This story is one of five winners of the Stop Copaganda short story contest, run in collaboration with Fight for the Future, Rightscon, and COMPOST Magazine.

Nadjea always knew her last night in the Clave would get wild: They’re the only sector of the city where drink and drug and dance are unrestricted, and since one of the main Clavist tenets is the pursuit of corporeal joy in all its forms, they’ve more or less refined partying to an art.

She knew to expect Kierk’s homegrown MDMA analog to hit like a blissy staticky tsunami. She knew to expect Mona’s band—formerly the Noctambulists, now Gristleswing—to pack the dancefloor into an electric sea of skin and sweat. She knew to expect the long rambling goodbye pep-talk from Vawn on the rooftop and the frantic-turned-tender goodbye sex with Ilya at hers.

She did not expect to stumble home and find a corpse on her doorstep. At first Nadjea thinks it’s a blacked-out passed-out neighbor, collapsed just meters from a more dignified sleeping arrangement, and crouches down to check their breathing. She can’t feel it on her palm. She fumbles for the sleeper’s neck, ends up with her hand on their temple.

It comes away sticky, and Nadjea’s buzz-dulled brain takes a minute to recognize the look and smell of congealing blood. Then her throat and heart both clench up. The corridor is dark – loadshedding started at midnight—so she reaches for the emergency lighting. The wall-strip activates at her touch and casts a pale dead light over a pale dead face.

Tay Osterman. Nadjea knows her, but not well, and while most of her is horrified a tiny part of her is so relieved it’s not Ilya or Vawn, Mona or Kierk, sister or parent or cousin. But of course Tay is someone’s Ilya, someone’s Vawn, someone’s sister or cousin and definitely someone’s parent. That fact turns her over to full horror, then shock, despair, nascent anger.

Nadjea speaks a prayer for the swift reunification of Tay’s soul with the Whole, then starts banging on doors.

Jonno Quimperes was the killer; everyone knows it but the cops. Even within the Clave’s carefully demarcated borders, where the cumulative force of the inhabitants’ dimmer implants jams almost all communications technology, news still manages to travel at lightspeed.

“He holed up in his room,” Nadjea says, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. “Ryoko is talking to him through the door but he’s not answering much. This is so fucked. So … so …”

“Yeah, Nadj,” Ilya says. “I know.”

They’re sitting in the Yellow Garden, so named for its tangled lemon trees and the bright brickwork painted to match them. Organic seed drillers move slowly across the soil, hopping then coiling then hopping again. The midmorning sun comes through in thick warm slices, and the springy carbon moss is soft under her hands, and Ilya looks so sleepy-beautiful slumped beside her—but Nadjea is not there.

Nadjea is still in a dark corridor, crouching over Tay Osterman’s corpse. Nadjea is still watching the news spread across the face of Tay Osterman’s son, a lanky thirteen-year-old named Anatohl who is always bouncing his football off the mural wall, targeting specific shapes each day.

Ilya leans over and plucks a tiny something from her cheek, rubs her thumb in a soft circle, like she’s prepping it for the tattoo. Her touch brings Nadjea back to the garden. She tries to meet Ilya’s worried gaze, but it hurts. Everything hurts. This should have been their last goodbye before Nadjea gives up her dimmer and starts her year of Whole-work on the outside, but nobody is leaving the Clave today and nobody is entering.

Nobody except the Dog. Remembering that makes Nadjea’s stomach slosh over.

“Why would he do it?” Ilya mutters. “Why would he kill her?” She blinks, removes her hand like she’s afraid she’ll tether the question to Nadjea’s cheek, then asks another. “Is it even worth trying to understand?”

“It is,” Nadjea says, through a tightening throat. “Because Jonno’s not confessing, and there’s no physical evidence yet. They sent the Dog first to soften us up but Vawn says this time tomorrow the Clave will be crawling with real cops, and everything might—change.”

Ilya rubs her back. “I’ll be right outside the bubble while it interviews you,” she says. “And if you wave, I’m busting in.”

