Qi by the Square Meter

Green meters were a rumor the rich used as weather. Nuria hit one and felt the ache leave her hands so suddenly she almost steered into the rail. The parcel warmed.

A notice bloomed on her wristband: surcharge, living cargo, lotus class. She had not declared living cargo. The band did not care. It deducted a minute, then another, as if time were a pouch it could pick.

“See?” the man said, closer now, on a rented board that skimmed the tolls. “The city already knows. You’re paying for a secret you haven’t even looked at. That’s bad business.”

Nuria killed the lights and took the service alley where boards scraped and bikes fit. “I get paid to not look,” she said. “You get paid to. One of us is going to have a worse night, and I have a lock on the parcel and a mother who checks the news.”

The lotus pulsed once, in a rhythm that was not quite a heartbeat and not quite a clock. Her band translated it, unhelpfully, as customer satisfied.