Sara

The Rios princess left, herded away by her bodyguard, and Sara held her breath and counted to sixty. Then she rose on shaking legs and held it together long enough to put out her hand-painted CLOSED sign and tie the flimsy tent flaps in a feeble attempt to shut out the world.

That task complete, she collapsed into her chair, dragged the trash bin between her legs, and hunched over, pretty damn sure the meat pies that had seemed so delicious a couple hours ago were about to come back up.

Her skin crawled. Her lizard brain howled. Her muscles were locked in endless spasm as instinct demanded that she kick over the table, grab her bag, and run. She still had a clean bolthole in Sector Eight. She could disappear into it and not have to come out for a month, at least. The freeze-dried rations she’d stored there wouldn’t be great eating, but malnourished was better than dead.

And dead was better than discovered.

Her stomach lurched. She sucked in an unsteady breath, but the candles that lit the tent’s dim interior provided more than ambience. They filled the air with sharp spice and a cloying sweetness that only twisted her gut tighter.

It was stuffy and too warm in the tent. Breathing shallowly through her mouth, she reached up to drag off her headscarf. The wig came with it, a heavy fall of auburn curls that she tossed onto the table on top of her tarot cards.

She’d gotten reckless. So reckless.

Why hadn’t she just kept to the game? People wore their desires and fears and hopes painted across their faces. A few strategic words to draw them out, and observation combined with logical deduction did the rest. People saw in her fortunes what they wanted to see. It was the easiest money Sara had ever made, her latest iteration of telling people what they so clearly needed to hear.

But then the Rios princess had wandered into her tent, and a ravenous need for actionable intelligence had opened up inside Sara, driving her to do the one thing that always, always ended badly.

Her discarded gloves peeked out from under the wig. The tent was claustrophobically warm, but she still yanked them free and tugged them back on.

Who could have guessed that sheltered, soft-looking Maricela Rios had such dark memories seething just below the surface? Did Sector One know that their beautiful, white-clad princess had killed a man with her bare hands?

If she closed her eyes, Sara could reconstruct the memories she’d taken. They were jagged, fuzzy around the edges in a way that meant Maricela had recalled them many times, and they were wrapped up in a sprawling tangle of nightmarish variations that seemed almost as real.

Memory encoding and recall were imperfect. The simple act of remembering could change a person’s perception of what had happened, especially when the human brain couldn’t always separate dream from reality.

Well, a normal human brain couldn’t.

Sara’s brain had already teased through the variations, cataloging and cross-referencing based on context clues. She knew the official story of the assassination attempt--that God himself had struck down Gideon Rios’s attacker for his audacity--but she’d always subscribed to the cynic’s theory: that Gideon himself had done the dirty work. After all, Gideon’s hands were hardly clean of blood.

Apparently, neither were his baby sister’s.

Sara could still feel Maricela’s rage like an echo in her blood. She could feel the handle of the knife, the resistance of the assassin’s body as she thrust it into him. Unlike Sara, Maricela hadn’t been trained in the most efficient places to stab a man. She’d been messy, driving the knife home again and again until some combination of shock and blood loss had finally rendered him unconscious.

The nightmares were even more telling. Sara had enough of those to know how her brain shaped her fears--helplessness. Hopelessness.

Maricela’s deepest fear was her own power.

It was a valuable insight into the royal family, and if it had ended there, the risk of touching her might have been worth it. But Maricela had startled, and her bodyguard had leapt into action, grabbing Sara’s bare wrist with his fingers--

Another wave of nausea hit her, riding a fresh surge of horror.

Darkness didn’t begin to describe what writhed beneath the guard’s placid exterior.

His memories overlapped hers for a dizzying moment. She was a small boy, shivering in the dusk, watching other children delight in the fat snowflakes trickling from the sky, knowing they’d mean a cold, miserable night if he couldn’t find a place to sleep--

--a man, surrounded by gunfire, lunging to shove someone out of the path of a bullet with a fierce joy that bled into disappointment when he hit the ground, unscathed, still alive--

--a youth, his chest tight as his mother turned to the wall, the sobs she fought to muffle still evident in her heaving shoulders--

--a man, slashing a blade across an enemy’s throat and feeling nothing as the blood splashed him, nothing except cold resentment--

--a boy again, shivering until his body ached, pressing tight against the brick wall behind him as the night grew colder and colder--

Sara shook her head violently, as if she could shake her way free of the borrowed memories. She’d never spent a night on the streets. Her father had prepared her for the likely eventuality of orphanhood with precision and foresight. By age seven, she knew how to hack the city’s network to give herself a new identity. By nine, her father had helped her establish an untraceable safe house in every sector. He’d drilled her on evasion tactics. On strategy, on network security, on disguising herself. She had credits stashed under half a dozen different aliases, and she knew how to vanish into the chaotic mass of humanity that lived in and around Eden.

The one thing he couldn’t teach her was how to deal with being a freak.

As soon as she thought the word, her mother’s voice rose from the depths of her too-perfect memory, warm and chiding. “You are not a freak. You’re my miracle.”

The recollection brought warmth with it, enough to combat the lingering chill of that snowy night and the shivering little boy. Sara closed her eyes and focused on it, sinking into the crisp, bright edges of it like watching a vid.

Her mother gathered her close, even though at eight she was too big to sit on her lap like a baby anymore. “Our brains run on electricity,” her mother explained, tilting her tablet so Sara could see the illustrated brain scan with bright bits of light flashing like fireflies.

“Neurons?” she asked, and her mother stroked her hair with a laugh.

“Yes, neurons transmit and process the electricity. That’s how we store memory. Most people will never be aware of it. They can’t see or sense the electricity without special equipment. But you’re different. It’s like in the wintertime, when you wear your socks on the carpet and then touch a doorknob. You get a shock, because the built-up electricity finally has somewhere to go. You’re like me, except I only get a little prickle. A hint of what’s going on in their heads. When people feel strongly, you get a spark, and you can see what they’ve seen. You’re like the doorknob--you’re a conductor.”

“A freak,” Sara muttered again. But the second the word was out, she regretted it. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt her mother, whose big brown eyes sometimes overflowed with tears--

The memory twisted. Her mother’s brown skin and dark hair blurred. Blue eyes and limp blond hair and a deathly pale face superimposed themselves over her mother, and Sara hovered, torn between her past and the bodyguard’s.

His mother had also curled into herself and turned to the wall sometimes. Somehow, Sara doubted it was because the guard’s mother was also a genetically enhanced neurosurgeon on the run from a secret military program.

Chemical imbalances of the brain plagued plenty of people who had nothing to do with experimental gene modification, and in the sectors, such disorders still frequently went untreated. It was conceivable the bodyguard’s mother had suffered from one, possibly exacerbated by whatever had resulted in those dark, helpless memories of sleeping in the streets. The memory was coated with too much resigned recognition for his mother’s grief to have been a sporadic or rare occurrence.

Sara could empathize. Her mother may not have been a conductor, but she’d taken in the pain of the world, collecting it like static that had no way to discharge. Sara had known early in life that Mama had bad days, and Papa would do anything it took to make them right, except that sometimes, he couldn’t.

Her father hadn’t accepted defeat well. Makhai soldiers rarely did.

Sara’s stomach nearly heaved again as she imagined what her father would have said about today’s fiasco. She was only eleven when the Base came for her tiny family, but her parents had spent every second before that day preparing her to live an invisible life. To hide in plain sight, to use her rapid processing skills and uncanny instincts to earn the right amount of money in the right ways--enough to be comfortable, but not so much as to be noticeable.

To never be someone the people in power took seriously or remembered.

Well, she’d fucked that up.