“Please don’t,” Nadjea says, but then, when she presses her face into Ilya’s soft neck, whispers: “Please do. I fucking hate that thing.”

Nadjea grew up with a healthy fear of Dog. Even as a kid, she understood the Clave’s existence was tenuous—she saw it in the way her dads marveled over what, to her, was a normal life. She saw it in their precise and reverent maintenance of their dimmers, in the fierce joyful pride they took in each square centimeter of the city within the city.

She saw it in the way their mouths and shoulders tightened whenever they spotted the Dog, a quadrupedal bogeyman stalking the Clave’s outmost borders. So when Nadjea sees it waiting for her in the vestibule, her knees turn almost gelatinous. She grounds herself by focusing on the familiar: the tile mosaic underfoot, the solar streetlamps that come to life at night, carved to look like luminous faces of the Whole.

As they get close she feels the uncomfortable hum of interference in her dimmer; Ilya’s head gives a tell-tale twitch that means she feels it, too. The Dog inhabits its own moving tech-bubble—a city within the city within the city—and Nadjea will have to meet it there. Vawn, as the Clave’s first liaison, is just exiting. He looks sick with exhaustion.

“Nadjea Bouchard-Iwata,” the headless drone says, motionless apart from a rotating sensor bulb. “Can I call you Naddie? Last night must have been such a shock for you, Naddie, but I’m here to help. You tell me everything, and everything will be just fine.”

Nadjea tries to smile—not for the Dog, but for Ilya, who gives her hand a last comforting squeeze, and for Vawn, who gives her a solemn nod.

“Sure,” she says, and steps inside the bubble.

For a sharp painful moment her dimmer seems to rasp against itself, then the sensation dulls and leaves her with a headful of steel wool. The leggy combat drone has become a chunky cartoon, all glossy fur and dangling pink tongue, wearing a stylized K-9 police vest.

“Walk me through last night,” the Dog says, thumping its holographic tail. “I love walks.”

Nadjea follows Vawn’s advice and keeps it as sparse as possible: the festivities, the stumble home, the approximate time she found Tay and got help carrying her to the clinic, where Su the emergency medic confirmed she was killed by a single blow to the skull.

The Dog is unmoved by that, but it narrows its cartoon eyes at the mention of the party—and again at the hour-long delay between her informing the Clave and the Clave informing the cops.

“You Clavists certainly make things difficult for yourselves,” it says. “No security drones! No eyecams! Half the potential witnesses addled by addictive drugs! But don’t worry, Naddie. We’ll catch this killer. I grrr-antee it.”

“It was Jonno Quimperes,” Nadjea says, because murder is an affront to the Whole and Vawn must have told it this already. “Jonno killed Tay.”

The Dog bares its holographic teeth in a grin. “Your suspicions are noted, Naddie, and don’t worry: Jonno Quimperes will be my seventeenth interview. We’ll get to the bottom of this no matter how long we have to dig. I love digging.”

“Can I go?” Nadjea asks, because it’s dangerous to move suddenly or unexpectedly around the Dog.

“Of course, Naddie,” it says. “Maybe you could find Anatohl for me and send him my way? I want to offer my condolences.”

Nadjea keeps her mouth clenched shut and exits the bubble.

Everyone knows it was Jonno for the following reasons: Magali saw him speaking with Tay in furious whispers by the apiary entrance, early evening, Dextra saw him shirtless and shell-shocked and rinsing blood off his hand in the washroom, early morning, and even though Jonno was away from the Clave for a decade, multiple people recall his temper.

The question is how to prove it, decisively, before they get fully infested by cops who’ve despised the Clave ever since it was established. Nadjea rolls it over and over in her head as she searches for Anatohl. People point her along, more solemnly than usual, but all she really has to do is follow the leathery smack of a football against stone.

He’s not picking targets today, just bludgeoning the ball as hard as he can against the wall, over and over. His bare feet are already beaten to an angry red. A half dozen neighbors are keeping watch, acting like they just happen to be lounging around the courtyard this morning. It’s probably driving him crazy.

