Not even a blaster held to his temple would crack open Senator Nuula’s lips. Secrets swelled behind that thin, dry dam, and I was going to bottle them up.
“I hope you can understand,” I said, tilting my head to the side and giving the wizened man a smile. He must’ve been at least eighty, wispy hair evaporating from his shiny egghead. He’d tried JuvenaDerm patches at least four times to no avail. Time had robbed him of the suppleness he clearly wished for, and the failed patches of lab-grown skin had peeled off and left a grid of scars across his cheeks. He smelled of old cabbage and, strangely, mayonnaise, explained purely by the fact that he was an elder bureaucrat, so engrained in politics that he could pay for smuggled condiments and his peers would look the other way. Maybe he had little packets of the stuff in his pockets right now, those slim, single serve pouches they used to slather on sandwiches a hundred years ago. His robes surely had enough hiding places for covert sauces.
But, back to the point of the raid.
I cocked my blaster.
“If you kill me, you won’t get whatever secrets you think I have,” Senator Nuula said.
“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. My breath had turned the inside of my mask swampy. Nuula’s small office roasted under hateful lights that cast shadows so intense it made everything look melted. His collection of antique clocks drooped and all the holoscreens sagged and even his overstuffed furniture had slumped over. This lava-puke of a room made me want to tear my mask off. But masking is an absolute requirement when you’re out collecting specimens.
“What do you want, if it’s not my blood?” the old man asked.
I primed the blaster’s syringe with a flick of my thumb and the needle kissed the man’s mottled white skin.
Nuula swallowed. “You’re one of those leeches,” he said.
“Someone likes his state-sponsored news,” I said as I slid the needle into Nuula’s temple. He grunted as it bore deeper and deeper, piercing his skull, slipping into brain tissue that had all the fight of soft serve ice cream. Convulsions ricocheted through his limbs. I held the blaster steady against his protesting body as I drew out memories and misdeeds and sins and slime, anything I could use against him, anything to make him cough up credits to protect his sweet little secrets.
After a few seconds, I drew the blaster back to my side. The gauge was nearly full, its insides undulating with clouds of shimmering organic data. I holstered my blaster and clapped the man on the shoulder.
“I’ll find you,” he said through gritted teeth as I stepped away from him.
“I very much doubt that,” I said before I typed the coordinates for Home into my wristcom. The small screen accepted my jump route with a green flash. I hit the button and my body pixelated, breaking itself into billions of tiny squares before scattering into nothing.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be carbonation, try pixelating. When you fizz back into being, you’ll question whether you aren’t actually a can of soda. For some, that’s fun. For me? Fucking nuisance.
I popped back into being, swallowing down the nausea and shivering until feeling started to crawl back to my nerves. I shook my head, clearing away the dancing stars, waiting for the dark walls of Home to materialize in front of me. Traveling across space and time as packets of data can wreak certain havoc on an organic body. There are some things meat can do that metal can’t, and vice versa, but as I fought down the bile and tried to tap away the swelling pain in my temples, I wished I were made of something sturdier than flesh.
I blinked and blinked until sense came flooding back.
Home. The subterranean space shimmered and sputtered as other leeches pixelated in and out, blinking off to wherever their next hit was, be it politician or starlet. The only way into the cramped space was via pixelation—the doors were sealed shut. All the tech and computers and whatsits lying around were draped in plastic sheets, meant to keep all the above-world drippings off the memories stored inside. Mirrors took up almost all the wall space so that no matter where you stood, you’d always be able to see yourself.
Because there was nothing remotely homey about Home, I spent little time there. Above, the city of MoonJoy clawed its way toward the glass-domed ceiling, trying to drag itself off this rocky moon stuffed with clubs and casinos and brothels. The streets coiled and meandered with the express purpose of getting visitors to spend more money. Neon bounced around alongside blaring music, turning the streets into a never-ending party. The undertubes were obviously horrid by comparison. But the shadows here could hold their tongues in ways the shadows above couldn’t.
“Is that my sweet, beautiful Kazik?” a voice said.
Mom stood near the navport at the center of the room. She looked sere as usual, body struggling to recover from her latest reconstruction. Her skin was a patchwork of colors, a jerry-rigged nightmare grafted together from whatever remnants of JuvenaDerm she could buy or scavenge off bodies. One arm was an older model than the other, her bolts and caps were wildly mismatched, and she was missing an eye. The other, glowing with a loud out-of-order red, was still calibrating after a software update.
“Hey Mom,” I said. Of course she wasn’t my mother and Mom wasn’t her real name. No one knew that precious information. The only thing I knew about her I’d found out purely by accident, when a patch of skin fell off her neck one day and revealed a scratched out serial number, the hallmark of a security droid.
