Many Hands

In a world where every eye is fitted with a neural implant and every street is painted over with curated light, there is one place the signal has never reached. Candor, Washington, sits in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, a dying fishing town of rotting piers, shuttered canneries, and people who have spent their whole lives looking at the world exactly as it is.

Then a hiker stumbles out of the clear-cut, her implant dead and her nerves shredded, and asks the town doctor a question ...