We continued to sit in the soured air as the air cycler whirred on in its valiant struggle to cleanse the atmosphere. As if touched by an invisible hand, the privacy curtain fluttered like a ghost in passing as Rob’s voice broke the silence.

  “How,” he demanded, “...do you know that number?” His tone wasn’t aggressive, just carefully guarded.

  My recitation of the CCN had been so sudden and unexpected; he was truly as shocked as I seemed to be; it had been more than just a feeling; it was a memory.

  I felt hyper-recollective. These flashes were tangible. Almost corporeal. I could smell her perfume. Feel the movement of my mother’s breath in the tiny capsule as she wrapped her arms around me like a cocoon. Hear the softly recited numbers as she enunciated each digit like the punching of a press writer onto a memory stick.

  There had been a steadfast look in her eyes when she’d entered the capsule we’d been forced to stay in. It had been so tiny, a child and slender woman could barely move for fear of being entrapped. Why and how we'd ended up there, I couldn’t fully remember. All I'd sensed was a sudden need to leave our home. An intense desperation as we bundled what could be gathered from the door to...

  There was a door.

  A WOODEN door. An honest-to-carbon wooden door she'd slammed on our way out. I'd been crying. Wondering why the changes had happened as she'd held me.

  The bitter taste of the cheap meal she'd purchased from a vending kiosk within the Capsule Bay's badly maintained facility felt like it was still on my tongue. I fought to not be sick. To make our already confined situation worse as I swallowed the bile.

  How? How could I have forgotten?

  How could I have EVER forgotten?!

  The cloying taste of the congealed sauce and poorly constituted protein mix served as an olfactory marker as I worked to remember the fleeting number at her insistence.

  "Owen?" Rob's voice said as his burly hand shook my arm. I'd been so lost in the memories I'd zagged out.

  "Who-What-Now?" I said, only now realizing he'd been speaking to me. It came out as a rush, and I snapped out of it. The memory had come back so strongly, it hurt.

  "Owen. I need to know. Aggie was the only one who knew that number.” He had a concerned but focused look on his face. “When did she tell you?”

  "What do you mean 'when'?" I asked, blinking a few times in confusion. I was...stunned. “Wait. No one ever called her Aggie except--” I said, trailing off.

  "Your father. I know, but answer me, Owen. It's important. When?" His brow was scrunched in concern, not anger, as he continued to stare into my face. Searching for...something.

  The puzzle I'd thought was nearing completion had just been picked up and tumbled along with several others. It had happened with so little warning. So little time; my mind joggled around as I fought to understand what was happening.

  "When I was, I don't know...Eight? Nine?" I said, not even questioning why he'd want to know. 'Bamboozled' might be the word I was looking for. My mental wheels were still spinning. "We had to leave somewhere suddenly. Barely had anything in a bag before we went straight to stay in the Capsule Bays. She said we couldn't find anything else because there was nowhere else we could go."

  He was whispering, almost to himself, a look of real pain washing over his expression. "I'm so sorry, Owen. She never said. Never told me."

  "Why would she tell you?" I asked, entirely confused by this point. Finding out Rob even knew my mother was a surprise in itself, but now? I had ZERO clue.

  "Eight. You were in the Bays as far back as Eight," he said, seemingly genuinely broken up.

  "You were the one who told me never to talk about it, remember?" I said, dazedly. "We eventually moved to the Stacks, and..." He straightened and looked at me contemplatively. "I don't think there ever was a chance for it to come up, was there?" I asked.

  I didn't hear his answer as another flash of memory came forth unexpectedly.

  I heard another voice.

  It was my father.

  My biological father.

  I couldn't remember the details of his appearance, but I'd known who he was. The bulky shoulders, draped in the finery of a silk shirt and vest, were locked tight as he stabbed a thick finger into my mother's frightened face. He had not been a small man. At least not physically.

