Pit District, Simoom
Four years ago

Harmony

After Sila passed, it was just me and Travers left. At first, I wasn't good to him—not the sort of mother he needed then. He was lost, but I spent most of my time crying, curled up in a ball on the soiled mattress in our room, or in the bar drowning myself with drink and trying to pick up men—though nobody would touch me. I thought at first that maybe I was just too ugly or everybody was just too polite, too nice. It was only afterwards I realized Pitters guarded against people getting too close.

Travers was eleven then. He tried to take care of me; he picked through trash for food scraps or anything he could sell or barter to pay for our board. I doubt what he got covered our rent, but the landlady never kicked us out. Then Travers started stealing. I didn't know nothing about it at first. I wasn't hardly aware of things going on around me—still in that blanket with my dead Sila—until one day Mancy came and pulled open the door to my room. He ordered Travers in in front of him. Dusty tears dropped down my boy's face.

"What the hell are you doing Madam?!" Mancy hollered in my ear, and me, with a hangover, wincing. "Wake up!" he yelled again. "I caught your boy, red-handed, in my abode, stealing my supplies, stealing my supplies!" As if to say, I suppose, it was okay to steal other people's supplies, but not his.

I remember looking at Mancy through bleary eyes and thinking I had never seen a more gorgeous man—even better looking than my dead husband. Maybe it was because Mancy had been in the Pit for years before I arrived. The dust has a way of smoothing out all your rough edges; it makes you glow with good health, even as it fills up your lungs and cuts off the air. Most people in the Pit kept their hair short or sheared it off completely—less for the dust to cling to. But not Mancy; he left his dark hair shaggy and wild, and it curled this way and that, and his beard, he trimmed to a perfect point—quite a feat of personal grooming considering our water situation. That morning when he stomped into my room, he was like a grey blizzard blowing in and throwing everything out the porthole.

I know what you're thinking, Vestra, sitting in the bar with Mac. How can I be talking about the same paunchy, middle-aged drunk locked up in a cell down the corridor from me? The man who'd confess to anything just to be left alone? How can that be the same Mancy as that tall, thin, gorgeous man I remember being with just a few years ago?

But he is.

"Keep your boy in order!" he said to me, hauling me off that mattress to shake me awake. "Do not think of leaving this room, boy," he hissed at Travers. "It is beyond contempt to abandon one's child to the dust. It is called parental neglect, Madam. And you are going to pay for everything this little thief has stolen from me!"

"I didn't steal nothing from you. I was just picking through your trash!" Travers said. He tried to sound tough, but I knew he was scared.

"Today you were rummaging through my refuse, but yesterday and the day before that? Items have been disappearing from my pantry for weeks now!"

"It wasn't me. It wasn't me, Mom...Mom..."

I had said nothing this whole time. I knew somewhere in the fog of my head I was failing Travers, but I couldn't stop myself, and even at that moment, he wasn't my main focus. I just stared, just stared at this whirlwind of a man. I wanted—well, I don't know what I wanted exactly—him, I suppose. I wanted Mancy.

I must have looked a mess, but I think I tried to smile at him. Whatever it was Mancy saw in my face it stopped him from shaking me. And then he muttered, "Bloody Hell."

That day he bought me and Travers the first good meal we had had in weeks; and he paid our landlady the credits we owed her. Two days after that, he moved us out of that boarding house and into the main bunker. Omari was not happy about it.

WAVE Orbiting Station
Now

Doric

Holy shit, did Harmony just tell me that story in my head—telepathically? I heard her as clearly as I heard Mac talking to me at the bar. It was like holding two conversations at the same time. I...I don't know what to...say...or...do...I can't...this isn't happening, is it? Something in my head seems to have opened and Harmony walked right in. I realize now it's been growing for days, ever since I touched the back of her head, maybe even before that, but now words are pouring out of her and into me. Full-blown telepathy outside of the Pit. Part of me always believed it was just nonsense. They were making it up or exaggerating. And now this. How could I report this? How could I even tell Mac? After our discussion about the dust, he already thinks me half crazy. Maybe I am crazy, maybe I'm in the middle of a psychological breakdown. Maybe I'm hearing voices that aren't there at all.

In a panic, I made up some excuse to Mac and left the Officers Club. I didn't go back to my quarters, but began to walk the corridors of the Station. I found myself limping, it seems in sympathy with Harmony's sore hip, over to the arboretum. At this hour, it was deserted. The solar lights were turned low to simulate night. I sat among the flowering trees, breathing in their oxygen, looking out through the windows at the stars and said to the woman in my head: "Are you actually there?"

Silence.

"Come on, Harmony," I yelled to the trees. "Is this how you do it? You get into people's heads? Is that what happened to Caraq? What do you want?"

And then she was talking to me—the essence of her meaning popped into me. What do you want, Vestra?

I jumped back. Her voice in my head now so loud and clear, and before I could even think of how to answer an image of Raquel sitting half-dressed on the bed that morning invaded my mind.

I've seen that face before. Harmony picked up on the image right away. The woman on the bed. She's that nurse with the wife and two kids on the tablet screen you showed me when you burst into the room.

"Yes," I whispered, not even bothering to deny or question what was happening now.

Tell me about her.

I shook my head. "No!" I yelled out loud. That's private.

Tit for tat, Vestra. You tell me your secrets and I'll tell you mine.

***

New Earth
Eleven years ago

I met Raquel back at uni during my fourth year. I was majoring in Psych; with a minor in Cyber Security.

