Hwa blinked. “Sorry?”
“My childhood. My youth. They’re…” He made an empty gesture. “Blank.”
She frowned. “Do you mean, like … emotionally?”
“No. Literally. I literally don’t remember. My first memory is waking up in a Lynch hospital in South Sudan, ten years ago. They had some old wells, there. They were replacing them with photo farms. I was injured. They brought me in. Patched me up. Paid for my augments. They assumed I was a fixer of some sort. They don’t know for which side. Apparently I had covered my tracks a little too well. I’ve worked for them ever since.”
Hairs rose on the back of Hwa’s neck. “Wow.”
“As long as I can remember, I’ve worked for this company. I don’t know any other kind of life.”
“Okay,” Hwa said.
“I’ve never lived without their presence in my life. I’ve never had what you might call a private life.”
Oh. “Oh.”
“But you have. And that’s something that’s different, about our experiences.”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“You don’t have implants,” he said. “Not permanent ones, anyway. They—we—can’t gather that kind of data from you. They don’t have a complete profile for you, yet. But they know everything about me. My sugars, how much I sleep, where I am, if I’m angry, my routines, even the music I listen to when I’m making dinner.”
“You listen to music while you make dinner?”
“Django Reinhardt.”
“Who?”
He smiled ruefully. “What I’m saying is, you’re the last of a dying breed.”
Hwa thought of the stain running down her body, the flaw he couldn’t see. He had no idea. “Thank you?”
“You’re a black swan,” he said. “A wild card. Something unpredictable. Like getting into the trunk of that ride this morning.”
Hwa shrugged. “Anybody could have done that. I couldn’t just let Hanna go. She needed my help.”
“You could have called the police. You could have called me. But you didn’t. You took the risk yourself.”
She frowned. “Are you pissed off? Is that what this is about? Because you’re the one who—”
Síofra hissed. He shook his head softly. With his gaze, he brought her attention to the eyes at the corners of the elevator where the eyes probably were.
“I just want you to know something about me,” he said, after a moment. “Something that isn’t in my halo.”
She smiled. “Well, thanks.”
“Not a lot of other people know this, about me.”
“Well, it is kind of weird.” She stretched up, then hinged down at the waist until her vertebrae popped their stiffness loose. She pressed her fingers into the floor and looked up at him from her rag doll position. “I mean, you are only ten years old, right? You can’t even drink.”
He rolled his eyes. “Here it comes.”
She stood. “Or vote. Or even have your own place. Does your landlord know about this?”
He pointed at the view of the city outside the elevator. “My landlord is your landlord.”
The elevator doors chimed open. They were on the school floor. Hwa had fifteen minutes to shower and put on her uniform before she met Joel.
“Hey, if you’re not too busy? I kind of didn’t do the last question on my physics homework. So I might need some help with that. Before I hand it in.”
“I think something can be arranged.”
She stood in the door. It chimed insistently. She leaned on it harder. “Did you ever go to school? After you woke up, I mean? Or are you just winging it?”
“I know what a man my age needs to know,” Síofra said. “Be seeing you.”
5
Silent Seizure
“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 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.