Announcing: Nameless

A sample from my first novel!

Today, I’m incredibly excited to announce Nameless, my first novel, and this week’s Stained Glass Woman is a sample of the first couple of chapters. It’s a cyberpunk action-adventure set in the dead cold of a January Minneapolis winter, and featuring a pair of queer women leads, thrilling action, and a cat with a prosthetic leg.

Nobody survives the winter alone.

Out February 11!

It was supposed to be a nothing job.

Identify a body that’d been reduced to its component elements by a swarm of nanites, get a paycheck. Satya Hassan didn’t have to like the cops to like paying rent, and with more than half of the country out of work, well, a gig is a gig.

Only now, she and Dan Landvik, a detective just promoted to homicide, are trapped on all sides by amoral megacorps, an uncaring government, and a mass-murderer that the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t dare to touch.

Betrayed by the people they thought they could rely on, facing an enemy they can’t pin down, and without even the name of a victim to go on, Dan and Satya will have to do more than uncover a conspiracy—they’ll have to face their own lifetimes of queer trauma, make allies out of enemies, and maybe even change the world along the way.

Or, at least, save a small cat with a prosthetic leg.

You can preorder the ebook for Nameless—a DRM-free epub, so it’s fully compatible with Kobo devices—right here! You can also get it in paperback or hardcover on the release date!

