove away, leaving him behind in the blackness.

* * *

Ash rubbed her palms together, trying to ward off the cold. Her breath clouded in front of her face. Her toes were numb.

She and Six were crouched in the shadows about two hundred metres from the tower. They’d left the car in a shallow ditch behind a low dune. Six was motionless, apparently impervious to the chilling breeze. A coil of nylon climbing rope was draped over his shoulder.

Up ahead, soldiers moved back and forth from tent to tent, spotlit under the halogen lamps. Equipment jingled on their belts. Heavy boots thudded the dirt.

There were twice as many soldiers as there had been a minute ago. It was changeover time. Half of them had just finished an eight hour shift. The other half were about to begin their watch.

Behind them, a concrete bunker lay in the shadows. The lights in the windows were out. The scientists were probably asleep. Behind that, Vepa Tower loomed against the night sky, seventy storeys high. A solitary red light blinked on top, warding off passing aircraft.

‘If you succeed in changing the future,’ Ash whispered, ‘you’ll disappear. Right?’

‘Probably.’

‘So you and I will never have met.’

Six nodded. He didn’t seem perturbed by this.

Ash planned to steal the ununoctium, rather than letting Six destroy it. That way, the future would still be changed, and Six would disappear, leaving Ash with several million dollars worth of rare elements to sell.

But if she and Six had never met, then she wouldn’t be here to steal the ununoctium. So what would happen then?

Maybe I’ll find myself with an $11 million violin in my hands, she thought. It was Six’s appearance which screwed that up.

‘We wouldn’t be able to see them,’ Six said. ‘In my time.’

Ash looked over. ‘Hmm?’

Six pointed at the soldiers. ‘We’d have to be much closer. Where I come from – when I come from – there’s so much pollution in the air that no-one can see more than a few metres ahead of them.’

Ash frowned. ‘Can’t the government do something about that?’

‘No government. Just ChaoSonic – the corporation which owns all other corporations.’

‘In this country? Or in the whole world?’

‘The rest of the world is underwater. We would be too, if it weren’t for the Seawall.’ Six inhaled deeply. A faint smile flitted across his thin lips. ‘I didn’t plan to come here. But I’m glad of the chance to see, and breathe.’

Ash tried to picture a world of smog and walls and lawlessness. She couldn’t.

‘What made the world the way it is?’ she asked. ‘A plague? A meteor? Nuclear war?’

‘Zombies?’ the radio crackled. Ash had forgotten that Benjamin was listening in.

Six shook his head. ‘There was no sudden catastrophe. No apocalypse. Just greed, eating civilisation one small bite at a time.’

Ash shivered, not just from the cold. ‘Are you almost ready?’ she asked Benjamin.

‘I’ve switched it on,’ he said. ‘Now we just have to wait.’

They couldn’t get through the checkpoint while it was manned, so they needed to make the soldiers evacuate. But because the computer systems were so secure, they couldn’t stage a fake alarm.

So they would have to create a real one.

From his position on the other side of the base, Benjamin was pointing the microwave emitter at the top floor of the tower. In theory, the emitter should agitate the electrons in the ununoctium and trip the warning sensors, without disturbing the nucleus and creating an explosion.

Benjamin’s theories usually worked in practice. Usually. Just the same, Ash’s teeth were pressed together as she waited for the alarm.

Ash had expected Six to ask if turning up the power would blow up the ununoctium, completing his objective. But he hadn’t – in fact, he had expressed concern for the safety of the soldiers and scientists, and had insisted on examining the microwave emitter. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t a murderer.

Lucky for me, Ash thought. Because if I steal the ununoctium, and he doesn’t disappear–

An alarm shrieked from the checkpoint. Even at this distance, Ash had to clamp her palms over her ears. Whirling red lights appeared on the tip of each fence post.

