Joanne felt hope drain out of her eight hours into the traffic jam. Granted she was asleep the whole time, but the sight of the exact same tree with the lightning-burnt bark, which Joanne had stared at an equivalent of an entire workday ago, was panic-inducing. “You don’t think this will turn into last month’s nightmare, do you?” she heard someone ask. “Last month’s nightmare” was a five-day, ninety-kilometer-long traffic congestion produced by a combination of heavy delivery trucks traveling on the national highway from the provinces to the city, an ill-timed major road construction work, several pileups, and an asshole police force who refused to let air vehicles land at the emergency bay areas to pick up passengers stuck in the gridlock. It didn’t take long before a mini-economy formed on the roadside, with vendors taking advantage of the helpless and desperate by selling food and bottled water at four times the price.

The bus’s interior was starting to feel humid, so she cracked open her window. It was nearing midnight. The trucks and buses and cars, in an effort to conserve fuel and battery, had turned off their engines, probably hours ago. It was eerily quiet. No angry horn honking, no street fights, no one screaming at the obdurate traffic sign. Perhaps everyone stuck on the highway had gone from anger to a state beyond anger—a complete and paralyzing understanding of the situation’s futility. The traffic was like a monster that had lain down and given up.

She heard a whoosh and felt the air conditioner blow a harsh, cold wind on the top of her head. The engine was back on, courtesy of the conductor who had probably gotten bored and wanted to watch his streams. Joanne pressed the icon on her window to replicate what was onscreen up front: footage of a long queue of trucks, an equally long and meandering interview with an “analyst”, the highway like a vast parking lot. Traffic at standstill on national highway.

Really? Joanne thought with disdain. No shit.

The conductor switched channels. “Ten Metro policemen, including a chief inspector and two senior inspectors, are accused of involvement in extortion and racketeering activities in the city, the latest of which involved what Arcadia Bionics alleged was a ‘Mod shop’ selling illegal—” “—following the successful launch of biomod Argos—” “Four of the ten suspects deny involvement—”  “—a recent audit of City Hall showed that various medical equipment purchased by the city government were overpriced by up to nine thousand percent—“

Joanne stood up to stretch.

With a hand on the small of her back, she walked to the front of the bus, and saw that a number of the seats were empty. The bus driver was asleep, slumped in his seat with a wadded-up shirt covering his eyes. The conductor was talking to someone on his no-hands. “Yes,” he said, sounding weary. “We’re still here.”

“Where’s everyone?” Joanne asked, after the conductor finished his call. The man stared at her as if to say, Where the hell have you been?

“They started walking.”

“Walking?” Joanne said, and for the first time noticed the steady stream of people weaving through the stranded vehicles, making the headlights blink. “How far away are we from the city entrance? Ten kilometers?”

The man shrugged. He looked like he was ready to start walking himself. “It’s better than being stuck here.”

Joanne walked back and inadvertently made eye contact with a woman her age sitting one row behind her, on the opposite side. The woman was sitting by the window, beside a sleeping woman who could be her older sister, or her mother. Her right eye was milky-white. Raised blue lines, like the circuits of a microchip or the tendrils of an otherworldly plant, crawled up from her right eyebrow to her scalp, where a portion of her head was shaved. The blue lines looked like thin, beaded cornrows. Argos.

The woman looked away from her as if Joanne’s stare burned, and tried to stand up. The older woman stirred and opened her eyes. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I was just—”

“Sit. Down.”

The woman sat down. Joanne sat on an aisle seat which belonged to a passenger who had probably already absconded, and glanced back. The woman was covering her eyes with her hands.

“Put your hands down,” the older woman said, sounding like she was gritting her teeth, a ventriloquist hiding her words.

The older woman said something more but Joanne couldn’t hear anything, until the younger woman screamed, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

The silence that followed was paralyzing.

“Is everything all right back there?” the conductor asked in a bored drawl.

“We’re fine,” the older woman said before he even finished asking the question. She stood up, leaning away, careful not to nudge the younger woman’s arm on the armrest. She was tall, broad-shouldered. Like an athlete. Like an abusive mother? Joanne contemplated this suspicion and idly pushed it away.

“I’m getting water,” the older woman said. No reply. Joanne heard a clunk of metal. “Give me your wrists.”

Joanne, who was scrolling through her emails on her phone, glanced back. The older woman was holding two bracelets, the clasps open and waiting. Joanne was shocked when she saw the metal rings. She knew the product. It was one of the projects she had worked on and modified during her internship at Hestia Industries, before being wooed by Arcadia Bionics. She had never seen it used outside of a police station, though. The sight of the bracelets made her cold all over, as though she were witnessing an assault in progress.

