“You’re not supposed to have that in here,” was Mariah’s first reaction.

“You’re no fun,” was her roommate Dylynn’s.

Mariah watched the raccoon between the slats of the laundry basket that Dylynn had upended over the animal. The raccoon looked drunk. It wove on its little feet, snuffling through the mucus pooling at the edges of its nose. It regarded Mariah with the wounded dignity of a freshman seeking out her first bottomless mimosa. Dylynn had placed the sum total of both their and Mariah’s textbooks on top of the basket, and dumped the laundry on the couch. Mariah guessed that the books were meant to keep the basket from moving, if the raccoon got ambitious. She wondered if she could pass Art History without Umberto Eco’s On Beauty. It was awfully heavy, and was currently doing foundational work in more ways than one.

“You should get a cat carrier.”

“I should get paid, is what.”

Mariah shrugged. “Fair.”

She edged around the laundry basket/raccoon habitat, and took a seat on the arm of the couch. Beside her, Dylynn continued making field notes in a journal with a raccoon sticker on it. Mariah leaned over and peered at the notes. “DISTEMPER,” Dylynn had written in red pen, above the words “CHIP?” and “WITHNAIL?”.

“I have a vaccine in the CRISPR drawer,” Dylynn said, without lifting their eyes.

Dylynn was an urban biology major at the University of Toronto. Mariah was studying arts platforming and fundraising at OCADU. Although their majors and institutions were wildly different, the Toronto Student Community Complex’s mandate was to foster interdisciplinary ideas among students who would otherwise spend their best creative cycles stuck in cars and transit, commuting between home and school. The tower’s matchmaking system put Mariah and Dylynn together based on their respective sleep patterns and the answers they’d provided to a forty-item questionnaire. It was a little weird, but it was better than breathing in black mould in a century-plus basement rental, or taking the two-hour bus ride each way to Guelph where Mariah’s parents lived.

“There’s a new variety of canine distemper out there, and it’s really vicious, way closer to the feline strain,” Dylynn was saying. “Even dogs who have been vaccinated are dying from it. Or dying from the dehydration that comes with it. That’s what gets them, in the end.”

“So you…caught a raccoon to experiment on it?”

“Yeah. Well, not really. Sort of. I caught a raccoon to take tissue samples. I’ve maxed out my tissue simulation membership.”

“There are memberships for that?”

“Yeah, it’s a sample-simulation subscription. Say that five times fast. But I’m maxed out since my jellyfish thing last term, which is still running. I can’t afford the premium tier.” Dylynn ran a hand through their hair. “I kind of didn’t know what to do with him? I guess? If I leave him out there, he’s just spreading disease, and if I turn him into Toronto Humane, they’ll euthanize him. My vaccine will take three days to propagate. Then we can test against other samples. I can monitor a real case in real time.”

“This must be illegal,” Mariah said. “Right? And either way, really, profoundly unethical. Like you’re probably destroying your career, if somebody finds out.”

“I have pentobarbital. I can euthanize him just like the City would, if it gets bad.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better!” Mariah threw a pillow at her roommate. “Like I could legit take that as a threat, you telling me that, the moment I raise a perfectly valid concern about bioethics!”

Dylynn threw the pillow back at her. “Mariah. If I wanted to threaten you, you would be puking your guts out. That’s what the Listeria samples are for. You know, the ones in the freezer?”

Mariah considered. On the one hand, this was a terrible idea. On the other hand, her roommate was a mad biologist who had graduated valedictorian from the top-tier STEM high school in Ontario. More importantly, they were a mad scientist who actually did dishes and wiped down countertops and knew the exact temperature at which one had to brown butter in order to make to-die-for chocolate-chip cookies.

Also, there was that one time that Dylynn had literally saved her life.

Mariah extricated herself from her seat, tiptoed past the raccoon, and made for the door. Finally, Dylynn looked up. “Where are you going?”

“To buy a litter box. And possibly some oven mitts.”

“No worries. I’ve got hockey gloves.”

“Just the litter box, then.” She pointed at Dylynn. “And remember. I know where you sleep.”

Someone in the tower had to have pet supplies. There were allowances for therapy animals. It was one of the things the consortium of university landlords had agreed on, based on Doctor Mayor’s influence — and willingness to pull in extra funding sources from the provincial government. No matter which of Toronto’s schools a student came from, they should have access to health and wellness services. This explained the gym, the yoga space, the meditation room, the abrupt switch from blue to orange light at nine p.m., and the presence of animals in most of the dons’ units. The don on their floor had Gordon the Therapy Gecko. Gordon’s student visiting schedule, like the meal plans and emergency alerts and discount offers and invitations to codejams and theatre tickets, was available on the tower app. Mariah herself was more fond of seeing Pixie, the obstreperous sealpoint Siamese on the twelfth floor. Whatever you had to complain about, Pixie could always complain louder.

Her steps took her to the hacklab on the third floor before she could stop them. It was a dumb idea, she knew. And not just dumb, but pathetic. Amateur hour. Low. Beneath her. Still. Jake was the only one she knew with a recently deceased cat and all the accessories that came with one. And this was an emergency. Sort of. For her and Dylynn’s cleaning deposit, if nothing else.

He stood up from his soldering board and looked over his shoulder at her before she could say anything. His face maintained a neutral blankness. Even when she wove her way past all the other projects to his desk, he acted like she wasn’t even there, until she said: “Hi.”

“Are you okay?” he asked, suddenly consumed by soldering together bits of board and sensor. It was the only question he ever asked her, when they ran into each other. Mariah had long since stopped telling him the truth, which made her next words a refreshing change of pace.

“I want to buy Thom’s robotic litter box from you. The fancy one. The one you built.”

Jake set the soldering pencil back into its clip. “No. I’m getting another cat. I already put in for one.”

Jake was American. He’d gotten out just before the borders closed. The shooting that entitled him to extra dispensations from the residential advisory board had happened long before that. Now he was studying Critical Making at Ryerson, but all his friends were OCADU hackers. It was through these hackers that they’d met.

“Good for you,” Mariah said. “I’ll rent it until the approval comes through.”

“You can’t rent — ” Now his frustration was plain in the set of his shoulders. He sighed. “You don’t even have a cat, but you want the litter box?”

“And some food, if you have any left over. And the cat carrier.”

He turned around. “You’re a real fucking piece of work, you know that?”

“That’s what the midwife told my mom.”

His mouth twitched, then firmed. “And you’re not funny, either.”

“I get that a lot. Are you going to help Dylynn, or not?”

He blinked. Mariah reminded herself to keep her focus off his eyelashes. “Dylynn’s getting a cat?”

“No. Dylynn’s developing a vaccine for the new variety of distemper afflicting the trash pandas of the city. And you can help.” Mariah felt a prickling along her neck. She turned,and saw Kerri, the girl who had always moved her projects a little closer to Jake’s desk. Kerri hastily looked down at her sewing rig. “Are you getting all this?” Mariah asked her. “Would you like a slide deck, or are you taking good notes?”

“Jesus Christ,” Jake muttered, and then he was hustling them out of the lab.

Withnail the Raccoon proved to be a more than adequate roommate once his surroundings improved. His first few hours in the unit were mostly sleepless, but lightly lacing his food with CBD mist (the same Mariah spritzed under her tongue before sitting exams) appeared to take the edge off. Dylynn said it might also prevent the seizures associated with distemper and help him avoid the nausea that would otherwise result in diarrhea. Loss of fluids was a primary cause of death in cases of distemper. Late that first night, Dylynn had some saline, a pack of easy-use syringes, bags, and tubing delivered just in case emergency fluids were needed.

“The guy who makes these escaped from Puerto Rico with nothing but a flash key,” Dylynn remarked, squinting at the supplies. “Open-sourced the designs once his company folded. Technically he’s breaking copyright, but there’s no single corporate entity that can prosecute.”

“I’m more concerned about the fact that you can get syringes delivered at three in the morning,” Mariah said.

“People do still have diabetes, you know,” Jake sniped. He was tucked into the other side of the couch, as far away from Mariah as he could physically get while still inhabiting the same piece of furniture. He held a faux-fur pillow across his stomach and occasionally worried it between his fingers. Mariah wished that she’d had a chance to say goodbye to Thom, his cat. She missed Thom, too. But Jake made it clear he didn’t want to hear from her, not even condolences.

“Not for long,” Dylynn said cheerfully, and went back to rigging a camera to record Withnail’s progress. “Science marches on.”

“You’re shitty at hiding evidence,” Jake said.

“I’m a scientist. Hiding evidence is the exact opposite of what we do.” 

Withnail was receiving a lot more personal attention than he might otherwise in an animal shelter. Apparently the policy for healthy raccoons was simply to vaccinate, chip, and release, or, in the case of a diagnosis, to euthanize. But the City had seen an alarming rise in dead raccoons lately, thanks to the flash floods and the year-round tick population. The latest strain of distemper was becoming vaccine-resistant. It was turning into a public-health hazard. Even if Dylynn couldn’t save Withnail’s life, they could make his last few days go more peacefully. It was a mission of mercy, really.

“And that’s what we’ll tell the dean,” Mariah concluded, “if we get caught.”

“But first, we need cover,” Dylynn said. “We can’t leave this room. Or really, we shouldn’t, not without doing a thorough decontamination. Otherwise, we’re putting the other animals in the tower at risk.”

“But won’t we be truant, in that case?” Mariah asked. “If we keep skipping?”

“Yes. The tower knows when we leave and when we come back. If we both stay in for more than a couple of days, it’ll tell our don. Remember the measles outbreak? If we’re both taking sick days, the tower wants to know.”

“Should we ask for help?” Mariah thumbed through the tower app. “I mean, someone in this place must need some extra points on their meal plan, or extra laundry cycles.”

Like the community kitchens, makerspaces, in-house library and theatre, athletic spaces, and rooftop garden, the tower’s currency was an encouragement for residents studying at all of Toronto’s universities to spend more time together. Students could trade points with each other for services, or gather points in groups to purchase access to experiences. The hope was that they would cultivate a co-operative mindset that might extend to the business world — after all, you couldn’t found the next hot startup without trusted friends and a place to work. It was sort of like one of Dylynn’s bacterial cultures: throw a bunch of live elements together and see what grew. Mariah had her doubts about this as a plan, but it was nice to spend all-nighters talking with people in person over pizza, instead of over a project management chat in one window. And even babysitting a vomiting raccoon was better than commuting.

“If we tell people, we’re just asking to get caught,” Jake said. “And Dylynn’s right. It exposes even more possible carriers. The other animals in the building will be at risk, even if they’re already vaccinated. We should be quarantining ourselves, honestly. All of us. Even me.”

Dylynn snorted. “Subtle.”

Jake’s ears flamed. “I’m not the one who had the dipshit idea to rescue a sick fucking raccoon and use it for extra credit without thinking the whole thing through. I’m just trying to think of the other animals in this building. My fucking cat just died, asshole.”

Mariah reached over to squeeze his hand, but thought better of it at the last second. She hadn’t meant it in a creepy way — not really — but it might be construed that way. Best to avoid it. Let him maintain his boundaries. But Dylynn didn’t really understand how much Jake cared about animals. Withnail was probably their first real experience of anything like a pet. They had no idea how deep the bond between Jake and Thom had gone. And now Mariah felt terrible for asking for his help.

“It’s okay if you want to bow out,” she said. “You haven’t touched him, or even gotten close to him. You’re probably still fine. And I really didn’t expect you to help out with the whole raccoon-sitting part of it, anyway. I just knew you’d have the best food and bedding and stuff on short notice. Besides, this is temporary, until the vaccine’s ready. Right, Dylynn?”

Dylynn nodded. “I’m just collecting samples, here. If it doesn’t work, I can give him the shot myself, or I can take him to Toronto Humane.”

“The shot,” Jake said, slowly.

“Yeah. Pentobarbital. The same as they would give him.”

This information seemed to take Jake extra time to process. He stared at Dylynn. “You have pentobarbital.”

“That’s what it says on the vial.” Dylynn paused to take a picture of Withnail. “It’s right there in the fridge. Go look for yourself.”

He licked his lips. His voice came out a little high and strained. “Don’t they use that for lethal injections, Dylynn?”

“Only in Texas. And Missouri. Fentanyl’s more popular, now, in capital punishment states.” 

Jake was nodding slowly to himself. “Do you even know how to give shots?” He was staring at the fridge. Mariah wasn’t sure which of them he was speaking to.

Dylynn reached across the coffee table to an earthenware bowl of oranges. “Yup. Been practising.” They frowned. “Oh. And maybe don’t eat those.”

Jake groaned. He turned to Mariah. “You’re gonna die, here. You get that, right? You’re gonna eat something with barbiturates in it and die like a fucking cultist. Is that what you want?”

Mariah couldn’t help herself. She laughed. She couldn’t pinpoint why exactly it was so funny — something about the way he said it, or maybe it was just the image of herself picking up an orange and slowly peeling it apart and dying segment by segment, wondering why she was so sleepy. Dylynn would find her dead on the couch and heave a great sigh and probably start preparing their own post-mortem before the ambulance even arrived. Mariah would become a footnote citation in Dylynn’s first big paper, or maybe even warrant a requiem in pacem in the acknowledgements section.

“It’s not funny.” Jake’s face was entirely red, now. It stretched from the tips of his ears down his neck and disappeared inside his shirt. “It’s not fucking funny, Mariah. You being dead isn’t funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“No it fucking isn’t — ” His eyes had gone very bright. His lips pulled inward and then firmed into a solid line. He sniffed hard and then made a noise in the back of his throat that meant he was swallowing his anger. “You’re right. I can’t do this. I won’t. Not again.”

He rose from the couch. Threw the pillow down on the cushions with more force than strictly necessary. Grabbed his bag and his jacket and made for the door. “You both want to fuck up your lives and careers, go ahead. But I’m not just sitting and watching it happen. Not this time.”

“Oh, come the fuck on,” Dylynn said. “You want to get all high and mighty about — ”

“She tried to kill herself, last year.” Jake had only one shoe half-on, but he stood firmly rooted to the spot, pointing at Mariah. Mariah flinched. She burrowed more deeply into the couch cushions. She found herself staring at Withnail. The raccoon followed the action with glassy, dazed eyes. She heard Jake’s arm flop down to his side, chastened.

“I know that, dickweed,” Dylynn murmured. “I’m the one who gave her the EpiPen, remember? Good thing there aren’t any bees left to sting me, so I had it lying around.”

“She tried to kill herself, and you decided that having a shit-ton of barbiturates around was somehow a good idea.”

“Hey, it’s better than breaking up with her while she’s still in the hospital, jackass.” Dylynn’s tone was pure malice. They’d clearly been saving that one under their tongue for just the right occasion, and apparently tonight was it.

Mariah made for her room. “Maybe you’d rather talk about this while I’m not here.”

“Mar.” Jake tried to catch her hand. She shook him off. “Mar. Come on. I have every right to be worried.”

“No, you don’t,” Dylynn said. They unfolded out of their chair and stalked across the living room. “You gave up that right when you wussed out. You said you couldn’t handle her drama.” They punctuated their words with finger-quotes. “So why don’t you put your fucking shoes on, and get the fuck out.”

“It wasn’t even a real attempt.”

The others turned toward her. Even Withnail rustled in his cage. Mariah stared at the bathroom door. It was right where Dylynn had found her, on the floor, having already puked up some of what she’d swallowed that night. Between that and the emergency shot, she’d lived to stand right here and have this completely ridiculous conversation, which was supposed to be about saving a raccoon’s life and not her own.

“I just had some drinks. And then I had some pills. I wasn’t thinking. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about…” she trailed off.

This was not entirely true. She’d been thinking about being dead. Not about dying — not about how it would hurt, or who it would hurt. But she’d been thinking about how much nicer it would be to no longer be alive. Being alive was so hard. And useless. And stupid. And there was really no point keeping up the whole charade. Everyone would have a much easier time without her, without her missed classes and blown deadlines and her socks on the bathroom floor and her mouldering food in the fridge and her wasted potential. They would find other roommates, other girlfriends. She was completely replaceable.

In his crate, Withnail let out a pitiful chirrup. They all snapped to attention. Mariah went over and wiggled a Cat Dancer through the mesh. Withnail responded immediately. Mariah wasn’t sure that he was doing better, precisely, but he was still responsive to things like toys, and he was still eating and drinking. And it was certainly better than being run over, or attacked by another animal, or whatever else happened to raccoons in Toronto these days. She’d been watching a lot of raccoon streams lately, and it seemed like tourists had a thing about chasing them with drones. It was sick.

“What happens if he makes it?” she asked.

“Depending on how far advanced the disease is, he’ll have brain damage,” Dylynn said. “Canine distemper is sort of like Alzheimer’s that way. The feline version can kill you faster, and it’s more resistant to treatment, but this one causes something like encephalitis. Brain swelling. Even if a raccoon gets over distemper, that brain damage usually makes survival in the wild really difficult.”

Mariah’s eyes felt hot. She blinked them rapidly and swallowed past the lump in her throat. “So you mean even he gets better, he’ll never really be the same?”

Dylynn cleared their throat. “Yeah,” they said, roughly. “Yeah, that’s the deal. But, if we try, if we keep working on it, then maybe we can, I don’t know, make his life a little better. More liveable. But we can do a whole lot of good for other raccoons.”

“If it works.”

“Yeah. If it works.” 

Mariah wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “We’ll have to give him up, though, still. Right? We can’t keep him.”

“There are rehab centres,” Dylynn said gently.

Mariah snorted. “Like raccoon CAMH?”

“I think it’s more like the Ford Centre,” Dylynn said. “More about the brand than the treatment.”

Mariah shuddered. Her mother had talked about the Ford Centre, after her little miscalculation last year. She had showed her the website and the videos and, naturally, the pricing plans, and after that Mariah shut up about feeling bad. When Jake showed up with flowers and a teddy bear and a serious conversation about their relationship, and how he couldn’t be with someone with needs like hers, it fit the pattern. She had tried to say goodbye to them, forever — or had at least been considering it, on some level — and now they wanted to do the same. To put her away somewhere that she and her feelings would be less of a nuisance.

Of everyone — her family, her boyfriend, her teachers — only Dylynn had reacted with anything remotely resembling composure. Dylynn had treated what happened as an experiment that went wrong, a thought process that had been indulged too long, and pulled Mariah out of it the same way they might pluck a thoughtless pedestrian out of a busy bike lane.

Maybe Dylynn just had a thing about taking on problems that other people didn’t want to deal with, Mariah thought, as she tugged on the Cat Dancer. Withnail continued batting the toy around. Maybe this was why they had taken in Withnail. Maybe that was why the two of them were still roommates.

“Does that camera stream?” she heard herself ask.

“Sure, I think,” Dylynn said.

“Then we should set up a stream and ask for donations,” Mariah said. “I’ll mock up a campaign. That’s what I know how to do. That’s how I can help. And we can crowdfund the money for a tissue simulator. You can try out more combinations and engineer more vaccines.”

“You’ll still get in trouble, if you get caught,” Jake cautioned.

“Dylynn can say it was my idea,” Mariah said. “We were out, and they wanted to take a sample, and I suggested bringing him back with us. Because I’m so delicate, or whatever.”

