Shards and Ashes

  “No.” She smiles down at the glass, and I lower the bottle to the tattered blanket on the grass between us.

  We are alone now, here at the edge of the reservoir at the far reach of the district. Her ghetto is faraway, her old life even farther.

  “I don’t drink.” That’s all she says.

  “At all? Ever?”

  She shakes her head. “Maybe if you have some water. I sometimes pour a little in. See, like this?”

  She fills her glass with water, splashing wine inside. It turns red, not so red as blood, only a faint red, the color of a spilled pomegranate.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I like to feel—like myself.” I’m scared. She doesn’t say that, but I hear it.

  I shake my head. “Not me. I like to feel drunk.”

  She laughs at me, but her eyes aren’t smiling. They’re big and dark and staring at me, as if she isn’t even thinking or talking about wine at all.

  “My brother dropped.”

  I try to act surprised. It only seems polite.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I have his dropletter—I mean, had it. I burned it, most of it. It wasn’t dated.” She shakes a little, bringing the water to her lips.

  I nod. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It’s what we say. I eye her closely. “Did you . . . know?”

  She puts down the glass of red water.

  “Yes. No. I’m not surprised. But I miss him. He was everything, all I had left of my family.” Her voice catches on the last word.

  “I understand.”

  “Tell me what it’s like.”

  “What?”

  “This. To live. To be at the end, like you are. Like Rama.”

  “The last drop?”

  She shakes her head. “Not that.” She looks at me more closely. “This.”

  “Before. You mean, the end of the necklace?”

  She nods. “The necklace of raindrops.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “In my family. It’s what we always did. Even my grandfather.”

  “It’s hard to imagine your grandfather was a poet.”

  “It was from a story.”

  I hold up my wrist. On it is a twist of brown string, weathered to the point where it looks like frayed twine. A single clear bead shines from where it is caught in a single loop. I shake my arm in the air between us, rattling it.

  “There it is. My whole life, all I have.”

  “You just wear it like that? Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Nope.”

  “What if something happens to it? What about you?”

  “If it goes, it goes. If I go, I go.” It really is that simple. Each drop of the necklace controls a corresponding nanograin of encapsulated biotoxin, swimming silently in my bloodstream. We get the poison injection when we get the necklace. When a drop’s signal dies, whether by command or by being destroyed or lost, the capsule dissolves, and we grow one step closer to the end.

  Drop by drop.

  One by one by one—until there are none.

  When that happens, we die. It’s only a matter of time. They’re finite and irreplaceable, the drops. They could never be made.

  Not by us, anyway,

  Only Jai’s grandfather and his coworkers—the other gods of the Shenzen Life Calculus—could do that.

  Jai knows it. She just doesn’t want to hear it.

  Her eyes flash dark. “I don’t understand you, people like you. Even Rama. Why do you want to leave? Why do you want to go from something to nothing? No matter how bad something is, isn’t something enough?”

  “You know what your problem is?”

  “I have a problem?” She looks irritated.

  I nod. “You don’t know what everything feels like.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You don’t know what everything tastes like. The flavor it has, the sound of it. The particular sharpness it brings. The colors.” My voice sounds like I am in a dream, and I wonder if I am.

  Her breath seems to catch as she looks at me. “What’s that? Everything?”

  I lean closer, hanging over her upturned face. “It feels like sunlight on the water, shuddering in a breeze that ripples everything, even things it shouldn’t.”

  I slip my arms around her, gently pulling her toward me on the blanket.

  “The way it moves the leaves in and out of all colors of green—uncurls the sky in all colors of blue.”

  She leans against me.

  “The way the water can cut through trees and shadows like thick sections of chocolate cake that catch in the back of your throat.”

  She closes her eyes, settling against my chest. I feel her heart pounding, just over mine.

  I don’t stop.

  I lower my hand to her neck, my mouth to the edge of her jaw. My words become a whisper between us.

  “The way a single word, a tiny sound can drift over and around the smallest blade of grass between you and the horizon.”

  I pull a curl of hair loose from her clipped, black braid.

  “The way that glass of wine, right there, can taste like everything you’re seeing and nothing at all.”

  “Water,” she says, looking up at me. “It’s only—”

  Then she says nothing at all, because our lips no longer feel like talking, and there are no more words on our tongues.

  It is you, I think.

  It was always you.

  I could tell her about the deserts I have walked or the mountains I have climbed. I could tell her about the crowded marketplaces and the tents stitched from scarves. I could tell her about beetles that taste like saffron, about creatures that fly when they should swim, swim when they should fly.

  The men who ring bells. The bells that bow men.

  I tell her nothing, because none of it matters.

  I know that now.

  It wasn’t life.

  Not for me.

  My pathway, that pathway, led only to her. To an empty cubicle on a crowded street in Pinminku. To the worst job of my life, and to her.

  Jai.

  One Nine Six Seven.

  She kisses me. I kiss her.

  We are a circle of pathways and arms and eventualities, stitched together with scarves and bells and saffron.

  We are more than eight numbers, more than beads in a drawer.

  We kiss and I feel my life begin, and the joke is on me, because I suddenly, desperately, want nothing more than to live.

