When Akilina opened her eyes, she saw gusts of snow swirling around Ksava. The car struggled to stay airborne, clinging to the unstable nanoelectromagnetic waves.
The weather was relentless.
Ksava managed to reach an airway and pulled over onto the shoulder.
"Are we here?"
"Yes," the LI replied.
Before he could add any questions, Akilina opened the door and stepped out.
She sent a command telling Ksava to find the nearest parking lot. He obeyed.
White dominated everything.
Akilina narrowed her eyes but could barely see a few steps ahead.
With every solar cycle, winters grew harsher and summers more deadly. Last summer, temperatures in Russia had exceeded forty-five degrees. This solar cycle, they were forecast to rise above fifty. Winters, meanwhile, easily reached twenty-five below zero in Moscow, and the cold intensified with every cycle.
Akilina had grown up hearing the same story. Factories swallowed the green. The fucking tech companies profited from scarcity. Pure oxygen for the filthy rich. Semipure oxygen for those crawling through the underworlds.
Breathing well should have been everyone's right. But the world worked differently.
And that pissed her off profoundly. Her mother had fallen ill because of that shit. Respiratory problems. A suffocating cough. Sometimes it seemed Darya would cough up her own organs.
One day, Akilina would kill the bastard who had sold her that stuff.
Even so, her mother still had enough breath to send messages and make calls.
Mamochka's thirty-fourth call flashed on the bioscreen.
In Fluxluna's half-light, Akilina felt within herself the same moon that had already bled in Darya.
She closed the holoprojection.
What had she expected?
Suddenly, a hand covered her mouth. Someone pinched her nose shut and yanked her backward.
Her head struck something. When she managed to open her eyes, she found a man smiling in front of her.
Akilina rubbed the back of her neck and frowned, giving him a look of pure contempt.
"You need to learn to defend yourself, svoloch." His voice cracked like a whip.
He had small, almond-shaped blue eyes. A pet dog's eyes, the kind that would do anything for its owner.
Rurik. Her father's right-hand man. Former Russian Army soldier.
He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke straight into her face. "Answer me, brat. Stop looking at me with that shit-eating face."
Rurik's car hovered in the air. Its LI kept it perfectly steady, as though the storm required no effort at all. Of course it would be an LI from the Duo or Una generations, the most advanced on the market.
Ksava was good too. But the factories had stopped producing Nine-generation LIs a long time ago. They certainly no longer made her model of Ciotto, a 2120 classic now considered a collector's item.
How many times had those assholes at the bar tried to convince her to trade Ksava for disgusting implants and prosthetics?
She remembered Yegor approaching, his breath heavy with alcohol. "Will you sell that beauty for half a million ninrubles?"
Akilina had turned down every offer. "Fuck off, cuck." She drank more vodka.
The man laughed and walked away.
A little later, another woman took his place. Always a different one.
Akilina shook her head, pushing the memories away, and looked back at Rurik. "What the fuck was that, asshole? You almost broke my neck."
"You can swear? You're fucking terrible at it, but there's room for improvement." More smoke in her face. Another smirk.
If he had meant to intimidate her, he had failed.
Akilina rolled her eyes. "Your implant is shit." She meant the metalized half of his face.
The skin was stitched between cables and components. His short hair, shaved at the sides, accentuated his square jaw. "That filthy little mouth is getting better, huh."
Fuck, did he ever stop smiling?
Akilina chose to turn away and stay silent for the rest of the trip.
Rurik did not mind.
The hours dragged on.
Akilina grew increasingly impatient.
When Rurik noticed her fingers fidgeting, he offered her a cigarette.
"What the fuck is this?" She frowned.
"Tobacco." Rolled between his fingers.
"You smoke that shit?"
"Shit is those synthetic neural drugs you young people shove up your asses." Rurik turned the cigarette between his fingers. "This here is the good stuff. Natural Cuban leaf. I roll my own. It's an honor to get one from me."
Akilina tried to imagine the taste.
She liked snorting nanodrugs and set her biochip to limit their effects to an hour. She believed that prevented addiction.
But this was different.
Natural drugs were addictive. Without a connection to the biochips, there was no way to regulate them with the same control.
She toyed with the cigarette between her fingers. What kind of high would that crap give her?
Rurik held out a lighter. That man was strange, all right.
A lighter? Who still used that shit?
Akilina lit the cigarette. Took a drag. The smoke burned her throat. She began coughing desperately.
Rurik waited patiently, hiding his sarcasm behind his smile.
She tried again. And again. Nothing.
She knew that shit would not work. She kept smoking until it was finished.
The car's black interior was thick with smoke when Akilina leaned forward. The world spun. Her blood pressure dropped. An unfamiliar dizziness swept through her. The earthy taste filled her mouth, but the numbing sensation seemed to make up for the discomfort.
"Am I supposed to feel this?" She braced her hands against the seat. Blinked slowly, trying to piece reality back together.
"It's good, isn't it?" Rurik took a drag from his own cigarette.
"Shut up. Give me more."
