“Oh no. Forgot it again.” Ellie mumbled under her breath as her hands brushed along the bare skin of her naked neck. She had to hurry or Cordelia would catch her without it.

She raced up the polished oak stairs to look for her missing joltlace. Aunt Cordelia expected so much from her now that she’d turned sixteen. So many things to remember and to do. Half the things she should do, she didn’t because she couldn’t remember them all. Cordelia usually forgave the small things. Things like dirty rooms and bare feet and uncombed hair all had been at one time or another forgiven, forgotten, and laughed about. But forget- ting to wear her joltlace wasn’t one of them. Aunt Cordelia had spent many thousands of her billions on one just for Ellie—a precious twinkling amethyst set in platinum and backlit by the soft twinkling glow of a linked kill switch inside the jewel. Just one squeeze and poppets would fall. Everyone who was anyone had one and wore it with pride. Why did she always forget to wear hers?

She topped the stairs where her ol’ Thom Poppet dusted, balancing on a personal lift disc hovering ten feet up near to the top of the collection of family portraits that lined the tall curling staircase. The venerable DesLoge ancestors going back to before the War of Devolution, mouths set in brave sneers and eyes that pierced the air like needles stood silent judges, always watching. Thom’s spindly-knuckled hands dusted each intricate mahogany frame with the care and patience that only a poppet spends. Ellie knew that her Thom had already spent hours at this job with no break, no rest or food. A poppet works until the job is done, guaranteed or your money back. At least that’s what the teach vids and commercials said. That’s the thing with poppets—they’re just like machines. Though Ellie wasn’t so sure when she looked into Thom’s eyes, brown and soft like syrup, even if they stared off into space all the time.

“Good morning, Thom,” she said as she slid past him, slowing to try to catch his gaze. She always tried even though they said poppets can’t see anything that doesn’t relate to their job. Can’t. Won’t. Ellie was never sure what actually dictated their lack of eye contact. She only knew that all poppets wore the same slack-jawed, wide-eyed emptiness like a uniform.

“Umnnggg.” Thom’s guttural response was the same no matter who greeted him. They say poppets all sound the same. Maybe someday she and Aunt Cordelia could whip up some kind of chip upgrade to soften the grunts or even allow for some speech—nothing too disturbing or complex. As Cordelia often said, “poppet brains could only handle so much.”

Ellie opened her door with a bang and tossed aside the mess of clothes on her bed she’d tried on that morning searching for the expensive toy Cordelia had given her. Thom hadn’t been through to clean up yet, thank goodness. Something about Thom handing her a kill switch didn’t sit right.

“Where is it?” Ellie bit her thumb in concentration as she shifted her personal compad, hoping the joltlace was underneath, perhaps hidden from last night’s studying. Nope. Where could it be? On her pillow? In her jewelry box? She shuffled through the gold rings and precious jewelry befitting her station in the DesLoge family, all presents from Aunt Cordelia. Still nothing. Where could it be? She gazed around the room, eyes skimming her extensive collection of books. Actual print book antiques that were all hers. Only the heir to the DesLoge fortune could afford that many real paper books. There! The chain glimmered, hanging out of the side of her copy of Golden Treasury of Antedevolutionary American Lit, one of the last print books made before the vidbooks replaced them.

That’s right, Ellie thought and grabbed the joltlace from the book pages. She’d been reading the uplifting lyrics written by the twentieth century band named Journey. Of course, the song’s streetlight people really referred to the sexual slavery that existed in the twisted free-market system of the bad old days before the Devolution. Imagine—live women driven to using their bodies as capital. What a horrible time that must have been. Now, the poppets fulfilled that function for society, though people of breeding didn’t openly discuss such things. She imagined someday she’d be let in on the intricacies of the poppet trade, maybe when she took over from Aunt Cordelia as the CEO of DesLoge Com, which wouldn’t be anytime soon.

Thank goodness for Aunt Cordelia, she thought as she smoothed the chain of the joltlace between her finger and thumb. She often wondered if she’d ever be ready for the DesLoge mantle of power that Cordelia carried with such grace.