  "Once you've dipped in the Bay? You'll never get the stink off you! Don't make me catch you around there. EVER. Am I clear?!" The tone had been bladed and sharp, slicing through the air even to where I had been partially hidden, across the short entryway in my room. I'd been hiding beneath a blanket to stay out of sight when he began accusing my mother of cavorting with the "wrong sorts of people.". It had happened shortly before we'd left. Before we'd been forced to flee to the Bays.

  Rob's eyes continued to search my face from across the table as he realized I'd zoned out again. His eyes filled with an unspoken sorrow as a voice, HIS voice, flooded my senses.

  "Others will see it as a sign of weakness." he'd said, "Like you're tainted goods. Keep it close to your chest, Kid, because they don't know. See? They don't! Some legitimately can't. Some of the best people I've ever known were from the Bays, and some of the worst? Well...never, and I mean NEVER, say anything around Golrich and his like. You hear? Bad news. I'd tell ya more, but then I'd have to kill ya. HA!"

  I shook my head to clear it, fighting to return back to the present. The Rob in front of me had shifted by leaning forward, both forearms planted on his knees as his head drooped down. He sighed. More wearily than I'd ever heard him do as his hands rubbed his scalp in frustration. His hair fluttered in alternating directions, which gave him a steadily deranged look with every passing of his hands. A trick of the light made the hairs match what I felt like my brain was doing. The stray tendrils whipped outward. Flailing as if to escape. My mind was a whirlwind of activity as all I could do was bear witness to the scenes before me as I was carried along.

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  Before tonight? Before I'd come to Rob's, I'd never had such vivid recollections. Everything had been muted, and I'd had issues concentrating. It had been hard to think. Something else always seemed more important. They had been suppressing our memories and emotions, and it seemed I wasn't yet fully prepared for the unrestricted flow of an unfiltered mind.

  The sudden urge to do something with my hands took over as I continued with my internal struggle. If I had to be honest, I'd identified it a long time ago as my way of coping with unusual situations where I felt overloaded. "To be idle was to be useless," as my father had once said to me. It eventually became how I gave myself time to think. A way of forcing my muscles to assist my churning brain while I worked things over. More often than not, it ended in success.

  So, I did it now.

  Trying not to trigger another memory, I stood, turning toward the dirty dish and cup sitting in the spilled puddle of Caf.

  Rob watched silently as I set to task. A stoic look of analysis on his face as he monitored my actions without comment, his eyes taking in everything as I gently lifted both items and stepped over to the sole source of running water in the tiny kitchen besides a tiny hydration dispenser where he'd been filling my cups.

  It was a standardized and hidden sink of a design just like the one in my old Pod. Tapping a toe leveled control allowed the surface of the counter to slide back as it nestled itself within the wall. A hidden mechanism I'd never bothered to study, but knew the principle for extended a spigot, which automatically produced an aerated stream of tepid water. Running the plate below the stream caused the gelatinous brown smear of the protein puck's remaining traces to sluice and flow into the tiny basin, which sat exposed below it.

  The light plopping noise of the water hitting the slowly growing pool and the hissing of the running faucet was almost hypnotizing. I imagined a similar flow to my memories as I thought back to the first time Rob and I had met. He'd taken me aside and told me, under no uncertain terms, should I tell people where I'd grown up.

  He'd known we'd been there but apparently hadn't known exactly when.

  One of the reasons I'd gotten along with Rob. Glossed over all the oddness. The weirdness of his personality when I'd first met him: he'd never, not once, held having lived in the Bays against me.

  The Bays had been dangerous.

  There had been all manner of people in the community: the unstable, the malicious, and the conniving. There had been...predators; and yet, despite the dregs of the Stacks, the Borderlanes, and the Spires ending up in the broken petri dish of the Capsule Bays, there were also bright shards of humanity. Supernova bright to offset the darkness hidden within the drudgery.

  "Shard-Keeper" was a term my mother had used often when mentioning the kinds of people willing to do best by one another. She'd referenced it when I'd read the missive she'd posthumously had delivered, which arrived minutes before my first notice to leave.