---

Prelude: Chat

<C3r3al_K|llr has joined “Public Insecurity Section 9” at 209.XXX.XXX.XXX (IP masked by host protocol)>
<$ave0RDi3>: hey cereal
<flutterbye>: Cereal! Long time
<C3r3al_K|llr>: yeah yeah
<T1nkerB3||>: Hey, Cereal. Good to see you again.
<C3r3al_K|llr>: o crap, tink’s here
<C3r3al_K|llr>: /logout
<$ave0RDi3>: lol
<flutterbye>: ha
<Anonymous User 13>: hehe
<T1nkerB3||>: Seriously, Cereal, it’s tinker, not tink. It’s not that stupid cartoon. And bell, like Alexander Graham Bell
<$ave0RDi3>: sure, tink
<$ave0RDi3>: ::pictures tinker prancing around his room in a green minidress::
<$ave0RDi3>: it’s a tough look, tink. gonna go blonde for it?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: lol
<flutterbye>: laaaaaawl
<Anonymous User 13>: o_o
<T1nkerB3||>: You guys suck
<C3r3al_K|llr>: then why do you hang out here?
<T1nkerB3||>: Not like I got a job or anything
<flutterbye>: i hear that
<Anonymous User 13>: yeah
<$ave0RDi3>: who does these days? you guys seen the monthly jobs report yet?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: oh, here it comes
<Anonymous User 13>: huh?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: wait for it...
<Anonymous User 13>: doesn’t that not come out for another week?
<flutterbye>: ha! Where do you think you are, some retro-themed net node?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: srsly
<flutterbye>: We, mr. anon, are unemployed, bored, overly intelligent troublemakers with computers
<flutterbye>: and we use them to get into places we shouldn’t.
<$ave0RDi3>: preach it
<C3r3al_K|llr>: so, which db did you break into, save?
<T1nkerB3||>: Who cares? Guys, I’ve got something awesome to show you.
<$ave0RDi3>: bureau of labor statistics
<$ave0RDi3>: obviously
<T1nkerB3||>: It’s going to change the world.
<flutterbye>: Wait your turn, tinker
<C3r3al_K|llr>: thanks, flutter
<flutterbye>: np
<Anonymous User 13>: so, what’s the report say?
<$ave0RDi3>: they’re claiming the unemployment rate’s 60.4%
<$ave0RDi3>: real data’s at 67.8
<C3r3al_K|llr>: shit
<flutterbye>: wow
<Anonymous User 13>: they cook the books?
<$ave0RDi3>: have done for years
<$ave0RDi3>: keeping the rate below 62 or something is supposed to be good for reelection
<flutterbye>: Fuck the feds
<$ave0RDi3>: hell yeah
<flutterbye>: man, makers are the bees knees
<flutterbye>: but they’re not exactly good if you wanna work for a living
<C3r3al_K|llr>: i hear ya. this recession’s been on for what, over a decade now?
<$ave0RDi3>: recession my ass
<Anonymous User 13>: pretty much since the gray war, right?
<T1nkerB3||>: So, can I go yet?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: ...
<$ave0RDi3>: tinker, you’ve been saying that shit for about two years now
<$ave0RDi3>: and it’s never anything
<flutterbye>: mmmhmmm
<T1nkerB3||>: But it’s true!
<$ave0RDi3>: tell ya what
<$ave0RDi3>: do the server run and you get ur turn
<$ave0RDi3>: deal?
<T1nkerB3||>: I don’t do intrusion though.
<T1nkerB3||>: You guys know that.
<Anonymous User 13>: server run?
<C3r3al_K|llr>: save keeps a secured server
<C3r3al_K|llr>: if you want respect around here, you gotta get in and see what he keeps inside
<whisper: $ave0RDi3 to C3r3al_K|llr>: been meaning to say, i wish you’d change your name
<whisper: $ave0RDi3 to C3r3al_K|llr>: kind of a hint for ppl
<whisper: C3r3al_K|llr to $ave0RDi3>: if i changed it, it’d be more of a hint
<whisper: C3r3al_K|llr to $ave0RDi3>: ^_~
<Anonymous User 13>: man, you guys are impressive
<Anonymous User 13>: i bet this place was just flipping out when you guys took Datek North America down for all that money
<C3r3al_K|llr>: ...
<flutterbye>: Ok, i’ve had enough. Save, you want this guy, or should I?
<$ave0RDi3>: i got it
<$ave0RDi3>: mr. anon, aka justin madigan, age 25 of the savannah police department (shield 414399), if you log off before i’m done with your dumb ass, i will make your life a living hell for the next three or four months until i get bored
<$ave0RDi3>: k?
<Anonymous User 13>: i’m not a cop!
<$ave0RDi3>: lol
<C3r3al_K|llr >: haaaaaa. cute
<Anonymous User 13>: really!
<$ave0RDi3>: sure. you were transferred to net crimes three days ago, according to your dept.’s records
<$ave0RDi3>: so i’m guessing you were sent in here by someone who’s been in net crimes for a good while as a prank
<$ave0RDi3>: first day off training, right?
<Anonymous User 13>: ...
<$ave0RDi3>: thought so
< T1nkerB3||>: Know what? Fuck you guys. I’m gonna go get rich, and you can all die in a fire.
< T1nkerB3||has left “Public Insecurity Section 9” at 209.XX.XX.XXX (IP masked by host protocol)>
<C3r3al_K|llr >: man, someone’s a jerk tonight
<$ave0RDi3>: meh
<$ave0RDi3>: anyway, officer madigan, we’re the niners
<$ave0RDi3>: and we might be gray hat
<$ave0RDi3>: but if anyone around here did something as petty as steal cash
<$ave0RDi3>: we’d run their asses out in a heartbeat
<flutterbye>: We’re digital vandals, man
<flutterbye>: We do it for the fun
<flutterbye>: and to flip the bird to people in power
<C3r3al_K|llr >: yeah
<$ave0RDi3>: so go tell your boss that you got in and you got caught
<$ave0RDi3>: and never come back
<$ave0RDi3>: got it?
<Anonymous User 13>: k
<Anonymous User 13 has left “Public Insecurity Section 9” at 209.XX.XX.XXX (IP masked by host protocol)>
<flutterbye>: Fucking cops
<$ave0RDi3>: i know, right?
<C3r3al_K|llr >: anyway, guys, i just wanted to say hi
<C3r3al_K|llr >: been busy lately, and i couldn’t get on very much
<flutterbye>: It’s good to see you again, cereal
<C3r3al_K|llr >: aaaaand, gotta go work now
<$ave0RDi3>: you’ve got a job?
<C3r3al_K|llr >: sure
<C3r3al_K|llr >: been gainfully employed ever since i joined
<flutterbye>: /jealous
<$ave0RDi3>: i’m not. working’s for chumps
<C3r3al_K|llr >: ha ha ha. bums
<C3r3al_K|llr has left “Public Insecurity Section 9” at 209.XX.XX.XXX (IP masked by host protocol)>

---

1— Satya

It was a very tidy corpse.

Satya looked at the battered barrel, discarded by some long-forgotten petrochemical company whose logo was still, faintly, visible on its side. It was clearly out of place here, but that was why it had been noticed—even stuffed in an alleyway in the dead cold of a late January winter night, with fat flakes of snow slowly drifting down to cover the faded but still vibrant blue plastic of the old thing, trash of this scale left in the urban heart of downtown Minneapolis would have been reclaimed years ago.

The lid had been left off, or maybe lost, and the corpse inside lay exposed to the snow. To the untrained eye, it looked nothing like a body. Rather, it looked like a bunch of spare materials for someone’s household maker—somewhere between ten and twenty gleaming, black one-kilo bars of graphite, hundreds of little hundred-gram beads of varying sizes and colors, and the telltale shining gray one-kilo bar of elemental calcium. There were probably a few extra little beads of calcium rolling around in the bottom with everything else, but it always surprised Satya how often a corpse had just that one one-kilo bar. It was all submerged, of course, in forty or so kilos of water and other liquid chemicals.

“What’s that smell?” one of the police officers asked, pausing to her left. Satya shifted a bit away from him, a blonde-haired man with an egg-shell complexion who stood about an inch shorter than she did. He had a young, clean-shaven face and wore the armored black uniform of a patrol officer.

