She watches them on the CCTV: bartering. She makes a mental note to reposition the camera — the sun glares, even through the glassy screen. But perhaps it is just her. Perhaps she is the one glaring. She had chosen Timta for management material because he had claimed to drive a hard bargain. But now she is sitting in the back office, reclining at his desk, recording him cave in to some low-life street-slicker.
“Come on, man — it’s a good one. Worth at least 50 pangols.” The desperation in his voice is pitiful.
Timta draws his eyebrows together, pauses. “30,” he offers.
“For a street fight? I killed a man and you want to give me 30 pangols?”
She watches Timta struggle. Flounder. His mouth opens and closes like a fish. Some hard bargain, she thinks.
“I’ve got plenty of deaths in stock,” Timta tarries.
“But in this one, right, I litera-” the street-slicker seems to be stifling a laugh. Or at least attempting to.
She curls her lip as she looks. The lower classes of Skyreen could be so crass. But she waits and watches.
“I literally punched the life outta this fuck.”
She listens to the man boast and drums her nails on her desk. Timta’s desk. Her desk. Everything is hers. This shop wouldn’t exist without her. Matter Over Mind is hers and so is everything in it. Including Timta. She feels the need to remind both men of this. But Timta is the harvester. She is the dealer. It won’t do to mix up roles. Especially when Timta hasn’t seemed to grasp what his even is yet.
“I’m hungry, man. Come on. Help a guy out,” the street-slicker pleads.
Timta stiffens. Swallows. He won’t make it in this world, she thinks to herself. This is just a little pawn shop. Even she is not big-headed enough to think of herself as a giant in the Memory Market Corporation. All she has is a little franchise. If he can’t survive here, he’ll never make it to the big leagues.
She is momentarily distracted. By something. Something. Something about the corporation? She accepts that her memory is a patchwork. She was poor once too, after all. But this certain something niggles.
“Fine. 50 pangols.”
The street-slicker whoops, flinging a fist into the air before slapping it onto the surface of the counter, awaiting his winnings.
“Memory first,” the hard-bargainer reminds him, lowering the glass screen between them.
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” He turns his back to Timta, who leans over the counter with the nexus.
The street-slicker’s top cervical vertebrae looks worn out. Even under his heavy spattering of lower-class stamps, she can see the mound of unmistakable bite marks. She wonders how many times he has willingly let a nexus take his memories from him. And surely for much less than 50 pangols. She likes the next part and almost smiles as he winces. The nexus has a scorpion-like tail that quite literally buries itself under its connector’s skin, until it finds the proffered memory. There is always the barest bit of blood.
Timta yanks the nexus out of the man’s spine when a little machine under the counter blinks its white light eyes at him.
The street-slicker’s hand is outstretched. She peers closer to see a series of pictures on his forearm — similar to those at the top of his spine: a withered rose, a dagger embedded in a skull. Nothing very original. Just the usual stamps the indigents of Skyreen seem so proud to display. He turns back to face Timta.
“Do you want a receipt?”
The street-slicker hesitates. “Nah.” He swallows. “I’ve still got the build-up to it. Don’t think it’s something I want to be reminded of.”
Now, that is a surprise. Receipts are normally boasting rights for long-forgotten events. She narrows her eyes at this, keeps them trained on her new property, forces them to follow his memory until it is securely locked away and irretrievable. Hers.
Once the man is safely out of her store and back on the savage Skyreen streets, Timta sidles his way into the backroom.
“Feeling particularly generous today, are we?”
“The guy was desperate, Daphne.”
“Desperation is all part of the game.”
“He was thin.”
“Then he probably would have accepted less.”
“Either way.” Timta sighs. “You’ll be able to sell that one for at least triple up in the Apex. There was blood everywhere.” He hands her a briefcase — innocuous enough.
“Try not to lose me anymore money while I’m out.” She makes sure her shoulder makes hard contact with his as she swings through the door.
There is a lumina waiting for her outside the back entrance. She slides into her seat, keeping the briefcase on her lap, beneath her ever-watchful hands. The lumina barely touches the waterway beneath it as it speeds off towards the Apex. Daphne enjoys the barely-visible feeling that it affords her. It was designed to traverse Skyreen almost undetected, bouncing the light off its watery, metal skin. She is wonderfully aware of her depiction: hardly more than a reflection on the surface of Skyreen’s system of canals.
She stares. The common sight of the skybots is enough to turn anyone away from street-slicking. Daphne included. Of course, you’re not supposed to say that. Technology has come a long way and Skyreen is fair and just to all of its inhabitants, but some are just more fortunate than others. As has been the way for millennia.
