Air blasted us, so hard that even the blackshirt threw up an arm before his face. Moran gave a shout and stumbled forward before turning around. A piece of backhoe zipped past his head.

  My throat was dry, and not from the flying salt. As I squinted against the gale, I hastily drew the stolen hyonic node from my pocket, ducked behind the open back door of the aircar, and slapped the node just under the front seat.

  When the blackshirt turned around, his face hard, he found me standing again. I stared open-mouthed at the blast radius. Nothing moved there, aside from the smoke.

  “Fuck me!” Moran cried, his face gone slack, brown eyes wide.

  I could feel the blackshirt’s eyes all over me. I turned to him and swallowed.

  “Did you do that?” I asked.

  He blinked. I wondered if he had been about to ask the same thing.

  “We don’t have time for this,” another voice called from inside the car. “Let them clean up their own messes.”

  I could hardly believe the words. Had the driver not seen that explosion? He spoke like he’d just seen spilled milk, not like he’d just seen twelve men die.

  I spread my arms. “You can frisk me now.”

  The blackshirt frowned, his brows drawing low above his glasses. Then he looked at Moran.

  “Those leeches. Who were they?” he asked.

  Moran was bone-white. I’d never seen a bearded man turn that color.

  “They were… no one. No one important. Just leeches.”

  “Who were they?” the blackshirt repeated.

  Moran swallowed. “Black Ibis. Local thugs. It’s no great loss. I can have them carted off and replaced in twenty minutes.”

  To his credit, Moran didn’t look at me. Not even once.

  Huh. Maybe he wasn’t so bad.

  “You do that, then,” the blackshirt said. He turned, expressionless once more, and frisked me. We all waited in awkward silence as he proceeded to find nothing, the backhoe hissing and sparking behind us.

  The blackshirt finally straightened. “Get in.”

  I got in.

  He closed the door the moment my feet cleared the threshold, and it locked audibly. I met eyes with Moran through the window. He gave me a little nod. I gave one back.

  Nobody liked the Black Ibis, not even the supervisors. The trash had just taken itself out.

  As Moran turned away, I faced the car’s interior, reorienting myself. A glass divider separated the front seat from the back, which didn’t bode well for me. The driver was a white guy, just as bald as his partner, with the same black glasses and sharp, tailored suit.

  “Am I a prisoner or something?” I asked as the blackshirt entered the car. I fought the urge to look at the hyonic node that I’d stuck under his seat. It wouldn’t explode, not easily—the other one had taken some very specific tampering on my part—but it was definitely contraband.

  The blackshirt closed his door, then twisted around. The glass partition between us began to sink away, probably triggered by his Deck. He handed me a pile of fabric.

  “Put this on,” he said, not answering my question. “Then strap in.”

  I took the clothing and looked it over. It was a slim-fit black suit, real cotton by my guess, but the shirt was white, so it didn’t look like I was about to be recruited into the black-shirt club. There was a necktie, flat red and boring. The suit was worth more than I made in a month.

  “Now,” the man said.

  I glanced out the window. We weren’t moving. Outside, Moran was gesturing for a cleanup crew. I didn’t want to wait up for them. The longer we sat here, the more likely it was that someone would start asking questions.

  “I can get this on while we drive,” I said. “There’s no need to wait on me.”

  The men said nothing, which was a threat in itself. They wanted this suit on me. What was in it? Trackers? A few hidden needles they could use to knock me out? Probably something to monitor my body heat, to help them see if I got nervous. Normally, an ID chip could monitor that, but they were flying blind with me.

  No matter what was hiding in the suit, I needed away from this crime scene, so I hurried to tug my work shirt over my head. The threadbare fabric left salt and dust all over the leather seats. The driver gestured, and the glass partition rose again.

  I grunted as I yanked my shoes off. “Aw, you don’t want to see the show?”

  They didn’t answer, again, but they were probably laughing at me. I was too tall and too big to dress gracefully anywhere, much less in the back of a government-issue sedan. My feet ended up against a window and my thighs got stuck to the leather, making a peeling noise when I pulled them off.

  But fumbling my way into the suit gave me a chance to surreptitiously pocket the hyonic node. The small metal-and-glass orb was small enough to fit in my hand, so I could hide it in my pocket so long as I kept my hand around it. I had no idea what I might use it for, and I couldn’t walk through any scanners with it, but I liked having it close.