“Ammonia,” she said, a bit of ice in her tone. For a moment, she let silence hang in the air, but he didn’t leave. “Where’s that fucking lid?” she eventually growled. “The snow’s gonna melt in all that water and fuck up my data.” The young fellow cringed a bit, and finally scurried away. Satya sighed, and looked around while she waited.

Two black police cruisers idled at one end of the alleyway, and a third sat at the other, next to a white forensics van. There were a half-dozen uniformed patrol officers working their way through the bureaucracy that inevitably accompanied a body these days, and three white-jumpsuited forensic lab techs pretended to help them, though there was little enough for them to do tonight. The snowfall had obliterated pretty much everything except the barrel and the corpse. Satya knew that there was a detective around here somewhere, the unlucky bastard who had landed a nano, but she hadn’t seen him yet. Snow crunched behind her, and she turned.

“You got the damn lid for our John Doe yet?” she asked, her tone a little gentler than it had been a minute ago. “I thought you guys had a maker in the forensics van.” The woman who stood there was a fair bit shorter than Satya, but she was still on the tall side for a woman, and wore short-heeled boots as well. Her skin was the pale beach-sand tan you saw a lot in Minnesota, lightened further by the deep winter, and her straight amber-colored hair was neither short nor long—a practical cut, and one many female police officers favored. She wore a wool coat and a turtleneck against the winter chill, and carried no lid of any kind.

“’Nameless victim’s’ the department policy these days. Don’t know if they’re a man, woman, both, or neither yet.” She paused for a moment before continuing. “Nice to meet you,” the woman said wryly, and arched an eyebrow. Satya didn’t offer her hand to shake, and neither did the woman.

“You seen Dan?” Satya asked, softening her tone a bit. She’d never met the guy, but a foul temper and some casual bluster often helped make up for the fact that she wasn’t part of the police department, which made her presence here on suffrage at best in the eyes of most of the street-level cops.

“Dan Landvik?” the woman asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s me,” the woman said. “Danica to my family, but most of the guys around here just call me Dan.” Satya didn’t bother to hide her wince. Dan still didn’t offer her hand. Satya didn’t either. They stood and regarded the barrel for a while in an uncomfortable silence.

“This your first nano?” Satya finally asked, but it wasn’t really a question. “Didn’t notice you around the department last time they found one of these.”

“How long ago was that?” Dan asked.

“Coupla years ago. Not many people around anymore than can actually reprogram the little bastards.”

“I was working Net Crimes until about a year ago.”

“Ah.” Silence again. Satya looked over at the other woman. “Guess you did pretty good work then?”

“That’s what they tell me,” Dan said, shrugging. “Homicide is… pretty different, I’ve got to admit.”

“Yeah, well, at least this one didn’t splash,” Satya said, and shifted her weight.

“You wouldn’t be here if it did,” Dan said a bit wryly. Satya made a sound of vague agreement, and they stood quietly in the gently drifting snow for a long minute. Eventually, Satya shifted her weight again and sighed.

“Sorry for being a jackass,” she said after a while, her tone quiet enough to be apologetic even if there wasn’t real remorse in it. Dan finally met her gaze.

“They printed the wrong size lid in the van,” Dan said, nodding toward the barrel. “I came over to let you know.” And meet you, she didn’t have to say. “We’re going to be working together for a few days. Figured it’d be smart to get started on the right foot.” Satya couldn’t help but smile at the passive aggression.

“Scandinavian?” Satya asked. Dan finally smiled.

“Norwegian, from up in Bemidji. My parents still live on an actual farm up there,” Dan replied. “Right out of an old Garrison Keillor program.” Satya chuckled.

“I deserved the shit out of that,” she said. The two of them stood in silence for a bit, and Satya tugged her gloves off to blow heat through her cupped fingers. The snow fell slowly, and there was something about it that always made the quiet deeper. Satya loved it. “Sorry. I’m a vet, and I never really bothered to…” she trailed off and shrugged. “You know. With the polite society shit after I got out.” Dan barked a laugh at the non sequitur.

“That’s okay,” Dan said, shaking her head. “I like straightforward.” A beat. “You know, they gave me a file to read about you before I came out.”

“Anything interesting?” Satya asked.

“I dunno. Outed you in the first two sentences, so I just stopped reading. Nobody who cares that much about someone being queer has anything useful to say about them,” Dan said, and Satya chuckled, some part of her initial wariness settling down.

“Better than the last three assholes I had to work with,” she said, smiling for the first time herself. “You’re a cop, but you’re people, huh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dan asked archly, raising an eyebrow. Satya shook her head.

