CINDER31LA

31 DAYS. 3 HOURS. 17 MINUTES.

I had 22,280 days to live. That was all the time I would get, whether I liked it or not. The clock never lied. The brass and steel of my lifeclock embedded in my wrist ticked on despite my mental whirring and purring, and I yanked my blue coverall sleeve down to mask the annoying tick tock of my heartbeat.

Returning my attention to the engine in front of me, I asked, “What’ve you got today for me, then?” I popped the hood of the steamer open and watched the faulty lines cross where they shouldn’t and meet where they should, with nothing transferring. “Hmmm...” I rubbed sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. “Seems you’ve got yourself all twisted, little buddy. Don’t worry, we’ll have you fixed up in no time.” As if in answer, the steamer chugged and whined, puffing a dirty cloud of old, used air in my face—clearly on its last legs. But I couldn’t return it to Old Mags like this; it was the only way she could see her grandchildren over in Prago City.

I spent all afternoon untangling the steam lines, trying to put them back together in a way that resembled the older models, but this thing was built before I was born and I couldn’t figure out how to line everything up to the radiator.

“Liquid toffee, El,” a synthetic voice croaked out from my desk.

“Ah, sweet toffee.” The bitter and sweet mixture always got my heart pumping.

IoN’s rusted, bronze body no larger than my head whizzed through the air with his new thrusters, his arms dangling behind as he raced back to the kitchen.

“Careful, IoN! You’ll knock something off the shelves if you don’t watch those arms.”

“Well,” he said as he whizzed back out with a can of compressed air, “if you did not pack them full with so many”—he paused and pulled an old project I’d been trying to work on last month from the shelf—“doodads, then I would not have a problem.”

He was always like this, moaning and complaining about the state of the garage these days. But with Dad gone, I had to step up and take over the business—my stepmother wouldn’t want to ruin her perfect new manicure my earnings paid for—and that meant there was no one to help clean up. The shelves on the metal and wood walls had stopped floating some time ago. I had since given up fixing their thrusters and nailed them to the walls the old-fashioned way.

“Just be careful,” I chuckled.

His small, hemispherical body whizzed around the garage, picking up all the tools I’d left lying about this morning after fixing my neighbor’s Instacaff mug. Business had been a bit slow recently—or, as my stepmother liked to remind me, nonexistent. The garage used to shine in the middle of downtown’s business park on level zero; even some of the rich would come to use Dad’s services. “He’s the best in the business,” they’d say, and I’d coo and wonder at his magnificence. Now, it was nothing but a scrappy old building with a broken sign the sun didn’t even reach since they’d built the city’s new level twenty-one a couple of years ago. We’d barely had any sunlight reaching us before, but twenty-one’s entertainment center blocked out the meager shaft of light that used to flicker our way from 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. every day. Besides, its white marble and old cog design was an eyesore I could do without. I hated the damn sight of it every time I stepped outside.

“Mom to Cinderella,” the radio echoed across the garage, dispelling my thoughts.

I cringed. I hated that name and she knew it, but I was reminded of the warning my stepmother gave me this morning before leaving our apartment: “Cinderella, darling, don’t forget to make some actual money today, or I’ll be forced to resort to grounding you.” She booped my nose, smiled that cruel, frustrating smile at me, and walked to the local spa for her morning massage.

As if grounding me would help pay the bills. I was the only one working!

“Cinderella!”

I snapped out of the daymare that was her plastered-on face and ran to the radio receiver. “Yes, Phyllis?”

“Cinderella!” the radio crackled again, forcing her voice into octaves even higher than her fake personality would usually reach. “How many times must I tell you to call me ‘Mom’ or ‘Mother.’” She sighed over the receiver. “Really, Cinderella, I simply cannot keep telling you.”

“Sorry, Mother.” My voice retained its usual nondescript tone, hiding anything and everything she might use as leverage over my life. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, now that you’ve actually asked.” She coughed to clear her throat. “I may have a job for you. Someone sent us a letter requesting your assistance at the Dome on level eighteen.”

Level eighteen? I’d never even left level zero. Most commoners didn’t venture farther than level ten, and even that was only if you had a well-paying job or an invitation to take you there. Level eighteen? I bet I could see the sun from up there. Not the small slithers we occasionally got when you found the right street corner at the right time of day, but real, actual sunlight.

