Chapter 1

Friday was moving fucking slowly. Amaya Queenie checked the time on her terminal again, still hours to go, and stood to stretch the stiffness from her legs. Her office was an unimpressive box, but it had one thing going for it: a window. That, and easy access to a coff-shop down the hall. Oh, and the bathroom was right next door. Super great. Just livin’ the corpo dream, aren’t you, girlie?

She crossed the room to observe the city above and below her. The transports, sprinting by her window, reminded her of the neurons in her own brain that refused to wake. She wanted some coffee. She’d brought her home-brew from her flat, but her proprietary blend of store-bought instant-ground wasn’t doing it. It was Friday, dammit. She deserved a sugary splurge for herself. That decided, she finished her review of the morning traffic and turned to grab her terminal from her desk before heading to the coff-shop.

No, you’ve just got the I-Don’t-Wanna’s, Amaya chided herself. She had plenty of work left for the day, and plenty of coffee left in her thermos. Coffee, work, Friday-bummies; these weren’t the problems. Something else nagged at her, like that stray hair she could never quite comb into line. Whatever it was refused to reveal itself, though. Admittedly, she’d had one hell of a year, and as the company provided shrink had explained with a strained face of practiced empathy, depressive swings would be common for a while. Fuck that, she thought. There was something else wrong. What, though?

Amaya’s office danced with the reflected light of transport vehicles as they zipped by her window. She turned her head back to the city and looked down from the window, desperate for a view of the green, nature laced promenade below. Amaya sighed and slumped her shoulders to let her forehead come to rest, a little too hard, against the window. No view of the trees and flowers today, just the smog collecting between the monolithic towers of Skyreach.

Amaya suddenly longed to be anywhere but work, and her inability to see the promenade made her crave the freedom to stretch her legs in the promenades below all the more. She took a step towards her door and stopped, teetering back and forth on her heels as her indecision devoured her focus. Stop it. You need to be here, something nagged. She still couldn’t name it, like knowing lightning is going to strike before it actually did. Whatever it was that wanted her to stay put, point made.

Since Marcus’s arrest, Amaya learned to trust that tingling sense of impending trouble. She’d be planting her ass firmly back at her desk and finishing her work. Amaya resolved to go for a walk in the greenspace soon, though. It had been too long since she left her comforts of the towers. She was working this high up in the city, shouldn’t she be trying to get out to enjoy the privileges of mid-tier living?

Amaya Queenie worked on the third tier of Skyreach, one of the most populous of the 30 cities hovering above Earth. She’d recently applied for and won a job in middle management with the Marketing Department at TerraHarvest, the principal Ag-Tech firm on Skyreach. Her work was not glamorous, but it was comfortable and she was compensated well enough. Her workspace, a one-hundred square foot room, remained mostly unfurnished, but a lone reading table, 2 chairs, and a white porcelain desk was enough for now.

The floor, a wood-stained linoleum designed to make the offices appear farm-ey, juxtaposed poorly with the touch-screen terminal on her desk and modern and brutalist furniture in the rest of the office. Walking in every morning, Amaya gained the distinct feeling that the space was in conflict with itself. Like the characters in her comedy streams who wore suit-tops and sleep-bottoms to corpo video meetings.

Watching the cars zoom by her window, Amaya considered her good fortune in winning this position. The money would be welcome - she could start saving again - but this felt like the the start of some real upward mobility for her. And her brother. Her parents had done the best that they could, but up-classing wasn’t as common as it used to be. Both of Amaya’s parents had been born into a labor families and barely ever made enough to feed everyone from month to month, much less paying off debt and purchasing credit upgrades to quantity up into another class..

When her father won a year’s salary at the betting parlor, they moved into a 2 bedroom apartment - the biggest living accommodations that Amaya would ever know with her family. One week later, her parents had been killed by a gas leak in a transport vehicle. Ever since, Amaya had been trying to find a level of comfort that only seemed possible by turning to corporate employment. Selling out, Marcus had called it. Well, here she was, and dammit if her parents wouldn’t have been proud of her. At least until they remembered what she’d done to Marcus

Her thoughts always turned to Marcus when she started to feel good about herself; You don’t get to feel good, remember? Marcus was serving time as a surface-scrap miner for drug possession. He was housed at the detention center on Cirrus Prime, and Amaya’s pride for her success forever carried a footnote that it came at Marcus’s expense. His time was up in another year, though, and they would both be able to make lives for themselves in Skyreach. Amaya’s latest promotion to a manager for TerraHarvest was the first in a series of moves, she hoped, that would elevate the siblings from the squalor that their parents couldn’t escape. She owed Marcus that much, she was positive; it was her puffer that he took the sentence for.

