Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Arthur grinned before he could hide it.

“Put her through,” he told his mother. She slid the wrist device to the edge of the table beside the cradle.

He waved his orange paw at it, and it unlocked.

Pearl’s projection appeared above the QUIP, her white fur, bright blue eyes, and the pink inside her ears. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, tucked beneath a travel hood. She looked older than the girl who had left two years ago, and none of their calls had ever quite caught it. The Commonwealth sent her parents wherever it needed them next, three cities in two years by his count, and every time he thought he had her located she'd already been reassigned somewhere he couldn't find on a map. He'd talked to her through half a dozen apartments and never once seen the room behind her.

“¡Blanquita!” Rufo squealed.

Pearl blinked.

“Rufo?”

“She remembers me!”

“Everyone remembers you,” Sable said. “Most annoying tom this side of the continent.”

Pearl ignored them both and looked directly at Arthur.

“Artie?”

There it was, his name in her voice, exactly as he remembered it and nothing like he remembered it at all.

“Hey Pearl.”

Her ears shot forward. “What happened to you?”

“He lost a fight with a hospital bed,” Sable cut in.

Arthur, who could barely move his neck, glanced at him. “Ignore him. Where are you?”

“We arrived in the district an hour ago,” Pearl said. “Pa rented a cargo crawler. We’re staying here three days, maybe four, while we clear our apartment.”

“You’re here?” His smile softened.

“Almost home,” she said.

“You called me before you even got in?”

Pearl’s image hesitated, just long enough for Rufo to make a strangled sound behind him.

“I had news.”

Rufo leaned in so close to the projection, almost falling over Arthur, that half his face lit up with her projection. “We all have news.” He whispered.

Pearl narrowed her eyes. “Why are you there?”

“Supporting our wounded brother,” Sable replied with all the confidence of someone who had shown up uninvited.

“I got into Red Horizon,” she revealed.

Arthur stared at her, his mouth falling open. Red Horizon. Pearl had applied to Red Horizon.

Why— When— A thousand questions started in his mind. How had she gotten her lattice? Her family wasn't better off than his—and Red Horizon? She had listened to him talk about the company for years, the ships, the ruins, what he would do if they ever took him— and never had he suspected, never imagined, when there were so many out there—No.

So how? And why hadn't she told him?

The pressure behind his eye sharpened, but for a second, he forgot it. “You got in?”

“Conditional intake. Assuming my baseline clears.” She smiled then, at Arthur, and tipped her head to the right, showing where her fur was growing back in. “I wanted you to be the first person I told.”

“Pearl! That’s incredible.”

Rufo cleared his throat rather loudly and made an urgent gesture toward Arthur’s chest, the restraints and the case sitting on his legs.

“Tell her,” he mouthed.

Arthur grinned. “That’s strange.”

Pearl’s smile faltered. “Why?”

“Because I got in too.”

Pearl laughed, and Rufo shouted something about destiny. Arthur tried to answer, but the migraine that had been building behind his left eye finally broke.

Rufo seized Sable by both shoulders. “They’re going together!”

“We heard them.”

“Into space.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Alone.”

“They are joining a company, Rufo.”

“Together, Sable. Keep up.”

The projection ahead of Arthur split into two Pearls. And he reflexively tried to pull his paws up to his eyes, to press them down, to massage them. The cradle around him responded, tightening the braces.

He closed one eye. It didn’t help. He felt his Ma’s paw on his thigh.

Pearl’s smile on the QUIP vanished. “Artie?”

“I’m fine.”

His mother was already reaching for the nurse.

“Artie,” Pearl said again. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Just a headache.”

The door slid open before he finished. The nurse came through with a scanner in paw, saw Rufo bent over Arthur’s bed and Sable crowded against the rail.

“Out,” she called. “He needs to rest.”

Sable caught Rufo by the back of his neck and began pushing him toward the door.

“Tell Blanquita we’ll see her tonight,” Rufo called. “And tell her destiny has spoken.”

“Nngh,” Arthur tried; he really did. He’d wanted to say nobody would tell her that, but the dull throbbing pain in the back of his head had started pounding.

“I heard him,” Pearl said.

The door sealed behind them. Arthur sank back against the pillow.

“Honey,” his ma said. “He will call you later, when he’s feeling up to it.”

“Vale,” she replied. “We’ll be at the apartment by six. I’ll come see you.”

“Pearl,” he grimaced, “You don’t have to—”

“I know,” she said.

His mother helped the nurse fit a cooling pad behind his head. The nurse passed the scanner over Arthur’s forehead and then the shaved part behind his left ear.

“Integration headache,” she said. “Your readings are clean.”

“Can you make it stop?” Arthur gasped.

“Yes, it will put you to sleep.”

He felt his ma’s paw over his, as the nurse connected a small vial to the line at his wrist.

“That’s good… that’s good news. Best I’ve heard all day.”

“Second best,” Pearl said from the QUIP.

He managed to smile. “Second best.”

Cold spread up his arm where the line was connected.

“Hey, Pearl?”

“I’m here.”

He meant to say something else. He would never remember what it was.

