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  “Hell, Ghost, thanks for the vote of confidence.” Milan put on an aggrieved tone, but his smile showed he didn’t mean it.

  Downstairs, Arnie was sitting at the table, cursing aloud to himself, his face red.

  “Bad luck at the poker game?” I asked, leading the others forward.

  “Mudgrub to the poker game!” He suddenly turned sheepish with a glance at my friends. Arnie wasn’t good with strangers. “Er, sorry. I mean, who cares about poker? Look.” He brandished the newspaper. “There is a new Grand Vizier, and the idiot has brought the race forward to this Saturday. This Saturday! There’s no way I’m gonna be ready, and I paid my deposit and everything.”

  His list was in my inside pocket. I took it out and looked over it again carefully. Nobody said anything for a few minutes. That was good. Let Arnie get used to them.

  “We can get you everything on this list by tonight. Would that swing it?”

  “Maybe.” He sounded calmer now. “I’d have to close the shop and work on it all week. But yeah, if you can get that gear, I’d have a chance.”

  “We can.”

  “Well, sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”

  When Arnie came back with a tray of chipped mugs, I did the introductions.

  “Milan, Nath, Athena.”

  “Nice to meet you, man.” Milan got up and offered his hand. “You really going into the aircar race?”

  Arnie hesitated before returning the briefest of touches. “If you kids come up with the goods. If they go in without a major hitch. If my guild comes up with the crew.” He emphasized the “if” to let us know he wasn’t very hopeful.

  “Which guild are you in?” asked Athena.

  “Valiant. Also known as Guild of Sucksville,” muttered Arnie. “Guild of Fatheads and Lazy Asses. Guild of Take-Your-Dues-and-Give-You-Nothing-Back. Guild of Losers.” He sat down heavily and then brightened up for a moment. “Still, I see that Ancient Honor is gone. Wiped out with the fall of its Grand Vizier. Serves ’em right, pompous indigo snobs.”

  “We’re forming a new guild today,” announced Athena, and inside I winced. Arnie’s outlook was very different from ours. “It’s called Defiance.”

  “Defiance, huh?” He rubbed his heavy, unshaven jaw.

  “What’s it cost?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Arnie was suddenly interested. “What’re the benefits?”

  “None.”

  “Hmmm. Good luck.”

  “Right. We’ll be off. See you around sunset.” I got up and kicked my board on before anyone could start talking politics; the others followed quickly enough.

  Arnie grunted.

  People got very worked up about their guilds, even red-card holders—especially red-card holders. When a guild got a sufficiently high ranking, it was given control of residence allocation, local amenities, planning decisions about traffic, all that kind of really boring stuff. Following the rise and fall of guilds had never interested me, but then I wasn’t a member of any guild. I couldn’t be; I was a cardless, unregistered person. Each guild tended to be based in a particular part of the City and tried to outdo its local rivals for control of petty privileges. The very top guilds, though, they were above parochial squabbles; they gathered the blues, indigos, and violets from all districts and fought for positions at the imperial court.

  “First stop, Mosveo International.”

  We had boarded along the edge of a disused canal to the back of the factory. This was the ugly side of the City, and I wondered if the others had seen this kind of area before. The old canal was just full of rubbish, from small colorful scraps of sweet wrappings caught in the reeds to great objects like abandoned streetcars and entire portapotties. The stagnant water was an ugly brown, and it gave off a fetid odor.

  A tall wire fence screened the luxury aircar factory from the canal. Already we could hear the steady rumbling of the sleepless production line inside.

  “Mosveo. Class. I always dreamed of driving a Starburst.” Milan drew to a halt and stepped off his board.

  “What’s the plan?” asked Athena.

  “This place is easy. Nearly fully automated. We just need to keep an eye out for the janitor. He sometimes comes out of that door there.” I pointed. “Walks across to that chair over by the Foundry sign and has a sleep. So watch the door.”