"Hey!" was the first thing I ever said to her. "You can't park your scooter here."

She was standing beside her e-scooter in the middle of the path and was glued to her screen. Didn't even look up.

"Hey!" I yelled again. "Move your scooter please!"

Still nothing. I waved my arms in front of her face.

"What?" she turned off her ears and looked up and I saw those fierce eyes for the first time.

"Move your scooter. You're blocking the path."

She glanced passed me and all around. "There's no one on the path but you and me. And there's plenty of space for you to go around."

"That's not the point. Rules are rules. They're there for our safety."

She looked me up and down, and her mouth twitched with amusement and scorn. "Are you for real?"

I shrugged. Wasn't my business anyway. "Yeah, and so are they." I pointed up to the circling patrol drones. "They're recording your picture right now. You're going to get a ticket."

She lifted her face to the drones and smiled. All I heard from up above was a faint buzzing, but I imagined the inner workings of the cameras, clicking and whirling and focusing in on her face. She didn't seem to care. She shouted at them: "Fuckers, yeah, that's right I'm talking to you fuckers! This is what I think of you and your tickets!" And she offered up an obscene gesture to the drones, deliberately and slowly — as if making sure everything was on camera.

"Are you crazy? Do you know how much credit just got taken out of your account?"

She laughed in my face. "You can't take something from nothing." And with that she kicked started her scooter and left me standing there in the middle of the path, watching her recede in the distance, the blue scarf wrapped around her neck and her long black hair streaming like a ribbon behind her.

The second time I saw her, one of my eyes was swollen shut. I'd been taken to the campus clinic after the incident. It was two o'clock in the morning on a weekend. The clinic was hopping, and the staff looked harried. I lay back on the gurney with a pounding head and an aching jaw. Someone in the cubicle beside me was moaning softly, or was that me?

I waited for I don't know how long—I might have dozed off—but then someone came in and the lights flashed on bright. Squinting out my one good eye, I saw approaching a female figure in green polka-dotted scrubs. Then there came a voice: "Hello, I'm Raquel. I'm the triage nurse. State your name please."

As soon as she spoke I knew it was her; I recognized that scornful amusement in her tone. Instant embarrassment washed over me. Totally irrational, but I did not want her seeing me like this—my face all bashed up—and that embarrassment glued my mouth shut.

"Sorry, can you speak? Can I get your name please?" She repeated.

I wrenched my mouth open. "Sorry, sorry. Sylvestra Doric. My name is...Vestra." And I squinted up to look at her face. She didn't return my gaze. She was looking at the pad she was holding; her black hair pulled back in a severe pony tail. Would she recognize me? Or at least my name? But that was silly, I never told her my name that day on the path. And she never told me hers, until now. Raquel. Her name was Raquel.

She looked at me with no recognition in her eyes. She moved with smooth confidence, strapping the reader on my wrist to take my pulse and blood pressure, moving her wand to my forehead to take my temperature. Her touch was entirely impersonal, but such a pleasure nonetheless.

She eyed her pad again: "Your pulse rate's a bit fast." Looking up at me, she inquired: "Are you okay?" I noticed how her forehead crinkled with concern—my mind immediately thought 'wow, she cares about me,' before remembering that nurses are paid to care.

"Yeah, yeah," I tried to answer her, but it came out as half sigh and half laugh. "Just been, ah..." I swallowed. "an eventful night."

"What happened?" She moved closer and with a light touch pulled the swollen skin away to examine my eye.

"Some underaged freshman got pissed when a sec drone caught him drinking on campus."

"And he punched you?"

"I was trying to get the booze off him before Campus Sec came." I didn't tell her I'd thought that if I could make a citizen's arrest it would look good on my application to WAVE Sec. Even then I knew I wanted to walk in my mother's footsteps. But I never told anyone that because, well, Sec families were looked upon with suspicion in some quarters. "Actually," I said, revealing some of the truth. "I think he was trying to take out the drone, but his elbow caught me in the face a couple of times."

"Ouch." She smiled at me then, and I tried to smile back but it hurt too much. Her cool fingers moved to the bruising around my jaw. She got me to open my mouth and shone a light inside. Her face was very close; I could smell peppermint on her breath.

Too quickly, her examination was over and she straightened up. "How's the pain—on a scale of one to ten?"

What kind of pain? I wanted to ask her, grasping toward some poetic metaphor about the pain of loneliness and unrequited love, but I was never that witty or clever. Instead I answered: "Oh, five-ish, maybe six."

"We'll get you some meds and an ice pack for your face. You're fifth in line to see the doctor. I expect a scan will be in order. Sit tight."

"Okay, and thank you," I said, then trying to delay her from leaving my cubicle, I blurted out: "Uhm, Raquel, I think we've met—"

But she cut me off: "Did that freshman manage to take down that drone?"

I shook my head, and was about to launch into an explanation of how fast and maneuverable the latest drone tech was, but she had left already.

After that I saw her quite often around campus. It's not like I was consciously looking for her, but she wasn't that hard to find. There were protests every week against the University's corporate funders—the same old shit about the evils of big business—and there she'd be in the thick of the crowd or at the microphone. I didn't attend these protests, but sometimes I wandered in to them. They were mostly peaceful. The drones were out in full capacity, not only Campus Sec, but the city's patrollers and the Roving news feed cameras. I found out her last name was Park-Lee—Raquel Park-Lee. And I knew somehow I'd talk to her again.