She pulled the joltlace over her head and snagged it in her thick brown hair. She jerked it through, but not in time. The soft pop was unmistakable.

“Forgot your necklace again, child?” Aunt Cordelia’s voice issued from the wall vid unit.

Caught again. The entirety of her bedroom wall was lit with the larger-than-life face of her loving aunt and benefactor, the formidable Cordelia DesLoge—richest, most powerful woman in the seven zones of US NOAM. The slight crazing of crow’s feet did nothing to diminish the beauty of Aunt Cordelia’s deep blue eyes, harvested just a few weeks before from a poppet of astounding beauty. Like so many ladies of means, Aunt Cordelia could pick and choose replacement features from the finest poppets. The surgeons at Parker Cosmetics, a DesLoge Com partner company, transplanted them without delay. What do pop- pets need with such beautiful eyes, anyway? Those eyes seemed locked on Ellie with a sharp interest that made her feel five-years-old again.

“I can’t keep you safe all the time. What if they turn on us, Ellie? They can be so strong. They’d kill you in a minute and then what would I do?”

Ellie turned away to roll her eyes so Cordelia couldn’t see. She straightened up, put on her ‘I’m a good girl face,’ and said, “Aunt Cordelia, you and the Corporation have made them so dependable. It’s been what... thirty years since the last poppets went rogue?”

“That’s right, Ellie, but twenty-two people died. You will wear your joltlace. It’s not negotiable.” Cordelia’s face lost its indulgent softness and stretched into a mask of severity—a visage usually reserved for the most serious company offenders.

Ellie nodded because she knew a lost cause when she saw one and sat the twinkling remote pendant around her neck. The rectangular-shaped stone settled into the hollow at the base of her throat, a weight that felt much heavier than it really was. So heavy, because the glittering device, sparkling there against her skin, could blow Thom’s head off with a simple squeeze.

“Sorry, Aunt Cordelia,” she said, and she meant it. Aunt Cordelia did love her in her way. Cared for her as her own mother couldn’t. Why was it so hard to remember this one little kindness? What did it cost to wear the necklace if it meant so much to Aunt Cordelia? She’d just have to be careful with it around Thom and the others. More than one loyal poppet had lost its head to a careless squeeze of a joltlace.

It bumped with each step as she hurried out of her room. She was expected downstairs to sit with Cordelia as the decisions of the day were ticked off. “Training,” Cordelia called it. Ellie called it torture. She stepped back out onto the landing where Thom Poppet had been. Done with the frames, he had moved on to the next task of precision and monotony. As Ellie’s feet found the top of the stairs, she noticed his lift disc floating off to the side of the landing in safety mode. Thom squatted mid-staircase, working on the spindles of the banister with lemony oil and slow, studious wipes of his cloth.

A quick test wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Ellie pulled the hover disc out and stepped on board, activating it. She took a deep breath and lunged over the stairs’ edge. The disc carried her swiftly down, each step catching, dropping her weight then lifting her back up in a jerky tumble down the edges of the risers.

“Thom!” She screamed as she flew past his crouched, black-suited form. “Thom, save me!”

She threw her arms out as if she would fall. Her body bobbled left and right, making it seem as if she might tumble off and down the steps to her death. She shrieked and moaned, trying to get a reaction—any reaction.

Thom didn’t respond. He kept his pace on the spindles without a twitch.

She thumped and bumped and screeched as the lift carried her down the last of the steps to the marble foyer and settled her safely on the floor.

Ellie stepped off and turned back to gauge Thom’s reaction to her near deadly antics.

None. No reaction. Just the poppet affect. Slack-jawed, unfocused eye, and the occasional drool drops down a less programmed poppet’s chin. Exactly what society had told her he was capable of.

Was she wrong about Thom?

She turned and moved across the vast marble entry

vestibule where the stairs had spilled her out on the floor. It hadn’t worked this time, but she’d keep trying to get a reaction from him. He’d helped her once. Sometimes she’d snatch little images of water closing over her head. Thom’s blue, withered hands reaching and lifting her. Could be a dream, but somehow dismissing it like that hurt worse than any rejection from her mother, Juni or failure with Aunt Cordelia. She glanced back at him, her sweet old Thom, and turned into the wider hall.

