Edge of Nowhere

1. Cats

Months of strange incidents at Quint Services Facility 17, and it was the cat that had done it. Emil wished he’d just let the poor thing wail for his dinner, but there’d been no telling when Lange would return to feed him. So he’d walked to the lab in the middle of the night. He’d never regretted a kindness more. Emil had spent twelve years in the Orbit Guard—eight years active duty, four in the reserves—but somehow twelve weeks at QSF17 had landed him in more trouble.

He didn’t sigh. He kept his tone even. “As I said in my report, I was standing in the hallway when the lab door blew off and hit me. It knocked me unconscious. I don’t know what happened in the lab before or after that.”

Emil’s interrogator was some higher-up at Quint Services, but not the billionaire himself. He’d given his name as Kristian Auer. Black suit, short grey hair, judgmental expression. He stared Emil down across the table and said, in a voice that could preserve corpses, “You were found inside the lab, Mr. Singh.”

Because the Nowhere doesn’t follow the laws of physics. Emil knew better than to say that. He waited for a question. If Auer wanted to accuse him of some wrong, he’d have to make that accusation in words.

“If something caused the door to blow off and hit you while you were standing in the hall, then why were you found inside the lab?”

“I don’t know how I ended up there, sir. I was unconscious at the time.”

Auer had laid a pen and an old-fashioned paper pad on the table at the beginning of this meeting, but he hadn’t touched either. The first page was still blank. Emil had known this interview would be useless—he knew so little, and he’d already written a report—but Auer’s hopes had been higher. Or maybe he was using his unnatural stillness to creep Emil out. “Did you know Dr. Lange well, Mr. Singh?”

“No, sir.” Emil’s bruised face still ached. They’d given him stitches to close the cut through his right eyebrow. The black eye needed more time to heal. Contusions purpled his arms and legs. And the rest of Emil was still reeling. They’d transported him to Franklin Station and de-orbited a pod to get him to this interrogation, worried that a trip through the Nowhere would cause him further distress. Re-entry in the pod hadn’t exactly been buckets of fun, but the space elevator would have been far too slow.

Not that Quint Services cared much for Emil’s time. He’d been recovering in a featureless room for four long days, forbidden from looking at screens, supposedly because they were worried he had a concussion. He’d been hit in the head pretty hard. But still, his alleged concussion had been a convenient reason to keep him from communicating anything to his team about what had happened six days ago, or why he’d been whisked back down to Earth for questioning without a word.

Emil still wasn’t sure what he’d witnessed before the door hit him.

“You and Dr. Lange lived in the same isolated facility together for months.”

“It wasn’t really possible to know him, sir. He kept to himself.” The Orbit Guard had had its share of grouchy assholes, but none of them held a candle to the head scientist at Quint Services Facility 17. Emil had never met a more cantankerous recluse than Dr. Solomon Lange. Not even Chávez and Beck could get him to smile, and everybody liked Chávez and Beck. Emil’s team avoided Lange, which meant Emil was the one who always got stuck telling him to go lie down, or eat something, or feed his damn cat.

“And yet you were in the lab with him on the night of the incident,” Auer prompted.

“I was passing by, sir. Sometimes Dr. Lange needed to be reminded to eat and sleep. On that particular night, Dr. Lange’s cat was crying for food. I went to tell him.”

“Are those not the actions of a friend?”

“As I’ve said, sir, we weren’t friends. I was keeping him alive. I knew he was crucial to the mission. And Dr. Lange’s room is right next to mine. His cat’s yowling was keeping me awake.”

The fucking cat was named Niels Bohr. When Emil’s team had first arrived at QSF17 and found that famous physicist Solomon Lange was a cat lover so passionate that he’d refused this post unless his cat was allowed to accompany him, they’d been charmed. Niels Bohr himself was a charming creature, a plump, dapper tuxedo cat who was always ready to give and receive affection—unlike his owner. After learning the cat’s name, Dax had laughed and asked why, if the cat was going to be named after a famous physicist, Dr. Lange hadn’t gone for broke and named him Erwin Schrödinger? Lange had given Dax a stare that promised violence. For one long, fraught moment, Emil had wondered if his first act at QSF17 was going to be breaking up a fistfight. The whole team had breathed a sigh of relief when Lange had simply turned on his heel and walked away.

