IN THE PRESENT

When I wake, the first thing I notice is that I am not alone. I try not to react, shifting slightly and rolling my head over to the side so I can peer through my lashes but maintain the guise of sleeping.

Someone is putting a mound of clothing on top of the chest by my feet. They walk out of my view and I hear more items hit the chest with a thud. It’s quiet for a moment before the person exits the room without so much as a glance in my direction.

When the door closes, I sit up and stretch, it feels like I’ve been immobile for days - maybe I have. I’m not sure how long I was out, but if my stomach is any indication, it's been a while.

I scoot over to the foot of the bed and paw through the items left for me. Clean underwear and a sports bra were at the top of my list and both are on top of the pile. Win - win.

Below them is an undershirt made of mesh. I recognize it as CannonWear, the high-tech light-weight underarmour Might soldiers and protectorates from various branches wear. It doesn’t look like much but it’s tough enough to stop a pulse from a high-energy rifle. You’ll probably have a nasty bruise and maybe a few broken ribs, but you’ll live.

There’s also a pair of loose grey pants that I hastily put on along with the other items. As I’m zipping up the pants, I squeal in delight at the final item waiting for me. Combat boots, which were once cream but now are a dingy shade of brown, sit next to a worn shoulder and thigh holster. I’d left them behind because they didn’t work for a covert mission. Tucking my pants into the boots, I lace them up and sigh happily. I’m glad Ander kept these for me.

I strap on the empty thigh holster and am about to put on the shoulder one when I realize I’m still just in a sports bra and underlayer.

A knock on the door prevents me from looking further. “Zo,” there’s a pregnant pause, “Can I come in?”

I walk over to the door and pull it open. Ander gives me a sheepish smile. In his hands is a dark green tank top. I take it from him and pull it on before going back to the bed and shrugging on the shoulder holster I’d dropped.

“Where are my things?”

“Funny you should ask. I would have thought you’d have gone through everything in my room by now.”

My eyes grow round. “Your room? Ander, I’m so sorry. How long have I been sleeping in here?”

He shrugs and waves me off, “About two days, but there’s plenty of other places to sleep.”

“Plenty of others to sleep with, you mean,” I mutter under my breath but I know he hears me.

He doesn’t respond as passes me and squats next to the bed. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t ruin your own surprise by being nosey.”

He reaches under the bed and takes out a metal box. As he turns on the balls of his feet, he holds it out to me with a wide grin, “Happy Birthday!”

It’s a quaint, old-world tradition where people used to celebrate the day they were born. He is a nerd for referencing it.

I take the box and flip the lid. Two small EF-pulse guns and a sheathed helo-knife rest inside. The guns have fingerprint scanners in the grips - a gift from my late Uncle Shuo. They only work for me. I slide them into the holster and gingerly pick up the helo-knife.

It’s one of a kind, also made by Shou. Not only can it cut through just about anything but because of the microfibers embedded within it, it’s also a smart device, capable of hacking into most Insight operating systems, which is pretty much everything in the Republic.

I slide it into the thigh holster and take a deep breath. I feel a little more whole again.

“Thanks for taking care of them. I didn’t think I’d be gone so long.”

“I still don’t get why you left them behind in the first place. It’s like you knew something was going to go sideways.”

I shrug and move towards the door. “Atilio said we didn’t need weapons. He was sure it’d be cut and dry and didn’t want to have to worry about scanners and the like. It made sense at the time.”

Ander follows me out, shutting the door behind us. We’re standing in a long shadowy corridor lined with doors. I can tell from the curve that it’s actually a large circular hall.

“You guys are on a loop track?”

Loop tracks were old Might barracks. The idea was to create a system where no room or person was above another. It also doubled as a running track. They’d gone out of style before I was born.

“You know how they are. Never destroy anything. Just decommission.” He says the last part in air quotes. “They left pretty much everything and with a few minor adjustments to the system, they think it’s still decommissioned. It’s much easier to find a base here, in Might than in the other sectors, like Insight.”

I want to ask him how my home base is doing but he’s already walking away. I follow as he leads me around the hall until we reach a glass cylinder on the inner wall.

“Bet you haven’t been in one of these in ages.” He gestures to the pneumatic system used to move between floors. It’s a never-ending conveyor belt. Simply tap the glass to open, wait for a platform to come by, and hop on. When you’re close to your floor of choice, reach out and the next available door will slide open, allowing you to hop off.

“I’ve never been in one. This tech is even more antiquated than the loop track.”

“But a lot more fun.” Ander says with a toothy grin as he pushes me through the opening.

At first I think there’s no platform and fear grips me as a start to fall, but my feet hit something solid a few feet below. As the platform reaches the appropriate height for entry, Ander gets on.

I shoot him a glare that could curdle cream but he is unaffected. “Fun, right?”