Ellie shook her head and smiled as she evaluated

her latest attempt to get Thom riled up. The whole “pretending to be in danger” test was something she tried on Thom once in a while. Once she’d lain in the bathtub face- down for an hour with a straw as her only source of air. Another time, she’d thrown herself in front of a speeding hover truck, only to have it zip off the track and into a tree. All that work and Thom had never reacted. He stood by, watching as she thrashed in the water or rolled downstairs. His gaunt face framed in the shadow of a smile death had frozen on his lips. Blank and full of nothing, just like the textbooks and DesLoge sales vids promised. Only, if he was smarter than what everyone believed, then he had to know that she wasn’t really in danger when she skidded down the stairs on the hover disc. Still, if she did something more dangerous, something really risky, and he didn’t save her, well... better not to think about that. And honestly, if anyone ever figured out that she was baiting a poppet to try to get a reaction outside of what the poppet programming allowed—she’d be a laughingstock. Imagine the DesLoge heir believing her poppet was human? She’d be called crazy or worse, a Resurrectionist.

Her cheeks flushed as she imagined the shame she could bring to Cordelia and the DesLoge name. She bit her lip, suddenly ashamed of her own childishness.

She walked into the formal dining room where Cordelia perched at the end of the long mahogany table. Her aunt hunched over a glowing compad, punching up a projection that Ellie knew well. A holovid hobbit with huge blue eyes and a gentle face glowed above the compad in front of Cordelia. The image was a vid page from Antedevolution classic novel, The Hobbit, which was Ellie’s current literature project from the Academy. Cordelia swiped the face of the compad’s screen, turning vid images with dismissive shifts of her elegant white fingers.

“They have you reading about hobbits? Hairy-toed little bastards and their smug little green buildings... hovels, really. Why would they have you read a book that is clearly designed to inspire class warfare?” Cordelia waved her vaporarette around for emphasis, leaving foggy tracers in the troposphere. “Haven’t we all had enough of that sort of thing? You know—the horror and the fantasizing?”

Ellie steeled herself for the morning rant. It was always something. She just needed to listen, let Cordelia make her point, then the lessons would begin. These breakfast meetings were the only time Ellie could count on spend- ing time with her Aunt, who would spend the rest of the day on company business either at the factory or with politicians. This was the hardest part of Ellie’s day, but she always looked forward to their time because it was just for her and no one else.

Even Ellie’s mother, Juni, didn’t get such loving attention from the DesLoge matriarch. That was okay though because Juni had a plan. She worked hard to make Ellie aware and forgiving of Cordelia’s shortcomings, her oddities, and her bitter, controlling methods of rearing her, the next heir. Juni wanted Ellie to manufacture the one thing that would win Cordelia over completely—love. Juni wanted her to pretend the shadow of love for the aunt who could keep them safe and rich in the enclosed dome of Santelouisa with poppets and parties aplenty. Strangely enough, and in spite of Juni’s clumsy efforts, love perched in Ellie’s heart like a starved baby vulture. She did love Cordelia, oddities and all.

“Ellie? Where did your mind go just then? I declare, you are worse than the poppets and they’re brain dead. I was saying, before you disappeared into that pit of a brain, why would that school of yours teach such unnecessary things? This world needs no more fantasies written or read. Death to fantasy and horror. Their time is done. Have you not looked around you, silly girl? My money keeps you and Juni safe, but outside the dome there’s horror aplenty. People starve. People fight and die and suffer. People are poor out in the wilds. Thank the Lord that my Harold took his money out of that damned market before the crash and thank goodness he created the poppets.”

It was a prayer Ellie had heard once or twice before.

