Chapter One
Everybody in the Cooperative Realm thought the planet Arkhide was filled with monsters.
What would they think of this garden, then?
Mondrian Delacroix stepped through the door-field from Arkhide Orbital Station’s airless metal corridor into the gorgeous abundance of its garden. Her boots sank softly into the sandy plasticrete flooring. The gentle give stood a stark contrast to the unyielding metal of the rest of the station.
Arkhide Orbital had been built first for synthetic humans, not bags of bones and muscle like Mon.
Why in Safra’s name had Aimee Five asked her to come here, anyway?
She knew why.
Heather. It had to be Heather.
Mon pushed back the helmet of her atmosuit, corralled her wayward hair again, and took a deep breath of clean air. The rich loam of actual soil was a novelty sweet enough to awaken childhood memories of long walks with her foster parents.
Heather hadn’t been so lucky with her parents. How she’d become Mon’s responsibility, though, was all on Mon.
Blasted damsels in distress.
She tried to cast her thoughts toward the sweetness of the new grass and the old roses. The tang of moisture in the light breeze, the dew allowed to linger before being whirred away by the air scrubbers. The foliage, shimmering greens and golds like an emerald tapestry, rustling in the artificial breeze as if greeting an old friend.
Mon’s lip twisted wryly. She’d been here only once before, a short eight months ago.
She’d come on a sort of diplomatic, mostly deliriously painful mission, towing seventeen-year-old Heather Quostov along with her like a stray kitten. A seventeen-going-on-thirty, astromechanical genius of a kitten.
With the synthetic humans’ help, they’d solved their mystery, and also found a temporary home for Heather. Well, Heather had found it. She’d begged to stay, to dive into all the new tech the synths might show her.
Thank Safra, Arkhide had said yes.
Staying here had saved the girl, for now, from the Cooperative’s greedy claws. Heather, like Mon, had an extremely rare skill. They could “hear” certain wavelengths normally far outside normal human range. The perception wasn’t just through their ears, but that’s how their brains liked to interpret it. Heather’s Listening abilities might be greater even than Mon’s. A fact Mon had omitted from the report she sent her Co-op bosses after she’d done the girl’s initial screening.
Living in the world was hard when you could sense every machine hum, every power line, every magnetic wave. Most Listeners couldn’t really function outside of special environments that offered a lot of accommodation. And a lot of training in self-control—which the Co-op was good at.
And then they owned you.
Until now.
Heather had devised a way to modify noise-canceling headphones to also block nearly eighty percent of the sounds only Listeners could sense.
It was going to change everything.
Now they could choose when to Listen and when not to. And they didn’t need the Co-op’s help to do it.
Mon slipped off her gloves and dipped a hand into the rich, loamy dirt of one of the flower beds. The cool, moist earth against her skin mirrored its tangible connection to the vibrant life it nourished. Not a Co-op base, for sure.
Heather’s invention had helped all the known Listeners in this sector. All one hundred twenty of them.
After Mon mustered out of Cooperative Central Command—her twenty years done done done!—she’d spent the last six months delivering Heather’s headsets far and wide. Watching the faces of the people the first time they switched the earphones on was sheer delight.
Arkhide’s patent attorneys had ensured Heather’s claim before Mon had let the Co-op see the headphones. Now Co-op Central had a license for the tech, and Heather had a passive income.
She would never need to muster in.
No Listener ever would.
Walking slow, avoiding the meeting she wasn’t quite late for, Mon trailed her fingertips over the delicate leaves of a nearby vine. Its buds might be berries soon.
Arkhide’s sun gave a lot of light to this garden, tucked into one of the two squared-off donuts that made up the space station. Half the garden’s outer wall and all the ceiling was clear to space, letting in the light and also giving a fair view of the planet below.
It was a strange angle, not quite center, not quite at the one-third mark. Mon didn’t doubt that it was the perfect angle for the light. Synthetic humans surely preferred precision over aesthetics.
Except, look at this garden. All manner of plantings separated into precise squares and triangles of foliage but allowed to be wild within them. Practical vegetable plots across the walk from a riot of pansy-like flowers. Balanced, beautiful, true.
Creepy, how pleasing they’d made it to human senses.
This new patent of Heather’s, surely it was just the first of many clever, patentable, things she would devise. She was the perfect kind of person for Arkhide, the system’s only world of synths and enhanced humans.
Were the Arkhideans really about to boot her off now? And why did they have to tell Mon that in person?
To collect her and take her away.
Blasted teenage damsels in distress.
