My body ached.

I was laying next to the fire’s fading embers, trying to think about my new client. My mind kept wandering to favorite old sore spots, instead. Climbing up the dune while the sand slips out from under my feet. Pressure points and subtle stretch of bones bent, muscles tensed, twisting my body where it met the ground. And useless old instincts. I was grasping for remnants of the magic that once was my air and my water, and was now… What was left twitched in response, impotent and infuriating.

Once, growing up, I saw a spider missing all but one of its legs, and I shared my pity among myselves.

I wonder if spiders can feel anger.

The muscle of my back jerked, distorting and snapping back like a rubber band. It hurt. I couldn’t seem to stop doing it, though, so I forced myself to think about something else.

My feelings for the Folk, pain in duotone. Equal parts longing and loathing. There was a well that went deep enough to flood this desert. Rage and grief could animate even this too-too-solid flesh. I had long sense determined to claw back into its proximity, though I had not made up my mind whether that was to be in a bid for reconciliation or something more… one-way. Now all that was left to do was plan and scrounge and prepare. Though at this rate…

I sat up and tapped the biofilm, barely pausing for its luminescence to fill the space, and began sorting through my supplies. I’d already spent too much time wallowing like this. I needed movement. Despair threatened to well up and carry me away, and that was no way to act with a fresh debt owed me and a new client.

It had been one year, five months, three days, and I-don’t-know-how-many seconds since the Folk had torn me free from my own mind, cleaved me along lines I had not realized existed, and cast me on the shore of the world. The network and my craft had been twin voids, and I had been as helpless as an infant. Now… well, I could carry myself upright, carry food to my mouth and swallow, carry on conversations. I had learned there was work for someone like me, and I threw myself into it. I was still in a bad way, but for a girl missing ninety percent of her processing power and all but a hair of her magic, I was probably doing about as well as I could have hoped.

Which brings us to my gun, the cartridges, and Nathan Dun.

It’s not hard to imagine why someone might want him dead. Of course, those people should be smart enough to pay their assassins the political wages that come with political work. None of them would stoop low enough to hire me. No, they would have hardworking, qualified professionals, who didn’t share my particular sob story. There are ways even for a mortal to hide from the eyes of the network and the Folk, if they have the money and the clout. The fact that Bela had come to me pointed to this being something more personal. Dun had something of a reputation for throwing wild parties, and a reputation for doing whatever he wanted at those parties. Bela wanted him dead. Not particularly difficult to read between the lines- he was a filthy-rich corporate sleezebag who paid for the privilege of not understanding the word no.

Getting personal is how you wind up with a knife in your spine, though. A deal is a deal, and a dead man is a dead man. Not like I cared a fig for her motivations, her story. I was in this for me.

I pulled my carbine from its pack, unfolded the stock and the barrel, tested the mechanism. Collapsed it again, stowed it in my pack.

Work clothes…?

I pulled on the jacket, electing to leave the rest behind for now. It had come out of the bioprinter, and fit me like a second skin. The colors rippled, saturated and wild lines shot through dull greys and browns.

Who Dun was did mean I’d have my work cut out for me, though. I tested the bond, a single thread tied into the growing web of power at my center. Melancholy and melodrama notwithstanding, I could still feel the relief each new job had brought me. A few traces of thought, light, agency, racing in circuits into the world and around and back again. Purchase for scrabbling hands, air for the gasping drowner. It would be long, and painful, but I could probably, eventually, ease the worst of the loss. One day I could be a proper witch again. Even blunted and ragged compared to who I used to be, that thought was enough to sharpen my desire to a dagger’s edge. So the deal would stand. Of course. Even if I would need to find a way to put an end to one of the most powerful men in the State.

Charms…

I rolled up my sleeves. One drop in two of the glyphs. Each responded with a pulse of dull red light. I could save anything flashier for later. I pulled up the hood, slung my bag over my shoulder, and stepped out into the night. The tent sealed itself and collapsed behind me, fading into the sand and the rocks, becoming, to all observers, unremarkable trash. I could move again in the morning. Tonight I needed some fresh air and information.