“Are you listening, Cinderella?”

“Oh, um, yes. Level eighteen at the Dome.” I tugged my sleeves down again and continued. “What time?”

“Nine tomorrow morning.” I could hear the beam in her voice despite the crackling radio. “It should go without saying, but just in case that simple brain of yours hasn’t kicked in yet, you must be on your best behavior. Who knows who this might be. This could set me—us—up for life.” And by “us,” she meant herself and my two stepsisters.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Good. Momsy out.”

I threw the receiver back in its holder. For the love of Seren, even speaking to that woman put me in a bad mood.

“Here.” IoN handed me a bright red candy—the last one from the pack I had been saving for a bad day. “You know,” he said, “you should try to request private funds.”

“I can’t. You know this already.” How many times must I repeat myself to this stupid steambot? “Since Dad died, Phyllis owns the garage until I turn twenty-one. Until then, she can do whatever she wishes with the money it earns.”

“But that is far from fair, El.”

I laughed. “Since when did I ever get a slice of the word fair?”

IoN did his best steambotic impression of a sigh, but, like usual, it came out all crackly.

“Still need to upgrade your voice. If I can save enough for the latest model upgrade, you’ll be able to moan, sigh, and even make crying noises.”

He laughed but twisted his top hemisphere—his attempt at a head shake. “I do like the idea of being able to sigh back at you sarcastically, but it is not worth the money. Save it for something more important.”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him to face me. “You are important.”

“I am just a steambot.” He crackled a sigh again. “I am not real.” He floated into the kitchen once more, which was where he went to sulk, and I returned to the crossed lines in the steamer old enough to be my grandma.

I twisted and pulled, realigned and remixed, until eventually—after swearing more times than I cared to admit and sweating more than a miner in the midday heat—I had the old steamer running again. Even the fumes seemed cleaner as they chugged out of the exhaust pipe at the rear.

“There you go, buddy. Good as new.”

IoN laughed from behind me. “You like talking to us, do you not?”

“Well, you, engines, and the garage are all I have. So, yeah, I like talking to you.” I turned around. “Besides, you and I both know you’re more than just an engine. Whatever my dad did to you, he made you into something I’ve never seen before.”

“So you keep telling me.” IoN floated away again, content at avoiding the conversation. “You just might not know about things like me yet. It is not like you trained in engineering school or anything,” he called out from the garage’s back room.

“Low blow,” I mumbled to myself. But he was right. I hadn’t been to engineering school, and it was one of the primary reasons business was so bad. Well, that and the whole Phyllis removing Dad’s “Needs Must Policy,” where you could pay whatever you had if the work was necessary to your survival. But even then, no one wanted to pay money to the girl who turned in Green to the police for a free meal—even the girl trained by my father. If I could just gather enough money for a year’s worth of tuition, I bet I could fast track through the course and graduate in no time. “Fat chance of that,” I mumbled. A year’s worth of tuition cost more than I’d made working here in the last five years.

Just one more year to go, and then I’d be twenty-one and I could do with this garage whatever I wished. I could even get my own place and live without Phyllis breathing down my neck every moment of the day. Or maybe I could sleep here?

The lights outside the window glowed a dim orange, having changed from daylight yellow moments earlier. “Time to lock up and get this steamer to Old Mags.” I looked into the back room for IoN and found him already in stasis, fixing himself up for the next day. “Good night, then.” I flicked my hand in a small wave and tore myself away.

I sat in the driver’s seat, powered it up—relishing in the clean engine purr that followed—and drove it down the street and around a couple of corners. The houses down here were all old stone, metal, and wood, with makeshift repairs dotting almost every surface. Even the businesses were made of much the same stuff. Raggedy kids played on every corner, old-fashioned steambots ran from house to house—almost in as many numbers as humans nowadays—and various blackened people wandered in and out of the small hatches in the ground that led to the mines. Although you couldn’t tell due to lack of light, the moss and shrubbery that grew here was dense, covering every spare inch it could as it seeped into cracks like Phyllis’s face powder; the derelict church down the way had so much of the stuff growing over it, I swear it was more greenery and cracks than stone.

