Page 5 of Coldwire
I wince, pulling the patch off my neck. The micro-needles across its surface emerge with a thin smear of blood. I’ll need to get the wound checked to make sure Nik Grant didn’t give me some disease.
“Can anyone hear me?”
The sudden cacophony of responses would confirm yes, I’m transmitting through the comm again. I stumble to my feet. There’s no chancethat Nik will still be within sight, but I hurry to the window anyway. Indeed, he’s long disappeared, but my eyes widen to register eight, nine,tenblack cars parked all around the building.
“Eirale, where did you go—”
“He was here,” I rush to say. “I went after him on the fifth floor. I’m coming back down.”
I shoulder through the door into the stairwell. It’s quiet. The ultraviolet LEDs have been replaced with an ugly, normal white light, calmer on my eyes while I round the landing, counting the fourth floor, then the third. Mint is trying to speak into her mic—“They want us out. They had a threat called”—and with someone else at the same time. She’s arguing with federal. Government people.
I make it back to the second floor, then along the thin hallway. Inside the nightclub, the lights have come on as well, white-blue to replace the strobes. Not all the patrons ran out. There are still clusters milling around the walls, nervously wringing their hands. I push my way past them, searching for Mint or Teryn.
Then I see the blood.
“Don’t come closer!”
I’m suddenly at the receiving end of ten rifles, red lasers pointing a collection of dots onto my suit. The nightclub is smaller than the blueprints made it seem—or maybe the chipping black paint on the walls pulls everything closer together. I’ve approached the back of its dance floor, beside the bar. And everywhere I look, there are federal agents. Holding weapons, directing camera drones, setting up caution tape.
“What’s going on?” I mutter into my suit for my team to answer. I raise my hands to either side of me, keeping them in sight for the agents. “Why are they pointing their guns atme?”
“Eirale, over here.” Mint’s reply feeds straight into my ear, but there’s a double echo, her actual voice coming from nearby. My eyes flicker to the side, and I catch a glimpse of her green braids over the shoulder of a federalagent. She shifts until I can see her face properly, her folded arms wrapped tightly around her torso. Her head tilts, gesturing to her left, and I follow the trail of blood on the floor up to a booth.
My breath snags in my throat. A man slumps over the table, his face pressed to the metal at an awkward angle. Judging by the red spreading around him, oozing onto the tiles at his feet, I have to imagine there’s a bullet embedded dead center in his forehead.
“Is that Chip Graham?” I murmur. I don’t want to move my mouth too much. I don’t want the federal agents to read what I’m saying, but my hands must lower in shock because they rush to scream at me, yelling to stay still or else they’ll shoot, they’ll fire immediately.
“I’ve been trying to tell them we were after Nik Grant tonight and thathedid this,” Mint hisses. “But the footage already leaked onto the feed.”
“What footage?” I demand. The federal agents are starting to approach me. One is taking out cuffs. I can’t understand what could have possibly prompted this reaction, why their rifles remain pointed at me, until Teryn’s voice breaks over the comms, ice cold:
“You, Eirale. There’s video of you shooting the defense secretary.”
2LIA
I can tell our backyard hasn’t been cleaned in a while because last month’s broken tree branch is still lying by the picket fence.
The early-morning wind howls against the window, rattling the latches. Downcountry sunrises don’t bring much light anymore, not like the way they’ve redesigned them upcountry. I hate how gloomy everything is at this hour, how empty the world feels. Shadows shift in the room like the mist outside—heavy and viscous, hemmed with weight. Dad says I shouldn’t sit in the alcove because it’s too exposed, and the window could be easily smashed. Our house is in Haven State, north of Button State and two hours away from Button City, where the daytime sky is always tinted vaguely brown. When the winds quiet, I can hear our electrified perimeter: a faint, steady hum that Tamera swears isn’t noticeable.
We’ve never had an incident at the house. The general public—despite their constant accusations that my father is a Medan spy—aren’t stupid, and they know he’s not here downcountry. Dad, like every other senator in Atahua, keeps his physical body in the District of Melnova, inside a locked hideaway office within the well-protected Capitol Building. On his reset days, he’ll be walking around the Capitol, summoning coffee to be delivered by service bots.
No one is getting past the fence, in any case. No looters, no hitchhiking vagrants looking for a warm place to hide out. I suppose there’s the rare chance someone comes by to throw something for protest’s sake, which is the only scenario I can imagine there being danger.SENATOR’S DAUGHTER CONKED BY A BRICK.Rather pathetic for a headline. I shift away from the window.
The television on the wall switches segments, starting the latest breaking news coming out of Button City. When I tilt back to listen, my hair protests the motion, caught around my shoulders like a black shawl. Apparently some government official was murdered last night. They don’t say what the official was doing in the city downcountry to begin with, where he was at risk of getting murdered. Nor do they mention that these sorts of assassinations seem to be happening more and more often, despite the innumerable security initiatives NileCorp launches at every quarterly presentation to “protect Atahua.” Before anyone can mull too long on the details, the newscasters turn over to a James Moore interview: an old one that I’ve practically memorized because I’ve watched it so many times, and I wave my hand to mute the television.
“Lia, are you up here?”
“Yeah,” I call back. “Alcove.”
Tamera’s footsteps draw closer to my room. I busied myself enough yesterday when I first logged out of upcountry, going from the treadmill to the rowing machine to the pull-up bar installed on my door. Now I’m just impatient to finish my mandatory twenty-four hours downcountry. Monthly users in the Pods stay upcountry the longest, but we still need to reset downcountry—in the real world—to prevent our bodies from deteriorating. Most of my grade at the academy do it together: on the first of each month, they’re all spat out from their Pods in the dorms of Nile Military Academy, free to move around as long as they don’t leave campus. While they use the time to socialize, to go for a run around the school grounds and shake out their bodies, I wake up here.
As much as I grouch and grumble, critically afraid of missing good gossip in the time I’m away, I know that Dad only insists on having my Pod at home in Haven State to keep me safe. Aside from skyrocketing crime in the few remaining major cities, our mere existence in the real world is dangerous. It’s why they invented upcountry, after all. Half a century ago, it would have been unfathomable to imagine how we have to live now. When Tamera reminisces about her childhood, she had blue skies in the real world and a minor flu season that took her out for a couple of days at most.
Then the seas started to flood the coasts, the very air turned cancerous, and the pandemics mutated at a rate that killed us faster than we could inoculate against them. The factories refused to stop pumping toxins into the clouds, and the megacorporations wouldn’t unplug their machines eating up freshwater. What else were people to do?
When NileCorp invented StrangeLoom, it promised a server to each nation. They would virtually replicate their streets down to the shape of the cobblestones, and the property that anyone owned “downcountry” would become their “upcountry,” too. I’ve had a ridiculous number of assignments on the famous presentation where James Moore introduced those terms to the world, how he paused after speaking both words as though he knew he was making history. Upcountry solved a problem without having to rectify the damage they were doing. The planet tried to wage a war after decades of torment, and NileCorp took its civilian combatants away. Now most of the world’s population has migrated to experience life online, and though this existence is all I have ever known, people sure do seem happier for it.
I flex my hands, watching the curve of my knuckles, the lines of my bones shifting and straining. My handheld device is already buzzing with updates on the feed, posts from my classmates returning to virtual. Rayna promised to collect all the reset-day gossip for me, so at least that’ll make an interesting lunch debrief.