The soldiers were well-trained. They hesitated only a fraction of a second before springing into action. Some worked on opening the razor-wire gates, while others disappeared into the bunker to help the scientists evacuate. By the time the civilians stumbled out in flannelette pyjamas and bath robes, the gates were open. Everyone fled the checkpoint across well-worn paths in the dust.

The radio crackled. ‘Are they leaving?’

‘Like frightened rabbits,’ Ash said. ‘Worst security procedure ever.’

‘In fairness, every sensor is telling them that the tower is about to explode. Is Six ready?’

‘He’s–’

Ash turned around. Six was gone.

She looked back at the tower. Six was sprinting toward the razor wire fence, and had already crossed an impossible distance. He must have started running as soon as she took her eyes off him.

He vaulted over the fence rather than diverting toward the open gate. When he landed inside the compound, he pulled the coat hook off his belt and swung it on the climbing rope, around and around, so fast that it looked like the propeller in a jet engine.

Then he let go.

The hook rocketed upwards with much more velocity than Ash had expected. It sailed past the fifth-floor window for which she had advised him to aim, and kept shooting up into the darkness until it was out of sight. The rope kept unspooling from the coil over his shoulder.

After a moment, the rope stopped unravelling. Six gave it two brisk tugs and then started climbing, hand over hand. After only a few seconds, he was so high that Ash couldn’t see him any more.

‘Six is in,’ Ash said.

‘Great,’ Benjamin replied. ‘I may lose radio contact with you when you get inside, but you can phone me if you need to. In ten minutes I’ll be outside the front gate with the car. In forty-five minutes, the scientists will return to shut off the alarm. Make sure you’re out before then.’

‘Got it.’

Ash dashed across the dust toward the open gate, hoping Six had done his part. Otherwise, she would find herself trapped on the lower levels while he was up the top, looking for–

Ash froze. She could see a shadow, clambering up the smooth wall of the tower like a gecko. Could that possibly be a person? The outfit was a dull grey, so it was hard to get a good look as he or she scrambled up the concrete surface.

We’re not alone, Ash thought.

‘Benjamin,’ she hissed. ‘Someone else is here.’

‘Who?’

‘No idea. They’re climbing up the wall after Six. They must be looking for the ununoctium.’

Benjamin cursed. ‘We should leave. We’re not prepared for this.’

‘We can’t leave Six behind.’

‘He’s superhuman. He can take care of himself.’

‘Not when he doesn’t know he’s in danger,’ Ash said. ‘I have to go in.’

‘Ash–’

The shadow disappeared into the darkness up above. Ash ran through the gate, and approached the door to Vepa Tower.

Chapter Eight

The Stranger

Six shook the last of the broken glass from his clothes and listened. The alarm wailed. The breeze moaned outside the broken window. There was no other sound. This floor was empty.

The inside of Vepa Tower was more cramped than he had expected, with a low ceiling of iron girders, and dirty walls made of reinforced concrete. The window through which he’d entered appeared to be the only one on this level. The floor was strewn with kipple.

It seemed wasteful to have a whole tower of unused floors. Perhaps it had been built with other occupants in mind, but once the top level’s purpose had been determined, no-one wanted an office in a tower which might explode. Or perhaps there was some other reason.

Six found the fire door. The hinges groaned as he pushed it open and found himself in a pitch black stairwell. He couldn’t see the steps, but he could hear them with echolocation – the screeching alarm echoed through the darkness, outlining each concrete slab, each dented hand rail.

He trotted down through the darkness until he reached the bottom floor. The last door was locked with a bulky steel bolt, but it was designed to stop intruders from getting in, while still allowing evacuees to escape. It would be a matter of seconds to drag it aside and pull the door open. The girl should be waiting on the other side.

He hesitated. Why should he let her in?

He doubted that he needed her help to find the ununoctium. And he certainly didn’t need her to destroy it. Why was she so determined to join him? She had said she felt guilty about the thefts, and Six knew better than most people that guilt was a strong motivator. But he sensed that something else was afoot here.

