One

Ironport Detention is a place they send people to die when they’ve done something wrong. Really wrong. And although I’m not perfect, I haven’t killed anyone, or broken any of the other Five Core Principles, to end up in this godforsaken place.

Or did I?

Memories of my arrest are blurred, like trying to read through smudges of grease. My broken SOULTM. Rolls of wire. A soldering gun. A boy laughing. And blood. So much blood…

Out of a hundred girls that started here, only forty-nine of us are left. I’m number Twenty-two. That’s how they tell us apart. By number. Not our hair or eye color. Not how tall or short we are. And definitely not by name. Although I do remember mine—Lezah—but there details of my past I can’t recall. Circuits that just don’t connect. It’s like I’ve lost an entire month of my life and I don’t know how to get it back, but I’m working on it. Hoping that if I remember, I can change my fate.

The obnoxious bell sounds—a reminder there’s a task to complete—its piercing tone bounces off the stone walls, pulling me out of my head. God I hate that thing. In unison, the forty-eight other girls and I take thirty-two steps down an expanding corridor. I don’t stop until I’m standing shoulder to arm with my roommate in front of our door, waiting for the rest of the girls to secure their places in line.

My legs beg for me to run, to find a way out, but all I’m trying to do right now is survive. Live one more day to figure out how to crack the system. Find a flaw they don’t even know exists to escape. And for that to happen, I need to climb into my bed and replay everything that’s gone on today in my mind. Even though my room is bare and lonely, it feels like the safest place inside these walls. A place where specialized WALking compuTERs won’t come barging in to drag me away. And most of the WALTERs here aren’t like the models that stand in front of a classroom, cook a meal, or help when someone’s sick. Here they have the scariest kind created—AIRS. The ones I’m sure were built without a sense of humor, or even a sense of humanity.

My eyes are trained forward at the girls across the hall, but I’ve gotten good at looking without looking. The girls to my left shift into position, the sound of their footsteps slowly fading. The girls to my right all stand at attention. Like me. None of us move. We don’t dare. My chest barely rises or falls as I wait in a long, dimly lit hallway with a door—and my possible escape—at the far end that taunts me.

I use my tongue to remove the lingering film that coats my teeth from my last meal as I ready myself for the bell to sound again. For our room doors to slide open in unison, and they can’t do it fast enough. Five… Four… Three… Two… One—

But nothing happens. Seconds drip by, slow and dense like dirty oil. My pulse doesn’t match the stagnant air around me.

Whispers buzz. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s wrong.”

“What should we do?”

The girl across from me shuffles her feet. She shrieks and stiffens her body. Her pain makes my heart jolt. I clench my teeth hard and swallow the thick feeling in my throat. I’ve learned not to react the way I want to. Not to jump to her side and try to help, or tell her it’s going to be okay, because it’s not. She moved too much, her high-pitched yelp tells me. The presence of the metal bracelet around my wrist always feels heavier any time I hear that sound. Even more if I’m the one who makes it. I want to throw my hands over my ears to block out the whimpering, but I’m not about to get zapped myself.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My gaze darts around, searching for any clue as to what’s going on. My room is so close, just inside the metal door behind me, and yet it’s so far away.

Heavy footsteps echo through the hall. From the corner of my eye, two AIRS appear, bigger than the humans they were built to resemble. Artificial Intelligent Roaming Security marching our way means only one thing. Someone’s time is up, and I just pray it isn’t mine. They’re all hard steel where a soft mesh “skin” should be, with inhuman faces that are cold and unforgiving. As if it couldn’t get any worse, these two are larger than any I’ve seen. Something about their mechanical forms appears more menacing than ever. AIRS are the only model of WALTER I’ve ever been afraid of. A drop of sweat slides down my temple, but I know better than to brush it away.

My chin trembles with the rumble in the floor from their heavy frames. They stop at my right, in front of Twelve and Thirty-three, the girls who share the room next to mine. Twelve’s knees shake so hard her bright red hair vibrates. A puddle forms around Thirty-three’s feet.

No one moves.

Or blinks.

Or breathes.

An eternity later, they grab Twelve and spin her around. With a loud crack, her cheek slams into cold concrete; red swells against her pale skin. Tears pour from her blue eyes and slide down her freckled cheeks. She looks as scared as I feel, but I have no right to. She’s the one with blood pooling at the corner of her mouth, with big, scary AIRS assaulting her.

“No!” someone down the line yells.

“Don’t. Stop. You’re hurting me,” Twelve begs, but the AIRS don’t respond. One digs their hand into her pocket and yanks out a fork.

Someone gasps and jerks back, then pays the price for it with an electrical shock from their metal wristband.

“That’s not mine. I swear. I didn’t take it.” Twelve’s voice cuts through me like broken glass. That’s basically what she is now. That’s what they’ll do to her—break her into a thousand shards. She’s already as good as dead. It doesn’t matter what number is on her bracelet, or however many days of her sentence she had left, her expiration date is now.

