Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against

THE DEFENSE OF FREE MIND ^{DESIRINA BOSKOVICH}

I’M AN HOUR into my shift in the greenhouse when the sirens begin to wail. The ear-splitting clang pierces the peaceful green hum of the hydroponic drip. My adrenaline spikes. I’ve been hearing these sirens since I was a baby, and the spike still hits me every time. But it’s different now, because I’m sixteen and finally old enough to defend.

I rip off my gardening gloves and sprint to the locker near the exit, touch my thumb to the lock. My boss is too old for militia duty; she gazes as I reach into the locker and pull out a rifle. “Be careful, dear,” she says.

The guns are always loaded, and always in the lockers, which are always by the exits. We live on Free Mind, and we’re always ready to defend it.

“Back soon,” I shout, my heart pounding with both fear and excitement. I run through the hallway, across the bridge, up the stairs, and onto the nearest defense platform, overlooking the rolling gray sea.

A dozen Defenders are already at the wall, guns notched in the slots, peering down their sights. I grab a spot and find my view. From here I can see the coastline, the City’s silver skyscrapers glimmering hazily against the sky.

I can see the boat closing in. A slim trawler, cutting through the choppy sea. I count five people, standing on the narrow deck, the City’s official insignia splashed across the side. From this distance I can’t see them clearly but City people all look alike, anyway, light gray jumpsuits, shaved heads.

They’re waving at us, shouting. They get closer and I see they’re holding guns. They’re always holding guns. But they don’t want to kill us. They want to conquer us, and take us back to land, turn us into City people, control our minds. They want to make us like them.

“Okay, now!” shouts the platform captain, and I aim my weapon once more, closing one eye as I sight down the barrel. I hold down the trigger until the magazine is spent.

Like all of the kids on Free Mind, I’ve been training to do this since I was ten. All those hours at the indoor range: they prepare you for the noise, the deafening staccato cracks; they acquaint you with the burn in your shoulder, the vibration in your hands, the acrid smell of gunpowder. Those hours teach you how to aim well and shoot straight, ocular implants highlighting the kill spots on your target. But they can never prepare you for what it’s really like: the act in the wild, the bodies dropping, the ship capsizing, the smoke rising from the hull, the mix of blood and oil churning in the water.

It’s over. The ship is sinking and the City’s soldiers are bullet-ridden and drowning, and Free Mind is safe—for now.

Since I turned sixteen I’ve done this three times; today, the fourth. Their assaults are becoming more frequent.

As always, the battle done, I’m wobbling and weak in the knees. The adrenaline departs my body as quickly as it arrived, and I’m suddenly sleepy and deflated. Together with the other Defenders, I’m giggling nervously, giggling with relief. We’re alive. We made it.

Behind my eyes there’s a weird ache, a dull buzzing tension that always seems to accompany these high-adrenaline moments. Only time and space relieve it.

WHEN I GET home my younger brother is sitting at the kitchen table in our small apartment, doing homework on his tablet and eating a bowl of shrimp. I sit across from him and help myself to a couple.

“I heard the sirens,” he says, eyes shining. “Did you go?”

“Yeah. I did.” My brother is fourteen, and my newly minted status as a Defender has greatly raised his estimation of my worth. Suddenly, his older sister is cool to him. I would be lying if I said I didn’t like it.

“What was it like?”

I describe the tension as we stood on the platform, waiting for the trawler to skim closer, and the way the City people waved and shouted, as if they could scare us.

“What were they saying?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t make out the words.”

I don’t tell him that you never feel the same, after the first time. I can always close my eyes and see, for a moment, the scrum in the waves, the bloody bodies fall.

“I wish I could go,” he says. “I hate sitting in class and listening to the sirens. Wondering.”

“Log your range hours,” I say. “You’ll be sixteen before you know it.”

“Why do they keep coming, do you think?” he asks. “What’s the point?”