“Mar,” Jake whispered. “Come on. You’re not like that. You wouldn’t…”

“No, really,” she said brightly, turning to him. “I see the therapy animals here all the time. It’s in the app. There’s evidence.”

Jake hissed like she’d struck him. He stood there awkwardly as Dylynn called up new tutorials for the camera, and Mariah pushed up off the floor. He followed her with shuffling footsteps as she entered her room and started looking for her device. He was standing in the door when she tried to leave. Mariah wondered if he had taken in what a total disaster the room was. It wasn’t like he was sleeping there any longer, and he was the only reason she’d kept it nice. She knew she was supposed to look after her space — the professionals surrounding her were very clear about that, about how it indicated self-love — but like most things, it seemed pointless.

“You’re still sick,” he said, flatly.

Mariah nodded. She thought of Withnail in the cage. “I’m always going to be sick.”

“But…” His face twisted. “You don’t seem… You seem fine.”

Mariah shrugged. “Thanks. I guess. I’m glad it’s working. Faking it, I mean.”

Suddenly, Jake’s face was very red and his eyes were very wet. “Wait, does that mean you’re going to — ” He swallowed. “I mean, are you going to try — ”

“I can’t kill myself while we’re trying to save a raccoon, Jacob,” Mariah snapped. “I couldn’t do that to Dylynn. I owe them.” With that, she tried moving past him. He sidestepped her, blocking her way out. “Oh my God, what is wrong with you?”

“I love you,” he said. “I don’t know in which way, yet, which sounds really stupid — ”

“It is really stupid.”

“But, my point being, I didn’t know you were still…” He struggled visibly to find the right word. “Working on stuff. And I want to help.”

How long had she waited to hear these words? It seemed like years. In her lesser moments she had played out scenarios just like this one in her head, endlessly rehearsing the moment he would finally decide that she was worthy of his help. Of the moment she and her emotions would no longer be inconvenient. She would know, once he said the magic words, that she was truly reborn: that the creature they let out of the hospital was not just the same messy awful excuse for a person and was indisputably deserving of affection. She would feel renewed, burnished to a golden glow, completely at ease with receiving love.

This was not that moment. Instead, she felt empty and exhausted. This wasn’t an apology, it was a confession. It was a thing Jake needed to unload. It wasn’t even about her.

“Fine. Get pizza.”

And he did. He actually took Dylynn’s order and didn’t complain and didn’t screw it up, and scurried out of the apartment to pick up the delivery, and got plates and serviettes and took the first watch over Withnail when Mariah went to sleep. And when she woke up, he was still there, and Dylynn was still working, and Withnail was purring as the leaves continued to turn.

Feet planted, fists wider than hips, the infamous Marigold Winters looms six feet tall at the gate, as though she could singlehandedly defend the compound. Not sure what I expected, maybe a dragon in a tie-dyed caftan, but she looks exactly like what she is: a rich old white lady. Wearing turquoise under long-sleeved billowy fabric, wide-legged pants, a brimmed hat for the relentless sun. Silver shoulder-length hair, topaz on earlobes and fingers, large smoky quartz at her neck. Old but classy. Very smart, and like she knows it.

On my side of the wall it’s just a regular Toronto day. Thirty-one degrees, hitting forty by noon. Buses bump through rush hour with thousands of sputtering cars, overheated faces frowning out the windows. The diesel-free self-drive lane moves faster. I’ve ditched my bike in the ravine — probably already scavenged for parts by now. Frankly, if Marigold doesn’t play ball, I’m screwed. No back-up plan, and my ego can’t take the fail.

“Creeping Jenny, what a name,” she laughs. “Lysimachia nummularia, a.k.a. moneywort. Hardy and invasive.” Eyebrow cocked, she’s sizing me up.

I’m scrubbed clean, braids brushed out, no colours, no studs or metal, scars and branding covered. “My mom’s a Healer,” I say. “Was.” I bite my lip. “She used to study with you. Said to come here if anything ever happened.” I sleeve-swipe my teary eyes. I’m banking on nostalgia and, of course, her immeasurable guilt.

“Aw, Hon,” says Marigold. “What was her name?”

“Janice. Used to go by Ginseng?”

Marigold’s mouth slackens. Boom. “The spitting image, I should’ve known. I’m so sorry.” Jiggly arms crush me to pendulous bosom. The crystal cuts into my forehead, and I can hardly breathe: patchouli and lavender and the stale scent of sweat, like she’d been working hard earlier. “Let’s get you some tea,” she murmurs. “Oat straw and chamomile and,” she holds my face between wizened fingers, looking into my eyes, “borage. Looks like you could use a dash of courage.”

Kindness. It knifes me somewhere in the gut. I sniff, lean on her rounded shoulder. The high-voltage metal gate clangs behind us, and bam, I’ve got myself a first-class ticket to the exclusive Humber River Herbal Collective. Suckers.

Truth: my name is Creeping Jenny, for stealth. Anytime we need a scout, they send me. I climb trees, parkour buildings, crawl ventilation shafts. I’m small, quiet, and camouflaged to the tits. I see and hear everything, share the minimum. Knowledge is fucking currency, Babe. That’s what Bones said back when I first ran with his junkyard gang. I figure he sent a drone, that he’s watching even now from the comfort of his tricked-out lair, probably entwined with Charlene and Ebony, so when Marigold turns, I shoot the grey sky my finger. Eat it, dickshit.

I love him, but it’s complicated.

Marigold tours me around reception, pointing out retrofits for zero-carbon emissions, grey-water laundry, and showering, smart-sensor blinds, and points through thick glass walls to the courtyard’s herb beds and greenhouse. It is paradise, no joke. Butterflies, moths, and bumblebees flit above flowering beds. Birds, too. It’s like watching the nature-doc app, but real-time. Of course I’d already scaled the walls and surveyed for myself, but some things still blow me away, and the doted-upon gardens are one.

Marigold scoops herbs, drops them into a teapot, brings a kettle to boil. Sympathy alone won’t gain me entrance: it’ll go to a vote if they let me work a trial period. At a half-mill deposit per applicant, obviously I’m a charity case. This could go a hundred ways.

Gently, she says, “Tell me about your mom. We lost touch many years ago.”

“She struggled.”

“You said she was a Healer. Was she practicing herbal magic?”

“Therapeutic touch?” I say. “Pretty much since I was born.”

Truth: my mother is totally dead, but she was not a Healer. Janice was a pole dancer downtown and got hit with the virus a few years ago, when it first swooped through the States after L.A. Probably an American tourist or businessman, someone who paid for a private booth, the works, as she used to say. She was laid out, a bad flu, covered in sores, and never got better. Police tape at the apartment escalated to plastic-sealant, and I watched from across the street as zombies lurched in Hazmat suits. I was running wild, hardly went to school. Just as well. Forced inoculation backfired, and half my class dropped dead before Christmas, teacher too. Slept rough. Partied with older guys, bankrollers, never gave it for free. Food, sometimes. I got lucky, or maybe I’m viral-resistant. Anyways, that was a long time ago, before Bones found me, back when I was, like, 12.

“My mom mentioned you a lot.” I don’t say how she cursed Marigold’s name, blaming her for everything gone wrong, saying we were meant to live at Humber River, that she’d swindled my birthright.

“She was very special.” Marigold’s voice trembles. “Things ended poorly between us. I’d always hoped to make amends.” She pours more into my cup. “Did she tell you we were lovers?”

I nearly spit tea onto the hardwood table.

“Guess not,” she says, delighted. “Young people can be so uptight.”

Seriously. Marigold is really old. My mom must have been, like, half her age. “So, uh, when did my mom leave?”

“A few months before you were born.” Marigold blushes. “We argued over you. Well, not you, but the idea of having a baby. I’d always thought it irresponsible, given how population density strains earth resources.”

“Now, not so much.” I wonder if she fist-pumped for the virus after it weeded us out. Did she still enforce member sterilization, given the whole dwindling fertility thing? If my parts work, I want to keep my options open. Definitely a money-maker.

“Well, overpopulation might be one of the reasons the virus evolved and spread so quickly.” Her eyes shift. “How exactly did your mom pass if you don’t mind?”

“Pills.”

Her chin trembles.

I practised this lie most. It has to ring true. If Marigold thinks the virus got her, I’ll never penetrate the inner sanctum. She’s sworn to protect the Collective.

Which is definitely worth protecting: four luxury condo towers connected by tunnel and airshaft, green roofs supplying 40% of the vegetables. Landscaped courtyard with shade and fruit trees, berry bushes, edible flowers, laying hens, and a premium trade agreement with the Organic Greenbelt Farmers’ Coalition. Advanced compost, including toilets. Their own damn water well. I’ve been sending drones, analysing data for months. I know the soil quality, human-resource stats, food stocks, tools, generator situation, and, most importantly, that they have next to nil in munitions. They are wealthy, emergency-prepared, established pacifists.

Totally asking for it.

“Poor Ginseng.” Marigold is lost in thought. When she comes to, she says, “Right. I owe your mother. I’ll support your nomination to stay. You’ll share my quarters as my guest. But we have rules that must be followed, mainly for safety. No exception.”

It was that easy. I didn’t have to blackmail or threaten or raise a hand.

Marigold leaves me with auto-admin, a step above a droid, and after skin-scratch DNA swipes and a battery of blood tests analyzed by its own app, I’m led past reception for deep-clean: dental, cavity inspections, scouring under nail beds, a terrifying hose-down, and retinal scans. I sip another steaming mug of tea while it runs data. Do or die.

Truth: I had quite the record in my pre-Junkyard days, one Digger said he’d clear, like he did for us all. His caramel eyes lit up when he infiltrated the high-security system. Shoplifting, loitering, several counts of public mischief, assault charges, and arson. “Shit, Jenny,” he said, impressed. Children’s Aid notes, sealed court records, psych assessments, and the scumbag shrink’s personal warning after I bit off his ear, all deleted.

I blow on the hot tea to calm myself as the system paws through my past. I was fast and smart, Digger had a soft spot for me: no reason not to trust him. Still, it’s a relief when I get the all-clear. I put on a set of their pristine clothes, total nerdporn: button-down shirt, cargo pants, soft-soled TOMS. Whatever. I’m in. The Junkyard Trojan Horse.

The first week, I keep my head down, wash dishes, play with their ding-dong kids. Kills me how oblivious and sheltered they are. None of them dumpster-dine, fight, or sex to survive, but we all grew up in the same two-kilometre radius. The original GreenLab investors — lawyers, researchers, bankers, profs, neo-hippie dorks — designed this gated community, started building a dozen years ago. All above board with paper-pushing loopholes, a few accusations of white elitism they deflected with a diversity-outreach program. Headlined in Toronto Life, the Star, the Globe. Not under the radar by any means, and their branding is on point, social media being what it is. Who bothers anymore other than com-core and people over forty? Whatever, Humber River has serious pull with City Hall. Private security company, but no weapons cache and zero ex-marines or military in residence.

I’ve been dreaming this payday for years, filling one detail at a time.

When I explained my takeover fantasy to Bones, he smiled lazily and said in that deep voice, “Ripe for the picking, Jenny Girl.” No other gang would risk drawing attention from cops or the army reserve, which patrols nightly ever since the riots. None of them have the balls or the brains.

Nights inside are hard. So quiet, like the seconds between chucking a brick and the alarm sounding. Plus it’s weird being in Marigold’s suite, thinking about her and my mom doing it. Janice had a slew of boyfriends, mostly jerks. When I was really little there’d been Billy, who explained they were non-binary. Billy was kind and fun and I never really thought about their relationship with my mom, but I was sad when it went back to being just the two of us. My mom was a mess.

Marigold finds me pacing the moonlit balcony. Sparks up a fatty and laughs at my bug-eyed surprise. She tokes, passes it, I inhale. Smoke hangs in the fragrant air.

“Woah.” This shit blows government green out of the water.

“White Widow,” she says. “Sativa-Indica cultivar, my magnum opus.”

She talks about Janice, making her sound almost cool. Asks about my life. Stuff I can’t answer — fear of outing myself, never having known how other people live. I tell about Bones, the edited version, that I hope he misses me and wants to get back together. Hope he’ll drop those other girls cold.

“What’s he like?”

The first time I saw Bones my mouth watered. An animal thing, fear and desire, everything lit up at once.

“He’s incredible,” I gush. Like a shovel in my chest, digging out organs and ribs, and long, silver tendons. God, I’m so high! 

Marigold says, “Picture your life moving forward without him. Who might you become?”

Impossible. Without him I’d still be an orphan banging for Big Macs, scamming social workers, hexing the state.

Or dead.

Bones scooped me right out of the gutter: starving, scabby, a belly full of worms. Full-grown and ripped, inked, and gang-branded with gold in his teeth. Bones is like an old-time pirate. Ebony says Daddy issues, but I don’t even have a dad. Whenever I’m cocky or fierce, he leans back and laughs, and that’s my favourite sound, bubbling up from a deep, dark barrel. I was the only one for so long. Then he started up with Charlene, eighteen and womanly. Ebony says guys get tired of the same girl, nothing personal. She says, “Whatever you do, don’t act sad. Guys hate that.”

Sad? I’m livid. Can’t open my mouth without flames licking out, singeing anyone in reach. If he doesn’t want me, I’ll frigging destroy him.

Truth: if this stunt doesn’t win Bones back, nothing will.

A few days later, weeding herb beds, Marigold asks, “Did Janice like your boyfriend?”

“Uh.” I hadn’t thought this through.

“Look,” she says. “When you break the plant at the top, the root stays below, getting stronger, interfering with the others, and we have no way of knowing. You need to slide this down to loosen the roots, then pull up the whole thing. Try.”

I do like she says, and what do you know? It works.

“To be completely candid,” she says, “I’m not sure he sounds like a positive influence. I wouldn’t feel comfortable having him here.”

Tick, tick, boom. Is she on to me? To distract I say, “Do you hate men? Janice was totally pooning out; that’s why we had to leave!”

Marigold throws her head back and howls. “Oh, Hon. It wasn’t like that. She could have sex with whomever she wanted. I’ll admit, I got jealous with the whole male-fecundity issue. It wasn’t very evolved of me. I finally learned you can’t take hold of another person.”

We keep working. I’m definitely trying to take hold of Bones. He’d taken me. And the other girls. Bones calls the shots, and if you act up, you’re screwed. “Not cute,” he says, and starves you out for days. The girls turn on you, too.

Ideas itch just like fleas. Got to scratch, and still they spread. For instance, why should Bones get Humber River when it’s my birthright?

“Anything you want to tell me, Jenny?” Marigold’s dirt-caked fingers hold my wrist. She looks me in the eye, waiting.

Finally, lunchtime: velvet squash soup, homemade bread. At the dining table, tiny diamonds swirl like magic around Marigold: chandelier reflections. Three weeks keeping my nose clean, and every day my body loosens its grip of doom: shoulders, hips, jaw. Getting soft with this good food, this surrogate Mom. Truth: part of me, call it deluded, wants to be voted in legit, call off the takeover. Imagine a future I’m capable of, given a chance. Marigold’s kind of embarrassing but she’s nice. Her biggest mistake was rescuing me.

Meanwhile, tick-tock. Junkyard’s closing in. Waiting for my signal, for a day most adults are off-site, kids at their fancy schools. It’s all up to me. Set the flare. Digger jams security, Bones and Ebony eliminate the guards, I open the gate. Digger resets the coding, all of it. We round up the hippies, send them packing. Who to keep: engineers, janitorial, a contract lawyer, the chef. I sent photos, so no mix-ups.

I’m on the fence about Marigold. She knows so much. Plus I’m starting to really like her. But she’d never follow Bones. She’d root him out by the balls or die trying. She’s older and smarter and better than him. If anyone could take him, it’d be Marigold. But he’s meaner. Can’t stand being outshone, especially by a woman. He’d use that snub-nosed Glock like he’s done so many times before. And guess what? She’d have his undivided attention, just like that.

Leslie snapped on xir surgical mask as Morgan impatiently waited for the van door to slide open. “The button on this van is just too damn slow,” Morgan whined. “The ones on the new vans seem so fast.”

“You could always take Wheel-Trans from now on,” Dana muttered. Morgan scoffed. “Good luck today!” Dana called, turning around in the driver’s seat to face Leslie. “And watch the vegetables!”

Morgan swung her cane out the door and rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to hurt the vegetables, don’t worry.” She hopped out of the van, and Leslie followed behind slowly, carefully stepping over baskets of vegetables between the seats.

Morgan was a small brown woman in her mid-twenties who walked with a small black cane. Leslie was a taller agender person who was much curvier and darker than Morgan.

“Good luck with the farmer’s market!” Leslie shouted pleasantly from behind xir mask as xe closed the door.

Dana lived with Leslie and Morgan in a kind of commune house. None of them could afford to live in the city anymore, and it just ended up being cheaper to split a mortgage in the suburbs outside of the city. Dana and the others had started a garden in the back, and they often used the van to also drop off Leslie and Morgan.

“Are you sure you’re up for today?” Morgan asked. They began to walk towards the elevator into the station as the van pulled out of the passenger pick-up parking.

“I’m just taking precautions today, don’t worry about me,” xe said tapping xir mask. Leslie’s immune system was compromised because of medication xe was on. Leslie nodded at Morgan’s cane. “What about you? Is your leg good for today?” Xir eyebrows raised, and xir tone was cheeky.

Morgan rolled her eyes. Her leg was never really good, but she knew Leslie already knew that. “All right, all right, I get it. You’ll let me know if you’re having a bad day.” She paused. “And I’ll let you know too.”

Morgan was born with weakness in her legs, so she had to be careful with how she much she used them, although she did learn the hard way. After a childhood of pretending she could keep up with the other kids if just tried hard enough, now her joints started to ache when storms began to brew, and she couldn’t stand up without grunting. She had always figured that she would have at least one more decade before it came to that, but that didn’t matter anymore.

Leslie nodded. “Glad we got that covered. Again.” Xe laughed and pressed the elevator button. “Let’s go.”

They were at Pape station so that they could get downtown for a meeting. Unlike Dana and a couple of the other roommates, Leslie and Morgan weren’t much for vegetable gardens. While neither of them hated working in the garden or helping with the business side of things, and they both definitely enjoyed eating from it, the garden just didn’t feel like their calling. Instead, Leslie and Morgan were freelance anti-oppression consultants, and today they were trying to pitch a company-wide anti-oppression training to a major corporation.

The pair made their way to the platform and waited for the subway.

“I hope we’ll be on time. How long is the ride down?” Leslie was staring down at xir phone, quickly glancing up at the platform monitor’s time estimate for the subway. Morgan could tell xe was calculating the minutes and possible delays in xir head. She sighed.

“I think we should go over the pitch on the way down. I don’t want it to sound like what we’re talking about is too radical or something.” Morgan walked over to the bench and lowered herself with a groan. Leslie followed, sitting next to Morgan’s cane.

Leslie was checking xir phone again. Xe was always worried about being late, but Morgan figured at least it kept them on time. It was very important when meeting new clients that they didn’t feel like they were wasting their time. But this meant that Leslie was always irritable and frustrated until they were at their destination with a minimum of a ten-minute time buffer. “But isn’t that the point? Like, isn’t that our brand or whatever?”