The Pavlovian beep of an incoming message from the terminal drew Amaya from her melancholy. Crossing the office again, Amaya resumed her seat at her desk to see who, this time, needed an updated client list or help with an invoice. Navigating to her instant messages, she found the alert, read the message, and felt her blood chill. The whole room grew cold as her mind raced with the possibilities - probabilities - of what she would soon learn.

Emergency Services —- Please Return Contact Immediately.

Amaya stood, her heart threatening to flutter from her chest, stomach twisting into knots. The message was sudden and impersonal, but vague; nothing to lose it over quite yet. In her heart, she knew. There was only one person it could be about. Marcus was the only person she had left. She knew he was doing dangerous work on the surface below Cirrus, but Marcus had told her he was only a paper-pusher and stayed in the transport office, even when the ship landed on the surface. She was saving for a big donation to ensure his placement in an even safer job, and she had always hoped that she could use some of her good luck in the corporate world to help her brother get back on his feet after he finished his work-sentence.

Marcus was her only living family, what was she supposed to do now? What had she been working towards all this time? Amaya needed to leave - she had to make arrangements for her brother’s funeral. Her supervisor, Blaithe, would have no problem with that - she was an ideal employee, for the most part. Her tasks for the day she could memo out to the couple of subordinates she’d been entrusted and all of that she could do in transit back to her flat.

Hold on - you don’t know what’s going on. Take a breath and let’s handle this one step at a time.

Amaya grabbed her hand terminal and quick-dialed the return-contact info. A chipper female voice was on the line in seconds. “Emergency Services, please provide the reason for your call? If this is an active emergency, please dial 000.”

“My name’s Amaya Queenie, I received a notification that I should return contact to this number immediately?” Her voice trembled and her hands shook. Her knuckles were white as she gripped her hand terminal and sweat was forming in her armpits and the small of her lower back. Her chest hurt. A few seconds of silence passed and Amaya heard a transmission switch as her call patched through to another zone. Probably someone over on Cirrus Prime, a thousand miles away.

An equally enthusiastic voice greeted Amaya on this new call. “Hello! This is Stefan Notts in Region 14, Zone 2; that’s Cirrus Prime commercial and residential below level 45. How may I direct your call?” Amaya dipped her head and sighed, then walked Stefan through the details. Exasperation oozed from her pores. “Oh! Oh.. oh, my.” Stefan’s sudden change in demeanor confirmed Amaya’s fears. Bad news a-coming. He seemed unsure how to say it, though, like he’d suddenly swallowed his own tongue. Stefan stuttered and gurgled as he struggled for the right words for a few more seconds before Amaya ended his suffering.

“Is Marcus alright?!” Amaya asked sharply, willing the tears to stay back just a few minutes longer.

Finding his voice, Stefan replied “No, ma’am, and I’m sorry to be the one to to tell you, but Marcus Queenie was declared lost and un-recoverable in a mining accident on the surface below Cirrus Prime earlier today. I don’t have details, but I have been forwarded a contact number for the Detention Officer responsible for inquiries in this matter. I will push it on to you immediately.” Stefan was eager to end the call, and Amaya knew he couldn’t do anything else for her even if she kept him on the line for further questioning. She ended the connection once the contact information was saved in her terminal.

Slamming her terminal down onto the desk, Amaya found that the tears would not come. Call it a sister’s intuition, maybe it was denial, but something was wrong; other than her dead brother and her new solitary status in the world. Whatever it was, she had to do something. Amaya tapped on her desk terminal to navigate to the commercial transit pages and watched the results spool in from her query for transit to Cirrus Prime.

The airy swoosh of her office door sliding open forced a delay to any travel planning. Amaya looked up from her terminal.

Blaithe Walters, the head of the Marketing Department, stood across the desk from her. Despite the circumstances, his appearance still almost forced Amaya to giggle. Blaithe fancied himself a classic British gentleman from the old holobook classics in school. Amaya wasn’t sure about his heritage, but he played the part damn well. He wore glasses even though he’d undergone corrective surgery for his vision decades ago. He kept his reddish-brown hair short, and usually had an electronic nico-puffer in his hand or mouth. Amaya thought she could detect a hint of what her business textbooks would have termed Modern London English. He drank hibiscus-rose tea at noon, referred to people as mate, and used cheers as a salutation.

