“Bespoke engineering revenue is up 340% over three years. We thank our exceptional new talent, and the markets that were apparently waiting for us.”— Quarterly earnings call to investors
“We found out which corporation is draining you.”
The assistant was still standing in the frame when he said it, and the first thing Dot did after dropping a sentence like that was turn his head a quarter inch and tell her, “Leave us.”
She crossed the pale office and went out a door I couldn’t see. I shook my head. “She heard you. Draining. She was standing right there.”
“Exactly, Dash.”
It took me a second, sitting on the edge of my bed with my feet on the cold floor and the gun book facedown on the pillow where I’d dropped it. He hadn’t dismissed her to keep a secret. He’d kept her in the room long enough to catch what mattered and then walked her out, so the catching would look like an accident, because he was angry at me.
“You wanted her to have it,” I said. “Why?”
“Because a thing arrives heavier when it leaks.” He folded his hands. “If Kallum announces that it knows, that’s a position, and a position can be argued with. If a girl with clearance and a loose mouth carries it out a side door, that’s the truth. People believe what they think they weren’t meant to find.”
Then he got to what he’d called about. “What I’m about to tell you is Level Six.”
I almost laughed before I could stop myself. “There are five levels.”
He didn’t blink. He let the silence do the work, and my laugh died somewhere south of my throat. “Okay,” I said. “Level Six. Got it.”
“Your house is clean enough for this. My office is clean enough for this.” He tilted his head toward the window behind him. “Next time, you come to the moon.”
He still hadn’t sat down. There was a chair in that office and I’d never once seen him use it. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said. “So I’m going to make use of you instead. You’ll learn the real world before you’re any good to anyone, and the drain is where you start.”
I jumped off the bed and moved closer. “Katherine wouldn’t sign off on that.”
Something almost moved on his face. “Your grandmother is a great CEO, I admit that. Without her, Kallum wouldn’t exist today.” He said it without warmth. “She is not Kallum. She runs us beautifully, and she has no idea where we’re going, because going somewhere was never in her blood. We’re aimless. So we’ll use you.”
“Ugh, Uncle, again this,” I shook my head and sat back. “Fine, use me how?”
“The corporation has already admitted to it. Privately. To me.”
I sat up straighter. “What corporation?”
He kept talking, and I filed the not-answering with the rest of it. “Kallum will hold the admission over them. We put them back in their lane, and we do it without a shot fired or a headline printed. Quiet leverage. The cleanest kind there is.”
“How,” I said. “How do you have an admission? People don’t confess to breaking a Sol ban, I mean, draining a kid because you asked nicely.”
For the first time, he gave me a smile. Small, but it felt like a victory. “Dante followed the thread. He’s good at threads. It ended where we expected it to end, and I went to the other end of it and had a conversation, face to face, and the people there did not enjoy the conversation.” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “That’s how.”
Dante, I believed. The rest I’d hold up to the light later. “And me,” I said. “Where am I in this?”
“You’re the proof it happened.” He came a step nearer the pickup, and the moon slid out of the frame behind him. “We pulled what data we could on the drain. We don’t know how it was built. It’s not a design any of our people recognize, and that alone should tell you who you’re standing in front of. But we know this much. If we try to remove it, it will self-destruct.”
“I wasn’t examined,” I said. “Nobody’s put me under anything. So where’s your data from?
“We don’t need to open you up to read a leak.” He waved it off. “We have enough data from the ones draining you.”
And there it was, the thread I kept a fist closed around all through the rest of it. Because somebody had put me under. Dewi had laid me out in soul-rest weeks ago and named the thing for what it was.
Dot didn’t know that.
Dot had a leak and ‘enough data’ and a story where the only safe pair of hands in the whole system happened to be Kallum’s, and meanwhile a healer he’d never heard of was further along than his entire intelligence apparatus.
The death part, though.
That part I’d take to Dewi and ask her, because if it were true, I wanted to hear from one person not in Kallum.
Either way, I wasn’t setting my clock by a man who’d just spent his day staging a holy war to see if I’d flinch. I’d get it out of me on my schedule, sick exhibit or not, and Kallum could find another body to wave around if the timing didn’t suit.