Mon rounded a corner, heading toward that clearing in the center with the benches where they’d held the big negotiations. Back when she had a job. A job she never wanted, but at least it had given her a direction. Now, who was she? And who would she be to Heather if the synths decided to send the girl away?
Humans must seem so slow and ponderous to a people who could communicate with one another at the speed of thought. At the speed of multiplexed thought.
She remembered this stand of thick bamboo stalks, backed up to the open space. Focusing on it, and tuning down her Listener sense, blocking the clashing waves of all the mechanisms holding this station together, she could imagine she wasn’t on a station at all. But she was, and there was a problem.
As Mon stepped into the tiny diamond clearing, everything stilled for a heartbeat, the very air holding its breath. The familiar woven bamboo benches radiated an aura of tranquility, their graceful curves inviting peaceful repose.
Perfect place for an ambush.
“Captain.” The dramatic soprano shattered the illusion of solitude.
Mon wheeled towards the sound, hands half-raised to defend herself, every muscle tensing before her brain could override the well-trained response.
And then override the jolt of distrust and fear.
Aimee Five glided into view from the opposite corner, a human-shaped synth, at least from the shoulders up. Her shimmersilk headwrap and wide-skirted gown of vivid crimson were perfectly set against the bronze of her skin and the bed of shoulder-high corn behind her. Her elegance was meant to unsettle, Mon knew from experience. All crisp, porcelain lines and fluid movements.
Of course, she did have fancy wheels under that skirt for feet. But it wasn’t just her body’s composition that contributed to the perfection. Aimee Five was a well-practiced politician, having led the planet’s High Council for five eventful years.
“Station Chief.” Mon willed her shoulders to relax into a casual slouch, aiming for nonchalance. Trying not to let the synth know how much her presence raked claws of disquiet down Mon’s spine, even as her logical mind tried to tamp down her body’s ingrained fear of synths. “I’m surprised you called.”
Aimee Five’s full lips curved in a shadow smile. Her copper eyes, wide in their bronze human shape of a face, sparkled.
“Have a seat.”
Mon settled gingerly on one end of the curved bench where Aimee Five had sat during the negotiations. Where Aimee Five’s colleague, Allen, had sat. Where Mon’s ward, Heather, had begged to stay here on Arkhide.
Aimee Five propped her butt on the garden bench, nowhere near its woven-bamboo back. Her cool gaze roved over the lush garden surroundings.
Mon followed her line of sight. In the warm sun, the swaying bamboo had an almost hypnotic quality. All of it, such a sense of abundance, such a thrum of life.
A weighted pause hung between them as Mon grappled with her unease. Synthetic humans, with their artificial near-perfection and their enigmatic ways, creeped her out. Augmented humans were shocking, but full synths? They were the stuff of nightmares, the villains in every space opera she’d ever seen.
But despite the sheer alienness of Aimee Five—and despite that Little Miss Society voice inside Mon’s head screaming “Abomination!”—Mon had felt a begrudging respect for her from the first. It wasn’t just the woman’s sense of resilience, or her unruffled self-possession.
Aimee Five had led the government that sent the negotiator who bested the Cooperative on its own terms. Aimee Five herself, not even raising her voice, had talked down an infuriated diplomat during a murder investigation.
Mon had been sitting right next to the diplomat, watching it happen.
“Captain,” Aimee Five said. “We have a problem.”
Mon’s chest went tight, a flicker of apprehension. She had hoped to speak with Heather first. Find out what was up, before facing the authorities. But the girl was on off-comms, apparently helping out in some emergency.
“Is it Heather?” Mon asked, her voice carefully neutral. “I know she can be a handful.”
To Mon’s surprise, Aimee Five shook her head, her expression softening.
“Not at all. Heather is doing remarkably well. Her insights and innovations—and her energy, oh my—have made her many friends here. We’re thrilled to have her as part of our community.”
Relief washed over Mon, as if a heavy air tank had lifted from her shoulders. One less damsel to save.
But if she wasn’t here for Heather, what was she here for?
Obviously reading the unspoken question in her expression, Aimee Five leaned forward, her gaze intent.
“Actually, Mondrian Delacroix, it’s you I wanted to discuss.”
Chapter Two
Mon glanced away from Aimee Five, from that copper-plated X-ray gaze of hers. She inhaled the sweet scents of the orbital station’s garden. The mint under the bamboo forest, the mist on leaves.
What could the Arkhideans possibly want from her?
She racked her brain. Had she made some big mistake the last time she was here? Did she owe them money?
“Sure you’ve got the right Listener?” she said, half-jokingly.
Aimee Five shifted forward again, toward Mon, fixing her with a stare that felt like a cortical scan.
