I waited until Ashlye told me they were on their way back from their cousin’s wedding to sneak out of the Clubhouse alone. I had promised I wouldn’t do that while they were visiting family, and I’d meant it. I would never do anything to mess up Ashlye’s family visits. But sometimes, I just wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t the Clubhouse—which Ashlye totally understood—and I wanted to be there alone, which Ashlye totally didn’t.

I had at least thoroughly prepared for it—nobody in their right mind was going to get any closer to me than they could help. No shower for two whole days, filthy hat jammed low on snarled clumpy hair, baggy sweatsuit and loafers so ragged they had no style or color anymore, big cheap low-light visor and biofilm veneers for my face—I hated that last addition, but while I did want to be ugly, I didn’t want to be spectacularly ugly. That attracted the wrong sort of attention just as much as being pretty did. And, of course, I didn’t want to be recognized.

Ashlye liked to raise the specter of that last possibility when they got really sick of me sneaking out of the Clubhouse. As unlikely as it seemed that Royce was still looking for me, there was always the chance he was. Or, at least as likely, the chance that someone would say casually one day in Royce’s hearing, Hey man, I saw this girl out in the Market today, you shoulda seen her FACE…!

If I let myself, I could imagine his face (expressionless) and his voice (thoughtful, rising in pitch)—Oh? What was it, about her FACE? But I didn’t. It was enough to recognize the danger and take precautions against it. Hence the biofilms.

So I sailed out the Clubhouse’s trapdoor exit and into the great outdoors, which was all I’d dreamed it would be: hot and black as the inside of an oven, reeking of mildew and old grease. Of course, the alley outside the Clubhouse wasn’t where I planned on hanging out—that was just past the alley’s mouth, and even from as far back as I stood, I could feel the bass rumble from unseen holo projectors through the soles of my loafers. Lights strobed across the thin slice of leaden black sky overhead; I hurried forward, towards the slowly swelling roar of sound that was at least a couple thousand other Market-dwellers emerging from of the ruins of the city’s gigaplex housing developments to gawk at the latest wonders on the cyber-mesh network.

I was halfway down the alley when I heard it—a dull, metallic thud, no part of the Market’s revelries, coming from the rusting hulk of a dumpster a bare meter to my left. I froze, then edged warily away from it, back towards the Clubhouse trapdoor—but I was really more annoyed than worried. It was hard to imagine would-be attackers lurking inside that particular dumpster; Ashlye and I were careful to keep our alley as filthy, deserted, and worthless-looking as possible. Probably some decades-old piece of trash had simply rotted to the point that it’d fallen over inside it—I inched closer, squinting up at the dumpster’s high walls, hoping to spot something that might corroborate that.

Something was sticking up over the dumpster’s top edge, shining palely in the gloom. I crept even closer, staring, then shoved the visor back up onto my forehead and triggered my right eye implant. Though Royce had told me at the time that the implant was the best money could buy, he’d been as full of shit about that as he’d been about everything else. It never had meshed properly with my normal left-side vision, so I always had to squinch my left eye shut to get a really good full-spectrum scan with the implant—

— and I recoiled, because that whitish, oblong bit of debris was a foot. A human foot, and not only that, a live human foot—as if to underline that liveliness, another faint thump! issued from the dumpster’s depths, sending a few rusted paint chips fluttering from its side to the ground.

Right. It was time to call Ashlye.

*     *     *
Ashlye heaved the body up off of their shoulders and over onto my workbench. It rolled bonelessly onto its—oops, make that his—back, head bouncing a little at the impact. “Jeez,” I said, a little reproachfully. “If you wanted to kill him, you could’ve just done it while he was still in the dumpster.” Ashlye shrugged, mouth tight with annoyance. I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I snuck out again—”

“No you’re not,” they snapped, then turned their back on me and stalked across the room to lean up against the wall, arms folded tightly across their chest. They didn’t have to try very hard to look menacing; they’d stopped by the Clubhouse long enough to gear up in case I had needed more rescuing than I’d indicated I did, and were consequently slim and deadly in form-fitting black mech-armor, gun ports jutting from their shoulders and hair scraped back into a long practical braid hanging down their back.

I crossed my own arms over my chest as I stared down thoughtfully at the actual rescuee. Or tried to—I’d forgotten I was still in disguise and my fingers got tangled up in the holes in the sweatshirt’s baggy sleeves. “Oh, shit. Can you keep an eye on him til—”

“Fine.”

Clearly I still wasn’t forgiven. I cast Ashlye an apologetic look as I hurried past them to my bedroom. They either saw it and ignored it or were too busy glaring at the rescuee, still obliviously unconscious, to notice. I yearned for a shower, but really didn’t want the rescuee to wake up with just Ashlye there, so I stripped off the biofilms, yanked on the first clean coveralls I found, dragged a brush through my hair, then ran back out into the Clubhouse workroom.