“You know damn well what that means,” she said. “You know how some of those guys get.” She held her elbows out at an angle, hooked her thumbs underneath the straps of an imaginary flak vest, puffed out her chest, bugged her eyes out, and grunted. Dan clapped a hand over her mouth in a reflexive attempt to conceal her burst of laughter, and one of the techs looked over at her, a bit surprised.

“Okay, fair enough,” Dan said after a bit, straightening up. “And yeah, I’m people.” She offered Satya her hand, and said, “I’ve got your back, you’ve got mine?” Satya nodded slowly and took it without hesitating.

“First thing they teach you in Basic,” she said. “You trust the grunt next to you, no matter what. Don’t know where they’re from or why, but they want to get through shit just as much as you do.” A beat, and then she continued. “Almost like one of those old buddy cop flicks, you know?” Satya said wryly. “Odd pair meets on the job, goes and solves a crime.” Dan snorted derisively.

“Those things are so stupid,” she said. “Real life is nothing like that.” The two were silent for a bit, and Satya found herself staring at the barrel again.

“So, this is your first nano?” she said eventually for a second time, and this time it really was a question. Dan nodded. “Well, I’ll give you my best,” Satya continued,” but these things are an electric clusterfuck. I think the national clearance rate’s something like twenty percent.”

“Sixteen, actually,” Dan said, her tone flat.

“That low?” Satya asked, then shrugged. “It’s the whole point, really. Kill someone, then turn a packet of nanites loose on their body to tear down the evidence. Damn hard to I.D. someone without DNA, retinas, dentals, or anything, and if the perp’s smart enough to repurpose the nanites, they’re usually smart enough to have ‘em tear down any traces of themselves they left by accident.”

“Guess that’s why we’re paying you the big bucks,” Dan said. Satya shrugged.

“No guarantees,” she hedged. After a moment, she bobbed her head a bit, and continued, “Still, I got you guys an I.D. the last three times running.”

“And two convictions,” Dan agreed. Snow crunching again, and the beleaguered forensic tech from before waddled over to the two women. He carried a white plastic lid and dragged a rusted green handcart behind him.

“Sorry about that,” the man said. He was short, and Satya hadn’t talked to him before.

“That’s okay, Gordon,” Dan said, and the tech—Gordon—started to hammer the lid down on the barrel with a rubber mallet, sealing it shut.

“You got my office address?” Satya asked.

“You betcha,” Gordon said. She nodded.

“All right, then. Do your thing.” Gordon lifted the barrel with his handcart and rolled the thing away. Satya watched it go before she said anything. “You can come over tonight if you want, but I’m gonna be programming for three or four hours, and then the code has to compile,” she said, turning to Dan. “Probably better if you swung by in the morning.”

“You’re going to work all night?” Dan asked, surprise clear in her voice.

“No,” Satya said. “I’m going to work for a couple of hours, and then I’m going to knock back a few while the computer tests the code to make sure it’s solid. Then I’m gonna sleep while a jar full of specialized nanites looks at that barrel really carefully.” Dan snorted, a wry grin cracking her face

“See, you almost changed my first impression of you there,” Dan said, a bit of sarcasm coloring the edge of her tone.

“What do you want?” Satya asked. “I’m not a fucking cop.”

* * * * *

The harsh buzzing of her office door’s visitor alarm jarred Satya from a deep sleep, Darius’ amiable dream-face, dim in the moonlight, fading from her mind quickly. She rubbed her eyes with her right hand and did her best not to remember what came after, in the dream. In the past. A flash of twinkling gray splashed across her vision, and Satya shook her head, once, sharply. The memory, twelve years old yet still sharp as a knife edge, fell back out of her conscious mind. For now, at least. The buzzer sounded again.

“Damnit,” Satya said, and glanced at the power monitor on her arm. Still only a half-charge, and she didn’t really have time to piece herself back together anyway. The buzzer sounded again. “Damnit,” she said again. Louder, she hollered,” All right! I’m coming!” and limped to the door.

2—Dan

The door swung open on near-silent hinges, and Dan found herself struck dumb. Satya stood in the doorway, towering over her. Much more of her scarred, rust-brown skin was exposed than had been last night, revealed by a rumpled tank top and shorts. Satya had clearly been sleeping in it. She reeked of stale sweat, with a chaser hint of something alcoholic.

What drew Dan up short, however, was what wasn’t there. Satya had no left arm, only a gleaming metal and black plastic plate which covered the left side of her chest and vanished into her shirt. Out of the leg-hole where her left leg should have appeared was a thin, black metal pipe with a foot-shaped blob of plastic at the end, the most rudimentary of leg prostheses. Dan couldn’t help but stare. A very long minute passed.

“Guess we’ve both been pretty goddamned rude now,” Satya said acidly, her liquid umber –not quite black– eyes squinting in irritation. Dan realized that her mouth was open, and she shut it with a faint click. Somewhere, she noted that Satya didn’t have a left breast; the plate covered almost the entirety of her left pectoral area and wrapped around where her shoulder should have been.

