9

Amira wriggled her shoulders, stretched, and then pulled free of the zip tie. She rubbed her wrists and put the tie on the table between us.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Isn’t your dad Thomas Hart?”

“Yeah.”

“And he didn’t teach you to cross your wrists and flex before getting zip-tied? Or how to break them off ?”

“We never fought the arrests,” I told her. The struthiforms that interrogated me in a separate room had retied my hands in front of me. I held them toward her now. “Can you help?”

“I will. But when they are about to come back, you need to put them back on, got it?”

“Definitely. I’ll keep them loose around my wrists.”

She pushed a fingernail in and somehow released the catch. The tie opened up, and I massaged my hands. “Thank you. Thank you for coming over.”

“You looked ready to pass out,” she said. “The rebreather masks were in a locker near the transport’s airlock. Didn’t feel right watching you die.”

I looked down at the brown flakes on my fingers, and on hers. “Did you get the shoelace tied before they pulled us away?”

Amira waited a beat. “No.”

“He wasn’t breathing.” I refused to look up at her. I kept my head down.

“I know.”

I took a deep breath. “I didn’t go to any regular schools much, we moved too often. I’ve been in the middle of protests, riots, arrests. I’ve seen people shot, but carried away by ambulances quickly. I’ve never seen that much blood before. It’s like something from San Francisco.”

“Or earlier,” Amira said, somewhat nonchalantly. “Before your dad. When the fighting was violent. The paramedics couldn’t get in during Pacification.”

“You’re not that much older than me,” I said. “You were, what, eight or nine years old then?”

“Yes,” she said.

I imagined a young Amira watching a running gun battle in the middle of a burned-out New Jersey. “And now you’re fighting for the Accordance?”

Amira’s jaw clenched. “Your parents are still alive and resisting. Lucky you. Mine were executed on a street corner. I survived because if you needed a pass, a way into limited movement areas, then you had to talk to little Amira Singh. For a payment I’d help hack and forge anything. My parents had wanted me to help the cause. The whole family invested in the cost of me taking online classes and apprenticing to older hackers, but all those investors had hungry children who needed me as a meal ticket after their parents were shot. Lucky for them I learn fast. Lucky for them I had the education. Unlucky for them, now, that I’ve been dragged off and they have no one.”

She waved her fingers over her eyes and at the silvered swirls on her arms and neck. “Accordance isn’t supposed to sell this on Earth, but there are always black markets where less-than-scrupulous aliens can make money selling us what we can’t make ourselves. I can tap into Accordance virtual networks and augmented reality feeds. We’ll never be full citi­zens, but I can at least taste a little of their world. When they caught up to me they gave me a choice: a lifetime sentence, or the CPF. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck ‘sorry.’ Everyone’s sorry the Accordance invaded our world. I’m sorry half my neighborhood fought back. Sorry I detected enforcers coming and hid myself, but couldn’t warn the rest of my family. We’re sorry that kid died in front of us. I’ll bet you’re sorry you betrayed your parents to serve in the CPF.”

She leaned forward and pulled her zip tie closed with her teeth as I stared at her.

“Someone’s coming?” I asked, doing the same.

“Under emergency session, acting president Barnett just forced microchip legislation through,” Amira said, letting go of the tie. “Everyone is now going to be sorry that Tranquility was bombed by radicals, because if they want to travel, they’ll now need to be tagged like the little pets we are. Everyone’s fucking sorry, Devlin. It’s the state of the universe these days. But at least you tried to help someone next to you, and that’s more than we often get.”

The door slid open. An Arvani commander in full matte-­black battle gear scuttled through the door. Its eight mechanized tentacles tapped the ground as it approached us.

No water in a tank, like civilian Arvani. This armor form-­fitted the alien. Pistons and plates hugged the octopus-like form, sliding and shifting with it as it walked toward us.

Shimmering glass covered the large, unblinking eyes. “Call me Commander Zeus. The sound is close to what I like to think my name begins with, and I hear the name holds import, so I will have it. I’m your new instructor. Of all the indignities piled on me of late, my latest is that all the human instructors at the Icarus camp have been dismissed and your training turned over to me. I had to come pick you apes up myself.

“If I could, I’d leave you here to rot. But that would be more paperwork than just hauling myself down here to drag you out of this room. Let’s move.”

Commander Zeus turned around.

“No,” I said, refusing to get up.

The commander pivoted back, a scary rapid uncoiling movement that happened in the blink of an eye, and regarded me. “No?”

“Tell me what happened to Keiko.”

The Arvani didn’t move for a second. “Dead.”

I’d expected that. I didn’t expect it to suck the air out of me even though I’d prepared for it.

“We need to do something,” I said. I wasn’t sure what. Some kind of ceremony. Something.

Zeus knocked the chair out from under me. I hit the ground with a groan, and the commander squatted over me. “One dead recruit is a tiny speck of shit in a whirlpool,” the alien said. “There will be more before your time is over. This is the perspective you should curl your limbs around.”

“We still have to respect our fallen,” I said. “It’s what we do.”

“The fallen do not care,” Commander Zeus said. “And I do not care ‘what you do.’ But I will tell you what I will do. If you do not follow me out of this room, there will be consequences for your dereliction. I’m sure you can imagine them. I do not care what you choose. My duty to protocol here has been made.”

Zeus turned around.

Amira grabbed my arm and helped me up.

“Remember Keiko in your own way,” she said. “Let it go for now. Don’t put you or your family on the list.”

“I had to—”

“I know. But you just pissed off Captain Calamari there. The creature that’ll be running our whole world for the next few weeks.”

“Commander Calamari,” I corrected her.

“No.” Amira squinted. “I think it’s Captain Calamari for me.”