by Taryn Skipper

Download the first three chapters as an e-book, or read below.

 

 

1: Desperate Times Call for Cheese

Teleportation was the ultimate life hack no one could shut up about. An avalanche of praise for my parents’ invention buried any other headlines when they unveiled the teleportation booth network. From painful morning commutes to life-threatening delays in disaster relief, all our problems were solved, they said. A decade later, the severed hand dominating my news feed told a different story.

I lifted my dad’s antique cell phone from my shoebox of assorted components and set it gently onto our pitted linoleum counter, then propped up my phone. In the shaky video, the bodiless hand leaked all over the bottom of a teleportation booth. A delicate, gold chain sparkled against dark blood. Fashionable, probably, but you can’t buy twenty-four-karat gold these days without signing a mountain of waivers. Anyone who passed the booth license exam and got a card knew gold was too dense to teleport. An official-looking person in an Emergency Teleportation Commission windbreaker picked up the bracelet with a white-gloved hand and turned away from the purple booth, angling the charm into the morning light. The other two booths in our block’s row of three stood immediately to the right, and I spotted our beigey-gray apartment building in the background.

I stopped the video and rubbed my jaw, sore from clenching. The sun had set hours ago, and the sky outside my kitchen window finally matched my stabby mood. Every port booth accident made me want to break something, and the news reels hadn’t failed to point out that this one hit less than fifty meters outside the door of the late scientists whose invention it was. My apartment, where my parents spent sleepless nights running calculations and formulas. My home, where I’d pretend to be asleep in the mornings so Dad would roll me up like a breakfast burrito and carry me downstairs. Where they’d tinker with prototypes at the kitchen table until my big sister Nadia ported us home from school. I’d never forgive them for getting themselves killed in the name of science, but they’d devoted their lives to building a better world. It wasn’t fair for the world to remember them only when something tragic happened.

I yanked open the silverware drawer and dug until I found the paring knife with the broken tip. It might have snapped when I’d pried the housing off our toaster, but who could tell, really? And now it was the perfect size for the screws on my latest project.

I popped open the old phone’s casing and hurried to remove the screws holding the guts together. Everything would go dark in half an hour, when the Emergency Teleportation Commission throttled overnight power to charge the teleportation booths’ emergency backup batteries. I had enough time to desolder the obsolete pairing chip and make room for a faster one with more range.

I understood the need to regulate power, but the lack of nighttime electricity ranked high on my list of ways the ETC managed to annoy me, right up there with their stingy tech policies. Someday, I would submit the application with the ETC to purchase an actual soldering iron. For now, I plugged in Nadia’s curling wand. It would do until she caught me.

My gaze drifted out the window to our leaf-strewn street while I waited for the wand to heat. Our row of teleportation booths stood a few meters down in muted colors I’d named day-old-bruise purple, gaslight blue, and pustule mustard. Bright safety lights reflected off the glossy plastic walls, and a scrap of leftover police tape still fluttered against the light post, tainting my parents’ legacy. The glow from the next row of booths shone between apartment buildings, about halfway down the block.

Blinking red light flashed around the edges of the middle booth’s door, indicating an incoming user. Seconds later, a delivery person balancing a stack of four pizzas exited the booth, pushing the gray-blue door open with his elbow and then letting it glide shut behind him. The design firm behind the booths’ aesthetic called it a “tonal postmodern minimalist” look. To me, they looked like a cell phone from the 1990s and a fridge from the 1950s had a sad, beige baby.

The light on Nadia’s curling wand changed from red to green. I pulled a silicone oven mitt out of the drawer and used it to grasp the wand close to the end. I held a paper clip against the metal to create a smaller soldering tip and focused on reworking only the solder holding the chip in place, and not destroying anything else. It would take more patience than I could usually scrounge up, but I had to get this right. I couldn’t work in FutureMove’s teleportation labs until I finished school, which cost money I didn’t have. So if I wanted to make progress improving booth safety, I had to get creative.

My parents founded FutureMove with their buddy from grad school, Dr. Shane Clarke, almost twenty years ago. They enjoyed ten years running headlong into research and development of better and faster tech, plus another five free years after they opened the teleportation booth network, before the ETC took regulatory control over the company and implemented safety measures. My parents pushed back against the restrictions for another year until their luck ran out and they died in their lab. I was thirteen when they sliced my heart to shreds, and for the past four years, every report of an avoidable injury twisted the knife a little deeper. The device I was building would be a massive step toward ending these stupid accidents for good.

One of my hearing aids chimed. Low battery. I didn’t have a free hand for that; one held the wand and the other steadied the wand’s end, ready to pull the chip away. The solder points started to give. Almost there . . . Got it! I set the curling wand down, and the paper clip stuck to it. I’d melted it to the wand’s plastic cap. Oops. Nadia would flip when she saw it, but she’d forgive me once I made this remote work.

The old phone, my dad’s ancient Gooseberry, had lain abandoned in his nightstand drawer well past its prime. But it ran the Goose operating system, same as the port booths. Since it was an older phone, it didn’t have as much dense metal to replace as a slightly newer model would, and the touch screen and physical buttons made it the perfect vessel for my DIY booth remote. Once I installed a longer-ranged pairing chip, I’d be able to communicate with the port booth from a distance, changing settings and destinations without having to stand inside. I’d risk only whatever dense metal I used for testing, and keep my extremities attached while I foolproofed port booth safety.

If I could demonstrate successful safety upgrades, the ETC overlords would release their clutches on FutureMove, my parents would finally receive the caveat-free respect they deserved, and I’d have a job at the company. My own headlines would roll in: “Alyona Zolotova, Genius Daughter of Teleportation’s Inventors, Perfects What They Started.” Nadia and I would both gain access to the best tools on the market, whether for soldering circuits or curling ringlets.

But I wouldn’t make my debut in anyone’s news feed—at least not for anything good—until I made a lot more progress, and my next move required a second body. I preferred to work solo, like an angsty lone-bat action hero, with no one around to hear me mumbling half-formed thoughts out loud. But when my work required the help of an eager sidekick, I was lucky to have the best one ever close at hand. I squatted at the kitchen vent by my feet, which carried anything I shouted straight into my downstairs neighbor’s living room.

“Hey! Jax! Get up here for a minute!” I picked up my laptop and a clipboard and patted my back pocket to make sure my trusty set of lock picks were there, ready to assist with the next step of my plan.

Jaxon Jeong’s familiar knock sounded, and I tugged open my sticky front door. My bestie’s navy sweats, Boba Fett t-shirt, and dark, tousled hair worked together to remind me why Nadia didn’t allow boys in the apartment while she wasn’t home.

Too bad I’d friend-zoned myself two years ago. He’d ported us to a quiet park on the south side of town and asked me to his senior prom. The shock of Jaxon acting out a scene I’d fantasized sent me into vocal arrest. I stared at him, silent and unblinking, slowly stepping backward into the booth. I punched in some random numbers and ended up fifteen miles away at a cheese festival where I sampled brie until I felt like it was safe to go home. I’d avoided the subject—and soft cheeses—ever since.