“I’m so sorry,” Dan finally managed, not entirely sure what to say. Satya snorted.

“What the fuck ever,” she said, and turned away from the door, walking away into the office. She hadn’t shut the door, however, so Dan followed her in. Satya walked with a pronounced limp, which she hadn’t had the night prior.

“Don’t do it again,” Satya said over her shoulder, and while the words were hard, the tone had softened. “I’m gonna take a shower.” She paused for just a moment. “And don’t touch my computer.” The door to the bathroom slammed shut behind her, and Dan was left alone in the office.

Office was, if she was completely honest with herself, a generous word. The place had once been designed as a fairly spacious one-bedroom apartment, but its location on ground level, its rent, and its location near the heart of Dinkytown had all but compelled the transformation of the place into a mixed commercial/residential unit. Most of the other apartments on this level, Dan had noticed, had made the same move, and their doors bore little signs to advertise whatever cottage business the occupants were trying to run. A cheesemongers’, a clothing stylist’s, the desperate hope of an interior designer’s–the hope Dan always saw walking into these kinds of apartment buildings, with their fierce dreams and fiercer hopes for a brighter tomorrow. Given the economy, they were probably mostly failing to run, but that wasn’t anything new. Dan always found herself hoping for the little cottage businesses anyway.

The main room of the apartment was clearly Satya’s office area. A large, heavy wooden desk crouched with its back to the broad sheet-glass window that dominated the far wall of the unit, though heavy gray curtains had been drawn to hedge out the early morning’s light. A little brushed aluminum dome sat atop the desk—Satya’s projection monitor, Dan guessed—but the desk was otherwise clean, aside from a dirty plate of what had probably been yesterday’s dinner, a used tumbler, and a half-drunk and unlabeled bottle of something that looked and smelled alcoholic. To the left of the desk sat the old blue barrel from the night before, its white lid leaning against the wall. A power cord curled over its rim and vanished inside.

Dan heard the hiss of Satya’s shower. She tried to relax a bit, remembering Satya’s rough-and-ready frankness from the night before as she wandered around the room. Bolted firmly to the floor and wall a couple of meters away from the desk, and out of sight of the front door, was a bulky weapons locker about two meters long by one high. Leaning against the wall against it was the sturdy frame of an electric bike, well-worn, the frame of which had been bolted together from two halves. Above it hung the room’s only two wall adornments. One was a picture, and Dan walked over to it to look more closely. As she did, the computer’s monitor beeped once, and an orange light began to flash. She left it alone.

The picture showed four young men and women, dressed in the mottled greens and browns of military body armor. The first was a broad-shouldered but thin man with a wide grin and warm, brown eyes and skin the color of wet clay on a potter’s wheel. She could see a weapon strap, but his gun, whatever it was, was slung behind him. Next to him, and standing a good four or five inches taller, was a black-haired man with eyes the color of ferns and rich, sun-bronzed skin. He balanced a heavy automatic rifle on his right shoulder, and didn’t seem much bothered by its weight. The woman standing next to him had skin like alabaster, burning and splitting from the sun at her shoulders. She was tiny by comparison, and while her figure was utterly obscured by her body armor, she wore her copper-colored hair in an almost obnoxiously feminine pixie cut. She was laughing, and the long rifle she held, butt resting on the ground beside her, came nearly to her shoulder. Finally, on the far right of the picture, was Satya, her heritage shining in rich tawny copper skin and black, black hair. She was young—almost impossibly young, Dan found herself thinking—and she stood with a supreme ease and confidence that bordered on arrogance. Dan wondered where the ease had gone.

The frame next to the photo displayed a medal. Dan didn’t know much about military awards, but she knew the Medal of Honor when she saw it. She looked back and forth between the medal and the photo, and suddenly felt like she was intruding on something deeply private. She quickly stepped away.

Satya’s office area was neat otherwise, a pair of comfortable chairs sitting in front of her desk, and a meter-and-a-half-wide sign hanging on the wall opposite to the weapons locker. “Factotum,” it read, “Commercial-Grade Printing & Programming. I Can Make Anything Happen For You.” The sign wasn’t colorful but, Dan realized as she examined it, it was very well-made. What she had initially taken for simple pigment printing was actually debossed into the face of the sign, color blending seamlessly from black to gray and back again in an effect that looked rather like a bas relief. As she looked more closely, Dan found she could pick out little tricks of texture and pigment in the lettering that made the words seem to almost swirl when she moved. In the bathroom, Satya’s shower stopped. Dan straightened.

Satya walked back into the office area, her prosthetic leg replaced by one that looked regular in every way. Her limp was gone, and she moved with natural smoothness. The prosthetic, Dan realized, must have been a very, very good one. Satya’s left arm was still missing, and she toweled her almost military-short hair a little awkwardly with her right hand.

