When she opened her eyes, it was too bright, so she screwed them shut again.
It took a few seconds for the pain to come back, and when it did, Piper wished she hadn't woken up. It felt like her bones were on fire; she could feel sweat on the flimsy sheets covering her body and her cheeks burned. Her ribs ached along with one of her ankles. When she breathed in, a wheezing sound rattled in her throat.
Ow.
At length, Piper forced her eyes open again. A blinding glare of lights eventually subsided to reveal the crisp interior of one of the academy medical centres, a fuzz of bleeping and whirring machines filling her ears.
Her nose twitched.
She could smell cigarettes.
"Welcome back to the land of the living."
With a herculean effort, Piper turned her head in the direction of the voice, and found Dr Carstairs lounging in his chair, puffing away nonchalantly as he swivelled towards her. She opened her mouth to speak, but a jolt of pain burned up her throat.
"Hurts doesn't it?" he muttered, flapping a hand at her. "Don't try to talk just yet. The impact fractured your larynx. Let the meds do the work – you should be able to speak in a few hours without aggravating it." Rolling his chair closer, Carstairs placed a data slate and stylus on her lap. "Use that if you've got something to say."
Piper tried a nod. Her neck hurt and she winced. She picked up the stylus and gingerly scribbled out a message on the reactive screen.
How bad?
"Bad enough." Carstairs wheeled back over to his computer, scissoring his cigarette between two fingers and leaning forward to peer at the screen. "The blast fed back into your implants and burned your ribs, right on the bone. Scarred your lungs along with it."
Piper's eyes went wide but he waved a dismissive hand. "Relax, relax. Nothing we can't fix here, but you were lucky that little raptor stopped when she did."
She scowled at that. Scribbled.
Does anything happen to Ferra?
"Nothing happens to her," Carstairs replied, shrugging apologetically. "She might be a vicious young woman, but she's one of the most capable AmpCore operatives in the whole academy. They overlook her ... eccentricities on that account.
"She's the darling of Wayfinder Navtech, and they build navigation systems for half the barges and cargo-copters in the city. AmpCore's not going to get on their bad side. On top of that she's hooked up with your friend Toran, which means Skiltron's got a stake in her well-being, too."
Toran's not my friend, she scribbled quickly. Carstairs rolled his eyes, turning back to the screen.
"Just a figure of speech." He sighed, one hand flashing over the keys. "But long story short, Ferra's done a lot worse for a lot less reason, so you can count yourself lucky. Little witch keeps me in a job, I suppose."
How long will I be here?
"A few days," Carstairs replied. "You're jammed full of the very best bio-repair nodules that Real-Raid and Maxpharm can come up with. They'll form base level repairs so I can clear an A.I.P. to finish the job."
Piper frowned. What's an A.I.P.?
"AmpCore Internal Practitioner. People who have mastered the Internal Principle – the best of them make pretty quick surgeons, but it's a delicate process. I like to keep them to specific tasks rather than fixing everything all at once." The doctor swung back to face her, a rueful smile on his face. "Someone should apologise to you, so it might as well be me. Sorry you got dragged into Ferra's little club."
I had a choice, Piper wrote quickly, resisting the urge to shake her head. Should have said no.
"I think we both know that Ferra wouldn't have let it lie so easily." Standing up, Carstairs stubbed out the remains of his cigarette in the ash tray and turned to leave. "Get some rest, Piper. I'll be back to check on you in a little while."
*
She awoke to gentle footsteps. Too gentle to be Dr Carstairs.
Piper felt the connective jolt of someone else's implants disrupting the atmosphere around her. With an effort, she straightened up in the bed as much as she could, biting back a hiss of pain as she looked to the door.
An elfin figure slipped over the threshold, smiling thinly as their wand disappeared back into their slim fit jacket.
"Arrow?"
"Hi, Piper," they replied. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I got the shit kicked out of me," she snorted, allowing her muscles to relax as she sank back into the bed.
"I heard about the fight."
"Great." Piper's lips twisted into a bitter sneer. "News travels fast around here, right?"
"Especially when it's about you." Arrow walked across the room, lowering themselves smoothly into the desk chair and turning to face her. "Are you alright?"
"Well, I'm alive." She shrugged. "But I'm stuck in here for a few days till my bones have healed enough for someone to fast track the rest."
"A.I.Ps." Arrow nodded sagely. "Useful people. Dangerous, but useful."
"You don't like them?"
Arrow wrinkled their nose. "They give me the creeps. Machines is one thing, but messing around inside somebody's body, playing with their blood – their bones – it's just a bit ... unsettling."
"Didn't peg you as the squeamish type." Piper smirked faintly. "So, what brings you here? Checking up on little old me?"
Arrow shrugged. "I wanted to make sure you were alright. It was wrong of Ferra to do that to you. She took advantage of her position."
"Can't imagine she's the only one."
"No, but Ferra is not like the others."
She heard the sting of bitterness in their voice, bitterness wrapped up in a lot of history. To her surprise, she felt a jolt of sympathy for them, corporate spiv or not.
"I take it you've had your run-ins with her?" Piper ventured. "Is she like Toran, about your...?" She managed a weak, vague gesture to Arrow with one hand. "Your identity?"
"Worse," Arrow continued, their jaw tightening. "Toran I can deal with, but Ferra? She's crazy. She likes hurting people."
"Yeah, I found that out first hand," Piper replied with a rueful smile.
"For what it's worth, you did the right thing," they continued. "This way, she got to prove her point, and it's done."