“I guess they have to,” I say slowly. “That’s just what the City demands. It’s not enough that they control the way everyone lives and looks and thinks over there. They can’t stand that we’re free over here; they won’t be content until they own us too. So they’ll keep sending people, forever.”

“But we’ll always fight them off,” he says, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself.

“Of course we will,” I say.

He seems satisfied with my explanation, but I’m not quite satisfied myself. Why would they sacrifice their own lives of comfort simply for the goal of absolute control?

THE NEXT FEW weeks are peaceful. Life in Free Mind relaxes into its steady rhythm: afternoon shifts at the greenhouse, evenings with my friends at the rec hall. My brother studies for his exams; he wants to be an engineer. My mother works long hours at the hospital, helping birth a fresh crop of babies. My father directs the Seastead’s southern expansion, building a new sector to accommodate our growing community.

One late morning I’m sitting at Hank’s with my friends, working on a massive stack of pancakes. Hank’s is located in a surface-level sector. It’s a little bit of a trek from where I live, but it’s totally worth it for the best pancakes in Free Mind.

Then the sirens start to wail.

My friend Paul hasn’t passed his Defender’s test yet so he grins sheepishly as the rest of us jump up from the table. My augmented reality kicks in; I see the gun locker in the corner, flashing yellow. I dash in that general direction, tripping over a few chairs along the way. Every Defender in Hank’s is grabbing a weapon. I follow the yellow flashing route to the nearest defense platform and get swept up with the rest.

I reach the platform—and everything is chaos.

It takes me a moment to process what I’m seeing:

The platform is covered with smoking rubble, chunks of concrete and burnt plastic, dust and sparks. The wall at the edge of the platform has been partially destroyed, and in that jagged space the City soldiers are coming through. There are bullets flying in all directions. Blood is running along the platform.

Something comes whistling up from beyond the wall. It explodes in a screaming bang and another part of the wall crumbles. A Free Minder falls. A City soldier is missing a leg. The pain behind my eyes is searing.

I’m frozen in shock and can’t even move. It’s never been like this before. I don’t know what to do. I look to my friend Isabel for reassurance, but I can’t see her anywhere.

Next thing I know someone knocks my gun right out of my hands — I’d forgotten I was holding it — and grabs me by the shoulders. It’s a City soldier. I can’t see him clearly; my vision is blurry with dust and sweat and tears. But I know it’s a soldier. He drags me across the platform. I’m kicking and screaming. “Help! Help me! Someone!” I’m trying to fight him off but I’m just a sixteen-year-old girl and he’s so much bigger than me. Another one grabs me too and then I’m immobilized, caught between them, writhing as my feet don’t touch the ground. Around me Free Minders are fighting for their lives and most of all, fighting to make sure the City soldiers don’t get beyond the platform. If they make it inside, it’s all over for us.

Then I’m being pushed through the hole in the wall and tossed onto the deck of the boat. The men who grabbed me come tumbling after. They land on top of me, pushing me flat on my face. Rough hands grab my wrists and tie them behind my back. I can feel the boat rocking and shifting, the idle motor kicking to life. We’re moving.

My captors sit me up. For the first time I see the Seastead from the outside. It’s a gleaming white ziggurat rising from the waters—and now, receding rapidly behind us. Two more City boats are floating just beyond the platform, where the battle continues. One of the boats is on fire. Another is sinking.

I crane my neck and try to see behind me. There is the scrappy wisp of land. There are the skyscrapers, shimmering along the skyline. We’re going to the City.

“I’m going to be sick,” I say, and a moment later I’m puking my half-digested pancakes all over myself.

“She’s just a child,” one of the City soldiers says. The voice is a woman’s. I squint at her, trying to make her out; I can’t see very well. All I can see is her close-cropped hair, almost bald. Her gray jumpsuit. It should be spattered with blood, as I am, but it’s not. It’s spotless, pristine. So is the deck of the boat.

