Chapter One-A
The gods were dead, but the orphans playing in the shadow of the wall didn’t care. Corporations were the only gods left in New Detroit, the toxic air and collected filth their sacrament to the masses. Malory sat on worn stairs with her twin sister and racked out a large chunk of phlegm, no blood. They were too poor for hospitals, or implants, or a neural net, so they watched six others in the distance bounce through luminescent chalk hopscotch lines etched into cracked blacktop. It was early autumn, the evening chilled and bitter, and only one of them had anything that could pass for a jacket. Their grime-caked faces were red with exertion and cold and one kid chanted an off-tune nursery rhyme the director used to sing them. Mal let her eyes wander to the orphanage that squatted beneath a semi-defunct apartment tower. The paint was yellow, faded, peeling away in vast sheets, and she wondered if anyone would care if the whole place exploded in resentful flames. She knew they hadn’t had a meaningful donation in months, forced to adapt to sleeping hungry or stealing what they could. Malory would light the fuse herself if they had anywhere else they could go.
“It’s good the blood’s gone,” her sister said. They were identical twins, but her sister had a small mole under her left eye that made her lazy smile mischievous.
“I guess,” Malory said. It didn’t matter much because there was nothing clean for them to breathe—her lungs would rupture again, it wasn’t worth celebrating.
“I dreamt about mom last night,” Maya said. Silence of the grave settled between them. An aerial vehicle passed by high overhead, tilting toward city center, the muted retort of a gunshot from blocks away announced the end of a life, and one of the kids gave a high-pitched cheer as someone made it through the squares with their eyes closed. “I always forget you don’t remember them,” she said.
“Nope.” The only thing Malory remembered were flashes, disjointed sounds, the essence of violence. There was dull metal, a broken mirror, toys strewn across hardwood. There was the chime of a clock from down the hall, a twisted sheet with cartoon cats, blood pooled against baseboards. Screaming, low and guttural, from her own dried throat. A strange fragrance of spring flowers. Trying to stitch the mess together into a memory when she went to sleep left her a headache and panic-sweat. She wished she could remember their parents; the way Maya spoke of them was wistful and left her guilty.
“It’s okay,” Maya said. She reached out and wrapped a malnourished arm around Malory, leaned her head on her shoulder. The warmth was welcome. Her hair smelled of dust, dandruff, and synth apples. “We’re still alive. We’re still here, and someday you can make the world pay for it, if that’s what you need.” The same kid made it through all the squares with his eyes closed a second time and they all booed because they knew he cheated.
“Maybe.”
The entire city blared, red warning signs overriding holograms and digital displays. s for gravy flavored synth-soy paste and the newest episode of Tianwei International’s kiddie show about skeleton grave robbers were blotted out by exclamation points, evacuation pleas, and codes that navigated neural nets to shelter directions. Klaxons wailed murder on concrete edifices. The air traffic swerved to land at the nearest AV lot and stores dropped shutters on panicked pedestrians. It was only noise to the orphans. Mal and Maya jolted and covered their ears. The rest stopped playing and milled about as a group, faces twisted in distaste. One girl crouched to play with a dead worm. They didn’t have anything to do. A shelter would never take in those that couldn’t pay—Aeon Automotive’s ‘Shark Teeth’ autonomous enforcement drones, a half-step away from military hardware and designed for riot suppression, made certain that unsavory elements were cast aside as refuse. The kids would wait it out, or they wouldn’t. Only a handful of things could trigger a full lockdown, smaller emergencies not worth the expense. It only mattered which culprit: terrorist attack, sudden onset weather event, war, chemical or radiation leak, epidemic, solar flare—the city had seen all and still remained.
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“Skyfall’s coming,” a distant voice called.