---

Darkness filled the room when Arthur awoke. The overhead panels had been lowered to a red standby light, and the corridor outside was dead still. The window facing out was pitch dark.

He moved his wrists first. The mechanical braces on the cradle had been opened, their locking latches disengaged. He sat up slowly, waiting for the surge of nausea behind his eyes. It came as a dull pressure, manageable now, no longer the blinding spike that had shut his jaw tight hours earlier.

He raised a paw to the side of his head. His fingers found the shaved patch behind his left ear, tracing the surgical seam to the cold dual ports set into his skull. They felt solid under his skin.

He looked down at his legs. The blanket was folded back, and the implant case was gone.

“Ma?” he called into the dark.

No answer came. The door to the corridor sat three inches ajar, letting in a strip of amber light from the hallway.

Arthur swung his legs over the edge of the mattress. The movement pulled his tail free from the narrow groove in the cradle, and a sharp knot of muscle relaxed along his spine. His feet touched the cold tiled floor.

He leaned heavily against the stainless steel tray beside the bed. His belongings sat on the lower shelf: his jacket and boots beside his QUIP band. He picked up the wristband and slid it over his left forearm. The dark glass surface hummed against his fur as the biolock read his pulse, and the familiar blue interface glowed to life.

His legs felt like wet rope, but they held his weight when he stood. He took three steps toward the door, steadying himself on the IV pole, and pushed the sliding panel open.

Footsteps echoed from down the hall.

His ma came around the corner carrying a heavy shoulder bag, her gray coat buttoned up to her chin. She stopped when she saw him standing in the doorway.

“Artie,” she said. “What are you doing up?”

“Where is everyone?” He looked past her shoulder down the main corridor. Every door along the hall stood wide open. The recovery rooms were dark, their beds stripped to bare plastic and their supply cabinets standing empty. Plastic crates and cardboard boxes were stacked three high against the walls.

“It's late, hijo,” she said, coming over to take his arm. “Vamos a casa.”

“Was I the last one in the ward?”

“I think so,” she said. “The clinic is closing tonight. They are clearing the floor.”

They walked together down the quiet hallway toward the lobby. The display screens on the walls were dark. In the main reception area, the front desk nurse was packing loose files into a shipping bin. A lone sanitation drone droned across the tile near the front glass, its yellow warning light flashing without a sound.

His ma handed the nurse a discharge token from her purse. The nurse scanned it, logged the clearance on her counter display, and handed back a stamped company receipt.

“What will you do now?” his ma asked her softly.

The nurse clicked the bin shut. “There are other regional posts inland. Something will turn up.”

Her ears dropped half an inch as she spoke. Arthur knew the truth. Coastal settlements were being evacuated across the province, and every other city inland was already overcrowded, especially to staff without a lattice.

Outside, the street was loud with the engine roar of heavy cargo crawlers double-parked along the curbs.

The whole district was actively tearing itself up to leave.

Halogen floodlights lit up the sidewalks where families piled furniture and plastic tubs onto wooden pallets. Commonwealth relocation officers in reflective vests walked line by line down the block, scanning QR tags stamped onto doorframes and clipboard manifests. Two men argued loudly beside an open flatbed over whether a generator would fit on top of their crates. Along the storefronts, metal shutters hung half-raised over empty display rooms because no one had stayed to lock up shelves that held nothing left worth taking.

At the corner of Fourth, water pooled three inches deep across the crosswalk where the sub-street pumps had cut off. Beyond the concrete harbor barrier at the end of the avenue, the dark surface of the bay sat visibly higher than the streetlights.

High above the intersection, mounted to the roof of a deserted four-story commercial building, a massive holographic billboard hummed against the salt damp air.

It projected a wireframe descent through the Precursor Complex beneath Mars, ancient corridors opening into shafts no survey team had mapped. The same advertisement had played since Arthur was a child.

Twenty years earlier, a mineral crew had broken into the ruins and changed the direction of Felini civilization. Modern drives, artificial gravity, neural lattices: all of it had begun with fragments pulled from beneath the Martian dirt.

The display cycled through standing bounties and impossible credit figures.

Discovery Participation Guaranteed.
Buy High Ground.
Leave The Tide Behind.

Arthur looked at his mother. At forty, her gray fur was thin around her temples, and her shoulders carried a deep, quiet fatigue. She looked up at the glowing wireframe corridor, let out a small sigh, and shook her head a microsecond before continuing up the slope. His mother knew what the advertisements omitted: for every recruit who bought a home with a discovery, dozens returned in debt. Some did not return. They had bet everything on him.

A sudden snap echoed from the sub-station down the block. The billboard flickered, tore into lines of blue static, and went pitch black.

Arthur had gone into surgery in his hometown and awakened in a place everyone had already begun referring to in the past tense.

Their apartment building sat four blocks up the slope. Inside, the living room had already been stripped bare. The walls showed pale rectangles where framed pictures had hung for fifteen years, and the floorboards were scuffed clean around the empty spaces where the sofa and table used to sit.

His ma handed him his small duffle bag. His entire wardrobe fit inside it with room to spare.

On the kitchen counter sat four hard-sided travel cases. The black implant case sat beside them. That was everything they owned.