But on every wall you could guarantee there would be a poster advertising news or reminding people of the law. The one next to Mags’s house had been the typical Meddling is a Punishable Offense for a few months now, reminding everyone, regardless of how desperate, not to interfere with your lifeclock. I couldn’t imagine ever being that despaired that I’d risk being taken. But it happened at least once a year, more during times of famine.

The steamer hovered a few inches above the ground, and as much as I wanted to take it higher to better navigate the busy streets, I couldn’t. This thing didn’t even have thrusters. It was made of those old steam hovers they’d used back in the beginning of the industrial revolution—First Cycle, year 34X, if the textbooks were to be believed.

According to the history books, Palatina used to be a bunch of single-level towns and villages, but when our ancestors discovered steam power, everything changed. Suddenly, we could power fake lights, radios, engines, and all manner of things no one had ever dreamed of before. As time moved on and the population grew, we discovered steambotics, and now our streets were littered with bots, old parts, and Seren knew what else in the upper levels.

Mags said Prago City was built in levels too, but I’d heard tales of flat villages and towns.

Maybe one day I’d get to see them.

From this angle, those upper levels all looked so clean and white. I could see some of the crisscrossing bridges and streets they used to navigate. The houses and apartments and businesses were all piled on top of one another to create higgledy-piggledy towers that got more elaborate the farther up you looked, until eventually you couldn’t really see any of the detail. People down here never got to go that far up, so I’d never met anyone who knew what they looked like.

I dreamed of seeing them someday.

The door with the yellow-speckled moss was Old Mags’s house. Her real name was Maggie, but the kids had dubbed her Old Mags, and I’d never heard anyone call her by her real name before. Well, there was a police officer who had tried one time when I was eight, but she gave him a piece of her mind. That was the first day I’d ever seen Old Mags yell. She was badass for her age. Not that anyone knew what her age was, of course, but she was the oldest person I’d ever seen.

It was taboo to talk about your age and how many days you had left to live—even to your family and friends. Most people kept their lifeclocks covered, with long sleeves common on modern-day dresses and shirts. I rolled the sleeves of my bright blue coveralls up when in the garage, but everywhere else, I kept them rolled down. The tick-tocking wrist I’d been stuck with since birth caught my eyes, and I yanked at my cuff—again.

I hated even thinking about it.

What would it feel like to know you were going to die tomorrow? It must be horrible. I’d heard about people trying to off themselves before their time was up, to retain some semblance of control outside of the clock, but it never worked. They’d survive or be badly injured or someone would save them. The clocks never lied.

Mags’s little apartment was around the next corner, but when I turned, several policebots surrounded the kid from the corner shop who always wore the pink ribbon in her hair despite her otherwise grungy clothing taste. Elise Cappenholt, along with her little sister, survived the famine that swept floor zero three years ago.

“Miss Cappenholt, please remain calm. We are here to remove you from the property for crimes against Seren.”

Crimes against Seren? That could only mean one thing. She messed with her lifeclock.

“No! I didn’t do anything wrong!” She thrust her arm out at them and sobbed. “Look! Look, it’s still intact. I didn’t do anything.”

“You will be questioned by Minister Farro, but until then, anything you say will be recorded as evidence. Do you understand?”

“No, please! I have a little sister. She’s only five. I’m all she has.”

One of the policebots clasped its cuff arm around her wrist and yanked her forward. “Please follow me.”

“No!” She kicked and screamed, but there was nothing she could do. There was nothing anyone could do. “Please, no!”

Another policebot cuffed her other wrist, and they lifted her off the floor and wheeled her down the street as she screamed, “Elsie! Find Mags!”

The policebots were just following orders, but it was hard to view them as anything less than evil when the only time they did anything was to force more misery onto our people.

Outside the corner shop stood a small child in a simple brown dress cinched at the waist; she held a pink ribbon in her hand as tears flew down her face and sobs echoed around the desolate street where people stood in mournful silence. No one moved as she wailed on the doorstep of a business she now owned at the mere age of five.

I hopped out of the steamer, scurried over, and knelt in front of her. “Hi, Elsie. My name is El. Would you like me to take you to Mags? I was just heading over there.” I held out my hand in offer.

She placed her tiny hand in mine. When I plopped her on my lap in the steamer, she curled up and sobbed into my dress the rest of the way down the street until she fell asleep.