Morgan frowned. Her distraction tactic wasn’t really working. “Yeah, but I don’t think treating people with respect and dignity is that radical and I don’t think that’s how it should sound.”

Leslie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. But in that case, is anything in our pitch really that radical, by that definition? Like, it is all about respect and dignity, isn’t it?” Morgan nodded. “Okay, so how long is it gonna take to get down?”

“We’re not going all the way downtown, so it should only be about twenty minutes. And there’s a bit of a short walk, but it’s still pretty close to the station.”

Leslie was checking xir phone again. Morgan was thinking about snatching the phone out of xir hand when she noticed a woman in her middle age staring at them from further down the platform. She shook her head and sighed. “Could we still go over the pitch?”

Leslie was staring down the tunnel now, eyes squinting. “I think the train is coming.” Xe stood up and reached back to help Morgan stand again.

She felt a sense of relief as the train started to grind to a halt in front of them. The person was still standing at the other end of the platform, and she continued to keep looking back at them. Morgan was sure that they were watching them move from the bench to the yellow line on the platform. She took a glance down the platform again, and sure enough, the woman was still standing where she was before, but her eyes were pointed directly at them. There wasn’t really anything special or even especially sinister about her otherwise.

The doors on the train opened and they stepped on. Morgan risked another glance. The woman was closer now that they were on the train. She was standing in their car now, although at the opposite end, but at least she was focused on finding a seat instead of staring at them. Morgan began to scan for an open seat herself. Leslie was back to staring at xir phone, not really paying attention to either the seats or the glaring woman. She pulled xem along towards some free priority seats nearby, although she made the deliberate choice to move away from the glaring woman.

Staring wasn’t unusual to Morgan. She was pretty used to it at this, but she always made a point to be aware of her surroundings. She usually got a lot of stares whenever she went out. Especially when she went out with the other housemates. Their group was eclectic to say the least: most of them used canes, braces, or other equipment, and even without them, they would stick out in a crowd. It used to bother her, but now she kind of figured that as a young cane-user, it was going to happen whether she was upset or not. While stares were common, that didn’t mean that there was nothing to worry about.

She looked back towards the woman. She was now seated close enough to glare in their direction with an uninterrupted view. The entire situation was sending off alerts through Morgan. She tried to stare straight forward, but found herself glancing back at the woman too often. There was usually some attempt to hide the staring.

“Do you think I’m going to have to explain neopronouns when I introduce myself?” Leslie asked. Morgan couldn’t believe that Leslie still hadn’t noticed the woman. She wasn’t sure if there was a point in mentioning it yet.

“Get off!” blared a croaking voice. Morgan realized it was the woman who had been glaring at them. Her shoulders tensed, and she tried to meet eyes with the woman. The train was getting full, and to Morgan’s relief, backpacks and passengers began to block her view.

“Like I’m going to have to introduce myself with my pronouns, right? So should we just use that to jump into the pitch?” Leslie didn’t seem concerned by the shouting. “Or do you think they already know about neopronouns and that would come across patronizing?”

“Get off this train!” The woman stood and began to work towards them. Morgan started to realize she hadn’t been glaring at her, but at Leslie. There wasn’t much about xem that should have drawn attention to xemself, not on that day. Both of them had made sure to dress professionally and keep themselves presentable. They couldn’t afford to appear sloppy today. They were wearing understated button-ups with suit jackets. Even their coloured hair wasn’t out of place; more people on the train had their hair brightly dyed than didn’t.

This had been something that had been bothering Morgan at the back of her mind, something that she had been afraid of since they had been travelling into the city more. Ever since the pandemic after the LA Olympics, everyone had been on edge. Morgan had known many people who were at least living with some kind of chronic condition after contracting an illness, and she knew many people who had lost people, including friends of her own. Any reminders of illness were regarded with a certain kind of dread and fear. And Leslie’s surgical mask was a stark reminder.

“I’m talking to you, sicko!” the woman shouted as she stood in front of Leslie. Xe had finally looked up from xir phone to stare blankly at her. “You think you can go around spreading your sickness around to everyone?” Her face was starting to get red and flushed. She used one of her hands to emphasize her words, jabbing a pointed finger at xem.

Morgan couldn’t move. Her mouth fell open as she searched for the words. While she had dreaded this moment for so long, she had never quite figured out how to respond. She didn’t know how to intervene and come to the rescue.

“It hasn’t even been, what, five years?!” the woman shouted. “Don’t you care about the people that we lost?”

Morgan whipped her head around. Most of the other passengers had turned their eyes away. The passengers sitting across from them were staring at the floor, and the ones further along the car all kept their eyes turned to the other end of the car.

“I lost my father because you sick people can’t just stay home! You have to go around spreading around your diseases to us healthy folk!”

The woman didn’t even seem to care whether Leslie responded. She had got started and was going to let xem know how she felt, every last feeling. Leslie was staring, but Morgan couldn’t get a read on how xe was reacting. Xir eyes seemed blank or even cold. Xir surgical mask made it difficult to tell if they were reacting at all.

Morgan gripped her cane tightly as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. She was still shaky from the encounter, and even though Leslie was still trying to get an answer about xir neopronoun question, she could not focus on anything except the ride.

“I’m sorry.”

Leslie was checking the route on xir phone and didn’t even look up. “What for?”

“For not doing something, for not saying something for you.” Leslie had started walking and Morgan followed behind. “I dunno. That it even happened in the first place I guess.” She couldn’t quite pin what she was feeling, but she knew it didn’t feel good.

“You didn’t need to say something for me, I’m quite capable of it myself.” Leslie looked back at her and slowed xir pace a little.

“I know, I just feel like I should have done something.”

“Now you know what to say. Or just tell her to stop, be quiet, that she’s being rude.” Xe sighed. “It’s not like it’s never happened before. Some folks really do just forget that these things can be useful outside of a hospital.”

“You’d think that after Doctor Mayor got elected that more people would be aware.”

“By blaming the sick person, they can tell themselves that they’d never make that mistake.” Leslie shrugged. “They’ll be fine and live forever. No one likes a reminder that they aren’t invincible.” Xe paused. “No one likes to think about being sick.”

The sounds of the bustling Bloor-Street sidewalk suddenly seemed loud in the silence between them.

“Do you think I should take off the mask before we get to the building?” Leslie sounded soft and impossibly small.

“Why would you do that?”

“I don’t want to ruin our chances with the pitch.”

Morgan smiled. “Wouldn’t that be a great way to pitch them that they need it?”

Leslie burst out laughing. “Definitely. Okay, I think I’m ready for this now.” Xe checked xir phone. “But we are going to be late.”

Morgan shuffled quietly beside Leslie. “And my hips aren’t going to get us there any faster.” She watched Leslie grimace. “But don’t worry. The meeting is actually fifteen minutes later than I told you.”

“What?” Leslie gawked.

“We’re always late.” Morgan shrugged. “So I thought this time we wouldn’t be.” She smiled and gave Leslie an enthusiastic pat on the back. “We’re going to be just fine.” s

The recently upgraded multi-automat installed inside the base of the lighthouse informed Jim that he had no new messages.

“Has my half-way house application been processed?” Jim asked.

“Not yet.”

“Why is it taking so long? When will it be ready?” Jim asked.

“It will take as long as it needs to take and no shorter or longer. Jim, you know there is a specific and important order to follow in the process of repatriating you back to the city. Have patience, please, and let’s take it step by step.”

Jim sighed. “That’s what Beryl says all the time. That I need to have patience and faith.”

“Beryl is wise and you are lucky to have her in your life. Similarly, I feel fortunate for the universe having brought us together here. Sometimes, I wish it would go on forever.”

Jim looked at the automat for a moment. “What? No, not me.”

“Did you hear about the good news?”

“What?” Jim asked.

“An enormous and truly wonderful and unique grass carp was caught the other day.”

“I didn’t hear anything about that. Who caught it?”

The automat said, “A homemade boilie was used. It was caught as the sun broke over the horizon. What a magnificent specimen! No surprise really when one considers there was an exceptional double conjunction of 2060 Chiron and the Mercury in Pisces two days ago and that—”

“Any updates on my quarantine status?”

“Oh, I’m afraid that information is currently unavailable due to maintenance. Would you like something to drink?”

“When’s it going to be available?”

“The drink?”

“No, the status updates.”

“Try again later, please. I also insist you sample our new lineup of fortified drinks and edibles.”

The automat shut down followed by the lights inside the lighthouse. Jim turned. The rain started again. The door had been removed, and the slowly advancing shoreline was framed in the centre of the doorway.

That night, Jim dreamt again of the bearded ghost with one arm. The ghost informed Jim that he had been murdered by soldiers while he slept. The ghost then asked Jim to follow him. They rode a quad-bike to the lighthouse. The lighthouse was nearly double the height of its normal size, and made of long irregular planks of wood. Due to massive flooding, the lighthouse was now in shallow water. It was also on fire. Do not believe the lies of the machine. You must stop them, the ghost yelled at Jim from atop the burning lighthouse. Don’t let them take the tree, Jim. The ghost then threw something down at him. It was his missing arm and it shimmered green, blue, and red in the flickering light of the fire.

That morning, while Jim helped Beryl shave her head and eyebrows, he told her about his dream.

“That again? Now your dream ghost wants you to save Yggdrasil? From what? What for?”

Jim shrugged. “No idea. It was vivid and menacing.”

“Eh, it’s just a silly dream,” Beryl said, looking into her mirror and applying sunscreen. “Although, if it floods again like last time, the lighthouse will be in the water.”

Instead of going directly to work at the filtration plant, Jim headed towards the Tree Protection Zone where Yggdrasil was located. Yggdrasil was the Ur-ash tree mysteriously impervious to the mutated Emerald Borer. It was to be taken back to the mainland and processed; its genetic offspring and clones would be planted throughout the city and possibly further afield. The tree looked no different from any of the others.

Rasmus, still exhibiting puzzling side effects from multiple rounds of the vaccine, was inside the zone slowly circling Yggdrasil. The boy was in an old faded yellow full PPE suit, the kind that had an external wind-up pump on the back.

The tree was located halfway to the Manitou Beach pier next to the only remaining building that was once part of the Gibraltar Point centre. It was now a station to monitor the trees in the vicinity.

Jomar emerged from the building, waved and came over. He had the prefab hut next to Jim and Beryl and was one of a small group assigned to watch and care for all trees inside the zone.

Jim asked him about the process of transplanting Yggdrasil.

“Funny you ask, because a scientist and an engineer from the city were here a day or two ago. I didn’t see them. Very quiet, you know? They came by a small boat early in the morning. The new guy met them. Apparently, they did some tests, looked around, and then left.”

“Why are they sneaking around at night?” Jim asked. “What new guy?”

Jomar shrugged.

Jim went to the communal ovens to pick up some bread. He asked the handful of people there if anyone had heard of a mysterious boat arriving in the middle of the night. No one had but one surmised it was city workers doing maintenance work on the docks and machines.

Jim took off his hat and rubbed his head and looked into one of the communal ovens. There was a wood fire in the rear corner, three loaves of round bread baking, and the head of the bearded ghost in the other corner. They’re all lying, he mouthed. It smelled delicious.

It was sunny the next day, but windy. Beryl introduced Bethwack-Chan. Although his head was cleanly shaved, he still had his eyebrows.

“I’ve never seen you before,” Jim said by way of a greeting.

Beryl shot him a look and Bethwack-Chan laughed. “Funny how people say that to me all the time. I work in the TPZ.”

“He brought us firewood,” Beryl added, smiling.

They went to the ovens. There were balloons, colourful flags and other homemade decorations everywhere. The wood shed, a repurposed TTC bus shelter now adorned with a giant cardboard top hat, was full.

“Took down a couple of sick maples. We have more than enough, so I was told to bring it here.”

“How do you know each other?” Jim asked.

Bethwack-Chan looked at Beryl and laughed. “We just met,” he replied. “Turns out we both have moons in Aries. Anyway, we’re thinking about organizing a disc-golf game as part of the faith renewal — ”

“Have you tried the new automat in the lighthouse?”

Bethwack-Chan shook his head.

Jim muttered something about going to work and left.

Jim took a detour to the lighthouse. Hanging about halfway up was an enormous homemade banner flapping in the wind. The automat was visible through the doorway. It appeared to be on — the display was a glowing white rectangle — but no one was in sight. Jim walked over to the entrance and looked around inside.

“Hello?”

The dispenser at the bottom of the automat slid open. There were two plain single-serving drink boxes there.

Jim picked one up.

“Try it,” the automat said.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Jim. Certainly nothing otherworldly.”

Jim stood there for a moment before taking a drink box and leaving.

Jim had a terrible dream — betrayal, lies, subterfuge — that seemed to last forever. Gasping for air, he finally woke up. Beryl was oblivious, and he quietly went outside. It was breezy and raining gently. The moon was lopsided, shining, and obscured by slow-moving clouds. Jim was staring at the blinking lights of the CN Tower visible above the trees, when Jomar came out and joined him.

“I had a kooky dream,” Jomar said, rubbing his head with both hands.

“Me too.”

In Jomar’s dream the island was completely flooded again, Yggdrasil was on fire and the lighthouse was secretly a rocket ship. The city sent no help. Too late to board the rocket ship, he was left stranded there.

Jim grabbed Jomar by the shoulders. “Something strange is happening beyond our control.”

Jomar gently, quickly, disentangled himself and muttered, “There’s certainly something peculiar going on. There are rumours that Emerald Borers were found here, and they weren’t the first. It’s alarming.”

Jim nodded and then said, “Come with me.”

Jomar shook his head.

“That new machine is the lynchpin to everything. It’s lying to us. It’s drugging our drinks and food.”

Jomar said nothing.

“Our dreams mean something,” Jim said and set off alone.

The lighthouse was dark. Through the doorway there was only the red indicator light of the automat.

“Don’t trust anything it says,” Jim muttered to himself.

The indicator light turned green as Jim approached.

“Congratulations, Jim! You’ve been randomly chosen as the winner of an exclusive and special lottery!”

“What?”

“Jim, you’ve been chosen as the winner of a very special lottery.”

“What have I won?”

“An extraordinary prize.”

Jim leaned in close. “Have you been lying to me? Have all my applications been actually sent? Is this island haunted?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts. Put your faith in science. You’re an Aquarius with an Ascendent moon in Leo, aren’t you? Let’s have a relaxing drink — ”

“Don’t want it. The ghost of the lighthouse keeper visits me in my dreams almost every night.”

“Sounds like you need a medical professional, don’t you think?”

“He’s right. There’s something strange going on here.”

“Would you like to hear more about the special prize you won? I am delighted you won, by the way. Are you happy? Be happy.”

Jim did not answer.

“Step around to the back of the unit and you will be presented with your special prize.”

The automat repeated the instructions and Jim did as he was told.

“Now what?” Jim asked.

“Flip open that hatch about a third of the way down on the left side of the unit. Press both buttons and hold for five seconds and then release them simultaneously.”

Again, Jim did as he was told and there was a heavy thud followed by two clicks. The back of the unit sprang out and collapsed to the ground in front of Jim. The light was dim, but Jim could clearly make out an enormous grass carp inside a clear bag filled with water on the dispenser platter. Even in the dim light, its iridescent scales glistened blue, red, and green. Its round eyes were clear and shiny. It was undoubtedly the most beautiful specimen Jim had ever seen.

“Pick it up, Jim. Be careful, please.”

Jim did so with some difficulty. It was lethargic but alive.

“Her Worship the Mayor will be coming for a visit in approximately thirteen hours. You have been chosen to give our new mayor, a role model and hero to all of us, a token of our appreciation for all the work she has done for the residents of the Island.”

Jim looked at the fish in his hands. The carp appeared to be staring at him, its mouth puckering slowly in and out.

“How is she alive in this thing?”

“The bag is impermeable to water but not to air. Let’s focus on the matter at hand.”

Jim continued staring at the carp. “Is this the special carp you told me about?”

The automat ignored his question and continued detailing the official visit. It would be her first visit since the brief flare-up about four months ago. But Jim was preoccupied by the carp. Its short mouth was puckering in and out more rapidly. It looked like it was trying to speak.

“Jim? This is important. I would normally print out the schedule but due to Her Worship the Mayor’s humble wish to keep….”

Jim turned his head slightly and brought his right ear closer to the carp.

“It’s trying to say something,” Jim said, quietly.

“Jim?”

Jim glanced back at the automat.

“What are you doing, Jim? What are you doing with that fish?”

Jim looked down at the carp.

The automat repeated its question, but Jim watched the round lips curling around the familiar shape of words.

“’They are lying to you. Save me. Save the tree’,” Jim read.

The carp continued moving its lips.

“There’s no such thing as a talking fish, Jim.”

Jim said nothing and continued staring at the fish.

“Let me be clear, Jim. If you’re thinking about doing anything other than what’s outlined in the terms and conditions of this special lottery then I’d strongly suggest you reconsider.”

Jim suddenly recognized it. “It’s you,” Jim muttered to the fish.

The carp’s round clear eye swivelled to look directly at him. Go, it mouthed.

Carrying the carp in his arms, Jim trundled out. All the lights on the lighthouse suddenly came on. Jim looked behind him.

Beryl was there.

Jim glanced over at the automat, which was quiet.

“Jim, what in the world are you doing?” Beryl yelled.

Jim looked down at the fish.

The lights shut off. It took a moment to adjust to the dark again.

The automat stated loudly: “You’re not well, Jim. Come back inside and let’s talk it over.”

Bethwack-Chan appeared out of the darkness and joined Beryl. He was wearing only a pair of loose trousers and had one hand behind his back. They were both saying things to him.

As they approached the automat, Jim yelled, “I know what’s going on now.”

“You are suffering from a wide array of delusions, Jim. Based on your irrational actions, you are certainly suffering from a new strain of the virus that adversely affects your mind,” the automat said. After a pause, it continued, “You will undoubtedly have to be quarantined for a much longer period.”

Holding the heavy and ungainly bagged fish close to his chest, Jim lumbered past the lighthouse. Bethwack pulled Beryl back as Jim went by. He hurried along the path, skirting the prefab huts. In almost total darkness, he tripped again and went face first into an exposed tree root. His nose began to bleed.

Yggdrasil was not there. Only a mounted lamp lighting a wide gaping hole in the earth. There were great deep marks in the ground leading away. Jim followed them to the water’s edge close to the pier. There was a discarded yellow PPE suit on the ground. Jim kicked it over with his foot and saw the external pump on the back.

Not far from shore, Yggdrasil was mounted standing upright on a large raft. A tugboat was ready to take it across the water to the city.

Jim made his way to the water and ripped open the bag.

Carrying the carp under his arm, Jim plodded and swam out to the tugboat, tossed the carp in and climbed aboard. He knocked the two workers out with his carp — pushing them overboard — and then stared at the control panel dumbfounded. Jim undid the ropes to set the raft and the tree free. He retrieved the emergency kit and hopped onto the raft and, using some of the rope, attached the carp to one end of the raft. The carp immediately began to swim, pulling the raft out into the lake.

“That’s not yours,” Bethwack-Chan yelled out from shore.

Beryl appeared with several other island residents, some holding lanterns and flashlights.

“Jim, what are you doing? Think about what you’re doing!” Beryl cried out.

“Wer wagt, gewinnt.”