The galaxy shone, soaring up out of the horizon, over the waves. My shoes sank into the sand and pebbles. Behind me, a constructed wall festooned with unplanned, wild-growing shrubs and trees conspired to hide this section of the beach from the eyes of the city. I’d stayed in this little alcove a few times, it was one of the nicer spots to hole up. I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. Farther along the beach some other camper sat at a barrel fire. I moved quietly, hoping to avoid their attention, and started up the rotting wooden stairs that led up into the city streets. My limbs were waking, life flooding into them. By the time I reached the top I was at a run, a blur of movement. Through the traffic, up the wall, toward the towers and the tangle of the city’s circulatory system. Faster than any human eye could follow.

A few minutes before I reached city center, I unfolded my legs and hopped down from the bus, darting into an alleyway. I pulled my hood up, faded into the brickwork as best I could. I thought back to Bela’s visit, this morning. Her workplace probably had at least some information about her involvement with Dun, and I figured it would probably help me find him. And to find her workplace, I would need to find her. I had several ways of accomplishing this given a bit of her DNA, but I hadn’t managed to find anything from her short stopover that I could use. That left the digital methods. I pulled Bela’s hardwire from my left pocket and fitted the jack into one of the small ports on the back of my neck. That connection was nearly dead from disuse, but probing the attachment shook a little of the dust off. Awaiting access, it told me. I yanked it out and stowed it. The device was little more than a personal network gate used by the impatient for large file transfers on local networks. It had two jacks, both for a standard network interface. It wouldn’t be particularly useful to me unless I could find a spot to plug the other one in.

I did have a target in mind. Directly across the street was one of the state’s data aggregation centers. Every one of the enfranchised citypeople had some kind of advertising forensics collected by the state. Available on request to the curious citizen or paranoid privacy activist, and at premium prices to anyone with some product to shove down some throat. I zeroed the camouflage in my coat, setting it to a uniform grey, stood, and walked in the front door.

---

“I found her family.”

navy pushes herself up onto tangerine’s workbench, getting directly in her way. tan sighs and puts her tools down, takes off her goggles.

“Yeah?”

“School records. I was thinking of taking a couple folks down to check in on them. See if we can lend a hand.”

“You think they’ll appreciate that? For all they’re concerned we just got their kid killed.”

“Maybe. Still probably should though. Two more kids. Discounted lunch. mar worked nights.”

tangerine bites her lip and doesn’t say anything. Old habits. She can’t shut navy out, not anymore. She herself had seen to that, had searched up and down the city for months to find the implants alone. It had been necessary. A force for balance, an unstoppable force to tan’s immovable object, according to maroon. A proper pain in the ass, according to char. Most days she had agreed with mar. Today, all she wanted in the world was to be left alone, to let her mind dissolve into a puddle of misery and never reknit itself, never learn to live in a world without maroon in it. It had happened before, once. She had spent more than a year in that place, had let the grief spill out and almost destroy everything else in her life, and drag the rest of them down with her. The workbench is a compromise with that desire. She’ll shut the others out as best she can for as long as she can stand it, and work herself to the bone.

navy hates compromise, and she hates being shut out. Even before tan slipped the relay implants into her brain, she had been stubborn and willful, pushed all of them to let her in on how the group worked. How it felt, how they communicated, what their internal experiences were like, on and on. Had pushed them into poetry, song, prose, painting, themselves and the others. Now that she’s one of them she hates it more than she has the power to communicate with language.

tan almost manages to fool her. An entire legion of thoughts- she just needs space, she just needs to process, she just needs to keep busy- and navy still manages to find how she expects mar’s signal back any second now. Her defense unravels from there, and all the bitter anger and the self-loathing spill out into the group in a wave. It feels sick with guilt, it feels lost and alone and wounded. Six identical sobs from six different mouths, it’s going to do it all over again-

No, it isn’t.

tan finds herself in navy’s lap, on the floor of her workshop. All of its bodies hurt, cramped from sitting still for too long. None of them move from where they are, though. char sits against the wall with them, rose half asleep on her shoulder. ivory lays on the floor, hand behind her head. phlox has her head across tan’s legs.

