Unison Spark
FOR LAUREN
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
1. The Girl with the Blue Pigtail
2. The Boy in the Business Suit
3. Don’t Look Back
4. Procedure Level Seven
5. The Scourge
6. In Unison
7. Flight of the Cloud Children
8. The Face of the Dragon
9. Watchmaker
10. Calibration
11. Topside Education
12. Launch Party
13. Survivors
14. Unison 3.0 (Beta Version)
15. Daughters
16. Sons
17. Friends
Acknowledgments
Copyright
1
THE GIRL WITH THE BLUE PIGTAIL
HER NEW NAME was Mistletoe. On her fifteenth birthday, she announced to her caretaker, Jiri, that she was sick of being called Anna.
He grunted. “Anna’s your name.”
“Who picked it out?”
“Your mother and father.”
“And where are they?”
He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Okay. What do you want to be—”
“Mistletoe.”
She read his face: that’s crazy. So she added, “Here’s how it is: I’ll be thinking of myself as Mistletoe, so when you call me Anna, I won’t answer. Because that’s not my name.”
She glared as he rolled his eyes in resignation, the signal that she had won. Jiri plunged his thick fingers back into the hopeless jumble of wires that had once been a genuine pre-Unison computer. Mistletoe went out on the balcony. Lying on her back, she gazed up through the airholes in the plasteel canopy that kept Little Saigon from rising into topside Eastern Seaboard City. She lived with Jiri at the peak of a mountain of makeshift houses that cascaded down thirty stories to the streets below. Their house was wedged so tightly beneath the canopy that Mistletoe imagined she could feel the weight of the city pressing down upon her as she slept.
She rocked her head gently back and forth until her fluffy blue pigtail flattened into a pillow. The airholes were no bigger than Jiri’s fist, but if she lay in just the right spot she could watch gleaming cars pass within teeth-clenching millimeters of one another. The hum of a billion commuters herded by Eastern Seaboard City’s traffic control system resonated down through the airholes and rattled her insides pleasantly, like the pre-Unison massage chairs Jiri sold at his junk shop. As the afternoon above the canopy faded to crimson dusk, she drifted into an uneasy dream.…
The room was dim and ice-cold. She was strapped to a slab inside a metal tube the size of a refrigerator. Old-fashioned gunshots, raw and booming, punctuated distant shouts. The thudding of disruptor weapons became frantic footsteps. A gentle voice said, “Don’t be afraid, Anna.”
Cut to a new scene. She was bobbing jerkily up and down. A snake was slithering across her shoulder. No, two snakes. Three! She screamed and found herself muffled, her face buried inside the folds of a man’s greasy, foul-smelling overcoat. She squirmed and he clutched her closer to his chest. The snakes were all around her. She tried to bite the meaty hand. The man cursed in a different language. Jiri! He was running faster than she’d ever believed possible, squeezing her to his body with one hand while the other fired a pistol backward over his shoulder. She extracted an arm and grabbed hold of one of the snakes. It was smooth and metallic, some kind of wire. She felt along its length until her hand reached her forehead.