Jim looked up. Rasmus, in his underwear, was perched on the lower branches.

The carp pulled the raft with the ash tree and Jim along the shoreline. As they approached the lighthouse, Jim retrieved the flare gun from the emergency kit, jumped off the raft and headed for the lighthouse, picking up a large rock along the way. Inside, the indicator light on the automat went from green to red, and Jim smashed the display with the rock and then fired the flare gun into the automat.

Back on the raft, Jim steered it further out into open water heading east. Jim looked back, and the burning lighthouse briefly matched and joined the city skyline, and Toronto became an urgent beacon in the night.

Jim urinated into the lake and then sat down. He closed his eyes.

“Where are we going?” Rasmus asked, a little bit later.

Eyes still closed, Jim answered, “Not sure, but we have to get as far away as we possibly can.”

“Then why are we heading back to the city?”

Jim opened his eyes.

The raft had turned and was heading towards shore. It was skirting past the tip of the Thompson lighthouse and heading towards the Eastern Channel.

Jim crawled over to the carp.

“You’re going the wrong way.”

The carp poked his head out of the water. “The results of your psycho-astrological profile and test came in. I’m afraid you didn’t do so well, Jim.”

“What?”

“What did you think was happening? Think carefully.”

Jim said nothing for a moment. “This was some sort of a test?”

“I’m not the manifestation of the lighthouse keeper’s ghost. Nor am I a mysterious spirit of the natural world rebelling against an increasingly technological one. You, however, are a result of an unfortunate and extraordinarily difficult combination of astrological placements, conjunctions, and ascendents. Reintegration might be too stressful for you, at the moment.”

“But the ghost — ”

“The ghost?”

Jim paused. “Where will — ”

“The authorities are waiting for you, and more importantly, the tree.”

Jim undid the ropes and lifted the carp out of the water.

They were drifting just at the mouth of the channel. Not too far off in the distance, two boats festooned with blinking red and blue lights were approaching them.

Jim ran his hand over the shiny glistening body and found something. He pushed a golden scale upwards and turned the tiny switch that was located against the body. A long panel across the body flipped open, revealing wires, coils, tiny bone-like shafts, and rotors all surrounding a dozen D batteries laid end-to-end in two rows.

“They’re here,” Rasmus stated.

Jim closed the panel and sat down against the base of the tree cradling the carp/automat.

The tugboat came alongside the raft with the police boat on the other side. A searchlight was slowly crawling over the raft.

“When did the test begin? What was I supposed to do?” Jim asked, shielding his eyes.

“I don’t know, but not this,” the carp/automat answered.

“I want to try again. Can I reapply?”

“I don’t know.”

They were being towed away with the police boat following.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Jim asked the carp/automat.

“I don’t know.”

“We could really do with a magical wish-granting lake sturgeon,” Rasmus said, with a sigh.

There were many people, all in yellow Hazmat suits, waiting for them at the pier.

Good Morning

The Provider wakes up to a kiss at the back of her neck. She almost startles, forgetting that she’s with an overnighter and not at home in her sweaty futon.

They fool around for a while. She defines “a while” to last as long as the muffled Metro Morning segment playing in the room beside them. She preps breakfast as he showers. Over waffles and diced strawberries, he complains about his boss making him work weekends. The Provider nods along.

“Asshole’s just riding me about coming in late, just on and on 24/7 non-stop. Not my fault traffic sucks and the TTC’s impossible, blame Doc May,” he says, around a mouthful of Nutella. “See, I would’ve voted for that Daniel Cook guy. But he got landslided. Well, here we are.”

The Provider nods.

Just as she’s showing him out, he surprises her with a tip. On top of his deposit before they met, his full payment at the start of their session and the Pizza Pizza coupons he left on the dresser, it’s a great start to her day.

She cleans the room fast: Lysol wiping all flat surfaces, restocking the condoms in the bedside drawer and replacing the sheets for the next worker.

Good Afternoon

She asks her car for the news. It feeds the Provider a tidbit about Timbits, telling her a batch of nutra-boosted glazed ones will help kids focus in math. An anti-condo rally in East Chinatown reaches its second day. Her ears perk at the last one, an announcement from Doctor Mayor about the expanded Scarborough reach for the city’s mental-health crisis-response service.

It’s a choice the Provider predicts won’t play well with the pro-cop crowd, but she couldn’t disagree more. She likes the health-conscious city leader, a favourite in the industry ever since she defended them against whorephobic fearmongering during the 2028 outbreak. A popular theory was that sex workers were transmitting the virus from athletes’ village to the general population, one that gained enough traction to net international headlines that even she read back home. Then a public-health official, she held a press conference devoted solely to shutting that misconception down.

The Provider’s car informs her that Tropical Joe’s has sold out of goat. Would she like to reroute?

She does, grumbling. No use pulling in for mild beef. She sets a course straight for the Fairmont. Watches the steering wheel turn itself.

Then her ride gets worse.

The Provider gets a text from her roommate. “ LL shut off the water X_X”

She’s glad she’s not the one driving, else she would have slammed the brakes. The Provider breaks out into a cold sweat. Sensing rising cortisol, her mood tracker buzzes a slow steady rhythm on her wrist. She breathes to the beat of her blue bracelet, and her anxiety starts to ease.

There are a million things she wants to reply with, mainly the caps-locked words WE PAID HYDRO TENANT RIGHTS WTF, but her thumb-tapping is interrupted by a follow-up text:

“You’re probably panicking. Keep your voice down settler!!!”

The Provider stifles a laugh at the callback to when they first met. On her second night at Egale Centre, she walked by their room. The door was open, and they were smudging. The Provider, smelling smoke, started screaming at the top of her lungs. They had screamed back with that line. Together, they laughed about it. Later. Much later.

The Provider promises she’ll figure something out as soon as she gets back, urges her roommate to head to a cooling centre for now. The fall heatwaves were dangerous, starting intensely and without warning. No water or central air in their apartment could get bad.

Her car drops her off at the Fairmont, wishing her a good afternoon before driving to its other renters. She doesn’t usually do hotels anymore, working from Brella’s shared incall property most of the time, like this morning, but this regular was worth the trip — he was moving to Montreal and this would probably be their last date.

She beelines the foyer in her six-inch pleasers, having no time, energy, or fucks to give for a switch to something more civilian-friendly. She hurries past a gaping group of pink-faced, mosquito-bitten tourists. She gives a little wave and they turn pinker.

Still, she empathizes. If someone had told her Toronto got so hot and buggy that it was a major public-health concern before she immigrated, she would have laughed right in their faces.

The porter by the elevator says hello. She holds her phone close to the porter’s face-screen. It buffers, loads a *GUEST VERIFIED. WELCOME!* screen. She rides it up. Breathes to the blue on her wrist.

She hurries to her room, flies through her prep, touches her wrist and exhales. When her client arrives, she wastes no time. It’s a good session. He’s a great regular and showers before they start without prompting. A playlist keeps time as they go. Halfway through, he fumbles in his bag and pulls out an Hitachi, asks if she’ll like it. She says no and they continue. It’s no biggie. His Enthusiastic Ongoing Consent (EOC) compliance rating has always been 100%.

By the time the last song plays, he’s already on his way out, a nice tip and a box of Soma truffles on the bedside drawer. She pulls up the Agency on her phone to confirm the session has ended and gives him five stars across all metrics.

Developed as a non-profit app made by sex workers during a Quayside hackathon, the Agency assists every aspect of her independent business. Taking a reasonable cut that goes to advocacy organizations, the Agency oversees her screening, schedule, accommodations, taxes, and ads. If she had been born twenty years younger, she doesn’t think she could handle her current workload every day, on top of all the administrative bullshit.

With a swipe she updates her availability in the app. The Provider decides to pull an all-nighter.

Good Night

The Provider loves Honest Ed’s. She browses the aisle piles, marvelling at stacks overflowing with yellowing pillowcases and smelly denim. Several of the ceiling-leak buckets spill over into filthy puddles. It’s perfect. So authentic. (At least, according to reviews. She wasn’t in the city before the place was torn down.)

She finds what she’s looking for: a shoestring-budget air conditioner with enough juice to save both her and her roommate’s life. She drags it to her cart and heads to checkout, phasing past stairways and mowing down the customers in line.

“Would you like a bag?” the cashier asks. The Provider squints. She prompts to interact one more time. “Would you like a bag?” the cashier repeats.

Not good. “Honest Ed’s Sim” was tagged #DeafHoH100Comp. A primary NPC without subtitles was a major accessibility oversight, one that could cost her a client if she brought them here. The Provider confirms her shipping address with the cashier, requests gift-wrapping, and pays. She files a bug report, then logs out.

The Provider slow-blinks the virtual afterimages away. Yawns, jiggles her sleeping legs. Takes off the Google Lucid Lvl 4 glasses, pinches the Lvl 3 contacts from her eyes. Although the equipment was pricey, Brella offered free access for their members; they need only pay for their own Lucid contact lenses and the tech room’s hourly rate.

If Brella’s grant with 307 goes through, they could invest in more gear. Maybe Lvl 2 pelvic motion sensors…

It had been a long night shift. The Provider went overtime plugged into neural wetworks, hotbuttplugging from sim to sim as her clients requested; so far she’s done kinbaku on the CN Tower’s Edgewalk, GFE + greek at the Ex, and a quickie at the Waverly — her back still itches from the phantom fleas infesting that hellhole’s scratchy floral bedding. Some XVR devs got way too authentic. She had been Princess Zelda, Batman, someone’s D&D character, herself, and then a neon-yellow version of herself for that client of hers who had a thing for Marge Simpson with her hair down. All bootleg mods of course, no official skin would include naughty bits.

When she first started out in online work, she stuck to augmented camming like most did. Stubby dildos IRL became majestic dragon schlongs for her viewers, her bedroom transformed into a queen’s boudoir. Her favourite was JOIs — jerk-off instructions — where she’d dictate absurd masturbation suggestions as her hair changed colour with the story’s mood. Eventually, the money behind XR (or XXXR as media sometimes called their niche) couldn’t be ignored. Local tourism couldn’t either. She bets a big percentage of Toronto’s sims was downloaded for sex, paid or otherwise.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s probably Sam, who texted her for a ride to mosque. When the Provider answers, she’s greeted with a guttural scream and a hug, so it’s definitely Sam. His hair is slicked back. He’s wearing black lipstick, a dark blazer, and fishnets.

“Cute, yes?” Sam asks, twirling on the doorstep. “Daddy asked for Bay-Street banker goth futch. Ooooh, I’ve got some Mystic! Let’s eat before we go.”

They split the muffin as they walk the hallways. Some of the bedroom doors are closed, for business or cleaning, but they stop for Sam’s peek into one of the unoccupied.

“Wow, the little brothel getting real fancy,” Sam says. He hasn’t been to the Brella Centre since checking into CAMH for their refugee in-patient program, doing POT meet-and-greets and camming while he got his work groove back.

The Provider corrects him.

“You say shared incall,” Sam says. “I say brothel. Whatever. To-may-to, to-mah-to, to-brothel. As long as we’re decriminalized, we can call this anything. Escorts Incorporated. How I’ll pay off my crew’s extravagant Iftar soon. The sexiest OSAP repayment assistance plan. Language is a social construct, babe!”

The Provider snorts. Begins to feel synthesized warmth wash over her in waves. Mystic Muffin was one of those nutraceuticals marketed as conversation lubricant. Meant to heighten social intelligence and improve friendships in close proximity, it hits her growling stomach a little too hard. For the next ten minutes, she cares deeply for everyone in the city. She wants to watch a Jays game. She has opinions about bike lanes. Wouldn’t her face look good with a raccoon stickandpoke?

Sam must be hungry too. Drake’s grandchild, Patio Season Graham, is a national treasure… are the Raps playing soon? Do you remember how awesome Ontario Place’s waterslides were, girl, can we log in right now?

As a Gen Z-er and a recent immigrant, she’s a childhood too late and a country too far to understand the nostalgia, but nods anyway. They reach the locker room, where three other workers are starting and ending their shifts. Communal Wet Wipes are passed around.

“I want to get into radical queer domming,” one of them says, applying eczema cream to her arms. “So a potential session could be the client licking my shoes while I shame their birth chart.”

“Oh I’ve done that, it pays ehhh,” another says. He squeezes into a glittery binder. “If you’re due in November, you should milk pregnancy fetishists. Ha. Get it?”

One of them is new to Brella, a woman who introduces herself as Aisha. She looks older, likely the new GILF masseuse everyone had been talking about last week.

The Provider is just about to ask what a birth chart is when the room buzzes. An Agency notification lights up everyone’s phones: toronto bad date list: new addition goes by martin.

The asshole paid in counterfeit, scamming at least two workers in the Annex last week. That won’t happen again. As an Agency affiliate, if he tries to book her, he’ll be auto-rejected by her screening protocol. They all titter, cussing the bad date out.

Aisha gags. “Back in the day, if a guy like this fucked me over I couldn’t warn anybody except friends and duo partners. You kids are lucky this new stuff is around.”

Curious, the Provider asks her colleague what it was like before “all this new stuff.” She knows Canada decriminalized sex work five years ago, but isn’t aware of what the big differences were.

“Honey, this job would be so much worse,” the colleague says. “Before Maggie’s and all the other activist groups won the Charter reform, everything was done in the dark. Now, I’m an indoors lady, but when I was streetwalking do you think I screened? Not really. And incalls like this were illegal.”

“Like, I still can’t believe that,” Sam says, shaking his head and wiping his makeup off.

“So you had to be slick about which hotels you were at or if you worked from home,” Aisha continued. “Picture that, the safe place you picked was against the law. Cherry on top is anyone working with you could get booked. If your friend was lookout, they could get in trouble.”

“My aunt, she worked, well her brother got arrested for driving her around,” one of the workers pipes up. “Served time and everything.”

“Can’t believe that,” Sam repeats.

The Provider turns Aisha’s history lesson around in her head. It’s different, so different she can’t imagine the atmosphere at all. Everyone knows what she does and where she goes to work. At the laundromat down the street, they give her a discount because of how often she’s in there with outfits and lingerie bags. Every shift starts promisingly because her location is safe and her john is vetted by her process and a hiveminded security system.

Brella is the only shared workspace in the city. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to work without learning from everyone who rented space or had a membership at Brella. They all helped each other too. Vanier, an SB and PR intern, wrote her ad copy, hyping her as a playful companion without any of the weird racialized “exotic” language. Mali, a PSO and Ryerson photography student, took her photos, using anti-facial recognition tools to keep her identity a secret. Olenska, one of Brella’s admin, helped the Provider find stable housing when her Egale stay ended.

There are bad moments, sex work was still work. But now it wasn’t bad in ways it didn’t have to be.

Good morning

The Provider drops Sam off — with a pinky promise to be at his nephew’s Freedom School graduation ceremony — then drives the car to its charging station, soaking in the sunrise.

Around her, the city wakes up to cardinal birdsong and bad traffic.

By the time she enters her neighbourhood, her roommate texts her an update: “OMG OK 1) WATER BACK WHOOP AND 2) OMG CHILLY SAVIOUR ARRIVED! ^_^ Delivery person helped me install. Cya soon!”

Perfect.

Then her ride gets better. Her car tells her Tropical Joe’s just opened; would she like to pick up yesterday’s route? The Provider does. She has goat curry for breakfast. It tastes like getting paid and air conditioner and community. And goat.

They can’t quite get the bloodstains off the pavement.

Not for want of trying. Not that they aren’t trying still. It’s been a good twenty minutes — fifteen since the ambulance has been and gone — and the bots and drones are still at it, rotary brushes scrubbing at a blur, nozzles spritzing iridescent chemicals onto the sidewalk. But the cement is just too porous, or the blood is just too stubborn, or Google’s custodial drones just don’t live up to the ad copy.

Out, damned spot. Marius Ghazali stares out through the window, allows himself a small sick smile. His knuckles sting at his sides, raw and oozing.

Everyone’s still out there. If anything there are more of them now, accreting around that first sparse smattering of onlookers who stood by while he vented his rage. The plastic barricades, thrown into place in the wake of his — episode — are keeping them at bay, but the gaps behind are filling. This could be an honest-to-God crowd before long even though there’s nothing to see here, not any more, move along, move along. One of the bystanders spies him through the glass, nudges her friend. Both flash him a thumbs-up.

His calf knots as the last vestiges of the taser charge tug at his motor nerves. He staggers, braces against the glass: floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a glorious invisible intelligent insulative ecofriendly solar-energy-collecting barrier that fits in perfectly with the garbage-collecting robots and the omnipresent cameras and the ubiquitous underground sensors infesting every square meter of this perfect creepy community in the heart of the city. A Bit of Heaven in the Depths of Hell — at least, that was the slogan doing the rounds at Quayside Management until someone with an actual conscience leaked the memo to the Oakville Beaver.

The Google logo towers above it all — atop this very building, in fact, in letters three meters high. Ghazali’s pretty sure it’s directly above him. He can’t see it from in here, but it — sticks in his mind.

It almost seemed to be smiling down at him the whole time.

His fangirls are shouting at him. Their mouths are moving, at least. Window must be soundproof in addition to its other miraculous properties. He turns away, surveys more immediate surroundings. He’s in some kind of conference room. Two doors: the one they dragged him in through (locked), the other leading to a tiny bathroom (ajar); an inactive smartpaint display on the wall between. A standing table dominates centre stage, a flat ovoid stretched along the room’s longitudinal axis at waist height. A Google Gamium sits on its polished surface like a plastic skull.

Not a fucking chair to be seen anywhere.

“Mr. Ghazali.”

The door’s already closing behind her as he turns. White, whippet-thin, maybe 180 centimeters. Startling green eyes under a brunette cap (chloroplast injections, Ghazali guesses). She waves one hand, and the window frosts magically to bright opacity. No more witnesses.

(But of course there are always witnesses, these days.)

“I’m Selma Hancock.” She carries an old-fashioned tablet in the crook of one arm, which seems a bit superfluous in light of the smart specs wrapped around her head, the glittering streams of data reflected in her eyes. “They want me to ask you some questions.”

“You police?”

She shakes her head. “Parameterization specialist. Here at Google.”

“You have a black belt or something?”

“Why do you ask?” Her voice level. Restrained.

“Just seems odd they’d send someone like you in alone with…” Ghazali closes his eyes. Sees blood and teeth and one wide, terrified eye fixed on his descending fist. Opens them.

“…someone like me,” he finishes.

But that wasn’t me. It wasn’t.

Until it was.

“We’re not alone,” she says. “Not really. You should probably keep that in mind.”

Ghazali takes a breath. “I think I should see a lawyer before I talk to anyone.”

“I understand your reluctance, Marius. May I call you Marius?” The corners of her mouth tighten; her eyes remain fixed on the tablet. She taps the earpiece on her specs. “They’re telling me to be informal.”

“I just beat the shit out of one of your employees. I’m not really in a position to take offence over boundary issues.”

She doesn’t smile. “His name’s Travis, in case you’re interested. Good guy. Friend of mine.”

I’m sorry, Ghazali wants to say, but what kind of sense would that make? “Is he okay?”

