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“Uh…” Meems makes a strange strangled noise. “He’s uh, not here.” Suddenly, she makes a horrible choked noise and runs from the room. I glance back at my father’s picture. Strange that they’ve put his picture beside my mother’s unofficial memorial; two chrome-encased souls on display. And why have they put my bed here in his workroom when I have my own room downstairs, and he needs to come in here and work?

  And then I understand. The hollow expression in Katrina’s eyes. Meems’s uncertain, halting explanation and sudden display of programmed emotion. “He’s—” My voice fails me. I struggle to swallow through the lump in my throat. I feel acidic, panicked blood coursing through my body, threatening to make me burst into flames. I tear at the covers, struggle to get up, to run screaming through the house for my father.

  I try to leap up.

  My legs don’t catch me.

  Too light and unbalanced, I tumble to the floor.

  I struggle to sit up, my arms like rotten noodles under my Natural weight.

  I struggle to stand, but I can’t seem to get my legs underneath me.

  Frustrated, I look down.

  And everything goes still. Silent. Horrifying.

  I scream.

  Chapter Eight

  Post-American Date: 6/17/231

  Longitudinal Timestamp: 8:34 p.m.

  Location: Dome 5: Evanescence

  I can’t stop staring at them. Or rather, the lack of them. The macabre reality is like watching someone pick away a bandage with sharp, Altered fingernails. Except there is no blood, no scab. No promise of rebirth. Only death and loss. Loss of life and limb. Literally.

  A desperate giggle escapes my lips.

  “She’s been staring at them since we got her back into bed,” Katrina is telling the doctor.

  The doctor, a Custom Aristocrat in a long synthetic coat, doesn’t look up from the digi-chart his android nursing assistant is displaying. From where I lie, the holographic projection of the chart covers the assistant’s entire body, leaving nothing but a disembodied pair of legs attached to a shadow.

  Legs? Are those my legs?

  “She’s in shock,” I hear the doctor say.

  When I look up, my hands reach down and touch the ends, as if they’ve been waiting for my eyes to look away so that they can prove I’m only seeing things. They only find what my eyes already know. There’s nothing there. My fingers and my stumps both seem to recoil, frightened of each other’s touch.

  It’s true. There’s nothing there anymore. My bottom lip won’t stop trembling. Words are coming out of my mouth. I can hear them, but I don’t understand them.

  Katrina gives me an uneasy glance, her fiery red lips turned down and her fake green eyes limpid. “She hasn’t, you know…” Her fine, manicured fingers fly to her head in an absent, red-nailed gesture. “Gone crazy or anything? I’m not certified to handle those kinds of cases.”

  It’s a dream. A nightmare. I’m going to wake up. They will be there. He will be here.

  The doctor spares one last glance at the chart and dismisses it. It disappears, revealing the chasis of an assistant nurse, plain face, white uniform, foolish white hat. “No. It’s most likely the medication. It should wear off soon.” His voice is smooth and reassuring.

  Like Dad’s voice. Tears begin oozing down my cheeks.

  “Have you told her about her father?”

  Katrina shakes her head, a wave of false color and emotion. She doesn’t care. She can’t possibly. She didn’t know my father, and she doesn’t know me. Though she plays this role well for the doctor. “No. I didn’t get a chance to. I think she knows, though. I think she senses it.”

  The shroud is falling over my world. Black shroud, white light. I’m not here. I’m dead. This is not me. I’m dreaming my death march. Legless death march.

  “There are options,” the doctor is saying. “Once she heals and gets her strength back. There are prosthetics or nanites. It doesn’t have to be permanent.”

  Katrina remains silent for a long moment. “We’ll see. I can’t really deal with all of this right now. Walking into this? Well, it’s a proper mess. It’s not my decision. I’m just the caretaker.”

  “Understandable. Please keep an eye on the G-Chip’s readings. Notify me if she experiences any pain or refuses to eat.”

  “Yes. Thank you doctor.”