I pointed at his ocean-blue socks with swirling yellow jellyfish. “You should have worn shoes, Baby Shark. We’re going on a field trip.”

Jaxon smiled and leaned against the door frame. “So nice to see you, too, Alyona. No, I wasn’t doing anything important.”

“This is way more important than whatever textbook you were probably reading down there. It’s my second-to-last step.” My Gooseberry remote would provide a quick and efficient path to my last step: to fix whatever fault my parents didn’t eliminate in their quest to teleport denser materials.

“Is this a walking excursion, or should I grab my bike?” Jaxon lifted his left pant leg, revealing a dull metal bracelet locked around his ankle. He’d been growing his ridiculous sock collection as long as I’d known him, but the disciplinary accessory was only added to his wardrobe about a month ago. The dense, tungsten core made it impossible for him to port, keeping him close to the ETC’s parental presence.

“We’re walking to the booths, but not going in. You know those maintenance devices the tech guys connect to install updates?”

“Yeah?”

“I made my own. Almost.” It currently sat nested among various parts and tools on the counter, a baby booth fix, nearly ready to hatch. “I can pick up a pairing chip tomorrow morning, so I want to get the booth end set up to receive a signal in the meantime.” My other hearing aid chimed. They’d both run out of batteries by the end of the night, and I couldn’t get new ones until the swaps opened up the next day.

“Wow, Aly, that’s legit!”

A smile sneaked across my face. I loved that nickname. Nadia dropped the a sometimes and called me Alyon, or she’d call me the cutesiest version of my name, Alyonushka, to annoy me. Only Jaxon called me Aly.

I polished my uneven fingernails on my shirt. “Yeah, I’m awesome.”

Jaxon gestured for me to lead the way with a flourish and a bow. I tucked my laptop and clipboard under my arm, curtsied, and headed outside toward the booths. Jaxon followed, shoeless and ready for shenanigans. For him, my tinkering was an excuse to hang out. While I was always glad to have Jaxon time, for me, taking things apart and finding new ways to put them back together helped me feel in control when so much around me was broken.

“So you’ll be able to talk to booths with this thing? Make them obey your every command like a cyberpunk supervillain?”

I turned, walking backward to face him, and tapped my fingers together. “Mwa-haha! My evil plan is nearly complete. I need to plug in directly because the ETC is actually smart enough not to allow remote account creation.” They at least tried to keep FutureMove data secure, which made my experiment more complicated. Another thing to add to my list of good but annoying ETC moves.

A breeze sent a chill through the October air, and the hairs on my arms stood up. I should have grabbed my jacket, but I’d been too excited to consider bodily comfort. Or maybe the goosebumps were due to the fact that we’d be messing with the booths out in the open, where it was much easier to be caught. I’d planned the operation for the quiet time before the power cut out and nighttime security made rounds, but I couldn’t guarantee no one would come by.

I aimed for the circuit breaker first. “Hold these,” I said, extending the clipboard and laptop to Jaxon.

Jaxon took them and waved the clipboard in the air. “There’s nothing on this.”

“Well, don’t show the whole block.”

Jaxon pulled the clipboard down and hid his face behind it. “Sorry.”

“It doesn’t need to have anything on it. It’s risk mitigation. Hold it up and smile at anybody coming to or from a booth, and they’ll assume we’re official.” It would work fine for the general public, but I’d get in and out as fast as my fingers could go. An empty clipboard wouldn’t do us any good if an ETC patrol came by.

I pulled my lockpick set from my back pocket and opened the thin wallet-style holder. The padlock hanging from the breaker box was a popular and easily bypassed brand. It wouldn’t take any finesse, so I chose the rake pick. I placed a narrow tension wrench just inside the keyway and pressed gently in the direction the lock would turn. Then I scraped the thin, bumpy rake pick quickly across the lock’s internal pins a few times, knocking them above the sheer line. I popped the lock in four seconds flat, opened the breaker door, and swapped the padlock for my laptop with Jaxon.

“Okay, look.” I pointed to the second breaker down on the left. “When I say so, flip this switch off and then on again.”

“I can handle that.” Jaxon made a flicking motion in the air.

“But not too fast, it has to power down, and then back up again. But not too slowly, because—”

“Aly, I know how to flip a breaker.”

“And only that second left one, not the—”

Jaxon tilted his head and gave me his “I’m not an idiot” look. I felt terrible when he did that. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, I only wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. This was the most important project I’d ever nearly completed.

“Alright, hold on.” I pried open the rubbery cover on the booth’s USB port and plugged in a cable connecting my laptop to the base of the far-left booth, the day-old-bruise-purple one. Locals only used the right two, even before this morning’s hand incident. A couple years ago, neighborhood kids found a platinum skull ring on the floor of the left one, still attached to an oozing finger. Rumor had it someone who used to work at FutureMove lost it going on the lam after claiming on social media that my parents’ experiment was tampered with. The post was debunked, but the kids named the booth Slaughterbox, and it retained a reputation no one on the block wanted to test.

I crouched and plugged my laptop into the other end of the cable. “Ready?”

Jaxon nodded.

“Now!”

Jaxon flipped the switch off and then back on. “Uh oh.” He turned his head away from the breaker box and peered down the street.

“You did great. I’m hijacking the boot sequence now. I just have to—”

“No, the sirens. Are they coming closer?”

I scratched the back of my hearing aids. No static feedback meant the batteries had reached the end of their usefulness. It was like putting on earmuffs. Without my hearing aids, I couldn’t distinguish consonants, and background noise became nonexistent. “You tell me. My ears are dead.”

Jaxon craned his neck toward the street outside our neighborhood. Few people drove anymore, including the police. But the new tungsten-coated handcuffs couldn’t teleport, so they kept it old-school and took arrestees downtown by car.

I finally heard the wail of the slow siren as it reached a lower frequency. It was coming closer, all right. The police had no reason to be looking for us, but we didn’t need to give them one standing here plugged in, clipboard or no. My fingers shook as they raced across the keyboard, giving myself admin access and creating a backdoor listener for my future pairing chip.

> add user system_patch42--password ‘k4r4t3Pr13$tbh’

> add user system_patch42--group admin

[+] Admin account created

>

> pchip_listen--mode pair

[+] Awaiting pairing request . . .

“Done! Lock it up. Let’s go.” I jumped up and ran homeward.

Jaxon clicked the padlock into place and jogged after me on his toes. “You owe me new socks for this. The ground is still dirty from the snow last week.”

I turned and stepped backwards to answer him. “You got it, Jax. I’ll find you the most random, outrageous socks ever made.”

Jax waggled his eyebrows. “Now you’re speaking my love language.”