There are six of them. Now one is coming closer to me. “I’m going to clean you up,” he says. “Don’t bite me, okay?”

I nod mutely. He looks like all the others. Exactly like all the others. I’m crying helplessly. I can’t help myself.

I don’t want to go to the City. I want to go home.

With the damp cloth he wipes my face, scrubbing away the stinging slurry of blood and sweat and dust. I can see better now but I still can’t quite see him. It’s like when I try to look at him — my eyes won’t focus. There’s this fuzziness. I can see the Seastead — how small it looks from here. I can see the sky and the clouds and the wheeling, screaming gulls, mad from the bloodshed. But I can’t see him any more clearly than I could before.

The whole time he’s talking. “You’re okay,” he says. “Stop crying. Okay?”

“What are you going to do to me?”

I already know what they’re going to do to me. They’re going to take me to the City. Shave my head so I look like them. Give me a pill to make me calm and turn off the part of my brain that questions. Send me to one of their education centers where they teach me again and again the things they want me to believe until I do believe them, until my mind belongs to them and I can recite their catechism without faltering.

“We just need some things, okay?” the soldier says. “Stuff your people have. You got parents, right? You look like you do. A nice family. They’ll give us what we need, and then we’ll give you back.”

“Need?” I say. “Like what?”

The pain in my head, it’s impossible. I can feel a black cloud gathering in my brain.

He’s looming in my vision, the soldier who was cleaning up my sick.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Renee.”

I try to see him. I feel dizzy, seasick — a Seasteader, seasick? I want to grab onto him, the boat, myself, anything. I’m pitching, tossing. Then for a second I do see him and he doesn’t look like what I thought. I catch a glimpse of long matted hair, brushing his shoulders. A patchy, curly beard, and rough tan skin and a scar across his cheek. I try to hold onto that vision and then it’s gone again.

It’s glitching in and out. I see and then I don’t.

It makes me sicker than ever. All I can do is close my eyes, squeeze them so tight all I see is black, and rock helplessly back and forth.

“Lukas said she’d get like that,” I hear one of the soldiers say. “Leaving the augmented reality field. They get out of range and get sick. He said it happens to the pirates every time.”

When I open my eyes again, everything is changed.

THE CITY PEOPLE are filthy and unkempt, their clothes tattered, a mismatch of styles I can’t place. Their faces are smeared with dirt, and heavily tanned by the equatorial sun. Their hair is not buzzed. They do not look alike.

The boat itself is barely more than a raft with a gas-spewing motor attached. An old boat that’s been patched and repaired so many times with so many mismatched pieces that in time it’s become a wholly different boat, nothing left of the original but a shape and a memory.

Now, as we round the peninsula, the City looms before me. It is a drowned city, the skyscrapers rising ghostlike from the waters, their glass windows all blown out like gaping black eyes, their frames rusting and disintegrating as the lesser structures collapse beneath the weight of rabid vines.

One of my captors laughs at my stunned expression. “Welcome to Miami,” he says.

“I don’t understand.”

I WATCH IN sick silence as they maneuver the boat among the wreckage. The gently lapping water is dark and tainted, viscous with algae and oil slicks. We edge up next to one of the tall buildings. They tie the boat off and then I see there is a narrow metal staircase, laden with salt crust and rust, zigzagging up the side of the building.

“We’re going to untie you now,” one of the women says. “So you can climb without hurting yourself. You’ll be good, right? You know there’s nowhere for you to go.”

I nod silently; she’s right. This world is so much different than I was taught and I don’t understand it at all. My survival depends on my captors.

I climb with them up the rickety stairs, several levels above the hungry water’s reach, and we enter a large space. There’s a blast of noise, laughing, shouting, music, and I think I hear a rooster crowing. As my eyes adjust to the dim I see there’s a crowd gathered. They fall silent when they see me. A baby cries. Everyone stares.

