The backhoe was broken. Again.

  I took my hand off the engine and shook my head. Machinery was always dying out here, getting plugged up by salt and sand.

  At least, that would be my excuse.

  “You cock it up again, Fields?” my supervisor said. He’d been hovering behind me, but not close enough to see the hyonic node I’d just pocketed.

  “The node is shot,” I told him, because I’d swapped in an old one. “I could go dig up a replacement at the dump.”

  He growled to himself, because he had quotas. He’d lose benefits if he didn’t meet them.

  “Fine,” he said. “Take my sandbike. I’ll call some leeches to get started while you’re gone.”

  The supervisor—a beefy Middle Eastern man called Moran, who had enough beard to protect his whole neck from sunburn—made a gesture with his hand. He was using his Deck to call for more laborers. They’d have to dig by hand until the backhoe got fixed, and it was almost a hundred degrees Old Fahrenheit. Someone might die.

  I was counting on it.

  “But don’t take all day,” he said, dismissing his Deck with a wave. “I know you leeches love to sit around.”

  I gritted my teeth. I still hated the word leech, even after ten years in this salt trap. I should have gotten used to it by now.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, closing the hatch to the engine. I caught movement to my left. A bot-driven transport vehicle was rising into the air, shedding salt as it emerged from a white dune of the stuff. Thanks to the constant hot wind of the desert, our charging stations were always getting buried, and the half-charged hovercraft along with them.

  I strode over to Moran’s sandbike with him close behind me, leaving a trail in the salt as I went. As a part of the New Greenland terraforming project, the City flooded the Sahara with ocean water. This filled up controlled aquifers by some process I barely understood. It left literal tons of salt behind.

  It was my job to dig up and transport that salt. It went to the City, where it could be made into sodiprene. The white material was used to make pretty much everything, all thanks to leeches like me.

  I trudged into the long shadow of the nearest shipping container, which had originally delivered the backhoe. Moran’s sandbike leaned against the side, and I paused to enjoy the weak shade. Today’s work area was desolate and colorless, scattered with pale dunes, dead equipment, and shipping boxes made of the ever-present white sodiprene. The dump would not be much better.

  Moran hovered a hand over the bike’s steering console, and the screen lit up. His ID chip, implanted in his wrist, would activate the machine based on his credentials. I had no such chip, because I was a non-citizen. I couldn’t even ride a bike without my boss’s permission.

  I fingered the stolen node in my pocket. It was full, the stored hyonic power buzzing against my palm. I still wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Sell it, maybe, but that was risky. Save it for a rainy day? Sure.

  I’d just swung my legs over the bike when the transport arrived with fresh leeches. They’d been close by, just like I’d planned.

  The vehicle trundled over to Moran, hovering a few feet off the dunes. It looked like a big, driverless truck bed, and all two dozen of its passengers glared daggers at me. All of them had a rudimentary tattoo of a bird under one eye, many of them scarred due to dirty needles.

  “Well, well,” said the largest man as the transport came to a stop. “If it isn’t Turn-Tail, fucking us over again.”

  I didn’t change my expression. These guys were Black Ibis, and I didn’t want to piss them off at the moment. “Rafe,” I said, inclining my head.

  Rafe scowled and stood up, cracking his knuckles, deciding to take offense at his own name. Several of his lackeys rose too, putting their hands on the black-painted beat-sticks they all carried. They bribed supervisors for the right to have the weapons, and the one time a supervisor had told them no, the man had been found without intestines the next day. No one knew how they’d done it without getting caught, but the supervisors never said no after that.

  “You little rat,” Rafe growled, his enormous brown biceps flexing. “What have you done this time?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Moran stepped between us. I respected him for that.

  “He hasn’t done anything,” Moran sighed, already tired of the posturing. “The backhoe needs fixing. Until that’s done, you lot will have to dig by hand.”

  I could almost hear Rafe’s teeth grinding together, or at least what was left of them. “You think Turn-Tail can fix anything? He’s fooling you to get a break.”

  “You think so? Then prove it. Fix the damn thing yourselves,” Moran said.

  I almost smiled, but held myself back. Moran had taken the words right out of my mouth.

  Rafe grinned at the expression I did allow onto my face—a cultivated and quickly hidden look of worry. He knew my game. He had me dead to rights.

  “You got it, boss man,” Rafe said, because even he knew when to kowtow to City people. He turned and waved for his men. “Come on, you lot. Let’s show the boss how useless Turn-Tail is.”

  The men gave a few whistles and a couple of laughs, then followed him. I watched them drain off the transport and file away toward the backhoe.

  “It really is broken, right?” Moran said quietly.

  “Yep.”