  A long time ago, on a similar mission, I had cut the wire fence, and the hole was still there. We flitted through the yard with no bother, staying low and keeping to the cover provided by stacks of disused pallets. The door to the main assembly hall was locked and had a motion detector on it, which I promptly disabled.

  “Time for some fun. Better put your earpieces in; it’s pretty loud in there.”

  I opened the door and, with some pleasure, watched their expressions of awe.

  Imagine the biggest room you’ve ever been in. Not necessarily the tallest, but the widest and longest. Then double it, and double it again. Keep going until it fills an entire block. Now add the sound of metal being hammered into shape, the hisses of pneumatic robots as they move through their infinitely repetitive moves, the explosions of bolt guns, and the fiery exhalations of the welding arms. It should be so loud that you can feel the different parts of your body being physically disturbed by the waves of noise: the deeper booms of the hammers resonating in your chest, the shriek of twisting, hot metal causing the top of your scalp to tighten.

  The whole room is in constant motion. It’s bewildering and frightening at first. But the longer you watch, the more you realize that the showers of white-hot sparks and the mindlessly immense blows of the most powerful robots always fall in the same places. Throughout the hall, a conveyor belt snakes up and down. A shiny silver engine enters the assembly line, pre-made and looking something like a walnut or a brain. At each work station that the engine is carried past, a piece of the car is added on, until the monochrome vehicles rise up the final ramp and are taken through the flapping plastic screens of a paint shop.

  “Death and destruction.” Athena’s voice came through the headset, and I turned to smile at her. Milan whistled in agreement.

  Usually our gang took its lead from Athena, or Jay. But now, wide-eyed, the three of them were facing me, intimidated by the fury of noise and light ahead of them. They looked solemn, hoping I knew what I was doing, and, of course, I did.

  “Here are your lists. It’s not as wild in there as it seems; everything is totally repetitive. Just take your time to figure out the motion of the robots, and you’ll be fine.”

  As they set off in search of the parts that Arnie needed, I didn’t watch over them, not even Nathan. You can’t hold someone’s hand in a situation like this; either you trust them not to blow it or you shouldn’t have brought them with you. Or so I told myself, fighting the instinct to check.

  Tall shelves, wide buckets, and sturdy racks held the subcomponents that the robots dipped into, before swinging back to the ever-moving line. Each of the subcomponent stations had feeder lines, thick plastic tubes that hung from the ceiling and ran out of the building. It was the labeling on these tubes that I read to confirm they were supplying the parts that Arnie needed.

  A Michelson Gyroscope 434 gauge. Check.

  Two semi-beveled compression tubes 20-260-0832. Check.

  Shield #2, power nozzle, preferably the Xexter 03403. Check.

  I worked my way systematically along the line, stuffing a large black carryall with the gear. There was just enough space for a person to move between the hissing robots without interfering with their abrupt, jerky motion.

  “Team. You have to come to the paint shop when you’re done.”

  “What’s up, Athena?” I asked, immediately worried, though there was no need.

  “Just a bit of fun. The paint-design programs are years old. I’ve hacked them.”

  At the paint shop, the vehicles rolled in a uniform gray and came out the far side glistening with their fresh designs in bright colors according
to demand. It looked like metallic green was in this season. Athena was at the control, her pad unrolled and a stylus poised over it.

  “Well?” Milan arrived next.

  “Wait,” she replied.

  As the aircar emerged, Nathan caught up with us all.

  It was a luxury family sedan, with maroon metallic finish and a huge but neat yellow anarchy sign across the hood.

  “Whoa! Class!” shouted Milan and punched his fist in the air. “Give me a go!”

  He played with the pen and screen. The next car was a Starburst. The sleek cool racing lines still looked impressive. But a bright purple finish with yellow spots and the words “longlivetherevolutionlonglivetherevolutionlonglivetherevo-lution” swirling around the outside had spoiled its looks.

  “Go for it, Nath,” Athena urged.