I start coughing at the smoky air; cooking fires smolder by the busted-out windows. A heavy stench hangs close, smelling of dirty fuel, unwashed bodies, stale urine, fried fish.

A man comes forward. He’s wearing suspenders and no shirt, his dark wavy hair tied back with a navy patterned bandana. He eyes me for a moment, then looks to my captors.

“We lost too many,” he says. Then I remember the two boats they abandoned at Free Mind, one on fire, the other capsizing, and all the bodies on the platform.

Why am I here?

LUKAS PULLS ME by the arm back to a corner of the space, where some dank cushions on the ground form a seating area.

“It’s not what you expected, is it?” he asks. His blue eyes are piercing, his dark eyebrows bushy. He has a long scar running up his left arm. I think he’s about thirty but his face is dirty and his dark beard is full of gray so it’s hard to tell.

I don’t say anything, and he continues. “I know. I come from Free Mind. I used to be one of your pirates. Oh, I know that’s not what you call them. You call them traders. We were pirates and looters, though. Setting sail from Free Mind, coming back with the stuff that keeps the Seastead’s whole economy afloat, so to speak. The first time I sailed beyond the field it was a real mindfuck.”

“But… why?” I don’t even know what I’m asking. Why the lie? Why is he here? Why am I here?

The second question is the one he answers. “Most of ‘em are happy to keep the story going because it pays so well. Not me though. Never liked Free Mind much anyway. Ran into some of these Mudlarks on a trip round the Gulf and just figured, what the hell.”

“Okay,” I say. Not sure what else there is to say, actually.

“Anyway, you look like the kind of girl who belongs on Free Mind, nice and safe and clean there, so I guess you’ll want to be heading back pretty soon, and that’s fine, long as your people don’t mind giving us some medicine. That seems like a fair trade, right? They get their girl back, we get some drugs so our babies don’t die.”

“Yes. That seems fair,” I say. My mind is whirling in a million different directions. How many people know the truth — that the City is a ruin? That Free Mind is the best place left? Did my teachers know? Do my parents know?

Then all at once it hits me. I’ve shot these people. I’ve killed them. The way they always waved their arms. Were they saying, “Don’t shoot?” Were they refugees, begging for medicine and food? Everyone around me is coughing and emaciated. The children are wailing. The smell of diarrhea hangs in the air. I killed them. I killed their parents.

The shudder that rips through my entire body leaves me nauseated and trembling. I want to be sick again, but there’s nothing left.

Lukas holds a radio. He’s thumbing through the static, calling out to Free Mind.

He finds our channel. Voices answer, and I want to think I recognize them, but I’m not sure I do. I listen, numb, as he offers his terms. Me. For the meds.

My mom is a doctor, and so I recognize the names of the drugs he wants. Stuff to stop diarrhea, to cure an infection, to lower a fever. Antimalarials. Antibiotics.

There’s a long pause on the other side and then a voice that I’m pretty sure is Free Mind’s Mayor says, “We’ll confer. Expect our answer shortly.” Then there’s a burst of static and silence.

Lukas looks at me. “Damn,” he says. “That’s pretty cold. Maybe they don’t actually want you back.”

“How many people know?”

He gazes at me for a moment. “Well, all the loot teams, of course, and all the merchant class, since their loot teams tell them. Everyone in government, and the tech team that maintains the augmented reality field. And whoever those people tell. No one’s supposed to talk about it, but you know. People, they let stuff slip.”

“My dad is a building contractor and my mom is an OB/GYN.” I say. “Do you think — do they know?”

He shrugs. “Hard to say. But, you know, there’s a reason all the Defenders are young, and it’s not just because of the fast reflexes and all that. It’s because they know you don’t know.”

“Will they even let me back?”

“They let the pirates back in. They let me back in. Until I ditched.”

“But why? Why the whole lie?”

“Every society needs its myths, I guess. Your people, our people, they decided to be free thinkers, and that meant they were free to invent their own facts. They fled the city as it died, took everything they could. Built their own world and a reality to match.”

