Up The Tower Read Online Free Page B

wall. “I just heard from Chairperson Howell that President Solap himself is highly invested in where we’re going with this.”
    “That’s wonderful, dear.”
    Automatic response, the tone filled with enough pride to let him know somewhere inside of her, she cared. Perhaps she did.
    They approached a tall set of elevators with golden doors. Raj turned, smiling, his hands gathered in front of his waist.
    “And this,” said Raj, “this is where you get off.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    He pointed at the entrance, winking. “You have to go, now. There’s a cab waiting outside.”
    “Oh. All right.”
    She was a little surprised. Usually when he asked her over during business meetings, she followed him around, looking nice until he wanted a break. Then he’d push her into a closet or a bathroom and make use of her and relax a bit. He told her she was good at that. Ana didn’t see how what she provided differentiated from something Raj could take of with his hands, but Raj was her first boyfriend. Perhaps this was just how things worked.
    He took her hands in his. Smiling, still smiling.
    “You and I, we’re just going on different paths.”
    “What?”
    Behind him, the elevator opened up. Three dark-haired girls with tech swirling around their beautified faces and tiny all-bust bodies appeared, softly cooing Raj’s name. They were high-class girls. Everything about them bespoke of a higher birth than Ana. They pushed in on his body—each of them appropriately shorter than him. She had been vultured. Her whole life, now theirs.
    “You're too small-time for my game, honey. Really, I just don't think you'll fit with my life.”
    There were some more words after that. Ana didn’t know if she really heard them. Raj drifted into the elevator, mouthing for her to leave. Maybe he was saying it. She couldn’t tell—all that filled her ears was empty, hissing air. She wandered out into the street, pushing away the driver that Raj had arranged for her. He fell backward into the street and cursed her, spitting at her heels.
    Ana slipped and stumbled down the street, dazed, her future gone, pressing southward into Junktown.
    * * * * *
    “H ey, Smellson!”
    Samson ignored the jeer, focusing carefully on opening the box. He was twelve years old and did not want to screw this up. Being twelve was important, and people took the things you did seriously, so long as you did them well.
    “Smellson, hey!” The Crowboy banged his crowbar on the dusty ruins of the factory line where they had set up the six crates from their haul that morning. “Don’t blow us up, okay? I don’t want to die with your stench clogging me up, yeah?”
    Again, Samson ignored the other boy, trying to concentrate as he eased his longtool through the gap in the crate before him. He very well could blow himself up; he could blow them all up. Inside the GuaranTech crate he tinkered with was a copbot.
    Copbots blew up all the time. If their main processors or power source were damaged, they blew up. If they were being captured, they blew up. If they ran out of ammo and couldn’t refill within about ten minutes, they blew up. When they blew up, they incinerated everything in about a hundred foot radius. The warehouse was not big enough for the Crowboys to keep their distance and still work in the role of protection as they had been hired. So they were in the blast zone as well as Samson.
    The copbots, deactivated, were precious and valuable. Strangely, they were valuable precisely because they were so hard to deactivate. A copbot was made almost entirely out of self-healing nanotech, and with enough time, it could repair from almost any wound to its metal shell. So, to keep this sort of power out of the hands of the gangster conglomerate that ran Junktown, the Five Faces, and any other sort of competitor, the copbots had a very liberal self-destruct mechanism.
    This is what Samson worked against. As far as he knew, he was the only person in the entirety of