With this many of itself so close, the places where maroon ought to be compound, feed back, fractalize. Grief is a girl in the room with them.

She was us, too. Idiot.

tan’s been crying, she realizes. navy shuts her up before she can form whatever she was going to say next into words.

Last thing I want is lose any more parts of us. Get it? No more, not allowed. I don’t care if you feel like you’re personally responsible for a nuclear warhead, you’re not actually capable of drowning us all. There’s more of us now than there used to be, and that’s if you’re not counting mar. Which I am. She was beautiful and she was one of the best and kindest people I ever knew, and she deserves to be remembered for what she taught us. We can stand on our own and we owe that to her.

All of the group’s bodies pull a little closer to each other.

Filmy sunlight empties into the shop through the stained glass, setting the dust alight and throwing streaks of color across the wall, across the tools and the benches. The traffic is barely audible from up here, more a vibration in the building’s bones than an actual sound. The others, the ones as-yet-unable, unwilling, or uninterested in joining their little network, had evidently left to give them all some space, somewhere between it being disbursed and standing up and it sitting down, huddled together. Just as well.

tan eventually breaks the silence.

“I guess we’re going to check on her family, then?”

The affirmative crystallizes among itself almost as soon as the words leave her mouth. Two spin off into a tangent about whether going as a group would do more harm than good, but no one doesn’t want to go at all. None of it wants more distance than strictly necessary. The tangent resolves to play it by ear. It’ll bring two bodies to the door and find something to do with the rest of itself nearby if visibly showing up would cause more problems.

They fall into the motions of a scavenge, albeit a somber one. ivory pulls data from each of the sensors they’ve hidden on the city’s transport network and starts a predictive model narrowing down their individual routes to the address navy pulled off the school’s servers. char and rose are in the kitchen, making what tan guesses is probably a casserole. She and phlox check the group’s gear, looking for nicks in their harnesses or cords, burnout in any of the motors, that kind of thing.

All told, it takes them less than an hour to prepare, and they’re practically on top of the hopspot already. The grid’s rails, having risen to pass through a station in the tower next door, take a sharp dive into the mess of streets, walkways, bridges, sails, cells, and overhangs that make up the city’s canopy. The transnet never slows down. In order to use it, you have to speed up.

---

char’s, phlox’s, and rose’s nodes have come and gone by the time navy’s is comping up. Sleek steel boxes, some black, some worn down to the metal. You can barely make out the stenciled numbers on each.

“You’re both still determined to make sure I don’t get to show off, huh?”

ivory sniffs.

“Still determined to make sure you don’t pancake yourself.”

“Oh, come on. All of you know I’m good at this. You’ve got a direct line into my muscle memory, for fuck’s sake.”

“Mhm. Which should take care of the whole showing-off thing, too. You’re looking for node D98F4.”

All three watch with binoculars, trying to catch as much of the incoming network between them as they can. Five or six nodes speed by, each going at least a hundred miles an hour. One of them passes through their hopspot, but ivory says the destination is wrong.

tan knows, and so navy surely must, that none of them doubt her talent or her competence. She knows the actual reason they let the others go before her. In spite of her token resistance to being treated like a green recruit, as far as tan can tell, navy’s frustration is always undercut with a soft, unspoken gratitude.

They spot the node coming in from the westernmost track, just as hot as the others have been. The noise of it drowns them.

Must be a heavy load today!

They move fast. Easy, practiced motions, hand into hand, harness to cord, cord to motor, body to arms. navy’s gloves and boots are snug and secure. She slams her visor closed. The node roars into the station. The group feels every scrap of its brainpower focus into an impossibly sharp point. The combination of trajectory, timing, speed, force, all of it, play out in its mind in the time it takes for the node to reemerge on the other side.

We good?

Yeah. Toss me.