All the same, she wonders at how the street-slickers can bare to share their bottom-feeding world with them: carrying resources that could be theirs; ferrying valuables to and from various, nefarious places; often stealing directly from them, taking the few bits and pieces they have back to the Apex. She supposes they don’t actually have a choice. They just have to bare it.
But luckily, the street-slickers aren’t sensitive souls. That’s what the Apex likes about them. That’s why they’re a good source of income — their lack of sensitivity. Their willingness to stage and create any memory in the hopes of pawning it for a few pangols.
As long as Skyreen looks good from the penthouses, it doesn’t matter which parts of it are crumbling away behind closed doors. Decaying and rotting. Suffering silently. And the suffering is silent. The Apex and its skybots ensure that.
She swifts past scantily clad women flaunting their age-old trade. She recognises a few. One had pawned a particularly putrid memory of infanticide a few weeks ago. It is not her job to judge, but her fingers flutter protectively over the briefcase, as though the woman still has the ability to get at the memory of the child inside.
The lumina leaves the street-slickers behind, and Daphne fights the urge to stroke the briefcase that contains the memory of the baby boy.
More skybots. Errand-running.
The Apex. She’s here.
The lumina enters the foyer, stretching out its side door to form a narrow corridor, directly connecting to the elevator. Daphne appreciates this. Skyreen’s streets are becoming more and more brutalised by the day. And brutalised people do brutal things. The contents of her briefcase proves this.
Her heels clack across the marble floor until the elevator ensconces her in its warm glow. She stops in front of the mirror, almost squaring up to her own reflection. The glass doors link arms behind her, as she is lifted up to the Apex.
She stares. She focuses on herself, blind to the luxury of the floors she is shooting past. She hones in on her eyes: cold, breathless-blue water. They wind anyone who dares to look into them for too long. She smiles at herself. But it doesn’t reach her icy eyes. She hums along with the familiar elevator music — practically the Apex’s anthem. Even though she is not one of them, she knows all the words:
Steel and glass pierce invisible sky,
Atop the world, where fortunes lie.
We are the Apex, swift and sly.
Claiming memories.
We tread on sunlight, unseen and gold,
Quenching desires and longing — behold!
We are the Apex, bright and bold.
Claiming memories.
The music stops. Daphne is relieved. The Apex can be so trite, despite the originality they claim.
The elevator doors disentangle their limbs from one another and reveal the Apex to Daphne. She looks over it with a gaze of indifference and apathy. She has lost count of her visits here. But it hasn’t always been this way.
She thinks back to her first ever sighting of the penthouse world, housing people who had never set foot on Skyreen ground. She remembers the first time she saw the opulence of the Apex restaurant. She tries to feel the same amazement, but to no avail.
There are no walls, just windows. Glass everywhere. Sunlight ransacks every inch of the top floor, bathing the ornate, gold furniture in an amber-like haze. But the view. Even Daphne has to admit that it’s tastefully decorated. Nothing distracts from the view, not even the lavish paintings they brought up with them from the Surface when Skyreen was discreetly first born.
As Daphne glances out at Skyreen’s skyline, the clouds surrounding the city’s ground-level border overflow, looking like a gathering gaggle of black-clothed clairvoyants. She chooses not to see this as an omen. Sure, the clouds could rise above the low-lying areas of the city, but this didn’t happen often. And even when it did, the Apex was never affected — its view, never obscured. The weather manipulation facilities are far too advanced.
Daphne strides out of the elevator — heels, once again, tap-tap-tapping across the marble. They make her a good few inches taller and she hasn’t felt her feet in years; ugly, bunioned feet are a small price to pay in exchange for feeling fine whilst walking through the Apex. Besides, the people here can afford to look good. So, she needs to look the part, too.
She makes sure to maintain eye-contact with everyone. She nods to a woman with some sort of feather-boa strapped to her head. She smiles confidently to a man decanting a bottle of brandy. She raises a hand to a couple at the bar in matching make-up, drinking matching cocktails, and wearing matching outfits. Yes, as long as she feigns confidence, feigns belonging, feigns respect, she’ll be fine.
She finally makes it past the luridly lit bar and spots Lord and Lady Pangol — wealthy enough to have the entire currency of the Overfolk nation named after them — sitting with their gaudily dressed friends.
“Darling Daphne.” Lord Pangol doesn’t mean to sneer. He just does it naturally. “We’re teetering on the tips of our trepidation to see what you’ve got in that treasure trove of a briefcase for us, this week.” He pulls her into him, firmly and conspiratorially, letting his hand drift a little too far down her back.
Lady Pangol takes both of her hands and raises them to her mouth. Daphne is used to her now. She doesn’t kiss or embrace — she sniffs, smells her fingers as though there is some irresistible scent on them.