Unfortunately, he had no choice but to let her in. If he didn’t, she would simply wait outside the door until he came out with the ununoctium – assuming he didn’t accidentally blow it up, killing them both. He had to stick to the plan. Let her in, find the element, get it out of the building, take it to the lifeless centre of the nearby desert, and leave it to destabilise itself.

He pulled back the bolt and opened the door.

‘What kept you?’ the girl asked.

Six ignored the question. ‘You’ll need a flashlight.’

‘Someone else is here.’

‘What? Who?’

‘Don’t know. Not one of the soldiers. He or she climbed up the wall of the tower, somehow. I think they’re after the ununoctium.’

Sounds like someone with Deck training, Six thought. Perhaps Soren Byre sent herself back in time after me. But why? To stop me from getting to the ununoctium? How does she plan to get back to the future afterwards?

‘We need to move quickly,’ he said, and started running up the stairs. A flashlight clicked on behind him, and he heard the girl’s footsteps behind him. He expected her to fall behind fairly quickly, but she didn’t.

‘Flashlight,’ she said as she ran. ‘It’s all American English in the future, huh?’

‘Amerwhat?’

‘Never mind.’

By the time they reached the top floor, Six’s heart – grown from a fusion of horse and falcon DNA – was pumping at an accelerated rate. Behind him, it sounded like the girl was struggling to breathe.

Six put his hand on the fire door. ‘You should wait here.’

The girl shook her head.

‘If the intruder is who I think it is,’ Six whispered, ‘she won’t hesitate to kill you.’

‘I’m going in,’ the girl panted.

There was no time to argue further. Six nodded and pushed the door open.

The room was unlike the rest of the tower. The walls and floor were panelled in a sleek white material. Sterilised power cables hung from the ceiling, secured by safety chains, ready to be attached to equipment. In the centre of the room, panes of reinforced glass formed a cube around a steel box.

There it is, Six thought.

A sound from behind him. He peered back into the darkness of the stairwell.

‘Get behind me,’ he told the girl.

* * *

Ash skipped deeper into the experimentation chamber, leaving the boy from the future to stare into the stairwell, his hands shrinking into fists, his stance settling into a kickboxer’s crouch.

The glass enclosure had a latch on the side. Probably magnetic. She could open it with the positively charged iron attachment in her pocketknife.

She crept closer, sneaking a glance back at the boy. He wasn’t watching her. Getting the box out would be easy. Getting it past him would be harder – she might have to knock him out with the ether-soaked cloth in her pocket.

She put one hand on the glass. Hesitated.

Six’s voice echoed through her mind. There was no sudden catastrophe. Just greed, eating civilisation one small bite at a time.

Had she created the grim world from which he came?

Ash gritted her teeth. The ununoctium was worth millions of dollars. She couldn’t not take it. She needed the money. Benjamin needed it. Her father needed it.

If she donated a hundred thousand dollars to Oxfam, surely that would offset any damage she did?

But still her palm stayed frozen against the enclosure. Whoever she sold the element to, they were unlikely to use it for good. It would probably end up in a bomb.

Cursing her conscience, she stepped away from the glass and turned to face the door. Whoever would coming, she and Six would stop them. Together.

A footstep reverberated through the darkness. A face emerged from the gloom in the doorway.

Six swung his fist toward the apparition–

And froze.

Ash’s eyes widened. The boy in the stairwell was Six. His hair was different, his clothes were different, but the face was identical. But how could there be two of him?

She looked from one Six to the other, baffled.

‘Kyntak?’ Six demanded.

‘Six,’ the other boy said. Even his voice sounded like Six’s. ‘We’re in trouble.’

‘What are you doing here in the past?’

‘I’m not in the past,’ Kyntak said. ‘Neither are you. We’re both inside the index of everything.’

* * *

Six’s mind was whirling. ‘I don’t understand.’

Kyntak spread his arms wide. ‘This is all a simulation of the world as it was in the early 21st Century.’