“My whole life I’ve been taught the City wanted to oppress us.”

“Some people find it oppressive to be asked for help.”

The radio crackles back to life. “Miami,” a disembodied, distorted voice says. “We’ve discussed your offer. Our conclusion is that we don’t negotiate with terrorists and unfortunately, we must refuse.”

I shout into the radio. “What about my parents? Do they know? They won’t let you do this!”

“They know you drowned,” the voice says. “In a moment they’ll identify your body.”

“My body is right here!”

“Not from their perspective.”

For a moment I can’t comprehend what he means. Then I remember—the scans. Every year, each resident of Free Mind gets a full body scan, the booth whirring as our spectral forms find three dimensions on some outside screen, our holographic likenesses stored permanently in the data bank. They said it was for security reasons.

They can tweak reality, and they own the contours of my face.

“That’s not a perspective,” I snap at the radio, my voice rising. “It’s a lie! It’s just a lie!”

“Just some alternative facts,” the voice says, and then the static goes still as the radio cuts off.

My kidnappers collapse with despair across the damp cushions. The other couple dozen people who appear to live in this squat are gathered around us now, wide-eyed. A cry goes up.

Lukas looks at me. I look at Lukas.

“Well,” he says. “Fuck.”

THE CITY PEOPLE aren’t happy. No meds. Ten of their own lost in the battle with Free Mind, shot and drowned for nothing. Now there’s me, another mouth to feed, and they don’t care if I live or die. Some of them want to kill me. They argue about it in the corner. They don’t care that I hear.

It’s not exactly an ideal situation for me, either. I want to go home. I want my family to know I’m alive. I want to return to the world as I thought it was. I do not want to be murdered and fed to the sharks.

In the short term, the Mudlarks decide not to kill me. Lukas is their inside man, the former Free Minder who understands the Seastead and knows its weaknesses. He assures them he’ll think of something to do with me.

I don’t know if he actually has a plan to use me or if he just feels bad about killing me, but either way I am grateful for the reprieve.

They give me a mat to sleep on in a room full of squalling toddlers. All hours of the night they’re waking up and crying with hunger and heat rashes. I try to comfort them back to sleep but nothing I do is good enough and eventually I just lie there crying too, thinking about my parents who think I’m dead.

A few days pass. I make a friend: another young woman on child-minding duty. She has never been on a boat to Free Mind and so she doesn’t understand why she should hate me. She shows me her tips and tricks for soothing small and miserable children. We commiserate. We are comrades in arms in the diaper rash trenches and this work, as grueling as it is, comforts me—because it makes me feel closer to my mother, somehow, knowing she’s doing the same things on Free Mind.

TEN DAYS LATER, Lukas pulls me aside. “I need to talk to you.”

There’s no private place here. We sit in the corner with the moldy cushions, the squat’s informal meeting place. I wait, nervous and fidgeting.

He holds a device in his hands. “We spent a lot of time and effort tracking down all the parts and pieces to build those IEDs,” he says. “We thought if we could just break through that wall… But I fucked up. It’s not the platform we need to breach. It’s their thoughts about us. It’s the filter. I should have been working on this thing instead.”

“What is it?” I look at it curiously, this odd conglomeration of circuits and coils and copper wires.

“It’s an EMP generator. I think—if I made it right—it could temporarily disable the augmented reality field. For a few minutes at least. Like being on a boat and leaving the Seastead’s range. So they would see us.”

“They could see me.” My friends could see me; my parents could see me. They would know that I’m alive and the Mayor lied. I could tell them the truth about the City and the people here. There is no mind control, no intoxicating pill. There’s just starvation and sickness.

“Right. So I need you to come with us. You and I, we’re still Free Minders, right? We need to make that gap in the filter. So they’ll listen.”

“I’m in,” I say. Not that I really have a choice. To stay alive, I must be useful. And I want to go back to Free Mind. I want my family.