  With his sheepish smile, Nathan leaned over the pad and began to sketch and select colors with the stylus. I could see that, beneath the bright yellow bangs that fell forward over his face, his blue eyes were gleaming with pleasure. It made me smile to see him happy like this.

  “Wow, Nath, that’s amazing.” Athena was first to see the new car. “They might want to keep that design for real.”

  He had made the vehicle into a howling vampire. The windows were eyes and the face was drawn in purple, mauve, and black inks, like a tattoo across the hood. The white hair of the screaming face twisted around the sides and roof of the car. Somehow I couldn’t see the respectable yellow- and green-card owners who could afford such an aircar wanting this design.

  “Your turn, Ghost. Then we’d better get out of here.”

  I settled for a pale blue sky with fluffy white clouds as my background, and then filled it with floating red ♥s. Not much of a statement, I know, unless you think about how there are millions of aircars out there, and they are all a standard simple monochrome. To introduce playfulness and individuality is in itself a kind of subversion. Well, that’s if my choice needed any justification. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to shout slogans. The others seemed to like it. Milan chuckled aloud when the happy aircar emerged.

  “Neat.” Nathan was admiring.

  This kind of work was a lot more fun with friends around.

  We hit two more factories before Milan started to complain about his empty stomach. So I took them to the Canal Café. This was a quiet place, built into the space between two arches of a gray stone bridge that carried an expressway over the canal. The customers were usually freight workers, and I’d sometimes go there if I needed a ride for a long distance.

  A red-haired girl was working today. She nodded to me as we came in and took our seats on the benches on either side of a worn plastic table. Milan picked up the little stand that contained the menu and used it to shield his face from the rest of the room while he whispered to us.

  “How we gonna pay for this? I’m low on credit.”

  “Here.” I dug into one of the inside pockets of my jacket and pulled out a handful of colorful credit chips, mostly reds, but mixed in were a few orange ones and two yellows. They were each about the size of a thumbnail. “This one has lots on it. And this. You’d better have one for now, till you get your own.” I slid a yellow chip across the table, and Milan hurriedly laid a large hand upon it.

  “You stole those?” Nathan couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. Even as a kid, I’d never suffered for lack of credit. You just had to go to a busy place and work the crowds.

  “Don’t you feel bad? For the people you took them from?”

  “No, it’s not like that. They just report them missing and get replacements. The trick is to make the chips usable again after they’ve been canceled.”

  “How did you break the I.D. tags on them?” It amused me that Athena was troubled not by the fact that the chips were illicitly gained, but by the technical difficulty of renaming them, so that when used they wouldn’t show up as reported stolen.

  “You can get devices that do it for you. One click and you’re sorted.”

  “Ghost.” Milan was now studying the list of all-day breakfasts and didn’t look up. “I gotta hand it to you. You know how to take care of yourself.”

  “What else could I do? I didn’t have anyone to take care of me.”

  “Yeah. Strange that, losing your memory. I wonder what happened to your parents, to leave you as a kid?”

  My friends were the only people I’d ever told about my strange circumstances.

  “Maybe they didn’t. Sometimes I wonder if I was in an accident that killed them and threw me clear, or something.”

  “Did you ever have a scan for brain damage?” mused Athena.

  “No.”

  “Maybe we can do that. I’ll read up on it.” And right away, she unscrolled her crystal display to begin browsing through streams of data, reading up on brain scans. That was Athena: full of belief that she could achieve her goals. When she had said this morning that she intended to form a new guild, none of us had laughed. People were always forming guilds, advertising them, trying to get members to sign up. Invariably they collapsed, but if Athena was setting one up, that would be different; it would have an impact, I was sure.

  Having eaten our fill, we relaxed. I don’t know about the others, but I felt happy. It was good to have them around me here, where I had been alone in the past. The only concerns spoiling my good humor were the thoughts with which I had awoken and that were still troubling me.

  “I’ve been thinking again about what happened at the police station.”