Six looked back at the girl. All the colour had drained from her face.

‘Six,’ she said. ‘Who is this?’

‘This is my brother, Kyntak,’ Six said. ‘He–’

Kyntak interrupted him. ‘She’s not real. She’s software. A recreation of a real historical figure, assembled based on photographs, phone conversations, emails...’

Six stared down at his hands. They looked real. They felt real.

‘Why would Soren Byre put me inside the index?’ he demanded.

‘Because she needed ununoctium,’ Kyntak said. ‘And the index knew where the last stockpile was – deep within the radioactive wastelands, on the top floor of Vepa Tower, forgotten by everyone for more than a century.’

‘But Byre already had the ununoctium,’ Six said.

‘I’m guessing she told you that,’ Kyntak said, ‘so you would try to destroy it when you thought that you were in the past. Now that you’ve found it in the index, she knows where it is in real life. You’ve led her right to it. And now she can build the machine for real.’

‘I’m not software,’ the girl whispered. ‘I’m a person.’

Six glanced back at her. She looked like she believed herself to be telling the truth. But so did Kyntak.

‘Why didn’t Byre just put herself in the index to find the ununoctium?’ Six said.

‘She was probably worried that you would find her body while her mind was in here. She’d be defenseless. By putting you into the index instead of herself, she achieved two goals – tracking down the ununoctium and incapacitating the person most likely to stop her.’

‘Six,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t listen to him. It’s a trick.’

Kyntak ignored her. ‘Six,’ he said. ‘When I found your body, Byre was nowhere to be found. By watching your progress, she must have already found out where the ununoctium is, and now she’s gone to get it. We have to stop her.’

‘But you came in after me,’ Six said. ‘Now we’re both stuck.’

‘No,’ Kyntak said. ‘There’s a pass phrase. When you say the words, you’re ejected from the index.’

‘What is it?’

‘Listen carefully, because I can only say it once. Ready?’

‘Ready.’

‘I’ve been searching high and low. Now it’s time for me to go.’

Kyntak flickered, and vanished.

Six stared at the empty air where his brother had been standing.

‘You think it’s true,’ the girl said. ‘You think that this isn’t the real world.’

Six nodded.

‘But... But everything is so...’

‘I don’t have time to discuss this with you,’ Six said. ‘But if it’s any consolation, one of my best friends is a robot. Just because you’re artificial doesn’t mean you’re not real.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been searching high and low. Now it’s time for me to go.’

The whole world went black.

* * *

Ash leaned back against the glass enclosure. She was alone. The boy from the future – or the boy from the present – and his twin brother had both disappeared before her eyes.

She knew that the soldiers would be coming back soon. But they weren’t real. She wasn’t real. What did it matter if she got caught?

I’m an app, she thought. I’m nothing.

She looked at the steel box. Inside was not ununoctium, but a digital representation of it. If she could get it out, she could still sell it. A fake buyer would purchase it with fake money. And then probably use it to kill fake people, like her.

She took her hand away from the glass. Even knowing that there would be no real-world consequences, she couldn’t take the box. It wasn’t right.

A humming noise brought her to her senses, and she realised that her phone had been vibrating in her pocket for some time. She looked at the screen. Benjamin.

What will I tell him? she wondered.

She answered the phone. ‘Hi.’

‘Ash, where are you? The soldiers will be back in ten minutes!’

‘Benjamin,’ Ash said. ‘If something really bad happened, and there was nothing you could do about it, would you want to know?’

He laughed nervously. ‘No. We’ve had this conversation before.’

Ash said nothing.

‘Why?’ Benjamin said. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Ash said. ‘It was just a hypothetical – everything’s fine. I’m coming out. I’ll see you soon.’

Chapter Nine

Awake

Six’s eyes snapped open. He let out a long, desperate gasp. His heart thumped painfully against his lungs as the cold air washed over him. The world inside the index hadn’t felt fake, but now that he was in reality, he could feel the difference. The dim light of the fallout shelter was so vivid. The acrid smell of the concrete left him gagging.