And so they do. navy soars across the gap between the buildings with a whoop and a holler, only barely catching up with the node as it dips under the canopy. They feel her attach herself, gloves sticking hard to the metal, and the cord disengages with her harness, flinging itself back up toward the rooftop, spooled in by the rotor. Her latency shoots up as the node carries her away, and tan feels her presence vanish, replaced by the structure of her comms client. missyouseeyousoon!

“Which I suppose just leaves you and I.”

ivory stands at the edge of the rooftop, watching the point where navy vanished. tangerine joins her, toes over the edge. The sun’s dipping down past the skyline now, orange and pink and amber flaring out over their heads.

Not really ever going to get used to separating, I think.

ivory’s curiosity bats at her mind, a cat with a string.

You don’t, do you? I don’t think it bothers the rest of us in the same way. Maybe for a while, I guess. Connecting up for the first time is kind of heady. Hard to let go of. Seems like it has been for everyone.

The phantom where maroon should be says something neither of them know how to interpret. ivory doesn’t want to be touched. tan wishes she was still nearby someone who does.

Yeah. It’s… I think more than that for me. Structuring myself like an individual is always going to be something I learned how to do. And not because I wanted to. I guess it’ll always feel a little backwards.

She feels ivory probe around her sense of self, gently pull out and unpick the knot that keeps the two of them conversation partners instead of one whole, and it gets what it wanted again for a short, sweet, shock of an instant. Then ivory pulls back, pulls tan’s attention to the time.

“One for the road. You can be the rest of us when we’re all back home safe, agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Her node comes. tan throws herself out into the space between the sky and the city, and lets the wind rip her voice out from her chest. You always yell on the way down.

We all learned it too, you know. None of us got a choice. I know that’s part of why I’m still here.

---

When the knock on the door comes, you are putting away the trays of food your neighbors and friends have been bringing. Your fridge has enough casseroles to feed a small army, and your mothers sit in the other room, talking in low voices. It’s Isa- she’s on watch tonight, you remember. She’s maybe… two or three years younger than- than Helena was. You wipe your eyes and answer. She greets you with a hug, and tells you there are visitors. You glance back at your mothers, frowning, but Isa shakes her head, puts a hand on your arm.

“No, it’s some gang. Weird clothes. Say they want to pay their respects. Want me to let them in?”

“…yeah, go ahead.”

You wonder at the wisdom of that, but you’re curious about who you assume must be your sister’s friends. She’s always been tight-lipped about who she was hanging out with away from the university. People who cared about her, she would say. People who would do their best to keep her safe. Maria eventually stopped trying to get anything else out of her, and the rest of you quietly figured you would find out one way or another eventually.

Turns out you were right.

When the second knock comes, you open it to find… well, Isa did say ‘weird.’ All of them are in loud colors, none of them alike. Most of them obviously painted or dyed something else to be that color, and all of them have patches or studs or sewn-in lights, and armored parts on their limbs. Most of them have helmets under their arms, painted to match.

All of them stand a bit back from the entrance, except for the girl in the shockingly violent green outfit, who holds out her hand for you. Her interface tells you her name is chartreuse, and gives you blank static for every other personal field. You feel your own cheerful reply give her your name, occupation, interests, and contact, and can’t help but feel a little disadvantaged.

“Nice to meet you, Bela. You must be- Helena’s sister?”

You nod, fold your arms, wait for her to get to the point. She shifts, uncomfortably.

“We… just dropped by to see if you all needed anything. And to bring you these.”

You spot another casserole dish, and a bundle of dark red clothes, like theirs. Tears prick again and you wipe them away, a hard burning roiling up from somewhere deep in your chest. You bite back the urge to slam the door in her face. Take the casserole dish and shove it into the fridge with the others, leaving the door open. The group takes that as a cue to come inside, all of them glancing around. Without giving them a second look you turn and walk into the den. Your mothers break off their conversation, looking at you.

“Would one of you talk to them, I- can’t, right now.”

