“Do you think you got it?”
Senna hadn’t even had time to flick her shoes off next to the door before Marin’s voice rang out from the kitchen. The condo, small, cool, and tidy, wasn’t situated on the more sought-after upper levels of the station, but Senna had put up with far more meager conditions. Marin made a decent living in IT but the hours were hellish; she was constantly on-call in case anything went wrong with the servers controlling the station’s Servitor-based security force, PaxDiv. There were times Senna watched her fly out the door in the middle of a meal, or after an alert roused her before dawn.
“I’m not sure,” Senna called back. Her brown shoes looked misshapen next to Marin’s pumps, two perfect, sleek black heels lined up neatly to the right of the door, not a mark on them. Her voice shook as she added, “It was . . . it wasn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Senna hunted for her voice, leaving behind the cramped foyer and passing under a square opening into the open-plan living space. A tinted window to her right offered one of the only outward views of the station itself. Most of the windows were fake, with simulated vistas. Jonathan preferred beaches, pre-cataclysm Bali specifically.
A few white patent leather sofas and a vid projector were clustered to the right, and to the left, a recessed kitchen went deeper into the condo. Behind the tall bar counter that separated the kitchen from the living area, Marin was dumping ice into a cocktail shaker, her black hair pinned tidily behind her ears. It was a good thing she didn’t look too much like her sister, or the shock of seeing her every day would’ve become too much. Mina had been smaller, almost fragile, with mousy brown hair and gentler eyes. Once, on the compound, Mina had told her that she looked just like her father, and Marin took after their mother.
The sisters shared the same lips, so Senna always stared at Mina’s eyes when she talked.
“I don’t know,” Senna admitted with a shrug. The whole thing had been so bizarre, she hardly knew where to begin. Paxton Dunn’s people had arranged a transport for her back to the apartment so she didn’t have to take the public elevators or light rail. The receptionist, Kris, had noticed that Senna didn’t have a VIT, and made all the arrangements quickly and silently, without asking. The driver hadn’t spoken a word to her the entire time. The interior of the transport smelled overwhelmingly—chemically—of spearmint. Senna’s mind kept wandering back to the boy she had seen in the lobby. Tall, thin, Asian, with intensely accusatory eyes. Bloodshot eyes, in fact, and he had the paper-thin, acne-spotted skin of the insomniac. She knew the look well.
There was so much rage in his eyes . . . the way he talked to her, like they were acquainted, like he had every reason in the world to hate her . . .
Senna sighed and leaned against the counter, listening to the rhythmic shurk-shurk-shurk of Marin mixing a drink.
“I thought you and Jonathan—” But she stopped herself. It was none of her business.
Marin smirked and shrugged. She was wearing a prim and tailored red suit, a gold necklace fastened tight around her neck, close enough to leave a little sub-necklace of welts. “Yeah, not exactly my prenatals. Whatever. I’m not pregnant yet. At least I don’t think so, and after the day I’ve had . . .” Marin winked one of her long, false lashes and dumped the cocktail shaker contents into a glass that could’ve been mistaken for a pitcher. The liquid was electric blue.
“Who cares about my shitty day,” Marin added, cozying up to the bar. “I want to hear more about this Dunn guy’s office. Jonathan thinks he’s not even real.”
Senna frowned, the scent of blueberries wafting strongly from the drink. Behind Marin, the kitchen had been neglected, clean and dirty dishes piled high next to the washer, cartons of takeout food stacked beside that. Someone needed to make a garbage disposal run, but the station charged for every use, and Jonathan liked to push it until things started to smell.
“How could he not be real?” Senna asked. “He invited me to do this experimental therapy, right? People must know what he looks like.”
“I know, I know, it’s fucking stupid. Whenever he’s interviewed it’s just a silhouette. Adds to his mystique, I suppose.” Already half done with her drink, Marin was eyeing the cocktail shaker again. “Sometimes I ask Jonathan if he loves those idiot conspiracy theories because our life is too boring, but he says that’s not it. I don’t know, I don’t get it, he’s a smart guy! Well, real or not, do you think you passed the test or whatever? Is that what it was?” She smiled and her teeth were lightly stained blue. “A test?”
“It was more like a clinical exam,” Senna admitted. Marin pointed to the shaker and lifted a brow, but Senna shook her head. There was no drinking in the compound, and the last time Marin had tried to get her to drink, Senna had wound up sick and dizzy the next day. Preece was wrong about a lot of things, but maybe not about alcohol. “They wanted to do some neural imaging, figure out if they could really delete my memories.”
Marin shuddered and pretended to gag, the sight made all the more ghoulish by her stained teeth. “Delete your memories. It sounds so fucking intense when you put it like that.”
“It’s intense no matter how you put it,” Senna replied. “I had to . . . They made me think about the crash. I had to go over all of it. It felt like walking them through a dream, but it must have worked. They didn’t tell me much, just that the data collection was successful.”
“That must have been hard,” Marin said softly, no longer as interested in her cocktail. “You okay?”
“I should probably sit down.” Light-headed. Tired. For a year, Senna had lived in the fog of despair, basic things like showering or getting up to have breakfast seemingly monumental. It was like living under a great, looming shadow, an avalanche of pain waiting to crush her the second her mind strayed to the wrong thing. She crossed to one of the sofas and dropped down, holding her face in her hands, elbows propped on her knees.
Painting had been her light and joy in the compound, but she couldn’t even do that anymore. All her supplies had been incinerated. Once the area was no longer considered a crime scene, station authorities probably wiped out all her murals.