He lifted his arms. The chains were gone. Kyntak must have freed him before going under–

Kyntak. Six looked around, but could see no sign of his brother.

He rolled off the table, and hissed as a set of needles was yanked out of his scalp, and presumably his brain. Depending on the size of the holes they had left behind, blood and airborne parasites could be leaking into his cranium. Without prompt medical attention, he might die.

But if Soren Byre activated her time machine, the resulting explosion could kill thousands of people. There was no time to see a doctor.

Six staggered to his feet, alarmed by the shaking of his limbs. How long had he been in the index, without food or water?

‘Kyntak,’ he rasped.

There was no response.

Six clamped his mouth shut. What if Soren Byre was still here? What if she had come back? She had learned all she needed to from Six. She had nothing to lose by killing him.

He staggered across the dusty concrete toward the door. Opened it. The only sound was the whirring of the servers, as the duplicate Ashley Arthur and her friend and her father and billions of others ran around inside.

Did they cease to exist when I left? he wondered. Or is she still in there, knowing that she’s fake?

Six had known for most of his life that he was artificial. It wasn’t so bad. But knowing that everyone else was, too – it would be enough to drive someone insane.

He stepped into the corridor, turned right–

And then heard a noise to his left.

He whirled around, fists raised.

The corridor was empty, but there was a door. A room adjacent to the one from which he had emerged.

He crept closer. Tried the handle. Unlocked.

He pushed the door open and jumped back, in case Soren Byre was inside, waiting to attack.

She wasn’t. Instead, Kyntak lay face down on the floor in a puddle of blood.

‘Kyntak!’ Six ran over and crouched beside his brother. ‘Can you hear me?’

Kyntak groaned.

Six turned him over, gently. Kyntak’s face was streaked with blood, but the only wounds seemed to be a pair of tiny holes on the top of his head.

‘No-one to put me in,’ Kyntak mumbled. ‘Had to do it myself.’ He smiled, revealing pink teeth. ‘Think I did it wrong?’

‘Damn it,’ Six muttered. He tore some of the rubbery fabric out of Kyntak’s outfit and used it to plug the holes. ‘You need a doctor.’

Kyntak let out a gurgling chuckle. ‘We both need doctors. But, no time. Right?’

Six nodded reluctantly.

‘Always no time,’ Kyntak groaned. ‘Let’s go.’

* * *

Neither of them could run, but they could jog through the debris-strewn plains. Six’s head pounded with every shuffling footstep. He could only imagine how Kyntak felt.

‘Once Byre has the ununoctium,’ Six panted, ‘is there any chance she could get her machine working?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Kyntak replied. ‘It’ll just explode. And the further in time she tries to go back, the bigger the blast radius will be.’

‘But if it worked–’

‘Even if it worked, it would still explode. Anyone within eight kilometres would still be fried.’

Six jumped over a laser tripwire, his forehead throbbing. The inside of his throat was coated with dust. Irradiated wind blasted his skin.

‘How long will it take us to get to Vepa tower?’

‘Eight minutes to get to the car,’ Kyntak said. ‘Another ninety-five to drive there.’

‘Too long. She probably left the moment I found out where the ununoctium was. She’s got a head-start of five hours.’

Kyntak dug his phone out of his pouch. ‘I can summon a chopper,’ he said. ‘But it would get to the tower only fifteen minutes before we did.’

Six shook his head. ‘Going to the tower is a waste of time. We need to get to her time machine.’

‘But it could be anywhere.’

‘Wrong,’ Six said. ‘It’s only been two months since her last attempt. She didn’t have time to start building it from scratch.’

Kyntak gaped at him. ‘You think it’s in the same place as last time?’

‘I think it’s our only chance.’

Kyntak hesitated, and then tossed him the phone. Six dialled.