  For the first time in my hard-worn life.

  I don’t tell her that.

  I pull her closer, letting her twist in my arms, letting myself twist in hers, until we are swimming in water and wine and kisses and blankets and she tastes like everything and there are no doubts anywhere, for anyone at all.

  8. J A I

  I become careless. Sloppy. Happy.

  I suck in my breath for no reason, gasping at the wonder that is my life.

  In the shower, I scream.

  When I have nightmares, they are not of death and dropping. They are of my life, before I met Z.

  When everything was nothing, sand on my lips.

  I forget to buy milk for my tea. I sleep through my first and second alarm.

  I wonder if anyone notices.

  9. Z

  I never understood anything. Now I know that.

  I wish it didn’t have to end.

  I wish I could tell her.

  I wish I could ask her brother.

  10. J A I & Z

  Everything is brighter in the air.

  Partly it is the sky, how clear it is, how close they are to the sun. Partly it is the machine, the light shining off the spinning blades above them.

  Zhishengji spin quickly, even for choppers.

  Partly it is their hearts, pounding themselves into one. A rhythmic arrhythmia, a new beat. Beating itself literally together, and to death.

  His lips
pressed against her.

  His breath in her ears.

  The girl, Jai, sits on her scuffed boot heels, staring straight into the sun. The boy, Z, circles his arms around her. To him, she is the sun.

  Beneath them, the light glints off the silver rooftops that were the Southlands, that are what remains of the Southlands, spreading like the scattered beads of a necklace that was meant to be broken. Scattered like petals, like leaves in the wind.

  Behind them, in the distant blue, is the stripe of ocean that lines the sky. Haiyang, as they call it. There are no rooftops there at all. It looks like life, like endless life.

  Siwang. The great river.

  How Jai imagines it.

  Vivid. Dazzling. The ever-present oblivion.

  That which is constant.

  That which remains.

  Love.

  Z steadies himself, steadying her. He catches his breath as the chopper twists beneath them.

  “Don’t be afraid.” He kisses her cheek, a soft place he has found next to her ear.

  “I’m not.” She leans back against him. A touch that is itself a kiss.

  “We’ll be together.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He smiles at her.

  “At least we won’t be apart.”

  “Ready?”

  The pilot shouts back to them. They only nod. The pilot doesn’t care. He gets paid either way.

  They clasp hands, ready to jump. Z takes one last look around the chopper. Everything is as it should be. He has been planning this jump for months, since before he knew her. Since the day he met Rama, and they made their plan.

  Nothing about this day is a surprise. Nothing except the feeling in his chest. But that’s not the question.

  Is she ready?

  She squeezes his hand, as if in answer.

  The chopper lunges in the opposite direction.

  “Goupi!” the pilot curses. “No offense, kids. If you’re gonna jump, you gotta go now.”

  Z reaches into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit, pulling out an envelope.

  “For my parents.” He drops it into the box. She smiles, without letting go of his hand.

  He knows she has no dropletter. She doesn’t need one. She has no one left to tell.

  Nothing remains for her but him, but this.

  The drop.

  “You want a parachute? I know it’s kind of pointless, but it makes some people feel better. On the way down.”

  The pilot turns to look at them, but they aren’t there.

  They are slipping through the darkness, searching for the beginning of their story, feetfirst and falling.

  They’re a hundred yards down before the pilot can even turn the chopper around and head back toward the base.

  In his haste, he doesn’t see the two parachutes missing. He doesn’t know about the deleted records, the hacked system that can no longer tell Two Zero One One or One Nine Six Seven when to end their lives.

  He doesn’t know it is time to begin them.

  He doesn’t know the biggest secret of all.

  That Rama is waiting, that he has always been waiting. That he is every bit his grandfather’s grandson.

  That he can imagine a new world, and bring it to life, whether or not it is right or wrong. That he can find the man who will bring him his sister for a price, or in the end, for no price at all.

  That Rama and his rebel encampment await them in the stretch of oblivion that is the Mojave Desert. In every way, it is the opposite of death.

  It is, for the very first time, life.

  An uncontrollable storm, more precious than any necklace of raindrops.

  The pilot flies on, unaware of the cloud pattern building beneath him.

  Instead, the pilot is wondering, as he does every night, how long it will be until he’ll be making that last drop for himself.

  The pilot shivers and heads for home. He has a girlfriend and a dog and a love for bread and butter.

  It is nearly enough, while he has it.

  To keep the drops and his thoughts away.

  Dogsbody

  by Rachel Caine

  WHEN I WAS thirteen, Corporate handed out free tickets to the Cup game to kids on Level K. A lottery win, they said, as they visited each narrow little apartment and listed off kids by name.

  By the time they got to Gray, Xavier, I had already heard all about it. Could have ducked it, I guess; my folks were long dead, and at thirteen I was mostly on my own anyway. But I was big, strong, and maybe a little stupid, ’cause I still thought I had a bit of luck, and it had finally paid off.

  So I took my ticket, and the Company man crossed my name off on his handheld and told me to have a nice time. He had a tight, empty smile.