“Maker’s past the curtain,” Satya said easily, the sharpness from earlier entirely gone, and gestured vaguely. “Go get yourself something to eat if you’re hungry. I’ll be out in a minute.” She disappeared into the apartment’s bedroom before Dan could say anything, but before the door shut, Dan could see that the bedroom beyond was a study in utter chaos, with clothing, paper, and detritus that she couldn’t quite make out strewn everywhere.

The room past the curtain had once been the kitchen, Dan could see, but it, like most kitchens these days, had been gutted. The maker dominated the far wall and was almost two meters tall and one deep. It was, in fact, the largest maker that Dan had ever seen, aside from an industrial-grade machine designed to build whole cars in a single pass and the really big construction models that they’d use to cast whole buildings in a single go. The walls all around it were lined with white wire shelving laden with what looked like hundreds of carefully labeled one-kilo ingots of metals of all sorts. Big jars filled with different kinds of beads sat next to many of the ingots. The maker hummed softly.

Dan was about to speak when she heard a small sound on one of the shelves above the maker. She peered up, standing on the balls of her feet, and a small pair of yellow eyes met her own. They blinked sleepily. She blinked back. A striped gray kitten roused itself slowly, stretching from its bed atop a stack of clear carbon ingots—diamond, Dan realized with a start. Diamond wasn’t particularly valuable any longer, as it was just a phase of carbon, but most people stored their carbon in dull gray-gleaming graphite.

The kitten—no, the cat, Dan realized with a start. It was small enough to be a kitten of a year or so, but moved with none of the awkwardness or restless energy that any of her kittens had ever moved with. She’d owned a half dozen over the years, growing up, and even the best of them had turned half-feral by the time they grew to adulthood. This gray thing had none of that fierce attitude.

The cat, then, hopped down onto the maker with a surprisingly loud clang of plastic against metal, and Dan realized that its front left leg was a gray prosthetic with an incredibly complex silver design inlaid into the shoulder of the tiny device, and running down its leg, twisting in fluid lines and sharp-edged dots. The cat looked at her quietly, sitting on the maker, and then began to clean itself.

“Hey, there,” she said softly, and reached out to touch it. It paused, sniffed her hand for a moment, and then threw its small weight against her hand, little eyes closing in feline pleasure. Dan felt an odd lump on the back of its skull, and peered over it. A little metal dataport protruded from behind its left ear. “You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” she asked. The cat mewed a bit, and began to purr as she scritched it.

“Give me a coffee. Black,” she said slowly to the machine, and a little holodisplay leapt to life next to it. The cat stared at the holodisplay, transfixed for a moment, but then turned its attention to Dan’s hand again.

“What varietal shall I produce?” the machine asked in a soft, androgynous voice.

“Huh?” Dan asked. She’d never had a maker talk back to her.

“I am equipped with programming for twenty-seven different bean origins, such as Ecuadorian, Salvadorian, Brazilian, and Costa Rican, and can reproduce their flavors in any variety of light, medium, or dark roasts. Additionally, I can prepare basic coffee in any of thirteen different ethnic methods. Shall I list them?” the maker asked.

“Uhh,” Dan said, not sure what to say. “Can I just have a coffee?” The machine hummed a bit, and a few seconds later a little black mug slid out of a bay on the front of the machine. Dan took it and sipped the steaming liquid inside. It was good. The door to Satya’s bedroom opened, and the tall woman walked out into the office area, buttoning a pair of black denim pants, her left arm now in place. Dan was careful not to look. She noticed that its synthetic skin matched Satya’s skin tone and texture anyway.

“Your maker tried to give me a lecture on the history of coffee when I asked for a mug,” Dan said, joining her. Satya smiled a bit, and Dan decided that she liked the expression on her. “It’s pretty huge, though. I don’t envy you your power bills.”

“It’s what generally pays the power bills,” Satya shrugged. “My maker can do more than your maker. That’s why people pay me money to use it.” She paused, looking down, then crouched. The cat had followed Dan out of the maker room, and threw itself against Satya’s outstretched hand. The tall woman picked the tiny gray animal up and stood.

“Well, that and the fact that you can program nanites,” Dan said. Satya snorted.

“You cops are pretty much the only ones who pay me to do that these days,” she said with a shrug. “Most people just break their nanites down and build new ones when they go bad.” There was a lull, and the two women looked at each other for a moment. “Anyway,” Satya continued eventually, walking over to the kitchen area, “The whole point of having a big maker is volume and processing power. People come to me when they need something specially made, the kind of stuff that a normal maker isn’t programmed to spit out, or when they need something bigger than a desktop maker can build. Pretty damn useless if it can’t actually do any of that.” Dan nodded and took another pull on her coffee. It was still good. “Gimme another coffee, same as the last one” Satya told the maker, and it hummed a bit more loudly again. Satya scooped up the little cat while she waited, settling him into the crook of her prosthetic arm. He sat up almost immediately, paws splayed against Satya’s collarbone and his head pushing against Satya’s chin in close-eyed affection. Satya took her coffee from the maker and joined Dan in the main space of the room.