Hancock keeps her eyes on the tablet. “How could he be? You beat him half to death. Someone you didn’t even know. A complete stranger.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“You ordered Thai two nights ago. Off the back of a Rosa’s truck. Crispy prawns, krill massaman, pork satay. Yeah, we’re sure.”

“Chicken satay,” Ghazali says. “Your spybots fucked up.” A half-hearted half-assed reminder that guilt goes both ways, but he doesn’t even believe it himself at this point.

“We weren’t watching, if that’s what you mean. SocNet algos predicted it from the upstream tertiaries eight hours in advance.” Finally she lifts her eyes. “They were wrong about the satay?”

“What — ”

“Listen. Marius. Big tough boy like you must know the depth of the shit you’re in. What might surprise you is how easily you could get out of it again. We may be able to keep the police out of it entirely.”

He blinks. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t, necessarily. They send me in here, they tell me to make you an offer. There might be extenuating circumstances.”

“They.”

“My bosses. Their algos. If you cooperate.” She grabs the Gamium off the table, holds it out. “No promises.”

He eyes the helmet, keeps his hands pointedly at his sides. “You want me to play games.”

“We want to understand what happened. What was — going through your mind.”

“That thing reads minds?”

“That’s how it works.”

“What it says in the manual,” Ghazali remembers (everyone has a Gamium), “is that it works by pushing pixels around in response to arbitrary brainwave patterns. And you have to train it first.”

“In default mode, sure. But it’s easy enough to rewrite the firmware remotely, and the hardware’s got horsepower to spare. It’s how we keep our upgrades so affordable.” She effects a small, brittle smile. “Sony makes you buy a whole new rig.”

He takes the helmet, turns it over. Its inner surface is lined with spiderwebs. Tiny washers bead the interstices. “So it’s what, now? Lie detector?”

“We could use it that way, if you wanted to deny doing something that’s been documented in realtime hi-def from six different angles. But we’re really less interested in what you say than your emotional responses when you say it.”

This does not make sense. In what kind of alternate fantasy world does an unemployed brother from the Cinder Block get to beat the shit out of a white collar for the price of some half-assed MRI scan?

In Googleville, apparently.

The Gamium prickles slightly as he sets it on his scalp, like a sweater afflicted with static cling.

“So.” Hancock’s tablet brightens in her hand. “You were just — passing through. On your way to meet Ezra Keogh, over at St. Lawrence Market.”

“How— ” Never mind…

“You ran into Travis going the other way, and you attacked him. Why?”

Ghazali tries to summon some echo of the astonishing rage Travis provoked in him. All he finds is a sort of clammy, ball-clenching horror at his own actions. I could spend the next ten years in jail.

But Hancock says there’s a way out, so he takes a breath and plays along. “You steal our personal lives. You sell us to the highest bidder. You — ”

“Let me stop you right there.” She holds up her free hand. “We know the spiel. We’ve been dealing with a surge in anti-Google sentiment ever since Doctor Mayor started whipping up the base with her warmed-over Big Brother hysteria. You were probably too busy to notice, but at least three upstanding citizens of Toronto the Good stood by cheering today while you kicked Travis’ ribs in.”

This is news to Ghazali.

“But you— ” she fixes him with a hard green stare — “You’ve just taken it to a whole new level. So when I ask why you’ve started beating people half to death, I would like to hear something beyond the same old talking points out of City Hall.”

She knows. Of course she knows.

She’s Google. She knows everything.

Ghazali sighs. “I had a friend too, once. Deon Rizk.”

Her eyes flicker across some invisible datascape. “Our cops didn’t kill him.”

“Not your cops. Your apps. Google Fitness showed Dee running 15K four times a week. Google Fitness showed him doing 30 chin-ups at a stretch. Google fucking Fitness showed reflexes and fast-twitch muscle response consistent with a middleweight practitioner of Mixed Martial Arts. Oh, and apparently Google Assistant overheard him expressing anti-police sentiments, which was enough to disable his privacy settings under the ATA. So poor little Officer Neukamp feared for her life. Murdered Dee because he was — how’d she put it — assuming an aggressive posture. Didn’t even bother trotting out ‘thought he had a gun.’”

Hancock doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. If I were in your shoes, I’d be pissed too.”

Ghazali snorts.

“What I wouldn’t have done,” Hancock continues, “is wait three years, then beat some random stranger to a pulp.”

“He works for Google.”

“Which makes him personally responsible for — ”

“He knew what side he was choosing.”

That face. That stupid fucking Travis face. That stupid Google baseball cap. Oh, he chose sides all right. Guy signs up to work for the spooks and the suits and fucking ICE-9, you don’t let him walk because he’s only the janitor.

That rage.

“I see what you did there,” Hancock murmurs, and Ghazali almost responds before he realizes that she isn’t talking to him; she’s talking to her tablet, to the little coruscating false-color silhouette writhing there. Gamium data.

She’s talking to something in his brain.

But now she sets the tablet aside and meets his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but I still don’t buy it. That level of anger, that — fury — our algos are too good to have missed it. You’re not even a Quayside resident, you’re a third-order downstream variable and they still knew what you were going to order off that truck before you even thought about eating out.”

“They fucked up the satay,” Ghazali reminds her.

“And they shouldn’t have. That’s exactly my point. Any more than they should have let a human pressure cooker walk up to one of our people on a public street and hammer him into a coma. If you were going to go berserker you would have done it three years ago, and you didn’t. These things do not come out of nowhere, Marius. They are predictable.” There’s an intensity behind the smartspec eyeshine, an anger, at any reality with the temerity to defy expectation…

Something thumps against the window. Ghazali turns, glimpses a small dark blur plastered for just an instant on the other side of the frosted glass.

“Bird.” Hancock says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Bird?”

“The polarizing mesh messes with their magnetic sense or something. When we blank the windows.”

“Your ecofriendly miracle windows kill birds.”

She shrugs. “We’ve got half a dozen drones on collection duty. Send the bodies to FLAP for barcoding. Nothing gets wasted. If we could get back to— ”

Over on the conference table, the abandoned tablet flickers. Something in Marius Ghazali just snaps.

Maybe it’s the condescension she’s been radiating from the moment she stepped into the fucking room. Maybe it’s her entitlement, the casual power she waves in his face like a red flag: oh aren’t I the generous one, not calling the police just so long as you jump through my hoops like a good little lab rat. Maybe it’s this smug white cunt’s obvious default assumption that of course he’ll do what she says, she just has to say the word and he’ll jump on command and dance his black ass all over her database. Maybe maybe maybe.

All Marius Ghazali knows in this moment is: he’s going wipe the smirk off this bitch’s face until she doesn’t have a face left to smirk out of. She sees it, too; suddenly her eyes are wide as satellite dishes, her mouth gapes like some hilarious gasping carp as she stumbles back into the table and the tablet tips and falls and lands face-down on that oh-so-tasteful-and-expensive carpet and Ghazali brings up his fists and —

— and the rage passes through him like a wave, and dissipates.

He stops. Frowns. Tries to get the feeling back. Wonders why, in the next instant.

Hancock’s backed into a corner with one hand raised, palm out: No. Stay away. Stay back. But that palm isn’t raised against him; it’s aimed at a far corner of the ceiling, at a tiny black bead that glistens there like a bird’s eye. Ghazali never noticed it before.

He lowers his fists. “I’m — sorry. I don’t know what…”

She emerges from the corner. Takes a few shaky steps toward the desk.

“I just — something took me, there. It was like — ” He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “Maybe you better call the police after all.”

She bends down and retrieves the fallen tablet. Checks a setting. Looks back up at him.

“What? What is it?” Ghazali asks.

“Someone forked an image onto my screen.” She does some magic to bring it back: the Google logo on a featureless black background.

There it is. There’s the rage he’s been missing, there’s that welcome white-hot face-smashing —

Hancock swipes a finger across the display and the logo disappears. Ghazali’s fury evaporates a moment later.

He staggers, blinks. “That’s interesting.”

She nods. “Isn’t it, though.”

“What the fuck,” Ghazali whispers.

Hancock stares at the tablet. “Someone knew my pass — Marrano?” She raises her eyes and her voice. “This another one of your judgment calls?”

I’m a weapon, he thinks. I’m a wrecking ball. The hammer falls and I just — lose control.

Hancock’s on her way out, tablet in hand. “Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right back.” The door opens at her approach; in the open-concept office space beyond, two people are peeling off their shirts and another sweeps assorted bits of desktop detritus into a garbage pail.

Someone did this to me….

The door hisses shut.

Too late, he lunges for it. Tries the doorknob anyway, finds it locked. He can hear a burble of faint voices beyond, indecipherable but for their overtones: anger, accusation. Soothing calm. Defensiveness.

Another bird hits the window. Ghazali wanders over, cups hands around eyes, leans against the glass and squints. It’s like trying to see through wax paper. He puts one ear to the pane. Maybe he almost hears something like voices out there. Maybe a siren, thin as a thread.

Maybe it’s just his imagination. Maybe the whole damn city has fallen silent.

The soundproofing must be really good.

She storms back in like a green-eyed thundercloud, tablet still in one hand, a small brown bag in the other. She thrusts it at him. “They want a stool sample.”

“What? Why?” He looks inside. “This is someone’s lunch box.”

“You think we keep fecal kits in the broom closet? We’re getting some droned over from Staples, but deliveries are backed up. We’re making do in the meantime.”

“What’s the hurry?”

She hesitates. Cocks her head, as though listening to — listening for — some inner voice. “I have to remind, you, Marius, this whole no-police thing is contingent on your co-operation.”

The penny drops.

“I’m — I’m not the only one.” He tries the words out, feels the truth of them.

Hancock’s eyes flicker.

“I bet I’m not even the first….”

Her shoulders shift. Something in her posture says Fuck it.

“You’re the fourth. That I know of.”

“Shit.”

“First civilian, though. For whatever that’s worth.”

“Civilian?”

“Couple of hours ago some code monkey up in ATAP just — went crazy. Started attacking people, hitting anything that moved, a few things that didn’t. Wild, undirected rage.” She hesitates, looks around as if expecting something to happen. Nothing does. “Security tazed him and dragged him off, and I don’t know if anyone’s even talked to him yet. Half-hour later, someone else over in Stroop. Same thing.”

“Office environment,” Ghazali says.

She nods.

“Surrounded by letterheads and screensavers and shit.”

“We didn’t make that connection. Can’t swing a cat without hitting a logo, nobody — and then you happened to wander by outside, and your rage was anything but undirected. And someone did make the connection.”

“This Marrano dude.”

“Had a hunch. Tried it out.”

“Without telling you?”

“Said he had to seize the moment. Didn’t want me chickening out, flipping the pad over. Thought I’d ruin the experiment.” She snorts softly, adopts some nasal sing-song Marrano-voice: “I turned it right off after a couple of seconds, you were never in any danger…”

Ghazali shakes his head. “Asshole.”

“Yeah.” She offers up a bitter smile, points it at the birds-eye in the corner. “Real management material.”

He looks back to the bag in his hand. “He thinks it’s something I ate?”

“Oh, that’s not Marrano. That’s just some algorithm.”

“An algorithm thinks it’s— ”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the — parameterization specialist.”

“Marius.” She takes a breath. “The thing about deep-learning networks is, they’re — opaque. Too many layers. We train them on these huge data sets and they always seem to serve up the right answers, but nobody really knows how, exactly.”

“So an algo wants me to shit into someone’s Tupperware. Because that’ll explain why the Google logo suddenly turns me into…”

Hancock spreads her hands. “Honestly, I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything.”

“And you’re good with that?”

She doesn’t answer.

“You could always try finding out for yourself.” He taps imaginary smart specs at his temple. “Unless, of course, Marrano would disapprove…”

Something hardens in her expression. “Actually, I haven’t heard a peep from that asshole since I came back in here.”

Beyond the door, a murmur of low worried voices. The sound of large objects being moved.

Ghazali smiles grimly. “I think he has other things on his mind.”

“Something you ate. Start with that.”

She reawakens the tablet (Ghazali flinches, but the logo doesn’t reappear), scrolls back through the time-series. “Just before you snapped. This thing here, this nerve, lit up.”

He leans in, squints at a translucent 3D image of his own brain. A strand of bright tinsel hangs off the bottom and fades to black. Hancock taps it, brings up a label.

“Vagus nerve,” she says. “Connects the gut brain to the head brain.”

“Gut brain?”

“Neural net wrapped around the GI tract. Smart as a cat, if you go by the synapse count.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Says here it’s programmed by gut flor — huh. You can literally change someone’s personality with a fecal transplant. Even cure bipolar disorder.” Hancock’s green eyes flicker madly back and forth: tiny snowstorms swirl across their irises. She’s immersed in rapid-fire AR now: “Gut bugs — yeah, gut bugs influence memory formation. Send neuroinhibitors to the prefrontal cortex and amyg — ooh, Marius. The amygdala. Fear. Anger. All that nasty id stuff. D’you know you can increase aggression by tweaking gut bacteria?”

I do now. The sting of raw knuckles reawakens at the thought.

“Hey Marius, know what else the cortex and the amygdala have in common? Pattern-matching macros. Colors. Shapes.” Maybe she’s not even Selma Hancock any more, he muses. Maybe she’s just a vessel now, a mouthpiece for some all-seeing all-knowing entity that spans the globe in a web of correlates and false-positives. “So gut bugs talk to gut brain. Gut brain talks to head brain. Gut bugs program head brain. But — ” She fixes him with a bright manic data-stare. “What programs gut brain? Weaponized yoghurt? Chicken satay?”

“That’s bullshit. How would gut bugs even know what Google looks like?”

“Brain knows what Google looks like. They spent millions making sure your brain jizzes out its own special cocktail whenever it sees that special Fisher-Price template. You ask me, bugs’re keying on the cocktail.”

Another thump on the window. Big one, Ghazali thinks. Seagull at the very least.

“GTA database.” Hancock lifts her hands. Her fingers tap the air. “Face morphometrics associated with felony assault in proximity to Google iconography, stratified Voronoi. Cross with faces capped entering public eating establishments over the past, say — what’s a reasonable incubation period?”

Ghazali shrugs. “No idea.”

“Two weeks,” Hancock says — “Two weeks is good,” — and wiggles her fingers as though casting a spell. “Euler correlation.”

Amen, he thinks.

“Run,” she says, and lowers her arms. Her eyes dim.

“Wouldn’t your algos have done this already?” Ghazali wonders.

“If someone told them to. They wouldn’t notice it on their own unless you got up over 80, 90 incidents.”

“Seems like kind of a blind spot.”

She shrugs. “Our sample sizes run into the billions. Anything that shows up in less than a hundred’s almost bound to be an artifact. I’m pushing it as it is. Ah.” Her eyes reignite. “There we go.”

It took less than ten seconds, he realizes.

“Twenty more cases in the past hour.” She grunts. “Yeah, there you are. You do like eating out of Rosa’s, don’t you?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So did at least three other hits. Wonder if they had the satay.”

“I know the Rosa guys. They wouldn’t — ”

“Wouldn’t what, Marius?”

“They’re just some mom’n’pop operation that — ”

“Mom’s wife has a friend with a Master’s in plasmid vector architecture, did you know that?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“Well, regional distributor, anyway.” She grunts. “Both within the past three days, though. Too recent. We need Patient Zero. Maybe two weeks wasn’t long enough. Or maybe — ”

It’s not a bird this time. It crashes low into the window with a crack, births a jagged spiderweb across the pane. Ghazali jumps. The window flickers around the damage, a small patch of heat lightning in an overcast sky.

“Uh…”

“ — maybe widen the focus,” Hancock’s saying.

Ghazali crouches, puts one eye to point of impact. It’s no longer like trying to see through wax paper; it’s like staring into a strobe light. He can make out vague shapes through the flicker, though. The green blur of the lawn. Something yellow, maybe the size of a bowling ball, off to the left. Motion in the middle distance; a forest of legs, on the wrong side of the barrier. Closer than they should be. He hears a sound like the roar of an ocean a continent away.

“We’re talking way more than twenty cases,” he says.

“Yeah, well. Takes a while for the data sets to refresh.” Fingers still in motion, eyes still on fire, hot on some trail. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the rock.

He tries again. “You know that giant Google sign you’ve got up on the roof?”

“Shhh.”

“I think it might be — drawing them in — ”

“Shhh!”

The next missile hits above and to the left of the first: another web of cracks, another fractured flickering aperture. Ghazali’s almost certain he can hear sirens, now.

Fuck this. He heads for the door.

Hancock’s hand claps down on his shoulder as his hand grasps the knob. “You don’t want to do that.”

He tries anyway. “Still locked.”

“Just as well.”

He puts his ear against the door. “I can’t hear anything out there.”

“Even so.”

Her eyes have died.

“Network’s down,” she says. “All over, I think.”

“Selma. There’s a mob out there.”

She doesn’t answer. She holds up the tablet that used to hold his brain; now it shows a frame grab from a security camera somewhere.

“Do you know where this is?” she asks.

It looks almost staged: attacker and defender facing each other on a tiled floor. The defender’s hands thrown wide against his assailant; staggered, off-balance, he collides with the shoulder of some armoured machine bolted to the floor. Blood courses down his face onto his navy-blue mall-cop uniform.

His attacker stands with back to camera, right fist arcing toward his face. Black denim pants, white cotton tee with a vaguely familiar command stencilled across the shoulder blades. Ghazali reads it aloud: “Don’t Be Evil.”

“Used to be Google’s corporate motto,” Hancock says. “Until it wasn’t.”

“Where’s the logo?”

“That’s not a victim, Marius. That’s the fucking perpetrator.” She jabs the tablet with one finger. “But I only got a time stamp and an IP address before the network went down. This happened five days ago. Do you know where?”

It’s maddeningly familiar: the way the shadows dice the sunlight on the polished red tiles, the retro-deco struts and pylons that speak of high ceilings and quaint architecture. The curve of that squat gray-green machine, that hulking…

Pump head.

“Harris treatment plant,” he tells her. “End of the Boardwalk. Supplies drinking water to half the GTA.” He sucks in breath. “We gotta tell someone.”

“I told you. Network’s down.” Hancock turns away. She doesn’t even glance at the damaged window.

“There have to be other networks.” She regards him as though he’s retarded. “You’re Google for fuck’s sake! You’ve got satellites! Solar drones! You run a whole separate Internet off weather balloons!”

“Marius. Google knows already.”

She sags to the floor. Leans her back against a table leg.

“I squeezed that signal out of the noise in, what. Ten minutes? Once I knew what to look for. You really think no one else did? You think eight billion lines of code wouldn’t have figured it out a gajillion times faster?”

“Then — wait, you’re saying someone let — ”

“Someone. Something.” Her shoulders rise, fall. “Maybe even started it.”

“Why?”

She looks up at him: Weary. Disillusioned.

Empty, somehow.