We talk. He tells me how the EMP generator works. I tell him what defense platform we need to approach, the one in my sector where the Defenders will know me. He calls in the others—the raiding party. And together we make a plan.

The whole time I’m thinking that whatever happens, I’m getting free of them. As soon as I’m close, as soon as it’s safe, I’m making a break for it. I’m going home.

FOR TWO DAYS they prepare, looting more gasoline for the boat, mending their body armor built from scraps, testing the EMP generator. I’m walking lighter thinking I’m going to get out of here, it’s really going to happen, soon I’ll be free again, and safe. I sing to the babies simply because I’m happy.

But at the same time there are other thoughts running through my brain, a parallel story that doesn’t match up: I want us to be successful. Us. Miami. The City. I want us to win. I laugh with my friend in the nursery and I wait patiently in line as they divvy up the stew at night—it’s not like Free Mind, they don’t use money, they just share—and I keep forgetting I don’t belong. I want us to get that medicine because this little girl I’m rocking has a fever that won’t break and this baby boy has a rash all up and down his back and this other little boy has the runs. I think, my mom is a doctor, she could help us. I catch myself on that “us.” She could help them.

I hold that thought and I also hold the thought that I’ll run from them as soon as I can. Two thoughts at once.

THE BOAT ROCKS precariously in the waves and I see it now for what it really is, a barely seaworthy vessel ravaged by rot and rust.

We’re approaching Free Mind: Lukas, me, three others. The Seastead emerges from the waters, a floating ziggurat, adorned with cantilevered terraces and platforms, the Free Mind flag waving proudly in the breeze. My breath catches. I do want to go home.

My stomach is flip-flopping. Afraid, nervous, hopeful. Let this work.

Lukas and I discussed whether we’d feel anything when he sets off the device. We still have the ocular implants, but they’re no longer connected; they’re dead hardware. We’ve been deleted from Free Mind’s augmented reality field, like so much else. What we see won’t change. But we might get a headache, he says. He isn’t sure.

We get closer. Soon the alarms will be going off in my sector. Someone else is working in the greenhouse where I used to fertilize the plants and thin the seedlings. They will hear the clang of the sirens and feel that adrenaline spike.

While I’m here on the boat with the City people, and now I know there is no adrenaline spike like the one you feel when you’re the one in the snipers’ scopes.

“Now,” I say. “We’re close enough. They’re going to start shooting soon. Now.”

“Not yet,” says Tom, peering through binoculars at the platform. “They’re not at the wall yet. Just a little closer.”

“Now.”

“Now!”

“Now,” says Lukas.

The blast spreads outwards, invisible but powerful. I feel it, a twinge that fades immediately into a dull ache, and I blink. I see the same.

“They’re puking,” Tom says, still looking through the binoculars. “I think it worked.”

But a minute later the guns are still coming through the notches, the sights trained on us. The first shot rings out. The bullet pierces the hull, above the water line, flowering metal.

I jump up and down and wave my arms, screaming so loud my throat immediately goes hoarse. “Stop! Don’t shoot! It’s me, Renee! I’m from Free Mind! It’s me!”

THEY SEE ME. My fellow Defenders—I recognize them, and they recognize me. They’re reeling, dizzy, confused from the shift, but the filter is down. I see it in their eyes. They know me.

“But you’re dead,” Jason says. He won’t let me board the platform. The rest glare at me suspiciously, their weapons still trained on me, on us, on the boat. I know that with the filter down, it will be harder for them to aim, but we’re still at pretty close range. “Who are those people?”

“They’re from the City,” I say. “But it’s not like how we thought. Look at them. There is no City. It’s just a ruin. Flooded out. They need help.”

“Of course there’s a City.”

I keep trying to explain but the words don’t help. My friends are looking straight at me and they don’t believe I’m alive; they’re staring at the dilapidated boat but they still imagine the City insignia that doesn’t exist. The filter is down but they still have their own.