  I threw the shirt on loosely. Those top two buttons were for masochists, and so was the tie, so I tucked that bad boy into my other pocket. I eyed the jacket, remembering the heat of the desert, then shrugged and snapped it on with a flourish. I liked the sound the material made.

  Well, don’t I feel like a million credits, I thought. The whole getup fit creepily well.

  Finally, I pulled my seatbelt across one shoulder. The moment it clicked, the car started to move.

  “Nice weather we’re having,” I said, trying to hide the relief I felt as the smoking ruin of the backhoe vanished over the first dune. “Little hazy, though. Bit of sand in the air.”

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

  No reaction from the blackshirts. I studied the backs of their heads as I brushed sand off the open seat next to me. The leather was so new it was gleaming, like beetles.

  “Am I getting arrested for something?” I asked, rubbing a thumb over the node in my pocket. “Did I commit some crime I forgot about?”

  The driver turned his head, and I saw his sunglasses flash in the mirror. He was even paler than I’d first thought, untouched by the sun, the color odd in a place like Northafrica. This used to be Egypt, fifty years ago, before the world consolidated down to fourteen Synths. Everyone was brown here, either by sun or by birth.

  When he spoke, his voice came through the glass clearly. “You’re going to be a citizen,” he said.

  I frowned. “You’re tenning.”

  He said nothing.

  “But my last application got rejected,” I said.

  He shrugged. “They reconsidered.”

  My chest gave a thump, and I forgot the strangeness of my darkly suited entourage. Nearly ten years of slaving away, terraforming this godforsaken useless place, and I had finally earned a place as a citizen of the United Synthesized Nations. I’d have a house to myself, a basic income, health care—

  Oh, fuck. I need to tell Lore!

  “Hey, can we stop by my tenement for some things?” I asked. “I haven’t got much, but there’s a headset—”

  “Your relevant possessions will be collected and passed along to you.”

  This time, it was the passenger-side blackshirt who spoke.

  I sat back. I needed my VR headset and a Net connection to contact my little brother, but it could wait.

  Citizen. I’m gonna be a citizen!

  I almost bounced on my seat, but then a flash of pink caught my eye. We were about to cross paths with an open-topped transport that looked like it was covered in giant magenta pom-poms. I frowned at it, and just barely got a glimpse of a dozen little girls in pink hats before the transport was gone again.

  “What the hells was that?” I asked.

  I didn’t expect them to respond, but Whitey said, “Kitty Scouts. A club for little girls. They run educational field trips to New Greenland.”

  Kitty Scouts? I huffed a laugh. Well, I guess you’re never too young for propaganda.

  I gave the men their treasured silence over the next few minutes, and finally the car reached the City gates. We stopped in front of translucent walls so tall that I had to crane my neck to see the top edge. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it kept out the rabble.

  When we came to a stop, I tensed and rubbed my left wrist, an anxious habit. Both the driver and escort would have pale, precise scarring in the same spot, where their ID chips had been implanted. These chips were then linked to their Decks, a neural interface they could pull up in front of their faces. They could use it for entertainment, browsing the Net, identifying other people, or anything really.

  I couldn’t see another person’s Deck unless they shared it with me, but I did know what they looked like. My brother had gotten one, and he showed it to me the day before he shipped off-planet.

  Right now, those Decks were being used to identify us. The gate guards had to be scanning the blackshirts’ chips at a distance, matching the IDs of the car’s occupants to the number of heat signatures inside it.

  I tensed. On their scans, I would look like the non-citizen leech that I was, with hot blood in my veins, but no ID chip. Only citizens were allowed an ID chip. Would they be able to see the node, too?

  Why is this taking so long? I thought, leaning toward the middle seat and peering up at the walls again, too nervous to sit still. The impassable wall stretched for miles in both directions, made of Sahara sand composite, superheated until it transformed into dirty glass. I knew there were other defenses up there, but they were the kind that killed you before you laid eyes on them.

  Beyond the walls, I could see the City, a tangle of towers, resplendent in shining white sodiprene. The gates—which were disguised as more wall to anyone without a Deck—began to creak inward. I let out a breath as turrets materialized above us. Apparently, once we were past the anti-entry dome, the guns became visible. And those were just the guns I could—

  Something green shot past my window, killing my train of thought. Startled by yet another burst of color in this whiteness, I ducked forward, banging my forehead against the partition.

