Shards and Ashes

  Pria’s eyes were black, but this man’s were dark. It wasn’t the color. It was what was in them. The kids fell silent, sensing a predator, and I did the same, and squeezed Pria’s hand to warn her to be quiet. She didn’t really need that, but I needed to do it.

  “Welcome to your new life of service,” the man said, and took a small, sleek handheld device from his pocket. “I will need ten from this car. Hands up, those who want to volunteer.”

  Nobody moved. Nobody. I don’t even think anybody breathed.

  The man sighed and looked put out about it. “All right. It’s lottery, then. Seat numbers—” He punched something on his keypad and read off a string of randomly generated digits.

  One of them was my seat.

  The other kids were reluctantly standing, pale and shaking. Pria looked at me with horrified eyes, her hand still clutched in mine. “Zay,” she said. “Don’t go!”

  The Corporate drone counted heads, frowned, and I saw him identifying seats and finding me. Our gazes locked. “You,” he said. “Your number is up.”

  I stared at him and let my face go blank and stupid. It was something I was really good at; I could look barely functional when I wanted. I’d learned it from Dad, only his hadn’t really been faked. He’d gotten his from the gasses in the mines.

  “Oh, for the love of— Are you defective?” He shook me. I let some drool wet my chin. “All right, then. You, girl. Get up.”

  He pointed to Pria, and she sucked in a trembling breath and cowered in her seat. No, I wanted to tell her. Fear doesn’t get you anywhere. But that would make me sound way too smart, so I just stared stupidly at the drone and squeezed Pria’s hand once, to let her know I was sorry.

  Then I let go.

  The drone gestured at her to stand up. She did, shaking like bad machinery, and then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell on the clean floor of the train and had a fit.

  It was an outstanding act. Better than mine. Only I wasn’t so sure it was an act at all, because she didn’t look good, and then she started vomiting and choking, and I was pretty sure it was for real after all.

  I snapped out of it and rolled her over onto her side.

  The drone’s disgusted stare snapped from Pria to me in an instant, and he pointed at me. “Not so slow after all, are you?” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Up, boy. Over here.”

  I didn’t have much choice. Sure, I could probably take him in a fight—he was Corporate, not much muscle on him, and for sure he hadn’t been schooled in dirty fighting—but once I did, what then? I didn’t know how to make the train doors open again, and with a lurch, the whole thing began to move anyway.

  No real choice. The man was armed; he could burn me down into a grease stain if he wanted. So I stood up, walked to the group of nine he’d already assembled, and stood there like I was part of it.

  The Corporate drone nodded, touched something on his handheld, and said, “Don’t move, any of you.” Some of the kids still seated were crying; some were just staring down at the tickets clutched in their hands. Nobody really thought that we were going to a game anymore. Or if they did, they were slower than I’d pretended to be.

  The train ran for about thirty long minutes, smooth and swaying, before it pulled to a stop. The doors didn’t open.

  The drone cleared his throat and drew all eyes back to him. “You’re owed a notice, by law, so this is it. We’re over budget. Level K has been exceeding allowable resource levels for five years running. A downsizing order has been given. Your people on the level were notified by drop this morning. You witnessed us choosing random numbers. We try to be fair in any redundancy process.”

  I heard every kid take in a deep breath, but nobody said anything. Even the kids who’d been crying were silent. Redundancy. Somebody was getting the sharp edge of the ax . . . and they’d pulled numbers.

  Seat numbers.

  They were going to kill us purely to save the cost of feeding and clothing us for the next couple of years until we could earn our bread in the mines or the factories. The bottom line was that the Company had too many human resources.

  We were victims of accounting.

  “Everyone still seated, please stay in your seats; the train will continue momentarily.” I barely heard the drone’s voice over the sudden hot rush of blood in my ears. Not that I was scared to die, not at all. . . . Death is pretty much a part of any day on Level K. But I just felt . . . angry. And I was wondering if it would hurt much. Probably not. They needed us gone; torture was just wasted man-hours.

