2034

That was the second time I saw my aunt kill someone, in as many days. And both times I had known she was going to do it before it happened. Or, rather, I had somehow known the person was going to die.

Lourdes rolled the man’s body off the train car through one of the rear doors and wiped her knife on the man’s scarf before tossing that aside, too. The moon had just begun to rise in that desolate country and so there was no one else to witness his dead form roll down the graveled mound along the tracks. In the blueish gray of the night sky, the misshapen lump of denim and limbs quickly faded into the many parched skeletons of once verdant shrubs returned now to a cactus-dominated terrain. Smog cover crowded out all but the brightest stars and a few of our celestial neighbors in our own system. It was a painting in dusky pastels.

We stood in one of the high-stacked container cars attached to the end of a doublewide transcontinental railroad. But we had not gone very far, perhaps we were not even out of California yet. The H-powered train hummed with the rhythmic pulse of the wheels as they relentlessly churned distance out of metal. To the right and left lay sealed compartments with machine parts and high-tech toys and who knew what else manufactured in one of the South Pacific Sustainability Centers awaiting delivery on the east coast. Logos on many of the compartments proudly announced their provenance, one of a dozen international firms contracted by the UN to provide shelter and employment for millions of refugees displaced by the fighting in the Indian subcontinent: “Doing Good and Giving Hope, Sustainably” and other similar slogans. At each door in the container, my aunt stopped and tapped and listened. The digiplate I.D.s only showed a pixelated pattern of three-dimensional binary tags. And even if we had used a reader to decode the supposed shipping manifest, it would have done no good. The whole point of secrets was to hide them through deceit.

Halfway down the constricted hallway, she must have heard something because she tapped again. This time, I also placed my ear against the cold metal. A faint tapping responded.

Lourdes rifled through the wallet she had removed from the man’s body and took out a translucent plastic key card. She looked up at the solitary light bulb, swinging overhead with the gentle swaying of the train. With a good hit from a discarded metal rod, she shattered it. We were in complete darkness except for the key-pads glowing green at the doors up and down the hallway. The whole world I knew seemed to contract to an alien landscape of corrugated metal and human skin stained the same emerald color.

“Nai, get behind me,” my aunt said.

She reached around her back and withdrew a handgun. Never taking her eye off the door or lowering her weapon, she shrugged the pack off her shoulder and lowered it to the ground to keep the valuables inside from breaking. Her other hand held both the key card and the newly cleaned blade. I stood next to her, my back pressed to the wall, barely able to see what she was doing. A high-pitched note beeped when she swiped the card against the pad and the green hue changed to turquoise. She immediately squatted to the ground, handgun raised and knife ready. I followed her lead and crouched down. We were dressed in similar practical boots with good grips, but I found myself off balance. With a hiss, the pressurized door pulled back from the frame and moved to the side.

Lourdes waited.

And so, I waited, barely breathing and not making a sound.

Tentative footsteps clanged on the metal floor, getting closer to the open door.

“No se muevan.” Do not move. Lourdes spoke the very moment two heads poked out from the door frame. She slowly rose, her laser-sighted gun pointed at two very frightened faces. “Ahora, caminen despacio.” Slowly, step out.

Two women wearing ill-fitting clothes took mincing steps into the hallway. Even in the dim green light, they sheltered their eyes with their arms, as if warding off blinding brightness after days spent in the dark.

“¿No hay nadie mas?” Is there anyone else? Lourdes asked.

They shook their heads.

“Se fue el y ustedes están libres.” He’s gone and you’re free.

They cried out in sobs and clung to one another. Their unrestrained cries sounded like gasps for air and a pent-up release of sorrow. Despite the low light, I could see contusions and dried blood. It was a sound and sight I never forgot and it changed me forever.

“Bajen a la próxima parada y llamen a este número. Busquen este policía y solamente a el. Cuéntenle lo que ha pasado y les ayudará. Pero, no digan nada de nosotras.” At the next stop, get out and call this number. Find the police. Tell him what has happened and he will help you. Just say nothing of us.

She handed the women an old phone that must have been from the previous decade. “¿Me entienden? En absoluto: nada.” Do you understand? Nothing.

They nodded.

“Este télefono solo puede llamar a un número. Cuándo el pregunte, díganle que simplemente se lo encontraron el télefono y la puerta abierta.” This is the only number it can call and when he asks, answer that you found the phone and the door open.

