Her face was sprouting wires.

She screamed and wriggled free of Jiri’s grasp, and then she was flailing in empty space. She woke before she hit the ground, sitting upright on the balcony, hands pressed against the sides of her wireless head, panting.

* * *

Today, six months later, Mistletoe sat on the balcony with her back against Nelson, the rickety scoot she’d rescued from Jiri’s junk shop. In the city above the canopy, Nelson was probably some rich kid’s discarded toy. Down in her teeming subcanopy neighborhood, he was a treasure worth protecting with her life. The four electrostatic ion lifts on the underside were top-of-the-line ESC craftsmanship. Her friend Sliv had replaced the clattering transmission and aligned the steering. She rarely let the scoot out of her sight.

“I had the dream again last night, Nelson.”

The scoot sat silently. It didn’t have A.I. components and couldn’t hear or respond. Conversations between Mistletoe and Nelson were heavily one-sided.

She sighed and looked through the clear plexi door at Jiri hunched over a tattered old instruction manual, squinting and sounding out the words to himself. She had seen other foreigners read Western English like that. But she had never seen anyone take notes like Jiri, like he was recopying the entire thing. His method seemed ridiculous, but she had never asked him about it, just placed it in the category of things they would never discuss. Since the bad dreams had begun six months ago, that category had grown steadily. Secrets seemed to breed more secrets. And there had always been something hurried and on edge about the way Jiri talked to her, as if he would rather she just kept things to herself. So, most of the time, she did. Her latest secret was a present from Sliv, a necklace with a silver charm of three interlocking gears. He’d never given her anything before, and she’d been too surprised to thank him. She kept it hidden beneath her shirt. The tiny gears inhabited the scooped-out hollow where her collarbone met her throat.

She watched Jiri scratch his mustache and turn the page. He was too busy to notice that she had spent all day out on her scoot without checking in. She hugged her knee to her chest and prodded her shin—bruised from squeezing between a stalled transport bus and a spice-import cart. Tender, but not unbearable.

Across the walkway that swung beneath the canopy, a young couple was tending a fire. Mistletoe waved, but they, too, had no time to spare for her and didn’t even look her way. She lay on her back, blue pigtail cushioning her head, and stared up through the holes. She wondered how many other kids were doing the same thing. Every time she imagined other kids, she imagined them with her exact thoughts and ideas and questions. She glanced down over the edge of the balcony at the endless jostling masses below—Little Saigon was like a ripe grape with mushy insides too big for its skin—and despaired. Because what did it matter what she thought about anything? She was a speck, a tiny particle who would live and die staring up through a hole while the world went about its business as if she had never been born.