Burn Rate

By K.B. Spangler

Rachel Peng, cyborg liaison to the Washington D.C. police, is trying to catch another killer, but this time the murders are personal. Two of her OACET siblings died on her watch, and Rachel can’t remember how. Fighting against grief and her fears that their deaths were her fault, Rachel has to catch a skilled arsonist who has visions of a master race with no space for anything he considers less than human . . . and she’s sure he’s not working alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.B. Spangler
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9780998431765

K.B. Spangler

K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband, Brown, and as many Rottweilers as she can sneak in the house without his noticing.

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K.B. Spangler

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2023 K.B. Spangler

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Burn Rate is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com

Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising, at redmoonrising.org

This file was sold via Smashwords.com its affiliates. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com to learn more.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ONE

Most of them didn’t know what a Luddite was. The word had a solid sound and they knew it had something to do with resisting technology, so they appropriated and adapted it because they were on a deadline to print up some merch. Not everybody approved. The amateur historians among them made noises about economics and looms and said a more appropriate term was needed, but the armchair generals said it was familiar and iconic and made them keep it. The generals said their movement must always be associated with the idea of revolution. The historians countered by insisting they should be associated with the idea of a successful revolution, but that argument didn’t get much traction, either. Facts and branding have never played nice.

That fight had happened ages ago, when meetings were packed full-on asses to elbows. These days, their members were few and far between. It had been almost four years since OACET had gone public, but…almost nothing had changed. None of the dire prophecies had been fulfilled! The monsters with their fingers buried in the global economy stayed on the sliding scale of bankers, politicians, and thieves. The biological weapons and nuclear arsenals and other weapons of death lay sleeping in their bunkers. The politicians who had once dripped poison and spun stories of the impending apocalypse now openly courted the man they called the Cyborg King.

These days, some people—not their people, of course, but people nonetheless—had begun to complain the Agents weren’t doing enough to change the world.

It was hard to keep their anger up. First, it was the members with jobs and families who drifted away. Those who watched too much television or spent too much time online stayed, as did the young firebrands, but the meetings became shrill. Those who remained were the ones who took comfort in inevitability: they just knew the Agents were biding their time! The Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies might be a threat as yet unrealized, but it was a threat nonetheless. Those cyborgs were proper wolves among the sheep, good manners shining brighter than their teeth. Someday, they told each other, those highly polished manners would fall away, exposing the true danger that good God-fearing Americans had allowed to wriggle into their population. It was cold, hard, unavoidable fact, and when it finally happened, the Gen-Luddites would be proven right.

Vindicated, whispered the man in the corner.

The others rolled their eyes and pretended he wasn’t there. He said he had money and connections, and he brought beer that came in bottles instead of cans. Aside from that, he was part of their group in name only. They assumed he was a government plant, someone from the FBI or a different acronym agency who was paid to sit in on their meetings and make sure they did nothing but beat their chests. They surrounded him with empty chairs and told him, loudly, that all meetings were recorded for everyone’s protection.

They assumed he was a plant because he said horrible, monstrous things in the unconcerned voice of a professor resting on his tenure. No one in their right mind talked like that anymore. You spoke in code or not at all. Even the media pretended they no longer tolerated blood for the sake of blood; there had to be more of a reason for murder than how certain people simply shouldn’t be.

Eventually, he became more than just a droning noise in the back of the room. He embodied escalation, talking openly of murder, of bombs.

Of fire.

They ignored him until they couldn’t, not for all the free beer in the city. He was told to leave. He looked at them, as if judging them and finding them wanting, and then stood and walked out. They had expected him to have the last word, some dramatic moment when he was framed in the doorway and cursing them over his shoulder. Instead, he slipped into the night and disappeared.

They wondered if he would come back with a gun, or if the feds might use the excuse to swoop in and clean house. They lived in strange times, they reminded each other, and for the first few meetings after he left, they drew lots for someone to stand guard. Sure, they said, it’s not as though they expected anything to happen but, y’know. Strange times.

After a month, he dropped out of their concerns. After another month, he dropped out of their memories: it was spring and March Madness only came once a year, and their small group of anti-technology patriots had no internal consistency when it came to anything that let them watch sports.

April came and went. May broke hot, and the men complained. The basement they used for their meetings was somewhat cool, but they were on the Virginia shore and the humidity was always brutal. They cranked up the air conditioning and complained about what they could do to get away from the heat.