Arthur looked through his small pile of personal items on the counter: a stack of family data disks, his pa's old deployment patch. He picked up the stone fish Pearl had carved for him three summers ago, small and lopsided, one fin thicker than the other where she'd given up trying to match them. She'd handed it to him still gritty with beach sand and called it a carp. He had told her carps didn't have that many teeth, and she'd told him to shut up and take it. He set it in the duffle himself, on top, where it wouldn't get buried. He reached for a rusted brass gear he had kept since he was ten, hesitated, and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

Hi looked at the four cases. “The university came through?”

His ma zipped the top one shut. “Temporary faculty quarters. Small, but it has a kitchen.”

“For how long?”

She did not answer immediately.

The housing fund had become his lattice. The money they had saved for higher ground was gone, spent on the lattice behind his ear, sitting behind his left ear in two units of empty grade-one capacity.

He picked up two of the cases by their handles. “When does the municipal transport bus leave?”

“We aren't taking the municipal transport,” she said.

Arthur stopped. “Why not?”

“Red Horizon sent a driver,” she replied, checking her wrist display. “They moved your intake forward.”

A black corporate crawler waited at the curb downstairs, the Red Horizon emblem painted across its side doors. It was the civilian version of the six-wheeled personnel carriers the Commonwealth used overseas: high-clearance and heavy enough to push through floodwater without losing traction. The armor had been stripped down, the weapon mount replaced by a cargo rack, but it still looked more suited to crossing a war zone than collecting recruits.

A broad-shouldered driver in a gray company uniform loaded their four cases into the rear compartment without a word, then opened the passenger door.

Rolling thunder reverberated against the buildings and the sky lit up as the crawler pulled away from the curb. Heavy rain began to fall in sheets, blurring the flooded crosswalks and the empty storefronts as they headed inland.

Arthur’s ears flattened.

“I hate the rain,” he muttered.

“You always have,” his ma said.

Inside, the crawler was warm and almost silent. Thickly padded seats absorbed the vibration of its six wheels, while a navigation display spread across the front glass, marking flooded streets in blue and abandoned vehicles in amber. The driver followed the route as it changed ahead of them, turning twice to avoid stalled traffic and once around a municipal transporter left sideways across an intersection.

Through the rain-streaked window, Arthur watched families shelter beneath plastic sheets while they loaded the last of their belongings. A man stood knee-deep in water trying to free a small car from a drainage channel. Farther uphill, relocation officers waved a cargo convoy through a broken traffic signal while people shouted from the curb for room that was not there.

His ma sat beside him with both paws folded over her travel case.

Arthur felt something in his chest loosen. Whatever happened next, she was getting out. She had somewhere dry to sleep tonight and a ride that would carry her past the flooded roads.

Red Horizon had sent the crawler for him. His mother was only inside it because he had been accepted.

He looked back through the rear glass as their building disappeared behind the rain. He had spent eighteen years wanting to leave the district. Now that it was happening, he found himself trying to memorize it.

He watched the district recede through the rain and wondered what would remain once the water claimed it. Twenty or thirty years from now, would divers descend through these streets and mistake the things they had abandoned for treasure?

The journey inland took nearly half an hour. By the time the crawler reached the high-speed rail terminal, the water had fallen away from the curbs and the storefronts still had glass in their windows.

Red Horizon’s district office stood across from the terminal. Its lobby was packed with luggage and company guards, while dozens of young recruits crowded the bench seats.

Arthur had been here two months earlier, the first day his eighteenth birthday was close enough for Red Horizon to accept his application. Back then, the lobby had been quiet, and he had spent an hour behind a glass door answering questions he had rehearsed for weeks. Now, luggage covered the floor, guards watched every entrance, and the interview felt as though it had happened in another life.

Arthur walked through the double doors with his implant case tucked firmly under his left arm.

Near the central intake desk, a girl stood beside a stack of gray travel cases. Her coat was pushed back over her shoulders, revealing a gray travel sweater, bright blue eyes, and sleek white fur. Behind her left ear, a fresh patch of fur had been shaved away at an angle, showing pale pink skin over a clean surgical seam.

Arthur froze.

Pearl turned at the sound of the front doors sliding shut. Her white ears came forward, twitching once, and her eyes widened as she locked onto him.

“Artie?” she whispered.

The distance dropped away in an instant, but before Arthur could take a step toward her, a sharp voice called out over the lobby speakers.

“Arthur Ashpelt?”

Arthur turned toward the front counter. A middle-aged registrar in a crisp Red Horizon blazer was looking down at a glowing desk panel.

“Here,” Arthur said, stepping forward.

The registrar checked the digital clock mounted above the glass doors behind her. “You are the last candidate for cohort two fourteen.”

The registrar flicked the contract toward him. Arthur’s QUIP chimed as the agreement opened across its display.

“Scan your QUIP to open your provisional account and authorize transport,” she said. “Baseline screening is across the hall. You have twenty-three minutes before the shuttle leaves for High Perch.”

A column of estimated charges populated along the side of the contract. Transport. Lodging. Equipment processing.

Arthur barely had time to register the numbers before Pearl reached him.