“Because you hate us, Marius. Because we steal your secret lives and sell them to the highest bidder. We’re the bad guys in every screed anyone ever wrote about the Panopticon, we’re the one thing the Libtards and the Altzis agree on. Only not any more, right? We’ve just gone from villain to victim. The brutalized innocents. It’s actually pretty fucking brilliant, as Hail-Mary PR strategies go.” She stares down at the floor. “With any luck we’ll be running this burg when the dust clears. If only we’d had a bit more data we could have seen this coming. If only we’d had in-ground sensors and automatic face recognition throughout the GTA like we do in Quayside. Think of the lives we could have saved if your antiquated notions of privacy hadn’t held us back…”

“No.” He shakes his head. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

A row of bullet holes hemstitches across the window in a jagged diagonal. The pane flickers, fails, falls under the onslaught; a thousand shards drop like icicles. Outside bursts In like a pile driver, a deafening blast of shouts and crashes and sirens. Black smoke and burning rubber. Bullets and bullhorns. A colony creature with a thousand limbs, tearing itself to pieces on the road. A self-driving Tesla hurtles across the lawn, straight as an arrow, flames guttering and leaping from its bright shiny carbon-neutral grille.

“You could always take off that stupid helmet,” she says before it reaches them. “It makes you look like an idiot.”

Halfway up the hill I sensed something was terribly wrong. Nearing the hundred-year-old building that housed the Children’s Peace Theatre, I heard shouts and panicked bilingual conversation. Parents called out kid names. “Paloma!” “Felipe!” “Nando!” “Vente!”

As I approached, the words “Hurry” and “Viene la migra” hit my ears. I cursed my arthritic knees that kept me from running. When I finally arrived, there was a flurry of activity around the house, the gardens, and the greenhouse. Bronze-skinned moms scooped up toddlers and dashed off on footpaths leading deeper into Taylor Creek Park. Their male counterparts hoisted pre-packed sports bags, grabbed kid hands and tread after the women. Every one of the “guests”, as we referred to them, scurried with purpose, seizing their belongings and children and disappearing into the bush. I marvelled at how fast they could move on this oppressively hot spring day.

Mere moments after the last of them had fled, I heard the roar of gas-fuelled vehicles racing up the driveway from Dawes Road. Five Hummers trundled through a corner of the garden, crushing seedlings in their wake, and screeched to a halt in front of the main entrance. An armoured bus careened to block the drive. Canadian Border Services. My heart sank. Clearly the children’s singing circle I had come to lead was cancelled. The plants would have to wait to be serenaded. Assuming they survived this day.

Thandie Williams, CPT’s Artistic Director, was striking, a lithe forty-something woman with long dreadlocks and skin the colour of half-past midnight. She stepped forward from a gaggle of angry staff, shocked performance artists, fearful parents, and a wide-eyed handful of eight- to twelve-year-olds who had come to sing with me.

Cops in SWAT gear poured out of their vehicles, weapons drawn. We froze. The kids looked to me, their teacher. “It’ll be okay.” I wasn’t convincing.

CBS agents swarmed the property, some charging along various footpaths, others kicking in unlocked doors to the house and shouting “hands up” or “on the floor.” Thumps, crashes, and protesting voices sounded.

Thandie shouted at some bulky dude with reflective sunglasses who swaggered like he was in charge. “Are you aware this is City of Toronto property? You’d better have a warrant.”

He ignored her and ordered us to stand together, hands on heads, at the far end of the parking lot. A couple of agents — one man, one woman — worked their way through our ranks scanning faces with a phone app. The seven staff and volunteers inside were eventually marched out to join us and, before being ordered to “shut up,” told us they had all been similarly processed. I felt useless standing among them. As the oldest I should have had the life experience to say something calming or encouraging. Nothing occurred.

The twenty-something agent who scanned me looked remarkably like my cousin from back in Guatemala. But it wasn’t Cheo, who had been shot in the head at the age of fifteen by a paramilitary and left on the church floor to bleed out. The nineteen-year-old shooter had been rewarded in cash by a Canadian company who wanted to punish Cheo’s mother, my tía, for leading protests against the mining of our lands.

The agent looked disappointed with my scan results. I was relieved. Those facial ID apps were notoriously inaccurate when it came to dark-skinned folks. Unfortunately for him, mine indicated I was “legal.” My family had arrived in Canada decades ago, well before the latest crackdown.

The kids were eventually allowed to sit in the shade. I was surprised that none seemed scared and a few even served up attitude with remarks like, “Is your mom proud of you?” “Your job is bullshit.” “No one is illegal.”

When told to shut up, eleven-year old Paula started to sing the Men’s Healing Song. I was proud to have taught her. The other kids chimed in, even the boys. I was afraid for them, but the cops only laughed.

The agent-in-charge finally showed Thandie the warrant on his phone. There was a perfunctory interrogation when he asked what we did here, who was involved and did we know whether any of the children in our programs were illegal. Thandie gave him correct (if not truthful) answers and, after three hours of searching the building and grounds, during which they showed little concern for the soles of our shoes melting into the asphalt, the CBS agents eventually and begrudgingly left empty-handed.

As we cleaned up the house and garden in their wake, Thandie apologized for not cautioning me ahead of time about the raid. A friend who worked at Parks and Rec had given her a twenty-minute phone warning. This was the second raid this month. The previous time Thandie’s friend had given us a day’s notice. “We should lay low for a bit,” she muttered.

I was happy to later learn that every one of the guests we had harboured for the past week had escaped. They had met their guide at Woodbine Station and been taken to their next stop on Turtle Island’s Underground Railroad. The network of sympathizers ferried migrants from Central America to remote northern First Nations communities happy to have extra skills and labour to rebuild in the wake of being hit hard over the years by epidemics and climate change.

For some of our Indigenous friends, accepting people into their communities was about survival, for others a matter of responsibility and honour. “These colonial borders have been nothing but trouble for our peoples,” Janet Green, a Six-Nations Elder on the CPT’s Advisory Council, was fond of saying.

Janet’s normally sun-kissed skin looked pale as she lay propped up in bed by a menagerie of pillows. We were in her modest rez house on Six Nations, kept in good repair by her daughter’s wife.

“About time you paid me a visit, Ketzal.” Janet smiled.

We kissed cheeks. “Shouldn’t you be in hospital?”

“I want to be with family.” She vaped homemade cannabis oil from an e-cig I’d gifted her last year. From the kitchen cooking sounds came from Lydia, the daughter, as she prepared lunch. “I heard about the raid.”

“Everyone made it out. This time.”

“Of course they did. My protection ceremonies never fail.”

I smiled at her bravado. “Thandie thinks one of our neighbours is a snitch.”

Janet nodded. “Kyle Jackson. A miserable old cuss. I used to babysit him. He was a sweetheart back then. But like father, like son, as it turns out.”

Apparently Jackson’s violent dad had eventually abandoned his family, leaving behind a traumatized son. “My father took care of the Jacksons for a couple of years. Made sure they had enough to eat. Even bought Kyle boots every winter. Then the old man got laid off. I lost track of Kyle when we moved back to the rez. Was happy to see him that day he came up the hill at CPT to complain about loud drumming or some such thing. He pretended not to know me, but I recognized the old scars.”

The very idea of child abuse, as always, made me nauseous. “Family violence turned to cultural violence?”

“Sad, huh? Did you bring it?” Janet asked. I pulled out my hand drum. She beamed. “Sing me one of your healing songs.”

I sang softly in K’iche until she fell asleep.

In the kitchen Lydia served me avocado-stuffed tortillas (homemade) and a cup of fresh ground coffee from beans I had just delivered. Jorge, a Honduran guest who had passed through last month, had once worked the coffee fields. He had offered the beans in trade for an assortment of local plant medicines I’d given his pregnant wife.

I told Lydia about the raid, this time admitting to my feelings of inadequacy and confessing my reluctance to replace Janet on CPT’s Advisory Council. I was thirty-two years younger than Janet’s eighty-seven, and where I had come from, calling myself an Elder at my age would have gotten me laughed out of the community — and rightly so, if my performance at the raid was any indication of how wise I waxed under pressure.

Lydia disagreed. “Mom invested a lot of years into teaching us. We would dishonour her if we didn’t use what we know to help the people.”

Janet had taken me under her wing three decades earlier, formally adopting me into her Bear Clan and teaching me Longhouse ceremonies, protocols, and the ways of local plant medicines. She called me daughter and had been helpful to my family when we’d first arrived in Toronto. That implied responsibility. It fell on me to pay her kindness forward.

As I climbed the hill for the Advisory Council’s fall meeting, my spidey senses went off again. This day would be a memorable one, but not for the reasons I thought.

On the edge of the garden a somber Thandie, four mid-teen boys from the video project, and a couple of men I knew to be parents of one of the boys sat on folding chairs arranged in a circle. Thandie waved me over into the shade, and Suresh, nudged by one of his dads, gave me his seat.

“Glad you’re early, Ketzal. We’ve got a problem.” After greetings were exchanged, Thandie explained. “It seems these young men trashed Mr. Jackson’s food garden a few nights ago.”

“He ratted us out to CBS,” Zigwon said.

“You don’t know that,” Thandie snapped. “And even if it’s true –”

“Every time me and my boys pass his house he calls us the N-word,” Reggie interrupted. “Tells us to go back where we came from.”

Zigwon piped in. “My mom is Nish. This is our land.”

“Anyway,” Thandie continued. “The old man was here this morning. He thinks the boys poisoned his dog.”

I winced at the notion of an innocent dog suffering because we humans couldn’t resolve our petty disputes.

“Stupid mutt tried to bite me,” Suresh said. “But I’d never hurt him.”

“The dog will live,” Thandie said, “but Jackson says if the cops can’t shut us down, he will.”

“He’s got a gun,” Reggie said. “Tried to kill us the other night. Cares more about tomatoes and cucumbers than human life.”

“You don’t destroy food, Reggie,” one of the dads said. “Not in these hard times.”

Reggie sucked his teeth in response.

“He told me I was a freak.” The normally soft-spoken Elan hung his head. As a trans boy he’d suffered too much ridicule and hate in his short life. My heart went out to him.

As details of the story emerged, I realized that, as an Elder Advisor, peacemaking was among my responsibilities. They were all expecting me to find a way to resolve this mess. I didn’t have a clue how I would even begin. Then I remembered something Janet once said. “It’s not my job to have all the answers. It’s my job to help folks come up with their own solutions.”

Zigwon took the initiative to light up a handful of dried sage in an abalone shell and fanned the smoke with a hawk feather he’d earned in the Creative Cuisine program.

Before smudging I shared a prayer. “As this sage goes around the circle, let’s each of us clear our minds so we can think in a way that takes into consideration the wellbeing of all life over the next seven generations. Let us be reminded to remain peaceful, inside and out.”

The boys’ expressions sobered with my words. They were, at heart, good kids.

In the next hour I posed some questions, and the boys eventually agreed that their actions in ruining Jackson’s garden had been neither honourable nor helpful to CPT’s interests. And it certainly wasn’t good for our guests. I was about to ask them what they thought should be done next when a visitor appeared. He startled us by coming up the back steps through our outdoor amphitheater. Gripping a cane, he limped over to the circle.

“Mr. Jackson!” Thandie stood and offered her chair.

The old man waved her off with the cane. “You people are a blight on the neighbourhood.”

Thandie looked despairingly at me, and I tried not to appear as anxious as I felt. Jackson looked nothing like I’d expected. He was lean and fairly robust despite the limp. At the same time his curly gray hair, hazel eyes, and café-au-lait skin indicated a mixed-race background. His use of the N-word suggested he had some self-hatred going on. And that, I realized, made this situation a lot more complicated than I would have preferred.

With his free hand Jackson patted a bulge in his pocket. “If you people can’t control your children, you shouldn’t have them. I can take care of that for you.”

The tension around me heightened, but I found myself relaxing. As a child I had known real killers, and this old man didn’t fit the profile. If Jackson were serious about killing anyone, his gun would be in his hand, not his pocket.

“Mr. Jackson and I need to talk. Why don’t you all wait inside?”

Thandie gave me an incredulous look. You sure? I gave her a half-smile and nodded. Jackson didn’t protest. He knew we weren’t in a position to call the cops on him. Or maybe he didn’t care. As Thandie and the parents herded the reluctant boys inside, I introduced myself to the old man and explained that we were sorry and ready to discuss how to make amends.

He scolded me with a finger. “They wrecked my garden. You going to feed me for the winter?”

I noticed a burn scar on the inside of his wrist. Several, actually, as though someone had put out multiple cigarettes on his arm. As I studied them, I realized the little round scars formed a Sankofa symbol.

“Reach back and fetch it.” I whispered the meaning of the mark, aghast that Jackson’s father would take the best-known and most beloved Adinkra symbol in the African diaspora to burn into his child’s skin.

“What?”

I gestured toward the scars. “ Is that how Janet recognized you?”

Jackson’s hand trembled, and he shoved it into the pocket with the bulge. “I’m not here to talk shit.”

“She passed away. Back in June.”

He flinched. I’d hit a nerve. It occurred to me that friendship is the most powerful protection spell anyone can conjure.

“She called you Kyle. Said you were a sweet kid back in the day. And your father was a sonofabitch.”

The old man collapsed into a chair. “No. She made a mistake. Kyle is dead.” Tears welled in his eyes, the crack in the armour I was looking for.

A Rumi quote I’d seen on social media came to mind: The wound is where the light enters. Maybe I had a role to play on the Elders’ Council after all. I sat next to Jackson and reached out to squeeze his hand. He let me.

Clement didn’t exactly believe in karma, but life hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped since the night he killed Puck.

Flying in from Boston, Clement caught the ferry from the island airport to the transit terminal at the bottom of Victoria Park Avenue, built around the still-operational R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. After the 2028 Olympic Pandemic turned the overstuffed streetcars and subways into wildfire disease incubators, the city started using the lake to relieve downtown gridlock. Passenger ferries — and a few allowing vehicle transport — now brought hundreds of thousands of commuters to a dozen stops along the Toronto waterfront from as far as Hamilton and Oshawa.

On deck, Clement gawked at the transformed shoreline of the neighbourhood now known as Lakeside. Nobody called it the Beaches anymore, because there were no beaches anymore.

The neighbourhood was originally built on top of a network of underground rivers and, through the 2020s, unprecedented rainfall swelled those subterranean waterways, quietly hollowing out the area’s sandy substrate. As the easternmost Great Lake, Lake Ontario experienced the most excess flow, regulated by the Moses-Saunders Dam between Cornwall, Ontario and Massena, New York. Except that Lake Saint Louis, where the Ottawa River meets the Saint Lawrence, floods at a ten-to-one ratio with Lake Ontario — a one-foot drop near Toronto means a ten-foot rise near Montreal, along with swaths of fragile Quebec agricultural land and New York’s overburdened river system.

In 2026, the American government refused to permit any drainage, and the Prime Minister, already facing a shaky re-election bid, chose to protect Montreal over Toronto. Most of the city’s homes were far enough from the lake to survive the flooding, but in the Beaches the loosened substrate dissolved, and the neighbourhood sank into Lake Ontario.

Among Doctor Mayor’s first acts of office were expanding the Leslie Spit to bulwark Toronto Islands and the Port Lands and pushing through construction of a reinforced concrete barrier along the south side of Queen Street East from Victoria Park to Coxwell, saving everything north of the Boardwalk Barrier from being submerged.

Everything south of the barrier wasn’t so fortunate, including Clement’s family home on Leuty Avenue.

After multiple class-action lawsuits, Clement’s dad secured ownership over the land — up to thirty metres above the surface, however high it rose — with enough funds to build a stilt-house on the original property. South of the barrier was now threaded with walkways and rope bridges, motorboats and dinghies tied to bobbing docks.

His dad refused to move during the lawsuits to maintain primary residence in the flooded property, living only on the second floor and then in a houseboat moored to the chimney. It was the last straw for Clement’s mom, who left for a condo at Danforth and Broadview with a view of the elevated tracks of the monorail shuttling passengers up and down the Don Valley. She loved being so close to the subway, even if it was hot and crowded, because she could get around the city so easily. She was infected soon after the Olympic Pandemic hit. A sixth of Toronto’s population died in 2028, including his mom.

The South American Unification War sent Canada waves of refugees, and by 2033 Toronto’s population bounced back to eight million. Among them was Lis, the Venezuelan woman his dad had married two years ago. Clement attended the wedding in Caracas, interested in visiting the new United South American Republic, but he hadn’t seen them since. He finally agreed to visit for his dad’s retirement party after thirty years at RBC-Bell&Tire.

But his real purpose was buried inside the cement foundation of the old house’s extension, now under Lake Ontario.

Leaving the ferry terminal, Clement strolled along the top of the barrier, which was outfitted with a wood-slat boardwalk and lined with vendors. After last year’s coronation, a handful of local seniors had petitioned to rename the barrier after Queen Catherine, stringing up homemade “Queen Kate Wall” banners from their condo balconies. Queen Street East was typically choked with vehicles, but more orderly since the streetcar tracks had been upgraded so drivers could switch on their cars’ self-driving function along the rails, everyone too busy tapping on devices or watching screens to bother honking and weaving around each other.

The retirement dinner was scheduled for six o’clock. His dad and stepmom would go directly from work, so Clement had four hours to locate the remains underwater and dig them up with the portable high-frequency excavator he’d borrowed from the MIT geology department.

The lake splashed against the concrete barrier and, underneath the rows of stilt homes, Clement could see the roofs and chimneys of the sunken houses. Most of his old neighbours, the ones who stayed instead of cashing out when the settlement cheque arrived, built sleek modern boxes on stilts, with lots of reflective glass, solar arrays, and modular components for easy reconfiguration. But Clement’s dad chose to basically recreate his old house above the original structure, rebuying the furniture he couldn’t salvage, so it felt like a surreal dream of his childhood home, but with enough differences — like Lis’s colourful Venezuelan art and her skimpy undergarments drying on the stairway handrail — to make it discomfiting.

Clement trotted up the floating walkway and unlocked the front door with a thumb-scan. In the foyer, he changed into the wetsuit he’d packed, along with the luminescent goggles, air regulator, permeation scanner, and excavator.

He dropped into the lake and shimmied down the old roof, the slope mottled with quagga mussels. As a teenager, Clement had once snuck out his second-floor bedroom window and broken his leg when the trellis came loose. But now the glass had been removed, and Clement wiggled into his old bedroom. The furniture, clothes, knickknacks, and books were gone, but traces of his adolescence remained. He wiped away a slick coat of algae and, sure enough, the graffiti mural he’d sprayed on the wall with a stencil was still there, depicting Drake in a Raptors jersey elbowing aside LeBron James to sink a basket, the net topped by a miniature CN Tower. Clement shuddered with humiliation and considered using the excavator to destroy this evidence of his teenage lameness.

Clement swam into the hall and down the stairs to the first floor, snaking through the kitchen — wood rotten, paint flaked, fixtures rusted — and gliding down the basement stairs. It was colder in the basement, darker. Quick, slimy things darted out of sight. Plastic toys and waterlogged stuffed animals hung in the murk. An old bike caked in algae sat in the corner.

He remembered exactly where he’d buried Puck, but he brought the scanner in case the sandy soil below the house had shifted. The spot was under the basement bathroom, installed when the extension was built, still largely intact below layers of sludge.

Clement engaged the scan, which emitted electromagnetic pulses to detect subterranean formations. Fifteen years of hating himself for the worst thing he ever did, and he was finally going to make amends.

It was the last weekend before high-school graduation, June 2018, when he’d snuck out after his parents went to sleep to go to a classmate’s disastrous house-party. The place was trashed — neighbours furious, drunk teenagers sprinting down Balmy Beach to get away from the cops — but for Clement it was a more personal catastrophe: Ava dumped him.