It takes everything inside me to keep my feet planted on the floor, to not leap to her side and try to wrench those AIRS away. Not that I’d do any good. I bite my tongue, dig my nails into my palms, anything to stop myself from throwing up.

Twelve thrashes as they hoist her into the air. Her screams pierce my ears and echo through my whole body as they carry her away.

The next bell chimes at last, and the doors slide open in unison. A swish of sound that stirs the still, damp air.

It’s impossible to force the images of what happened from my mind as I follow Sixty-one inside our room and head to the bathroom to do our business. I’d rather skip the next steps and just curl into bed. There, I’ll close my eyes and pretend I’m somewhere else instead of this awful place. “Lights out” can’t come soon enough.

I stand next to Sixty-one in front of the sink—actually, it’s more like a trough. A shiny piece of metal above reflects our images, the vague outline of two people. One who’s tall and dark with gorgeous blonde hair. And the other, me, who’s small and pale. If I focus hard enough, the dark circles under my eyes become more visible. Through the distorted reflection, I notice my thick black eyeliner and dark-purple lips. If I had my personal SOUL device in hand, I’d change it all right now, turn my dark hair a few shades lighter and lose the eyeliner altogether. It all feels wrong. But this is what I must’ve looked like the day they took me. It’s like the person staring back at me doesn’t match the memories I have about my life before I got here. But along with all my other possessions, my government-issued SOUL is gone, too. And no one can live without their SOUL, without the device that’s their phone—computer—appearance alternator—money—you can’t buy anything, go anywhere, or even communicate with anyone. Not having it solidifies the fact that my time is running out.

Our khaki jumpsuits create the same blurs of movement in the shiny metal plate. I wonder if Sixty-one would change anything about her appearance. She looks as though she’d been resetting her nanobits when she was picked up. She’s tall, lean, with legs that go on for days, completely beautiful without even trying, and unlike me, she has all ten of her fingers still intact. She’s the kind of girl who’d never be friends with me, but it has nothing to do with the way she looks. The tattoo on her wrist is all the reason I need. It isn’t made with nanobits like the ones that litter my arms. Her red teardrop is made with real ink. The symbol for “blood not oil.”

We both wash in unison. She doesn’t say a word about what just happened. She never says a word. At least never to me. Not that I care. A long time ago, I had an amazing friend. The best. But just like the events of the night I was taken away, my memory of her is distorted, and a deep ache settles in my stomach.

After I splash icy water on my face and brush my teeth, another bell sounds, and I retreat to my bed on the opposite side of the room from Sixty-one’s. It takes me seven steps to get to mine, and it takes her only five to get to hers, even though they’re the same distance from the bathroom. The bracelets must have a way of knowing this. That’s how I think they work, at least, based on movement, since there aren’t any cameras or other ways of monitoring us inside our room. One too many steps, one wrong swing of the arm and—ZAP.

I remove the tattered pieces of fabric with thin rubber bottoms that are supposed to pass as shoes and slide under the single blanket on my bed. If you can even call it that. It’s beige, dull like everything else around me, and rough and scratchy, but it’s the only thing to help protect me from the cold. Above my head is a small window, just big enough to see the stars. There’re so many of them tonight. Constellations like Orion. Taurus. Perseus.

Video plays on the walls, an image of Twelve lying on the ground. No matter which way I turn, her face is there. I clench my eyes shut, but the stinging in my wrists forces them open. She thrashes around, a blue streak of electricity penetrating her from the bracelet attached to her wrist. She screams. The high shrill of her voice slices through our room and forces my whole body to curl in on itself. Her bright red hair whips back and forth, and her pale skin turns purple.

Then she’s still, and the video’s gone.

I swallow the bile in the back of my throat and roll onto my side. Through the space between my bed and the wall, I notice the box underneath to capture small rodents has closed, meaning some little critter is inside, probably too scared to even make a sound. I reach down and yank it open, ignoring the harsh sting from my bracelet. Someone deserves to be free, even if it isn’t me. A moment later, a small gray mouse darts out and disappears through a crack in the wall. I rub my wrist and use my fingernail to scrape a chip of beige paint away from the steel bed frame. It’s been three months since I arrived here. Three—painful—horrible—months. And according to this date on my wrist, only five more days to go. Until they kill me. Yesterday, six seemed so much further away.

But soon it’ll be four.

Then only three.

Trembling starts in my core, and soon I’m shaking all over. I need to get out. Or at least, I need to figure out why I’m here. I can’t die in this place without knowing.

Except for one huge problem: there’s no hope of escape. The taste of copper fills my mouth, and the shot of pain reminds me I’m still alive. That I still might have a chance.

I need to do something.

I need to try.

A hand slips over my mouth. My heart stops. Holy shit. I stare into the eyes of Sixty-one. A tear glides down her cheek and hangs from her chin. “Help me,” she mutters.

I focus on her bracelet. It’s the same as mine. Heavy black metal, a size too small; it digs into her skin. The only differences are her date and it’s not shocking the hell out of her for being out of bed.

Nothing.

No stream of blue light.

Impossible.

How’s she doing that?