  But I could see the thing now. It was a bird, flying through the city gates alongside us, sneaking in with our car. Birds were rare enough in the Sahara, but this thing was no gull. Its feathers were a vivid lime green.

  The car swerved slightly. “Shit!” Whitey blurted. “Thought that was a drone.”

  Passenger-Side snorted. “Probably a pet that got out.”

  I peered after the vibrant bird, amazed at the concept of a pet. Animals didn’t enter the Saharan tent cities; they knew better. It was a miracle no leeches had caught the parrot and fried it up for an afternoon snack.

  As I watched the bird, however, it suddenly banked, and we’re talking sudden, all flutters and flapping; it lost several feathers in the move. I thought the thing had gotten shot, but it only seemed to be turning around as fast as it could. Once reversed, it dive-bombed a building ahead of the car, and then banked again, flapping in place, hovering in front of the building’s front window. The car was approaching it now.

  What on Earth is it doing? I’d never seen any bird flap in place like that. Is that… is that a bakery?

  I had been watching the bird, not paying attention to the City, but now that I was looking directly at a place of business, my eyes widened. The high-rise building was white, made almost entirely of glass windows and pale, shining sodiprene. The lightweight material stretched high into the sky, building endlessly upon itself, transport platforms extending every couple of floors while smaller towers were built against it on three sides.

  The other towers were much the same, capped without a point or a roof, as if they were unfinished. Aerial vehicles hovered ponderously between every cluster of towers, like fat bugs patrolling a forest of succulents. I’d seen these towers from a distance, but up close, the scale was beyond me.

  Guns clung to every corner I could see.

  The guns and their attending cameras were white, but the road and sidewalks were silvery, cut into solar-grid hexagons. People strode casually along the clean paths, mostly in pairs, chatting and fiddling with their invisible Decks. Covered transports passed us, their cabs enclosed in solar glass, some of them hovering two feet up on the same level as us, some ten feet overhead on a different line.

  Turns out, the pedestrians were the main source of color here, most of them wearing ankle-length neon coats over glittering shirts and pale trousers. If rainbows could sprout legs and start posting to social media, then they would be right at home here.

  Also, the whole place was spotless. I knew for a fact that maintenance bots patrolled the City, recycling most detritus and dumping the rest in the Sahara where the leeches could poke through the scraps. That’s where I should have been, right now, looking for a discarded hyonic node while Rafe and his buddies burned to ash in the desert.

  The thought made me uneasy, so I refocused on the parrot. We’d been going slowly, according to some unnamed traffic algorithm, so we still hadn’t reached the green bird. It still flapped in place before the bakery window.

  The window was a marvel all its own, made of glass, unbroken and clearer than I was used to seeing. Lights shone from within, powered during the day. In the tent cities, it would cost all your wages to run your lights when the sun was out. It seemed a special sort of madness to me.

  As for the display, it was filled with cake, a dozen kinds. Pink cakes, wedding cakes, cakes shaped like space ships, cupcakes with flowers in the frosting. I hadn’t seen anything like it since childhood, and my mouth watered at the sugar-sweet memory.

  I was so entranced that I hit the window switch on my car door. The window rolled down a few inches just as the car passed the bakery.

  “—cake!” the parrot shouted. “They turned it into cake!”

  Then the bakery was behind us, along with the bird. I blinked and turned around, but no one else was close by. The bird really had been the one speaking.

  “Do you have robot birds here?” I asked.

  Whitey sniggered.

  “Personal electronics aren’t allowed in City airspace,” Passenger-Side said. “Too much interference with air traffic.”

  “But that bird just…?” I started to say, but what was the point? Parrots could talk. I’d heard that somewhere. So there wasn’t anything strange about this.

  The window refused to roll down farther, so I sat back and studied the passersby. The citizens were just walking around, gesturing at their unseen Decks, paying no attention to the world that surrounded them. Some were women, for hell’s sake. Women who felt safe just... walking. They didn’t even have beat-sticks with them.

  I couldn’t get over it. It didn’t seem real. I would be safe here. I could live peacefully.

  That is, if they weren’t lying to me.

  I settled back in to wait.