I stopped outside Old Mags’s front door and went to knock, but her smiling face greeted me as it swung open before I got the chance. “El!” Her face fell when she saw little Elsie wrapped up in my arms. “Oh dear. Has something happened?”

“Elise was arrested moments ago.”

Her eyes widened and a wan smile crept across her face. “Here. Let me take her off your hands.” She wrapped Elsie in her arms, and the little girl buried her face in the old woman’s neck as Old Mags took her to the spare room upstairs, where she allowed any child who needed a space to stay. When she had no doubt tucked the child into bed and soothed her crying, she came back downstairs with a somber face. She grabbed me in a bear hug tight enough to crush bones. Pulling away, she looked behind me to see her steamer, and her eyes widened. “You managed it.” She let me go and inspected her steamer. “You...fixed it.”

“Yeah, those old steam lines caused me a lot of hassle, but I figured it out.”

She whacked me on the back, her gray hair and crooked nose beaming. “Good on ya, girl.” She opened her garage door, which was just wide enough to allow the old steamer to pass through, and beckoned me inside. “C’mon. I just put a spot of toffee on.”

Ah, toffee. Pretty sure I’d never turned a cup down. Solid toffee existed too, but it was almost impossible to get ahold of this far down. I remembered my father buying me some for my birthday one day when I was little. It was sweeter than the steaming cup of liquid toffee in front of me—usually mixed with some kind of coffee bean and had a strange texture—but, if Seren allowed it, I wouldn’t scoff at a chance to taste the solid kind again.

“Tell me how you’ve been, girl,” Old Mags demanded. Her usual gruff way of asking how I was always brightened my day, but recently, thinking about a summary of my life only made me grimace. “That bad, huh?”

I tried to smile, but I wasn’t sure it worked. “Same old, same old.” The last of my energy left me in a slump of my shoulders. “Even when I do manage to get ahold of that garage in a year’s time, I won’t earn enough to get by. We’re only okay now because Phyllis is still claiming the dregs of Dad’s death fund.”

She grinned and patted my shoulder. “It’ll all work out.”

“You always seem so sure of things.”

She chuckled, her toffee threatening to spill over the side of her mug. “Everything usually does work out. You just gotta have faith in Seren.”

I didn’t even know if the god, Seren, existed, but if He did, then I hoped He’d heard my prayers. “If I could just get a year’s worth of lessons at a top engineering school and graduate on a fast track, I’m sure more people would be willing to at least try me.” The moment Dad passed, it was like the entire floor gave up on us. On me. No one wanted to even give me a shot, despite having seen me assist Dad for years prior. Dad used to have customers all the way up to floor twelve, but not me. The other floors might as well not exist for all I see them. “I’m nothing like Dad.”

“Stop that,” Old Mags scolded. “You’re just a little rough around the edges.” She placed her mug down on the small tower of cogs she used for a side table and wrapped me in her arms. “And you know who else was a little rough around the edges at your age, girl?” I shook my head. “Your father.”

“Really?”

“I remember when he was as unsure about life as you, crying over not having any chances, the first time a girl dumped him, and even when he was unsure about engineering school.”

“He was unsure about school?” I sniffed, holding back the tears. “I thought Dad had always wanted to be an engineer?”

“Oh, he did. But he was full of doubt. His father wasn’t particularly nice about him having grand plans and wanted him to settle for what he had, and your father often let that get the best of him. But he believed in himself.” She smiled at me, and I forced myself to grin back, even if I wasn’t feeling it.

Believe in myself . . . I could do that. Maybe.

I looked up at the ceiling with a frown. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“She has a shop she can run, and I know a family who’ll take her in and keep her fed for a few years until she’s old enough to be on her feet. I think she’ll be just fine.”

“It’s lonely being an orphan.” I stared at the floor as the words tumbled out of my mouth unbidden. “Friends help.”

“I’ll make sure she has plenty, don’t you worry.

“Thanks, Mags.” I got up to leave, but she grabbed my arm.

“Don’t even think of leaving without payment, girl. I won’t allow it.”

“I can’t take money from you.” She was the only reason most of the orphaned kids down here got fed. “You’re like family.”

She waved my concerns away and grabbed a coin purse from the side. “Here.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Same as your dad used to charge me.” She winked and laughed at my shocked face as she showed me out.