“Personally, no, I am not. But I was overruled.”
The synth leaned back, glancing up and out, toward the windows. Toward Arkhide, her planet. That blue-white ball with the many brown spots of tiny islands and the many, many red spots of mighty volcanoes.
A very young, very seismically active planet, Arkhide should have been terraformed well before the migrants from the planet Wala settled permanently on it. But when Wala was destroyed in a hideous accident not even two generations ago, these pioneer Arkhideans were all that remained.
“Allen talked me into it,” Aimee Five continued, the hard brass of her voice softening. Her longtime advisor was the nicest, smilingest synthetic human Mon had ever met. “And your Heather.”
“Heather?” Mon said. She wasn’t following.
“Fine. Let me make it plain. We have a slight… issue on Arkhide. One that we think a Listener might be able to help us with. Problem is.” She speared Mon with another one of those bone-scan glances. “It isn’t something we want your Cooperative Realm to know about. Ever.”
The buzzing in her head must be insects near. But Mon didn’t dare break Aimee Five’s eye contact.
“You’re not tracking,” Mon said. “You’ve already decided I’m not trustworthy. Obviously. I’m Cooperative. Central Command, even.”
But Aimee was already speaking again in that rich, melodic soprano.
“Allen says, and Heather agrees, that you are no longer 3-C, if you ever were. You took the Cooperative’s coin because there was a war on and they offered good training cheap. Once they had a bead on you, they left you alone to spy and run solo missions, and you let them paint you as a rebel and a chaos agent. Great cover story. Fooled me, for a while.”
“Now the war’s over,” she continued, “and you’re already hiding things from the Co-op. Entire people, in fact.”
Mon pushed to her feet despite the tell it would be to the synth.
She couldn’t sit still with her life all spread out like that. She thought all those details—especially the clandestine parts—were deep off the grid.
Evidently not.
“How do you know all this?”
“We do our research, too,” Aimee Five said. “Plus, your Heather has the instincts of a fabulous spy. Too bad she can’t keep her mouth shut.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. But still, it didn’t add up.
“So you don’t want Heather, because she’ll talk. But why me?” Mon’s voice matched the disbelief in her mind. “Surely there must be other Listeners out there, others who could help you.” Although Co-op Central did try to scoop them up, all the ones they could find.
All the ones Mon had helped them find.
But she was done with that.
Aimee Five shook her head, her expression grim.
"Don’t think we didn’t look,” she said. “Heather put the basic Listeners’ test recordings on Arkhide’s chat boards, and everyone who thought they might be one took the test. Not one passed. No one came close. Listeners are one in tens of millions; we are only tens of thousands.”
For the first time since Mon had stepped into the garden clearing, Aimee Five’s perfect composure fractured just a bit.
That didn’t comfort Mon. She paced away from the synth, towards the tall, golden-tasseled corn stalks. The whirr of the wind through the tassels crowded her ears. So they knew all about her, and they didn’t trust her. Why should she care? What stake did she have in the synths’ problems?
“I don’t need a job,” Mon said.
“You’re going to walk away from a real problem?” Aimee Five said. She sighed theatrically. “So unlike you.”
“Not my problem,” Mon said. Facing away this time, she knew the synth couldn’t read her face. Luckily, because she was starting to waver.
Aimee Five sighed. “It’s such a puzzle,” she said. “Nobody’s been able to crack it.”
Dead hit. Mon never could turn down a puzzle. And an Arkhidean-proof puzzle? Safra’s tits, just the thought made had her salivating.
But a puzzle could come in a message packet. It didn’t need face-to-face.
“Fine,” she said, pacing back to stand in front of Aimee Five. “So you’ve done your homework on me. So you know I can keep my mouth shut. That’s not the problem. So what is it?”
Aimee Five touched her chest, where a human’s heart would be.
“May I have your word that, even if you don’t help us, you will not tell your former masters about us?”
She had no idea.
Mon was done with the Cooperative Realm. They’d forced her to recruit—to steal—Listeners from every edge of the system. She’d served her time; she’d paid her debts. She wasn’t giving them a single thing more. Ever.
Mon stopped directly in front of Aimee Five. She loomed over the seated synth.
"Yes.”
Aimee Five smiled, slow. She patted the bench where Mon had been sitting. Taking the power back.
Mon sat. It would be rude not to. But she slouched, resting her shoulders on the high back of the woven bench. She jammed her hands into the side pockets of her enviro-suit. This was the second time she’d come to a negotiation underdressed.
“On Arkhide, we have a base that’s underwater,” Aimee Five said.