The night it happened, they were still complaining about the weather. Too hot. Too humid. Most of their members weren’t bothering to show up at all. One of them, a kid in his early twenties with a lot of tattoos, came inside, glanced around, and slipped back out again before anyone could catch his eye. The others saw this and wondered if they should leave off meetings until autumn when the ocean would stop hurling damp all over the place.

Then the bomb went off and the building came down, and this ended everything about them, complaints and all.

TWO

She didn’t know her own name.

There were other things she didn’t know—Why can’t I see anything?—but the lack of a name, the lack of identity, gripped her as she thrashed her way towards consciousness.

Not again!

There were sharp movements around her and a solid surface beneath, with straps across her chest and arms and legs to restrain her. No strap to stabilize her head; huge, thick hands supported her instead.

The smell of smoke.

A cloying mess all over her, thick and filthy.

Too many sounds. A shrill roaring, snapping, crackling. Panicked men shouting orders. A woman’s soothing voice telling her over and over that she was safe, they were here with her, she was in no danger.

She knew that voice: she seized that knowledge and used it as a lifeline to haul herself back to sense. She tried to speak, failed, wet her lips and tried again. Her own voice came out like a crow’s harsh bark. Jenny?

Rachel! Right, yes. Rachel Peng, that was her name, and now she knew it was Jenny Davies’ slight, strong hands clasping her own. Don’t move, okay? Stay still. We’ve got you but don’t try to move.

Those hands moved from her wrist to her neck and forehead to check her vitals, prying open her eyelids, carrying the modest heat of a small flashlight against too-tender skin. But she couldn’t see the light at all.

There’s something wrong… I can’t see…

A pause, and then the woman—Jenny—said, Rachel, everyone here is OACET.

OACET!

While her name had unlocked a chunk of her self, that single word unlocked her entire world, bringing with it the added knowledge that she was that world’s biggest dumbass. Rachel forced herself to concentrate and activate the tiny cybernetic implant in her brain, and reality crashed over her like a tsunami returning to shore. Visuals: the four cluttered walls of an ambulance; a man large enough to take up half the space; a smallish woman busy with a penlight.

And she couldn’t see because her eyes hadn’t worked in years.

She tried to sit up, found she was still strapped down, and began to shake in panic. Jenny said, Mako, keep her still, please, and those thick, heavy hands pressed against both sides of her face again. Skin brushed against skin and his pain roared through her—Mako had a broken jaw.

Someone finally found a way to keep him quiet, she thought, and started laughing uncontrollably.

Shit, she’s got the giggles. Mako?

Another gentle pressure, this time against her mind. She felt a tight link open, and Mako’s soothing mental voice flowed into her senses. Calm down, Rachel. You got out, but you need to remain still until Jenny is done. You were…we don’t know what happened to you.

Got out? Where was I? Her fear-fueled giggles vanished, as if Mako had swept her mood away. Maybe he had. Mako’s abilities were strange even by OACET’s standards. What happened to your jaw?

Stunned silence paired with a quick flutter of surprise, and then Mako said through their link, Jenny’s going to put you to sleep, so you’ve got to deactivate your implant again.

No! She struggled, pushing against him, shouting with her crow’s voice. Why did it hurt to talk? Wait! I’ve got to—

Mako, I need you to take her offline.

She didn’t hear what Mako said to Jenny by way of reply as her world dropped back into the dark, followed by the chill of alcohol and the prick of a needle against her shoulder, with Mako gently cradling her head until she allowed herself to slip into unconsciousness. She knew she could have fought against it, but there was such appeal in ending all of…all of this.

When Rachel Peng next came back to herself, it was with the slow purpose of waking. This time, the sense of being immersed within a hospital was suffocating, with the smells of chemical cleaners overlapping the harsh feel of the sheets against her cheek. There was the silence made from the white noise of machines and the nervous energy of bodies forced into stillness. The foul sensation of her skin smothered in paste was gone, but her right arm felt suspiciously heavy and her fingers refused to bend more than the smallest arc before a sharp ache zinged through her wrist. Probably broken, definitely stuck in a cast.

What happened to me?

There was an empty spot in her memories. A large one, but nothing as scary as that moment when she had come to in the ambulance and couldn’t remember her own name. She remembered a breakfast, a perfectly normal breakfast with her perfectly abnormal household, and then nothing.