‘This is Agent Six of Hearts, requesting immediate backup. Authorisation code zero, zero, Delta, Juliet. I need all available agents to assist with the evacuation of an eight-kilometre radius, centred around the following co-ordinates.’ He recited the location of Byre’s facility from memory. ‘This is a Luther-class emergency.’

He hung up.

‘Call them back,’ Kyntak rasped. ‘We need to send someone into Byre’s facility to try to prevent the explosion.’

‘No, we don’t.’

Kyntak raised his voice. ‘We’ll never get everyone out in time. We have to send someone in. Call them back. That’s an order.’

‘I’m going in. We don’t need to risk anyone else’s lives.’

‘You? You need medical attention. You have no weapons. You–’

‘It’s my fault,’ Six said. ‘I told Byre she needed ununoctium, and I told her where to find it. I have to be the one who stops her.’

‘I’m not letting you kill yourself out of misplaced guilt.’

‘We’re closer to her facility than anybody else. And you can hardly walk.’

A silhouette appeared in the toxic fog. The car.

‘It has to be me,’ Six said. ‘Get in the car.’

* * *

‘How does she keep finding soldiers?’ Six demanded.

‘She pays well,’ Kyntak said. ‘And she probably doesn’t tell them they’re going to get blown up.’

Six stared at the thirty troops standing around the crumpled facility. Half of them were inside the chain-link fence, the other half were outside. All had carbines cradled under their arms. If he and Kyntak drove any closer, they would be spotted and showered with 9mm rounds. The car might withstand the barrage, but it wouldn’t break through the fence.

At least we know she’s here, he thought.

The fence itself was about a metre too tall for him to jump over – on a good day, which today wasn’t. Every muscle in his body ached. He would have to climb it, presumably while people shot at him from both sides.

‘Do you have flash grenades?’ he asked Kyntak. ‘Anything I can use for a distraction?’

‘No,’ Kyntak said. ‘And in any case, I don’t think they’ll fall for that twice.’

‘Different soldiers.’

‘Same leader. That’s why she’s put them on both sides of the fence. You’ll never distract them long enough to climb over it.’

No time, Six thought. No time to wait for backup, no time to figure out a better plan. It’s do or die – probably both.

He handed the binoculars to Kyntak. ‘You see that window?’

’"Window" implies glass,’ Kyntak said, after a pause. ‘I think that’s just a hole in the wall.’

‘Whatever. I want you to drive toward it.’

‘You did see the fence we were just discussing?’ Kyntak said.

‘Yeah. Brake before you hit it.’ Six stepped out of the car and clambered onto it, putting one foot on the windscreen and another on the roof.

Kyntak leaned out the window. ‘Did I ever tell you you’re a total lunatic?’

‘Just drive,’ Six said.

Chapter Ten

Showdown

It didn’t sound like an engine at first. It was like a giant swarm of bees, getting closer and closer. The soldier stared into the darkness beyond the fence, looking for the source of the noise. She saw nothing.

‘Heads up, guys,’ she said.

Other soldiers could hear it too. Heads turned. Gun barrels raised.

She settled into a half-crouch, finger within the trigger guard of her carbine, head weaving from side as if she could see around the darkness. Her heart went into overdrive, filling her system with adrenaline as the roaring got louder.

She saw it. A car, headlights off, rocketing toward the fence with a boy poised on top like a ludicrously oversized hood ornament.

The sight was so bizarre that it took her a moment to react. She had been trained not to aim at anything she didn’t definitely want to kill. But she had been ordered to shoot anyone or anything who approached the fence.

‘Open fire!’ she roared, and pulled the trigger. The carbine kicked in her hand. But the first three shots hit too low, punching into the dirt below the license plate of the car, and she didn’t have time to adjust her aim. The car was about to slam into the fence–

And the boy jumped.

He cleared the fence, legs straight, arms locked to his sides. The momentum from the car left him hurtling through the fog above the soldier’s head, as streamlined as a nuclear missile.