  I could hear the murmurs of the kids in the seats, and they were tinged with relief. We weren’t a sentimental bunch, we K kids. Everybody had to look out for himself. Couldn’t blame them. I’d have been just the same.

  The doors opened, and beyond was a tunnel, dimly lit with long strips of glowing glass in a dirty orange. It was clean, but plain. The drone gestured us out, and after a hesitation, I led the way. Better to go first than last, almost all the time. There wasn’t anywhere to run. Nothing but a barred gate in the wall, and the trains, and walls.

  The drone was the last one out. As I looked down the train, I saw that all the other cars had opened, and drones were leading or hustling out their quotas of ten as well. Ten per train car. Maybe a hundred, total.

  There had been worse Company cullings. All of Level H had been made redundant, after food strikes and riots; nobody knew what had happened, exactly, but there hadn’t been contact with Level H for four years now, and Corporate had just sealed it off and left it with biohazard warnings on all the entrances. Sometimes on K we told each other gruesome ghost stories and dared each other to break in. Nobody ever had. All ten thousand people on H had just . . . vanished. As if they’d never been.

  The Corporate drones in their black jackets and neat haircuts, with their handheld devices, faced the train cars and stood there waiting for something. I saw something flash on our drone’s screen, and he nodded and tapped a control.

  The doors banged shut on all of the train cars at once, and then . . . then the screaming started. It was a few voices at first, then a panicked wave of sound. A freezing feeling came over me, something that numbed me right down to the core.

  I took a step toward the train car. It was stupid, and I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d never looked into that window and met Pria’s dark, panicked eyes. Seen her press her small hands against the window and mouth my name.

  Because I couldn’t help.

  It wasn’t us being made redundant after all. It was those on the train, with their pathetic painted faces and team colors and tattered little banners.

  One thousand nine hundred of them, give or take a few orphans.

  It was maybe a minute before the last screaming fell away.

  I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I had my back to the tunnel’s rounded wall. Around me, others sank to the floor, crying. One girl screamed and tried to run back for the train car—family in there, maybe, or someone close to it. I grabbed her and wrapped my arms around her as she flailed, until she went limp. I still held her, a warm rag-doll weight, because holding on to someone, anyone, felt good just then.

  At least it had been quick. Well, they’d stopped screaming quick. Maybe not the same thing.

  “Process complete,” the drone said, and tapped a command on his handheld.

  The silent, dead train glided on, a smooth and beautiful monster with a stomach full of prey, and the cool breeze blew over us as it picked up speed and pulled away. When the hissing sigh of it was past, the drone turned and looked at us.

  “You’re all employed at Corporate,” he said. “Congratulations. You now hold the job title of dogsbody.”

  A dogsbody is the lowest form of labor available at Corporate, as opposed to the Operations. The old term for it is servant, or slave, but it’s not really either one of those. You’re an employee, and you get paid, but you can’t ever be more than a third-class dogsbody, unless you make it to the top one percent in
your one-year review. If you don’t make the top cut, you get culled. Easy as that. Always new, strong dogsbodies being brought in from the levels to replace you.

  I was a One Percenter at fourteen, and promoted out of third class. By sixteen, I was second-class dogsbody to Senior Management. I was an appliance. A very reliable machine. And for as long as I worked, they’d keep using me, so I kept myself working, ticking along, growing stronger and faster and deadlier every day.

  I could have tried to run; there had been chances, over the years, but running back to the levels was great only if you wanted to die hard, and alone. No, I stayed. I became a good little Corporate drone, and I kept earning promotion credits until one day, just a few days before my seventeenth birthday, my handheld showed me transferred upward to the ultimate top level.

  Dogsbody First Class to Tarrant Clark, Global SVP, Corporate Resources. Where I’d set out to be from that very first moment in the tunnel, listening to those screams, because according to everything I’d been able to look up, he was the man who ordered downsizings. One thousand nine hundred, give or take a few orphans. I wondered if he remembered anything about it. He was a busy man, after all. He probably ordered hundreds of massacres just like it every year.