“How’d your collection go?” she asked, her voice warbling as it struggled through her modulator. She fumbled around for the hairbrush she always kept at the navport. I handed it to her and she began to run it through her hair. Any time she hit a tangle and pulled at the knot, her hair parted, revealing little sprouts poking out of her scalp, not unlike a doll’s head. Only Mom’s hair, like her skin, was not just one color or texture. She had black kinks next to auburn curls, gray waves alongside blonde locks. The longer I worked for her, the more I was sure she settled for aesthetic discord if it brought her closer to humanity.
“Only the most beautiful parts,” she often muttered to herself while gazing into one of her many mirrors.
I took out my blaster and removed the syringe full of Nuula’s memories. Right as I moved to put the syringe in Mom’s hand, her iris blinked green, cycling through different colors before settling on amber, like my own.
“Ahh, there you are,” Mom said, cupping my cheek in her cold hand. She studied my eyes for a moment before tutting. “I really need to install a better color scale for my eye. I want gold flecks like yours.”
Mom took the syringe. Without another word she loaded it into the navport, gently nestling the needle into the receptor before pressing the plunger down. Symbols and words flashed across the screen, and then images shrieked by, moving so fast you couldn’t make sense of them. Once they slowed down, the usual suspects appeared: affairs with busty or well-endowed adolescents, bribes to get out of traffic violations, credits accepted from lobbyists keen on making spores illegal.
“Nothing exciting, but enough to blackmail for a few million,” Mom said. She leaned against the navport and continued to brush her hair. “Would you be a dear and fetch my lipstick?”
Mom’s vanity stood next to the navport. She’d covered it in potions and bottles to hide the chipped white paint, and the oval mirror was draped in a silk scarf to hide the crack at the top. It looked like something made for a child, especially when she sat on the accompanying pink pouf, her knees taller than the vanity’s surface.
“Which color?” I asked as I slid open the drawer.
“I’m feeling saucy today. Let’s do Fuck Off Fuchsia.”
As Mom slicked color across her lips, I studied the credit estimate ticking up and up on the navport’s holoscreen. My cut was twenty percent, which wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent in my debts. Sharks came sniffing around my door every few days, eager to snap up the credits I’d lost to MoonJoy’s sin-reliant economy. I made myself scarce as much as possible, but there were days I had to pixelate to avoid an oncoming fist or knife.
A few more hazy memories presented themselves, but the very last one started out unlike the others: in a painfully bright room. A white box sat on a table. Everything was blurred at the edges, as if Nuula had been drinking.
Where are they from, Nuula said in a distant, sluggish voice.
Kexus, a voice answered. They were all desperate to get off that icy rock. Nothing there except ice mines and certain hypothermia.
My heart froze at the mention of my home planet. Immediately I thought of nights spent on icy doorsteps, stiff joints in the morning, begging for food and then digging it out of the trash as a last resort. Kexus was not a particularly kind planet, nor was it very well-known. Perched far in the Outer Rim beyond the Crab Nebula, the only way on or off was by cargo ship. Why was Nuula, a high-profile politician, working with a nobody from Kexus?
Nuula crept closer to the table and peered into the white box. It almost looked like they were holding hands, the way the arms were arranged inside, palm to palm. Nuula poked the skin of one and met frozen resistance.
Truly macabre, Roon. I can’t believe I’m doing this, said Nuula.
It’s lucrative—trust me, said Roon. The Android Uprising opened the door for some… innovative new business ventures.
The memory evaporated and the holoscreen went blank.
I glanced at Mom, who stood motionless.
“Looks like we found our next hit,” she said after a while, voice purring, her single eye gleaming with hunger.
I shook my head. “I can’t go to Kexus.”
“Because of that bounty? Oh, please. It’s only ten million. Or it was the last time I checked. That’s chump change, especially for grand theft.”
The thought of Mom checking my bounty made me squirm. “It’s too risky,” I said.
“I’ll raise your cut to thirty percent for all contracts going forward,” Mom said.
My heart leapt. An extra ten percent would be helpful. But was it worth risking my life and returning to a planet that would see me jailed, or worse, dead? Kexus hadn’t conformed to the Federation’s ideas of justice. Punishment for crimes was decided on the whims of the Ice Lords, and they loved a good spear through the heart.
“Fifty percent,” I said.
Mom studied me, circuits and synapses considering my worth. She had no sympathy for my debts. She gave zero shits about the reasons why I leeched. If I had a baby to feed or a cardboard house, she’d laugh in my face if I asked for more money. All she needed was someone desperate enough to do the job so that she could get money to build her body. And MoonJoy offered no shortage of people drowning in debt.
“You know what? I’m feeling generous today,” she said. “Forty and nothing more. Take it or leave it, my dear.”
Forty percent. Even after paying my debts I’d be able to hit the casinos with my pockets swinging. The risk remained: Kexus would see me killed. But the reward?
I took a deep breath and said, “Deal.”
