Chapter 5: Felix
"You look like hell."
“You look like hell.”
The old police guard hovers over me on the other side of the cell’s wall. The AG glass between us ripples slightly, sensing the casting amplifier in his badge.
“We can’t all be as spry as you, old man.” Smirking, I give the guard a once over. “The limp’s a nice touch, by the way.”
As if by magic, the man in front of me transforms, his wizened posture straightening until he’s nearly as tall as I am. Nathan Cervantes, known by those who need to know as ‘the Buzzard’. Through the extensive prosthetics on his head and hands, I catch glimpses of the man who practically raised me. The hair that went gray before its time, after his daughter was killed in a mob stampede when NP officers pressed into a group of protesters. The amber eyes that never lit up the same way again. The strong hands they say killed dozens of Pallies during the riot years.
I don’t know if that’s true— never asked— but I do know those same hands yanked me off the street and into an alley before a security drone dropped a missile on my head and turned me into a statistic in the next day’s newscast. Mom was deteriorating by then, and I needed someone to look out for me as I scrambled to provide for her. So Nathan and I decided to stick together and ignore the ways we were both broken forever, at least for a while.
Then I lost Mom. Would’ve lost everything, if it hadn’t been for Eliza and the man standing in front of me.
“Eliza said she’d send you,” I say. “I didn’t believe her, though. Thought you’d be too busy training for that AG circus.”
My uncle says nothing, just avoids my gaze, scratching under the lining of his dark brown prosthetic nose. Fine, I’ll keep going.
“I still don’t understand why you signed up for the Melee. No one’s even come close to pinning you for the riot murders. You don’t need a pardon.”
“Doesn’t matter.” A tired sigh makes his chest rise and fall. “Every day I wake up wondering if today’s the day they catch me. I’ve lived the past twelve years in the shadows, Felix. I want to walk in the light.”
“Yeah, well. The light’s overrated.”
He huffs out a breath of a laugh, and the tension between us eases.
“What happened to the actual officer on duty?” I ask.
“Taking a much-needed nap in the storage closet. I expect he’ll wake up in ten hours or so, once the drugs wear off. In the meantime, let’s get you out of here.” My uncle pulls out an official New Palisades Police palm glass. His hand hovers over the keypad by the cell door, and freezes mid-air.
“Those fucking assholes,” he mutters, looking at the screen.
“What’s the hold up?”
He looks up at me, something heavy etched in the lines of his face. “I need you to understand something, my boy. I’ve got eight digits here. I enter those digits, and you can walk out of this cell. But that don’t mean you’re free. Far from it.”
Understanding dawns. My run-in with the Pallie princess this morning has stained my legal record, and now there’s a fine. “How bad is it?” I ask.
“Fifty thousand,” he says.
“Fifty thousand credits?”
He swallows. “Due next month, or they’ll garnish you.” The word strikes icy terror in my chest. Being garnished means being destitute, indefinitely. No funds to pay for anything, zero credit. A reputation in the gutter. A scarlet letter on my chest. I’ll be a pariah. As the saying goes, cred in the red and you might as well be dead.
“But that’s more money than I’ve ever seen in my life,” I say. “I don’t know anyone with that kind of cred.” Correction: I didn’t know anyone with that kind of cred until this morning, when that green-haired egomaniac ruined my life. There’s no gig on the planet that could cover that debt—in the Boundary, or even over in NP. I don’t even have anything valuable to sell; my apartment’s barely more than a mattress on the floor and a potted plant in the corner.
That doesn’t mean I’m entirely out of assets though…
“You got my palm glass?” I ask. My uncle slides it through the AG barrier, which parts for his hand as it responds to the amplifier in his badge. I grab the screen quickly and scan desperately through my MemoryBanker app to check my current storage. Maybe I overlooked something, maybe there’s some windfall I forgot about? But the app just confirms what I already know, what’s been true for months now: I’ve already leased everything but the app’s complimentary 30 day storage, and my handful of remaining memories of Mom. Her warm alto singing me a lullaby, tired but soothing all the same. The squeeze of her hand as we wove through the crowds, on our way to somewhere I can’t recall. The way her gaunt, pallid face lit up with one last glowing smile for me, right before she left me forever.
Those memories are off limits. I can’t lose any more of her than I’ve already lost.
When I look up, my uncle’s staring at me. I know that look. It’s the same look he gave me when I was twelve and we still slept on the streets. The first time he insisted I take the threadbare blanket for myself instead of sharing it, then proceeded to shiver all night beside me. Or the look when he swore to some hungry ganglords that he was the one who’d stolen their pilfered bread, and took the beating that should’ve been mine.
This is the look my uncle gives me when he’s about to do something stupid for my sake.
“No.”
“Felix—”
“I’m not taking your spot. I don’t want to go to the Melee. I don’t even want you to go.” I run a hand through my hair. “I’ll figure something out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” he says. “You have been placed in a situation it is impossible to climb your way out of. The impossibility of it is the entire point. The Consortium doesn’t set debts like that to teach us a lesson. It sets them to cull the herd.”
I cross my arms. “Well, fucking baa then, I guess.”
“You don’t mean that.” He shakes his head sadly. “You may not want to live for your own sake, but do it for hers. You are the last remaining repository of your mother’s memory. The last life she touched. The last record that she was ever here. You gonna let them cull that, too?”