I kept all of that off my face. Or I tried to. “You still haven’t said who.”
Dot studied me a moment, deciding something. “FutureTech Systems.”
I knew them the way you know a logo, a tech name off the SASDAQ board. “FutureTech makes consumer-tech though? Why would they target me?”
“They make whatever they decide they can sell. That’s the problem.” He let his hands fall apart. “Every house in the Fifteen owns a segment. That was the arrangement when the Alliance was drawn. Fifteen segments, fifteen families, and you do not put a toe across the line into someone else’s, at least not on a Sol scale. Palistra has retail. We have custom engineering and the high end of arms. For ten years FutureTech has been creeping up-market. Bespoke engineering. Premium custom work. Our work. On a scale that rivals us. And a house that reaches into our segment gets its fingers broken in public, fast, so the next house remembers what the segments are for. That is the rule. It’s how the Fifteen has held for over a century.”
“And we did nothing.”
I waited for the rest, and the rest didn’t come.
“That’s what I want you to sit inside of,” he said. “FutureTech walked into our segment, and Kallum, the house that breaks fingers, looked the other way. Quarter after quarter. No reprisal. No warning. Nothing at all.”
“Maybe somebody missed it.”
“Nobody misses ten years.” His voice didn’t lift. “Somebody let them in. Somebody opened our segment and held it open. And that is not a clerk, Dash. That’s standing. That’s height. To make this house look away, you’d have to be sitting very near the top of it.” He paced once across the office and stopped. “That may be the board.”
I’d picked this call up from Uncle Dot, the man who at least bothered to build a cruel little stage play out of someone else’s apocalypse to teach me a lesson. Somewhere between the assistant and now I’d lost him. The thing in the frame was Director Dot, the Rook, and a Rook could lay a sentence like that down and not have anything move behind his eyes while he did it.
The board.
I’d eaten with the board.
My whole life, the long dinners, the gatherings where the family knitted out past anyone I could name, and you shook a hundred hands, and half of them shared your blood.
The board was faces around a table. It was a great-aunt, one of the soft ones, who kept a planter of something green and stubborn alive on a windowsill in a hab where nothing was supposed to grow, and who’d caught me at nine staring at her failing little grow-light and decided right there that I was hers.
She used to slide parts under the table between courses.
Salvaged from a teardown, a dead actuator, a board with the smoke already let out of it, pressed into my hand with a whisper to go ruin it and bring it back worse. I built her a tender so the green thing would stop dying on her. It was the first thing I ever made that worked.
She could be one of those hands that held the segment open for the people draining me.
I didn’t say a word of it. “What do you want from me?” I said instead.
“Tonight, nothing.” He unfolded his hands. “I won’t move against my father’s philosophy. I’ll point. When you walk toward the wrong door, I’ll say it’s the wrong door. That’s the most you’ll get from me, and it’s already more than I gave anyone who came before you.”
I thought about FutureTech, and a rot somewhere up near the top of my own family, and me walking around underneath all of it with a target I couldn’t see drawn on my back. “If someone on the board is feeding the people draining me, and you’re about to parade me around as your proof, do I get a detail? Somebody on me?”
“No.”
“You just said there’s a—”
“There are ways to keep you safe from this family’s enemies. I know every one of them.” He looked at me. “Besides, this is against the ‘young master’ rule. You turn twenty, you can do things alone.”
“So Asti is free?” I asked back. “Can we dive into shards together?”
“Leave her out of this,” he almost hissed.
“Uncle, that’s hypocritical and insane. I’m—”
“That’s the family.”
And he killed the call.
The wall turned dark. The gun book facedown where I’d left it, the chapter on barrel harmonics I was not going to finish tonight.
I sat there for a while. I don’t know how long.
Then I wanted a drink.
The amber thing in the short glass that I’d watched adults reach for my entire life and never once understood, the thing they put between themselves and a bad day, and for one clear second I understood every tired man I’d ever seen pour one. There was a bad day in the short glass, and the glass made it smaller.
