“But I—”
“No further information is required of you at this time,” he said.
“Stop cutting me off,” I said evenly. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“No.”
I opened my mouth to say something else, but closed it again. Sometimes haan were like that. I adjusted Tānchi’s weight in my arms and tried to keep from swaying as I waited.
“I’m fine, by the way,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
He just stood there, unmoving, even when the air next to him began to crackle and the wall shimmered and warped. A moment later, a pinprick of light dilated out until it formed a hexagon that stretched from floor to ceiling, and through it, I could see a second haan.
This one was female, and it struck me as weird to see two haan females in one day. She was smaller and lither than the males, with slender limbs and a pair of translucent breasts that rested to either side of her pulsing heart. I wondered if they dispensed the same speckled goo found in the surrogate rations.
She made a low, fast clicking sound as she leaned closer to me. Her neck was long and thin, and her glassy face was delicate and pretty. Her eyes were the color of fire, surrounded by a cornea of hot blue. When she entered the room, I felt a surge of excitement from the male.
“Um, hello?” I said. She stared at me, then gestured for me to approach, to step through the gate. I looked to the guard, then back to her. She gestured again, her thin fingers beckoning me.
I stepped through. When my foot came down on the other side, I found myself in another small chamber, this one round, with some kind of console to my right.
“The guards signaled that you were coming,” she said, voice box flickering as her deep, sultry voice issued out of it. “I’m sorry to have made you wait, but I wanted to meet with you personally.”
I stepped toward her, really unsteady now. The events of the night had begun to catch up with me.
“Sam Shao,” she said without consulting any sort of computer or tablet.
“That’s me.”
The silence stretched out, and the warm glow of her eyes seemed to bob and drift in front of me as her brains fluttered behind her forehead like swimming krill.
“I...” The room seemed to spin a little. The tank of adrenaline that had fueled me so far was running dry. “I need to return the child.”
“I know.”
“Something happened,” I said. “The place where I’m staying... some people broke in. They grabbed Dragan—”
I stopped short as she moved closer, seeming to grow in size as her eyes turned more focused and intense. The dark pinpricks of her pupils were like sunspots in the flame of her eyes.
“I will take the child.”
“He wasn’t hurt,” I said.
“I know.”
“I kept his feeding schedule,” I told her. “He’ll be okay for another four hours or so.”
“I know.”
“It’s just... my guardian is missing and our apartment is wrecked. Someone stole the ration kit from me ... I don’t have any money or any place to stay. He’ll have to go to someone else.”
“I will take the child.”
She reached out, opening her hands. I adjusted the blankets around Tānchi and carefully handed him to her. As I did, I felt a pang from him that made my breath catch. Fear and a sudden shocked hurt poured through as if to say, of all things, he would never have expected this.
You’re sending me away? his eyes seemed to say. He reached out for me with his little hands. Why? What did I do?
“Sorry, kiddo,” I said. I felt a lump in my throat I didn’t expect.
“Do you want to say good-bye?” the female asked softly.
I nodded. “Yes ... thank you.”
She waited, holding Tānchi out while I leaned in close.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered in his ear. “I really am, but you’ll be better off with someone else now.”
I always got a little sad when I gave them up. The mite links made for a deep bond that happened fast, and moving on always hurt a little, but this time was worse. Our time had been cut short. On top of everything else, I realized I really didn’t want to lose him too.
Maybe I can take him back. Get more rations and keep him on. I can find a motel that will take us both, and...
I didn’t have much money, though, and anyway I had to find Dragan. I just couldn’t worry about a surrogate right now.
“I’m really sorry,” I said in his ear. I gave his cheek one last stroke.
I looked up at the female and nodded. Tānchi watched me over her shoulder, still hurt and confused, as she carried him to the empty station. She opened a smooth metal hatch there and then placed Tānchi inside. He looked back at me, and I gave him a little wave. He raised one little hand and waved back before she shut the door again with a vacuum thump. A low rumble came from the wall, making the floor vibrate slightly as she tapped at a virtual keyboard in the air in front of it.
“Where are you send—” I had started to ask when the mites went dark and the connection broke.
“Back,” she said.
“Back wh—”
“Your transaction is complete.”
She handed me a black strip of paper with a series of haan stamps on it, which I realized was a receipt. I sighed, not sure if I should laugh or cry. I stuffed the receipt in my pocket and ran my hand through a sweaty lock of hair.
“Look,” I said, “I need help, okay?”
The haan stared, not speaking.
“Soldiers took my guardian,” I continued, the words coming on their own. “They tried to kill me. I can’t—”
“Thank you for your service,” she said. “Your transaction is complete.”