“Hey, Anatohl,” Nadjea says. “Ilya made food.” She holds out a bowl of lentil curry and cracks the lid so the smell wafts out. “You’ve got enough time to eat before you talk to the Dog.”

He lets the ball bounce once, twice, then tucks his chin to chest and volleys it into the wall so hard it ricochets past Nadjea’s head and flies off into the badly trimmed bushes on the other side of the courtyard. He finally looks at her, puffy eyes screwed up against the sunshine. For a moment she thinks he might start crying again.

He sneezes instead. Rubs his nose. Glares.

“Why all this fucking talking?” he says, voice cracking on the curse. “Why can’t we just—” He clenches his fists and speaks in a mutter. “Just kill him.”

She decides to field the first question, leave the second to an elder. “The talking is because the cops don’t care about justice for your mother,” she says. “They care about destabilizing the Clave. This is an opportunity for them to gather data from their biggest blindspot—”

“Vawn already told me to keep my mouth shut.” Anatohl grits his teeth. “I know the cops don’t care. But you don’t care either. You were supposed to leave today.”

That hits Nadjea in the gut. For a moment she’s a kid again, lying flat on her back, staring up through blurry eyes at the climbing frame with the wind knocked out of her lungs.

“I’m going to leave soon as I can, too,” Anatohl says, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with hurt. “Fuck this place. I know the cops don’t care, but maybe if they had data, if there was drones in here, then maybe last night …” He shakes himself, like he’s trying to dislodge the thought. “I should have known,” he croaks. “I seen him hanging around. Watching. Trying to talk to her. Should have realized he was a fucking creep.”

Anatohl’s chest heaves. His shoulders shake. Nadjea knows now is the time to say the exact right thing, or hug him the exact right way, but all she can do is stand there holding out the bowl.

“Not hungry,” he says to it, then stalks away.

Nadjea finds herself wandering. She’s been doing that more and more often since she made her decision to leave, retracing all the paths she’s walked so often with her family, her friends, her neighbors. No matter where she is in the Clave, she can conjure up little ghosts of conversations or comfortable silences. It won’t be like that outside.

She takes a familiar turn, gravitating automatically toward her dads’ place. She saw them just a few hours ago—had to pry herself out of their arms, in fact, since the mingled shock of a murder in the Clave and their daughter finding the victim triggered all their old mama bear instincts. Even so, she knows some part of them is glad her going away has been temporarily delayed.

It would be easy to go to her dads now, help make them their ginger tea, play a slow cozy card game at the carved wooden table she helped decorate as a kid. Maybe she even owes it to them, this unexpected slice of time. Or maybe she owes it to Ilya, or Kierk, or Mona, all of whom she loves and is leaving.

But it’s that growing guilt over leaving that redirects her feet toward Jonno’s room. If she can do one last thing for the Enclave before she goes, one last thing that serves the Whole, it should be this. She’s the one who found the body, after all, and a sickening thought keeps circling in the back of her mind: It was her goodbye party.

If it weren’t for the dark and revelry, maybe Jonno would have never gotten the chance to be alone with Tay in the corridor, and kill her.

Kierk is taking a shift outside Jonno’s door when she arrives. Their hair is still a wild sweat-stiff halo from last night and they’re chiseling absently at their cheekbone, eyes bagged from no sleep.

“Didn’t know him and Tay even knew each other,” is the first thing they say.

“Me either,” Nadjea admits. She opens the bowl; it’s still hot enough to let out a puff of steam. “I was going to give him this, but you can have part of it.”

Kierk takes a long sniff, slides their spoon from its pouch, and scoops up a bite. “Thanks,” they say, speaking thickly through the first mouthful. “And thanks to the Whole and the cook. Ilya?”

“Ilya,” Nadjea confirms. She nods toward the door. “He’s only been back for a couple weeks, right? And keeping mostly to himself?”