Emil didn’t share any of that with his interrogator. It wasn’t relevant. He didn’t want to find out if Auer’s disapproving frown could get any deeper.

Auer didn’t drum his fingers on the table or fidget in any way. Emil was beginning to wonder if the man ever blinked. “Do you have any notion of what Dr. Lange was working on at the time of the incident?”

“Only in the most general terms, sir. I know he studied the Nowhere and that he wanted to… open a door, I think, was the metaphor that one of the other scientists used to explain it to me. A way into the Nowhere for people who weren’t born runners.”

“Which other scientist?”

“Dr. Heath, sir. She’s working on the runners, on what biological differences make it possible for them to go into the No—”

“I am aware of Dr. Heath’s work with Dr. Winslow, Mr. Singh,” Auer said, his voice even crisper and more clipped than usual. “Do you believe that Dr. Lange was trying to open this door on the night of the incident?”

“I don’t know, sir. As I said, I was just passing by. I was knocking on the door of the lab when I heard this loud, ripping sound. I thought Dr. Lange was in danger but the door—”

“The details of the incident are in your statement, Mr. Singh. There is no need to repeat them here. Let me rephrase my last question. Based on what you saw in the aftermath of the incident, do you believe that Dr. Lange succeeded in opening a so-called door?”

“There wasn’t… there wasn’t a hole in the lab, if that’s what you’re asking. It didn’t feel like the Nowhere.” Emil repressed a shudder. He would have noticed that. But he couldn’t explain how he’d ended up inside the room after the door had blown off its hinges and thrown him backward into the hallway. He wanted to say I think it was both an explosion and an implosion. Then Auer would ask him why he thought so, and he didn’t have an answer except that he’d ended up inside the lab. Some force had propelled him there, since the lab door had still been half on top of him when he’d woken. If Emil said that, they’d be right back at the beginning. “It just looked like an explosion had happened. Everything broken or flipped over. The walls were still intact.”

“Thank you, Mr. Singh. Now, regarding your statement, I’m still unclear on a few things. Did you see Dr. Lange die?”

“I don’t see how a human being could possibly have survived an explosion like that, sir.”

“But did you see him die?”

“No, sir. It was impossible to see anything. As you can see,” Emil gestured at his black eye and his stitches, “my injuries are consistent with my statement.”

“And after the incident, did you find his body in the wreckage?”

There had been a blinding light, a burst of pain, and then blood rushing into Emil’s right eye. An instant of unconsciousness. Emil had woken up to emergency alarms blaring and Dr. Heath and Dr. Winslow rushing into the lab, both in their pajamas, lifting the door off his body and dragging him out. Emil could remember the sight of the lab in disarray, smashed tables and broken glass on the floor, but he couldn’t remember seeing Dr. Lange’s body. Maybe he’d blocked out the sight. “No, sir.”

“Dismissed, Mr. Singh. You’ll be sedated for transport back to QSF17 tomorrow. For now, you should report to medical for your regular treatment.”

And Dogs

The trick to making money was never asking questions. Clients didn’t pay him to talk. They paid him to transport parcels thousands of miles in an instant. Kit could navigate the Nowhere with ease and he didn’t worry about what exactly he was delivering. That had won him a reputation as the most discreet and reliable runner out there.

Unfortunately, today’s parcel had an attitude. Kit had to break his own rule.

“You didn’t sedate her?” Kit held the squirming dog at arm’s length. For a tiny thing, she had a lot of fluffy white fur. And sharp claws. Kit never feared crossing the Nowhere, but this yappy little dog would put his leather jacket and pristine black-and-silver t-shirt in serious danger. Animals—and most humans—reacted badly to the trip. Kit was one of the rare people who didn’t.

