Chapter Two-A

  Malory woke with a blood-curdling scream to the sensation of being murdered. She was in her childhood room collapsed next to a broken mirror listening to the metronome of an antique grandfather clock down the hall. She gagged on the taste of iron as the shadow moved through the space, eyes hazy and unfocused. She knew the shadow meant death, the loss of parents, her home, years in an orphanage discarded by society with only the love of her sister and she couldn't breathe, couldn’t fight back, couldn’t stop the man and she would be the next to die and finally know what it felt like for a blade to caress her intestines. She howled again, all wounded animal and inviolable proof of her existence. It was a will to remain even when the only thing left was spite, or a girl who wanted more than anything to remain whole and loved and couldn’t. Then she was back, tangled in sheets, drenched in a fountain of terror-sweat, her sister’s foot lodged against her face in their upstairs broom closet just big enough for a bed. She unraveled herself from the sleep-clutches of her twin, who drooled on a ratty pillow, and slipped into the hall. She needed to wash and there was no more sleep to be had.

  The bathroom on the second floor was cold, spartan, and barely functional, the window showed a couple inches to dreary brick and the apartment tower next door. She peeled off her clothes and left them on the sill to dry and tried to get the tap to spit out anything that wasn’t fresh from the arctic. It took several minutes, but she was practiced, and knew how to turn it in slow metronome bursts until it dribbled hot water. It wouldn’t last long, so she hurried to rinse herself of trauma, the vestiges of sleep, and collected grime. She kneaded knuckles into her scalp and used the pleasure to distract from hunger that gnawed on her ribs. The mirage of dream-gore on her tongue threatened to send her into another panic, so she visualized the nightmare of half-stitched memories slopping down the drain. She hoped it would leave her clean, warm, and stress-free, and it almost worked—the shadow sinner wasn’t easy to ignore. When she was done, she wiped off with a towel she shared with her sister. It was still damp and she cringed at the texture. She dressed, left the room, and tiptoed down the stairs to the first floor.

  Everything was dark and deceptively peaceful. If Mal closed her eyes, she could imagine being anywhere else: a highrise corporate condo with a curtain wall overlooking the expanse of the city, the massive rooftop holograms, all that neon. She could walk into Purgatory to work a gig, just as much badass mercenary as Mover Marlow or Redtail Martinez. She could remember the false safety of her childhood home, the scent of baking and synth-limes, a mother’s smile, but she wouldn’t—the familiar texture of a well-traveled linoleum kept her grounded and on track to her destination. The front window of the orphanage was positioned so that laying down in the perfect spot let the kids gaze up between the embrace of the wall and the crowd of skyscrapers at the moon—the large survivor trailed through the sky by wayward fragments and Energo Lunar’s catastrophic mistake, heavenly body reduced to comet chased eternally by disintegrating tail. Malory had never seen it whole outside old photos, holos, and discarded memory chips and wondered if standing on its surface in a fogged helmet before disaster was as peaceful as she hoped, a distilled approximation of freedom from the trappings of her life. When she leaned back in the spot to look at the moon, she lifted her hand and envisioned expansive mechanical digits threading patchwork into defunct amalgamation—her impossible dream of putting the moon back together complete, if only in her imagination.

  A glint from the closet in the hall to the left caught her eye, light bleeding from the crack underneath. She knew who it was, and decided to have some fun. She crept to the door, slowed her breathing, and felt the cool of the handle. She waited a few moments, then wrenched the door ajar with a snarl, deep and primal, to scare her fellow insomniac—Nadia didn’t even flinch. She sat cross-legged in a pile of alloy parts and frayed wires, dark bags under her eyes and hair a mess, every bit an abandoned doll in the scraps of a techie’s makeshift workshop. She set down the gear in her hands and looked up.

  “Three out of ten,” she said. She smirked and brushed the errant strands of yellow from her face. “You need some new material.”

  “Bite me,” Mal said. She closed the door behind her to keep from waking the director.

  “Maybe, after I’m finished,” Nadia said. She clicked her teeth together playfully.

  “What are you making?” Malory asked. She didn’t see anything that could equate to extra height among the offal.

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  “You’ll love it,” she beamed. She lifted a couple disconnected pieces and waved them around. “None of us have any implants or optics, so my little baby will be marvelous. If I can get it working.” Her face fell in frustration.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Malory said. It was an eldritch of coiled metal, tangled wires, and bright chalk face winking on its surface.