I don’t dignify him with an answer as we make our way up. We’ve gone four floors when he reaches out and pushes me forwards again.

I step out into a gigantic white room lined with wide tables. On either side of each table are a series of hovering discs that are used as seats. From experience, I know they are about as uncomfortable as it can get. They are supposed to adjust to your weight and height but I’ve slid off of them more times than I can count.

Ander leads me to the back where a line of men and women are slowly moving by a buffet setup. I peek over his shoulder and see that it’s nothing worth rushing in for. Just the usual, nuition-filled grey gloop and, my personal favorite, nutrition-filled brown gloop.

“I’m guessing you’re hungry.” He hands me a tray and we get in line.

As we inch forwards, I look around me, wanting to find familiar faces. It may be a different base from where I’ve lived for the past three years, but there’s always some intermingling between bases. But, with each face I scan, my shoulder slump a little more. I don’t recognize anyone.

As if reading my thoughts Ander murmurs, “Insight base has gone dark. It happened about two weeks ago. We aren’t sure what’s happened and with everything going on we haven't been able to send someone to check in out.”

My whole body goes rigid. The entire base...my home, gone?

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

A reassuring pat on the back does little to assuage the storm growing inside me. If I hadn't been caught could I have prevented whatever happened in Insight? Or, would I be just as gone, captured or killed, as the rest of them?

A pile of gloop hits my tray with a resounding thump and pulls me back. Ander is holding out a spoon for me with an encouraging smile. I try to give him one in return but I know he sees through it. He leads me over to a mostly empty part of the mess hall and we sit opposite each other. I mostly poke at my mush, not really hungry.

“You need your strength. If there’s one benefit of this shit, it's that it's packed full of good stuff.”

I nod, knowing he’s right, as I lift a spoonful to my mouth. We eat in relative silence. I guess he can tell I’m not going to fill him in on much more at the moment. Not that there is much more to say. My capture was uneventful, minus getting the shit kicked out of me, and my time in prison even more so. No one even came to visit me, not even to torture me. I was left alone with my thoughts until the day they hauled me out to give me one final beating and execute me.

I set my fork down. “It doesn't make sense. Why didn’t they torture me for intel? They knew who I was.”

Ander meets my eyes with a hard expression. “You said they’d already gotten Atilio. Maybe…”

I cut him off, “Atilio would never betray us!”

His eyes flick over to my hand and I realize it’s clenched into a fist, the spoon inside it warping under the pressure. I release and the bent spoon clatters onto the table.

“Zo, I’m not saying he did anything by choice. But whatever he told them, maybe it was enough.”

I scoff, “You and I know that’d never happen. They’d never have enough. It just doesn’t add up.”

Ander shrugs as he takes another bite. “We may never know, Zo. I will agree that it is quite odd though.”

If I wasn’t interested in eating before, now I’m less so. I get up and push my tray through one of the receptacle units on the wall.

Ander gets up as well pushing his tray through an adjacent unit before wiping his hands on his pants. He nods in the direction of the exit and we leave the mess hall together.

He doesn’t say anything but I know I’m still supposed to follow. We end up on another floor in a large conference room.

A few people are milling around the space. They look over at us, nod at Ander, and completely ignore me which suits me just fine.

On the center table is a holographic projection of a building that’s been reduced to rubble. On the table surrounding it are maps and blueprints from all over the Capital City.

“Remember the Caffrey Depot bombing?” Ander asks as we approach the table.

I nod. It was one of our biggest mistakes of late. Intel had said it would be empty but at the time of the explosion, an entire platoon had been inside. All 39 had died, incinerated in the blast.

“It was a failure,” I look up at Ander, “but it was also a few months ago. We know what went wrong. Why are you guys still hashing it out?”

“That,” Ander points to an adjoining office at the back of the conference room, “is something we will discuss in there.”

We enter the sparse office. Like the others rooms I have seen at this loop track, it is devoid of personalization. But, since we are always on the run, there’s very little “personal” any of us have. My hand slides over my weapons holster of its own accord. I keep all my “personal” strapped to me.

Ander leans against the desk and clears his throat. The scar pulls tight as he grimaces. “Starting tomorrow you’ll be back in training.”

Now it’s my turn to grimace. “Training? Are you serious?”

“It’s full covert. It’s not something you’ve done before. This isn’t going to be sneaking into a warehouse in the dead of night. You’ll have to be out there, Zo!” He’s almost yelling by the end of it and I know he’s worried, which makes me worried too.

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. What exactly am I going to do?”

“Erm,” he rubs his eyes and then lets his head fall back as he lets out a loud, long sigh. As I watch him, I see all the things I had been missing. Grey hairs that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him, are sprinkled through his short-cropped hair. There’s another cut that runs along his hairline and behind his ear. He has aged five years in just one.

I wonder if I’m the same. I feel like twenty-six going on fifty.

Ander looks ahead again and reaches behind him to grab a holo-disk.