I faced forward again so he wouldn’t see the color blooming in my cheeks.

If I’d gone to the booths alone, I would have simply teleported anywhere the police weren’t. Despite the dangers of porting, the thrill of knowing I could move through space at incomprehensible speeds hadn’t dulled since my first trip. My mom was first to port across state lines, and I’d been second when we picked up the design firm’s representatives in San Francisco. Looking back, I was naive to trust her with my life on a semi-inaugural long-distance port like that. But that’s how kids are. I’d grown up since the accident.

I wrenched my front door open, set the laptop on the table, and pumped my arms into the air as I spun around to face Jaxon. “Yes! Jax, we did it!”

Jaxon held up his watch hand. “And we did it in . . . perfect . . . wait for it . . . time!”

The lights in the apartment blinked out, which meant we had about an hour before Nadia got home from her date.

“What’s the last step, now?” Jaxon said.

My mind produced several ideas for steps to take in the dark with Jaxon, but he moved to the fridge. He opened the dark refrigerator a crack, slipped his arm in, pulled out a crinkly package, and slammed the door. Nadia had drilled into both of us how dangerous it was to open the fridge while the power was out. According to her, everything would rot, and we’d die of food poisoning. Our neighbors had upgraded to models with power reserves to keep food cold at night, but they cost more than Nadia made in several paychecks.

The rechargeable light I’d rigged above the kitchen table clicked on, illuminating the half-empty bag of shredded cheddar Jaxon held like a bucket of popcorn.

“Now,” I said, “you hand me some cheese, and we find the tech swap location for tomorrow so I can get my pairing chip. Everything else is ready to roll, thanks to your breaker-flipping prowess.”

“I’m a flippin’ boss, yo.”

“Once I add that chip, I’ll be able to shoot whatever I put in that booth to any other booth, all from the outside.” I flicked a piece of pocket lint toward Jaxon and made a pew noise to illustrate.

Jaxon dodged. “I assume that’s not a part they carry at the government swaps?”

I let out a sarcastic laugh, shaking my head as I sat at my laptop and logged in to the underground message boards.

The ETC had legal tech swap locations all over the city. But at the right—or wrong—places, you could find less-legal, highly regulated tech by trading in other interesting parts. Those hidden gems showed up at different locations every Saturday, and every Friday I had to hack my way through a series of clues to the hidden port booth code and directions.

Jaxon took the chair next to me. I reached for the cheese, and he slapped my hand. “No celebratory snack for you until you dig up that location code. And hustle. Your battery is low.”

He reached across my screen and pointed at the power indicator in the lower right corner. I slapped his hand back.

“Did’ko,” I said, borrowing my mom’s favorite Ukrainian curse. I’d had the laptop on since I called Jaxon through the vent, and it seemed to be draining faster every day. The power would be out for another seven hours.

For normal people.

“No problem, I’ll take a quick detour through the grid and turn our electricity back on for a while.” A few weeks ago, I’d left a couple of USB drives in FutureMove bathrooms loaded with a spreadsheet titled “next fiscal year raises and layoffs” and waited for someone to open them. The spreadsheet contained macros that, when enabled, would install a keylogger. From there, I had an AI chat bot parse through everything the unsuspecting employees typed into their keyboards. I’d found one employee’s fall down a rabbit hole about time zones on the moon, and another who liked to write out email responses to his superiors with colorful descriptions of where they could shove their requests, and then delete them. Whatever gets you through your day, I guess. More importantly, I’d found a few functional passwords.

“Stay on target!” Jaxon said, waving cheese in my face. “Just find the location code quickly. The ETC will never let you work at FutureMove if they catch you breaking in. Or you can wait for next week’s swap.”

I shook my head. “That’s where you’re wrong.” I grabbed him by the shoulders “I can’t wait another minute, let alone a week. I’m too close!” I gave him a playful shake.

Jaxon let his head flop around. “Okay, okay.”

The power grid software wasn’t accessible from the internet, but some numbskull had connected a FutureMove printer to the internet for updates. From the printer port, I took control of a FutureMove computer terminal on the internal network. Whatever I did on the terminal would appear on its monitor, visible to anyone passing by. But it was well after hours, and this wasn’t my first digital rodeo. I opened the power grid software with one of my stolen passwords and entered the non-gendered version of our last name, Zolotov, into the customer lookup field and pulled up my account. I hovered the mouse over the slider to override power restrictions and—a big red no battery symbol flashed onto my screen, and it went black.

Oh no.

My chest squeezed inward, and I grabbed the edge of the table. This was bad. I’d left my account wide open on an unmanned FutureMove terminal, with a cursor arrow pointing out my plan, like a big sign saying “Alyona was here.” I wouldn’t be able to fix anything if I got myself banned from my parents’ company.

Jaxon slapped his forehead. “Oh, no.” His hand slid down to his cheek, and he passed me what was left of the cheese.

I stuffed a pinch of shreds into my mouth and wrangled my reeling brain. “We need power, quick.”

Jaxon and I scoured the kitchen for a power source. My stomach dropped lower every second. The longer my name sat up there on the terminal, the better chance some ETC overnight grunt with no life would see it and ruin mine.

I made myself breathe so my brain wouldn’t go as blank as my monitor. “Check the junk drawer. Power banks, batteries, any size—”

“How about your phone?”

“Not a chance. My phone holds all my hopes and dreams. I can’t risk it.” And by hopes and dreams I meant notes and schemes, and some of the last pictures I’d taken with my parents. It was long overdue for an upgrade, but I couldn’t risk hurting it. They’d surprised me with it, told me I was old enough, and that they trusted me with technology. I literally slept with it under my pillow.

Jaxon reached for his back pocket. “Then, my phone?”

“No way.” I pointed to his ankle. He’d already been arrested for phone-related charges. “In fact, you should head home. I don’t want you guilty by association if they come for me.” My heart pounded in my ears.

Jaxon shook his head and pointed at the light above the table. “That’s still got a charge!”

“Yes!” I climbed up on the table and pulled the batteries out of the light, casting the kitchen into uneven shadows. I lost my balance and Jaxon shot out of his seat to steady me. Alright, stop panicking and think. The batteries would work to keep my laptop running for a while once it started, but I didn’t want to drain them during the more power-intensive boot phase. I needed something else to give it an initial boost.

I scanned the room from my elevated vantage point and my eyes rested on the microwave.

“The capacitor!” If it could start a microwave older than Nadia, it could boot a laptop. “We need to remove the cover. Jax, go to my room and find the screwdriver. It’s under the bed, inside my left softball shoe. If you find bolts, check the right shoe.”

“Aly, breathe. You’ve got batteries. The light’s cover comes off without—”

“No, the microwave, for the quick burst . . . just, screwdriver, please!”