He felt sorry for the dog, but he was more worried about the clothes. The t-shirt was programmed to shift its abstract silver pattern every few minutes and was one of his favorites. He’d bought the jacket in Tokyo. It was designer, for fuck’s sake. He’d saved for months and made a special trip and it was the perfect shade of bright green to clash with the Virulent Violet dye in his artfully tousled hair.

“Arielle has an all-natural diet,” Carl said. The dog’s delicate name sounded funny in his deep, scratchy, tough-guy voice. Carl Akins was a local mob boss whose mistress lived states away in Inland New York, and their long-distance relationship was making Kit richer by the week. The mail and regular delivery services were slow, fraught with corruption, and subject to scrutiny by state police. Like any criminal with two brain cells to rub together, Carl didn’t want to expose his business to that. Since he could afford Kit’s fees, Kit’s talents as a Nowhere runner had become essential to his underworld empire and his personal life. There were no border patrols or customs agents in the Nowhere. Kit just wished Carl’s preferred love trinkets tended more toward diamonds and less toward sending Miss Tallulah an entire menagerie.

At least the parakeet had been in a cage.

“Arielle’s gonna all-natural yarf on my jacket and it’ll cost you extra,” Kit said.

“There won’t even be time for that.” Carl waved his hand dismissively. “You’ll be there in two seconds.”

Kit resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “It doesn’t work like that. Time passes differently in the Nowhere.” In truth, Nashville to Inland New York only required a few minutes traveling through the void, but a few minutes was more than enough for Arielle’s special diet to end up on Kit’s favorite distressed-to-perfection fitted black jeans and limited-edition red sneakers. 

“What’s with you today? You never talk this much. I don’t pay you for physics lessons, kid.”

“Not a kid.” Kit was twenty-one years old and most days, it felt like a lot more. “Seriously, Carl, this poor animal’s gonna have a rough time in there. You sure you don’t want to sedate her?”

“And send my Tallulah a sleeping lump of a dog? And have her message me shrieking about chemicals and toxins and whatever the fuck else? I don’t think so. Do your damn job and bill me when you get back—which should be four seconds from now, if you get going already.”

Like most people, Carl hadn’t ever been in the Nowhere. And if he had, he wouldn’t have wanted to go back.

Kit wasn’t most people. He could feel the Nowhere all around him, no matter where he was, currents of tension in the air, pulling him closer. All he had to do was focus for a moment and he could step right into the void. He’d been able to since he was eleven years old and it came so naturally that he had a hard time believing other people couldn’t. It was right there. You just had to want it.

One second he was standing in Carl’s warehouse arguing, and the next, he and Arielle the dog were soaring through the airless black of the Nowhere. Kit propelled them forward, feeling powerful and free. Arielle yelped and scraped her claws down his face and chest, shredding his t-shirt. Then, as predicted, she vomited.

“Fuck,” he muttered, glancing at the wet mess on his t-shirt. Poor dog. No more live packages—at least, no more live packages that weren’t sedated.

It was the easiest kind of trip, going to a place he’d been before. The Nowhere was directionless, a pulsing expanse of darkness, so runners navigated by feel. Most people worked the same routes over and over again, but Kit didn’t like to limit himself. If the price was right, he’d go anywhere.

The remaining moments of his trip through the Nowhere weren’t as carefree and weightless as he wanted them to be, since he was feeling sorry for the dog and for his clothes. But the trip was short for him and shorter for everyone on the outside, since he arrived in the lobby of Miss Tallulah’s high-rise apartment building only one second after he’d left Carl in Nashville.

The doorman eyed his disheveled state and gave him a dirty look. Yeah, fuck you too, buddy. “Delivery for Miss Tallulah,” Kit said. She had a last name—Miller—but it was too mundane for her career as a famous spiritualist and she’d once squawked at Kit for using it. She was real stuck-up for a goddamn scam artist, but her criminal boyfriend was paying for Kit’s rent and his taste in clothes, so he kept his mouth shut.