I got up and got water.
I drank it at the window with the district lighting up below me, and I let the want move through and out, because Dot had just spent an hour and a fake holy war telling me I was weak like my father, and not reaching for the glass was the only thing I had to say back to that.
He’d never know I’d said it.
That was fine.
I knew.
FutureTech.
I picked the gun book up off the bed and closed it.
Somewhere on the moon a man had just hung up on me, and I sat a minute longer trying to work out which one it had been, the uncle who tested me or the director who used me, and I couldn’t.
I couldn’t tell, neither I could sit down.
The water hadn’t helped, the gun book hadn’t helped, and lying down had lasted about ninety seconds before I was up again, walking the short rectangle my room allowed, window to door to bed and back, with FutureTech going around my skull on a loop and Dot’s voice underneath it telling me to be patient and quiet and ordinary and wait.
I wasn’t going to wait.
That was the whole of it. Dot wanted a sick exhibit he could wave at a boardroom on his own schedule.
I’d stood at that window twenty minutes ago promising myself I’d take it into my own hands, and a promise you make at a window in the evening is worth nothing if you climb into bed right after it.
So I pulled up the band and found the contact I wanted.
She owed me a favor. One favor, redeemable by Dash Kallum, no expiration, witnessed by a man on a couch who’d learned what a netrunner does when you blow up her exfill and laugh about it.
I called.
She answered on the second ring, already at the rig. “Dashi.” Warm on top, the patter of keys somewhere behind the warmth. “It’s late and I’m sniping. Shouldn’t you be tucked in, letting the staff worry about the world?”
“I don’t have staff.”
“Tragic. Miss Natalya, then, we’re working, so you use the name. What do you want at this hour that couldn’t wait for a civilized one?”
“You told me you prefer the night,” I countered. She was silent, except that I heard her playing the game. “Fine, I’m cashing in the favor.”
The patter hitched. “The one I owe you. TagoKiller, the couch.” Her amusement arrived a half-second late. “Bold, opening on the IOU. Most people warm me up first, Dashi. Flowers. Small talk. You go straight for the throat. Wait—” she furiously smashed the keyboard. “—Got him. Okay, I respect it. What’s the job?”
“I need you to find someone.” It came out cleaner than I’d feared; I’d rehearsed it on the walk to the door and back. “Somebody inside FutureTech Systems, or close to it, who came into power they didn’t have about half a year ago. A jump. A kid who tested like nothing and then tested like something. A prodigy out of nowhere, with paperwork that’s a little too clean.”
“That,” she said slowly, “is a terrible request.”
“It’s—”
“It’s enormous, and it’s word like nothing. Someone at a SASDAQ 500 corp who got stronger. Do you know how many people that is? FutureTech papers a hundred prodigies a quarter for the investor decks. Half are real, half are fake to look good, and every one of them tested like nothing and then like something, because that is what the word prodigy is for.“ The keyboard came back fast, irritated. “You’ve handed me a haystack and told me it’s full of hay. What am I looking for?”
“The jump. The timing—half a year.”
“Why half a year? Why FutureTech? What’s under it, kotě, because right now you’re describing an entire industry and calling it a portrait.” The keys ran and ran. “I can pull four hundred names tonight and not one will be the one you want, because you’ve kept back the single fact that would let me throw the other three hundred and ninety-nine away. So. What is it?”
I paced to the door and back. “Does it matter? You find them, I’ll narrow them.”
“You’ll narrow four hundred names. You. With what?” The warmth thinned in her voice. “I died. Ugh.” Then the keys went quiet. “Dashi. I’m going to say a true thing now, and I don’t do it often, so listen. You called me late in the evening to ask a favor on a search you wouldn’t describe. You’re not bad at hiding the thing. You’re bad at hiding that there is a thing. So here’s an offer.”
I stopped at the window.
“Tell me the real one and I don’t just clear the favor, I go past it. I put hours into this that you didn’t buy and couldn’t afford, because a thing you won’t say out loud to a runner you trust is a thing worth my night. You trust me with it, I spend myself on it.”