Jaxon turned on his phone’s flashlight and jogged up the stairs, shaking his head. Red and blue lights caught my eye from the kitchen window. The flashing crept between buildings at the end of my street. Safety patrols by car? There was nothing illegal about taking a microwave apart, but my heartbeat surged anyway. I ducked my head down and hopped off the table.

Jax came back downstairs and started removing a screw at the back of the microwave.

I pulled the screwdriver out of his hand. “I’ve got this. You go watch for Nadia. She’ll be back soon, and she’ll be in a bad mood.” She’d reached the point in her relationship when she usually came up with a reason to dump the dude. Finding me taking apart another appliance with a boy in the apartment would put her over the edge.

“You don’t trust me with a screwdriver?” Jaxon pouted.

I forced my focus away from his lips and back to the task at hand. “It’s not that I don’t trust you.” I struck a pose with the back of my hand to my forehead and put on my therapist’s British accent. “I have deep-seated control issues stemming from childhood trauma, and I’ll never let anyone close enough to trust them with even the most mundane of tasks.” I joked, but the Social Services-mandated counselor wasn’t far off. Just one of many flaws helping kill off any chance of ever leaving the friend zone with Jax.

“No, you’re just a control freak,” Jaxon said with a smirk.

Also true.

“I’ll take Nadia watch,” he said.

“Thanks, Jax. And see if you can tell what the police are slow-rolling around in cars for.” When my hearing aids were working, I could hear Nadia coming. Sort of. I’d connected my hearing aids to her phone’s location data with an applet that announced her proximity into my ears. But they’d run out of juice, and I was glad to help Jaxon feel useful.

I held my breath as I removed the microwave’s capacitor and tried to avoid shocking myself—a task complicated by the lack of light. I pictured my name still on the FutureMove terminal, glowing brightly on the power override screen without authorization. My heartbeat pounded in my temples.

After much finagling and a few curse words, I’d beaten the batteries and capacitor into submission and hovered my finger over my laptop’s power button. “Moment of truth!”

“You have this. No way anyone had time to see anything.”

“Well, there’s no way to know, barring a knock at the door. But I can at least stop advertising my own ineptitude.”

“Oh, good,” Jaxon said. “We’ll keep your ineptitude between us.”

I looked up to glare at him and caught him standing with his back to the window, holding my baby album up to the scant light and smiling like a buffoon.

“Jax! You’re supposed to be the lookout!”

“But you’re so cute!”

As a baby, he meant. Everybody’s cute as a baby. The fluttering in my chest was probably my worry over whether I was about to blow up my computer, or Nadia’s impending arrival. I may avoid ETC discipline, but my sister’s disappointment would be equally awful.

Jaxon shifted his focus to the street and immediately dropped to his hands and knees. “So, don’t panic, but there’s an ETC guy walking straight for your front door. Like, ten seconds away.”

Panic choked out my next breath, despite Jaxon’s instructions. I dived over the back of the couch. My foot knocked the decor on the side table—a defunct computer laid on its side and filled with marbles and trinkets. I pushed the decoration back into place to avoid a loud spill, and then grabbed Jax by the arm. I would not let him be seen here with my tech project and give the ETC an excuse to extend his probation. He fast-crawled as I dragged him across the living room and pushed him against the wall on the far side of the bookshelf. I willed time to stop so that I could freeze there with him for a few seconds.

Harsh pounding on the front door made me jump into the shelf. Someone must have seen my unauthorized meddling on the terminal. I’d taken too much time.

The pounding came again, five fist-slams into the door. “ETC. Open up.”

I didn’t have a chance to hide my new tech or pretend I wasn’t home before the door swung wide and a tall figure in an ETC windbreaker barged into my kitchen.

 

 

2: The Dread Pirate Manbun 

The ETC security goon clicked on a flashlight and swept the beam around the main floor of the apartment. He seemed overdressed for night patrol in dark jeans, pointed leather shoes, and a blazer peeking out from under his black windbreaker. Great. I’d gone and ticked off their leader.

“Alyona Zolotova?”

I flinched into the shelf and managed to catch a textbook before it fell onto my foot. “Can I help you?”

The flashlight’s beam landed on my face. “You can save us both a little time. I have to get back to HQ. So, if I were to perform a search of these premises, would I find any unauthorized files or tech configurations?”

I did my best to take a slow, even breath. “Um, no, sir.” Definitely nothing to find in my desk, in my backpack, or sitting on the kitchen counter. Or a few centimeters from my knee in the hollowed-out book where Mom kept thumb drives with backups of their research. Or in the bottom of the giant can of dried lentils in the cabinet above the fridge, where she kept her backups of the backups. I hoped this would be the only question, and he’d be gone before Nadia came home. But that seemed far too easy.

The executive-looking agent tilted his head, his high bun bouncing against his shaved undercut. He was missing the ball cap with ETC on the front that usually completed the uniform, probably because it wouldn’t have fit over his bun. He moved the beam slowly along the rows of books on the shelf. “We’ve heard reports of tomfoolery in these parts. Care to explain?”

Tom-what now? “Sir?”

“Malarkey. Hijinks. Skullduggery.” He pulled a fist up to his chest as he said the last word in a poorly executed pirate voice.

Just when I thought the situation couldn’t get any more confusing, Nadia pushed past Captain ManBun and kissed him on the cheek. “Well, now you’ve ruined it,” she said.

ManBun laughed. “I felt bad, Nad. The look on her face . . .”

“You’re such a softy, lapochka moya.” She placed her pale hand onto his olive cheek and followed the term of endearment with another peck to the lips.

Yuck. The tension in my chest melted into a puddle of annoyance.

“Oh, no,” I said, using the book in my hand to point to my sister and her kiss buddy. “Tell me this isn’t some kind of scared-straight gag.”

Nadia giggled. “I was telling him tonight how I could almost guarantee you’d have another appliance completely disassembled before I got home. We thought it would be funny.”

“Oh, did we?” I said, frowning.

ManBun pulled Nadia into a loose hug. “I do have to run though, babe. The on-call engineer pinged me about some red flag on the network. I have to go in.”

My ears tingled. Some red flag named Alyona Zolotova? Maybe. But if Nadia’s new pirate-talking boy toy was the one in charge of catching me, maybe I didn’t have anything to worry about.

Nadia pouted and ManBun brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Freaking mandatory sweeps for every digital bump in the night. I wish I could stay. I’d love to get to know Alyona and her friend.” ManBun turned his smirking face to the dark half of the room by the bookshelf and pegged a spotlight on Jaxon squatting against the wall. “Find what you need over there, pal?”

Jaxon stood too quickly and hit his shoulder on the TV stand. “Ouch. Yeah, no, I guess you don’t have that book, Alyona.”

Nadia broke from the hug to nail me down with her eye daggers. “Alyona! No boys when I’m gone. You know that.”

I shot an eye knife of my own toward ManBun. Way to go tipping off my sister, you eagle-eyed rat. “We were just—”

“Studying,” Jaxon said.