  Yes, thank you doctor.

  Chapter Nine

  Post-American Date: 6/18/231

  Longitudinal Timestamp: 2:49 a.m.

  Location: Dome 5: Evanescence

  I have to pee.

  I have to pee, and the bathroom is so far away.

  “Meems,” I whisper. Not loud enough. “Meems.” I try louder. It hurts, scratches, makes my throat feel raw.

  No answer.

  I have to go. “Meems!” I cry, as loud as I can. As hard as I can. “Please.” My voice breaks.

  Still no Meems. Where is she? I have to GO. Now.

  I wrench the blankets aside. Refusing to look at the stumps, I grip the side of the bed and try my best to lower myself down gently. But I’m weak. I’m weak and tired, and I was never that strong in the first place.

  My arms give out, and I collapse on the floor. Pain shoots up my back, makes my skin sting and my muscles spasm. I force myself onto my stomach and try to crawl. My fingers scrabble against the floor, but the low pile is stiff and unforgiving, offering little purchase. The stumps bump and thump, responding to brain impulses that demand my legs help propel me. But the signals are lost; there are no legs to make move. Only the stumps, and they hurt. They hurt when they thump against the floor.

  I go limp, wanting them to be still, wanting to stop the thumping and the twitching and the pain. Hating it all.

  I try to hold my bottom half still, try to pull with my arms, but I just don’t have the strength. I try and try until there is nothing left in me. Nothing but the desperate need to be in the tiny room that now seems like a mirage to a drug-addled mind.

  I can’t hold it anymore. As I lose control of myself, feel the hot terrible stuff seep down what’s left of my legs, soaking the bandages and puddling under my stomach, I finally realize that I will never wake up. This is not a dream.

  I have no legs.

  My father is dead.

  My life and everything about me is uglier than ever.

  I finally begin to cry.

  Chapter Ten

  Post-American Date: 7/2/231

  Longitudinal Timestamp: 10:15 a.m.

  Location: Dome 5: Evanescence

  Meems comes in, all bright and cheerful. “Well, what would you like to do today?”

  For a long moment, I just glare at her. She knows very well that I can’t do anything. When her expectant gaze doesn’t waver, I look away.

  I don’t feel comfortable with how reliant on her my new handicap makes me. I feel like the geriatrics of old—before nano-tech and assisted suicide made it so that you could either live forever or, like my grandparents, die before you were pickled.

  From the corner of my eye I can see her plant her hands on her hips. “Are you going to lie there and mope for the rest of your life?” she demands.

  I turn and blink at her, blurry-eyed and lost in my own misery. Without realizing it, the words, “Go to hell,” escape in a raspy breath. It feels good to say it. Eloquent. Succinct. I’ve always loved that old line. Dad once explained that hell used to be some kind of religious person’s version of the Outer Block, a place where the Disfavored were banished to so that the Aristocrats wouldn’t have to see or interact with them.

  Before I know what’s happening, Meems is across the room, her hand coming hard across my cheek. I wrench back, pain blooming through a body that has halfway lost itself to oblivion. When the stinging subsides and I can see straight once more, I whip my head up and scowl, ready to scream
and rage at her, but she speaks first. “You are still alive.” Her words are a tight, low hiss. “Do you think maybe you should have died instead of your father? He certainly would not have sat around rotting like this.”

  Meems’s affirmation of his death is like a knife to the chest. A choked exhale escapes my lips. While I had my suspicions, as long as no one said anything about him, I could have almost convinced myself that he was anything else but dead. I start crying again, the reality of it just as painful as the loss of my legs. Overcome with grief, I bury my face in my hands.

  The bed shifts as Meems perches herself beside me. I feel her hands come around me, pulling me close to her and holding me there, like she did when I used to have nightmares as a child.

  “He’s gone.” I sob into her shoulder.

  “Yes,” she says, smoothing my hair. “But you are still here. Make him proud of you, Ellani. Be strong. Do not let this beat you. You must persevere.”

