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“You are aware that today is a school day?”

“I’m aware.”

“And you’re aware that you are now employed to watch out for one Joel Lynch, heir to the CEO position at Lynch, the company which just purchased this entire city, including the secondary school he attends?”

“Yup. That’s a big 10-4.”

“And that he’s been getting death threats?”

“From beyond the Singularity. Real Terminator shit. It’s clear as fucking mud.”

A long-suffering sigh vibrated through her bones from somewhere across the city. Probably the crystalline perfection of Tower Five, as far as possible from the rust and grime of Tower One. Hwa tried to imagine her boss hidden behind walls of glass and maps, directing the city with a twitch of his long fingers. A crossing signal here. A seemingly random outburst of music there. She imagined him plucking it like an instrument until it sang with activity.

“I have a present for you.”

“Is it a bacon roll? Because I could do with a bacon roll, right about now.”

“ . . . I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a thing for people who don’t have nanites doing repair work on their livers every time they toast absent friends.”

“ . . . How did you know I have those?”

Hwa smiled despite her headache. “Just a hunch. When do I get my present?”

A knock sounded at the door. Hwa picked her way across the living room and peered through the peephole. A courier in yellow stood in the hallway, looking terrified to touch the buzzer.
“Now,”
her boss said.

“I hate these things,” Hwa said.

“They’re the latest model. And perfect for someone without other augments.”

“They’re . . . ” Hwa wiggled her fingers in front of her new specs. As she did, the device scanned the scars on her knuckles and filed them away in some silvery somewhere that was probably just a data-barge rusting off the coast of one former Eastern bloc nation or another. DAMAGED, the glasses said, and pointed helpful blinking arrows at her fingers and wrists and shins and feet and anywhere else she looked. DAMAGED. Like she didn’t know that much already.

“They’re loud,” she said, finally.

“They’re the quietest on the market.”
Síofra actually sounded a little hurt. Like he’d gone to the trouble of picking out something great and fucked it up instead. Which was exactly what had happened.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get used to it.” Hwa scanned the main entrance. The specs told her where every little camera and microphone was. They lit up snitch yellow on the map. She could pick out the angry kids (red halos), the sad ones (blue), the baselines (green), and the ones who were making out with each other (grinding columns of deep purple).

“We should have gotten them for you sooner. But for someone like you, someone who’s lived for so long without . . . ”

“Without any augments,” Hwa said. “Without any help.”

“Most of these devices are designed to work alongside other services, other technologies. But you’re different.”

If by “different,” he meant “poor,” then he was onto something. It wasn’t that Hwa had some moral or aesthetic commitment to living free of augmentation. The programmable tissues that spontaneously healed her classmates after hockey practice would have been much appreciated where her liver was concerned. But Sunny had never found money for that kind of thing. At least, not when it came to Hwa. Hwa was a bad investment. The lasers that were supposed to fix the stain running down her face had only made things worse. So why throw good money after bad?

“The good thing is, now I can see what you see.”

Hwa snorted. “You know I’ll be shutting these off when I’m in the girls’ locker room, right?”

“Could you say that a little louder, please? I’m not sure the PTA heard you.”

“Oh, come on,” Hwa said. “You’re not worried about the PTA. You work for Lynch, and Lynch pays the wages. They’d offer you a two-fer on the Lindgren twins, if they could.”

She directed her gaze to a pair of blonde girls wearing varsity volleyball jackets over their uniforms. They reclined against the opposite wall, chests out, knees up, all shiny hair and white teeth and laughter. They were everybody’s number one fantasy. If you didn’t want to fuck them, you wanted to be them. Hwa didn’t need a subscription to any one vision of reality or another to see that much.

“Not interested.”

“Liar.”

“Can we not discuss this, please? We’re being recorded, you know. For quality assurance purposes.”

Hwa examined the floor. Her tights had a run in them down her good leg. She inspected the damage idly, twisting her leg this way and that, but her specs had nothing to say about it.