  I reported for my first day of work to Tarrant Clark’s Residence Office—the Res, in dogsbody slang. The man who opened the door to the Res was named Helman, and the insignia under the Corporate logo on his coat pocket meant that he was classified as Junior Administrative Assistant, and he was young and intense and worried.

  “You’re a big one,” Helman said, looking up at me. I presented him with my handheld. “Xavier Gray. Right. You’ll be working upstairs, with Pozynski.” He pulled out his own handheld, and the two devices talked together silently, then both gave a soft cheep as information was exchanged and verified. Deal done. It was more civilized than spitting on palms.

  “How’s the staff?” That was a question I was allowed to ask of a Junior Admin, and Helman looked pretty casual, in general. “The mood?”

  “Tense,” he said. “Budget’s been running tight this year. Clark’s been in strategy meetings for a week. He’s due back tomorrow. We’re trying to get everything perfect before he arrives, so be prepped for short tempers and long hours.”

  Nothing new to me.

  Helman shut the door with a press of a button, and the lights came up in the entry hall automatically. Clark’s home was the size of an entire level where I’d come up; the hall alone was as big as a small factory, tiled in shiny, rare natural stone and with beautiful art on the walls. I’d never seen better, but then, this was my first time inside one of the Res buildings.

  “He’s had a couple of assassination attempts,” Helman admitted. “That’s why we’re bringing in all new support staff. You came highly reviewed.”

  I knew I had. I had years in Corporate service, wearing the black jacket, my head wired into the earpiece, taking my orders and doing whatever needed to be done, anywhere, anytime. I’d never had to fry a train full of redundant child-workers, though. Not yet, anyway.

  I pointed to the staircase. “Up?”

  “And to the right.” Helman nodded. “Oh, you’ll need to check in with Pozynski, desk at the top of the stairs. She’ll give you the credentials.”

  I nodded and moved on, jogging lightly up the winding staircase toward the second level, and paused in front of a desk on the landing, where a beautiful, willowy blond girl in a well-tailored jacket smiled at me impersonally, our handhelds talked, and she passed me over a plastic bin of things.

  Item one, a pistol, with two extra magazines. I took it out and checked it with professional speed; it was a good weapon, very clean and well machined. It wasn’t a Corporate product; I checked the insignia on the side. Different logo. “We’re buying weapons from Intaglio?” I asked. Intaglio was a direct competitor in arms and food production. Their headquarters were halfway around the world, which had made it a hell of a lot more difficult to bomb them out of existence. Location, location, location.

  “We buy from the vendor with the best price and quality, same as anyone else,” Pozynski said. “Sometimes that’s one of our divisions internally. Sometimes it isn’t. The weapons contract is with Intaglio right now. Problem?”

  I loaded the gun. “No problem,” I said, and slipped it into my empty shoulder rig, under the jacket. Weapons contracts with out-of-company vendors meant people got downsized. My gun had bodies on it, even before I ever fired it.

  Pozynski checked the list and held out a thin metal chain. A collar.

  I didn’t reach for it immediately, and looked at Pozynski, who raised her pale eyebrows. “Everybody here wears them,” she said, and tapped her own with a long, tapered fingernail. “Regulation.”

  I hated it, but I smiled and said, “I just don’t look as good as you in jewelry.”

  That earned me a more genuine smile. “Oh, you’ll look fine.” Pozynski stood on tiptoe to put the collar around my neck and snap it in place. It was a thin braid, and she fiddled with it to pull it down a little, make it more like a decorative object. “There,” she said, and slipped it under my shirt. Her fingers felt cool and sweet against my skin. “If you don’t like the length, just hold it for a few seconds, then pull to drag it lower. If you want it shorter, three taps on the chain to make it contract. It has a safety, you can’t strangle yourself with it accidentally. Got it?”

  “Got it.” I’d worn a collar before, but when I was just starting out. The first year of dogsbody service, everybody wears one. For good behavior. That way, they can end you on a moment’s notice, just by pressing a button on a handheld.