He hadn’t woken up, and Ashlye hadn’t stirred from their spot against the wall. I jogged over to the workbench and hooked up some disposable leads to the standard body implant locations, then synced them with my personal console and set my best decryption apps to take a crack at anything they found. While I was waiting, I dug our med-surg kit out and slapped one of the diagnostics pads on his bare chest.

After about ten minutes, the holo tank connected to my console spat out several screens’ worth of alphanumerics. Ashlye, unable to keep cutting off their nose to spite their face, wandered over to stand behind my shoulder. “Wait, he’s clean?”

I couldn’t blame them for the tone of disbelief. “Of ID, yeah. Which I agree is—wait, wait, I don’t think he’s a Fed, don’t just chop his damn head off!” Ashlye resheathed their biggest knife, looking sullen. “He’s not totally clean, see?” I pointed at the second set of results. “High-level medical implants. Maybe top-level, my ware’s not good enough to be able to tell that kind of a difference.” My stomach clenched up a bit. I’d been hoping he was either some poor loser down on his luck, somebody we could actually help out, or next-best, somebody’s hired muscle that we could return to them for a suitable fee. But nobody with med implants like that was in the first category, and the rest of him was too slim and soft-fleshed to be believable as the second. No tattoos, no brands—not a single scar marked that fine-grained, eggshell skin.

The med-surg kit chimed in—no brain damage, not even a concussion. He’d been roughed up, but hadn’t ended up with anything more serious than bruises. My stomach tightened even more—whoever had jumped him, probably Market kids with delusions of ganghood, hadn’t wanted to mess him up too badly, probably because they’d both recognized what he most likely was and hadn’t had any way of knowing that he’d been ID-scrubbed. Everyone knew Uppies were hot-wired for search-and-rescue; nobody wanted to hang around waiting for that to happen. But it was still hard to believe—Uppies, those privileged residents of the city’s domed exurbs, didn’t go wandering around alone in random Market alleys, scrubbed of their ID markers. Did not—except here he was.

As I was bending over him to look more closely at the kit’s display, his eyes snapped open. For a long moment, there was no sense in them at all—it was like being stared at by a doll. As I straightened back up, he blinked hard, gaze focusing on my face a split second before he jerked away, lips peeling back from his teeth in revulsion. I jumped myself in sympathy, then realized what his problem was.

“Oh, right. No biofilms. Sorry about that, I forgot.” Not entirely accurate—in the Clubhouse, I wore what I wanted, and since I never wanted to wear biofilms, that was that. “Settle down, I’m not the one who put you in that dumpster.”

“What dumpster?”

“The one—never mind, I guess you were unconscious for that part. What’s the last thing you remember?”

He stared whitely at me. “Who are you?”

One corner of my mouth quirked up involuntarily; I cast a sideways glance at Ashlye, who rolled their eyes. In their particular line of work, Ashlye did occasionally deal with Uppies; maybe this combined degree of entitlement and wild incaution was normal for them. “You can call me…Jade?” I’d always liked that name. “And this is, ah—”

“Ashlye,” said Ashlye flatly. That wasn’t a great portent for our rescuee, but he seemed oblivious to the nuance.

“Richard,” he said, after a pause. I thought about saying That’s one of my OTHER favorite fake names! but that seemed unnecessarily mean, so I just nodded. “So—you found me in a dumpster?” He glanced down at his naked self. “Like this?”

“Yeah.” I turned my back on him—safe as houses, with Ashlye there—and rummaged around under my personal console. I had a quilt there, left over from a freak snowstorm a few months before—we didn’t generally have to worry about keeping warm in the Clubhouse; our problem was usually the opposite. I scooped it up and dumped it on his lap.

He flinched back, his eyes darting unerringly to the right side of my face, then looked resolutely away as he bundled the quilt around his shoulders. His gaze caught on the holo tank, then roved around the workroom, lingering on my personal console and the med-surg kit. “What is this place?”

I didn’t really have a good answer to that—the Clubhouse wouldn’t mean anything to him, certainly not what it meant to me and Ashlye—our refuge, our hideout, our entirely illegal Market residence. “My cyber-mesh workshop,” which was also true. “It’s my day job.” Ashley thought that was funny; I could tell by the way their eyes crinkled at the corners.