  I pull away and blink up at Meems’s face. “H-How?”

  She closes her eyes and looks away. “He would not like you like this.”

  I bite my trembling lip, hot tears still falling. She’s right. Dad wouldn’t be happy to see me wasting away. It’s been weeks since the accident, and I’ve been moping and feeling sorry for myself. Still. “It’s not as if I don’t have a reason for being this way.”

  She nods. “I know. Despite my suggestions that it might speed your recovery, Katrina and her ward will not come up and see you.”

  Why would they? Katrina, my new Evanescence-issued guardian, and the other ward who the city placed into her care, have no reason to care about me. I’m a disabled Natural, someone who was shoved into their care, someone who came with unexpected problems that they most likely didn’t sign up for. I look down at my stumps and grimace. “I have no legs, and Dad is gone.” The words come out in a squeak.

  “You have a right to be upset,” Meems concedes. “But I will have none of this behavior, Ellani.”

  I lower my head and shake it, hiding a bitter half smile. She never has been a patient android.

  “Come, I think it is high time you did something productive with your time.”

  I don’t fight Meems as she practically drags me out of bed and dresses me, but I don’t do much to help her, either. When she ties knots at the ends of each of my pant legs, I cry harder.

  “Oh, honestly,” she breathes. She picks me up and plops me in Dad’s hover-chair. “Some of us have work to do. Go feel sorry for yourself over there.” With that she shoves the hover-chair in the direction of the window.

  With nothing else to do, I watch the security droids below until I realize that, from this window, I get a clear view of the Outer Block and the wastelands beyond. The vast system of Disfavored neighborhoods that border Evanescence on all sides is hidden from the Aristocrats by a huge maximum security wall, but my house is built close to the wall, and I can see over it.

  Down below, the shanty huts are built one on top of another, as if some great Aristocratic giant dumped industrial waste in the cracks of the earth. The makeshift rope ladders and uneasy scaffolding allow for a city of plastic sheets, scrap steel, and precious wood to rise in and among the rickety concrete mortar shells and steel skeletons of a world lost in time. It’s brown and gray and dirty, filled with poisonous gases, sludge water puddles, fractured culture, and a steadfast struggle for survival. Through the smog and steam, shafts of weak sunlight shine, teasing a glimpse of the creatures who made it all happen.

  Zane’s words echo in my head. ‘They’re just like you, Ellani.’ I look down at my non-legs then back at the Disfavored below. We are alike. Natural, broken, forgotten, living a shattered existence. And just like that, I feel a strange kinship with the Disfavored, and I suddenly don’t feel so alone. If they can go on, then so can I.

  “The Disfavored are so tiny,” I say, wiping away half dried tears.

  Meems looks up from where she is making my bed but goes right back to watching her hands fold the rayon sheets. After all these years, she knows I’ll explain myself when I’ve collected my thoughts.

  But I don’t know what else to say; I don’t know what to think anymore. I have so much I want to express—more that I want to scream about—but it’s all a bottled tempest, a jumble of computer coding that I can’t untangle and execute.

  I watch her make the bed.

  Eventually she looks up again, her expectant face saying she’s still waiting for me to explain my comment about the Disfavored being tiny.

  “The Disfavored,” I say, canting my head toward the window. “They’re so small and helpless looking, but they must be very strong to live out there.”

  Straightening, she smiles, the synthetic skin of her chasis crinkling at the corners of her mouth and eyes. “Your father thought that as well. He liked watching them. He used to tell me that they were like ants—so small but capable of transforming the landscape. They inspired him.” For a moment, she seems lost in thought, and then she continues speaking. “One of the reasons he made the game is because of the Disfavored. He said he could look out the window—at the Disfavored—and see what the world and humanity used to be like, and the fact that they still lived gave him hope.”

  “Hope,” I repeat. Hope for what? I stare out the window, trying to see what Dad saw, trying to embrace something—anything—of his. At this distance, I can see as far as the domes of our sister cities, Cadence and Adagio. “Cadence looks so…blue.”