"She kicked my ass."
"Join the club, Piper. She runs the Sharks for a reason. No-one beats Ferra in a duel." Arrow sighed, leaning back in their seat. "It hurts now, but long term, you've done yourself a favour. If you'd refused to fight her she would have made your life a living hell down here."
"You weren't down there," Piper said after a moment, carefully picking out the words. "At the Sharks. Did Ferra ask you?"
"A while ago."
"And you didn't?"
Arrow shook their head. "No. And it was a bad idea."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." A shrug. "You didn't do anything. Ferra's old school, she's dangerous, and worst of all, she's got the skills to back up her mouth. I just stay away from her now."
"Could have used your advice before I decided to go down there," Piper chuckled, before stopping abruptly when pain lanced through her ribs.
Silence settled on them, filled only by the low hums and bleeps of the medical machines. Piper didn't quite know what else to say, and her body still ached all over from Carstairs ministrations. She could feel the ruptured grafts reattaching to her bones in a singularly odd experience.
Odd, but welcome somehow. With every millimetre of metal that wound its way back through her body she felt a little more whole again.
"Piper," Arrow said eventually, looking almost ashamed. "I didn't just stop by to see how you were doing. I've been... doing a little research."
"Research into what?" Piper asked warily.
"Into, well, you."
"Oh, good." Piper closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her head back against the pillow. "Why?"
"Sorry, it's just, you're different. There are so many questions and nobody will give us any answers." Arrow kicked with their heel, propelling themselves neatly over to the dormant computer. Their wand appeared in their hand. "So I decided to look for them myself."
A flick of their wrist made the screen spring to life, their amplifier glowing softly. Piper could see the wisps of power flickering back and forth between the machine and Arrow as they warped the system to suit their needs.
"They didn't tell you," Arrow said as they worked. "They ran DNA tests on you when you arrived here."
Piper shrugged. "Corps keeping secrets. Big surprise."
"They don't keep secrets from themselves."
"What does that mean?"
Arrow reached out, delicately turning the slim computer screen so she could see it. "I'm sure it's not news to you that the corps keep the DNA on file of every registered citizen of Hadrian."
"Not news at all." Piper could feel her temper rising; Arrow held something just out of reach, and she was tired to being given the run around in this place. "What has that got to do with me? What did you find?"
"I hacked the medical databases in the academy," they replied, as though it was the most casual thing in the world.
Their amplifier pulsed softly at the screen changed. Suddenly Piper was looking at a photograph of herself, accompanied by a few paragraphs of medical text. She tried to read some of it, but her eyes hurt, and none of it meant much to her anyway.
"So I've got a file here. What about it?"
"I... well there's not really an easy way to say this." Arrow shifted awkwardly in their seat, then shrugged. "It's a fake."
Piper blinked. "What?"
"It's a fake file. The DNA tests they ran on you when you got here, they don't match with corporate records."
"So somebody made a mistake-,"
"No, Piper." Arrow shook their head. "It's not real."
A sense of utter dread coiled itself around Piper's heart and she sucked a breath in through her teeth, bracing herself for a fresh revelation that she knew she didn't want. Her implants flexed with her emotions, sending a shudder through her body.
"How do you know?" she asked.
"Because I cross-referenced against your family." A faint flick of the amplifier changed the screen again, and Piper's breath caught in her throat when she saw the faces of Arden and her mother appear.
The first time she'd seen them since the night with the wraiths.
Arrow's right eye twitched as she manipulated the system. All three files showed side-by-side, and at a glance they looked like a family. Piper wanted to believe it with every scrap of herself, and it was all she could do not to scream. Their eyes matched, evergreen and bright; their faces looked similar too – enough that they had to be related.
But Arrow kept working. DNA helices appeared in front of each image, swirling languidly in a pattern that was almost pretty. One by one they locked into place.
Confirmed Match.
Confirmed Match.
Error. No Match Found. Contact System Administrator for further information.
Piper swallowed hard. She could feel the implants beginning the heat under her skin and a faint orange glow seeped through the flimsy medical bedclothes.
"Piper, easy," Arrow murmured, rolling their chair back slightly. "I thought you had a right to know."
"What does this mean?" she forced out through gritted teeth, battling to keep control.
"Well, I'm not totally sure." They shook their head in bafflement. "But, according to this, they're not your real family."
"They're my family," Piper snapped. "No matter what that fucking machine says."
"Of course, I know, I didn't..." Arrow raised stammered. "I just mean, you're not biologically related – to either you mother or your sister. The records are wrong."
She felt like she was about to explode. Piper closed her eyes and tried to sink back into the bed, hoping the dark might just swallow her up like a bad dream, and she'd wake up at home, away from the corps, away from AmpCorp.
Away from a real world she couldn't handle.
When that failed to happen she exhaled, long and slow, feeling her breaths and letting the power flow gently through her damaged implants. When she felt calm enough, she tried to just logic this whole mess out.
"Does that thing tell you who I am related to?"
Arrow shook her head. "Well, that's the weird part."
"There's more?!"
"There no match for your DNA in any corporate records. Nothing – not in any of the medical corporations, security companies, employment medical submissions. There's no trace of you." Arrow told her, looking back at the screen. "I've never seen this before. Piper, you're... a ghost."
"Why would someone fake my records?" she asked.
"You're unique, because of your implants." An awkward shrug. "I guess someone, somewhere, was trying to hide you."
"From who?"
A flicked of fear crossed Arrow's face. "From whoever sent a codewraith to try and kill you."
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