  “Me, too.” Athena had been bent over her unrolled computer. Now she straightened up, all her attention on me.

  “And me,” added Nathan. Milan just shrugged noncommittally.

  “Don’t you think what happened was amazing? That pirate, Cindella, she knocked them all out. Fair enough, that could be a drug or something. But I saw her being hit by a pulse blast at full power, and it didn’t hurt her. Then she gave us a drink and we went invisible. Right?”

  “It’s deeply disturbing.” Athena was grim. “I simply cannot find any rational scientific explanation for it.”

  “What about non-scientific ones?” asked Nathan. “What then?”

  “Then I would concede it was magic. But I don’t believe in magic.”

  “I’ll tell you another strange thing.” Milan took his foot down from where it had been resting on a spare chair and sat up straight. “I was keeping a lookout for cops in Turner Square, right before we cut in to the den. There was a woman who stopped walking, and the next moment, she had gone. Disappeared.”

  “I saw her, too.” Nathan’s voice was placid, but his eyes were shining with animation.

  Athena scowled. “There’s a lot of chat in the discussion forums about people appearing and disappearing all of a sudden. It’s very odd. It seems to have started about a week ago.”

  “Really? Show me.”

  After a few careful fingertip touches to her screen, Athena turned the computer to Nathan. The rest of us watched silently as he read, pushing his bangs behind one ear to keep them out of his eyes. Milan slowly wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread, then folded it into his mouth.

  “Very interesting.” Nathan sat up. “I feel that they are connected somehow.”

  “What are?” mumbled Milan through his bread.

  “Cindella making us invisible and these people, popping in and out of existence. It’s the same kind of magic, somehow.”

  Athena resolutely shook her head. “Whatever it is, it is not magic.”

  We just didn’t know enough, but something strange was happening. As far as I was concerned, any change was to be welcomed, but Athena seemed to be taking a different view.

  “Come on.” I hauled my pack out from under the table. “Let’s head back.”

  As we left, I paid for us all with the credit on a red chip.

  We were boarding back through a grim industrial estate toward Arnie’s, when Nath pulled up.
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br />   “Look at that.”

  “Well, well, well.” There was a sting of bitterness in Athena’s voice.

  A row of gaudy posters had been sprayed along the bottom of a large billboard.

  The cryptic phrase at the bottom of the flyers might look a bit odd. But anyone who had heard of Ronnie’s would have no problem understanding it. Ronnie’s was a club that ran in a large abandoned hospital on Fifteenth and Elizabeth. The events there were always arranged randomly, about three or four times a year, and they were always huge. Personally I was not a great enthusiast for the milling throng of hundreds of kids, giddy under the influence of heeby-jeebies, or worse, staggering around drunk. But I usually went. I had to admire the organization behind them and the fact that here were thousands of people doing something the authorities disapproved of. And doing it well. These raves were properly organized. Plus the atmosphere was exciting; more than a whiff of rebellion was in the air at these events.

  The really interesting thing about the upcoming rave was the lineup. NoPhuture was Jay’s band.

  “We have to go.” Milan narrowed his eyes.

  No doubt about it.

  Chapter 8

  DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

  We are fond of this meeting room, the plush velvet chairs, the immense mahogany table. It is the scene of Our greatest triumph.

  There was a time when We were not the sole power in Saga; We were not even the strongest. Those were challenging days, and part of Us, the part that harkens back to Our youthful years, misses the excitement. Excitement? Yes. But also fear, sleepless nights, and a permanent knot in Our stomach. Our current exalted status is far more preferable. Especially now that We have the newcomers to play with.

  About a thousand years ago, give or take a few decades, the eight most powerful guild leaders of Saga met in this room. They thought that they had come to witness the demise of a particular rival. Only one servant was allowed into the room to bring us our drinks on a silver tray. With the agreement in advance of every one of them, this was Our assassin, Michelotto, and they knew he was here to kill someone. Everyone else had surrendered their weapons and passed through a metal detector on the way in.