Oscar Karna, the only kid with a surname besides the twins, the ninth and oldest of them, ambled up to everyone from down the street. He looked mature enough that he could trick smaller businesses into letting him work under the table for a couple credits and never really hung around the rest of them. They only considered him part of the group when he brought them food. Malory knew it was only a matter of time before he joined one of the gangs and never came back. She’d seen it happen, so many churned through the doors of the orphanage into crime or obscurity. That was just the way of things: join a gang when you were old enough, slowly die, or disappear. No one ever got adopted. Adoption was a myth like Lacey Lantern or Ozone Cordova, a beautiful fiction to foster hope. Oscar was tall, had the whispers of a beard, and carried himself with a certainty in his shoulders, in the firmness of the eyes none of the others could claim. He had a bag overstuffed with bootleg merchandise he’d been hawking on the corners before lockdown, the strap close to breaking.
“You wanna watch,” he asked. His left eye twitched—a withdrawal symptom, probably slinging more than just bootlegs. Maybe he’d joined up already and only came back out of habit.
“How,” Nadia asked. She was the shortest, the only one with a jacket Mal had given her for a birthday the year before, and she still shivered when she spoke. “You’re not dumb enough to make us climb the wall.” Her voice was a haunted children’s doll: soft, eerie, and mechanical, affected by a memory chip she’d dug from trash outside an uptown bordello.
“I know a different way,” he said. “No security bots, no cameras. No one will even know we’re there.” He smirked, disdain leaking through. He was cocky. That got people killed, would kill him too, someday. “Follow,” he said, and walked away.
Malory looked at her sister, tangled hair falling in her eyes, and smiled. They stood and chased after him. Their legs were short, and he was in a hurry. The rest tagged along, Nadia having to run full-speed, desperate not to trip. There was no traffic on the roads, cars and armored vehicles left abandoned, and streetlights pulsed like the breath of a dying beast. Where tree holos stood, only massive exclamation points remained. The world was stained red, the monorail quiet. Nine sets of footfalls slapped the pavement. Other rejects loitered in alleyways and inlets they passed along the way, and there were enough of them to build a small mountain if they banded together to storm a shelter, but none of them wanted to be a doomed hero. Malory had never been so far from the orphanage and wondered if she’d ever go back. A chunk of dead moon could land on her head any moment—it would be easier that way, she knew, but kept jogging after Oscar hand-in-hand with her sister. Far above, she saw a daredevil dancing in the middle of a skyway, waiting for the show. Always an anarchist at the end of the world. Paying to be packed in sardine safety didn’t sound appetizing to her, either.
“We’re here,” Oscar said. He stopped in front of a busted gate, analog prosecution sign spray painted with a black hand print. The rusted chain failed to hold and shrieked offense as he put weight against it. It opened enough for them to squeeze through. “Get in, quick.” Impatience, the attitude of a babysitter, too many uppers.
The old tower was dark and in complete disarray. Trash and broken things littered the square, more than a few used needles jutting from piles of detritus. The roof, their destination, housed the Tianwei International satellite uplink from before they built the massive array circling downtown, beaming cheap overproduced drivel directly into the city’s optics. The faded purple neon bulbs that lined the facade were shattered and lifeless, a monument to excess and decay. There were no red warnings of imminent disaster here, no power grid. The doors and windows were shuttered with thick steel—they had never bothered to rent out the vacant floors, and Malory wondered if the person responsible had been downsized without letting anyone know, a last middle finger to the company. Some enterprising individuals tried to strip what they could from the exterior, unable to carve their way inside, but it was fruitless. None of the gangs wanted to fight the Black Hands in the depths of their territory for access to scraps and the copper wiring of a defunct corporate property. There was no way for the kids to enter; scaling the outside was dangerous, but possible. There were ample handholds, scaffolding, ledges, ladders, and cables. Some window washing platforms none of them could hack. Getting to the top in time was an exercise in endurance.
Oscar started with a leap, feet slammed into metal grates. He didn’t slow down for them.
He ambled up at a brisk pace, backpack swinging, boots sure in cracks and crevices. He was up and over the side of the entrance and out of view in seconds.
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