  “Oh. Right,” she said. “It’s a home-brew EMP. Should shut down implants and cameras. And reusable, unlike a grenade.” She went back to tinkering with junk.

  “Where did you even learn to make something like that,” Mal asked. She sat down and picked through scrap, looking at the variety. She didn’t recognize most of it, and wondered how Nadia had gathered so much.

  “Memory chip,” she said, as if that explained anything. When she noticed Malory’s silence, she sighed and continued. “Rich people throw chips out all the time, and I look for them whenever I leave. I have a whole library in my room you could watch if you ever came to visit.” She turned back to the pieces in her hand, threaded a wire through old neon tubing, connected to another, twisted. “Found this one yesterday, and couldn’t sleep without building it.”

  “Why crabs, though?” Malory asked. It was kind of cute, if not haunting the uncanny valley. It would have looked at home stalking the labyrinthine sewage system hunting rodents.

  “No reason,” she said. She looked up and flashed crooked teeth. “I just like them.” Carcinization in action, and even tech bent to the evolutionary imperative at the whims of a tiny tinkerer. She added another bent plastic cap to one of the claws.

  “Need any help?” Malory asked. She didn’t know the blueprint, but she could at least shape components.

  “Always,” she said. “I can’t figure out how to fit the magnifiers in the core. Definitely not my own fault for modifying the design, though.” The sea creature was still missing legs and a pincer, its body cavity plucked open to be filled in a slow autopsy in reverse—metal, tubes, and determination crammed into a steely corpse.

  “You could use the limbs,” Malory suggested. It seemed like plenty of unused space to solve the problem.

  “That could do the trick,” Nadia said. She blinked and tilted her head to the side, chewed the inside of her lip, and took a deep breath. “Yeah, I think it’ll be great. Put the rest of the legs together, and I’ll handle the insides.”

  The fabrication progressed like clockwork—circles of recycled neon glass, junkyard magnets, coils of metal and wire and plastic fused into lifeless automaton just before sunrise because two orphans complemented each other in symbiotic familiarity. Pancake torso topped with scavenged solar panels, each leg molded, stuffed, and assembled into chalk-faced crustacean. A pinched finger, a few drops of blood, another blemish on a tattered dress. Mal pictured an army of them crawling through the ventilation of ZenTech tower, situating themselves at critical infrastructure junctions, and bringing the entire corporation to its knees. The place had been assaulted before, but never with autonomous EMP drones, and she thought it was novel enough to succeed. Nadia might be able to get them moving like she imagined with access to a proper atelier, but that was for the future, and if they lived that long. They stole glances at each other as they worked, but neither noticed the other bewitched, and then it was done. A treasured moment of peace consigned to the trash heap of oblivion and reminiscence.

  “I wish we could test it,” Nadia said.

  “The director will kill us if you set it off in the orphanage,” Mal cautioned. It was the perfect kind of recklessness she’d come to expect; Nadia had no regard for consequence or side effects, just the desire to know the creation performed as anticipated.

  “I guess we’ll just have to go in blind,” Nadia said. She picked up the completed device, spun it around, and looked in its luminous eyes.

  “What do you want to use it for?” Malory asked.

  “A heist,” she said. “I want to hit Bagley Market.” The place was a fortress of unabashed consumerism: three tiers of stalls overflowed with synthetic meat, fish, eggs, and raw vegetables, street carts hawked savory fried food, and the brilliant colors of textiles waited for new owners. Clothes, shoes, bags, perfume, bedding, books, stationary, toys, electronic scrap, holograms, memory chips, gray-market programs, second-hand chromeware, and surplus civilian robot models all crowded the walkways with vivid signage and cameras pointed in all directions.

  “That’s insane,” Mal said. There was no hesitation. “We’ll need some of the others.” More help meant more to eat, less hand-me-down rags and dumpster dives, technology that was made the same decade. A chance the orphanage hadn’t been able to give them.

  “Martin and Spencer always tag along,” Nadia said. There was a lot of risk, but they never shied from adventure.

  “I’ll talk to them before class,” Malory said. She stood, stretched her back until it cracked, and scraped at the dried blood on the tip of her fingernail. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Set the crab off near the stalls we want to hit to knock out cameras and optics, grab what we can, and run.” It was matter-of-fact, and left no room for error, for dreaded consequence. “Should last a minute or two.”

  “Winging it, then,” Mal said. She laughed and left the room.