Okay, so crisis was probably overstating things, but the dust had barely settled behind the team’s van before Jacinth showed up, her rambunctious twins trailing in behind her. Her wavy, salt-and-pepper hair was caught up in a messy knot on her head, and she was still wearing a flour-dusted apron over her patched overalls.
Jacinth leaned all six feet of her large frame against the table and slid a tablet across to Maya. “I’m back.”
Maya flipped open her own tablet and pulled up the master inventory. “Is it the industrial mixer again?”
The baker huffed. “No, I finally got that thing fixed, but now my oven is on the fritz! Burned two batches of loaves, and a third came out raw in the middle. I never should have upgraded from the damn brick. At least fire can’t malfunction.”
Sometimes Maya heard people muttering that the tech that made its way off the Hill and into the surrounding neighborhoods was designed to fall apart. She knew the evil of the TechCorps was far more banal. The failed innovations they offloaded onto the gray market hadn’t been designed to fail. But when they did, the TechCorps had no problem selling broken shit to people who couldn’t complain.
A few taps on her tablet pulled up her complete archive of appliance manuals. “It’s the TL-3700 model, right?”
“Yes. I don’t know how you always remember.”
Because I don’t have any other option. Maya forced a tight smile as she found the file. Jacinth’s tablet was already set to receive, so she swiped it over. “I’m going to do the same thing I did last time,” she said, popping open the GhostNet. She had a shortcut to the forum where people traded troubleshooting hacks for TechCorps hardware, and it only took a few quick searches to export all the notes on Jacinth’s oven. “Start with the official manual, but if that doesn’t work…”
“Listen to the criminals?”
Maya snorted and sent over the file. “They’re all criminals. Some are just legal ones.”
“Fair enou—hey!” Jacinth lunged fast enough to catch her son’s hand before he could sneak one of the spare tablets off the table.
“I was just looking!” he protested immediately.
“Look with your eyes, not your fingers.” Jacinth offered Maya a frazzled smile. “Sorry, their grandma usually has them now, but she’s sleeping off a cold, so Nick and Tilda are making the afternoon deliveries with me.”
“That’s a big responsibility,” Maya said solemnly to the kids as she deftly moved her stack of loaner tablets out of the way of curious little fingers. “Since you’re helping your mama out with her work, maybe I have something special for you here…”
Two pairs of eyes lit up with anticipation as Maya lifted her tablet and flipped back over to their main inventory. She’d rescued a treasure trove of 2040s media off one of the RLOC servers a few weeks ago, and she knew exactly what would earn Jacinth—and Grandma Linda—a few hours of much-needed peace.
“Here you go,” she told the twins, flicking a series of files to their mother’s tablet. “Nick, I found you a series on the Second Dust Bowl and what life was like in the Deadlands back when you could grow things there. And Tilda…” Maya grinned. “Ready for the third season of Teen Witch?”
“You found it?” Tilda gasped.
“Of course I did.” Maya winked at her. “I can find anything. Now you two listen to your mother and help her with the deliveries, and go easy on your grandma, okay?”
When the twins’ overlapping promises of good behavior faded, Jacinth straightened. “Have I mentioned lately that you’re a saint?”
“You want to say thanks, send Linda around with some of those soft pretzels once she’s feeling better.”
“A bucket of them.” She swept up the tablet. “Thank you, Maya.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Maya replied, smiling.
She sent them off with a wave, but the door had barely swung shut before someone else showed up looking for more math books to challenge their brilliant teenager.
Math, Maya knew. She also knew Shakira would outstrip the limitations of their current collection before winter. A few weeks ago, she’d talked Conall into using his backdoor TechCorps access to pirate their entire math curriculum, so she sent Shakira’s father off with a course on integral calculus and instructions to send the girl along if she got stuck.
Next in was Cheryl, who brought her client schedule for the week. Sex work in Five Points had gotten a lot safer once Cheryl implemented her check-in system. Maya had helped them improve upon it with refurbished smartwatches she’d hooked into a database hidden in an anonymous corner of the GhostNet. Failure to mark themselves safe—and fully compensated—at the end of an appointment triggered an alert … and a swift follow-up. Usually by Dani in full-on murder mode.
Problems had decreased rapidly after that, even for people who weren’t part of the network. Maya was pretty sure the potential troublemakers of Southside told each other scary bedtime stories about Dani showing up on their doorstep like an avenging angel. Whatever the reason, everyone gave their manners a firm polish before paying for sex in Dani’s territory. Just in case.
Maya almost got the warehouse door locked behind Cheryl, but then someone showed up needing to borrow tools for home repairs, and by the time she was shuffling them out, a familiar truck was backing up to the door, its bed loaded down with crates of shiny, red apples.
“Bryan Barnes.” Maya braced both fists on her hips. “You been poaching apples from Becky?”
“Nothing so criminal.” The driver swung out of the truck with a grin. Bryan was a big, burly, bald man with a red beard, scars on his hands and arms, and an air of effortless competence. He hefted three crates at once as if they weighed nothing and carried them through the door. “Becky’s engine finally crapped out, so I told her I’d bring in her haul and pick up what I need to fix it.”
Maya propped the door open and went to retrieve another crate. The deeply colored apples were massive—a credit to Becky’s skill at coaxing her orchard to its fullest potential—and the thought of taking a bite of one set Maya’s stomach to rumbling. “She still insisting on running that piece of shit on pure biofuel?”
“I’ll talk her around to solar eventually.” Bryan grinned. “She did agree to barter a nice bunch of apples if I can get her truck running again. You know what that means?”
“More apple cider for me?” Maya let the crate drop to the table with a thump. “I’ve been craving it since last year.”
“I still owe you for the cyclepedia.” Bryan carried another three crates in and set them on the sorting table. “As soon as it’s ready, I’ll bring it over.”
Usually she would have waved off the offer—the practically ancient database of motorcycle engine and repair manuals she’d unearthed had taken her under an hour to convert to an easily searchable format—but Bryan’s apple cider was even better than his mead. Sweet, tart, and just enough buzz to make her tingly without fuzzing up her brain. “You know I won’t turn it down.”
“I know.” He placed the last box and winked at her. “I’m storing up credit for next time I need an obscure engine user manual.”