The first thing I felt was the blizzard slapping me hard across the face.
I swam back up through the fizz and found myself in an alley. Even beneath a heavily insulated jacket and a wool cap and mask, my skin screamed. ‘How did I do this when I was a kid?’ I thought, and then I lamented how, in the span of the five years I’d been away from Kexus, I’d turned into a milksop who couldn’t handle extreme temperatures. Only MoonJoy’s balmy recycled atmosphere.
As the cold started a grudge with my bones, I tried to quell my pounding heart as I peered around the alley. Frozen garbage and yellow snow and rank rime brought me right back to the days when I prowled the streets and picked pockets. I relished the smooth wallets less than the hit of warmth I got slipping my hand into a stranger’s pocket. The slums had been frozen in time, but over the A-frame roofs and cheap shanty walls, new skyscrapers peeked up from the downtown hub in the distance. The overcast sky was laced with ships, little ants marching through the gray, carrying ice and ore to be sold at far-off markets. A cargo freighter rumbled by overhead and caused the entire stretch of slums to violently shake.
Because it all looked so familiar, I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to be here. At least not here, in this alley. That was never part of the plan. I was supposed to pixelate right into Roon’s lair. Mom and I did all that recon for a reason, triangulating his location so I could avoid setting foot outside. This was supposed to be a nice clean hit. Now it wouldn’t be.
I checked my wristcom’s data logs. My jump route was solid up until I entered Kexus’s atmosphere, when it wobbled and shook and patched in and out. A note in the log attributed the failure to weather interference. I was lucky my body hadn’t been snowed all across Kexus.
Botched pixelation aside, I downloaded Roon’s coordinates into me. My wristcom vibrated as the data entered my body, snaking its way up to my brain until I suddenly knew where I needed to go.
I left the alley. Soon I remembered, this is how you walk on Kexus, head down but eyes up, always on the lookout, but not looking like you have something to hide. And this is where you find the good scraps, thrown out the back of sick houses. The chance of illness is worth the soft, unfrozen heels of bread. Roofs are the only safe place to collect snow for melting down into water. If you need gloves, socks, caps, goggles, sometimes you can find bodies behind bars. And never, under any circumstance, set foot on an Ice Lord’s turf.
Take my word for it.
I wound through icy streets with snowdrifts piled up to the roofs. Children played on the haphazard slopes while their parents haggled for fur hats and fuel. A restaurant served hot dumpling soup, the smell still as intoxicating as it was when I was a kid, but then the succulence was replaced with the dirty tang of snow seal dung. A beat-up snow hopper slid by, engine hacking up acrid fumes.
Memories thawed. Dead dreams resurrected themselves. Moments I hadn’t lived for years suddenly seemed like they’d happened yesterday. It wasn’t homesickness, this feeling rooting around inside me. It was more like relief that I wasn’t missing anything.
I came to small square buzzing with merchants and mercenaries. Just as I was about to slip into a nearby alley to avoid the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a holoscreen projected onto a building at the far end of the square. Faces flashed over windows and doors, listing names and bounties and last known whereabouts. Then I recognized a familiar face.
Kazik Alzman, age 20, bounty: 15,000,000 credits. Last seen in the Tuliq Quarter.
Part of me warmed with pride knowing my bones were worth more than when I’d left. The photo was from five years ago, so I still looked like a gangly, good-for-nothing teen with a patchy beard and hollow cheeks. Hopefully the muscle I’d put on helped me look different enough from the boy Kexus remembered for stealing Ice Lord Tuliq’s snow hopper—with his daughter riding shotgun. That joyride ended with my first bounty and my first kiss.
When my face made way for another, I moved on.
I walked until my feet went numb and my eyelashes were white with ice. A few times I had to duck into doorways to avoid roving mercenaries. When they finally passed, I hunched forward through the blizzard and pressed on until I arrived at Roon’s ramshackle shop. A sign over the door flashed in holographic blue: Books! Books! Books! As if it were a strip club instead.
There would be no surprising Roon. My pixelation debacle had ensured that. I could go in blaster blazing, hoping to catch him off guard. Sneaking was out of the question in this blizzard. Negotiation was a possibility—Roon was a businessman after all. But proximity mattered most. I needed to get close.
I pulled down my mask, ignoring Mom’s cardinal rule of anonymity. Then I took a deep breath, pushed open the door, and went inside.
Roon’s shop was rather extraordinary, packed with colorful books. The mildewed scent of ages-old paper had a quaint charm to it, and for a moment I got lost imagining what it would be like to read from a book instead of a holoscreen. Some of the books had gold gilded edges and others were bound in soft leather. Still more were paper, corners rounded from being shoved into pockets and bags. And best of all were the tiny books you could fit in the palm of your hand. I hate admitting how enchanted I was by it all.
Before I could get swept further away, the sound of steps, hollow and thumping, pulled me back to the present.