“Let me get you some ice water,” Marin muttered.
“I’m fine, really.” Adrenal fatigue, that was what one of Senna’s many doctors told her had happened. Too much stress, too much grief, too many changes all at once. Her body had shut down, but Senna was still waiting for it to open up again.
“Shut up.” Marin came to the sofa with the water, and of course she was right. As soon as Senna’s hands closed around the cold, smooth cup, she felt a little better, and the tide of nausea rising in her stomach ebbed. With a little shudder of relief, Marin pulled off the sleek black style she wore as a wig and tossed it across the room. She scratched at her scalp, and at the thinning hair there. Senna looked away, feeling as if she were staring at something private.
“These new anxiety drips are amazing,” Marin murmured, seemingly unbothered by the clump of hair that came away in her hand. “Guess I was lucky enough to get one of the rarer side effects. Oh well. Wigs are expensive, but peace of mind is priceless.” She relaxed back against the sofa, glancing at her VIT, and then her eyes popped open wider. “When you’re feeling steadier, there’s something I need to give you.”
Senna lifted her head, moving the hair out of her eyes. “What is it?”
“Station Affairs sent it over,” Marin said, laughing at Senna’s groan. “They’re not going to stop bothering us. You know that, right?”
“I do.” It was part of why Senna felt it was her time to leave. She couldn’t be held liable for what happened on the Dohring-Waugh. The crash wasn’t her fault, but she was the sole survivor. All the questions, all the investigations, led back to her. After she was recovered from the evac pod, SA had taken her into custody. It was the first night she spent alone in a little room all by herself, and the isolation was devastating.
“Here.”
Senna hadn’t even noticed the small package that had been sitting on the coffee table. It was only just larger than a man’s fist, wrapped in nondescript black plastic.
“If it’s a bomb,” Marin joked, placing the package next to Senna on the sofa, “I’m going to haunt you forever.”
“It wouldn’t be,” Senna replied with a thin smile. “Station Affairs has their hands full with me already. They wouldn’t add another problem to their list.”
“True!”
Senna peeled off the black plastic, and inside she found a new model VIT, the latest version. On the image of the VIT monitor itself, the agent assigned to her case had written, Just wear it. Please?
“Will you?” Marin asked, pointing to the inscription.
“Agent Tiwari has been pretty patient with me,” Senna sighed. “So I owe him.”
Marin put her hand on Senna’s shoulder and squeezed. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Senna. You don’t owe him anything.”
Senna didn’t know if that was true. People wanted answers. Justice. Blood. Even the laws had changed after the crash. Now every citizen applying for resident status on Tokyo Bliss Station had to opt in to being traced through their implant. Preece had claimed religious exemption for the compound; that was how they all managed to go about their lives without implants or VITs. Every week or so, another message arrived from Agent Tiwari, reminding Senna that she wasn’t exempt either, that she was also subject to the law. Senna just kept putting it off.
Of all the cruel things Preece Ives had done to her, maybe the cruelest was not killing her like he had done the others. After that much death and tragedy, everyone on Earth and the stations and the colonies wanted a scapegoat.
They got Senna.
“He’s not all bad,” Senna whispered. She sensed, in fact, that Agent Tiwari had a soft spot for her, that he could tell she was brittle, and that one question too far, one step over the line, and she would crack and break. Maybe for good.
She opened the package and wrapped the monitor around her wrist. Even lightweight and cushioned, it felt odd on her wrist, more like a shackle than a fashion and technology accessory. Agent Tiwari had chosen the popular rose-gold model.
“Damn. That’s nice, my model isn’t nearly as flash,” Marin said.
“You can have it.”
“And get tracked by SA for the rest of my life? No thanks.”
Senna smirked. “I think that ship has sailed.”
“Maybe, but this will all blow over eventually,” Marin told her, squeezing her shoulder again. “You and I won’t forget, but everyone else will move on. I guarantee it, you’ll be shocked how fast people stop caring.”
The flat front surface of the VIT resting on top of her wrist lit up as soon as it touched the warmth of her skin. A greeting in twelve languages appeared in white text on a black background, then dissolved to let her know that no unlinked AR implants were detected in the vicinity, asking if she would like to proceed with setup manually.
“Maybe this is a good thing,” Senna said with a shrug. “If I get into Paxton Dunn’s program, I’ll be on Ganymede, and I’ll miss you. At least I can use this for messaging, since I don’t have my own terminal.”
Marin grinned with her blue teeth and raised her cup. “That’s the first silver lining you’ve found in a while.”
The VIT, as it turned out, was already registered to her, and it only took a few quick password inputs tapped out by hand to link the tech to the messaging address Marin had helped her create. New emails were waiting, blinking, a faint, happy chime indicating as much.
“Another alert from Tiwari,” Senna snorted. “They’re never going to let the implant thing drop, and they’re going to start fining me if I don’t comply.” Fining her money she didn’t have. Her eyes roamed the short distance to the other unread message, and her heart felt like it was expanding in her chest. No. It wasn’t possible. Already? “But maybe I can outrun them . . .”
Marin scooted closer, trying to crane her neck and see the little interface on Senna’s VIT. She smelled like blueberries and hairspray. “What do you mean?”
“There’s an alert from Dunn’s office,” Senna whispered, hardly believing it herself. “They’ve already approved me for the experiment. I’m going to Ganymede, Marin. They want me to leave this week.”