Daphne retrieves her hands at the earliest possible opportunity, which does not go unnoticed.
She distracts with, “Good afternoon,” addressing the ridiculously clothed collection of people around the table.
But nobody replies. They just look her up and down. A woman, whose neck its being throttled by a choke-hold of pearls, gives her a tight smile, as though the ostensible strangulation is affecting her ability to move her face.
A person in a masquerade mask gives a flick of their wrist, hand hanging limply, as though they are dismissing her.
She takes a seat.
Opposite, there is a woman staring at her, wearing only lingerie — black lace accented with a heavy ruby necklace that seems to weigh her shoulders down. She does not smile — simply tilts her head to the right. A man in an expensive tuxedo sits beside her with his hand between her legs.
Daphne looks away and lifts a hand to beckon a server. “One of your famous sky-limits.”
The server scrunches his metallic, skybot body obsequiously, and rushes off to his cocktail station to synthesise her drink.
“There’s no feeling quite like that of being served, is there?” the woman in lingerie purrs. She spreads her legs and everyone around the table takes a deep breath, inhaling her smell.
Daphne fixes her eyes on Lady Pangol. “And how did the last batch serve you?”
“Well,” she bats her eyes coquettishly, “I adored the makeshift Colosseum-in-a-car-park memory — just inspired. Who knew the street-slickers could be so creative?”
“Yes, we shared that one,” said Lord Pangol, leaning over the table. “The moment it hit my bloodstream, I knew it was going to be a little drop of heaven.”
Daphne had found that memory particularly disturbing. Ancient History had always been kept from the street-slickers, lest they get any nasty, little ideas about riots and rebellion into their emptied heads. History always seems to find a way of coming back around.
“Gave me an idea, actually,” Lord Pangol proudly professed. “I set up our very own Colosseum here, in the Apex. Survivors leave with 500 pangols.”
“Just inspired,” his wife croons.
“Yes, it has been rather entertaining.” The man in the tuxedo removes his hand from the lingerie-d woman.
Daphne looks out of the window, her eyes falling to the ground where street-slickers are shuffling around under the great gaze of the Apex. The pearl-throttled woman follows suit: uninterested at first — dull and dumb; then her eyes light and latch onto something; hatch a glow that seems to emanate through her entire body. She lifts a hand and one of the skybots clangs over at lumina speed.
“Her skin colour,” she says, pointing down into the messy Skyreen streets.
“Oh Kala. How many times are you going to change colour?” Lady Pangol chuckles affectionately.
“It’s only a bit of DNA. I can change it as many times as I want,” Kala replies, huffily — her neck straining against the pearls.
Lady Pangol raises her eyebrows and returns her attention to Daphne. “Thank goodness you don’t have the option, dear. Sometimes there is such thing as too much choice.”
Before Kala can retort, the lingerie-clad woman speaks: “Zana, bring me my haemoglobin.”
One of the more humanoid skybots arrives with its head bent over a tray. “Do you want it here, Miss Oolin? Or would you like to go somewhere more private?”
“Here will do, Zana. Fill me up,” she says, without removing her eyes from Daphne.
Daphne wonders if a street-slicker would react the same way she did, seeing all of this grandeur for the first time. She wonders what they would do for a haemoglobin injection. They must have had terrible altitude sickness when Skyreen was first born.
She turns to Lady Pangol, fastening her face into an excited smile. “Are you ready to see my stock?”
The woman squeals with delight, tapping her shiny-shod feet underneath her chair relentlessly.
Daphne feels the lingerie woman’s gaze still lingering on her, but she focuses all of her attention on opening her briefcase and setting up the Oracle. She flicks a switch and the head-shaped machine flickers and blinks itself into life.
As soon as her eyes open, the Oracle speaks with a voice that is more human than anyone sitting around that table. She is a guardian. She guards. Or she attempts to guard. She remembers every memory the nexus has ever entrusted to her.
“Daphne, I implore -”
“Hush, Oracle. Download and play memory sequence for 21st August 3304.”
The Oracle obeys and her heaven-blue eyes project a hologram into the middle of the table.
The low-life street fight that Timta took earlier was the last memory to be fed to her, so it is the first to be shown. The first offering to be regurgitated — vomited up.
Street-slickers, shoddy and grubby (even as crystal clear holograms), gather on the table in front of them, surrounding the memory-donor and his opponent. They cheer, jeer, sneer at them: no more than boys — shirtless and desperate. The memory circles the table in the manner the two boys circle one another. A fist flies out. Then another. A flurry of them. A flurry of crunches. The memory-donor is clearly stronger and he howls his war-cry up to the sky, briefly cutting off the view of his battered opponent. When he brings himself back down to the ground, the other boy is wobbling away from him, open-mouthed, gormless and exhausted. The circle of street-slickers link arms, trapping him in the ring. Daphne watches the floor as it plays out. She doesn’t like to be reminded of humanity.