  “Because if it’s not, they’re going to kill you for putting them to work.”

  “Yep. Still want me to leave?”

  He chewed his lip. “Maybe you’d better.”

  As much as he looked down on me, as all the supervisors looked down on me, Moran knew I was valuable. I could fix these machines better than any of them could. I’d made it my mission to learn.

  It had earned me a few perks out here in this wasteland, and the Black Ibis had noticed. They liked perks, and they wanted mine. But after failing to recruit me, they had decided to hate me. I was now next on their hit list.

  They just hadn’t gotten around to killing me yet.

  “I would stay back,” I said to Moran. “Rafe will want to beat on someone when he can’t get that thing to run.”

  Moran eyed me, but I was already revving the bike, double-checking the charge and getting a feel for the thrust—sandbikes were just as likely to break down as backhoes—and then I kicked off, whizzing away from the shipping container and hovering up the next dune.

  Now, I did smile. This was going to be good—

  My sandbike started blaring a proximity warning.

  I hit the brakes hard, angling to stop the bike faster, and none too soon. Another vehicle was cresting the dune in a spray of sand, and I had to gun the bike to get out of its way.

  I pulled to a stop to watch the aircar. Unlike the transports, it was sleek and black, not sodiprene, the windows tinted and impenetrable; it hovered off the ground using a hyonic engine, blowing salt in all directions. It breezed past me sped down the hill, where it came to a stop near Moran. The big manager had gone stiff at the sight of it, and he stood at attention as the passenger door opened.

  My heart thundered, and I glanced toward the backhoe. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I started to ride the bike back.

  As I came, a tall man in a black suit emerged from the car—black slim-cut jacket, black shirt, black pants, black shoes. A hot outfit in the desert, but it shone oddly, so maybe it was some kind of cooling fabric. He wore imposing sunglasses, his skin Northafrican-dark. A cloud of air conditioning blew at his cuffs.

  What was a blackshirt doing out here? I slowed the bike as the guy gestured Moran forward. If I could just keep them here—

  “Fields!”

  My stomach dropped at Moran’s voice, but I set aside the sandbike and jogged over. You didn’t keep a blackshirt waiting. These City toadies had long leashes. He could probably order me dead with a drone.

  “Talon Fields?” the man asked when I reached him. His voice was gruff but monotone, as if he rarely used it.

  “That’s me,” I said, as Rafe climbed into the backhoe and started it. It rumbled to life, and he raised a fist. The other men cheered.

  Ignoring the laborers, the blackshirt extracted something from his shirt pocket. It looked like a makeup compact, but it was as black as the rest of his getup. He flipped it open and held it out.

  I reached to take it from him, but he jerked his arm back and shook his head.

  “No. Your finger goes there,” he said, nodding at the compact. “DNA and print check. Standard confirmation.”

  I exchanged a glance with Moran, wondering if I was being lied to. We didn’t get this kind of tech in the desert.

  Moran nodded me toward the compact. He looked nervous. I did as I was told, and tapped my finger into the thing. The dark material caved like clay, forming around my finger. Something poked me, and I flinched, but I still managed to scrape a bit of the gunk out with a fingernail when I pulled my hand back. Whatever it was, it wasn’t cheap.

  I pushed the claylike stuff against the hyonic node in my pocket, sweat breaking out on my brow. I was mad to steal from these guys. Old habits died hard.

  The blackshirt took the compact back, closed it, and held it out. His eyes scanned through space about ten inches above the object. Once again, someone was using their Deck interface to look at something I couldn’t see. He was probably reading through a hologram of data, which would confirm that I was indeed Talon Fields.

  He stepped away, bent to the side, and opened the rear passenger door.

  “Spread your arms,” he said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I’ve gotta frisk you.”

  “Why?”

  He stared at me, unmoving. Cold air wafted out of the vehicle. The car should have been stifling in the glaring heat, but it was letting out an arctic gale. I could see leather, real leather, inside it. I remembered the smell of real leather.

  That’s when it hit me: these guys were taking me somewhere.

  “What do you need him for?” Moran asked.

  The blackshirt rotated his head to look at Moran, smooth and slow, like a mannequin. Moran paled and raised his hands.

  “Never mind. Need-to-know basis,” he stammered. “I get it. I’ll just be going.”

  With that, Moran hastily made for the truck of leeches. I watched him go out of my peripheral vision, feeling like a lifeline was pulling away from me. I never liked him—never liked any of the City meat, really—but I didn’t have a good feeling about this.

  “Sir, wait!” I shouted. Moran stopped and turned around.

  That’s when Rafe kicked the backhoe into drive, and the machine burst apart in a blaze of blue flame.