Nadia repositioned ManBun’s arm to point the light at the book in my hand. “You’re studying Human Anatomy and Physiology together? In the dark?”

My ears burned and my fingers longed to throttle the extraneous man in our apartment for complicating my life. I hefted the book. “No, Nadia, not this one. Anyway, you’d better let this guy go.” Forever.

ManBun winked at me. “Unfortunately, yes. But I think it’s great you’re playing with electronics. Best way to learn. I remember giving myself a good shock with a battery and some copper wire about your age. Great to finally meet you.”

My ears burned hotter, embarrassment shifting to rage. He was ten years older than me, tops, the condescending jerk. I was seventeen, not a child goofing around with a circuitry kit.

ManBun and his snitching flashlight finally left, and Jaxon followed him out the door with a quick salute.

I took control of the conversation before Nadia could lay into me. She was already upset, and she hadn’t seen what we’d done to the kitchen. “So, how was Monte Cristo?”

Nadia tried and failed to keep her glare in place. Her eyebrows relaxed into rainbow shapes as she hugged her purse. “Perfect. The trip was perfect, he’s perfect . . . but Monte Cristo is a sandwich.”

“Oh, yeah.” With swiss. “Monte . . .”

“Carlo.” She closed her eyes. “Like a fairy tale. Oh!” Nadia reached into her jacket pocket. “Look what the ocean pushed right up to our feet on our walk! It’s perfect.” She held up a smooth, beige, heart-shaped pebble and placed it on top of the marbles in the computer decoration.

I snatched it back out on impulse. The yellowed, boxy computer had been Dad’s first. He’d refused to throw it out. Too full of memories, he’d said, even if the hard drive didn’t have enough memory to run a modern program. Mom filled it halfway with blue and green marbles, topped them with a shell she’d found on their honeymoon, and called the piece “Memory Marbles.” No way I could let Nadia put some dude’s rock next to the tiny umbrella from Dad’s coconut drink and the clay bead I found on a hike with Mom.

“Hey!” she protested.

I took a breath and reminded myself to choose my battles, just for tonight. “Sorry, I wanted a better look.” I pushed it into a corner until it was half-concealed by marbles. “How does he get to port across the world like that?” Dad had insisted the port grid remain cost-free for Denver’s users, and Mom had convinced the city to keep the clause in their contract by arguing that the Regional Transportation Department would save over a billion dollars annually by switching from bus and light rail to porting. But international porting was not cheap.

“As head of security, his booth card has priority clearance. He’s amazing.” She squinted at me. “What do you have in your hair?”

I raked my fingers through my dark-brown mane. It was cheese, but she didn’t need to know that. “So, you’re not at the breakup stage yet?”

The typical maternal edge seeped back into Nadia’s voice. “Of course not. We should set up a double date. He might be the one, and I think he and Jaxon would get along.”

My cheeks turned pink, and I hoped Nadia’s voice wasn’t carrying down the vent. “Jaxon isn’t . . .” I said in a low voice. Jaxon wasn’t into me like that anymore. I’d blown my chance, and he’d dated a couple of randos in the interim. I was grateful our friendship reverted to normal. I needed him too much to risk making things awkward again.

Nadia plucked another piece of cheese out of my hair and grimaced. “Well?”

I appreciated the gist of her suggestion. She didn’t tell me much about the guys she liked anymore, or anything overly personal since our relationship status changed from “sisters” to “it’s complicated.” Mama Nadia was great, but Team Siblings got pretty lonely when she’d taken the promotion to parent. She must really like this joker.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m booked for a while. I’ve got some copper wire to wrap around a battery.”

“Oh, lighten up. He was only trying to connect with the electronics talk.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Speaking of lightening up, why is it so dark in here?” Nadia reached for the kitchen light switch.

I pulled her into a side hug and veered left before she realized I’d taken the light apart. “You must be exhausted, right?”

“I suppose I could sleep. We walked half the city. They don’t allow porting anywhere near the tourist areas over there. I’d almost forgotten how nice it was to stroll, hand-in-hand, under the stars . . .”

“That sounds, like, so amazing,” I deadpanned. What did sound amazing was the prospect of getting upstairs to finally get my search off that ETC screen. Then maybe cloning Manbun’s booth card sometime, and making it look like he was going about his business while Jax and I found our own non-heart-shaped beach rocks. “I want to hear all about it over breakfast.”

“No, you don’t.” Nadia laughed. “Good night, love you, Alyonushka.”

“’Night, babe.”

Nadia growled at my kissy face and left up the stairs. I’d spared myself her wrath, but only for the night.

She’d most likely kill me in the morning.

 

3: Trouble Afoot

Natural light trickled into my windowless bedroom from the hallway. I pulled my phone out from under my pillow, turned off my alarm, and opened the news feed before heading down to whatever breakfast Nadia made.

Nadia started in on me before I even made it into her line of sight. “Chto za yerunda, Alyona! What did you do?”

I backed up a step.

“I heard you. I know you’re there.”

Curse that squeaky step and curse my dead hearing aid batteries for not warning me I’d hit it.

I plodded down the rest of the stairs. Nadia held her melty curling wand like an injured kitten, pulling at the paperclip I’d accidentally attached.

“It was maimed for a good cause, I promise. I’m about to eradicate booth accidents.” Getting closer to eradicating them, anyway.

Nadia raised an eyebrow, and I tilted my phone toward her so she could watch the replay of the hand incident. She paled and turned away.

Just as I shoved an entire slice of bread into my mouth, my phone vibrated in my hand. I recognized the special buzzing pattern I used only for Jaxon. Chewing furiously, I checked my reflection in the microwave door. Mornings were not kind.

Nadia smirked. “You’d better answer. I’m not sure how long you two can go without talking before you implode.”

I glared at her and raked my fingers through my hair.

Nadia tucked a flyaway lock behind my ears, and then patted my curls. “There’s no helping this hair without my wand. But he’s seen you looking way worse and hasn’t run yet.”

I turned abruptly from my reflection. “I’m checking for crumbs. I don’t care how I look.” My face flushed. I angled toward the window and hoped the light would wash out my ruddy skin tone.

Jaxon’s winking picture floated above the words Accept Video Chat?

I swiped yes.

Jaxon leaned against a wrought-iron park bench, his road bike visible behind him.

“What’s up, biker boy?” I said. “You forget it’s the weekend?”

“Biker man, thank you. I had to get out before my upstairs neighbor started stomping around in search of Crunch Munchies cereal.”

“Shut up, you and your kale smoothies are so jealous. Sweet helmet, by the way.”

Jaxon knocked the side of a neon pink bike helmet and flashed me his exaggerated fashion model smile. He had no idea how gorgeous he was, the giant dork. Meanwhile, the light from the window had only managed to highlight my halo of frizzy, unbrushed hair.

“Safety first. I’m glad I’m biking instead of porting. Yesterday’s accident is still all over the feed.”