She nodded and gave her aunt a bright smile as she pulled out a chair next to her. She reached for the compad to scan the DesLoge Com production reports with its end- less numbers describing the trade-in poppets and all the effects of the DesLoge Com empire’s proprietary treasure. As she scanned, Cordelia waxed poetic about dear Harold DesLoge. Ellie knew the story by heart. Brave, prophetic Uncle Harold saw the writing on the wall. He rid himself of all stock in blue-chip, Dow traded corporations. He invested in the new medicines—tonics that restored dying organs, revitalized decaying limbs, and eventually raised the dead from their graves. Just the freshly dead, mind you. Fresh because spoiled things, things with more bone than flesh, hadn’t the muscle or will to get up out of their lead-lined beds.

Harold, according to the history books and Aunt Cordelia, ushered in a new age. After several years of testing, positioning, quietly building legislation to protect himself, his product and the profitable living to be made from raising the dead, he introduced the drugs first to military, because he was a patriot. Of course, Ellie suspected the truckloads of gold the military paid him hadn’t hurt. After a year of the military being purged and replaced by poppets, Harold began marketing his formula, in a weakened version, to regular people.

Ellie pulled closer to the table and glanced at the compad report her aunt sent her. She pretended that the scrolling figures of world domination through rising sales impressed her as Aunt Cordelia wanted them to. She nodded in the appropriate pauses in her Aunt’s morning lecture about poppet supply and demand. But Ellie’s mind couldn’t stay focused on the business of DesLoge Com, instead her thoughts wandered back into the history of the family’s great gift to humanity—the creation of poppets. Because Ellie had Aunt Cordelia to tell her about it, she knew the whole history. At first it had been a slaughter. Families, shocked at the loss of their loved ones’ souls or any semblance of a personality, turned in their poppets to the authorities for removal, destruction, anything that would keep dear old dad from trying to strip skin off of junior or chew on grandma’s face. The government had

rounded them up by the thousands into pens for destruction—a bolt shot through the brain just like they did with cattle at slaughterhouses. Good old Harold had been on hand for the first round of executions. Brutal, he’d called them. He’d shed tears over the waste of his creations. So, he went back to the drawing board. After adjusting the chemical recipe, the first mass-consumption poppets were born.

Tick, tick, tick—Aunt Cordelia’s lacquered nails rapped a smart rhythm on the glossy tabletop, jerking Ellie back to the figures at hand. She quickly rescanned them for the upcoming quiz that happened every day over breakfast in the DesLoge mansion. A quiz she never seemed to pass.

“What is DesLoge Com’s standing today?” Cordelia leaned back in her chair, bright blue eyes gazing right through her.

Ellie slid her fingers across the screen’s surface, flip- ping through files and digital sales reports, scanning for the information she’d been trained to find.

“Hmmm... sales are up in the blue sector by forty per-cent. We are not meeting demand for mine poppets. House poppet sales down by twelve percent.”

“Why is that?”

Ellie shook her head and flipped through the stack of

reports from the seven regions’ managers, people who expected her to understand this complex business with only a pass of her eyes and a few seconds thought the way Cordelia could.

“So.... maybe people have enough house poppets right now.” Probably a wrong answer, but she had to say something. Silence is weakness.

Cordelia pressed her lips together in a thin pink line. Ellie had guessed wrong. She always guessed wrong.

“Sorry, Aunt Cordelia.” Ellie closed the reports and pushed them aside. She lifted the delicate china cup, filled with Citrocon Tea, a poppet-grown product from the Geolina Region and sipped. Understanding the tea, produced on poppet laboring plantations, was piffle knowledge. “Piffle and puff,” Cordelia would say. Knowing where a product was from or which region produced it was a start, but knowing how to predict the need for the product or how much poppets could produce or knowing the ins and outs of managing that district and the six others that made up the DesLoge’s commercial empire, that wasn’t any piffle. “Maybe I just don’t have a head for business like you.”

“Nonsense, dear. You are a sixteen-year-old with a head full of fluff and flowers. You will grow into it.” Cordelia lifted her own cup to her lips and took a sip. She lowered it and folded her hands into a graceful nest. Most women, Juni had often told her, show their age in their hands. But Cordelia’s looked ageless and vibrant, even though she was over one hundred years old. Her silky skin lay plump on her bones in a way that only the plastiques and injections of the best Parker Com preservationists could achieve. She was like the Mona Lisa or the Monroe on a Subway Grate—timeless. “Someday you will make a fine CEO. For now, you make a fine school girl and a lovely niece. Come and kiss me before you fly away, little Ellie bird.”