The object floats between us and projects the face of an attractive young woman. From her uniform I know she is from the Might Army - a low-ranking officer since her collar is silver with one stripe.

“This is Varda Dorne. She was the officer in command of the platoon at Caffery Depot. She was a pretty unimpressive person as things go, with no offense to the dead, and sadly no one mourns her passing. Her two older brothers died fighting the Workers Rebellion five years ago and her youngest brother was in the Depot with her. Parents are also dead, though that was natural.”

“I didn’t know people died of natural causes anymore.”

Ander nods in agreement. “They lived beyond their means having four kids. They couldn’t even get the youngest into an academy much less afford the boosters. They died like the rest of us plebs do.”

I glance at his sidelong. Ander has never been a pleb, how the lower class of Capital City jokingly refer to themselves. He was born and raised in prosperity. Giving it up by choice doesn’t make you one of them. Hell, I’m not one either and my family was never as acclaimed as his.

I look back at the projected woman. “So she had no one. And no one close to her is alive anymore.”

“Exactly.”

I know where this is going. “But no one survived the blast. That’s a certainty. They know she is dead. It wouldn’t make sense for her to come back.”

“If she wasn’t in the Depot when it happened then she wouldn’t have died.”

I roll my eyes and wave the projection away. The room dims slightly. “Come on! You and I both know that an officer who abandons their platoon is a deserter. She’d come back only to be executed!”

“I never said anything about abandoning. I’m thinking more like taken hostage. They know we are responsible for the bombing. Why not embellish the story a bit?”

He waves the projection back on and changes the image from Officer Dorne to a weird-looking device. There’s no face, just the shape of a head made up of dots connected with razor thin lines.

“Latest in nanotech. It’s a digital rendering device. We’ve got three working now and a fourth almost finished. Two are already being used in the field.”

I enlarge the image with my fingers and look over the fine details. Zoomed in, the mesh of the device becomes clearer. I zoom back out again after I’ve gotten a good look at it and the image expands to also include the upper chest of the model. I can see a tiny network of thousands of connections that cover the entire face of the user, ending just within the hairline and wrapping around the neck to seamlessly close where the micro receivers attach beneath the skin at the base of the neck.

“Once it’s on you can’t take it off,” I murmur, changing the graphics to look at how the tech is integrated into the spinal column. I may not have done great at the Insight Academy but enough repetition gets anything to stick. Basic integration of technology into human anatomy is entry-level stuff at Insight.

“Not without having it surgically removed.” Ander points at the point of connection, and the image zooms in on the wiring that wraps around the brainstem and continues down the spinal cord. It looks as if the nano wiring integrates itself into the host.

“What if someone ripped it off?” I gesture to the edge of the collarbone.

“Almost impossible. It’s a hair’s width. Grabbing it is a feat in itself. But if someone did manage,” he pauses, thinking about the possibility. “Well it hasn't happened but severing the connection like that, ripping it out, it would probably cause nerve paralysis.”

“Temporarily?” I ask, afraid I know the answer.

“Not sure. We can only guess. No one has had it happen.”

I think about Officer Dorne. Just from briefly looking at her I can see the similarities. We have the same honey skin tone. Most of the agents here are from Fate and Might, where everyone is as pasty white as if they’ve never seen the sun.

I guess I have another thing to thank my Mother for.

I don’t even ask if he wants me to impersonate the dead Might Officer. That part is already clear.

“What about the hair?” I touch my dark brown hair. It’s nothing like Officer Dorne’s auburn waves.

“Just a bit of micro reconfiguration.”

I snort, “that shit always looks fake. It’ll look like a bad wig.”

Ander chuckles and waves the halo-disk back to the woman in question. “It’s gotten better. Trust me. If it’s any consolation, we aren't going to do anything to your eyes. They are very similar so we aren’t worried. Just a clear lens for eye scans but nothing major.

I nod, wondering if he can see the tension buzzing just beneath the surface of my skin. I don’t want to be a dead woman. I don’t want a face that isn’t mine, a face that I might never be free of. Who knows how long it will be until I see myself again? If I die, no one will know who I am. No one will ever know.

Ander doesn’t seem to notice my downward spiral. He turns off the holo-disk and motions to the door.

“Mica can go over the deeper analysis of the gear with you if you want. You know it’s not my thing.” He stops, his brow furrowed. “Have you met Mica?”

I walk past him and back into the conference room. “Yea, he’s the weird Insight defector with the glasses, yeah?”

“That describes half of them, you know.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, well, they are a bunch of...” I stop myself because, in all honesty, I don’t want to insult them.

Ander smiles and passes me, leading the way. “I should clarify,” he says over his shoulder as we walk past the still-projected fallen building. “You won’t be training, exactly. You’ll be learning how to be a Might Officer.”

“Oh, joy,” I mutter under my breath.