“I…” My throat tightens. “Just get me out of here, will you?” I ask softly.
He enters the code, and the AG wall disappears completely. Then my uncle enters a sequence on his own personal palm glass, and my pocket buzzes with an alert:
THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME!
Fantastic news: Nathan Cervantes has transferred their slot in The Melee to you. You have
13 hours, 49 minutes, 8 seconds
to accept
[PRESS HERE TO ACCEPT]
I stuff the screen back in my pocket.
My uncle sighs. “Promise me you’ll at least think about it.”
I stare at him, this man who’s fought so hard for me over the years, before I was even old enough to fully appreciate the risks he took by not leaving me behind. Some good it did him. Both of us are still trapped like rats in this maze. Losing our loved ones. Losing parts of ourselves.
“The Pallie girl,” I say, switching subjects. “She said she knew you.”
“She lied.”
Big surprise. “She said she owed you a debt.”
A thoughtful expression crosses my uncle’s face as he considers me. “Now that…” he says. “That may be true.”
❖
The first thing I do when I enter my eighth-floor walk-up apartment is check the bathroom light— off, thank goodness. Then I tend to Horace, my snake plant. Eliza tells me I’ve had Horace for about two years now, which makes him the longest relationship in my life besides her and my uncle. It’s a simple arrangement: I give him water and an open window. And in exchange, Horace gives me the sense that the sparse studio I live in even remotely approaches a home, as opposed to somewhere I spend time while I wait for my life to start.
Any day now.
Speaking of Eliza, she’s been texting me nonstop for the last twenty minutes:
ELIZA
So are you gonna do it?
FELIX What, take my one-man yodeling act on the road?Thinking about it, yeah
ELIZA
Shut up
Are you gonna enlist in the Melee???
Good news travels fast, I guess.
FELIX Not likely. What kind of father would I be if I just
abandoned Horace like that?I run a thumb over Horace’s deep green leaves. I can remember the last time I watered him, which means he’s not due yet. In a week and a half he’ll shuffle off of the edge of my complimentary thirty days of memory storage. Then I’ll bust out the watering can.
Eliza’s lighting up my glass with a bunch of reasons why I should sign my life away. I ignore them; I’ll tell her why she’s wrong later. On the rickety side table near the entrance is a cluttered pile of odds and ends I always dump out of my pockets as soon as I walk in the door. Usually it takes a minor miracle for me to summon the minimum amount of giving a crap required to sift through the stack, but today I could use the distraction.
Let’s see…
A couple of utility bills I can put off until next week, a flyer promoting the latest abomination of a holo-concert, and… a book. The back cover was ripped off long ago by the looks of it, but I skim a few pages, and the writing seems pretty good. I turn the book over to see the title. The Great Gatsby. Oh, right. This was the book Eliza was telling me about, the one that brought me and— Iris? Ivy? No, Irene—together. I consider donating the book again next time I’m out, but then I decide to keep it. Maybe I’ll like it… again. There’s a second first time for everything.
Before I put the book on the ancient cracked laminate of my kitchen counter, I notice something sticking out between the pages. I pull out a bright orange postcard, the words NOTIFICATION OF RENT INCREASE stamped across the top in unforgiving black ink. My eyes scan over the rest…
Dear tenant…
Effective August 1… that’s four weeks ago. Fuck.
As always, we appreciate your contribution to our community.
I’ll bet you do. All one thousand credits of it.
I stare at the notification in my hand. How long have I had it? Eliza said the thing with Irene ended a couple of months ago. Most likely past-Felix got this notification, had a mini-panic attack not too dissimilar from the one I’m feeling crawl down my throat right now, decided it was future-Felix’s problem, and tucked it away in the book for me to find later.
Thanks, pal.
I remember a holo-cartoon when I was a kid, of a strong man at the circus, lifting one of those giant mental weights you only see in cartoons, with “one ton” stamped across it. He was struggling, but doing alright, until one of the clowns climbed up to the top of the tent and dropped the lightest, most unassuming little feather. It landed with a ping on top of the weight, and the whole thing collapsed on the strong man.
This orange postcard is that feather.
And unlike the strong man, I don’t have cartoon physics on my side. I feel like I’m trapped in some giant’s fist, their enormous fingers wrapped around my chest. The giant keeps squeezing, and squeezing, and I can’t escape. Can barely breathe. Even if I hadn’t gotten slammed with an impossible debt for daring to keep a Palisader from hurting my loved ones this morning, the hits just keep on coming. Death by a thousand paper cuts. A ton of feathers is still a ton. Still impossible to carry.
I let the postcard flutter to the ground. None of this matters. At all. Not the rent increase, not the bills, not the food rations. Not the gigs Eliza busts her ass for as she bends her own morality beyond recognition. My whole life, the Consortium has told Bounders to jump, and we’ve asked ‘how high?’. The only difference for me now is that they’ve set the floor on fire. I’m a mouse trapped in a maze with no exit, and I can feel them watching, amused. What will he do? How long will he last?
Not long.
I’m tired.
I slide my palm glass out of my pocket. If fate decides the Melee is the end of the line, then that’s fine by me. I’ve got nothing left to lose.
I open the invitation, and I accept.
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