“Only talked to him a few times,” Kierk gurgles. “About gardening. He took over some of the tree-trimming for Finna.” Their eyes drift to the door. “Vawn said to be soft, be patient, said re-entry can be tough on folks. I say he never should’ve got back in.”

“He’s still a Clavist,” Nadjea mutters. “He never renounced the Whole.”

“But he was gone for over a decade, Nadjea,” Kierk says, indicating the sweep of time with their spoon. “That’s not normal. People change outside.”

“And he won’t confess?” Nadjea shifts tracks. “What’s he saying now?”

“Never spoke to Tay, never even saw her, is what he says.” Kierk blinks. “Refuses to come out. Won’t let anyone in. Vawn was worried he might try to kill himself, but he’s been responding to the safety check every fifteen minutes.”

Nadjea tries to parse it. She trusts Magali’s word about the argument by the apiary, trusts Dextra’s word about the encounter in the washroom. She trusts that if the cops do come swarming in, they’ll find plentiful physical evidence. The Clavist way is to always confess wrongdoing, and she wants to believe Jonno is still a Clavist.

“Can I do the next one?” she asks.

Kierk shrugs, nods, so Nadjea settles the lid back on the bowl and goes to the door. She gets a flash of Tay’s body, sprawled in the corridor. She raises her fist. The knock seems to echo through the whole of the Clave.

“Jonno, this is Nadjea,” she says. “We’ve never spoken, but I’m Silas Bouchard and Boniface Iwata’s daughter.” She pauses, because the memory of Tay in the corridor makes the next question taste like ash in her mouth. “Are you safe?”

A few pounding heartbeats pass, then: “I’m safe,” Jonno says, in a rasping, trembling voice. “Thank you, Nadjea.”

“I brought you food,” she says. “Well, it was for Anatohl. But he didn’t want any.” She hesitates. “Anatohl being Tay’s son. I was there when they broke the news to him. I’m the one who found Tay’s body.”

Silence. She exchanges a measured look with Kierk, then presses on.

“That party last night, it was sort of my goodbye party,” she says. “I was meant to leave the Clave today. And part of me’s glad I can’t, because I don’t know—don’t really know—what it’s like outside. And I’m terrified. And I was wondering if you felt that way, too, when you left.”

Another silence, this one long enough that Nadjea thinks the conversation might be over. Then she hears movement on the other side of the door, a hand fumbling the lock. She tenses. Kierk tenses. The door opens just enough to fit a sliver of Jonno’s tattooed face. His eyes are swollen, shot through with pink.

“Don’t leave,” he croaks. “Leaving is—leaving was the biggest mistake I ever made.”

“I already decided,” Nadjea says, heart in throat. “I just need to know what I’m getting into.” She looks to Kierk, who is mouthing something about getting Vawn. “You should eat, Jonno. Let me in?”

All the rooms in the Enclave are the same base template, so walking into Jonno’s feels a lot like walking into hers, or Ilya’s, or her dads’—just far sparser. The porous stone walls are bare, and the only furniture is a cocoon bed and a simple chair from the woodshop. He offers her that, situating it by the open door, then crosses deliberately to the far side of the room so she has a clear escape route.

“Can you open the window?” she asks. “It’s dark in here.”

“Right.” He yanks the curtain aside, admitting a stream of sunlight dancing with dust-motes. He rubs furiously at his nose, ducks out of the light, and retrieves the bowl of food. “Thanks to the Whole and the cook and the giver,” he says. “I’m not—not that hungry. But thanks.”

He tries the curry, scooping clumsily with his left hand. His right is a cloud of bruised flesh he keeps cradled in his lap. Nadjea already caught a glimpse of the skinned knuckles, matched to the bloody imprint on Tay’s temple. It makes it hard to sit down, breathe deep, look Jonno in the eye.

“I had a party, too,” he mumbles. “The night before I left. It was a good night. In the morning I gave up my dimmer, said my goodbyes. The Clave arranged it so there was someone to take me to citizen registration.”