The earpiece hummed.
“...That’s how it works. Right?” She added quieter. “Trust. You give it, the other one gives it back. I read that that’s the mechanism. I don’t have a lot of—I don’t have much data on it.” A small sound, almost a laugh aimed at herself. “But that’s the protocol. Yes?”
There it was.
The woman who’d burned my earpiece in my pocket to teach me a lesson about the word no, asking me to confirm the rules of trust as if she was checking them against a spec. I’d seen this version of her once, in a storage unit, asking for her own fee in pieces because she couldn’t get the sentence out whole.
The drain was about to stop being a secret.
Dot was going to carry it into a boardroom and wave it around with receipts, and inside a month every name that mattered would know there was a hole in the Kallum boy. A secret with a thirty-day shelf life wasn’t a secret.
“Okay,” I said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, because this part I didn’t want to say on my feet. “Here’s the real one.”
“Something’s draining my System compatibility. Somebody built a thing, put it in me, and it’s been siphoning since I turned system age.”
Nothing came back from her end.
“I’ve been clawing back over the line ever since, a crystal here, a stone there, and I’m above twenty now on my own steam. But my real number, the one they dragged me down from—” I saidm “Is nearly ninety.”
“O kurva,” Natalya whispered. “Really?”
“Really. It isn’t being destroyed. It’s being routed. Sixty points of me are going somewhere, into someone, and that someone has been getting exactly as strong as I was supposed to be, on my numbers, this whole time.”
The keys came alive. “And FutureTech, because—”
“Somebody papered a prodigy who does high-end work no one trained them to do. I think he does it on my compatibility.”
“You think.”
“I’m going to know. That’s you.” I was up off the bed again, the energy back in my legs. “And when I kill the drain—when I take my sixty points back—whoever’s been riding them loses them. All at once. He drops from whatever he is now overnight. I don’t know what that does to a person. Whether he just gets weaker, or whether sixty points leaving a body the way they came is the thing you don’t walk away from.” I heard how I sounded and didn’t soften it. “I want to know that, too. I’ve been told my whole life to take the hit and grow from it like a good Kallum, and I’m finished with it. Somebody’s been wearing my life. I want to be looking at them when I take it back.”
She was quiet; the line was quiet, long enough that I checked the band to see whether it had dropped.
“No,” she said. Oh, this one I knew. It was a Czech no, the one that meant well, the one she used as a running start. “No. That, I can work with. That has edges.” The keys built under her again. “Open net first. Every prodigy FutureTech’s paraded in, call it eight months, I’ll widen it, crossed against anyone whose number climbed when it had no business moving. That’s this week. I run that from here.”
“But the open net only ever gives you what they want it to. The real answer, revision histories, the internal ledgers, who they credited and when, that’s inside. Closed loop. I’d have to be in their net properly, hands on the actual records.”
“So we run an op.” I was pacing again. “Like Bhavsar. You get me to a port, I slot in, you—”
“Stop. No op. Not tonight, not because you’re vibrating at almost midnight and need to feel like you did something. You give me the week. I scout. I find out where they even keep that kind of record, how hard it bites, whether it’s a thing two people walk away from or a thing that erases two people. Then we look at what’s real and go by ear.” The warmth returned “The fun part is last, zlatíčko. Not first.”
I made myself sit back down. “Okay. The week.”
“Good Dashi.” No top layer on it this time. The keys went back to their easy idle. “And the favor’s clear, but this isn’t the favor anymore. This is the other thing. The thing you trusted me with. Mm. I read you’re supposed to feel something when it works. Do you?”
The room had stopped feeling like a box I was wearing a track into. “Yeah,” I said. “A little.”
“Huh.” A thoughtful tap of keys. “Noted. Sleep, kotě. Names next week. And don’t decline my calls.”
The line cut on her terms.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the band still warm in my hand, and the loop was still going, but it had somewhere to go now, instead of just going.
Author's note: I'm sorry for the later chapter! This one had a lot of "plot" packed into it and my brain refused to work properly in the heat we have here.