“Here,” Satya said, holding out the little cat when she noticed Dan’s gaze. “His name’s Muezza.” Dan took Muezza, which remained remarkably calm during the exchange. He settled down quickly in the crook of her arm, looking up at her but not lunging for affection in the way he had moments ago. After a moment, he began purring and kneading her arm, and Dan could feel tiny lifelike claws poking out from his prosthetic leg. They prickled her arm.

“His leg is incredible,” she said, looking at the intricate silver inlay again. “And the design is beautiful.”

“It’s not a design,” Satya said. “It’s calligraphy.” She paused for a bit, then continued, “It says ‘a love of cats is an aspect of faith.’ More or less. It’s hadith. It’s better in Arabic.”

“You’re Muslim?” Dan asked.

“Nah. My mom is, and she and Dad raised me in the faith, but with one thing and another…” she shrugged. “There was something about the language of the suras and the hadith that’s always stuck with me, though,” Satya said, and stroked Muezza with her right hand. Her good hand. “It’s a long story,” she said after a bit. For a moment, her face softened, and Dan wasn’t sure what she saw in the play of emotions that ran across Satya’s face then—sadness, old pain, maybe loneliness? Her face smoothed over almost immediately, and for a time nothing was said.

“Oh,” Dan remembered, breaking their silence. “Your thing beeped while you were in the shower.” She gestured across the room with her coffee mug, and Satya peered over her. She grunted, and made her way over to the desk. A holodisplay sprang to life when she neared it, the broad semitransparent projection hovering over Satya’s desk. It showed something angular, shaped more or less like an elongated hexagon with a deep divot carved out of one end and two segmented rods poking out from the other. Dan deposited Muezza on Satya’s desk, and the little cat looked up at the holodisplay above it disinterestedly, then promptly curled up and fell asleep.

“Well, there’s your remainder,” Satya said slowly. “Found it pretty quick, too. Got lucky this time.” She reached out and spun the object, little blue neon lines springing out of it at several junctures. Dan guessed that they were annotating something, but the text attached to them was dense, and she couldn’t read it from across the room.

“Remainder?” she asked, joining Satya by the desk. Satya glanced over, a puzzled expression on her face.

“How much do you actually know about nanotechnology?” Satya asked. Dan smiled, a bit embarrassed.

“I used to work in Net Crimes, remember? We didn’t really deal with physical stuff. Mostly intellectual property, so the before and after the printing bits.”

“Oh-kay,” Satya said, looking back at the displayed object. “Short version, then. Basic rule of smart nanotech programming: the last thing that the little bastards do when they’re done is take each other apart. Whenever you’re working in an open environment, like with reclaimers or whatever, you include a few lines of code at the end to tell your nanites to disassemble each other and jam in with all the materials they’re processing. That way, you’re only out the cost of power for the whole operation.”

“Makes sense,” Dan said. Satya nodded.

“Thing is, there’s always one leftover. Doesn’t matter how many you had doing the job—at the end, there’s two left, and one has to take the other apart. Leftover just sits around and waits for its battery to die. That’s the remainder,” Satya explained. “So, what do you want to do with it?”

“Guess we tag and bag—” Dan cut herself off. “Wait, you mean there’s an option here? Isn’t that thing evidence?” Satya nodded.

“Yeah, it’s evidence, I guess. Nobody in a court’s gonna be able to see it, though, so any documentation you do is gonna be basically the same as the real thing,” she shrugged. “And I get that there’s a point of principle or something in having the actual thing in the actual room, but it really won’t get you anywhere before the trial.”

“So, what’s plan B?” Dan asked.

“I push that,” Satya said, pointing at a blue-glowing button on the holodisplay, “and my nanites take this thing apart atom by atom and record everything.” She paused. “And, honestly, I really want to push the button.”

“Why?” Dan asked.

“Because that is the weirdest damn piece of nanotechnology I’ve ever seen,” Satya said, and spun the object. Dan looked more closely at the display.

“Manipulators,” Satya said, pointing at the rods, after a short delay. “Processor,” she said, pointing at the back of the thing. “Data storage,” she said, flipping it over and pointing at the bottom. She waited expectantly.

“So? What makes it strange?” Dan finally asked, taking the bait. Satya shook her head a bit, and laughed once halfheartedly.

“Where’s the damn battery?” She asked rhetorically. “This thing’s magnified a whole lot, obviously, but it’s still a damn big nanite. Almost as big as a second-generation model, and that means it’s a power-hungry little fuck.”