Roon appeared from a door at the back of the room. He looked more tired than he had in Nuula’s memory, but his appearance was mostly the same: white skin, gray hair floating above his head in cirrus wisps, a forehead cut with wrinkles, and broad shoulders that, despite the slant that age brought, had retained much of their strength. Under a plain white shirt his corded muscles had no trouble with the massive tome he held.
“How can I help you?” Roon said.
I smiled. “I’m looking for a rare Earth book, from pre-calamity. It’s called Bridget Jones’s Diary. Do you have it?”
It was the only book title I could think of. Mom had been raving about it lately, spending late nights poring over its contents, sifting through the downloaded story and mimicking the characters’ speech patterns.
“Earth literature is hard to come by these days,” Roon said, studying me from behind dirty spectacles before slapping his giant book down on the counter. “What does a young man want with a book like that?”
“You’ve heard of it then?” I said, trying to cover up the fact that I had no idea what Bridget Jones’s Diary was about.
“Son, look around. I’m a man who deals in books.”
‘And bodies,’ I wanted to say.
“I’m surprised you didn’t try The Arched Spine first,” Roon said as he meandered through the shop, browsing the shelves. “They specialize in that kind of genre. It’s difficult to get out to Lophala though. All those asteroid fields, you know. But die-hards will do anything for pre-calamity romance. Guess there’s not much love to be had these days.”
Romance? I ground my teeth. Roon pulled a slim book from a shelf and brought it back to the counter.
“Bridget Jones’s Diary,” he said as he set it down.
We were only a foot away from each other. Would a quick jab to the throat do the trick? Could I grab his arm and swing him over the counter? He was old. It might work. But he had to be strong, all that muscle gained from hefting and hacking up bodies.
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” I said. It was so quiet I thought I heard a speck of dust settle on the counter.
“Five hundred credits,” Roon said. “You could get it for cheaper at The Arched Spine. But you’re not at The Arched Spine, are you.”
Roon studied me, his eyes flicking back and forth between mine, bouncing from right to left, right to left. The hair on my neck stood up. I couldn’t waste any more time.
I pulled out my blaster.
“You gonna rob me for it?” Roon said with a chuckle. He came around the counter, steps slow.
“Do as I say or this could get bad,” I warned.
“Lucky for you I prefer doing things the easy way,” he said, holding up his hands.
“Kneel and put your hands on the floor,” I said, leveling the blaster at Roon’s face. He knelt, grunting as his knees creaked against the wood.
He gazed up at me with pond-green eyes, eyes that had seen into countless bodies. He was a man who’d seen what an arm looks like cut crosswise. He knew the hills and heaths of the brain and had perhaps memorized the market price for each organ. I wondered if he’d ever felt things like guilt or embarrassment or shame. He would call himself a businessman. Shrewd. Talented. I would call him despicable. His memories would go for millions.
I stepped closer to Roon right as a ruckus erupted outside.
“Found you!” said a voice.
A flurry of ragged armor and weary metal whirled beyond the window. Gauntlets reaching, scrabbling for something, the doorknob, surely, because they had found me, had come for my bounty at last. I thought I had escaped my fate all those years ago when I left Kexus. And maybe I still could if I drew out Roon’s memories and pixelated before they got to me.
But before my fate could burst through the door, the scuffle stopped. Mercenaries had merely caught the ear of some small street urchin, a stolen something in his hands. As I watched the mercs drag the boy off, relieved it wasn’t me instead, I felt a sharp twinge in my thigh.
“You know, for someone from Kexus, I’d expect thicker pants,” Roon said.
It took me a moment to spot the tiny needle in his hand.
“But like I said, I prefer things the easy way.”
I blinked, trying to understand what had just happened. But when Roon started to swim before me, body turning into waves and swirls, I knew.
I had been so careful. Had built a reputation for being competent. I was Mom’s favorite, a mantle I’d proudly taken up and flaunted in front of her other leeches. And I deserved it: I’d never missed a hit, never failed to deliver memories to Mom’s pocket. But now that crown slid from my head as the room began to spin.
I stumbled backward, dropping my blaster as I hit the ground.
“You look different from your wanted picture,” Roon said. “More grown, I suppose. Fifteen million credits is quite the bounty. That’s enough for some to retire on.”
I fumbled with my wristcom, hoping to punch in the coordinates for Home, but my hands slapped the device like slabs of granite. I tried to pixelate anyway, but the carbonation fizzled out, the route incomplete.
“But that’s chump change compared to what I can make from you. I’m sure you understand—you’re a leech, after all.”
I couldn’t speak. Words were too heavy and my tongue had turned to jelly. I fought to stay conscious as Roon leaned over me and pulled me up by the collar. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and took out a spoon.
“Huh,” he said. “She was right. You do have nice eyes.”