  Should have known better, about the luck.

  See, we all knew better, that was the thing; Level K was a hard place, and we didn’t get much. Getting a ticket to the Cup was something that happened up on Level A, maybe B . . . not down here in the dark.

  But everybody wants to believe in something, and we believed in the Cup game.

  So that morning, some two thousand kids arrived painted in crude makeup. They carried makeshift signs to wave and clutched tickets like they were passes to heaven itself. Two thousand shining, excited faces. Mine among them.

  The trains pulled in on time—big, shining, sleek things, all lights and glass and gleams. They were so beautiful, so unreal they might have been from another planet. Kids watched with rounded eyes, opened mouths as they realized, just as I did, how drab and broken our station looked, with its cracked tiles and rusty metal.

  Maybe it was just that I was a bit older than the others, or I was naturally suspicious, but I thought it was strange there were no adults here to see us off. Not one nervous parent, not one idle gawker. Nobody had come.

  All kids. All alone. Clutching tickets.

  Hackles prickled at the back of my neck.

  “Zay,” a girl’s voice said, and a hand caught me on the shoulder. It was Virtue, another orphan; we sometimes scrabbled together; sometimes we fought each other over a particularly good find or job. She was a little younger, maybe twelve, and turning womanly with it. Not in a bad way, though. “Zay, you going?”

  “I guess I will,” I answered, and shrugged. “Got a ticket. You?”

  She held up her ticket for an answer, between thin fingers with broken nails. Then she shook her head, took her ticket and tore it in half, in two jagged pieces, and let it fall to the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I blurted; couldn’t help the knee-jerk appalled feeling, seeing that coveted ticket go to waste. Could’ve sold it premium.

  Virtue looked tense and very, very serious. “Look around. All these mouths heading up toward the Cup. There’ll be prime pickings around here for a while, Zay. Jobs still need doing. We wouldn’t have to come to knives over it. You should stay too.”

  I sent her a long, level look, and said, “You know something wrong about this, V?”

  There wasn’t much to betray it, a slight widening of her eyes, but I knew I’d hit the mark. She shrugged, just a tiny shiver of muscles, and said, “Nobody here to see us off. Don’t you think that’s wrong? It’s like they weren’t allowed.”

  “You think it’s a trap?” I said.

  She frowned for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head. “No proof, but I’m playing it safe. You ought to do the same.”

  Fine, I was thinking, but what if this is all the luck I ever get? How do I let that go? “Hard to pass up something like this. A real holiday, and all.” I knew she was right, and it made me feel hollow and cheated inside, and stubborn. I was a tough boy. I could take care of myself.

  She looked wounded. I knew I’d hurt her; she’d put herself on the line to warn me, and I was throwing it back. “Fine. Go on, get coddled by Corporate. But don’t blame me when I grab the good jobs.” She started to turn away. I held her arm, just for a second.

  “I reckon I’ll go,” I s
aid. “But if this goes sideways, you take it out on somebody for me, hard. Swear.”

  Virtue’s eyes widened, but she was quick to spit on her hand and hold it out. I spit on mine, and we slapped palms. Deal done.

  The trains gave out a heavy, almost human sigh, and the doors opened on every car. Kids shouted and shoved forward, waving their signs and makeshift rag pom-poms. I started to queue up, and Virtue grabbed my arm.

  “What?” I asked. “Deal done, right?”

  “Sure,” she said, and for a second looked outright scared. “Zay, just . . . watch yourself.”

  Before I could answer, Virtue faded back. I saw her Cup ticket halves blowing in the breeze of the tunnel, and then she was a flicker of movement in the sea of pressing bodies.

  Then she was gone.

  I joined the flow and was swept into the nearest car, throwing elbows into those who got too close. Most gave me a wide berth; I was a big, strong kid, and had a rep for a temper. Most didn’t try to cross me. Nobody did, more than once.

  Inside the train, the seats were plush, clean, and a rich shade of red, like fresh blood. I sank down, a little dazed by the metal and the carpets and the softly playing music, as the last of the kids shoved on board and found seats. There was one empty next to me, as others gave me a wide margin of respect. A very small girl, maybe six, was the last one on, clutching her ticket in both hands and looking around in utter terror.

  I grabbed her arm and sat her down in the seat beside me. She let out a yelp of surprise and fear and cowered. I scowled. “Name’s Zay,” I said. “Don’t bother me; I won’t bother you.”

  She blinked. She was a tiny thing, skin and bones really, with masses of soft black hair twisting their way into dreadlocks, and eyes like pools of oil. “Pria,” she said, and tried for a smile. “Thanks for the seat, Mr. Zay.”

  “It’s just Zay; I’m no Corporate drone,” I said, but deep down inside, I was a little pleased. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever called me Mr.

  Pria’s face lit up, and I think she would have talked my damn ear off all the way to the upper levels and the stadium . . . but then the doors hissed open again as a stranger got on board. He was Corporate, there was no doubt of it; he was wearing a black jacket, with the Corporate logo on the pocket, and he had one of those neat, short haircuts and an earpiece, just like you see on the monitor commercials.