Rachel poked at that spot as if it were a hole from a missing tooth. It was a void without even the suggestion of a blank page to write on. She might as well have blipped ahead in time from slathering a bagel with cream cheese to being strapped to a backboard in that ambulance, and that meant trauma. Bad trauma, the kind that would take her time and distance to process. Trauma her brain felt that she couldn’t deal with at the moment, and considering the sampler-sized chocolate box of unique and distinctive traumas that had defined her life just a few short years ago, that implied this specific traumatic event was…

Well, it was probably very, very bad.

She spent another moment in the privacy of her own head before she turned on her implant. Such a tiny thing, not even the size of her pinky nail, and it had redefined her life. Everyone’s lives.

You’re awake! A man’s deep voice, too much like Morgan Freeman’s to make any other comparison. A voice that was heavily slurred from a wired jaw, causing her to wonder how long she had been out.

Rachel flipped frequencies to so she could look at Mako Hill. Being blind still had its challenges, but her cybernetic implant helped her navigate most of them. Through the microscopic computer implanted in her brain and the devices hitchhiking along her optic nerves, she had found that different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum could be turned into something similar to sight. There was no single frequency which mimicked the abilities of the human eye. No, that would have been too easy. Instead, Rachel’s version of sight required her to flip back and forth between different frequencies to use the ones best suited for the task at hand. Her go-to frequencies allowed her to navigate the environment with the fewest problems. In those, stationary physical objects were the easiest for her to perceive. Buildings, for example, stood out as clear as day. Cars and other moving objects gave off jittery signals which required her to concentrate to make out their details, but they were still relatively solid.

People? People were complicated. As people were always in motion, they carried with them a rich wealth of energy which nipped away at clarity. Faces were almost always moving, constant twitches of muscle which reduced them to featureless blurs with rough facial expressions. But people also carried emotions, and to Rachel’s senses, emotions registered as colors. Running a particular frequency through her implant caused these emotions to bloom into a complicated rainbow in which color was a primary indicator of mood. These colors moved and shifted around the body, and Rachel had gotten pretty good at reading their meanings. The region around Mako’s jaw was the dull, throbbing red of pain that was still fresh but was also managed. Three-day pain, she thought, and glanced down at her own broken wrist. She couldn’t perceive her own colors, but she imagined it would look about the same as Mako’s jaw, the kind of persistent ache that you didn’t notice too much during the day but still kept you up at night.

Mako caught her looking at her cast, and his conversational colors went the sickly pallor of guilt.

Fuck, she croaked, as she pushed herself up. I broke your jaw?

It’s okay, he said, as he touched his own puffy cheeks.

Rachel shook her head as she took a personal inventory. Voice? Still raw. Body? Fine, except for the arm in the cast. No noticeable head injuries. There was acute weirdness in her lower decks, but that was most likely a catheter. She opened a direct link with Mako so they could both avoid the challenges of physical speech, and asked, What happened to us?

He blinked, surprised. What do you mean?

"This." She gestured to herself, to his face. I can’t remember anything from before the ambulance, and even that’s fuzzy.

His conversational colors slowly bleached white as he realized what that meant. You’re…you’re joking, right? You remember breaking my jaw.

"No, I don’t," she snorted, and held up her fresh cast. But I am a detective.

Oh shit, he whispered aloud, which came across their telepathic link with the sensation of pulling away. He had scooted his chair close to her bed, but now he stood up and backed away to put distance between them. I gotta… You stay here. I’ll tell the duty nurse you’re awake.

He slammed their link shut like he had put all of his considerable strength into closing a steel door, and fled the room.

Very, very bad, she whispered to herself, and sank back against the nearly comfortable bed.

Time to take inventory, then, and maybe figure out what had happened before she had to be told. Rachel sent her scans out, through the walls, and into the building, and learned she was in an expensive private room in one of the top floors of a hospital. Not much evidence to uncover there, as Rachel’s girlfriend was the kind of wealthy who bankers knew by name, Rachel’s boss was the kind of wealthy who could buy his own bank, and the Office of Complementary and Enhancement Technologies intimidated anyone with enough brain cells to require at least a few connective synapses. Any one of those would have gotten her a private room. But the fact that she was in a hospital in the first place meant whatever had happened had been public, as OACET had its own medical suite secreted away in the basement their headquarters in downtown D.C., and they would have whisked her away if it had been possible.