Clement had been gushing about getting into UBC and out of Toronto, clueless that Ava had found out two weeks earlier she’d been rejected by all the west-coast universities. Her parents would never let her move to Vancouver to live with Clement if it wasn’t for school. Buzzed on a couple of beers, Clement was insensitive, and the whole thing escalated into a furious break-up.

Coming home through the backyard, wobbly from the beer and upset from the fight, unsure how to fix it or if he even wanted to, Puck surprised him by scrambling out of a bush, yipping and yodelling with happiness. His dad must have let the dog out for a nighttime pee and forgotten about him.

He’d just wanted to quiet Puck before his parents woke up. In the fifteen years since, Clement had replayed that moment ten thousand times and he still didn’t understand why he’d kicked the dog so hard. But he had.

The pug was named after his favourite character from the Alpha Flight comic series, although his mom had liked the Shakespeare reference, and his dad had assumed it was about hockey. Pugs have abnormally narrow nasal cavities and chronic breathing problems. The impact likely collapsed the fragile nasal cavity and, after being knocked unconscious, Puck would’ve suffocated. Clement might have been able to save his pet’s life, but he was too busy having a panic attack, shaking and crying and begging the dog to wake up.

His parents were building an extension at the back of the house. The workmen had dug the hole for the foundation, but wouldn’t pour the cement till Monday. Clement grabbed a discarded shovel, scooped out a shallow grave, wrapped his pet in a plastic bag from the shed, mumbled a prayer for forgiveness, and buried the dog.

The whole time, his cell had buzzed with calls from Ava. Maybe if he’d answered, they could’ve worked it out. But he’d just committed a monstrous, unforgivable act. Ava loved scratching Puck’s belly and imitating his excited snuffles. They’d planned to bring the pug with them to Vancouver. Ava would joke that they’d buy a stroller and dress him up like a baby to freak people out. She’d cradle Puck in her arms and pretend to talk to the dog in snorts and grunts. Clement felt he deserved nothing but heartbreak and loneliness.

Sunday morning his parents got into a huge fight when it turned out Puck was missing and his father couldn’t remember if he’d brought him in the night before. Coywolves had been sighted in the area. They thought Clement had been asleep upstairs. The family plastered posters along Queen Street East. The foundation was poured the next day.

Eighteen years old and roiling with guilt, Clement resolved to fix his terrible mistake — by bringing Puck back to life. That decision propelled him through undergrad at UBC and grad school at Stanford and a PhD at MIT, where he now worked. The biotech revolution of the late 2020s that exploded from the emergency science innovated to cure the Olympic Pandemic had made cloning safer and cheaper, but human experimentation was still illegal. You could clone a dog though.

The problem was cloning a dog from fifteen-year-old remains hastily wrapped in a plastic bag and buried in cement.

That’s why Clement had spent the past five years developing a technique to rebuild degraded DNA using an exonuclease-reversion enzyme that amplified traditional polymerase chain-reaction protocols. By sequencing the 2.8 billion base-pairs of DNA in the pug genome across the thirty-nine canine chromosomes, Clement had a 99.8% accurate genetic map. If he could get a pure-enough sample of Puck’s DNA to fill out that stubborn 0.2% gap, he could clone his dead dog by gestating a fertilized embryo inside the pug he’d adopted from a rescue shelter near his Cambridge apartment. His paper detailing the experimental process had been recently published and shortlisted for the Novitski Prize and the Brenner Medal, a huge boon to his tenure application.

Clement was sure he’d lose both awards. He didn’t exactly believe in curses, but he also knew a curse didn’t require your belief to mess with you. He’d been approached to sell his technique to a biotech company that wanted to clone beloved pets. The offer was generous, but Clement felt paralyzed, unable to move in any direction until he made things right with Puck. He felt a grim, burrowing stain on his life, with only one way to erase it.

Except Puck wasn’t there.

The scanner revealed a ghostly structural mesh below the herringbone tile his parents had argued about for months before his dad acquiesced to his mom’s taste. But he couldn’t locate the remains. He searched the basement for an hour. Nothing.

Wondering whether the soil had shifted beyond the footprint of the house, Clement swam upstairs and through the windowless patio door to what had been the yard, now a forest of greasy aquatic plants. Even after so many years, it had never occurred to him the body might simply not be there anymore.

And then he found it. Just behind the rotting shell of the old shed: a small, bent skeleton on the glowing screen.

But something was wrong. He’d wrapped Puck in a plastic bag and buried him just deep enough to be covered. This spot was a metre underground and, instead of a plastic bag, the skeleton was inside a box. It was hard to detect what material the box was made from, but as he adjusted the resolution Clement didn’t need the scanner. He recognized the plastic tub where they used to store Puck’s doggy treats.

Understanding surged into him. His goggles fogged over, eyes stinging with tears.

His father would’ve been enraged. There would’ve been punishment rituals, withheld forgiveness, caustic reminders. This discretion was beyond his father.

But not his mother. She must have found Puck, placed him in the plastic tub and buried him properly. It had to be her. His mother had known all along.

Floating in what used to be his backyard, Clement’s mind spun through years of conversations with his mom before her death. Despite his guilt and regret and disgust over what he’d done to Puck, he had never detected anything different in the way she treated him.

A panic attack clawing out of him, Clement kicked to the surface, spat out the regulator, ripped off the goggles and gasped ragged breaths. The cool lake water washed away his tears.

Numb, Clement walked along the barrier, vendors calling him by name as their client feeds picked up data packets from his phone. For fifteen years, he’d planned how to bring Puck back, not just to counteract the curse he didn’t really believe in, but to balance the moral scales. The whole time, he’d missed a more profound truth. What else had he missed while staring through a microscanner at gauzy wisps of DNA?

The afternoon sun felt too hot, too bright, as if the photons were worming into his skin like parasites. His brain felt oily from the lake, swollen inside his skull. He couldn’t handle this retirement dinner. He’d probably get drunk and cause a scene. He might punch someone just so they’d punch him back. It was going to get bad, and he wanted it to.

That’s when he saw her — Ava.

Trotting along the barrier with a bag of groceries in one hand and a yoga mat rolled up under her arm, hair plastered to her face, skin flushed with sweat. They saw each other at the same moment, so there was no way to pretend otherwise.

“Clem?” she said. “Hi. I, um, heard you were in Boston. Somewhere fancy. MIT?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, eventually everything feels like a job.”

They didn’t hug or kiss cheeks or shake hands. They just stared at each other, half-dazed.

“But you’re doing okay?”

“I’m doing great,” he said. “Really great. Uh, how about you?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “Never expected I’d still be living in the Beaches. Lakeside. They don’t even call it the Beaches anymore.”

“No beaches,” Clement said.

“No beaches,” Ava said.

She wiped her hair from her face, self-conscious. She looked away, making eye contact with a vendor, who smiled, toothy, eyes darting across the data stream behind his sunglasses.

“Hi Ava,” the vendor said. “British confectioners use only organic and hormone-free milk production in their chocolate. I know how important that is to you.”

Ava blushed across her collarbones, embarrassed she bought enough chocolate that it highlighted in her purchasing profile.

“I have, um, frozen goods” she said. “I should probably go. But so nice to see you.”

“Yeah,” said Clement. “There’s a retirement thing tonight. For my dad. I’d better get cleaned up.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your mom,” Ava said. “She was always so kind to me.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It was awful.”

“Those were scary times,” she said. “Glad they’re over.”

She reached out her hand and he shook it. The last time they’d touched, it was on what had been a beach not far from where they stood, holding hands, woozy from the beer, hoping she’d want to skinny-dip and make out. Now all that was underwater.

Clement gave an awkward wave as Ava continued along the barrier. He felt his insides folding up like origami, like snakes with broken necks, jittery and wrong. He wondered what would happened if he jumped into the lake. Maybe a wave would slam him against the concrete, and he’d lose consciousness. Maybe everyone would think it was an accident. Maybe he didn’t care what they thought.

“Clem!”

He spun around to see Ava hurrying toward him, ankles wobbly in her sandals, tee-shirt stained dark at the armpits. She’d abandoned her grocery bag.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“I should’ve gone to Vancouver with you,” she said. “I was so embarrassed I didn’t get into school there. I told myself I was angry at you for leaving me behind. But I shoved you away as hard as I could. I listened to my parents and stayed home to go to York. They were both so unhappy. I don’t know why I paid attention to anything they ever said.”

“I wish you’d come with me too,” Clement said. “Everything in my life has gone wrong since we broke up.”

“But you’re doing so well.”

“I just ran into my ex-girlfriend in my old neighbourhood. What am I supposed to say? That I’m alone? That I’m lost? That I wasted the last fifteen years of my life? That I don’t understand anything and probably never did? I’m not doing great.”

“I’m not doing great either,” she said. “I make so many bad decisions. Over and over, the same ones. I can’t seem to learn.”

Ava wrapped her arms around herself, trembling as if cold, unable to look at him. Clement wanted to reach out for her, but he didn’t want to make another mistake when it seemed like mistakes were all he could make. Finally she looked at him, and he did reach out for her, and she lunged at him, seizing his body to hers. He held onto her, and she held onto him, and they stood like that, both of them crying in the sunshine.

Two ferries puttered by, one headed east, the other west, tooting their tinny horns in greeting. The people on deck waved at each other.

“Now you see why I got us one with tinted glass,” Palassio said, smacking the window while the car steered. “Nobody can see him waving for help!”

He shared a laugh with the boys. As they headed up Broadview, angles of streetlight alternately revealed and hid the glaring, gagged face of the city planner in the back seat.

“We can’t do him here,” said Hansen. “Get blood on the upholstery.”

“And we can’t get out of town,” added Louch, who shared the back with the planner. “Cameras all up the Don, and every other major route. Unless we take side-streets the whole way — ”

Palassio shook his head. “We gotta mind our alibis. Be back at the hotel before we’re missed.”

“The lake?”

“No. Look.” He shared the app in his smart glasses with the car’s dashboard screen. The big rectangle lit up with a map of Toronto; the city’s jumbled, almost logical grid of streets was overlaid with coloured swatches. It almost looked like a traffic app, but instead of congestion it showed security-camera and neighbourhood-watch coverage.

“See those?” He pointed at a rash of little red dots strewn across the map. “Those are police cruisers, and the little triangles are drones. God, I love crowd-sourcing.”

Palassio smiled, framing the screen with his hands in case the planner had been looking. “You fucked with the wrong people, jackass.”

The car was driving, so he had the luxury of turning to contemplate the distant city lights off to the left. Past the muted tones of the forested Don Valley, downtown was a milling crowd of glittering giants extending from the lake to the indefinite boundaries of North York up ahead. Toronto was a beautiful city; maybe, if he wasn’t here for work, he might have considered settling. Along with four million other people? He laughed and shook his head.

Anyway, you never live where you work. Not if you’re in the Profession.

“We should take the next right,” said Hansen. “Cop coming down the hill.”

“You heard him, turn right,” Palassio told the car. Then he turned back to the map. “See anywhere promising?”

“Maybe… What’s this?” Hansen pointed.

They were headed into an old corner of the city, East York, which was protected by water to the south, the Don Valley, which curved from the west over the north, and to the north-east… “That’s funny.” The map was highly detailed, but where O’Connor crossed a bridge at the top right corner of the neighborhood, the detail fuzzed out.

“Is that another valley?”

Hansen leaned forward, pinched and expanded the view. “A ravine. But a big one.”

“I see a road in.”

He turned and grinned at the planner. “You’re in luck. You get to dig your grave by a nice old creek.”

Palassio avoided cities unless he was working. Sure, there were also problems in the countryside, what with the permanent drought in America’s breadbasket, mass migrations within and from beyond the continent, and some new tropical disease hitting practically every month. He didn’t work in Canada much, and most American cities were hives now, squeezed into tight high-density knots by mass transit. Palassio hated crowds, and he hated the facial-recognition cameras that were everywhere now. It was getting harder and harder to do his job.

Luckily, all that densification came with its share of corruption. Development deals could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so having a city planner discover the short-cuts you were hiding in your budget could have dire consequences. Palassio’s fees were a rounding error compared with the litigation costs if that all went public.

They zig-zagged up to the Danforth, passing Relief-Line subway entrances just closing for the night, drunks from the pubs flagging down self-driving car-shares, little old ladies out walking their dogs. Palassio glanced out now and again, but mostly he was puzzling over the map. Finally he leaned back and said, “Ungag him.”

“You’re not going to get away with this!” gasped the planner.

“Seriously? You had all this time to think about what to say, and you chose that?” He waved at the screen. “What is that place? There’s no cameras, no police, no Neighbourhood Watch, no nothing.”

The planner shrugged. “Can’t see. Can’t help you.”

“It’s called…” Palassio squinted. “Warden Woods Park.”

“Oh shit.”

Something in the planner’s tone made Palassio look back. The guy was squirming up against the door as if he could burrow through it. “We can’t go there!”

“Why not? Toxic waste or something?”

The planner opened his mouth, closed it. “Never mind.”

“Make him co-operate,” Palassio told Louch, who went to work with the Taser. While he did that, Palassio unfiltered his smart glasses so he could see all the AR tags and overlays in the East York neighbourhoods they were passing through. The sky, which had been black, suddenly sprouted meridional lines as thin sheets of colour dissected off the city into zones, electrical-power cells, school and sewer catchments, electoral ridings. Every object manufactured in the last fifteen years had Internet of Things sensors and Net connectivity, and they all broadcast their statuses. The city had a nervous system through all its lines, pipes, and boulevards; no pothole could grow more than a few inches in diameter before Toronto felt it and reacted.

This fog of information was a problem to anybody who wanted to colour outside the lines. The city was a maze, more complex and layered than any map of city streets could be. The city planner spent his days exploring that maze. Zoning restrictions and local bylaws were embodied in the very sensors in the sidewalks and bridges, and they all chattered constantly. The city itself told the planner what power, water, and other services were allowed here and not there, but it was his responsibility to report any violations to the Planning Council. That made him the weak link. Silencing him could keep certain infractions from becoming public.

After a long drive past storefronts and hair salons and incongruous mid-rise condos, they turned onto a wide avenue called Pharmacy and headed north. After a few blocks the car made a right at a tennis court. It was very dark up ahead. Palassio glanced back; the planner licked his lips, looking out now. He seemed properly scared.

They entered a parking lot; past it, one of Toronto’s famous ravines fell away to the north and east. The cloven valley was darkly forested and unlabeled in AR, its trees rendered two-dimensionally, like a painting, by distant streetlights. There were no cameras in sight, but oddly, a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate stood between them and the woods.

Nothing moved. They parked, and Palassio got out.

It smelled great here, fresh and green. There were no lights in the little valley, though houses climbed the slopes on the other side. “Get him out.” Palassio dragged a dufflebag full of tools out of the trunk and lugged it over to the fence. His app continued to insist that there was no surveillance down here — but why? Warden Woods Park was visible in Palassio’s Augmented Reality view, but only as an absence of light and labels. It made him uneasy, this one blind spot in the heart of a giant city.

Except, he noticed, it wasn’t quite empty. There were labels in there. Palassio squinted through the black trees. “Huron-Wendat. Anishinabek? What the fu — And what the hell is the Haudeno — the Haudenosaun…”

“Haudenosaunee Confederacy,” gasped the planner.

“Yeah, what?”

“Those are the territories we’re on. The First Nations.”

“Oh, right.” Palassio had heard about this. Canada was being carved up by increasingly ambitious land-claims settlements with its original inhabitants. Seems they’d spent the past generation graduating constitutional lawyers from the country’s best schools, and now they were putting them to use. “Truth and Reconciliation, right?” he said to the man he was going to murder tonight. “You did the truth part, now it’s time for the reconciliation — and guess what! It’s costing you.”

The planner had shut up again, so Palassio continued. “This ravine where we’re going to bury you, it’s claimed by the, the Haudenosauneega? That’s why it’s black in AR, because they’re running the place themselves, and won’t let us white folk in?”

The planner wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Something like that.”

“They live down here?”

The planner croaked a laugh. “No. They made a deal, and then they walked away. Nobody owns this place now.”

“Nobody? — Hey, stop that!” Hansen had been about to break the padlock on the gate with a set of bolt-cutters. “You pick it, stupid. We don’t want anybody knowing we came down here. No sense them finding this guy before we leave town.”

Hansen set to work picking the lock, and meanwhile Palassio grabbed the planner by the scruff of his neck and frog-marched him up to the fence. “Grab it.” The planner did, and nothing happened. Palassio grunted. “Not electric. What do you mean, nobody owns this place now?”

The planner slumped, seemingly defeated. “That was the deal they made. The First Nations have talked Canada into adopting a legal framework of Buen Vivir. That means that places can own themselves. They’ve got rights, like people.”

Palassio laughed. “So what, this park owns itself?” The planner nodded.

“Got it!” Hansen opened the gate, then hesitated. “Safe?” He looked to Palassio, who looked to the planner.

The planner sighed. “There are no police drones, Neighbourhood-Watch cameras, First-Nations monitors or provincial environmental sensors in there. No tech owned by anybody, not even an electric fence.”

“Go on, then.” Palassio gave him a shove, and he crossed from parking lot to dewed grass. His killers followed, toting flashlights and shovels.

There had been an asphalt path here at one time, but tall grass had invaded it from both sides, and broken branches lay across it. Palassio made out the top of a park bench poking above the weeds. The whole place had an air of abandonment that was downright creepy. It was as if nobody had set foot in here in years; but that was impossible. They were in the middle of a city.

The planner was walking straight now, looking around himself as if he too were curious. Not a good sign. Palassio considered shooting him right here, but they still had a good fifty yards to go to the bank of Massey Creek, which was where he wanted to bury the jerk. He didn’t want to drag a limp (and likely messy) body any further than he had to.

Hansen stopped suddenly. “Hey!” he hissed, pointing off to the left. There were big leaning trees there, but one giant had fallen and made a kind of clearing. Its log made a black bench across the gray tangle, and on it, something glowed.

“Is that a… a phone?” Palassio had his gun out now, but he couldn’t see any people. He moved under the trees, and yep, it looked like somebody had nailed a plastic-wrapped smartphone to the downed log. When he reached it, he saw that a thin wire led from it to a small solar panel that was also nailed to the log.

The screen flicked off, and as it did he heard something moving in the bush. “What the hell?”

“Get ‘em!” Hansen took off before Palassio could stop him.

“Oh, for the — come on!” Palassio broke the little screen away from its moorings, then pushed the planner ahead of him. Hansen was leading them deeper under the arching roof of trees. When Palassio caught up with Hansen, he smacked him on the back of the head. “Just a raccoon, dumbass! Jeez, they’re gonna hear you up the slope.” He thrust the little screen, now dark, under the planner’s nose. “So what the hell are these?”

“They’re all through here,” said the planner. He no longer sounded afraid; his tone now was wry, even humorous. “See? There’s another.”

A blue square lit up high on one of the trees. It was dim, but just managed to silhouette a tiny, hunched figure that sat in front of it. Louch swore. “Is that a squirrel?”

“Shit, there are cameras here!” Hansen yanked at a cable, and something toppled out of another tree. He drew his gun and marched up to the planner. “You lied to us!”