She looked back at me, “Come on.”

“When we get into the next car, act as if nothing is out of the ordinary. You belong here. We just finished going to the bathroom and are going back to our seats,” Lourdes said before opening the door at the end of the container. “And watch your step.”

As soon as the door slid to the side, a screeching force of wind and noise blew in. The other car was only two yards ahead, but the night could not occult the ground moving quickly beneath our feet. The parallel railway tracks built to support the weight of a doublewide locomotive with two sets of wheels lethally offered twice the opportunity to get riven should one’s footing slip.

While I stood at the joint of the two cars, gripping the overhead attachment cables and imagining the gruesome fate that awaited should I fall, Lourdes walked over the metal piping with surefooted confidence. I trusted my hands more than my feet (though, just barely) and applied lessons learned from schoolyard games to somehow scramble behind her onto the other side.

She used a trick with the number pad — some kind of mini-drive she plugged into it — to open the door and we walked into the end of a third class passenger car where the rows of bathrooms were. They were definitely the bathrooms and already overflowing by the smell and wads of paper strewn across the aisle.

No one even bothered looking up as the two of us walked past rows to our right and our left. They were too tightly packed into their seats, heads entirely covered with Escapion Full Face visuality glasses where they could escape the present by tinkering around on the AI-verse unhindered. The ones playing video games were obvious, they would twitch or swing the virtual controller, sometimes even yelling, and always annoying their neighbors. Those unfortunate enough to sit next to the windows received a non-stop barrage of advertisements that played across the panes of glass.

One man (the one who was yelling the loudest and repeatedly kneeing the seat in front of him) accidentally elbowed the man to his right. For his fed-up neighbor, this was the last straw. He began punching, no accident about it. A brawl broke out when another passenger lunged over the seatback to exact revenge, but inadvertently hit a sleeping woman.

“Hey, watch out.”

Each punch was awkward, overextended, the opposite of my aunt’s economic moves. Unlike scenes in the movies, these people did not know how to fight. A few teenagers cheered, phones raised to record and upload the entertainment. We just kept walking forward, stepping to the side as the train cops finally rushed in to calm the situation.

Simultaneous commands streamed over the intercom and digitized window panes: “All passengers are asked to return to their assigned seats.”

But the brawl followed us, engulfing bored and miserable third class train cars and requiring ever more attention. In the end, the distraction proved useful—no one asked why we were walking car to car.

We stopped at a cabin a few cars up from where we first entered. Lourdes had somehow managed to book a respectable sleeper with bunk beds and a small private toilet behind a metallic screen that barely gave enough room to stand in. But, it worked and did not bear the odor of scores of previous users.

“Most importantly,” said my aunt, “It has a door, which we can lock.”

As soon as we stepped in, she slid the metal rod she had carried from the container car against the door, bracing it to make opening it from the outside difficult (or, at least, rowdy).

Lourdes unwrapped the complimentary soap at the sink and scrubbed any remaining blood from her hands. She worked at the skin underneath her fingernails the way surgeons did. The floral perfume of Victorian roses filled the air.

“Whose telephone number was that?” I asked, sitting onto the lowered couchbed. To my right, the ad-free window revealed the night landscape of city lights in the distance. Even in the darkness, the curved lines of cylindrical vapor stacks of a newly constructed nuclear power plant stood out against the skyline. We must have been passing the seismic stability corridor, far east of the faultlines in California.

“An honest cop in Houston,” she replied, washing the sink itself with soap.

“Houston? Is that where you were all this time?”

“Goodness no. I have not been to Houston in a decade and that was just for a layover in their zoo of an airport.”

The surprisingly quiet highspeed hand dryer made quick work of the task.

“Then how do you know he’s still ‘honest’? People change over time.”

“Oh, I do not know him. I merely know that he is honest.” Lourdes placed her bag on the couchbed next to me and unbuckled the top flap.

“You don’t know him? Does he know you?”

My aunt shook her head as she unfolded a special oiled felt cloth from a pocket in her shoulder bag and with great care began to wipe the knife she had quickly cleaned.

“What’s he going to think when he gets that call?”

My aunt paused to consider a mark on the point of the blade and then the hilt. Even in the etiolated energy-saving light, it glistened.