But not-Richard clearly didn’t get the joke. “Yeah? Maybe you can help me—” Suddenly he looked desperate, or as desperate as anybody who really had no idea what desperation actually felt like, could look—lips thinning and pinching together, fingers clenching on the quilt til his knuckles shone white. “My sister—she ran away from home. She’s done it before, but this time she came down here, into the Market. My dad’s investigators think she was talking to somebody here and whoever it was, offered to take her in—but the cops haven’t been able to find any trace of her, and the investigators wouldn’t even come down here without military-grade support. I know she’s here, though—they were right, she was talking to someone, though she wouldn’t tell me who it was before she left.”

It was funny—I wanted to feel sorry for him, and in a way I did. There was no doubt he was in the grip of some strong emotion over his sister’s disappearance. But who really knew why he wanted his sister back? I didn’t doubt Royce had pitched a fit once he’d had to accept that I had gone—probably a short-lived set of emotions, except possibly the rage-related ones—but then, not-Richard didn’t look enraged. Reframe, I thought—what if one of Ashlye’s cousins was missing, had been taken!—oooh. That helped. I couldn’t help casting a quick look over at Ashlye, who looked utterly unmoved. Well, of course—Ashlye cared about their cousins all right, but only their cousins.

And me. Ashlye would have turned the world upside down to find me. And maybe not-Richard felt the same way about his sister—well, he had to, didn’t he? To come physically down himself to the Market, ID and tracker-stripped so no one would know and try and stop him…my left eye prickled, startling me, and I blinked hard to clear the blurriness away. I could look for his sister; I could at least do that much for him, since I was pretty sure by now how things were going to turn out for him otherwise. I looked over at Ashlye again and waited for them to meet my eyes, then raised my eyebrows; they nodded once, slowly.

“Okay.” I put on my best businesslike demeanor. “I can do a search for you. I already have your genetic print mostly sequenced—is she a half-sister, or—” Not a stepsister, I hope, I thought belatedly. But Richard was shaking his head.

“Full sister,” he said. “Our father’s first wife—” not terribly relevant, unless he’d made a habit of mislaying other sisters in the past. “But if you’re going to search law enforcement databases, the investigators already did that.”

I wrinkled my nose. “No. Different ones.” His eyes opened wide—physical scan had put him at age twenty-two, plus or minus two years, but he suddenly looked closer to Ashlye’s age, or maybe even mine. Something had relaxed muscles I hadn’t even realized were tensed around his eyes and jaw. Hope, maybe? “This is going to take a little while, though, so you may as well try to get comfortable.” I pulled the sensor pads and input helmet from the cabinet above my personal console.

“Could I, uh, get some clothes—”

“We don’t have any that would fit you,” Ashlye broke in irritably.

The helmet sealed around my head, cutting off my view of the workshop. I left the audio inputs disengaged, since I didn’t need them for this sort of search. I was rewarded for that stupidity by overhearing him, some minutes later, asking Ashlye in a roundabout sort of way—

“You mean her face?” Ashlye’s voice was almost too friendly. “Why doesn’t she fix her face?”

“Well—you all have this high-tech setup, so you—”

“Maybe not everybody cares if they look pretty for you,” even more silkily.

My face, my face—certainly I wished that Royce had never done what he’d done to it, and even more that I’d either been old enough to understand what infection was, or had someone else around who’d given enough of a shit to make sure I didn’t scratch at the healing scabs. Those sleepless nights, one after the other blurring into weeks, first the relentless agony of the burns, and then the itching—I’d lost my right eye to sepsis before Royce had realized I might actually die of it and had gotten me medical treatment. Not regenerative treatment, of course; that would have negated the original point. Pretty attracts the wrong kind of attention…you don’t want that, do you? Remember what happened to your mother? You want me to fix it so that never happens to you?

But even after that, I’d stayed with him. I had still believed, on some desperate fading level, that he’d done it for my own good, and also I’d thought I hadn’t had anywhere else to go. Royce’s gang had controlled (still did, as far as I knew) a good quarter of the Market and I couldn’t leave the Market—legally, I didn’t even exist outside it. Things hadn’t really clicked for me until a few years later, though, when he’d started visiting my room at night. Monster-Face’s room! Not that he’d ever called me that…not to my face—

At first, it had been just talk—highly technical talk about the cyber-mesh work I loved, that nobody else but him even understood, and if it was a little weird and awkward to be having those discussions in my bedroom, that was probably just me, right? Then, a few weeks after that, he’d started sitting right up next to me on the bed—then his hands had started to wander, just over to my knees at first, then higher—and higher—

I’d been right in thinking I had nowhere else to go, but nowhere was where I went anyway. In the dead of night, two hours after he’d left my room that last night, because even to me it had been pretty clear where all that was leading.

But nowhere, as it had turned out, had at least had Ashlye in it.

“Uh—Jade? You done yet?” Ashlye was doing their best to sound casual, but I could hear the tight thread of worry in their voice. I snapped to attention and realized that yes, the search was done—had been done for a good five minutes. I disengaged from the helmet and pads and turned around to face them both.