He raised an eyebrow. "Hedeon said you were like this." He handed her another cigarette. "We treat our own with respect. Watch that tongue, svoloch."
"Uh-huh. You almost break each other's necks?"
Rurik gave her a crooked smile. "You're not one of us yet."
Akilina took the cigarette from his hand and put it in her pocket.
Two hours on the road. Four cigarettes. In the solar cycles that followed, she would discover that the Colombian herbs that fucker Denden brought were better. Her fingers would never again go long without a cigarette. She would end up smoking three packs a day.
Who would choose otherwise in this shitty life?
Rurik finally parked.
The walls of the Vorovskoy mir rose before them like a fortress carved from ice, near historic sites buried beneath snow and withered vines.
Akilina followed him, fighting the gusts that pushed her backward.
Atop the walls, guards almost invisible in the snowy haze kept their weapons trained.
This was serious. Very serious. But she had already come this far. All she could do was keep going.
Two members of the organization, a human and an android, blocked their path.
Rurik kept walking.
As soon as they recognized him, both their expressions changed. Visibly embarrassed, they stepped aside.
He was the second most important man in the entire Vorovskoy mir. If he walked into any branch of the organization, the local Pakhan would have to bow his head.
Akilina looked around.
Enormous warehouses. Each seemed to hold a different fate.
She preferred not to imagine what happened inside them. If she really was going to be trained to replace her father, she would have to swallow her own morals. After all, that was the price of being there. And all she wanted was to be close to him. The rest, she would endure.
They kept walking between the nanometallized warehouses.
Ahead rose the little castle of Khalmer-Yu.
Poisonous plants clung to the gray concrete like living traps. Tiny blades lay hidden in the walls. They could be fired from a hundred meters away, slitting throats and cutting anyone who was not registered in the fortress's nanosystem.
The entire structure was controlled by Una, the Vorovskoy mir's most advanced LI. Her database received daily updates. Hacked Motherboards from the corporations that ruled the world fed the system.
Those fuckers. The world. Her father. All their fates seemed intertwined.
Soon, hers would be too.
The wind cut like razors, lashing her skin and stealing her breath.
That place felt like a prelude to the world's cruelty.
Was she really going to live there?
If that was the price of being close to her father, perhaps she could endure all those cuts.
The gate opened automatically for Rurik.
They crossed a frozen garden. Dry shrubs. Trees petrified by the cold. Fallen leaves gleamed beneath the muted light of the heavy clouds. The days offered little during winter. Here, they would offer even less.
Akilina would get used to it.
As soon as she entered the castle, a wave of warmth washed over her skin. She took off her heavy coat and draped it over her arms.
A robotic coat rack leaned toward her. "May I take your coat, Akilina?" That LI was far too polite for a place like this.
She handed over the coat and kept following Rurik.
The man walked without looking back.
The corridor was long. Full of doors.
Rurik stopped at the last one and knocked twice.
A sharp voice, like a bullet cutting through the wind, granted them entry.
Akilina stepped through the doorway.
The first thing that caught her attention was a painting enclosed in a massive gold frame. It depicted two elderly people. Her grandparents?
The wall gleamed, lined with cabinets crammed with paper books.
Akilina knew printed books still existed, but she had never imagined her father kept a collection.
She would soon discover that paper could be one of the most powerful weapons on that nanotechnological planet.
After all, the world's true rats were those who had information on everyone while allowing no one to have information on them.
The Russian criminal organization was steeped in cybercrime. Its members broke into corporate systems and blackmailed companies for billions. Trillions.
When the victims refused to pay, they sold the information on the illegal market or to the press, sending market values plummeting.
Often, the Russian monarchy itself bought that data to use as leverage against other governments.
Paper had become one of the safest hiding places for secrets. It could not be hacked.
Hedeon looked up from the documents. The gray chip implanted in his cheek glowed faintly. Every Pakhan had one.
His fair skin had a texture similar to hers. His green eyes, also just like Akilina's, settled coldly on the new arrivals. He sighed impatiently. Then he set the papers on the desk and ran his fingers through his dark brown hair. Like hers.
The truth was that Akilina had only seen her father once. In a photograph Darya had shown her. Until then, they had communicated only through voice calls.
But his stern features were exactly as she had imagined. "You took your time, Rurik."
Rurik walked in and leaned against an empty table, folding his arms. "The little girl here held us up for an hour."
Finally, Hedeon looked directly at his daughter. "Trix, welcome."
Trix?
How long had it been since she had last heard that nickname? She could not even remember who had come up with it. Darya was the only person who still called her that.
Trix. She repeated the name in her mind. Akilina Orlov Volkov would have to disappear in that life.
She walked to the center of the office, dragging her feet across the black carpet. She missed being able to hide her hands in her coat pockets. Unsure what to do with them, she folded her arms. "What's up?"
Hedeon raised his eyebrows. "Did your mother teach you to talk like that?" He turned to Rurik. "Everything ready?"
The man nodded and left, leaving father and daughter alone.