“Hmm. I am not sure. I do not believe I have ever considered what he thinks. I know what he will do. He will make sure they are taken care of.”

“Wait. You’ve done this before to him?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She merely shrugged. “Good people are hard to find; I appreciate professionalism.” She put away the blade and then looked at me. I was still seated on the couchbed, still wearing my backpack. “Naiara, you might not feel it now—you are probably still too excited from the adrenaline, but you are exhausted. You need to eat dinner and get rest.”

Lourdes was correct—at least about dinner.

“Oh, right.” When I opened the backpack I had carried for the better part of a day, I realized I was famished. It did not matter that the tortillas and beans were mashed into an indistinguishable mess. We sat next to one another in silence for a few minutes, eating the provisions my aunt had thought to pick up from the roadside taqueria earlier in the day. There was something about the stillness of the room, no voices, no running, only the measured beating of the train wheels outside, never-ending drumming that drew us closer to our destination. It was the first moment of peace in a day.

And it was the first time the change felt permanent. Everything began to sink in: I would never see my family again. No one who had known me for the first 16 years of my life would ever see me again. All the fights and the misunderstandings with my mother would remain unresolved. And all of them would think I was dead, the latest and last victim of a serial killer. And when they wondered where he stowed my body and would grieve and weep and hope-against-hope that I might somehow come back, alive, and yet, with the passing of the years, resign themselves to the loss, only my mother would know the truth. The woman who I thought did not understand a single thing about me was the only person who had known the whole truth. And I could never ask her about it or apologize.

My aunt must have known my thoughts from my expression.

“It is very difficult,” she said. “I will not prevaricate and pretend that this is easy or that you will not wonder what might have been otherwise. But, that fire that has been burning in your heart, the sense that you have had all your life that you are meant to do something—this is it. It will cost you everything in ways that you cannot know.” The catch in her voice as she spoke—or, perhaps, the catch I imagined hearing in her voice because I could not have said it otherwise—made me wonder at the price she had paid. “But all the most important things in life are like that. And so, they are priceless.”

I nodded. Her words seemed a sacred proclamation.

“And,” she added in a matter of fact tone, “If you contacted them, you would only put them in mortal danger.”

I felt a wry smile bidden to my lips. Yes, I suppose, there was that.

“I don’t feel doubts,” I said. “I don’t know what I feel.” I looked down at my hands greasy with the remnants of a meal and then my aunt’s and went to the sink. “Excitement. Loss. Hope. Uncertainty. And then, underneath it all, a kind of certainty. It’s like I’m remembering something I’ve know my entire life, but I cannot remember where I learned it or when I forgot it.”

Lourdes nodded and gave the faintest of smiles.

“Wow. This soap is really strong.”

“Indeed.” She did a number of stretches and then pressed the screen the wall to lower the bed opposite mine. I found her looking at me as she sat, her hands gripping the side of the bed as if she were steadying herself. /

“I don’t think I can go to sleep just yet,” I said. I grabbed my new tablet from the backpack—the newest technology I had never even imagined I would own. I wiped a long line of tortilla grease from the screen with the cuff of my jacket. Things like this cost what an average American made in half a year. I had only seen these in movies, but Lourdes had given it to me saying, “You will learn that this is more than a toy or a tool, it is a weapon,”—a weapon with a bright screen that might be too distracting if someone else were trying to sleep.

I looked at my aunt in question.

“Go ahead,” she said.

I turned on the screen but ended up watching her for a moment as she readied for bed. She unbuckled the holster at her right knee and the one at her back and hung the bag she carried on the hooks above her, the contents peaking out the top. But she did not take off the knife at her hip and she placed her striker within finger’s reach against the wall. Her own shoulder bag was filled with weapons I had never seen before—weapons that looked like a strange anachronous assortment: ornate flying stars with sharp points that might have belonged in a museum, a sleek black metal box that could have been the processing unit for a computer, and a clear cylinder with some thick bright blue liquid. She did not say what that last one was for and I could not guess from the look of it. Lourdes stretched herself out on the body morphic mattress, a clear line of vision to the door.

“You have gotten an entirely new identity, Nai,” she said. “Your mother made it easy—having you at home and switching your biodata with our oldest sister’s—que en paz descanse. There is no way they will be able to trace you back to your past as long as you stay out of it.” She dimmed the lights and settled into a watchful sleep.