I leaned a little closer, lowering my voice. “One of them was a haan.” She didn’t answer, but the shapes in her head writhed a little in their fluid bath. She watched me, the rigid contours of her glassy face not moving. Whoever she was, she was good at controlling the mites. I couldn’t feel at all what she might be thinking. “She was pretending to be a human—”
Light flickered behind me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I didn’t have to turn around to see that the gate had opened again. She was giving me the boot.
“You guys are so far beyond us,” I said, looking at the floor and shaking my head. “I know you could help me. I know you could. If you wanted to you could—”
“Your tra—”
“I know.” I turned, a little wobbly on my feet, and wiped a pink mixture of sweat and blood from my forehead. “Thanks for the help.” I put air quotes around the last word, but she didn’t seem to pick up on the gesture.
I turned around and found myself looking through a gate in the wall, back into the room I’d come from. With nothing else to do or say, I stepped through.
She followed me, which I hadn’t expected. On the other side I watched her as she reached up to grip a metal, many-eyed orb nestled up in a ceiling niche. Her long fingers rotated it so that the eyes stared up into darkness.
“What are you—”
A second gate crackled into existence on the other side of the room, and through it I could see the city street outside the settlement. The protesters and worshippers were still there, and they perked up at the sudden appearance of the portal.
“Leave now,” she said.
“Fine.”
I stepped through, back into the humid night air. On the other side, I turned back in time to see her approach the haan guard who first greeted me. She placed one hand on his shoulder, and I heard a muted slither followed by a crunch. As the gate fizzled out of existence, I heard the distorted splash of water and, for just a second, it looked like the draping material of the guard’s suit collapsed to the floor.
Then the portal vanished, leaving me to stare at the brick wall. The protesters who were gathered at the perimeter looked at me with contempt, while the gonzo worshippers looked at me with awe. To my right, the guards a
t the station looked up from whatever they were doing long enough for one of them to laugh at me.
“How’d it go?” Sun asked.
I gave him the finger, but he just laughed and tossed my backpack over to me.
“Go on, get home before someone sees you out.”
I shouldered the pack and headed back the way I’d come. When I passed the protesters, one of them muttered at me.
“Haan fucker.”
“Excuse me?”
I couldn’t see who said it, but a small group of the men were scowling, their ugly faces lit by the glow of the electric lamp.
“Race traitor,” one spat.
“Race traitor?” The fatigue had me punchy. “For real?”
“When they take over—”
“There’s not enough of them to take over even if they wanted to,” I snapped back, “so can the ‘invader’ bullshit. They gave us gate tech, force field and brain band tech, better rations, clean water, and free energy. The only bad thing they gave us was scaleflies, and even those at least you can eat.”
“The Impact,” the guy said, raising his voice. “Was that bad enough for you?” He threw a half-empty can at me and I swatted it away.
“That was an accident,” I said, raising my own voice. “It sucked, but-”
“A quarter of a million people died!”
“An accident, ass-wipe! It was an accident! They’ve been trying to make up for it ever since, but it’s never enough, is it?”
“They’ll take over one day,” the guy said. “You’ll see.”
“What are you afraid they’ll do if that happens? Clean the place? The sweep’s in less than an hour. I hope you all get arrested!”
I pointed at the lamp they were huddled around.
“The batteries in that thing are haan tech, you know,” I said. The oldest man turned as I passed by him, and stared up at me from the hollows of his eyes.
“Fuck you,” he wheezed.
~ * ~
Chapter Four
28:23:51 BC
Rain had begun to fall hard and the security sweep was in full swing by the time I got back to my neighborhood. Vamp’s app displayed a cloud of orange markers moving toward Tùzi-wō, the 3i’s holomap laid over sheets of drizzle and the throngs of people hustling through street fog to get somewhere dry. If I zoomed in to the map, I could actually see the individual units strobe slowly down the streets as they were seen, lost, then seen again, and twice it warned me to take an alternate route to avoid them. It was the first time, I think, that I realized Vamp’s project was probably going to get him into real trouble.
As I slipped through knots of people on my way toward the market, I pulled up my chat contacts. I was about to tap Vamp’s heart to tell him what had happened when I saw the stack of messages from him in the 3i tray. He already knew.
