“This purse must have cost more than our boat!”

I ran my fingers over my mouth, thoughtful.

“She probably found it. Maybe stole it. I don’t know. Either way we’re in deep shit. These things have an expiration date. If the authorized party doesn’t use it within thirty-six hours, the chip reports itself back to the mainframe as stolen, and sets off a built-in tracking beacon.”

That meant Goreelaz. Large, heavily armed men in black helmets whose primary reason for recruitment is a severe lack of compunction and sole purpose was the reclaimation of misapropriated government property. They’d be coming for us soon.

“We have to get rid of it! Throw it in the bay,” Laressa said.

“That would maybe save our skins. But the woman you stole this from is still screwed. If you lose a relief chip, they don’t just deny you a replacement. They arrest you for misapropriation and put you to work in the fields until you’ve paid back the cost of the chip. We can’t throw it away,” I said.