“I never said there was no Internet of Things in here. I just said there wasn’t human surveillance.”

Hansen put his pistol to the planner’s temple. “What does that even mean?”

The planner gulped. “The — the climate plan. You know, everybody knows the Plan. With the carbon bubble bursting and all, people want to go the next step and reduce the carbon already in the atmosphere. Torontonians wanted to help. Wh-when the Anishinabek negotiated the personhood of Warden Woods, they had a council and asked themselves, what would the Woods want? They decided it would want to be rewilded, so they fenced out the city. And they added an Internet of Things here — sensors, cameras, facial-recognition for animals and computer interfaces for animals. So the creatures living around the Woods could order up food, bird-houses, whatever they needed to thrive. The phones train them, even the birds are part of it.”

“And this reports to the Anishin — ” But the planner shook his head.

“It’s all coordinated by a Distributed Autonomous Organization, a dumb AI that runs on the Net and is paid for by carbon credits that the Woods sell to the city. This part of Warden Woods is a person, and it’s beholden to no one.”

Something about the tone of his voice… Palassio shone his light at the planner. “Why are you smiling?” Hansen looked as well, then stepped back, swearing. The smile on the planner’s face was not pleasant.

“People didn’t get it. They were like you — the first few years, all kinds of jerks broke in here to party, or dump trash, or just carve their initials on the trees. First the Woods put up signs, then fences, then it sued the city… It tried everything. Nothing kept people out. So it finally had to take extreme measures. Now, nobody I know’s been down here in ages.”

“Something else out there,” hissed Hansen, crouching. Palassio could hear it now — a rushing sound he’d mistaken for the wind, starting and subsiding now here, now there in the treetops.

“I had this crazy hope,” said the planner, “that I might get out of this alive. But when you decided to come here, I realized that was a stupid fantasy. But, if I was going to die, at least it wouldn’t have to be alone.”

The rushing sound was everywhere, and cut twigs and leaves were drifting down. Palassio and the boys swung their lights around and around, trying to catch whatever it was. Louch had dropped his shovel; they were backed together now, on the buckled remains of the path next to a broken footbridge.

The planner had disappeared, but his voice still came faintly from the darkness. “The city’s asked the government to intervene. This military technology would be illegal in anyone else’s hands. But Warden Wood’s got good lawyers, and they argue that it has to go to extremes to protect itself.”

A dozen spotlights suddenly pinioned the three of them, and more hit the planner, as a buzzing roar filled the air and swirling dust spiralled up around them.

“Can’t say it’s wrong, can you?” shouted the planner…

And then it all went dark.

On the morning of September 22, 2033, Amanda Allan was awakened a full half-hour before sunrise — not by her customized birdsong of choice (35% Marsh Warbler, 25% Eurasian Skylark, 40% Common Nightingale), but rather by the chainsaw-to-the-brain wail of Jaden McNally-Homsi, bawling for his binky. Amanda sighed and removed her iEye. She moistened it with a few iEye drops and popped it back in. Her valet, Beale — an anthropomorphic brown bear — greeted her with a smile.

“Good morning, Amanda. Shall I cancel your seven a.m. alarm?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Black Americano and kefir #3 at seven-twenty am?”

“No, I’m up, so…double espresso and kefir #3 at six-fifty if no one’s using the Brekky.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“Sleep stats?”

“Light sleep: 2.6 hours. Deep sleep: 38 minutes. REM: 7 minutes.”

“Fuck.” An ad for SleepWell appeared before her: a woman conked in a king-size bed with a dreamy smile on her face. “For the best sleep of your lif — “Amanda swiped the ad shut. She didn’t want meds. What she wanted was to not be roused around midnight by the sound of Maggie and Jamil bonking in the bedroom across the hall — “Are you ready for it?” snarled Jamil over and over until Amanda wanted to shout: “Yes! We’re all more than ready for it, please get on with it!” She hoped Maggie had been ready for it with some contraception, since Jamil was still one of the fully-fertile. Amanda loved Maggie and Jamil, but she had loved them more before she and Michael had let them take Rachel and Priya’s place in their retrofit. And she’d loved them far more before they’d birthed wailing Jaden.

“Messages?” she asked Beale.

“Thirty. One urgent from ‘Mom’.”

Thirty? She had cleared them at four a.m. “Open Mom message.”

Amanda’s mom appeared in a purple housecoat. “Hi, Sweetie, there’s a Health-Canada recall on Protein-Pal cricket flour. I don’t know if you use that brand —” Amanda deleted the message. She didn’t use that brand. An ad from Protein-Pal hopped in from the left. Amanda flicked it away.

“Body stats?”

“Weight: 139.6 pounds, 26.8% fat. Waking blood pressure: 139 over 89 — elevated, scheduled check in two hours. Microbiome within optimal range; however, Methanobrevibacter smithii is 27% lower than average.”

An ad for Practivate appeared. A laughing woman bounded down a beach with a golden retriever by her side. A voice said: “Every shot of Practivate contains a quarter billion CFU of M. smithii!” Amanda ordered a bottle.

“Weather?”

“Heat alert for the GTA,” said Beale. “High of 39 degrees Celsius with a Humidex of up to 50.”

“Uch!” One degree shy of Lily’s school trip being cancelled. It seemed like every other day of Grade three was a field trip. The year had just begun, and Lily’s class had already gone to Mars, the Arctic Circle, and the Battle of Hastings. But those were OCU-Ed trips, which Amanda preferred for safety reasons. Pioneer Village was one of the few locations the younger kids had to actually travel to, which is why she had volunteered to chaperone even though she was totally choked with work. The idea of the Village made her uneasy. Even with cooling wands, it was going to be stupidly hot, and there were a lot of real trees up there and farm animals too. Who knows what gross bacteria or viruses lurked? Lyme for sure. Probably VRSA in the soil. And what if there was a power failure on the way there or back? During the heat wave of ’27, dozens of schoolchildren had been nearly cooked to death in the Crosstown LRT when it lost power in a tunnel. They said it couldn’t happen again, but Amanda wasn’t going to risk it. She would accompany Lily to the Village and work whenever she could grab a moment.

Amanda got out of bed and headed to the bathroom. Miraculously, it was unoccupied, though a matted hunk of Maggie’s red hair sat in the middle of the floor like a taunt. Amanda kicked it behind the toilet, then took a piss and checked the TruNews headlines. France was still burning, and so was California. It seemed like half the world was on fire, and the other half was flooded. There were a dozen unexplained CrispR-baby deaths in China, a dangerous escalation in the West Bank water war, dust storms in India, and complete chaos in Chile after another round of landslides. God. The only good news was that King Charles had received his new liver and was doing well. “Shut feed, start shower,” said Amanda, trying not to think about Chile. Against warnings from Michael, she had watched live feeds of the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Now she couldn’t get the images out of her brain. Michael wanted her to have them reconsolidated, but she felt funny about that. She was old-school when it came to memory.

“Sorry, Amanda,” said Beale. “Household shower limit has been reached for this morning.”

“What? No, that’s not possible.” But of course it was. It had happened multiple times since Maggie and Jamil had moved in. One or the other of them had used twice their share, ostensibly by accident — something that had never happened with Rachel and Priya. Not once. Oh how Amanda missed them, especially Rachel, who had been her friend since junior high. “Don’t remember me this way,” she’d whispered in the final stages of the O-virus, curled fetal in the hospital bed, all bones and blisters.

Amanda sighed and washed her armpits in the sink. An urgent message from the CRA appeared, informing her that she had made an error on her tax return and needed to remit $4,800 and all business income receipts by October 15th. “What the fuck?!” she screamed, batting it away before retrieving and saving the message. Amanda’s blood pressure alert flashed yellow. She blinked it off and went to get dressed.

The LRT was crowded and smelled unfresh, like sweat and a panoply of cheap deodorants to mask it. Lily was fencing with her cousin from Montreal, her right arm twirling and jabbing in the air, much to the annoyance of the commuter in front of her, whose only riposte was a dirty look.

Amanda should have been working, but instead watched an exposé that one of her Sphere peeps had copied from the Deep Web, about how major corporations and even universities were using DNA to discriminate against anyone with Jewish ancestry. This was because of the Olympic virus, which they believed had targeted Israeli athletes before mistakenly spreading to the general population. Amanda’s stomach clenched. Michael was half-Jewish and had been unable to find work for months. If he didn’t get something before the end of the year, they’d be screwed. And Lily was a quarter Jewish. So now Amanda didn’t just have to worry about viruses specifically designed to attack her daughter, she also had to worry about an entire society shunning her because of it? She instinctively reached out and touched Lily’s arm.

“Mom!” she said, somehow managing to add several syllables to the word. “I’m in the middle of a match!”

“Sorry, Baby.” Amanda felt acid rise from her gut and sizzle against her esophagus. Her heart-PH alert flashed red. She chewed some Tums, then went swimming with dolphins for a few minutes to try to calm down.

Amanda hadn’t been to Pioneer Village since she was a kid on an elementary-school field trip. It was remarkably unchanged, apart from cooling wands (cleverly disguised as sunflowers or old-timey objects) and, of course, the vast parking lot, which had been repurposed. Half was now vegetable garden, with the remainder turned into an interactive hologram of a day-in-the-life of a Canadian family, starting with the Stongs, who had settled there 200 years ago, then jumping decade by decade to the present. It was pretty cool. Amanda had been wending her way through quickly, but surprised herself by lingering in the 1980s and inexplicably fighting back tears in the 1990s. Something about seeing things she hadn’t looked at since she was a kid triggered the strange response. Touch-tone phones and tamagotchis, a whole family gathered around a television, watching the same thing (Friends), the view out the window of a grass lawn and a driveway with two cars, and beyond that the strip-malls and farmers’ fields that used to lie north of Steeles Avenue. Mortified, Amanda fled the exhibit and waited at the exit, catching up on work until Lily’s class emerged. She scheduled a session with her online shrink for that evening. She hadn’t slept properly for months — years, actually, since Rachel died. Clearly, she was getting squirrely.

Michael was probably right. She probably needed meds.

“Hot enough for ya?”

Oh God, thought Amanda. She pasted a smile on her face as the exhausting mother of Patricia Thomas approached her outside the weaver’s shop. “It’s not bad by the wands,” said Amanda.

“You working?” said the exhausting mother of Patricia.

No, thought Amanda, I’m just sitting here waving my hands in the air. “Yup,” she said, using FACE to find Patricia’s mom’s name, which was Beatrice. Beatrice had taken a few Continuing-Studies design courses and always wanted to talk to Amanda about the business. “What’s up with you, Beatrice?”

“You didn’t see my post on Sphere?”

“No,” said Amanda. If she was even peeps with Beatrice, it would be the outermost Sphere.

“Oh! Well, remember you mentioned that City of Toronto contest to design the new amphitheatre in High Park?”

“Yeah…”

“I won!”

“Oh! Wow! Congrats!” How is that possible? “When was it announced?”

“This morning!” said Beatrice. “I’m so pumped!”

“Cool!” said Amanda.

Lily’s class started streaming out of the weaver’s shop. Amanda and Beatrice followed along the path to the blacksmith’s.

“Your firm entered a design, right?” said Beatrice, with a faux-sympathetic smile.

“Um, no,” lied Amanda.

“Really?” said Beatrice, trying to surreptitiously blink on her LiEye-detector. But Amanda noticed and blinked on her blocker.

“Nope.”

“Oh. I thought that’s how it came up — I asked you about what you were working on.”

“Yeah, I was considering it, but was too busy with actual paid commissions.”

“Ah,” said Beatrice. “Well, check out my design when you have a sec. I’d love to know what you think!”

I think it’s almost certainly a rip-off of a real designer’s work, like everything you do, thought Amanda. But she smiled and said: “Definitely!” 

“Whoa!” said Beatrice, pausing at the entrance to the blacksmith’s shop. “It’s a thousand degrees in there! Want to go to the water station?” She held up her thermos.

“No, I’m gonna — I’m curious,” said Amanda, stepping into the dark shop to get away from Beatrice. It was unbearably hot inside. The climate control wasn’t working, and the forge was heaped high with red embers. It took a moment for Amanda’s eyes to adjust to the light. She saw a blacksmith, slick with sweat, pumping hard on the bellows. His linen shirt was soaked through, revealing a thick, muscled body behind the leather apron. Amanda felt a twinge of desire as she watched him work. She moved to the front of the group with the idea of posting a clip of the blacksmith on her PIX scroll with the caption: Hottie! Literally! But as she got close — straining up against the chain that cordoned off the forge at a supposedly safe distance — the blacksmith placed an iron rod on the anvil and struck it hard with his hammer, sending a white-hot coal fragment directly into Amanda’s eye. She screamed as her iEye took the impact and instantly melted.

“Are you OK?!” said Mr. Fofana, Lily’s teacher.

Amanda plucked out the lens and blinked a few times, refocusing. “I’m fine,” she said, surveying the shrivelled mass in the palm of her hand, “but my iEye is toast!” 

“May I see?” said the blacksmith.

Amanda held out the device, but the man stepped close and peered into her right eye, his hand moving instinctively toward her cheek. She swatted it away. “I’m fine!” said Amanda, rattled by his proximity and look of concern. For the second time that day, she found herself tamping down tears.

“Then those are good for something,” muttered the blacksmith, glancing at the ruined iEye. He returned to the forge and thrust the iron back into the embers.

“Seriously?” said Amanda. “An apology might be nice.”

“She could have been blinded!” said Mr. Fofana.

“Not to mention that I was supposed to be working all day,” said Amanda.

“Then you should thank me,” said the blacksmith, wiping sweat from his neck. He had vivid blue eyes with a thick limbal ring around each iris. There was intelligence there. And arrogance.

“All right, kids, let’s vanny. Too hot in here,” said Mr. Fofana, glaring at the blacksmith. “And this is not safe!” He lifted the heavy handmade chain and let it drop. “You should have a barrier here.”

“It’s safe if you stand behind it and don’t push a foot past it,” said the blacksmith.

“Plexiglas!” said Mr. Fofana.

“You’re lucky you had your iEye in,” said Lily, as they left the shop.

Lucky, thought Amanda, mulling the replacement cost of a new iEye, the fact that she had no way to finish her overdue work, that she owed the CRA $4,800, and that a faintly talented dabbler had just surpassed her in a design competition. She removed her now-useless earpiece and dropped it into the pocket of her dress. “Are you having a good time?” said Amanda.

Lily shrugged. “It’s so weird here,” she said. “We have everything, and they have nothing.”

“Okay, people,” said Mr. Fofana, herding the children toward the dining pavilion. “We’ll hit the water station and then break for lunch.”

“Oh my gosh,” said Beatrice, grabbing Amanda’s elbow. “I just heard what happened! I hope that wasn’t a new iEye!”

“No, it was an IX-8.”

“Oh!” Beatrice looked shocked. “Well, I guess the universe is telling you to upgrade.” She laughed loud and staccato.

“I’m gonna…find a washroom,” said Amanda, slipping away from the group. She didn’t want lunch. She was hot and nauseated and tired and depressed. But the farther she got from Beatrice, the better she felt. She had an urge to return to the 1990s living room, but there’d be nothing to see without her iEye. She headed instead toward the mill. That had been her favourite building when she was little. She’d like to watch the big water-wheel turn. As she passed the old–fashioned general store, another group of schoolchildren spilled out across the pathway. Amanda veered onto the lawn of the doctor’s house to avoid them. She cut through the back garden — marigolds, runner beans, tufts of lettuce in neat rows — and exited through a rear gate into a field that led down to the mill.

The field gradually became meadow, all damp and fragrant and alive with bumblebee buzz. Amanda couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen or heard a real bee. She moved through the nodding wildflowers, wary of the bacteria in the soil, but relishing the sweet humid air. She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs.

When she reached the mill, she was sorry to see that the wheel no longer turned. The water in the river had dried up, and the wheel was sun-bleached and cracked. She started to ask Beale when this had occurred, but there was no Beale. Her right eye kept blinking, and her fingers kept twitching — her brain triggering her to check alerts and messages every few seconds.

Feeling restless, she moved back to the main path. That’s when she spied the blacksmith. He had doffed his leather apron and was walking toward a log house at the end of the road. On impulse, Amanda followed.

When she reached the tiny cabin, the blacksmith was already inside. Amanda hesitated for a moment on the threshold, and then entered. It was dark and smelled heavily of wood smoke and fresh baking. Amanda moved through the windowless main room — embers heaped and glowing in a small stone hearth — to the kitchen, where the blacksmith stood, eating a hunk of bread. The jaw working. An old pioneer woman was seated by the window, doing needlepoint. She wore a yellow bonnet and reminded Amanda of a daffodil. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” said Amanda.

“I’m going up,” said the blacksmith to the daffodil, but he was looking squarely at Amanda. He disappeared into a stairwell in the corner of the kitchen that was roped off with a piece of twine. She heard his footfalls as he climbed to the second floor.

The pioneer woman concentrated on her stitching.

There were butter tarts cooling atop linen tea-towels on a thick pine table. The window glass was warped and wavy. Bundles of dried herbs lined the sill.

“It’s so peaceful here.”

“Yes,” said the daffodil. She stood and removed her bonnet. “You can peek upstairs, if you like. I’m taking my lunch now.” She smiled at Amanda and exited the cabin.

Amanda stood motionless in the kitchen for several minutes. Then she ducked under the twine and climbed the steep and deeply worn stairs to the second floor. There was a spinning wheel on a landing that separated two small bedrooms. She peeked into the one on the right — a child’s room, with a braided rug, a narrow cot, and an antique ragdoll. The blacksmith was in the room on the left, stretched out on a sagging double bed with an iron headboard and a faded patchwork quilt.

She surveyed him from the doorway. “You destroyed a very expensive piece of tech,” she said with a quaver in her voice. He didn’t say anything. But he moved to the far edge of the bed, making a space for her. She felt her finger twitch — if only she could scan him on FACE. She had no data on this person at all.

Amanda entered and pressed gingerly on the bed. Sturdy. She sat on the edge and ran her hand over the quilt, which was worn and soft. They blacksmith lay on his back with his eyes closed. Amanda slipped her sandals off and stretched out. She breathed in the dusty scent of the quilt, the healthy sweat smell of the blacksmith, the wood-smoke and bread.

The blacksmith turned to look at her. He looked at her for a long moment before moving toward her. She tensed, expecting his mouth on hers, but the blacksmith took her face in rough hands and kissed the eye he had nearly injured. It was the most intimate thing Amanda had experienced in years and she had to stifle a sob. She thought about sex with Michael, how they always used Skinz and never, ever had sex as themselves with their own real bodies.

Amanda stared into the naked eyes of the blacksmith.

“I take my break here,” he said. “Every day at noon.”

Amanda nodded. The blacksmith wiped the tears that were snaking down her face, then reclined on his back and closed his eyes. Amanda sighed. Soon she would have to go find Lily and her classmates, who would be finishing lunch and continuing their tour. But for now…

The room was still and quiet.

Amanda heard nothing but long, slow breaths. The blacksmith pulled her close, and she rested her head on his chest. She stared out the small bedroom window. She watched clouds skim by behind the rippled glass. She watched dust motes float through a triangle of sun.

Then, for the first time in a very long time, Amanda fell into a deep and restful sleep.