This is how you kill someone.
You don’t need a gun or a knife. You don’t even need to want it. All it takes is one bad decision.
I was fifteen when I became a murderer.
There was a boy. A beautiful boy. He had a way of looking at things—like the world brimmed with unseen wonder. And if he couldn’t find the beauty, he would make it. His nail beds were smudged with charcoal from art class. In sketchbooks, he captured the softness of apple blossoms, the forest of shadows cast by classroom desks when morning sunlight poured through the windows, and the outlines of students carrying transparent umbrellas in the rain. One time, I caught him drawing me—and I barely recognized myself. The curve of my lips held a thousand secrets and my sweep of brown hair seemed artistic instead of unruly. He came to school in a small red car, bought by his parents so he wouldn’t have to rely on buses. The car’s autopilot was programmed for school and home and nothing else.
I was nothing like him. My knees jounced with unspent energy, my fingers playing with a cheap smart-ring I’d managed to buy secondhand. I wrote computer code in the air, my fingers tracing invisible hacks. I did not createbeautiful things—I picked apart existing programs, finding back doors and slipping inside like a thief in the night. I took what I wanted.
And I wanted that boy.
He wanted a day off from school.
The wanting was our undoing.
Because when I hacked his car’s navigation system, I accidentally turned off the program that made us visible to the other driverless cars. I sat in the driver’s seat, using my smart-ring to upload the hack. And then I set the autopilot to take us across the city to a local zoo. We laughed at our own cleverness as we zoomed away from school and onto a bridge. The sun shone through golden dust motes, and the thrum of music rattled through the seats. It was a moment of triumph, of freedom.
The difference between murder and manslaughter is intent—but that doesn’t matter to the victims.
Let me tell you what does matter: velocity and momentum. Rubber and steel. An SUV trying to merge into a lane that its sensors said was empty. The railing of a bridge, crumpled outward as the boy’s red car was pushed over the edge and into the water below.
I remember the world jerking sideways. I felt my neck snap to one side, fire in my spine. And then there was nothing but weightlessness. Adrenaline surged through my body, sharpened every sense and pulled time to a standstill.
We spent an eternity in free fall.
Hitting the water below was like slamming into concrete. The car crumpled inward, the steering wheel crushing most of my heart.
I was conscious for only a handful of moments. But it was long enough to see the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield, the lights in the dashboard winking out, and the spatter of blood across the ceiling. It was long enough to know. To understand. To feel that bone-deep wrench of guilt.No no no no, oh please no, let me go back, just five seconds, let me fix this, let me not have—
When death took me, I welcomed it.
And then it spat me back out again.
I awoke in an unfamiliar place, in an unfamiliar body, to an unfamiliar man sitting at my bedside. He had dark hair, a light complexion, and eyes that could have been gray or green. He wore a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a suit jacket draped over the back of his chair. A tattoo of golden clocks was etched into his left arm and a holographic chessboard sat before him. When he saw me awaken, he flicked the chessboard away and leaned closer. The harsh hospital light illuminated the delicate lines at the corners of his eyes.
Countless wires and tubes connected me to machines. To my bleary eyes, they looked like threads tying me to this new reality.
I was a tapestry still on the loom—something yet unfinished.
I licked my dry lips. “W-who are you? Where’s my family?”
The man said, “You aren’t going to know my name, but you may call me Prefect.”
I stared at him blankly, uncomprehending.
He said, “When you hacked that car, you overrode theidentity of the owner and hijacked the vehicle’s autopilot. A federal felony, these days. The passenger also died—which leaves you on the hook for felony murder.”
A howl of unspoken grief welled up in my chest. Perhaps it would have eased the pain to scream, to wrench myself from the bed and claw at the floor. I wanted to close my eyes; I wanted to be away from all of this. To pretend that I hadn’t done something unforgivable. I wanted to go back to that morning, to return to the girl who’d offered to help a boy skip school.
I’d killed him. He was gone because of me.
And in that moment, I despised myself with an intensity I hadn’t known was possible.
“Why are you here?” I rasped out. Even my voice sounded unfamiliar. Later, I would learn I’d been intubated for the better part of a week.
“Because it was a very good hack,” said Prefect. “Exploiting a security flaw in the sound system and then uploading a fake update? Quite creative.”
“I killed someone,” I said flatly.