“What are you watching the news feed for? Aren’t you supposed to be preparing for your interview? Procrastination scrolling is my thing.”

“I got a decent amount of prep in before I was so rudely interrupted last night.”

Nadia squished into the chair with me and pushed her head into view of the video call. “Jaxon, are you getting a new job?”

“Hi, Nadia.” He waved at the phone. “Tutoring for pay on campus. They’ve got a sister university in San Diego, where I’m hoping I’ll work at least some days once my probation is over.”

I squeezed Nadia’s arm. “Work-study jobs get a guaranteed interstate port pass. We’re hitting the beach!”

“If you convince me to let you in the booth with me. Better be nice.” Jaxon’s curved lips distracted me from whatever else he might have said.

I hip-checked my sister off my chair. “Plus he’ll get free elective credit. His parents will only pay for college if he chooses a business major. But he wants, what, Anthropology-something, right?”

“Social Anthropology, yeah,” Jaxon said. “But the interview isn’t until Monday and the news reels are making me nervous about interstate porting. I am somewhat partial to my limbs.”

Nadia walked to the sink, jerked the handle on the dripping faucet, and filled her mug. “The booths aren’t supposed to allow anything to teleport when they detect heavy metals. FutureMove had a company-wide meeting about it when we completed the density sensors.”

“And you’d trust your life to that? Even after the sensor install, people lost body parts and mutilated a cemetery’s worth of cell phones.”

I pulled the last two slices of bread out of the bag on the table. “If I wore jewelry, I’d play it safe and give up gold altogether. Maybe switch to a nice string of pearls.”

“It’s those anarchist hackers we can’t trust,” Nadia said, taking a drink from her mug. My boyfriend says the ETC is tracking down their leadership.” She pulled her fuchsia lips into an angry pout. “What kind of person hurts others for fun?”

Jaxon snickered. “My dentist.”

I sighed at his dad joke and set the phone face-down.

“Hey!” Jaxon said.

I leaned back in my chair. “The ETC probably wants a scapegoat for when their safety measures don’t work. Either way, porting is perfectly safe when people take responsibility for what they’re porting with instead of relying on the ETC. Why put your life in their hands?”

“Or put your hands in their hands, as the case may be. You’ll lose them faster than a medieval thief,” Jaxon wheezed in his I’m-so-hilarious voice.

I propped up the phone and made a face like the laugh-crying emoji. “So funny.” Jaxon swore his nerdy humor helped the kids he tutored remember the facts, but I wasn’t sure how they hadn’t strangled him.

“Voobshe, Alyona.” We’d unleashed Nadia’s inner babushka. “That was a real person, you know. With people who love her. Uzhasno. Not funny.”

I shook my head at Jaxon. “Seriously, dude, have some decorum.” I sneaked him a grin, but Nadia was right, as usual. I put up a good front most of the time and tried to avoid investing emotion into every tragedy on the news—I had my own to manage. But I couldn’t ignore this accident, right in our own row of booths. I had to get that pairing chip today.

My sister punched some non-responsive buttons on the microwave and whirled around. “Alyona.” Cold tea water splashed onto the counter as Nadia banged her mug down.

The noise was muffled with my hearing aids dead, but I still winced.

“I thought I said no more tampering with kitchen appliances. Now you’ve ruined the microwave and the stove. I can’t even make tea. I’d have some toast instead but . . .” She picked up what was once the toaster lever and dropped it back into the pile of assorted metal parts.

I held up the empty bread bag. “We’re out of bread, anyway.”

Nadia glared at me under her long lashes.

“And you shouldn’t microwave your tea, Nadia. I don’t trust those things.”

“Alyona!”

“I’ll fix it,” I said. “The microwave is easy. I needed to borrow the capacitor last night.”

Jaxon clicked his tongue at me from the phone. “For shame,” he said as if he hadn’t helped me take the thing apart himself.

“Whatever, just put it back,” said Nadia.

I couldn’t put it back; the capacitor was blackened and smelled like the fresh excrement of a sickly robot. “It’ll be working by tomorrow. Jaxon and I are going on a parts swap.”

“That’s what you said last week about the stove.” Nadia wrapped her ridiculous fuzzy pink scarf around her bleached, flat-ironed hair. She normally curled it after she straightened it—which struck me as maddeningly inefficient given our natural curls—but I’d made that impossible. I added the curling wand to my mental list of transgressions to make right. Oven, toaster, microwave, kitchen light, curling iron. Maybe she’d relax if I fixed everything in one go.

“It will, I promise,” I said. “And don’t forget the bread on your way home.” I shoved the last morsel of pumpernickel into my mouth.

Nadia sneered on her way out the door, as intimidating as an angry baby bunny. “Can you at least resist the urge to destroy anything else today?”

“I prefer the term reverse-engineer.” I blew her an exaggerated kiss and a few dark crumbs. “Love you. Have a good day.”

“Love you too,” Jaxon said from my phone, mimicking my sing-song tone.

Nadia rolled her eyes at me but winked toward my phone at Jaxon. “Don’t let Alyona get you into any more trouble.” She slammed the door on her way out so it would close properly. We couldn’t afford to heat the whole neighborhood, as she put it.

“She’s still working Saturdays?” Jaxon’s face zipped out of view as he turned his phone around, probably strapping it onto his arm. After a few seconds of jostling, the intricate gold-leafed patterns of the Capitol walls glittered in the rising sunlight as Jaxon pedaled past.

“Somebody’s got to answer FutureMove’s phones.”

FutureMove allowed us to stay in the apartment rent-free—something our parents had set up in case anything were to happen to them. But we still had to pay for everything else: essentials like bread, online college courses, and Nadia’s cosmetics subscription boxes. Dr. Clarke helped us further by employing Nadia as the head receptionist, even though she was barely eighteen at the time.

I balanced my phone on top of the toaster’s heating element, the capacitor, and the stove’s fuse as I carried them upstairs. Jaxon and I spent half our days on video chats, so we were used to long silences. I fished my backpack out from where it had fallen down the crack between my bed and the wall and stuffed the pile of components inside. I added the fried kitchen light rechargeables to the rattly tin of used batteries I kept in the front pouch, then retrieved my earbuds to help hear Jaxon while he wasn’t holding the phone to his face.

I propped up the phone on my desk in time to watch Jaxon’s view pass under Bonita Boulivard on the Biino Creek bike trail, almost an hour’s ride away. “You did leave early.”

“Working off interview jitters.” The phone’s view tilted sideways—he was probably taking a swig from the flask he wore on a silly belt for long rides. He passed the Denver Performing Arts Complex, where dull construction fabric still covered the largest buildings, making the whole area appear drab and claustrophobic.

“I hope the city manages to gild those buildings eventually. I know tungsten is just as port-proof as gold, but that view is depressing.”

“Funding issues,” Jaxon huffed. “With unemployment stuck in the double digits, voters won’t approve a ballot measure to—”

“Gross, you know I hate politics.”