  "It's better than the Bays." I whispered to myself, repeating what my mother had often said to me in the first few months of living in the NS-Housing Pods. The saying hadn't been entirely true for me. Barring a few bright points and tiny, eeked moments of comfort and bliss, the Bays had been a much less cold and calculating environment than the Stacks had ever become.

  We'd gotten out when she'd remarried, to a junior executive on his way up the ladder. When we'd moved to the Stacks for the first time, he'd treated me like I wasn't important. He hadn't been violent or abusive, but I'd spent most of my time alone, as far and as quiet as I could've been without being seen, for fear of cold, analytical judgment or casual indifference.

  Being the wife of a supervisor-class worker for the Processing Plants allowed some benefits my mother hadn't had access to otherwise. The chief among them: corporation-sponsored mods. TxCorp supplied, installed, and managed. In light of the recent discoveries? I could see, very clearly, how my mother had become who she was, and what she'd become saddened me.

  After the implants...she'd changed. Dramatically. He'd become a subdued version of herself, like a shade, lacking solidity or definition. A little less bright. Less...caring. Unable to say no to things she had never compromised on.

  I'd kept my name, despite the fact my mother remarried. When she and my father died by what was deemed an "...accidental malfunction of safety protocols." There were no further details. I wasn't allowed to see her body.

  At the time it hadn't occurred to me to be bothered by it, but I was bothered now. Why hadn't they let me see her body?

  The filisheet had been fresh. Recently pressed, smelling vaguely of heated polymer and ink as I absorbed the words in the emptied room of distant memory.

  The world can be fractured and made whole again, Owen.

  As children, we were taught the heavens and stars above were shattered. We picked up the pieces and formed them back into a whole so people might live, and even though our life was a difficult one, that's why it's important for someone to keep the shards safe.

  Together.

  It's my final hope you'll gain your citizenship and finish your education. Make our shards whole again. I love you, my Little Wish.

  I'm sorry.

  Become better than we ever were.

  - Mom.

  The dish and cup were clear. Their surfaces were shining as they sat within the nearly overflowing sink.

  I wasn't sure how long I'd been standing there.

  I extracted the dish and cup before tapping the closing mechanism with my toe, futilely trying to wipe clear the hot tears on my cheeks as the counter reappeared over the face of the hidden basin. The clunk of an opening outlet followed by a hiss of spraying water met my ears as the contents of the basin were jettisoned and whisked away along a feedline into a substation processing facility far, far from here.

  It seemed like an oddly specific term, but it had stuck with me. It was what I was reminded of when I'd met Rob.

  When all others spoke about Rob in hushed tones and mocking laughter where they thought he couldn't hear. I hadn't. Instead, I'd viewed him with open curiosity. Listened when he taught and laughed when he told me the rules of the world by challenging them.

  She'd called me that. Her "Little Wish.". It had been something she'd only called me before we'd fled to the Bays. Back when she'd been who she was. The thought triggered the memory of a phrase she'd taught me for when someone died in the place of her birth.

  The Canals.

  "We pick up the pieces and form them back into a whole so people might live," I said quietly to myself, leaning forward to grip the counter as the tears began to fall.

  He'd said the last part along with me. Rob's expression was full of understanding, the sorrow plainly written on his haggard face as his mouth pressed into a thin line. He'd known the words. How? I didn't understand or care in the moment.

  Gripping my shoulder securely, he pulled me into a crushing hug. The emotional outbreak earlier had been a pressure release. This? Was something else...

  I began to tremble.

  Then shake. It was uncontrollable.

  "I'm sorry, Kid," he said, simply. I clung to him and began to sob, my breaths coming out in ragged gasps as I squeezed tightly and didn't let go.

  The grief of losing my mother again. The fear, anger, and helplessness of seeing Karl pointlessly kill himself right below me. My abandonment by Pandora and the future I had hoped to share. The futility and forlornness of Branch's last act, and the unfairness of all of us becoming pawns in a game we were never meant to play, with senses we couldn't trust.

  Through it all, like a behemoth holding the world upon his shoulders, Rob kept me standing as the feelings crashed over me like a tidal wave.

  Enveloping me.

  I mourned.

  Finally. I mourned.