THIRTEEN, at Sarah’s favorite greasy spoon. Some shitty hole-in-the-wall with ugly floors of cracked brown tile and a faded yellow awning out front, new owner every week, same employees every time. Everyone in our blocks knows her, from the quiet schoolteacher who buys her a coffee to the boisterous chef who knows exactly how she likes her bacon. Everyone respects her in that quiet way we respect refreshing summer storms or early autumn breezes- everyone except me.

I’m a scrawny little mouse tagging along on the back of a snow leopard. Sarah watches me gnaw on some too-big piece of mystery meat with a hand curled under her jaw, eyes dancing in the morning light. Rare sunlight streams through a crack in the overcity districts. Everyone’s in a good mood. Her most of all. For two months, Trust Foundries was choking down the power supply to the biggest Vents grid and jacking the prices too high for anyone to pay. Half the lights in our blocks were off, the rest going down next week. People on the lowest layers freezing from cold, people on the highest fighting like they always do when the lights go down. She singlehandedly shut down the corp’s operation and put that grid in the hands of Venters; where it should be.

“Sometimes you just have to remind them who’s boss,” is all she said.

But me, I’m just thirteen. Just a kid. Thinking I’m hot stuff, thinking I’m ready for a real job, pissed off that she left me to twiddle my thumbs while she went out to be a hero. She took me here to apologize and watch the sunshine. I’m too dumb to see that, too. And when I finally snap at her that she shouldn’t treat me like a kid because I’m not her daughter and she’s not my mom and I hate that she’s always leaving me behind, I don’t see the horrible tears that form in the corners of her eyes, because she was once a mother, and mothers never let their children know how much it hurts.

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Thirteen, sitting on the edge of the bridge by the range. Legs dangling above the bottomless Abyss. Hating myself. My mom left me on a bridge just like this one. Had to choose between me or drug money. She chose the drugs.

Sarah finds me on the bridge and sits beside me. She puts her big fur cloak around my shoulders. Counts her fingers like shell casings while she thinks of what to say.

In the end, we don’t say anything at all. My mom abandoned me on a bridge. Sarah found me on one. So it’s a good thing, I think, that she was nothing like my mother. That she cared about me in her own way, and I wanted to grow up to be just like her.

It took a few more years to realize that she didn’t want me to be just like her. She wanted me to be better. But by then, it was already too late.