Today, he wore a dark three piece suit with plaid vest and a bright red bow-tie. The suits changed, but Amaya now thought the bow tie to be permanently affixed around his neck.

Different, today, though: the flushed cheeks, shiny forehead, and something else. Amaya thought she could sense something oscillating between anger and…. fear? But why? What was he afraid of?

Blaithe could be serious, in fact he was serious most of the time, but Amaya had never seen this expression or felt this energy from him before. Amaya had been a mostly-ideal employee, not yet missing a deadline or turning in sub-par reporting or copy-editing for her holo-ads, but this was a controlled rage directed at someone who has seriously fucked up and has only a few moments to explain themselves before the dam breaks. But his eyes. This man is scared of something.

“Amaya, what the hell did you do?” Blaithe demanded.

“I’m sorry?” Amaya said defensively, the sudden assault threatening to shatter the strong-sister-facade from just a few seconds earlier. Her face reddened and the corners of her eyes sparkled as tears welled. She blinked them away.

Noticing the shift in Amaya’s character, Blaithe adjusted his bow tie, huffed, and tried again. His tone remained firm, but he tried a more diplomatic approach this time.. “Amaya, I just received a call from corporate security alerting me to your immediate termination and I have been instructed to detain you until security forces arrive. They’re on their way now and will be here any second. Security forces, for heaven’s sake, Amaya. Please tell me, what have you done?” His glasses slipped from his nose in his excitement and fell to the floor, clacking noisily against the linoleum. He leaned down to pick them up and straightened them onto his face again, leaning toward Amaya as he did so. He quickly glanced at the door to make sure they were still alone. “Amaya, I’ve heard that the coalition has questions for you” he whispered, his face the one of someone witnessing a transport accident.

“I… I don’t understand.” Amaya said, her voice cracked. She showed Blaithe the message on her hand terminal as she began to cry. Her world was ending, dissipating out of view, swallowed by the fog of corporate politics, like the greenspace she could no longer see below her building. She tried to summon her courage from earlier, but it was gone, pulverized by the energy of Blaithe’s revelation.

Blaithe’s eyes were wide when he returned her hand terminal. He came around the desk, gently placed his hands on her shoulders and moved her to the side as he began to gather Amaya’s belongings, handing them to her with a huff when he was finished. “Here’s what is going to happen, Miss Queenie: You will quickly, I mean VERY quickly, gather your personal effects and you are going to extricate yourself from this office and building. You will use the service elevator, you will leave this tower, and you will go to Cirrus Prime, and I anticipate that I shall never read about your apprehension.”

“What are you-” Amaya tried to ask. Blaithe spoke over her as he continued typing on Amaya’s terminal, apparently oblivious to her attempt to speak.

“As for myself, I came to this office and found you absent.” He opened an application on Amaya’s desk terminal and began tapping out a message as he continued speaking. “Other than that, I haven’t seen or heard from you today, besides your satisfaction of weekly KPIs and this cryptic message, that I just received, about a family emergency and needing a week of personal time.” He tapped a final button and the sound of a Message Sent notification dinged softly from the terminal. His hand terminal chirped, happily alerting Blaithe to the message he’d received from himself, but he did not check his hand terminal.

“Good luck, Ms. Queenie.” he said. Amaya turned to leave the office, taking in her small space one final time, while it was still hers. She gave Blaithe a final nod of gratitude, shouldered her bag, and left the office. Stealing one more glance at Blaithe as she crossed the threshold out of her office, Amaya could swear she noticed an air of concern, maybe even affection, coloring his face. Blaithe wasn’t the type to stick his neck out, at least not for others. He’d been around long enough, though, to know when corporate was hiding something. Though he’d never shown it overtly, he’d grown quite fond of his little Q. The world was more interesting with Amaya in it, and he did not want to see her thrown into a detention cell for the rest of her life.

The walls were a clinical white tile with an occasional board for bulletin-posts announcing new corporate codes-of-conduct or advertising for new members to join the tennis or chess clubs. Amaya kept her eyes down at her hand terminal as she moved down the vast hallway toward the service elevator. It was Friday, so only a handful of essential personnel were attending to their work from the office, but Amaya still passed a few familiar faces in the hallway. Jenks, from the Accounting team, tried to stop her and ask about her weekend plans, but she had to gesture to her phone and keep walking, too busy, can’t talk right now, so sorry!