The younger woman glanced up and stared at the bracelets in disdain.

The older woman took her wrists and locked the bracelets in place. “I’m just trying to protect you,” she said. Each bracelet had a circle that glowed green. They pulled the woman’s arms down to the metal armrests with a loud thunk.

Joanne turned away and watched the older woman walk down the aisle and out of the bus. When she turned back, the woman with the milky-white eye was staring right at her. Joanne smiled out of reflex, and was relieved when the woman flicked her wrist and gave her a tiny wave.

Joanne almost said, Good luck to her, a bottle of water will cost an arm and a leg out there, and caught herself. She didn’t want the woman to know she had been eavesdropping. What’s with the bracelets? she also wanted to ask.

“This is the worst, isn’t it?” Joanne said instead. “I wish the city could just send a battalion of air cars and lift us out of here.”

“Why won’t they, I wonder?” she asked.

What’s with the bracelets? Joanne couldn’t believe she was carrying out a normal conversation with a manacled woman.

“I don’t know,” Joanne said, and felt the stirrings of a low-level fury that was quickly overpowered by the pain in her back. “Maybe because we’re not anyone important.”

The younger woman didn’t have anything to add. Joanne used the silence to introduce herself.

“My name’s Joanne.”

“Kala,” she responded.

Joanne nodded. “Cool Mod, by the way,” she said, carefully not adding, I work for Arcadia now, but I designed those things on your wrists.

“Argos,” Kala said. “The giant with a hundred eyes.”

“Cool,” Joanne said.

“I’m going blind,” she said.

Joanne didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Even with the Mod?” she said, finally. “Shouldn’t it help?”

“Do you know that in dreams,” Kala continued, “I will see only the things I have ever seen prior to going blind? So in my dreams my nephew will forever be eight. People I will meet after my eyesight begins to fail will appear in my dreams with blurred faces.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve made peace with it,” Kala said. “That was about a year ago. But while I was visiting support websites, downloading audio books, switching my gadgets to text-to-speech, my parents heard about this clinical trial sponsored by Arcadia. So I signed up, and I was fitted with Argos.

Kala stopped talking abruptly, making Joanne think the older woman had come back. But she was still out there, still hunting down that elusive, reasonably priced bottle of water.

“Argos didn’t work?” Joanne said.

“For eleven months I could only sleep two to three hours every night, because Argos gave me terrible headaches,” Kala said. “Once I walked down the street and everything went dark, like someone threw a hood over my head. Incomplete biomechanical fusion, the doctors said. So they went in and kept tinkering and adjusting, but so far nothing has worked. I guess it was my fault, right? I shouldn’t have believed in it so wholeheartedly. I should have been ready for failure.” She took a deep, ragged breath. “I should have said no. I tried to have it removed, but we’re in too deep. My father had to pull out his down payment on our Tower apartment to afford all of the tests the Arcadia doesn’t cover. I was hoping I would be cured so I could work and get our apartment back, but—”

They fell silent as the engine revved and the bus moved an infinitesimal, disappointing inch forward.

“I’m so sorry,” Joanne said.

“I have heard of terminally ill people who agree to experimental treatments that drain their family’s savings and drain their energy,” she said. “And I wonder: why do they even bother? But it’s the hope that’s pushing them. The hope that they’ll be cured. And then they die.” Her smile was small and sad. “If I were them, I’d rather have the certainty of a death sentence. Hope is a terrible thing.”

Joanne wondered what she could say, what she could do to comfort her. She felt overwhelming relief when Kala abruptly changed the topic. “So,” she said, “what were you doing out here? Did you have a vacation in the province?”

“If only,” Joanne said. “I visited my parents. You?”

“Visited an aunt,” she said. “My mother and I,” a nod of her head outside the bus window, “we asked her for a loan.”

“And you got the loan?”

Kala smiled. “My aunt lent us the money, but not before disparaging my life choices.” She shrugged. “I think every family has an aunt like that.”

They shared a laugh. Joanne watched Kala struggle with the bracelets, which of course would never budge.

“Would you like me to disable the magnet for you?” Joanne found herself saying, and realized right after saying the words that there was no taking them back.

Kala stared at her. “You can do that?”

“I can do it if the generic passcode’s not yet overwritten.” What the hell are you doing? “Most customers forget to change the passcode, to be honest.” Shut your mouth, Joanne.

Kala stared at her, thinking. She glanced at the front of the bus. Joanne followed her gaze. The older woman had not yet returned.