“So it lost its battery,” Dan said, straightening. “Big deal.”

“It’s still running,” Satya said. Dan met her gaze, and this time she had an almost hungry look in her eyes.

“What’s the lifespan on a typical nanite?” she asked, looking at the model again.

“Half hour to three hours on a charge,” Satya said. “Maybe more for a third-generation reclaimer version, but that barrel’s been sitting in my office for about ten hours now. Anything I can think of would’ve gone dead or needed a recharge before now.”

“How long could one work without a battery?” Dan asked after a beat.

“About a second. Maybe two,” Satya said. Dan leaned back, thinking.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” she eventually said, buying herself a little time to think. Satya shrugged, and stood up straight as well.

“I was up late. Code didn’t compile the first time, so I had to spend a couple of hours bughunting,” she said.

“I thought you were going to get drunk and sleep,” Dan said, a little bemused.

“I did,” Satya grinned a little. “And I did.” Dan shook her head.

“See, now you’re at risk of making me think you’re a good person again,” Dan said. Satya barked a laugh, and Dan was surprised at how rough—brutal, really—it sounded, not like how Satya had laughed before. This was not the laughter of someone who was amused at a funny quip, or pleasantly surprised by an unexpected pun. It was anger as much as laughter, scornful and full of disgust.

“Don’t you ever fucking worry about that,” Satya said acidly, her eyes returning to the projected nanite. “Been a long time since anyone had half a reason to think anything like that about me.” Dan found her eyes drawn back to the hologram as well. Dan chewed on her lower lip and couldn’t help but wonder where a self-hatred that intense could’ve come from.

“Take it apart,” she said on an impulse, and Satya nodded.

“Maybe if we get real lucky, we’ll even be able to salvage a little of the thing’s programming,” she said. “No promises. If it’s running anything magnetic, we’re shit outta luck, but this thing’s pretty damn weird. You never know.” Dan nodded and turned away from Satya’s desk while the tall woman fiddled with her holodisplay for a minute. She found her eyes drawn back to Muezza, his silver calligraphy reflecting the holodisplay in snips and bits.

“I’ve never seen a prosthetic like that before,” Dan said. Satya glanced over and snorted once, softly looked away.

“It’s a side thing I do,” Satya said. “I make prosthetics for animals that need them. Mostly cats and dogs, but sometimes you get something weird like a horse or something.”

“You design them?” Dan asked. Satya nodded. “Doesn’t each one need to be custom?” Satya nodded. “Wow,” Dan breathed, looking down again. “I can see how that’d pay the bills.” Satya shook her head.

“I do it,” Satya said. “I don’t charge for it.” Dan blinked, not understanding. “If they want me to illuminate it with something like that,” Satya pointed at Muezza, “or put in a sculptural design or something, I’ll charge them for the art, but not the limb design.”

“Why not?” Dan asked before she thought to hesitate. Satya sighed, and took a long time to answer.

“Because,” she said, “a cat isn’t a cat if it can’t pounce or climb. A dog isn’t a dog if it can’t fetch a ball. A horse isn’t a horse if it can’t run.” She paused. “And because they didn’t deserve to lose their damn legs.” Dan let that hang in the air for a moment.

“Yeah,” she said mildly. “Definitely the sort of thing someone who’s not a good person would do.” For the first time since Dan had met her, Satya was stunned into plain and obvious silence, mouth hanging open the same way Dan’s had when she’d seen Satya’s prostheses, earlier. An uncomfortable exposure, and Dan fought her instinct to apologize. The silence between them stretched. Eventually, after what felt like hours, Satya looked away.

“Anyway,” Satya said, her cool indifference back in place, “it’s gonna be a little while before we get anything on that nanite. Maybe a couple of hours, just so we can be certain that the resolution’s really good.”

“I know an executive at Godwin, Ingersol, & Davidson International,” Dan said, grateful for the safe conversational grounds. “I could give him a call, see what he has to say about this weird design. Maybe something like it’s been in the pipeline at one of the big patent firms.” Satya leaned back, face creased in thought.

“GID,” she said. “Isn’t it that big-ass intellectual property firm? Holds a couple million patents and sells reproduction rights?”

“That’s them, Dan said. Satya nodded slowly at first, and then with vigor.

“That’s probably a pretty damn good idea,” she said. “The way they spy on each other, your guy’ll probably know who’s working on something like this even if it isn’t them.” She paused and screwed her face into a sour expression. “Not much of a fan of those corporate vampires, though.

“It’d restrict the victim pool,” Dan said, shrugging. Satya shrugged back after a moment.

“Hey, I’ll take five thousand over five million any day,” she said.

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You can preorder the ebook for Nameless—which, again, is a DRM-free epub, so it’s fully compatible with Kobo devices—right here! Paperback or hardcover will be available at launch, on February 11!