Wait, was she still in Washington? She used her implant to ping the computer attached to her IV drip, and learned that she was at Walter Reed. The computer had useful information about how long she had required its services (sixty-four hours) and the current date and time. She wiggled the fingers on her left hand, counting backwards. Nearly three days spent unconscious in the hospital, and that last memory of breakfast was exactly a week ago. That meant—

I’m missing four days of my life.

She shivered, trying not to think about missing days—missing years—and slowly eased herself into the wide open mental space of the collective’s group link.

It had taken nearly eight years for them to understand how a hivemind could be formed of individuals. The link which connected her to the other cyborgs was always active when she used her implant, but they were all getting better at staying out of each others’ minds unless they were invited. Instead of the great crashing sea of emotions that had once formed the collective, they had learned to draw themselves back, to lurk on the peripherals of presence. When Rachel’s implant was active, she no longer felt like four hundred people were trying to occupy her single body. Now it was just her, Rachel Peng, a single person with four hundred bodies she could occupy if she chose to be very rude about boundaries.

As she made her presence known, there was a great rush of excitement, an unnatural clamor of thoughts and feelings that pushed and pulled against her. Buffeted in a storm of different minds asking the same questions she was asking herself—are you okay how are you what happened what happened what happened what happened WHAT HAPPENED—Rachel felt the edges of her sense of self begin to blur.

"Stop." A calm harbor of a voice, undeniable in its authority. The idea of a sea wall in the shape of a man slid between Rachel and the rest of the collective. That single word was enough: the others felt Rachel pushing back, trying to force her own identity into place, and they slunk away in guilt and grief. Before Rachel could ask herself why four hundred people were in mourning, the sea wall turned towards her and pulled her into a private link before it fell into the familiar mental patterns of her boss, Patrick Mulcahy.

"I’m glad you’re awake," he told her. Don’t talk to anyone until I get there.

He waited before she sent him vague feelings of assent, compliance, before he broke away, leaving the impression that he was running for his car at top speed.

Rachel shook herself as he left her head, and backed out of the link as much as she could without going offline and losing her visual abilities. She slammed an away message in place to ward against the collective, and then curled up around herself in a loose ball, her right arm and its heavy cast cradled against her chest.

Whatever happened was extremely bad, she thought, followed by a moment of irritation that the stupid catheter wouldn’t allow her to go fully fetal. She loved mysteries—you couldn’t be a good detective without a passionate love for solving puzzles—but not when they were hers.

A knock at the door, and the entire hospital seemed to discharge into her room. Mako had gone for a nurse but Rachel’s monitoring devices had alerted her doctor to her status change, and she was suddenly lost within endless questions. Jenny Davies was OACET’s own quasi-neurologist and she had already declared Rachel free from serious head trauma, so the medical team quickly diagnosed her memory loss as temporary amnesia, likely stemming from emotional trauma and high body temperature brought on by proximity to the fire.

Wait, what’s this about a fire? Rachel shot Mako a look. "I was in a fire?!"

He shrugged as he shook his head, and then opened a loose link. Pat will explain everything when he gets here.

Caught between the twin impulses of wanting to know and never wanting to know, ever, she took the coward’s route and instead asked if the catheter could come out.

Five minutes later, she was still confused, but the nurse had insisted she use the bathroom on her own to make sure the plumbing still worked, so she was also raw and edging towards furious. When she popped out of the bathroom, she told the medical team to clear the room. They pushed back—they had to push back—but they’d have had better luck arguing with a sack full of wet mules, and she told them so.

It’s supposed to be wet cats in a sack, groused the nurse who had caught catheter duty.

Guess you didn’t get a good look at the size of my sack while you were down there, Rachel shot back at her. The nurse didn’t dignify her with an answer.

As Mako tried to slip out with the medical team, she grabbed his shirt sleeve with her good hand. Not you, she told him in the tightest private link she could hold.

He stared at her hand, small and pale against the dark green of his shirt. For a brief moment, she saw herself through his eyes: a half-Chinese woman in a hospital gown with short, spiky black hair and an oval face. Taller than most women, as her father was a Scottish giant and she had inherited his overlong legs. The type of athlete who could run five miles or climb a rock wall without breaking a sweat, as long as you didn’t throw some weight training in the middle. Decent shape, yes, but there was no way in hell she could beat Mako Hill and his nearly three hundred pounds of solid muscle in a fistfight…except apparently she would try, and he really didn’t want to go through getting his jaw rewired again.