  I thought I was past all that. Guess not. The chain felt thick and heavy around my neck.

  Pozynski pointed up, and up I went. The hallway overlooked the entry hall below—a perfect defensive position, if you were properly armed, because they’d reinforced the wall beneath the banister with ballistic armor. There were gunports, too, though well disguised as ornamental medallions. Position of last resort.

  Well, I was the last resort, because as Clark’s personal first-class dogsbody, I was expected to put myself in front of any danger.

  The second door on the right had a palm scanner, which not only read the whorls and loops of fingerprints but also tested for body temperature and pulsebeats. No cutting off some poor bastard’s hand to trick your way inside.

  I put my hand on the scanner. Light flashed beneath it; there was a soft, approving beep; and the door clicked open.

  I stepped inside, closed it behind me, and immediately registered a change in atmosphere. The carpet was thicker, lusher beneath my polished shoes. The lights were more subdued and elegant. The artwork on the walls was priceless, full of color and swirls and confusion.

  There was another desk at the far end of the room, near a dazzling bank of windows overlooking a false, computer-generated sunrise. Behind it sat a woman of about my own age—thin, serious, dressed in a Corporate jacket like everyone else but with a small golden pin on the lapel that denoted her as Senior Administrative staff. She had brown hair, which she’d pulled up into a tidy coil on top of her head, and although she wasn’t especially pretty—not on the level of Miss Pozynski—she had a certain gravity to her that drew my steps her way. Again, she was young—younger than I was, this time.

  Then she looked up and met my eyes, and I felt a shock of surprise. “Virtue?” I blurted, and immediately stopped myself. My gaze flew to the digital nameplate on her desk. V. Hardcastle, Senior Administrative Assistant. Her real name, the one she’d been born with down in the levels. What the hell was she doing here? She hadn’t been on the train.

  “Zay,” she said, and gave me a smile that was tense and free of any surprise at all. “Welcome to the Res. Handheld?” I gave it to her, still struggling to accept the sight of a familiar face, here. She matched the handheld to hers, orders digitally transferred and confirmed with the audible ping, and then she relaxed a little as she gave the device back
to me. I slipped it into my pocket, and felt my face sliding into a frown.

  “You got me this job,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

  “I felt I needed someone I could trust,” Virtue said. “Like the old days, on the level.”

  I nodded, still measuring this new Virtue. I didn’t know her. A gap of a year in Corporate was more than enough time for someone to shift themselves completely—look at me. I’d gone from a tough, hardscrabble orphan to a tough, hardscrabble orphan with a gun.

  And we’d been apart way more than a year.

  “Relax,” Virtue said, and smiled. I recognized the smile, as I’d recognized the eyes. Warm, guarded, fragile. Her old, familiar smile. “We’re not at knives yet.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  “Yes,” she said. There was a strange flash in her eyes I didn’t understand. “I worked hard enough for it.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “Difference is, I didn’t apply for the job.”

  “I know.” Virtue swallowed hard, not looking away from my eyes. “I told you not to go, Zay. I told you.”

  “You knew. You knew all along, didn’t you?” I’d spent a lot of time not thinking about the Cup Train, and a lot of time feeling way too much; that’s the way of things, when you push them back into dark corners and cage them up. They turn nasty. The surge of rage that swept over me was blinding, and I wanted to grab her by the throat and shake an answer out of her.

  I didn’t have to. She was already talking over me. “I didn’t know, I swear! I just guessed something was wrong. If I’d known, I’d have blown the whistle, Zay. You know that. I just had a tingle, and I heeded it.”

  I believed her. I might not know this present-day Virtue, but that Virtue would have screamed the house down if she’d really known what was going to happen. She wouldn’t have just saved herself. We were cold, we K kids, but not that cold.

  “So why did you hire me?” I asked. “Old times’ sake?”

  “In a sense,” she said, and stood up. “Come with me. I have someone I want you to meet.”