“Much better.”

“Did you like high school?” What a stupid question. Hwa had no idea why she’d asked that. Where was Joel, anyway? It was getting late.

“I don’t know,”
Síofra said.
“I doubt I hated it as much as you do.”

“Yeah, well, I still can’t believe I let you con me into coming back to this place.”

“Better late than never. We were lucky to find a candidate for this position who lacked both a diploma and a prison record.”

“Yeah, that’s some luck, all right.”

Across town, Síofra laughed. Hwa felt it as a tickle across her skull that skittered all the way to the base of her spine as sure as if someone had run a finger down there. She twitched against the wall.

“Hwa?”

Hwa opened her eyes to see Joel standing in front of her, blazer laid neatly across one arm, school tie in a tight little knot she couldn’t help but want to mess up. Christ, he was even wearing the Krakens logo tie pin.
The tie pin.
Like he didn’t already look enough like the skinniest little Tory ever.

Right then and there, Hwa decided she had to get the boy in some trouble before the trouble found him, first.

“Hwa? Are you okay?”

The warning bell rang. Hwa shoved herself off the wall and teetered only a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get to physics.”

“Were you talking to Daniel?”

“Yeah.” She raised her voice slightly so her boss would be sure to hear it. “But he should be
working,
and we should be, uh . . .
learning,
I guess.”

Joel blinked, as though he were not truly listening. Then he nodded to himself, fished in his bag, and pulled out a pouch of electrolytes. Orange flavored. Or so she assumed. There was a cartoon of a smiling orange on it, which was holding a glass of orange juice. Which sort of made it the Orange Jesus, holding out its blood and offering salvation of the breakfast beverage variety. Joel grinned and wiggled Orange Jesus in her face. It was the first time she’d ever seen him really smile. He put the pouch in her hand. “Daniel says you should drink this. For your hangover.”

There was a basic problem on the desk when they got to class. At least, Joel said it was pretty basic: “It’s Moore’s Law,” he said. “About exponential growth in computational ability. Didn’t you cover exponents in Grade 8 algebra?”

Hwa tried to remember Grade 8. She’d turned fourteen that year, and had a general memory of fourteen sucking worse than the other years for some reason. Oh, yeah: because her mother wouldn’t shut up about how
her
first single had gone
platinum,
when
she
was fourteen. And then she’d talk about pink champagne and parties and music producers and how to fend them off, always making certain to end her stories with something like, “Not that you’ll ever have that problem, Hwa-jeon.”

Hwa-jeon.
It was a dessert in Korea. When she was little, Hwa thought her nickname being a dessert meant she was sweet and special, a nice treat at the end of a nice person’s day. Then she asked Sunny to make it for her.

<> Her mother had taken one look at Hwa’s face and rolled her eyes. <>

“Hwa?”

“Huh?” Hwa blinked at Mr. Branch, who was peering at her with his head cocked. In the specs, his emotions didn’t register like the students’ did. Maybe the faculty all had theirs screened out. Not exactly sporting. “What? Sorry. Were you talking to me?”

“Yes. I was asking you where your homework was. I was calling the roll for missed assignments. Five hundred words on one problem you’d like science to solve?”

Hwa frowned. “What?”

“Your homework—”

“You
call the roll
for missed assignments?”

“We went over this during the syllabus review yesterday,” Mr. Branch said. “When assignment are not sent to me by the start of class hours, I will call for them in case they’ve been forgotten.”

Hwa arched her left eyebrow. “In case they’ve been forgotten,” she said, slowly and deliberately. She turned her face to a little the right, just so he’d be sure to see the stain. Just like that, his lip twitched. A little ugly went a long way, with beautiful people. “Don’t you think that’ll make your students feel bad? Like, ashamed of themselves?” She plucked at her tartan tie. “I mean, we wear uniforms and everything, but this isn’t a Catholic school. Shame isn’t really a teaching tool.”