“You hate plain water, too, but I’m going to keep dosing you with both.”

Denver port-proofed city buildings as soon as a couple of FutureMove scientists achieved a proof-of-concept for porting without a receiver booth. Mostly only mice had ported without a receiver, and they usually ended up dead, landing halfway through walls or underground. The ETC made porting without a destination booth highly illegal, but it was enough of a security risk that the city applied gold leaf along the outside walls in artistic patterns tight enough to prevent anything human-sized from porting through. When the money got low, they did what they could with tungsten, which could be pretty all polished up, but the cheap tungsten-weave construction fabric wasn’t made for looks.

I reached into the keyboard drawer at my desk until I felt my small stack of envelopes. I pulled them out and tucked them into the laptop slot in my backpack to try to keep them somewhat flat. Technically, I worked Saturdays too. I served court summonses, and it was the best day to find people at home. Only instead of greeting them with a “How may I be of service?” like Nadia did for her job, I told them they’d been served and then took off like a foul ball. The pay was decent, and every summons I served got me a little closer to the tools and components I needed to finish my parent’s research, fix the booths, and earn a place at the company I was born to work for.

Jaxon grunted as he propelled his bike uphill. “So, where are we meeting for the swap? You got the location with your computer witchery, right?”

“Of course I did. I’ll text you the port booth code.” To find the code, I’d had to reverse-engineer a binary and scour a terrible website written entirely in Comic Sans. The final clue was hidden in the metadata of a GIF of a stick figure with a shovel and hard hat captioned, “This website is under construction.” He looked like he’d been digging there since 1998.

“Call me when you get there. You keep forgetting I can’t port.” Jaxon twisted his upper arm so the phone’s front camera faced his feet in what must have been a hilarious display of balance and flexibility to any passersby. He’d tucked his pant leg into a bright green sock speckled with tiny retro sunglasses. As his pedaling foot came up I caught the dull glint of the battered metal ankle bracelet.

“Oh yeah, ya hooligan.” I appreciated the ETC taking safety seriously after a rocky beginning, but the punishment seemed a little harsh for getting caught with an unregistered cell phone. I’d let him use one of my burners while I installed an upgrade to make his battery last longer for our marathon video chats. He’d taken the blame, and now he was stuck riding everywhere.

I cleared an itch in my throat. Allergies, not guilt. “Head toward the Mall. The port code looks like it’s over that way again this week.” I switched to my sister’s scolding voice and added, “And take some time to consider your actions during your ride.”

I swiped end call and opened the false bottom in my lower desk drawer. I grabbed a couple of my more questionable items to trade at the underground-market swaps: a port-proof unlocked SIM card and a port booth activation card registered to the social security number of someone recently deceased. Normally, free government SIMs came with port-proof copper connections instead of gold, and booth cards were issued to everyone statewide, as long as they passed the booth license exam. But those of us who didn’t want the ETC’s grabby hands pawing at our data through the government SIMs’ backdoor or tracking our every move with the booth card would pay a pretty penny for these puppies. I stuck them both in my shoe and jogged down the stairs and out the door to my street’s three port booths.

I bent down in front of the pustule-mustard booth on the right and pretended to tie my shoe, pulling out the scrap of paper with the numbers I’d jotted down last night. I stepped into the sleek plastic housing. The ETC’s cheesy informational video played in every booth—an attempt to calm public fears about porting. Few people had more than a surface-level understanding of how teleportation worked. Some might mention the phrase, “predictive quantum mapping” from the videos, but apparently, even my parents got it wrong about the density barriers.

I let the video play on the port code screen while I studied the coded instructions. On the screen, a cool cartoon dude dressed like a vintage surfer stepped into a blue booth, which transformed into a blue surfboard. He and his booth board wobbled in a gentle wave pattern through tiki huts and palm trees.

A friendly voiceover bounced around the small space: “. . . The subject remains intact for the whole journey, and every molecule stays right where it belongs.” The huts and trees shimmered apart to let the surfer dude pass directly through them. He landed in a booth on a beach, ran out through the sand, and hit the waves. “Remember,” said the voiceover, “walk or drive your old electronics to the nearest ETC exchange center for booth-proofing, and trade in or store your gold and platinum accessories. Now, hang loose, and—.”

I cut the video short by punching in the eight-character port code. The screen prompted me to tap my booth card or transfer the ridiculous five-dollar fare for anyone without a card. I’d programmed card data registered to one of the unused social security numbers into the RFID ring Jaxon had given me for my birthday last year. I tapped my ring to the card reader and did a mental safety check. I had DIY booth-proofed my phone ages ago, and my silver earrings were the densest material on me at ten grams. Teleporting was considerably safer than traveling by car, according to the stats. As with cars, people generally didn’t care how it worked as long as it got them where they were going. But I’d seen enough of the horrifying ways it could go wrong to make me squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath every time I hit the “GO” button.

After a bright flash and a floating feeling, I felt the floor back under my feet. I took a few seconds to shake off the intense pins and needles sensation. Even with dead hearing aid batteries, I could faintly hear the whine of an electric shuttle and the low murmur of tourists through the booth door. I’d correctly assumed the Sixteenth Street Mall was the general area of this week’s secret swap location.

The tech swaps were next on my list of the ETC’s well-intentioned annoyances.

From homeowners associations to nation states, teleportation threw presidents of anything with a border into full panic-mode. No one knew how the technology would affect the way we kept our spaces safe, or whether some other status-quo-destroying invention lurked just around the corner. In their rush to appear proactive, the politicians decided it best to save us from the possibility that any additional innovations might take them by surprise. Homeland Security hooked up with the Travel Security Agency, and their unholy union spawned the Emergency Teleportation Commission.

The ETC published a hefty tome of tech regulations and monitored hardware like a syndicate of stingy librarians. They couldn’t risk people attempting home-brew modifications to port units or masterminding any other secret experiments, so you could only buy new components after turning in broken ones at an official swap location. If you didn’t have anything to trade, they made you register for the new parts and tools or submit an application with an explanation of their intended use. So stupid!

The outdoor pedestrian shopping district bustled with tourists, who were easy to spot in autumn. The out-of-towners were bundled in new coats and snow boots against the fortyish-degree chill, while Denver natives sported shorts and sandals. I landed somewhere in between with my olive hooded jacket, tan cargo pants, and broken-in gray sneakers.

I “tied my shoe” again and tucked away my scrap of paper after a final look. 10062082R4L3FLUX. The first part was the code I entered to get here. The rest hinted at the exact location of today’s underground market. R4L3FLUX was either some kind of sci-fi soldering droid or a code. Rale Flux? Did I need to get to the light rail station? Maybe flux meant flux capacitor, like in the old classic film, Spaceman From Pluto. There was a historic clock tower down the block.