The doorman nodded and accepted Arielle as gravely as anyone could accept a motion-sick lapdog. He messaged Miss Tallulah—of course she wasn’t waiting in the lobby for her delivery, no matter how instantaneous—and a minute later, the elevator dinged and she exited in a flutter of floral-printed silk bathrobe and hair curlers. A blindingly pink cocktail sloshed out of the glass in her right hand. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

Kit could have appeared directly in her apartment. Depending on the parcel, sometimes that kind of privacy was necessary. But Miss Tallulah claimed he emanated “negative energies” and would throw a fit if he showed up at her door, so he used the lobby. She was probably right about him, in a way. Kit put off all kinds of negative energies when she was around.

She squealed at the sight of Arielle, took the dog from the doorman, and kissed her head. “Oh, but what’s that smell?” she asked, cradling the dog in one arm and the cocktail in the other. When her gaze landed on Kit, she scrunched up her sharp features in disgust.

He wanted to ask if her cocktail was all-natural. He didn’t. Kit could sometimes get away with rolling his eyes at Carl, but if he so much as blinked wrong in Miss Tallulah’s presence, he’d lose this very lucrative line of commerce. So he said, as neutrally as possible, “Arielle didn’t enjoy the trip.”

“Oh, poor baby,” Miss Tallulah cooed, pressing her nose to the dog’s. “Well, we’ll get her settled, won’t we? Yes we will! Oh, sweet thing, come up here with Mama…”

She went back to the elevator without a thank-you or a goodbye. Kit did roll his eyes then, and the doorman caught him, but the man was too dignified to respond with anything other than offering Kit a tissue to wipe up the dog barf.

“Thanks.” It didn’t help much, but the thought counted for something.

Before the doorman could say goodbye, Kit was back in Nashville, awaiting payment and trying to look as steady as possible. Even two quick trips through the Nowhere left him drained.

Carl frowned at him. “Guess you were right about Arielle.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, holding out a hand, expectant. “You owe me five percent extra for damages.”

“The fuck I do,” said Carl. “Your fee’s high enough as it is, you little freak. Five percent! Jesus. You’ll bleed me dry.”

“Five percent extra or our arrangement is over,” Kit said. Carl didn’t usually insult him like that, but it wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. The law-abiding world feared runners, a class of people who couldn’t be caught or imprisoned, and sometimes the criminal world did, too. The only difference was that Carl needed him.

Carl sighed and handed over a stack of cash, dollars as green as they’d ever been, even if commerce between states had been more difficult since the institution of border patrols. Tight border security was great for Kit’s business but bad for everyone else. Kit counted the money and nodded, satisfied.

“You comin’ in on Monday?”

“Of course,” Kit said. Monday would be a regular re-up for Carl’s stash of out-of-state medicines. An inanimate parcel, no sedation required. “See you then.”

He walked out of the warehouse to his bike. Technically, he could have been home in an instant, but only if he wanted to collapse on the floor as soon as he got there. Three jumps in a day was a lot, and it had been a long week. He needed food and rest. His stomach was already rumbling.

Besides, the bike looked cool. He had his priorities.

He’d always loved to get away, to go fast, to come as close to flying as possible. Lots of kids were fascinated by motorcycles and cars and planes, so at least in that sense he’d been normal. Most kids didn’t channel their need for speed into learning to teleport, but then again, most couldn’t. No one knew exactly why some people could jump into the Nowhere at will. The speculation was that it was a rare genetic mutation. People like Kit were such a tiny fraction of the population that it was hard to study them. Sure, there was an official corps of Nowhere runners working for the federal government—making deliveries to the space stations that needed to get there faster than the elevators could and whatever else they were tasked with—and they all had to give blood samples and shit. But there were only a few dozen of them, and Kit stayed far away from that. He’d rather mix with Carl and Miss Tallulah than some faceless, soulless government agents. As a rule, he didn’t join things. He was just a courier, but he had enough money to do what he wanted and he was nobody’s lab rat. Kit was free.

He took the ramp up to the freeway and accelerated until it almost felt like he was flying through space again.

* * *

Kit parked his bike in the alley behind Zin’s bar and walked in through the kitchen. A pot simmered on the stove. Lime and Thai basil wafted through the air. He was starving.

“Is that you, baby?”