Penny nods and extracts herself from Maria and Lisa, squeezes your hand. You send her the recording of the last few minutes and collapse into yourself on one of the chairs. Block out the murmur from the other room. You know, somewhere deep in your gut, that these are the people responsible. Your sister was good. Your sister was good and whatever they dragged her into, somehow it…

Your mothers didn’t tell you why the drones took her. The cop who came to break the news, he had told Lisa. You asked. She clammed up. So you went to the official reports. Unlicensed medical tech. Unauthorized mind-to-mind connections. Modification of proprietary hardware. Sentenced without notification. Enough there to piece together the truth. A hive. A fucking hive had gotten its hooks into Helena somehow. She never told you.

And now here they are. Standing in your stupid kitchen, talking to your stupid mother, wearing their stupid sad faces as if it wasn’t their fault. You want to throw things at them, yell and scream and make them leave. Instead, you sit and try not to listen to them. Hug your knees to your chest.

It’s really only when the conversation dwindles, and you stop trying to block it out with bad song lyrics and force of will, when you notice that the orangy one is sitting on the floor in front of you. You glance over at the kitchen. Penny’s serving- five? Six? -more of them some of the food the others left, heating something up on the stove.

“Go away.”

Your voice is barely a whisper.

The orange girl looks up at you.

“Okay.”

She’s standing to go when your mouth opens, unbidden.

“She told us her friends were going to keep her safe.”

“…We tried. I wish we had done better.”

“Me too.”

And then she goes to the other room.

The green one is pressing a card- “if you ever need anything, let us know-” into Penny’s hand when the smoke alarm goes off.

---

The buzz of the building’s alarm snaps you back to the present, a two-tone cacophony echoing directly into your interface. You feel it dump adrenaline into your blood, glance around to see everyone else still going about their work. You query the building.

Report to your quarters for inspection, says the automated reply.

You feel your stomach turn to lead. The building isn’t responsible for any kind of inspection you’ve ever heard of. You ping it again, ask it for authorization. You can feel your legs turning to jelly, and now the others are looking at you, and your interface is still trying to give your a heart attack-

Report to your quarters for inspection. Authorized by manual override.

You swallow, and glance towards the door. You want to run. You know it would be enough, if this is about the witch, to confirm whatever doubts are keeping the building’s operator from killing you. You gulp down air, trying in vain to settle your heartrate, and turn towards the elevator.

When you step out, the man who greets you does so with a smile. Your blood is ice. Charcoal grey, pinstripes. Sensible leather loafers.

“Miss Bela . And here I was thinking our acquaintance was at an end- it seems my security team has flagged you for an inspection. I thought it best that I see to it personally, given the nature of your… involvement, with my company.”

Your fingers clench. Your pings against the building bounce off. It does not respond to you.

“Would you be so kind as to lead the way to your chambers?”

You turn and walk stiffly, keeping him out of your line of sight. The alarm blares in the back of your brain. You find yourself walking in time, racing though the contents of your quarters in your mind. You don’t have a weapon, it’s against policy. No kitchen means no knives- maybe you could use a chair, or a curtain rod?

The goons in black, flanking your door, put an end to that line of reasoning. You swallow, and open the door.

You stand near the window while they search your quarters, from top to bottom. Carefully, methodically. Everything put back exactly as it was. Nathan Dun sits at the bar, sipping his coffee, regarding you. You’re half tempted to ask why you were flagged. You don’t. Instead, you busy yourself trying to disappear into the walls of the room.

Finally, one of the goons makes some kind of motion to his boss, and he sighs, tips his hat to you.

“Well. I suppose this was all some kind of misunderstanding. Take care of yourself, Bela.”

He sets a display down on the bar, showing you the selected photo. It’s- you, yesterday. Onboard a transit node, headed to the city’s outskirts.

“You can never really guess what sorts of people are out there, you know? Best to be cautious.”

And with that, the three of them file out into the hallway. As the door clicks closed behind him, the alarm falls silent, and the tension holding you upright vanishes. You barely make it to your bed before collapsing into a heap on the covers.

---