“Does it hurt the same as a regular tattoo?” Nadjea asks, eyeing the spiral blit on his cheek. She knows people born on the outside get theirs done internally, at birth, the same way she got her dimmer implanted. But Clavists who leave, even temporarily, have to give up the dimmer and get the tattoo.

“Doesn’t hurt at all,” Jonno says. “And at first, you know, it’s incredible. The city is so much bigger than you think, but you can be anywhere in a blink. It’s like living inside a dream or a lucie trip. After a week, all the holos know your name. The shops shuffle around when you walk in because they know what you want to buy. And for any job that needs human-human interaction, Clavists are in high demand.”

Nadjea knows she needs to steer, needs to find a way to get him back to last night, back to his skinned knuckles and Tay’s lifeless body. But part of her is desperate for every detail of Jonno’s decade outside the Clave, because it was something out there that changed him.

“It felt so good to be—new,” Jonno murmurs. “To know no one. Be anyone.” He looks up at her, hollow-eyed. “I wanted another year of it. But one year extra became two became three, and I still knew no one, and I was no one. And I was so fucking lost, but I couldn’t come back. I was in this—cycle. I was running the same code over and over.”

Nadjea understands coding in only the most abstract sense, but she seizes on the opportunity. “But something interrupted it,” she says. “Because you did come back. Why’d you come back?”

Jonno’s face closes off all at once. “I got … tired.”

It must be at least partly true; she can sense the exhaustion in every cell of his body. But he’s alive, and Tay’s dead, and Nadjea has not a cell in hers that feels sorry for him. Her anger foams upward again, and this time she lets some out.

“Why the fuck won’t you confess?” she demands.

Jonno tenses up; she readies herself to run and scream, knowing Vawn and Kierk must be in the corridor by now. Then he slumps forward, head in hands, and shuts his eyes.

“You did a terrible thing,” she pushes. “And now you’re doing another one. The Dog is here. You know that.” She borrows Vawn’s words and channels his angry calm. “The cops are going to drag this out as long as they can, Jonno. And once they’re glutted for data, they’re going to use what you did to make the Clave look dangerous. Lawless. Unstable.”

Jonno is mouthing something to himself, rocking backward and forward.

“They’ll make another push to shrink the dimmer zone or abolish it altogether, and it’ll be because of you,” Nadjea says, louder, more harshly. “Because you killed Tay.”

Jonno breaks. “She grabbed me and I swung!” he howls. “She grabbed me and I swung and she dropped and—Anatohl.” He digs both hands into his scalp, so hard that the bruised flesh spots white. “Anatohl. What’d he say?”

Nadjea hesitates, remembering what the teen told her about Jonno hanging around, trying to talk. But Jonno is finally telling the truth, so she tells it back. “He said he wants you dead,” she says flatly. “And he said he wants to leave the Clave.”

Jonno seems to sink into himself, compacting like a black hole. “No,” he mutters. “No, no, no. It was supposed to be so different. We were supposed to be family.”

Nadjea watches him shiver and shake, trying to parse the sudden panic, the aborted confession. Her mind whirls from one thing to another. She sees Anatohl’s football bouncing away into the courtyard’s ragged bushes, remembers Jonno took over some tree-trimming. She sees Anatohl sneezing in a sudden beam of sunlight, recalls Jonno ducking away from it just moments ago, face screwed tight.

The Clavist way is to always confess wrongdoing, unless that confession might endanger others. She remembers, unbidden, the goodbye sex with Ilya, the dark wild freedom she felt last night. Jonno had a party too.

She’s just beginning to understand when she hears voices in the corridor—first Vawn’s, then a synthetic chirp that sets her teeth on edge. Jonno recognizes it, too. He must have heard it often outside the Clave, heard it from hundreds of different quadrupedal bodies roaming the city. He sits bolt upright as the Dog pokes its featureless head inside.