A collective
Hmm
that went through the class, as though they hadn’t really considered that side of things, before. Which they probably hadn’t. But you couldn’t grow up with Sunny as your mother and not start seeing opportunities for emotional manipulation for exactly what they were. In the specs, Hwa watched the baseline green ripple into contemplative orange.

Mr. Branch’s mouth thinned. “Things have changed, since you dropped out three years ago.”

The rest of the class
Oooh
’d. The orange turned back to green. Beside her, Joel winced. He shot her a look that begged her not to take this any further. He was worried—the aura around him was a thin bruise blue. She winked at him. Anybody who thought she was hurt by comments about having dropped out didn’t really know her. The day she turned her back on this place was one of her favorite memories, and thinking about it never failed to make her feel better. She leaned back in her seat and looked at Mr. Branch. She crossed her hands over her stomach, like she’d just finished a big meal and was ready to relax.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sure they gave you a whole seminar on the new rules, once you were come from away.”

Nothing happened. Branch appeared to be processing what she’d said. She’d said it in slang deliberately, so he’d have to spend time working it out in front of the whole class. Because while he was her teacher, he was also being an asshole, and if there was anything she’d learned in three years of bodyguarding it was how to deal with assholes. You had to puncture them like the inflamed little sphincters they were and watch while all the pus drained out until they were just shriveled little rings of nothing special. Words were good for this. Like subtly reminding an entire classroom that Branch was a stranger, not a rigger, not even from the mainland but from Away, from Vancouver or wherever clear on the other side of the country.

“Just get me the assignment,” Branch said. He started calling off more names.

“You can have mine,” Joel whispered to her. “I wrote two.”

Of course he did. “Why would you do twice the homework?”

“I’d already written one, on faster-than-light travel,” Joel said, “but then I pinged him about it, just to show off, and he shot me down. Said he wasn’t taking any science fiction questions in science class. Real problems only.”

“So what’d you write about, instead?”

“How the ITER failed, in France.”

Hwa nodded. “That’d be good for science to figure out.”

“Science
has
figured it out.” A smirk tugged at the edges of Joel’s lips. He lowered his voice still further. “That’s why we’re building another one.”

Hwa turned to him. “We?”

“The company,” he said. “We’re building another experimental thermonuclear reactor, right here. Underwater.”

“Underwater.” Hwa pointed at the floor. “Under
this
water?”

Joel nodded. “Under the city.”

Hwa drew breath. “What the hell kind of James Bond villain bullshit—”

“You promised your father you wouldn’t discuss this outside the family, Joel,”
Síofra said.
“Hwa signed a non-disclosure agreement, but you shouldn’t make it difficult for her to adhere to it.”

“You’re building a fucking
sun
under this town, and
I’m
the one you’re worried—”

“Miss Go!”

Hwa’s head snapped up. Branch did not look happy. Shit.

“Since you and Mr. Lynch have so many things to discuss, perhaps you’d like to discuss them in the hall. Eight bins of fetal pigs were just delivered for Miss Jarvis’ biology class, and they’re not getting any colder sitting out in mailroom. I’d like you to bring them from downstairs to the science lounge, and load them in the refrigerator.”

“Can we have the elevator pass?” Joel asked.

Branch smiled. “No.”

Hwa shrugged. She stood. “Come on.”

“But—”

“It’ll be good for your arms. Let’s go.”

“So, are you guys gonna disconnect the whole rig and fire everybody, or just wait until your science experiment explodes and kills us all?”

“It won’t explode.” Joel grunted, lost control of his one bin, and set it down on the floor. “Why wouldn’t they give us a dolly or a hand-truck or something we could use to lift these things?” He flexed his fingers. “My hands hurt.”

They were barely out of the mailroom off the main entrance. They’d been walking for all of two minutes, and hadn’t even cleared the lobby, yet. Even if the death threats against Joel were totally bogus, and Hwa was inclined to believe they were, she’d be damned if she didn’t whip him into shape. The kid could barely lift twenty pounds.