“Yeah, be right there,” he called, then forced himself to hurry up two flights of stairs so he could dump his disgusting jacket and t-shirt into the hamper and change into something clean. He stuffed the cash into the hole in the wall where he kept the rest of his earnings, then shifted a pile of clothes until it was hidden from view. He pulled out another black t-shirt, this one with diagonal slashes across the chest. Slashes of color, that is—intentional ones, not terrified-animal-claw ones. The t-shirt was made of smart fabric, and the slashes subtly changed color in response to heat. Right now they were neon green.

When he came back down, his legs were already beginning to shake with exhaustion. He paused at the bottom of the stairs to catch his breath, but he ran his hands through his hair to make it look like he was messing it up just right. Zin was sitting in one of the booths in the back corner of the long narrow bar, smiling at him. “So vain.”

“I learned from the best,” he told her. She beamed. The green in his t-shirt clashed magnificently with the brilliant walls of the bar, one of which was yellow and the other a different shade of green. Zin loved color as much as he did.

He went into the kitchen and collected a bowl of pho from the giant pot on the stove. At least once a week, on a day she knew he was coming back from a run, Zin ordered it special from a restaurant down the block. They probably thought she was hosting a party. Kit scooped some sprouts and cilantro into his bowl and went to join her in the bar.

Too hungry for conversation, he sat down and shoveled the entire bowl—noodles, brisket, herbs, bean sprouts, and broth—into his mouth.

“The way you eat, boy, I swear,” Zin said. “It doesn’t make any sense. You oughtta be my size at least.”

Zinnia Jackson was gloriously fat. Her gorgeous, unusual combination of brown skin, freckles, and red curls—not to mention her ample breasts and hips—had won her brief pop stardom in her youth, but money hadn’t followed fame. Now she ran this bar in the undercity with her wife Louann and made it her hobby to keep Kit alive. They’d known each other since Kit was eleven years old. He’d lived here as an adolescent, then moved out after he started earning enough to pay for his own place, then moved back into the third floor apartment last year when Zin and Louann had needed a tenant to stay afloat.

“Running makes me hungry,” he said between mouthfuls of pho. “You know that.”

“You can know a thing and still not understand it,” Zin said. “And Laila’s fat and she’s a runner.”

Kit made a noise with his mouth full. That was true, and he couldn’t explain it, but Laila had run out on him and he wasn’t going to talk about her.

“You gonna tell me what happened to your face?”

“Dog,” Kit said. Eating was more important than words.

“Not sedated, I take it,” Zin said. “You do get into some trouble.”

He shrugged and kept eating. Louann came down the stairs carrying a toolbox. She nodded at Kit, which was about as talkative as she ever got, and then disappeared into the basement, no doubt to fix something structurally essential to the crumbling building.

“Hello to you too, sweetie,” Zin called. She was grinning.

Louann had an effortless, stoic butchness to her. She kept her greying brown hair buzzed and she always had an oil-stained bandana somewhere on her. She’d never worn anything designer in her life and she thought Kit and Zin were endearingly silly for caring about clothes, and yet somehow she was still the coolest person Kit had ever met. Louann was quietly competent at everything, whether it was plugging leaks or propping up doorways or repairing Kit’s bike or coming by his apartment with groceries and medicine when he was sick. Louann did all that without ever being asked, and Kit was grateful. Zin would have come for him, but she’d have been melodramatic about it.

“I worry about you,” Zin said, which was exactly the kind of thing Louann never said, thank fuck.

“Well, stop.”

“You don’t tell me what to do, Christopher,” Zin said. As far as either of them knew, his real name was Kit, but Zin had taken to calling him Christopher as a private joke whenever she scolded him. “I will worry about whatever I damn well please, and if it happens to be about how you work these wild, quasi-criminal jobs all the time, wearing yourself down to the bone crossing some unknown void full of fuck-knows-what, and you don’t ever see another soul—”

“It’s not full,” Kit said. “It’s a void.”

“You hush when I’m scolding you. I don’t care what’s in there. It’s not good for you to run all the time like you do. Every time you come home starving—and mauled by animals!”