He nodded towards the chair. Rachel dropped his arm and returned to the bed, sitting so her legs draped over the edge. He pulled the chair up to the bed again as he sighed, his conversational colors falling into anxious yellows, oranges, and grays. Not just the grays of stress, either. No, this was the miserable cold fog of loss and sorrow, with lightning flashing in silverlight streaks.

The colors of mourning, she realized.

Suddenly she didn’t want to do this. Rachel wanted to stay here in this moment where reality lurked outside the door, waiting to be fed so it could move in and take up space in her mind again. She was living in the now, and while this was bad enough, it wouldn’t be anything like living in the after. But avoiding this news hadn’t been a conscious decision, and she refused to allow her subconscious to make her choices for her. The last time that had happened…hadn’t ended well.

"I know it’s bad," she assured him. But I’m missing time.

Shit, he whispered aloud, the word muddy through his teeth. He took off his sunglasses and covered his eyes. Most of her fellow Agents were photosensitive, where even the dim lights in a hospital room with the blinds closed could trigger a headache, but she didn’t think he was fighting against that.

He finally gave in. You were working a case.

"Me alone, or me plus the others?" Rachel was part of a team of four who worked out of First District Station of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. Mako would know if her team had been with her: his cousin, Matt Hill, was their interrogator. His partner, Jacob Zockinski, managed expectations, a job which sounded easy but one which Rachel would gleefully remove her own teeth with a rock to avoid. Raul Santino, her best friend and former roommate-slash-current roommate, was an absolute nerd, smart as anything, whole libraries in his skull even without a cybernetic assist. She was the team’s knight—point her at a problem and she would solve it or die trying. The four of them made a solid partnership, their strengths complementing each other, their weaknesses minimized.

Mako’s grief intensified, with sparks of light and darker gray rolling through it. She didn’t say anything: he still picked up on her mood, her rush of panic through their link. They’re okay, he said quietly, even as they shared an understood but, and the stormcloud of his emotions settled around them both. You were chasing an arsonist. He blew up some buildings. All of them were owned by OACET fanboys...a computer store, a gaming group. You know, the pro-technology folks who are terminally online and love us more than anything.

Rachel nodded.

"I don’t know much else. You were searching abandoned buildings—" He paused and looked towards the door. She followed his lead, sending her scans out and down, finding nothing of note within five hundred yards.

"What?" she asked him.

"Mulcahy’s here." Some surprise traveled across their link at her missing the obvious. He’s parking in the second garage.

"I’m running nothing but localized scans and emotions."

"Gotcha." He slid his chair away from the bed, his relief at no longer having to break the bad news an oil-and-vinegar mix of reluctant gladness against her mind.

"Just tell me," Rachel said, nearly begging.

"It’s not like ripping off a Band-Aid," Mako replied, the silver and grays of his stormcloud wrapping tightly around him as if he couldn’t let it go. "I don’t want to do this. Not with you in my mind.

"You don’t want to do this, either," he added, standing. If you did, you’d already know. You’re the best of us at reading what we can’t say.

Mako very carefully touched her hand and allowed his pure emotion to move into her—sadness, loss, mourning, love—before he went to meet Mulcahy on his way to her room.

Leaving Rachel alone with herself again.

Not entirely alone, though.

You were there, she whispered to her implant. You saw everything I did. Literally. Are you blocking me from my memories?

There was no answer. There wasn’t supposed to be an answer. Her implant was intended to be a part of her, its organic components cultivated from her own cells to prevent rejection. Jenny had told her to think of it as an organ as critical to her continued functioning as her lungs or kidneys. But thoughts didn’t pass through the lungs, and her implant wasn’t attached to her kidneys. And there was always, always! her suspicion that there was no way in hell she would have chosen to sit outside and stare up at the sun for two days straight.

I don’t like this, she told it. If you’re doing…whatever you’re doing, you need to stop.

No reply.

You can’t take over my life.

Silence.

"I’ll name you, she threatened, out of ideas. Something dreadful, like…like Fannigan. Do you want to be Fannigan? I can start calling you Fanny."

Nothing.

Rachel sat back in her hospital bed and waited. Maintenance tasks required some attention: texts were sent to the most likely concerned non-OACET parties that she was conscious and doing fine, yes, just fine! with the exception of mild laryngitis and a broken wrist, no need to worry, will call later. Her girlfriend got a lengthier text which said more of the same, plus an apology as she was still in the hospital due to some mild neurological symptoms, and because she was a cyborg they were going to watch her for another hour so she didn’t accidentally nuke downtown D.C. or