But the soldier was more worried about the car. She fired again, and this time struck the windshield. The glass became an opaque web of cracks. The sedan smashed into the chain-link fence with the force of a truck filled with sledgehammers, showering the soldier with torn up shards of wire – and then it stopped, tangled in the fence.

She started jogging toward it, hoping to confirm that she’d hit the driver. But when she was less than a metre away, the vehicle lurched into motion again – backwards. The car careened through the dust, the hood scarred by bullets and wire, before swerving, skidding through a 180 degree turn, and shooting off into the darkness.

The soldier spun back toward the building, looking for the boy who had jumped off the bonnet. She expected to see his broken body on the ground, or splattered against the wall of Byre’s facility.

She didn’t. He had vanished.

She peered into the yawning window. Was it possible that he had flown through that gap into the building? Surely not. But where else could he be?

‘Fan out,’ she yelled. ‘Sweep the perimetre.’

If he was inside, it didn’t matter, she told herself. The monster would finish him off.

* * *

Six slammed into the floor inside Byre’s facility, sending a shock of pain through each of his limbs. His head throbbed, as though his brain was swelling up. His stomach was a tight knot in his abdomen. He couldn’t stand. He could hardly breathe.

Shut off the machine, he told himself. Then you can die.

He clambered shakily to his feet.

The facility hadn’t changed much since he last saw it. The metal floor was still warped by the supermagnetic event. The pipes which lined the walls had been dented and torn by the flying debris. Only the broken chunks of concrete had been swept away, clearing a path to the machine.

Six staggered forward. One step. Two. His pulse thundered in his ears–

Then he heard something else. A slow thumping, getting louder. Part of Byre’s machine?

No. Footsteps. Too heavy to be Byre. Too heavy to be human.

Six threw himself into the shadowy gap between two fat pipes as a Taur rounded the corner up ahead. It was bigger than the last one he’d seen. Its arms, roped with bulging muscles, hung almost as low as its massive feet. Its head hung down, the back of its leathery neck dragging across the ceiling.

Six held his breath, hoping that the creature hadn’t seen him.

Thump. Thump. The pipes rattled around Six as the monster got closer.

Can’t fight it, he thought. Can’t run from it.

He thought of his escape from the Taur at the checkpoint. The creatures were intelligent – perhaps he could negotiate with it?

But if he tried and failed, the beast would tear off his arms and leave him to die of shock. So he stayed, shivering in the darkness, listening to the approaching monster.

Soon it was visible through the gap. Its skin glistened with grey sweat. Its gigantic three-fingered fists clenched and unclenched by its sides.

It walked past him.

Six kept holding his breath. He could slip out now, and try to get to the machine while the creature’s back was turned. But once it reached the end of the corridor, it would turn around and see him.

The safer option was to stay where he was until the Taur had gone back to wherever it came from. But he could already hear the whining of Byre’s machine. She had switched it on. In minutes, this building and everything around it would be shattered into microscopic pieces. He didn’t have time to play hide and seek.

Six eased out of his hiding place and crept down the corridor, away from the Taur, toward Byre’s machine. He moved as quickly as he dared, ignoring the pain from his head and his legs.

Something hissed behind him. No – sniffed. The Taur could smell him.

Six broke into a desperate run. The beast bellowed behind him, shaking the walls with its furious cry, and dashed after him. Six could hear each footfall denting the floor as the monster came closer and closer.

The hatch in the floor was just ahead. Open.

An enormous arm swiped at the back of Six’s head – but he heard it whooshing through the air and dropped to his knees. The beast’s clutching paw swept over him as he slid along the floor for the last few metres and tumbled down into the hatch, where the Taur was too big to follow.

He plummeted through the blackness as the Taur shrieked with rage, slamming its fists into the metal floor above. The echoes bounced and faded and bounced some more and then Six hit the ground and blacked out.

* * *

It was the whining which awoke him. So much louder than before. Six felt like a fly, trapped inside a screaming jet engine.