Fuck it; I don’t know how long we have until the filter goes back up. I know I don’t have time for this. I lie because it’s easier for them to understand.

“I didn’t die, the City kidnapped me, but I escaped. We all did. From their mind control camps. We’ve been trying to get to Free Mind. Now can we board?”

“You can,” Jason says, still suspicious. “The rest stay down there until our backup arrives.”

I clamber up the ladder. The minute my feet hit the platform, I’m making a break for it—pushing past the Defenders, knocking their weapons aside, running toward the doors. I sprint down a hallway and then another; I’m heading toward the hospital and my feet know the way. Behind me I hear shouts but I don’t pay attention. I have to reach my mom.

I FIND HER in the maternity ward, as I knew I would. The usually busy hospital is quiet, the machinery down from the EMP blast.

She sees me.

A dozen expressions flit across her face: grief, rage, hope, despair, confusion, longing.

“I didn’t drown,” I say, and I throw myself into her arms. She hugs me back so hard and in that moment, I really do believe that everything is going to be okay. I’m stupid. I hope.

She pushes me back so she can look at me. “But we saw—”

“They lied. They made it look like that—”

“Of course,” she says, shaking her head, and in the corners of her mouth I see a flood of emotion I can’t yet unpack. “The filter. I knew it felt off. When we saw you. But— I was crying so hard—”

“You know about the filter.” The words fall from my mouth flat and dead. “That it’s not just maps and reminders and emergency exits. Did you know about the City, too? That it drowned?”

“It’s for the kids,” she says. “The filter. It’s for you. It makes it easier. Didn’t it?”

“But it’s all a lie!”

“No, it’s not,” she says. She’s flustered and defensive the way she used to get when my brother asked too many questions, but maybe it’s only because her daughter has just risen from the dead. “It’s true, basically. They do want to control our minds. They want to make us feel responsible for them, and make us feel guilty for not giving up what we have, just because our parents had the foresight to leave before things got so bad. They want to force us to feel sorry for them and if we don’t, they attack us. For not thinking what they want us to think.”

That’s when I make a split decision. Like Lukas. I know what Free Mind means now and I can’t go back.

There’s a chug and hum in the background. The systems returning online. The grid springing back to life. The filter going up.

My mom is still watching me. Her face is different. I don’t know what she sees but it isn’t me; I’m still deleted. She knows it’s me but she also trusts the filter. I understand. She is holding two ideas in her head, two parallel thoughts that don’t agree. Perhaps it gets easier with time.

I run from the room, down the hall, through the scrum and flurry of staff preoccupied by the glitch in the field. I shove through a swinging door and into the nurse’s station. There are meds, and I grab them, fistfuls of them, as many as will fit into the front of my shirt.

The sirens are screaming now. I race back to the boat.

THE MUDLARKS SURVIVE on salvage and scrap. The drowned city is dangerous in so many ways; toxic chemicals in the water, oil slicks that burn for days, rotted buildings collapsing onto narrow canals that once were streets. Alligators and sharks are always on the hunt. So I shouldn’t be happy when they let me on the salvage team, but I am. I stole the medicine, I leapt onto the boat. I escaped, I survived; we all did. I’ve caught the thrill. And the salvage team can use someone small and light to creep across the fragile beams.

I still sleep in the nursery most nights. They are kids without families and I feel most at home there.

There’s one little girl that keeps crawling onto my mat with me at night. She was sick, but she’s better now. She yanks on my arm with her strong little fingers until I put it around her. She has nightmares, she says. She misses her mom.

“What happened to her?” I ask one night, whispering in the dark. All she says is “She went away,” and I don’t know if that means she got sick and died, or if she went away on the salvage team, or if she went away to Free Mind to ask for help and never came back, because we shot her. I don’t ask. I’m afraid to know.

So all I say is, “I miss my mom, too.”