Not-Richard’s face was pale and set. “You couldn’t find her.”

I pinched my lips together and inhaled through my nose, then out through my mouth in a sigh. “No, I found her. I mean—what’s left of her.”

I had thought he’d been pale already, but he turned white as a sheet and clutched at the sides of the workbench. “Wha—what do you mean, what’s left—”

“She was farmed.”

His face didn’t so much as twitch.

“He doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ashlye impatiently. “Man, she was organ farmed.” His expression was still blank. “Chopped up and sold for parts, do I have to draw you a—”

“Shut up!” he screamed; I flinched away from the spray of spittle flying past my nose. “What the fuck are you talking about—that’s sick—”

“Where do you think you Uppies get your transplants, when the doctors don’t have the time to grow you a nice new part?” Ashlye wore a small, tight grin that carved deep grooves around the corners of their mouth—how they would look in ten years, or twenty, maybe, if we managed to survive that long. “There’s good money in it. What the hell did you think might’ve happened to her?”

“I don’t know—some, some kingpin or drug lord holding her for ransom or, keeping her, you know—” His cheeks had gone from white to red.

Ashley snorted a laugh. “There’s enough sex in the Market to go around and then some, boyo. Nobody’s keeping some random Uppie girl around just for that.”

Not-Richard stared at them; Ashlye was more than equal to staring back, and he broke first, eyes lowering to stare blankly at his quilted lap. “You’re sure,” he said softly.

Ashlye didn’t say anything to that—well, they weren’t the one who should, really. “Yeah,” I said. “The DNA on a bunch of sales from last week matches yours, just like a full sister’s would.”

“Could you—could you give me your evidence?” It was my turn to stare blankly at him. He looked up, careful to focus on the left side of my face, though his eyes were earnest enough. “Is it the kind of evidence that would stand up in court? Because—”

“She could. But she won’t.” Ashlye sauntered over to the workbench.

“Why not? I can pay you—I give you my word!”

“You can’t pay us enough,” said Ashlye coolly. “You’ve seen us. You’ve seen our place. Sorry. You’ll go back to your Uppie world, there’s no word you can give that will make me believe you’d never rat us out. Why wouldn’t you? What’s it to you, what happens to us? But if you just vanish down here in the Market, like your sister did—whatever reason that happened to her is probably roomy enough to cover you t—”

I had to give him that much, that he had really good reflexes—he almost caught Ashlye off guard. But he was no match for Ashlye. Few were, especially naked and unarmed. At least it was over pretty quickly.

*     *     *
Ashlye was waiting for me in the Clubhouse living room; I hadn’t been sure they would be. I’d stayed a long time in the shower. They patted the sofa next to them expectantly and I trudged over, hair still sopping wet. When I sat down gingerly on the edge of the cushion, they slung an arm around my shoulders and tugged me closer. “I’m dripping on you,” I said.

“Whatever. I don’t care.” They settled back more comfortably, pulling me with them. “Did you put him up for auction?”

“Yeah.” Organ farming wasn’t our usual gig, so we probably weren’t going to get top prices, but we could always use the extra credit.

We sat without speaking for a minute or two. “Are we going to watch something?” I asked finally. The holo tank in the middle of the room was dark and silent.

“We could watch something. Or I could tell you about my auntie’s wedding.” I turned my head sharply to look up at them; they were smiling impishly.

“Wait, it wasn’t your auntie’s wedding—it was your cousin Saraya’s wedding—”

“And my auntie Susann’s wedding,” they said, now grinning outright. “Oh, nobody else knew about it but Susann and her new wife—and my mother—and now Saraya is so pissed off—”

“Wait!” I jumped up and scampered to my bedroom. Five minutes later I was back wearing my favorite jammies and slippers and clutching the Raggedy Ann doll that had been Ashlye’s first gift to me. Ashlye was just sitting back down on the sofa with a steaming mug in each hand. I sniffed the air. “Oh, my God, is that cocoa? Your mama’s cocoa?”

“She sent some back with me, especially for you. She wants to know when you’re coming to visit again.” Over the rim of their mug, Ashlye’s eyes watched me, dark and steady.

“Oh. Well.” I squirmed. “Sometime…”

“I wish you would.” They paused. “You know you don’t have to wear biofilms for her. She’s seen your face. She doesn’t care.”

“I know. I want to go.” I did want to. Sort of. Ashlye knew everything there was to know about me, but knowing wasn’t the same as understanding.

Ashlye snapped their fingers in front of my face. “Hey! Don’t start brooding again, okay? So, I showed up at Mama’s apartment the night before the wedding—”