For years, I had fallen asleep while reading an old tablet, with my younger sister giving me a hard time for the light in the room.

“But, please, use your headset,” Lourdes said. She tossed an arm over her eyes and, judging from the slower paced breathing, promptly fell asleep.

I was much too excited to be able to sleep so quickly. Too many images and questions from the last day raced through my mind to be able to shut it off as my aunt had. Later, I learned that her soldier-like capacity to sleep on command was the outcome of years of training. I started with the headlines of the day: “Five Year Mission to Fourth Planet Takes Off”—an uploaded video showed eight astronauts entering the Santa Maria Spacecraft at Cape Canaveral. Santa Maria was carried into the sky on the back of Boeing’s spaceplane and then, as the two reached the upper stratosphere, the interplanterary craft separated and then ignited its own engines. The eight passengers on that voyage were hailed as heroes as they left on a journey previously completed only by an unmanned probe that had returned rock and atmosphere samples from the fourth planet just the year before.

Gambling websites set stakes for whether some, or any, of the astronauts would make it to their destination, or return, alive. Illegal betting aside, everyone knew the mission could result in tragedy as had the first privately funded expedition of 2028. And to face the black knowing that another vessel careened endlessly off course—and with two of those adventurers still alive, from what we could tell from the command computer readings, that was courage that captured the hearts of billions. The other side of admiration was the horror of being entombed alive with no hope, ever, of rescue in a case of metal lost in the vast emptiness of space.

“Santa Maria will make the eighteen month journey to the fourth planet, going deeper into space than humanity has dared tread before,” the narrator explained, “And they’ll have eighteen months on the planet surface before they use solar wind to guide them back home. The astronauts have been on a strictly vegan diet for the past three years, so that doctors can make sure their bodies can get all the nutrition they need. But, of course, the big question we all have is who will be the first pairing. Web rumors are already circulating that…”

But not all the news was salacious or good. “Fighting Extended in Bangladesh: Indian Civil War Spreads.” Videos of shoot outs in closely packed neighborhoods, this year more gruesome, if possible, than last year. Conflicts in the subcontinent were only one example of the fighting into which South Asia and Central Asia had descended. For the last decade, old cultural and regional tensions had flared up into all-out war. The drought and the contamination from poorly maintained factories had made things worse, leading to famines that the people did not take lying down. Instead, states and nations invaded their neighbors looking for food and clean water and the response had been disastrous. All of southern Asia was a war zone and now the last standing government in the entire region of five billion people had fallen.

Millions of refugees scrambled to get out on rickety boats, but many did not make it. Those that managed to find seaworthy craft ended up in processing center after processing center, an uncertain existence in Southeast Asia for years until the UN finally decided to open six-month resettlement centers in the South Pacific. Eight years later, the average length of residence at the temporary resettlement centers was eight years and counting, processing paperwork stuck in limbo. The continued fighting on the subcontinent provided fresh batches of refugees to replace any who managed to get their papers in order. In 2031, China finally had enough of it all and hastily erected a southern and western wall that was heavily policed and wasn’t for the tourists to climb and photograph.

This was all excellent business for the hydrocarbon warlords, of course, who sold the natural gas and oil resources of the region on the global black market. Rumor was that China was a major buyer of their fuel—but this was categorically denied. New photographs and video had been posted on the web in the last 24 hours, showing the region from space. There were plumes of smoke that had risen to the atmosphere and were leaving trails that stretched westward across the continent. Just last year I’d given a presentation in one of my classes about the conflagrations in Asia because it still seemed so incredible that we’d actually seen a nuclear war between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on internet livefeed (fought with bombs purchased from Pakistan). But the news that caught my eye was the reposted 140-character update: #Extermination Lahore-whole city dies in 24hrs—no one knows why, all collapse, bloated bodies, no disease/weapons: eyewitness.

Twenty million dead in a day? There had been stories of small villages and then remote towns dying mysteriously in that kind of timeline, but uncorroborated and impossible to prove. But an entire city? The images, grainy as if snapped while running or hiding, could have been of disaster casualties anywhere in the world.

