Shards and Ashes

I understood my place in the game.

Then Z moved in, right across the hall, in another nameless cubicle of our government-subsidized office. Here at the job I only qualify for because of my grandfather and the role he played in the founding of the FEIC, and the mass production of Xianglian necklaces.

Pioneer of the FEIC Expiration Monitors.

The shackles we all wear around our necks, hide in our boxes.

My grandfather was a doctor.

All he meant to do was save lives. That’s the punch line—or it would have been. If the Xianglian were jokes.

He sat at the head of the federal organ-donor lists. He watched while good hearts went to waste, time and again, when they were given to unfit recipients, simply because of their youth. He began to develop a database, youngest to oldest—until he computed their LC, life calculus. Junkies dropped lower, taking alcoholics and prescription-drug users with them. Convicts, prostitutes, high-risk behaviors dropped again. There were so many factors. So many reasons to be denied key organs, additional days and months and even years of human life.

Time, he realized, was a factor. Just not the determining factor.

The nature of the life, that was the true cost. That was the math that mattered.

The Feds noticed when his patients’ surgical outcomes soared. My grandfather’s agency grew.

I don’t blame him, any of them. I understand why they did it. It’s possible I would have done the same thing. My grandfather was a good man. He was only trying to help.

That’s when he realized the database had other uses, so many other uses. To think that he could imagine a new world, and bring it to life, whether or not it was right or wrong. He was as a god among men.

When people wanted to end world hunger, they didn’t consider how the ends could justify the means. When faced with overpopulation and the erosion of global resources, they didn’t perform the cost-benefit analysis.

The FEIC database did it for them.

And so our grandfather became a god, before I was even born. You know how they say we have to make the world we want for our children, and our children’s children?

I am that child.

I didn’t tell Z that. I didn’t tell him any of this.

I look up to see if he’s there. He’s not. He’s late. Of course he is.

I am never late.

I don’t know why Z works here. He’s never told me how he got the job. Only his name, over lukewarm tea in the break room, since our break isn’t long enough to steep it properly.

Laurence Horatio Hanzicker.

An old name, from an old time.

Z’s what you’d call a Stringer, the kind my mother warned me about. Bare string, nearly the length of it. World traveler. Pilot. Rebel. Thrill seeker.

He makes Hana look like a medical librarian. Like a research botanist.

Like, well, like me.

I have 99 percent of my necklace, fully intact. My life, preserved in a box. In a drawer. In a pouch. In a room so locked up and lonely, it might as well be Fort Knox.

My grandfather’s granddaughter.

I’ve memorized the database. I’ve eliminated my risk calculus, almost entirely. I’m a perfect candidate for anything.

Z is not.

He’s on his last drop. That’s what people say about him.

He’s final.

Zuihou. That’s what he says. Z for short.

I don’t know when it will happen. Any day. Any hour. Any minute could be his last.

If what they say is true, Z’s life is all used up, while I hold mine here in my hands, bagged and boxed up in satin and velvet and drawers.

I don’t know why I’m crying.

For Rama or Z or me.

My family, everyone who has gone before.

Everyone who has dropped or will.

I don’t know which one of us I’m crying for.

My screen lights up and I deaden my mind for another day at work. The interface logs me in. One Nine Six Seven. That’s all I am.

I wipe my eyes and lift them for the scan.

This is my life.

Is it any wonder Rama jumped?

5. Z

She’s there when I finally get to work.

Late as usual. The Shift Super glares at me as I walk by the front desk with my helmet stuck under one arm. She looks at me the way my old aunties did, after I came home from school. Like pit vipers.

Rough.

My hair stands straight up after I ride. I let it dry that way.

Also rough.

I see her there, across the room, in the little place where her cubicle stares at mine.

One Nine Six Seven.

She doesn’t know why I’m always late. That I ride my motorcycle all the way down to Pinminku, waiting in the alley until she locks her little door and leaves her little cat inside.

I follow her, two blocks behind. I’m her guardian angel. That’s what I told her little brother, before I set him up with the drop. I told him I’d do it. That’s how he knew he could do it. Leave all this. Her.

She just doesn’t know.

That, or how badly I wanted the job.

She’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The only beautiful thing in the room. Everything else is made of smoke.

Smoke and steel and ash.

All around us, everyone is dying, and they feel it. It’s no way to live.

She’s not dying.

She may never die.

I watch her. Her head fixed, eyes staring straight ahead. Her mind is wild, though, a thousand mountains and moons away.

Even I know that. Even from here, my desk, all the way across the corridor.

She hasn’t seen me come in. Not yet.

She’s a flower, I think, the moment before it’s cut. She’s a puddle of rain in the street, before a tire has yet to run through it.

Jai.

Even her name is a petal and a puddle to me.

She stands. She hangs her jacket on the hook behind her. Pulls something from her pocket.

Paper.

Strange.

A letter? A paper letter. Her face looks tired, drawn. It isn’t good, whatever it is.

I try to remember. Her family is gone. She has only Rama. He’ll be gone soon, if he’s not already. He’s been