“It’s a scratch, Zin. From a lap dog.”

“Don’t back-sass me when you’re supposed to be listening. You need something in your life that’s not work. Go out and make friends! That young runner Aidan hasn’t been here this week, and he comes by all the time—did you hurt his feelings?”

“I can only hope.” Kit hadn’t done anything. He didn’t know why Aidan had stopped showing up, but he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. However it had happened, he was grateful that Aidan Blackwood had finally gotten the message that Kit didn’t care about his stupid crusade. Kit would rather take a trip through the Nowhere with an un-sedated alligator than have a conversation about comradeship. He’d never joined anything in his life and he wasn’t about to join a runners’ union.

Zin made a disapproving noise, then continued. “I haven’t seen Laila, either, and she’s just about your only friend. Or I guess there’s that other one, the tall, handsome one you work with sometimes, but I haven’t seen him either. But anyway, there’s the sweetest little waitress at the pho place and she always asks after you. And a young woman who does those fancy light-up manicures down the street. They’re magged out, so I hear—”

“No one has ever said that,” Kit interrupted, ready to tell her that no one even said mag anymore unless they were being ironic, but she waved him off and kept going.

“Well, they seem like exactly the sort of thing you like, and besides, my point is you could go get yourself one and get to know her.”

Instead of responding, Kit got up and went into the kitchen for a second bowl. He didn’t want to meet anyone new. Laila had flaked on a job this week, as well as their standing post-run appointment at Winfield’s barbecue joint—Kit knew because he’d waited in a booth by himself for an hour—thus proving once again that friends were a waste of time. She hadn’t answered any of his messages or the door of her Detroit apartment when he’d knocked. He’d jumped into her living room, too, but she’d been out and none of her roommates would tell him anything. Kit wasn’t going back for more humiliation. He and Laila were done.

And if Zin happened to be right that “tall, handsome” Travis Alvey wasn’t around, Kit wouldn’t be the one to tell her. She wouldn’t approve of his arrangement with Travis, one where they appeared directly in each other’s bedrooms if either of them had an itch to scratch.

“Oh, you are so difficult,” Zin said. “For the record, I’m not bothering you to get a girlfriend. Just a regular friend. And how am I supposed to know what you like when you never talk to anyone or go anywhere unless you’re getting paid?”

Money was reliable. Things were reliable. People let you down and got you hurt.

Kit came back and ate his second helping while Zin talked.

“Anyway, if you don’t want women, you know that won’t bother me. Why don’t you get on Elevate and message that nice boy who delivers the booze, Kit? What’s his name? Antonio or something. He always smiles at you.”

He stopped slurping down broth for a second so he could say something. “No girl or boy, no matter how nice, will make me any money.”

“Money’s not everything, Kit.”

He looked at her, mouth pulled to one side, and raised his eyebrows.

“Sure, it makes life a lot easier,” Zin said, gesturing at the cracks in the plaster, the taped-up windows, and the rips in all the upholstery. “But it won’t make you happy.”

Kit shrugged. “Who says I’m not happy?”

It was Zin’s turn to raise her eyebrows at him. He didn’t want to deal with that, but he did want more food, so he went in for a third bowl. As he was dipping his chopsticks in, Zin said, “If you’re running yourself ragged to pay rent on that room, I just want you to know that you don’t have to.”

“Zin.” The question of rent always made them argue. Zin and Louann had convinced him to move back in by saying they needed a little help. An understatement. They were deep in debt, and so was he. Kit owed them for years of his life. The least he could do was pay rent. “I’m not strapped for cash, you know that, right? I work because I want to.”

And the money made him feel safe.

She tried and failed to hide her frown. “Okay, baby. Like I said, I just want you to know.”

He shook his head. “I’m fine, Zin. I have you and Louann and enough work to buy whatever I want. I don’t need friends.” Once, he’d had a few, but they’d all up and vanished. Aidan only came around to bother Kit about his stupid union and Travis only showed up when he wanted sex, and now neither of them was around. He’d thought things were different with Laila, but he’d been wrong. He shouldn’t be surprised. That was what people did. Everyone except Zin and Louann, anyway. He didn’t need to meet anybody new—he already knew how it would go.