  Meems comes to stand beside me at the window. “The nano-glass on the domes, most likely,” she explains. “I am sure they say the same about us.”

  Squinting, I try to focus on Cadence. I’ve never been to another city. I don’t know anybody who has. I’ve heard there are tunnels connecting the cities, but no one uses them. In an effort to avoid another war, the cities avoid one another at all costs.

  “Do you think they have Disfavored, too?”

  Meems crosses her arms. “I suppose so.”

  Together, we watch the Disfavored in the street below. Most of the people on the street wear cumbersome masks that protect their lungs from the toxic smog of the wastelands. Their drab clothes are made of recycled cloth, cut more for function than fashionable form. As they hustle and limp along, they have the harried appearance of those being chased—as if an invisible droid officer follows them with a Taser.

  Instead of hovering on tracks, their few broken-down pods lumber along on wheels over cracked, gray-black stretches of concrete, whatever merchandise they haul loaded up in rickety crates that threaten to topple into the street.

  It all has the look of eminent collapse. An accident waiting to happen.

  Accident…

  “What happened, exactly?” I ask. “With the accident. Did anyone else get hurt?”

  She glances down, distracted. “No.”

  “But it was such a bad crash.”

  “It was only the one pod.”

  “One pod?” That almost never happens.

  At my confused tone she says, “Sensor malfunction. The pod failed to make a turn, flew off the track, and hit the security wall. The front of the pod was completely destroyed.”

  My stomach rolls over. “Did he…did he suffer?”

  She refuses to look at me as she says, “He died instantly. Could not have been a swifter, more efficient death.” Her voice has reverted to the same mechanical tone it gets when she recites supplemental lessons or repeats laws. She gets that way when she wishes to recoil from her emotions—which means she’s lying.

  I feel the blood drain from my face and, twisting my fingers together where they sit between my outspread half legs, I swallow the bilious taste in my mouth. “I yelled at him before he died,” I confess. “I told him I hated him.” I bite my lip and shake my head. “I’m a horrible person. I should be dead, not him.”

  “But you are not dead.
You are the one who lived.”

  I let out a trembling breath. “It was such a stupid argument.” Because I wanted a Mod, the last words to a father I loved more than anything were words of hate. And now look at me. I’m more hideous than ever. I glance up at her. “This was a punishment. A well-deserved one.”

  Meems glances down at me, her face unreadable.

  “If I could have my father back, I’d be happy to be my Natural self forever. I’d never complain again.”

  She looks away. “Unfortunately, that is not a possibility.”

  I look back out the window. “What should I do now?

  “You are smart, Ellani. Too smart to let your brain rot.” She walks toward the desk. When she comes back, she’s holding my flex-bracelet. “Do something productive while I help Tasha with the chores. And…” She pauses in thought. “If you feel that you must escape this new life, I suggest other, more productive ways of doing so than feeling sorry for yourself.”

  I cock my head. “Like what?”

  For a split second, her eyes flit toward the gaming console before settling on me. “Your father had much ambition for you.”

  I don’t hide my sarcasm. “Yes, because playing games would be so useful.”

  “Just think about it.” She places a hand on my shoulder and turns to leave, but then she pauses, reaches into her pocket, and places something on the desk. A small transparent data storage box.

  “What’s that?”

  She doesn’t turn to look at me as she says, “It is your father’s G-Chip. It was removed before his body was laid to rest. Katrina told me to put it in the disposal unit, but I thought you might want to keep it. Perhaps you can find a bit of your father in its contents.”

  She has her hand on the door when I find words again. “I had a dream last night.” I stare down at my trembling hands. “Not a nightmare, for once.”

  “Did you?” she remarks, no emotion in her voice. “If not another nightmare of the accident then perhaps you’ve gone back to dreaming of Quentin Cyr?” There is a note of hopefulness in her voice, like she thinks some part of old Ellani is in here somewhere. I’m not as convinced as she is.