There was news about New York, too, but I’d never really been interested in the city to which we were now traveling. I had always been more drawn outside of the country, but of course I had never been allowed to go much farther than the central valley town where I was born in California. I had never even gotten as far as L.A. My mother and I had fights about it for as long as I could remember—my wanderlust, her insistence that I stay closer to home than anyone I knew.

I supposed I should get to know the place Lourdes sensed, I thought.

“I sense direction,” my aunt had said to me as we scrambled down the hill to the train (this was before the human trafficker had tried to seize us and before Lourdes plunged her knife up his chin, into the base of his of his brain).

I sense death.

The news on New York was a study in opposites: gleaming towers that had been newly built, violent crime in the outer reaches of the city, police running terrorism drills, the latest in biotech and spacetech innovation, civil disobedience. This time, several hundred protestors had gotten arrested outside the New World Trade Center. They carried signs, “Privatizing N.O. Lab = Stealing From Us” “Near Orbit: Funded by Taxpayers, Stolen by Uncle Sam” “N.O. cure for Pneumonic Dengue? Promises made, promises broken” “Don’t Sell N.O. Out!”

It was boring.

Shrug. Who cared what happened in that city? Feeling as if I were transgressing or trespassing, I opened the news on California: stricter water rations, record-breaking summer heat (yet again) even though it was just June, drugs, budget default, celebrity sex videos involving minors, energy prices raised once more even though the expanding necklace of nuclear plants in the seismic corridor (funded by Californian taxes) had promised cheaper electricity. I looked at Lourdes to my right to see if she noticed, but her breathing remained unchanged.

My aunt had only cautioned me against entering into my old life, not against reading about the life I had left behind. Or, at the very least, the general geographic vicinity. And then: “Leatherplank Killer Strikes Again”: highschool soccer star’s body found, teammate missing, feared victim of the creepy killer who stalks brunettes. There were videos of distraught family members and weeping teammates and candles being lit in a make-shift shrine where Elsa’s body was found, a blood trail leading around a warehouse. I winced at the pleas for any information and the anguished police briefing where a small town cop was unable to finish reading a statement before breaking down in sobs. I could not bear to look at it, especially since I had watched in shock as my aunt destroyed any evidence that would point to who the killer really was.

That night, like many nights after, I dreamt about the murder. But the dreams never told the whole story, they skipped from one scene to another, sometimes focusing on one detail, sometimes another.

I followed Elsa around the building after the evening match.

“I have to pick up the spare bag of balls. Maybe Lindsay forgot to,” Elsa said. “Can you give me a hand?”

“Sure,” I said, confused because it was usually a one-person task among many others after our late matches.

Seeing my expression, she added, “I guess I just need to talk. Coach was a little weird earlier, even though we won. I think he was mad at me or something.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Do you know?”

We walked to the back of the locker-shower facilities while everyone else celebrated at the post-game barbecue.

But he was there, waiting for her, surprised (and pleased?) that there were two of us.

“Hi, ladies,” our coach said.

That was the first time it happened to me: a sensation filling me, like a wave from my core to my fingertips, knowing that Elsa was about to die and that our coach was, too, though I did not know how I knew. In my dream, I visibly glowed, but, of course, that was merely what it felt like. How to describe what it was like? A clarity and focus and certainty drowned out all sound and, though my eyes registered visuals, I was too terrified by what had gripped me to do anything but stand and stare. I could smell it, I could smell their sickly putrid deaths.

I gagged and threw up.

“Are you feeling all right?” asked our coach. “You look like you got hit by a ball in the head.”

The sensation, the smell passed after a couple of seconds, but by that time, he was close, too close, to us.

With a gun that he had carried behind his back, he pistol-whipped me on the back of the skull. The searing pain sent me to the ground. And between the black and gray and then blinding white spots that clouded my vision, he pounced on her, ravenous hands pawing at her body and cinching around her throat.

Elsa fought back but was incapacitated quickly. Before I could get up, there was a gleam of silver in the moonlight. A figure clad in darkness kicked my coach in the throat, forcing him off Elsa’s body (and snapping his neck), and then thrust a long, thin blade beneath his chin and into his brain to finish the job, killing him instantly. The figure leaned over Elsa, touching her throat—she was alive, but only for a few more torturous seconds before succumbing to her injuries.

And then the figure stood up and turned to me and said my name, my real name. It was the last time I ever heard it in my life.