Lord and Lady Pangol have clearly picked a side and cheer on the memory-donor as though he can hear them. As though he can even remember this moment.
“Go on. Fucking hit him,” Lord Pangol growls as his wife once more squeals with delight, fists clutched to the side of her face.
The memory ends with the donor standing over the other boy. He is unrecognisable from the beginning of the memory. He lays there, bones protruding from his face, bruises haemorrhaging, blood bubbling as though it has been brought to the boil. The street-slicker hadn’t lied: he had quite literally punched the life out of him.
Daphne’s expression is absolute. Her smile has not strayed from her lips. “So, there’s the sample memory. Who wants to open the bidding?”
“200 pangols,” says the man in the tux.
“250,” challenges Lord Pangol. “Screw it — 300!” he cackles.
Tux holds up his hands and backs away. This was all just a formality. The most violent memories were always claimed by his lordship.
Daphne sucks the memory out of the Oracle with a syringe and places it carefully in a purpose-designed carrier. She gets up, shimmying her way around the table to present the memory to Lord Pangol, bowing as she does so. He likes a good show and Daphne always delivers.
When she retakes her seat, she ensures that she makes eye contact with each person at the table. “Next up, we have an orgy in the middle of one of the canals.” She commands the Oracle to play the first minute of the next memory. The Oracle obeys, spreading a hologram of glistening, wet, naked street-slickers across the table.
“100,” Miss Oolin offers before the first 10 seconds have even played.
“Any challenges to 100?”
“150,” Lady Pangol interjects playfully.
“200.”
“My my, you want this one, don’t you, Lolita? 250.”
“300.”
The men chortle to themselves — a sound not unlike swine.
“Any challenges to 300?” Daphne asks after a slight pause.
Silence, but for the moans coming from the hologram.
Daphne halts the memory. “Sold. To Miss Lolita Oolin.” She extracts the memory and gets up once more, looking at Miss Oolin’s heavy ruby necklace instead of her face. When she presents it to her, she meets her eyes and wishes she hadn’t. Her face shows a feeling similar to Daphne’s when she is dealing with street-slickers. “All yours.”
Miss Oolin snatches the carrier from her and hands it straight to Zana.
Daphne returns to her seat and repeats her facial expressions, her words, her actions for the remaining plethora of memories: an out-of-hand party in a dirty, abandoned car park; another street fight; a murder of an old man in his home; a rape that Daphne manages to joke about getting for a bargain because the street-slicker was so eager to get rid of it; and of course, the infanticide. Pearl-throated Kala takes the latter, after a challenge from Tux. Daphne does not look at her when she delivers that memory.
“Dear Daphne, you out-do yourself every week,” preens Lady Pangol as she runs her fingers lovingly over her new collection of carriers.
“Yes,” murmurs Miss Oolin, fingering her ruby necklace. “And what about you? Do you ever keep any of these memories for yourself?”
Daphne is surprised to hear Miss Oolin speaking to her. Let alone directing a question to her. “I’m just the dealer,” she smiles sweetly. “It wouldn’t do to forget my role.”
“What if you did forget your role?” Miss Oolin leans over the table, breasts almost spilling out of her bra. “What if the memory of your role was snatched from you?”
“I don’t pawn my memories.”
Lord and Lady Pangol chuckle.
“I have one of your memories,” Lord Pangol says, looking steadily into her eyes.
“And me,” says his wife, returning Daphne’s sweet smile.
“Me too,” Kala says.
Miss Oolin raises her hand. “Guilty.”
Tux is silent but smiling salaciously.
“And what memories of mine do you have?” Daphne asks, her calm mask now slipping and uncollected.
“Every ending to every weekly meeting we’ve ever had,” Lord Pangol answers.
The niggle has returned. It has returned with a vengeance that makes her palms sweat. She rubs them on her thighs, hoping her skirt will mop up the moisture.
“Deep down, you’re nothing but a street-slicker,” muses Miss Oolin. “A jumped-up one. A street-slicker who has done well for herself. But still a street-slicker.”
She makes to get up but feels cold, hard, metallic clamps push down on her shoulders. Whipping her head around, she sees that Zana has secured her to her seat.
“Don’t worry, Daphne. Relax. You won’t remember this either.”
Whoa!!! That ending! I'm hooked.
Okay, glad I popped back to the prologue. This is incredible. Such great worldbuilding and characters.