“What?” Mon said. “I thought you-all avoided the water. And all this time you had an entire secret base?”
“We use it for… research.”
That didn’t sound sinister or anything.
And what about when that Co-op science sphere fell into the sea, and everyone on Arkhide nearly had a heart attack trying to get it out? Then again, the sphere had arrived without warning, and nobody knew it didn’t mean harm.
“The base is for research, as I said. And protection.” Aimee Five waved a perfectly tapered hand toward the planet. “We need to monitor seismic activity, constantly. The spot where the base is located gives particularly strong—and accurate—warning of impending trouble.”
“Volcanoes?”
“And earthquakes, and tsunamis. The base can usually give us two-days’ warning. Sometimes even three. With two days’ advance notice, we can move an entire city and all its peoples from an endangered island to a safer one. That’s where your Heather is now, helping with a migration.”
That sounded just plain impossible. Mon couldn’t stop to ponder that.
She glanced away from Aimee Five, her mind running down the implications. That couldn’t be all the base was doing. There must be something else.
Something the Cooperative would be more interested in than weather emergencies.
She glanced back and met Aimee Five’s gaze, her eyes narrowed.
“Okay, great. I’ll keep your secret. So spill.”
Aimee Five’s expression grew severe. “I’m telling you this because the majority of the people of Arkhide voted in favor of it. I did not.”
Wow, so the entire planet knew all of Mon’s business. Fantastic.
“The base has been been picking up strange signals,” Aimee Five said. “Signals that we can’t decipher—and not for want of trying.”
Mon sat up straight.
“Signals?” she said. “Like you’ve never heard before?”
“Or seen,” Aimee Five said. “If it’s communication, part of it is outside our perception. It must be. And we’ve tried all manner of scans.” For the first time, frustration flattened her perfect bell of a voice. She took a breath.
“Your talents, Mondrian Delacroix, extend far beyond the mere scope of your Listener abilities,” she said. “Your exploits during the war and after show you possess a preternatural intuition, an ability to perceive patterns and possibilities that even our most advanced intelligences cannot replicate. Your mind is not bound by rigid constraints of programming or logic. It flows, like the tides of a thousand oceans.”
Yeah, so that was coming on strong. Despite herself, despite the lingering wariness pulsing through her mind, Mon felt a reluctant flush of heat rising up her nape. Was that admiration she detected in Aimee Five’s voice? Maybe, even, a hint of envy?
“You want me to go to an underwater research base, your only one,” Mon said. “To Listen. Try to understand. That’s it?”
“It’s not a simple assignment,” Aimee Five said. “I suggested we tap Heather. She said she is up for it.”
She would.
“You are absolutely not sending a seventeen-year-old down into some dank base underwater all by herself.”
Aimee Five mock-groaned. “Not you, too. I got an earful of that from Allen.” She flicked a hand, as if batting the idea away. “No, we are not. We’re asking you.”
Only now did Mon remember to negotiate. When the hook was sunk deep. She’d have to get better at this now that she was in the real world.
“What’s in it for me?” she said, knowing how weak her position was. “Room and board and no glory?”
Aimee Five threw back her head and laughed at that, the unexpected peal of amusement filling the garden clearing with silvery, sparkling mirth.
“Pretty much. No, listen. This data contains mysteries and, I expect, revelations that could shatter our current understanding of the very nature of this universe and our place within it. The scientists and analysts may be stymied, but you... you might unravel those knots, Mondrian Delacroix. Not as some glorified operative or spy, but as an autonomous explorer sailing uncharted seas of pure potentiality.”
Mon blinked, caught off-guard by the sheer audacity of Aimee Five’s proclamation. It struck chords of yearning and skepticism in equal measure, notes of both temptation and caution.
She found herself leaning forward despite her lingering reservations, drawn in by the synthetic woman’s sheer gravitational charisma and conviction.
Scanning for any sign of Mon’s true feelings on her face, Aimee Five’s expression sobered, the humor draining away like a receding tide, replaced by something fierce.
Slowly, unconsciously, Mon found herself nodding in mute acknowledgment of the possibilities unfurling before her. A sly, feral grin curved her lips as she held Aimee Five’s copper stare with her own liquid brown gaze.
The synthetic woman’s perfect features remained impassive, though Mon didn’t miss the answering glint of approval, of reciprocated ferocity, in her gaze.
Aimee Five rose from the bench in one sinuous motion, extending an elegant hand out towards Mon in silent invitation.
Steeling herself, Mon reached out and clasped the proffered hand. Aimee Five’s cool fingers offered a startling contrast to Mon’s own overheated palm.
“Follow me,” Aimee Five said.