“Can you try?” Kala said, and Joanne stood up and knelt beside her.

She was right. The generic passcode was still there. “Kala,” she said, after the magnets were disabled and Kala lifted her arms with a relieved sigh, “if you are in an abusive household—”

“I’m taking a walk,” Kala said, and pushed past her to get to the bus door.

“Wait!” Joanne said, “I’ve only disabled the magnet. The alarm is still—“

 “It’s okay,” Kala said, scratching the blue tendrils of her Argos. Scratching, scratching, scratching. The circles in the bracelets still glowed green. She glanced back, as though she was sure Joanne would follow her. “It’s okay,” she said again.

The weather outside was cool and pleasant. They walked past two buses and a ten-wheeler truck, weaving through the crowd, and saw people, mostly exhausted bus and truck drivers, lying on the grass on the road shoulder, using their shirts as pillows and makeshift picnic blankets.

“You might trigger the alarm, you know,” Joanne said. “If you traveled outside the authorized radius.” But Kala didn’t react. Stalls lined the shoulder, people sitting behind tables hawking sandwiches, popcorn (Popcorn? Joanne thought, incredulous), fruits, water, soda, and perplexing items like iridescent plastic roses in glass vases, Flash-Earrings, and glowing bowling pins. Joanne tried to understand the logic behind this—do they think people stuck in this traffic jam would suddenly feel the need to buy luminescent novelty junk? One vendor showed off his wares by juggling the bowling pins, the glowing items leaving behind streaks of light. The effect was hypnotic and, Joanne had to grudgingly admit, beautiful.

She became aware of a tinny beeping that progressively grew louder. Kala, watching the juggler, the glow reflected in her milky-white eye, lifted her hand to the blue veins on her scalp again, and Joanne saw that the bracelet light had turned red. It’s the alarm, she thought, and did not manage to articulate the thought before Kala brought her hand down and tore off a tendril of Argos from her head.

Joanne did not know where the scream originated, but it was sudden and very loud, so loud that she felt her head constrict. Before long she realized it was Kala herself who was screaming, blood pouring from the gash in her scalp, from her torn eyelid, from the gaping maw of her eyehole. The tendril hung from her cheek like a snake. Joanne saw Kala fall to the ground, saw someone, the older woman, Kala’s mother, plow through the crowd—“Kala!” her mother screamed, pushing people aside, “Kala!”—and she moved back in fear, allowing herself to be lost in the crowd surging forward to gawk. “Someone get some help!” someone said, but did not get help.

“What happened?” a man asked Joanne. His shirt was wrinkled and he was carrying a thick jacket. Joanne imagined him napping with the drivers. Maybe he was one of the drivers. She watched him craning his neck to get a better look. “I think someone got hurt,” he said in a small voice.

Joanne stood still next to him in the middle of a curious crowd six onlookers deep, weary and excited bodies moving forward and back, forward and back. She could no longer see Kala. All she could see were the outline of shoulders, hands holding phones.

“Give me your jacket,” she said, surprising the man.  

“What?” He was a thin man with a thin face, a smattering of pimples on his chin. He was probably Kala’s age. Joanne pulled at his jacket. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

Joanne pushed through the crowd. “Out of the way!” Kala was on the ground, limbs caught in a seizure, hair clotted with blood. The man must have loosened his grip in shock upon seeing Kala, and Joanne found herself holding the jacket. She knelt and placed it under Kala’s head. Another woman with enormous spectacles knelt across from Joanne and handed her an old towel, bristly and rough. “For the,” she said, then gestured at Kala’s wound.

Joanne pressed the towel against Kala’s head and turned to the man. “Find a doctor,” she said. “There has got to be a doctor stuck here with us.”

“You bastard!” A hoarse scream. Joanne looked up and saw Kala’s mother bobbing up and down, searching for someone. Her face was red, tear-stained. People were holding her back, calming her down. “You bastard!” she said. “I saw you! I saw you! You bastard! Why did you remove them? I was trying to protect her!”

Up ahead, trucks started to move forward, and some of the people got tired of the spectacle and returned to their vehicles. Kala’s mother sank to the ground, still weeping and screaming. The woman with the spectacles stayed with Joanne, and minutes later the man came back, telling her that he couldn’t find a doctor but that someone had helped him call for an ambulance. Kala’s seizure stopped, and Joanne gently rolled her onto her side. She could feel warm blood seeping through the towel pressed against Kala’s head. “It will be all right,” Joanne whispered to her, as the buses and cars and trucks lumbered forward into the city, as the sound of an ambulance siren grew louder and louder.