I thought about messaging him back but wanted to get off the street first. Security hadn’t reached my block in force yet, but groups of local cops were out, rain pelting off their helmets and black ponchos while they watched the vendors all trying to pack up and leave at the same time. As they broke down kiosks they made last-minute sales under clusters of umbrellas, some with the cops themselves. I moved under a shop front awning with a crowd of others, nestling into a gap next to a rattling rain gutter to get the lay of the place. Red and blue lights flashed through the haze of neon from in front of my apartment building a couple of blocks away. A bunch of cops were out front waiting to see if the nut who crashed the airbike would show, and I could see an aircar hovering up near our ruined balcony, its lights flashing off the building’s glass face. Going back there wasn’t an option.
I skirted across the street and made my way down the block to the Nan Hai Hotel where Vamp and I sometimes got a room with friends if we wanted to cut loose a little and Dragan was home. It was a shit-box, and I really didn’t want to spend the money, but I needed a place to clean up and sleeping in a crash tube wasn’t going to cut it.
When I headed inside, a small crowd of people were in the lobby, dripping rainwater as they watched a TV mounted on the wall. It showed the wreckage from inside our apartment, reflected police lights flashing in time with the ones outside the hotel window. I recognized the remains of the smashed wet bar, where police were standing and pointing toward the battered airbike. The camera panned down and zoomed in on a few shell casings that were circled with chalk.
“One?”
I looked over at the woman sitting at the check-in counter. She’d checked me in before but didn’t show any sign she recognized me. Her stringy hair was streaked with gray, and her leathery lips were pinched around a thin black cigarette.
“Yeah,” I said, approaching the counter.
“Hourly or nightly?”
“One night.”
“I got two singles up on forty, no AC and no TV.”
“Shower?”
She nodded. “Sixty yuan.”
“I’ll take it.”
She swiped my card and pushed it back to me along with the room badge.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, like she’d noticed the scrapes and bruises for the first time.
“Long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
I took the card and badge and made my way to the elevator lobby.
The A.I. yammered at me as I rode it up. Something about lip injections, I think; I wasn’t listening. My clothes were wet and uncomfortable, and the chemicals in the rainwater made every scrape and cut itch. When the elevator finally stopped and the doors opened, I trudged down the hall feeling tired, beaten, and very alone.
The hotel room offered little more than a dingy closet with a single twin bed and an end table with a plastic lamp. It had its own toilet, though, and the tiny bathroom had a standing shower stall, as promised.
As the door latched behind me, I tossed my pack on the bed and peeled off my tank top. It was stained with blood and there were some holes in it, but it was going to have to do for now because I hadn’t thought to grab another one before I left the apartment. I kicked off my shoes and wiggled out of my pants, then hung the clothes on the curtain rod to try and dry them out a little, stopping for a minute to look out at the streets below. I could see my apartment down the street, where another police aircar cruised down from the sky lane to join the others on the ground.
What am I going to do?
I didn’t have a good answer to that at the moment. I just stared through the sheets of rain that washed down over the window, and watched the lights stream by until my stomach growled and I remembered the ration. There was no point saving it now.
I unzipped the pack and found that the guards hadn’t looked inside, or if they had, they didn’t confiscate anything. One piece of good luck anyway. I grabbed the ration and carried it into the bathroom, where I turned the shower dial to a single rinse. The pipes thumped in the wall, and while the water tank filled I pulled the plastic wrapper off the ration and ate the dry crunchy puck while sitting on the toilet.
As the food made its way down to my belly, the pounding in my head eased somewhat, but it didn’t do much to stop the empty ache. I felt a tickle on my cheek and wiped my eyes. Once they started, the tears wouldn’t seem to stop. They’d beaten him so bad. He was knocked out, facedown, and bleeding, but they’d just kept beating him. How could they do that?
“I love you like you were my own flesh and blood....”
Dragan never said stuff like that. He just didn’t. He pushed. He teased. He yelled sometimes, and swore. He didn’t tell people he loved them, not even when he did.
It had taken me so long to trust him. The thought chafed in my mind as I chewed bitter scalefly that was supposed to be his. I’d spent too long waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to beat me, or touch me like so many other men had done or tried to do. It felt like time wasted now, and I realized that I was starting to get scared, really scared, that I’d never see him again.
I swallowed the last of the cake.
What would I do without him? Ling kept saying I should be going off on my own, that most people my age couldn’t wait to get out of the house. She acted like it wasn’t normal not to have any plans to leave, but the truth was I just wasn’t ready to go. I didn’t want to go. I wanted things to stay the way they were. I just wanted to hang out, bitch about work, and go to Fangwenzhe Festival with him instead of using it as a place to pickpocket. Even when he got on my case, there was a small part of me that kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was his real kid. What was I going to do if—
The Burn Zone Page 6
