The Receiver

2 6 - C I C A T R I X

I wake before my alarm goes off.

An echo of pain still pulses softly behind my eyes. My hand goes to my burnt arm automatically, brushing the smooth skin. Some mornings, when I'm still half-asleep, I forget it's fixed. Most of the time I wish it wasn't.

I slip off the bed and amble over to the balcony where the view of the sunrise is obstructed only by a single monorail soundlessly gliding along its skytrak. Downcity, we were always too close to the ground to see more than a sliver of the sky. But this high up, the skyline is closer to my feet. Past the mazelike sprawl of the city of steel and glass is nothing but a lush vista of florae, a hothouse without a ceiling. The most exquisitely beautiful lie.

Where the sun begins to crown the horizon a thin band of fiery gold spills like liquid copper over the land, blending into a hot pink blush that eventually fades into milky yellow. A cool morning breeze whips yesterday's clothes around me. My stomach rumbles. I can't remember the last time I ate. As the sun rises the light morphs so quickly I can practically watch the colors shift, the pinks to yellow, the yellows to blue. It reminds me of when I was a kid and thought clouds were something uppercrusters created, these magical pillows of air that smelled like flossed candy.

I wonder if any kids are staring up at the sky now, marveling at the same mysteries so many years later.

I turn away from the sun and back inside, resting on the foot of the unmade bed.

"Show me the Engineer," I order.

The laserscreen pops on and locates Lyath at a small table in his apartment, eating breakfast. Zoa sits on his left, sipping green juice from a round tumbler. Four other techies I don't recognize are seated around the table with them. None of them talk, at least for the moment, each busy with the dish in front of him or her.

"Who are his guests?"

The image of Zoa glows in neon blue light.

"Zoa Asimov Stone," the room's dulcet voice says. "Twenty-four years old. Ranked in the top twenty droid coders in the Technocratic Union and daughter of the eighth Engineer, Lyath Zephyr Stone."

The screen goes on to inform me of the names and occupations of the other attendants, all technocratic policymakers, roboticists, and one assistant coder.

"Show me the Engineer's most recently commissioned bots."

"Searching..."

The laserscreen splits into multiple screens showing different locations scattered around Upper, inside and outside of buildings, scouring the city for what I assume will be thousands of sleeping bots standing in a configuration spelling out his name or something.

The screen zooms in on one of the screens as the bots are located.

In a dark room, somewhere deep within the Zephyr building, strictly regimented blocks of them stand at attention. Despite the dim space being lit only by emergency strips of yellow-green light around the border of the floor I can still see them. Their plating is matte, which makes their armor much less reflective than the fancy housebots most uppercrusters own. They're almost camouflaged in the iron-gray room, just like they will be against the bleak streets of Lower.

There must be at least a thousand.

"Phobos," I curse.

Then I get a good look at their faces, or rather the absence of them. It's easy to see these bots aren't for companionship or domestic assistance because, unlike Frank and Tetra, the only feature they've been fabricated with a single eye exactly like the backside of Zoa's guardbot that day in The Core.