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Synopsis

Stellaxis operatives 06 and 22 have escaped. Years ago, they survived a corporate civil war; Stellaxis kidnapped and modified them into celebrity supersoldiers. But 06 and 22 have finally broken free from their barracks. They flee into a strange city they barely remember, trying to remain anonymous while their faces appear on billboards.

It will be an expensive disaster for the director of the supersoldier program if word gets out about the escaped operatives. But she has paired them for a reason: 06 to aggressively engage, 22 to keep her in check. One flight, one anchor: a perfect team if they would just return to their rightful place with her. If not, all operatives' days are numbered.

Excerpt

One cold night, two children stand in front of a coffee shop. Snow blows all around them, and they are badly dressed for it. A boy and a girl, the barista thinks, noticing them through the plate glass. Young enough or short enough that the window-paint lettering COFFEE, retouched just that morning by the barista themself in blue to match the blue chalk on the sidewalk chalkboard, arcs over both their cold-huddled heads like a monochrome rainbow.

Strange clothing, the barista notes. The one they think might be a girl is in an oversized lime-green blazer, the maybe-boy in a white lab coat, like a tiny pharmacist. Both blazer and lab coat are buttoned the whole way up, but the blazer only goes so far. Beneath it, the girl's got on what looks like a simple dark shirt that buttons up the front. No winter gear to speak of. No real coats, even. Snow in their hair. Window light pools around them: soft, buttery, looking much warmer than it is.

The barista checks the time on their lenses. Four minutes till closing. Quiet this time of evening, usually. Storm like this, the place is dead.

A normal day, they'd be finishing up wiping down the counters now. Flipping the door sign?like the chalkboard, a symptom of how terminally old-school their boss is?to CLOSED. Walking the six blocks to the checkpoint, then the two blocks home. Tilting their head back, from time to time, to let the app on their lenses show them where the stars would be, if the sky weren't wall-to-wall snow and smog instead.

Rag frozen in their hand, though, they're just standing there. Watching these two weird kids devour that yellow light with their eyes.

Nine years old or so, the barista reckons. Then reconsiders. It's the look on the children's faces that's lifting years off them, peeling them back to something less worldly, less certain. It's in the way the upper half of the girl's body is oscillating toward and away from the door, one indecisive degree at a time, while her feet, in their no doubt seasonally inappropriate attire, do not move. In the way the boy holds himself in perfect ready stillness, in a way that reminds the barista of nothing so much as their cat, facing down a spider, unsure which of them is the hunter and which the prey.

Eleven, maybe. Twelve at most. In any case too young for this shit. Unsupervised. Underdressed. Three hours into an expected all-night nor'easter. They look like they're wearing half a Halloween costume apiece. And not the good kind. The kind you slap together out of stuff from your parents' closets and basements when you can't afford the ones at the party store.

The snow is coming down in big clumpy flakes now. When it hits the kids' faces, it takes an alarmingly long time to melt.

In hindsight, the barista will wonder why it took them so long to act. Unpack, in bullet points, as part of a whole minute-by-minute replay of everything they should have done instead. Rationalize, albeit feebly.

• Because the children weren't visibly injured.
• Because the barista has their implant set to alert them if there's a bioweapon in the air and it hadn't gone off in days.
• Because one of the best parts of this job is how it's way out on the edge of the Stellaxis half of the city, just a couple of blocks from the Greenleaf one, near enough to the little strip of demilitarized zone that beyond a few small skirmishes this street hasn't seen real combat since October.
• Because, due to the above, there was no quantifiable threat for them to need rescuing from. Just two kids, ogling a warm haven from the cold.

Because the real answer makes less sense.

Copyright © 2023 by Nicole Kornher-Stace

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