* * *

Kit went upstairs to check his messages in private. His third-floor apartment was a studio with a kitchenette along one wall and a mattress taking up most of the rest of the space. He almost never used the kitchen to cook, since Zin and Louann were only one flight of stairs away and they were much better at it than him and always willing to feed him if he washed dishes afterward. But he couldn’t live without food nearby, so all his cabinets were overflowing with snacks. Louann would never have said so, but Kit knew she was horrified by the amount of processed junk in his apartment. She was always quietly heaping vegetables on his plate when he went down for dinner, and she never listened when he explained that he ate vegetables all the time, because he ate everything all the time, because he was a runner and he was always hungry. Zin always laughed and told him he was “like a little animal storing food in its den.” Kit always rolled his eyes at her fox joke, but it was true enough. He’d been hungry a lot in his life. Keeping his cabinets well-stocked made him feel safer. He’d even started keeping the gross candy that Laila and Travis both loved—chocolate-covered wafers called Zings that looked good on the outside but contained some kind of red-dyed, cinnamon-and-cayenne-flavored syrupy goo that made your mouth go numb—but he supposed he could throw them away now.

Food wasn’t the only thing he saved. Every spare corner was stuffed with clothes. There were two free-standing racks forming an L-shape around his mattress and piles of folded and unfolded clothes everywhere. He knocked some aside, flopped onto the bed, and looked up at the ceiling.

He flicked his wrist and a display appeared above him in large print. He checked Elevate first, not for social purposes like Zin wanted, but for business proposals. Elevate was too public and easily surveilled for real business, but Kit liked to keep track of who was messaging him there. Incompetent criminals and, judging from the misused slang in one message—almost as cringeworthy as Zin saying magged out—at least one undercover cop. Kit deleted those unanswered. The cops couldn’t hold him without resorting to sedation or starvation, both of which were currently illegal, but still in practice. This cop was probably after Akins and associates, and if Kit led him to them, he’d never work again.

More reliable proposals came in through an encrypted messaging service he used. There were twenty-two messages in his inbox, and the display scrolled with the motion of his eyes. He sorted through them and began to dictate his responses. Ten of them he rejected outright. Kit was running a business and he didn’t have time to be fucked with. Those people would come back with a real offer if they were serious. There were six offers he immediately said yes to—clients he knew, small parcels, short distances, easy money—and arranged his schedule accordingly. There were a few more that required some thought.

And one very strange request.

It was from a new client, which was always tricky. Kit preferred to meet people before he agreed to work for them. It was a common-sense precaution, since his work often led him to skirt the law. Or break it, if you were dead-set on getting technical. But this client, some company called Quint Services, wanted him to show up for a job tonight. That was unusual, too, the short notice. And the address was somewhere far out of the city. No details on what he needed to carry, or their final destination.

But the offer was enticing. No—arresting. Jaw-dropping.

It was a buy-yourself-a-personal-spaceship kind of offer. A silk-sheets-and-champagne-for-the-rest-of-your-life kind of offer. Or more realistically, a pay-Zin’s-debts-and-go-the-fuck-on-vacation kind of offer. Although the silk sheets sounded like his kind of indulgence, come to think of it.

Kit normally played it safe and kept to one job per day. Zin might worry about him getting ambitious or greedy, but he wasn’t a complete fool. Preserving his health was an investment. It made working six or seven days a week possible.

That offer, though.

He ran a quick search for Quint Services and almost nothing came up. Some kind of private research firm. It was the latest venture of a billionaire named Oswin Lewis Quint. He was white and cookie-cutter handsome in the promotional photos. Nothing too scary. Come to think of it, he looked vaguely familiar. Kit scanned the search results again. There were a few brief, friendly profiles of him, all talking about how he was going to change the world. No details. These tech companies were just secretive, that’s all.

If he was going to make it on time, he had to leave now. Kit was sitting up and grabbing for his helmet before he’d even finished replying to the message.