As she approached the lift, it dinged in anticipation of a new arrival to the floor. Amaya’s heart sank, fuck me, caught immediately. The door opened and a member of the custodial staff stepped out onto the floor, apparently responding to a sanitation query.. “You seem mighty happy to have caught this one,” he said, grinning. “Let me hold it for you.” The janitor held his smile as he placed his arm over the sensor to keep the doors open for Amaya. She smiled at the custodian in appreciation, stepped into the chamber, and pushed the button that would take her to the vehicle platform where a transport cabbie was due to arrive in 4 minutes.

The higher up Amaya went, the less likely the elevator would stop, as the executives and owners usually did not visit the office on Fridays. The security offices were also stationed at the base and middle of the buildings, so she felt good about her chances of making it to the top now. Still, her heart ran laps around her insides and her mind swam with questions. Why are they trying to arrest me? As silly as it seemed, she even worried that they wanted to question her about whether or not it was her herb that Marcus got caught with.

As she reached the top of the building and stepped out onto the transport platform, she felt a sense of relief. No security forces up here, at least not yet. They must be keeping the hunt for me internal, she realized. That scared her more. People disappeared, ceased to exist, when the coalition went looking for them, and isn’t that what Blaithe had said? That the coalition had questions for her? Her heart fluttered and she took a deep breath to calm herself.

They hadn’t considered that Blaithe would help her escape, so it was probably considered it a small errand to apprehend her. Amaya doubted they even could pick her out of a crowd if they needed to, and since they had not stationed any guards up here, she would bet her credit limit that the camera system had not been queried to look for her face. There were 10,000 cameras across Skyreach, but if none of them had been told to look for her, she was safely on the run for now. Her head start wouldn’t sustain for long, though. Get moving, girl.

The platform was bustling with activity. While her offices were mostly empty today, there were still residential quarters, commercial and residential services, even a mass transit stop contained in other sections of the massive complex. People in all manners of dress moved across the platform to their transport queries or to their bus-transports to leave the city or to travel down to one of the numerous tiers above or below their current one. Hoping to be further lost in the crowd, she began moving across the terminal to where her cab was reserved to land and checked her hand terminal to confirm its imminent arrival.

Andre is landing momentarily and will be ready for you soon! Please be ready to go!

The display gleamed proudly, as if this was just another fare, just another day. To Andre and most everyone else on the platform, it probably was. She’d had similar feelings on her way to her parents’ funeral. Why do others get to act like this day is normal? This day is anything but normal.

Not now. She forced the brooding thoughts from her mind and focused on what she needed to do next. Shit. What should I do next? Her terminal chimed as the cab landed, blowing detritus from the rooftop all around her, forcing her to squint and cover her eyes or risk getting debris in them. The vehicle bumped into the ground, the landing struts grinding against the hard tarmac of the landing pad. She got into the vehicle and a mixture of cherry-almond and sweat welcomed her as a large man turned back from the controls and smiled, a black hole where one of his two front teeth should have been. “Where to, madam?”

Andre spoke with a thick southern drawl, his heritage the obvious beneficiary of the mass immigration from southern portions of the United States during the beginning of the old world crisis. Hearing him speak was like watching butter melt slowly in a pan with the knowledge that you would soon add egg-yellow and have a delicious meal. Andre was oddly comforting, but Amaya wasn’t sure if she could afford to trust anyone right now. Still, she nodded, shared her address, and tried to believe, if only for a moment, that this could be her first stroke of luck today.

Andre’s black hair was slicked back and he had a bushy caterpillar of a mustache above his top lip. His bright yellow jumpsuit bore his company’s insignia - an old school Volkswagen Beetle ground car with angel’s wings flapping the vehicle into flight. “Name’s Andre,” he said, gleaming his missing-tooth grin at her. “Where can I take you?”

Amaya took in the vehicle. It didn’t much resemble a Beetle, but she supposed that was a tradition from long ago. Volkswagen hadn’t made a ground car in 80 years. She sighed, mentally preparing herself for whatever outcome this dice-roll might produce, and tapped the button on her terminal to confirm her address.

“Back to my flat, please, Andre.”