Ellie smiled, set aside her tea and gave her aunt a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll try harder next time.”

“I know you will, sweet.” Her aunt waved her away with a smile that warmed her icy eyes and turned back to the scrolling reports. Moments of love were fleeting in the DesLoge house. Best to grab them and tuck them away into her heart, since someday she’d need to be the heartless bitch that Cordelia had become after Harold’s sad and untimely death. That was the plan, anyway.

“Auntie, I’m going into the kitchen. Do you need

anything?”

“Now, my silly bird,” Cordelia said, her bright blue eyes

never left the sums and figures she studied, “if I needed anything Thom would get it. Yes?”

Ellie nodded, smiled, but still rose to get her own food from the kitchen. She’d lived in the DesLoge mansion for most of her life but knew she didn’t really belong. Her mother, Juni, had told her she’d be out on her butt if she made even the smallest mistake. Ellie didn’t know what it was, she knew that Juni had made some mistake since she was “out on her butt” and disinherited. Ellie was Juni’s best hope and she never let her forget it.

Ellie walked from the wide archway of the dining room, past Thom, who’d finished his spindle wiping and halted, stiff-bodied and waiting for orders next to the kitchen door. She patted his cold hand as she walked past. Even though he didn’t respond, he was always her Thom. The kitchen door swung open, revealing the bright white everything within.

Wide counters, brightly lit cabinets stacked with bone phosphorescent china, the shining appliances, and a staff of cooking poppets that any family of means would be proud of.

She walked to the cooler to dig out a crumpet and juice, staying out of the way of the busy kitchen staff. Baking, rolling, chopping, cleaning: all jobs once worked by illegals from other nations or the desperately poor now taken by poppets. Families did well selling their skilled dead. Maybe uncle was a machine mechanic and on the corpse market he’d fetch a small fortune. He could do the work even without his higher thought centers, because after a lifetime of working on machines the abilities had become rote.

After Uncle Harold was killed by a poppet whose control formula had failed, the company scrambled for solutions. First, poppets were treated with the formulas that woke them to their poppet life. Processors injected into their frontal lobe direct non-muscle memory and contained programmed actions not part of a poppet’s former life skills. Thom, Ellie’s poppet, was an old white-skinned banker who had pissed off Uncle Harold by not investing in DesLoge Com. He’d announced publicly that he thought poppets were unseemly, against the intentions of the creator and other such nonsense.

When Thom died, his family had sold him for a huge amount to pay off the debt he left after the market’s crash. Harold’s treatment of Thom had been gleefully cruel— beatings and tauntings mostly. After Harold died, Cordelia repurposed him as the butler because of his refined walk and agreeable features. His years as a banker to the rich had set his face in such a way that it seemed like he smiled gently. Ellie never hit Thom like Aunt Cordelia did. His quirky face made her feel welcome in the fortress mansion that Harold’s peculiar institution had created.

Back in the beginning, they’d called poppets like Thom zombies, but no more. The Z word was the newest never say, soap in the mouth, dirty word. Don’t call a poppet a zombie, because zombies ate people. Zombies were shambling, bumbling, cartoon monsters, and really, sym- pathetic. No one wanted to sympathize with the poppets, because then... well, everything everyone knew would be upside down. The duty of every citizen of US NOAM was to understand their place, to preserve their way of life, and protect the dome cities and that included treating poppets as what they were—reanimated, empty-headed dead servants. The name “poppet” had been Aunt Cordelia’s genius.

A harmless, sweet name. A name that denoted the place of the servant dead in the new republic. Poppets, small and useful items, like the dollies of old they were named for. The name represented the new creature’s lack of status and rights.

Thom shuffled in with a tray full of freshly cut fruit.