“Jonno Quimperes,” the drone says. “Can I call you Jonny? I know it feels like everyone is against you, Jonny, but I’m here to hear your side of the story. In fact, I think you’ll have a particularly valuable perspective on the Clavist Autonomous Zone and its odd goings-on.” The sensor swivels her way. “Nadjea Bouchard-Iwata, please clear the room.”

Nadjea locks eyes with Vawn, standing in the corridor with his fists clenched at his sides. The Dog is going to offer Jonno a bargain of some kind, and now that Jonno has no future in the Clave, he might be desperate enough to take it.

But when she looks his way, she sees his face has gone unnervingly calm. “I’m Jonno Quimperes,” he says, wrapping his hand around the wrong end of the spoon. “I renounced the Whole years ago. I killed Tay Osterman, and I’m going to kill everyone else in the Enclave, one at a time.” He meets Nadjea’s gaze. “I have a knife. Please, don’t tell Anatohl.”

He flings himself off the bed—not toward her, but toward the Dog—and his body erupts under a hail of algorithmic gunfire.

It will be a few weeks before Nadjea can leave the Clave. One of the Dog’s bullets ricocheted into her side, grazing rib, and she would rather heal slowly here in the Clave’s clinic than quickly in an anonymous city medcenter. She talks with Ilya and plays cards with her dads, takes ukulele lessons from Mona and lucies with Kierk.

She thinks about Anatohl, and when she can’t stand it any longer, she tells Ilya what she’s pieced together. For starters: A decade is easier and catchier to say, but Jonno Quimperes actually left the Clave thirteen years ago. He made a life for himself in the outside, but it was one he hated—what he told Nadjea of it was only the sketch; Vawn knew more of the grisly details.

“I still don’t know how he found out about Anatohl,” Nadjea admits. “Maybe a chance conversation with another ex-Clavist. Maybe Tay contacted him herself with a courier, wanted him to finally know. But either way, that’s what brought him back. This fantasy of family, second chances, his life if he’d never left the Clave.”

They’re in the Yellow Garden again, sprawled out on the carbon moss—Nadjea more gingerly than usual. Ilya’s been letting her talk, only nodding here and there, absorbing without commenting. Now her frown deepens, and she takes the breath she does when bracing to speak. Nadjea waits.

“Tay was always fine on her own,” Ilya finally says. “She’d have told him that. That argument Magali saw the night he did it—it would have been about that, then.”

“About telling Anatohl,” Nadjea agrees. “Yeah. Jonno lost it, and he hit her, and he killed her.” She swallows. “And the instant she was dead, I think he went from wanting to tell Anatohl the truth to wanting to keep it secret at all costs. To not fuck him up even more, realizing his biodad showed up just long enough to kill his mom. That’s why he wouldn’t confess. That’s why he committed suicide by cop.”

“It was fucking cowardly, what he did,” Ilya says bitterly. “He could have gotten you killed, too. And Vawn.”

“He could have,” Nadjea admits. “But it got the Dog out of here. Made the case open-and-shut.”

Ilya is silent for a while, tracing circles on the back of her hand. “Are you going to tell Anatohl?”

“Don’t know.” Nadjea bites the inside of her cheek. “People say he’s doing better, then that he’s doing worse, then that he’s doing better again. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a—a right time.” She asks a question of her own, the soft venomous thing that’s been lurking in the back of her mind. “If I leave, am I going to change so much I can’t come back?”

Ilya squeezes her hand. “You’re going to be okay, Nadj.”

“Thank you,” Nadjea says, squeezing back, willing herself to believe it. “Love you, Ily.”

“Love you, too,” Ilya says, leaning forward. “And if you’re even one day late coming back, I’m busting out to look for you.”

Nadjea kisses her, then settles in against her shoulder. The motion throbs her rib. Sunlight is pouring through the lemon trees. The air is still. She watches the seed drillers hopping slowly across the soil, burying small secrets at every stop. She pictures the Dog roving endlessly just beyond the Clave’s borders, stalking, sniffing.