I glanced over the row of white vendor tents. The first three tents on the right displayed jewelry and scarves and Colorado souvenirs. The fourth tent on the corner was a licensed electronics swap. This could be R4, R meaning the right side. I rounded the corner to the right and continued down the side street, lined with more tents all the way to the next block. I counted down three on the left side and pulled out my phone so it would look like I was busy texting while I considered the options.

Unlike the licensed trade tents, these underground guys had the swoon-worthy wares: CPUs, GPUs, motherboards with the gold connectors already replaced with less-dense metal, and so on. But if I were to ask for the wrong thing at the wrong tent, I could not only land myself some sweet new ankle bling and be twinsies with Jax, but I could compromise the whole underground tech swap and lose access to the tools I needed.

I’d apparently spent too long in one place, and some clipboard-wielding polo shirt locked on to my position. Not just any polo shirt; I recognized the bun bouncing toward me. ManBun homed in with his friendly eyebrows on. I decided a fake phone call would be more effective than fake texts at this point.

“Hey,” I said into the phone, and then pointed at my earbuds and shrugged at ManBun.

What was he doing here? Weekend volunteer work? His lanyard had little trees and globes on it, and his clipboard seemed too full of actual signatures to be a prop.

“Yeah, I’m here, Sixteenth and Welton,” I said to no one.

ManBun hovered. Didn’t Mr. Head of Security have more important things to do? I held up my pointer finger to him and stepped away. Crap, why did I do just-a-minute when I wanted to talk to him approximately never? I didn’t have time for anyone else’s cause right now.

“Oh, yes, sure, I’ll head your way.” I jogged to the left side of the cross street and ManBun meandered along behind me. My phone buzzed several times with incoming texts. So glad I had it on vibrate or my jig would be up. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Mm-hmm.” I hurried up the row of vendors until he was out of sight, hoping ManBun found someone else to trick into saving the whales or whatever.

I had passed L3 a few tents ago and ended up at the bike racks, where a bike that looked a lot like Jaxon’s stood locked up. Good; I wouldn’t have to wait forever for him to get here. The third tent on the left was another licensed electronics swap. They had name-brand batteries and the appliance parts I needed, so I traded in my “reverse-engineered” parts on Nadia’s fix-it list and sent the payment for the balance on the new parts through my phone. I couldn’t wait to switch out my hearing aid batteries; the Mall was a barrage of jumbled noise, and my ears were ringing.

“Got it, thanks,” the ETC lackey at the swap tent said when the payment came through.

I pulled out my earbuds, leaned in and lowered my voice. “So, you have any flux?” If he did, I’d have to pretend to change my mind about wanting some. If he recognized it as a code word, I’d have to make up my mind whether to let him know that I did, too.

“Like, for soldering?” He turned and shouted to someone loading non-port-proof goods into a truck. “Hey Steve, where would we keep the soldering flux?”

My ears tingled and I did a visual sweep for ManBun. Shut up, I wanted to yell at the swap attendant. Anyone on the entire block with the same instructions could know what I was up to now. Maybe I should have turned left—

“You needed flux?” A one-woman anime convention perusing the wares at the next tent raised her pink eyebrows at me from under a sparkly purple hat with cat ears.

I darted my eyes from side to side like a cartoon spy and nodded.

“I can show you where they have some.” She could be for real, but her outfit was over the top for someone looking nearly thirty. She could have been an ETC spy trying too hard.

She stared at me during my internal debate. Her neon yellow nails, bright against her deep ochre fingers, clicked an impatient rhythm against the tent’s leg.

My phone buzzed again. Oops. I hadn’t called Jax to tell him where I was yet, only pretended to. “Hold on, I have to make a phone call.”

She sighed and beckoned with her bobbly head. “It’s just up here.”

I nodded and started walking again. Another text popped up as I was typing in his name.

“Away from three,” it said. Autocorrect? I scrolled up to check his other messages.

Jax: Stay home. They know whoops you ate.

Jax: Whoops you are

Jax: Who you ate

Jax: WHO U R. THEY KNOW. GO HOME NOW.

Jax: I’m serious don’t go it snot safe.

Jax: OMG I HATE THIS PHONE just get

Jax: Away from three

A sort of dying chipmunk noise escaped my throat. They who? The underground-market people? The police? The ETC? Who could possibly know I was looking for under-the-table trades?

I took a deep breath and tapped Jaxon’s name and hit call. The phone thought for a half-second and gave me a “call failed” error.

I kept the phone pressed to my ear, in case I’d heard wrong.

Silence, except for my runaway heartbeat.

Maybe a rolling blackout was affecting a cell tower. Jaxon was fine. I rested my phone-free hand on my hip and tried again. It rang once and hung up. He was probably mad I took so long to call, trying to freak me out or something. My heart pounded as I mentally retraced last night’s steps. Was my power hack the reason ManBun had been called into work last night? Was he here now because of me?

“This way.” The flux girl urged me toward the bike racks.

The bike that looked like Jaxon’s now hung awkwardly, its pedal stuck in the next bike’s spokes. The untoasted pumpernickel squirmed in my stomach, and the smell of stale urine wafted in from the alley ahead.

Flux Girl started toward me, reaching for my arm with her neon yellow fingernails. I took a step back from her invasion of my personal space.

“STEP BACK, PLEASE,” an official voice blared through a megaphone over on the Mall. Something must have happened. I kept moving backward away from Flux Girl.

“PLEASE, CLEAR THE AREA.”

“Look,” said Flux Girl. “I really just need you to come with me.”

I turned and ran toward the booths past a few tourists scurrying away from the sound of the megaphone. I tried Jax again on the way. Nothing. The increasing pressure in the front of my head and the ringing in my ears made it hard to think. I had to get home and figure this out. The pairing chip would have to wait, but I could fix the microwave, and Jax would call, and everything would be fine. I rounded the corner at Sixteenth and came to an abrupt halt. Police wrapped their favorite yellow tape around my ride home, and ETC officials helped divert foot traffic to give them a wide berth. Somebody must have left another involuntary tissue sample in the port booth.

“Wait!” Flux Girl called, running up behind me. Her persistence freaked me out. I had to lose her and get to another booth before the line got long. After two accidents in two days, they might even shut the booths down for diagnostics.

I pushed into the gathering crowd of unnecessary snow boots, ducking to hide my height and keep my unruly head of hair from view. I caught a glimpse of the taped-off booths, red lights flashing around their doors. An investigator in white gloves kneeled in front of the pustule-mustard booth and reached in to collect whichever appendage had been left behind.

One of the tourists spun around and threw up right in front of me. I jumped away, stomach reeling from the smell of vomit and the churning dread I was desperately repressing. I turned back to the investigator who held a large athletic shoe with soggy, limp laces over an evidence bag.

She slowly pulled a battered metal security bracelet up over the bloody remains of a sunglass-spangled green sock.

 

 

This is the end of the free sample. Get the book here!