Beautifully cut little roses and tiny ships with floating hummingbirds suspended on tiny, edible hover discs painted their color of the ruby bellies. One of the kitchen poppets had in life been a famous chef. She wondered how Cordelia had acquired him. If his family had sold him, they certainly hadn’t needed to. His fortune massed for years after his death due to sales of books, spices and the pots and pans that bore his name. Ellie suspected instead that Cordelia had paid the Grave Hawkers to rob his grave. What family, even one with such wealth, would ever begrudge Cordelia DesLoge a world class chef?

Em, Cordelia called him, was genius in the kitchen. Em’s particular talent—cooking, slicing, prepping—kept him in constant reach of things that, if the chemical cocktail that kept him from wanting to crack open your skull failed, he’d be a knife wielding maniac. Hence, the joltlaces.

Her family legacy. Harold watched his wealth, his empire of poppets grow from a fad, Own your own personal poppet! Be the envy of the neighborhood!, a full-blown economic sector responsible for, either through production, sales or what the poppets produced, most of the economy.

Ellie walked back into the dining room to eat her crumpet. She bowed her head for a moment.

“Bless Uncle Harold.” Ellie prayed this because she believed it. It had been taught to her and every other domesafe child in the world, and it was true. She owed everything, her life and her safety, to him. To him and to Aunt Cordelia. “He saves me every day and so do you, Auntie.”

Cordelia nodded, a satisfied jerk, then lightly punched the buttons on her compad. A smile flitted across her Aunt’s features and Ellie knew she’d gotten through to her,

just for a moment. She smiled back and chewed her crumpet. Thom wandered in, with light steps, carrying her book bag in his hands as Cordelia had ordered.

Ellie took the bag, gulped the last of her juice, slung the bag across her shoulders and leaned in to peck Thom on the cheek. “Thank you, Thom.”

Damn it, she thought.

If she could smack herself for being stupid in front

of her Aunt, she would and then go back and take away that kiss. Cordelia had tolerated her loving actions toward Thom when she was a kid, but now? Her aunt’s face hardened and erupted into a sharp poisonous scowl of bright, squared teeth and perfectly plumped lips.

“Ridiculous. Why would you do such a thing?” Cordelia pushed herself up out of her chair, her tiny body seeming so much bigger when she raged. She ticked her well-shod feet across the floor. “Thom is just a creature. A machine at best. He is not aware of your esteem. He does what his chip tells him to do. What I programmed him to do.”

“He is just meat driven by wires and chemicals. He is not even as important as a lump of meat.”

Aunt Cordelia whipped her hand back and made to slap Thom once again, but Ellie moved between them, took Cordelia’s hand in hers and squeezed it. In the corner of her eye, she thought for a second she saw Thom take a step back, but that was ridiculous. Poppet or not, Ellie couldn’t believe it was okay to hurt him. He was her family.

She shook her head. Good thing she hadn’t said that out loud. No matter how she felt about him, she couldn’t let Cordelia see, because she’d be ashamed. Ellie didn’t ever want to be a source of shame for her family. Family meant everything and Cordelia was the most consistent, involved family she had. Her approval, her love meant more than any inheritance. That’s why she had to get this right. Thom was just a poppet. Just a revived machine.

“Yes, Auntie. Meat. I just forget sometimes. I won’t do it again.” Ellie switched her book bag onto the shoulder closer to Cordelia, as if it could shield them from her wrath.

“I need to get to school.”

“I’m serious, Ellie. You have to grow up. They are a

product. We sell poppets.”

“Yes, of course, Aunt Cordelia,” she nodded. She hoped her eyes would open wide enough, be earnest enough to convince her aunt that she took her seriously. “I’ll try to remember better.”

Thom glided away as Cordelia allowed Ellie to hug her lightly. The clouds of anger lifted from her face and Ellie felt she could go. Thom walked her to the door, held the door open, handed her a jacket, and waited for her to walk out, down the steps and into the waiting autocar.

Ellie stepped into the autocar, shut the door and ordered it to drive to the Academy de Bellum. As she pulled away, she stared back at Thom who stood stone solid in the doorway, still and waiting for instruction. He would be waiting there when she got back. Ellie laced her fingers together to control her urge to wave goodbye to Thom.