He pushed at the dirty floor with his palms. Get up! he told himself. Get up!

The world was still spinning around him. The best he could manage was a crawl, toward the noise at a painful pace. Bile rose in his throat. He choked it back down.

There was probably another way into these lower floors. The Taur could arrive at any minute. But if he could shut off the machine, it didn’t matter what the beast did to him.

By the time he reached the door to Byre’s room, he was less dizzy. He stood. Pushed the door open.

It was like travelling back in time for real. Byre stood exactly where she had before, her knuckles white around the two metal cylinders, her eyes wild with excitement and fury.

‘Six,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to lie – I’m surprised to see you.’

Six ignored her and staggered over to the console. A timer was counting down from 48 seconds. A readout told him that she had set the machine to blast her 81 years into the past. He reached for the shutdown lever.

It wasn’t there.

‘Given what happened last time,’ Byre said, ‘I thought it was safest to remove the emergency shut down switch. Now I’m glad I did.’

Six couldn’t believe it. He had failed. The machine couldn’t be stopped. And now he was going to die.

He hoped Kyntak had made it outside the blast radius.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Byre said, ‘I’m sorry. I know you’ll cease to exist when I kill the founding members of ChaoSonic. But they’ve done much, much more harm than good.’

Six was barely listening. Kyntak had told him that the blast would be proportional to the spacetime distance – the further Byre tried to go back, the bigger the explosion would be. If he could change her destination to something more recent, perhaps only this building would be destroyed. He and Byre would die, but probably no-one else. The Taur might survive the blast, thanks to its thick, leathery hide.

However, if he touched the controls, Byre would overpower him. He was in no condition to fight her off. He would have to wait until the last second, when she would be afraid to let go of the cylinders.

The timer read 24 seconds.

‘I have a rule,’ Six said. He had to shout over the roaring of the magnet. ‘I don’t kill people.’

Byre’s eyes narrowed. ‘Conveniently, killing me wouldn’t stop the explosion.’

‘But if you die because of your machine, and I didn’t warn you, then that counts.’

Byre said nothing.

‘So this is me,’ Six said, ‘warning you. You’re not going back in time. Kyntak says it’s impossible. We’re both about to be blown to pieces.’

‘The machine will work.’ There was no doubt in Byre’s voice.

11 seconds.

Something snarled. Six whirled around. The Taur had appeared in the doorway.

‘Kill him,’ Byre said.

The Taur’s molten eyes fixed on Six’s. It squeezed through the door and reached out for him–

Six ducked under its grabbing arms and twisted one of the dials on the console. The readout changed from 81 years to 22 years to ten months to two months.

‘What did you just do?’ Byre shrieked.

Six couldn’t reply. The Taur had grabbed him by the throat and was lifting him up. He heard the cartelage in his Adam’s apple creak. Everything was getting dark.

The Taur had turned away from Byre. Away from the machine. With his last shred of strength, Six hugged the monster, using it as a giant inhuman shield, burying his face in its tough flesh–

And then – KABOOM – the air was painted white.

* * *

Soren Byre landed in a heap. She was somewhere dark and loud. The floor was metallic. It shook under her fingers.

She stood, swaying unsteadily. She had felt the first fraction of a second of the explosion, but then it had disappeared – or rather, she had. The explosion hadn’t happened yet. She was in the past.

Things fell from the ceiling around her. Objects skittered across the floor. She had transported herself into the midst of an earthquake. Somewhere, somewhen.

She turned, looking for a way out, and saw a figure running toward her. Fleeing, perhaps. Did that mean the way out was behind her?

The boy’s face came into view. It was Agent Six of Hearts. His clothes were different, and the holes in his head were gone, but it was definitely him. Somehow, he had travelled through time with her.

‘It works,’ she hissed, delighted to have proven him wrong. ‘It works!’

And then something plunged into the back of her head, and she knew nothing more.