“Holy shit, you’re the best,” I said under my breath. They were messages from Dragan’s e-mail account. Vamp had managed to hack into Dragan’s security e-mail and pull copies of the messages that had been sitting in his in-box. There were only a few, but accessing them like that was enough to get him in huge trouble, never mind posting and distributing them. Add to that Dragan was flagged as a violent dissident—
Vamp? There was a slight pause.
Yeah.
Vamp, you have to take that down right away.
I will. Make a copy.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Where are you?
I can’t believe you would do that for me.
He paused again, a little longer that time. Where are you? I need to tell you something.
That place we sometimes stay. You know where I mean?
Yeah.
What do you need to tell me?
In person.
Ring me when you’re here. I’ll come down.
See you soon.
I thumbed through the e-mail entries, excitement mingling queasily in my stomach with the remains of scalefly and too much shine. The first mail on the list, the last one he’d received, was from some guy named Eng with no subject. I opened it up and found just a few sentences:
Passage clear to Duongroi. Meet me at my place in the Pink Bull, Hăiyáng-Gāodù, to pick up passports. Bring payment, and come alone.
I checked the date. He’d received the message the morning before, after he’d arrived in Hangfei maybe, or shortly before. He hadn’t responded, but he’d read it.
Passports. My heart sank a little as doubt tried to worm its way in. Dragan had a passport, so why would he need new ones? Why would he need to get them from some guy in Hăiyáng-Gāodù, instead of through security, and why was he so hot to sneak over to Duongroi?
There’s a reason, I thought. You don’t know what’s going on. He had a reason.
“Hăiyáng-Gāodù,” I said to myself. Did he know this guy Eng? I’d never heard him mention him.
I rustled through my knapsack and found a few cigarillos in a squished pack. I pulled one out with my teeth as I tapped in a quick search for the Pink Bull—it was a hotel. Dragan must have gone there before coming home maybe, or maybe this guy Eng was still there waiting for him. I lit the smoke and took a deep drag, a small nicotine rush kicking in as I blew it out through my nose.
Eng.
I sifted through the other e-mails. Most of the ones below it had to do with work. The one right below Eng’s had the subject line RE: Alexei Drugov. I opened that one.
The brass is shutting this one down. From this point on, any and all information regarding the Drugov family has been marked classified. Drop it, Shao.
The rest of the thread had been redacted. The ones below it suggested he and a team of others were investigating abductions in a place called Lobnya, in the Pan-Slav border territories. Most of it was just requests for supplies or personnel, along with status reports that were encrypted so I couldn’t read them. A couple looked like they were between him and someone else, though, some civilian. There were two mingled in with the rest to someone named Innuya Drugov. They were in Pan-Slav gibberish, but the Web translator was able to decipher it for me. The first said just:
Please, Dragan, tell me something. Is he alive? Is my son alive?
I found him. He’s alive. Stand by.
Thank you, Dragan. I owe you my life.
The last one read:
Innuya, read this carefully and do exactly as it says. If this works we’ll have a very limited window to get him into Hangfei, so you have to be ready when I say. Gather a single pack containing only what you can’t leave behind. You will never return. I know this is hard. Be strong. I love you.
My eyes lingered on the end of the message.
I love you.
Before I knew it, my face flushed and I started chewing the inside of my lower lip. He did have a girl there. The son of a bitch really had hooked up with someone, some Pan-Slav, and her Pan-Slav kid.
Alexei Drugov.
I glared at the name. I felt stupid being jealous, but I was, and I couldn’t help it. Was this why my messages had gone unanswered? Did he have some kind of second family over there or something?
“I’m going to ask you one more time, where did you take Alexei Drugov?”
That was the name the woman soldier, the haan in disguise, had used during the raid. They were looking for him ... but why?
... the feeds are already buzzing. Word is he got picked up for smuggling some kind of weapon into Hangfei. Something bad.
Possibilities, all the worst possibilities that had been floated across the news channels for the past months started firing off in my head. Could it be true? Had one of them finally snuck something over here that was a million times worse than just a roadside bomb?
And had Dragan helped them?
If this works we’ll have a very limited window to get him into Hangfei, so you have to be ready when I say.
I shook my head, taking another drag off the cigarillo.
“It’s not true,” I croaked. Dragan would never attack his own country. It had to be the kid, or his mother, and if Dragan really did sneak them into Hangfei, there was no way he could have known about it. He wouldn’t do that. There was no way in the world Dragan would do that—
A knock came at the door, and I jumped so bad that I dropped the phone down onto the bed next to me. I took a step back and froze.
Who knew I was here? Just Vamp, and there’s no way he got to the hotel that fast.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even breathe, I just stood there, completely still, as the knock came again.
“Sam Shao?” a voice called softly. It was a man’s voice, but I didn’t recognize it.
I started looking around for some other way out, but there was nowhere else to go. When the knock came a third time, I pulled the curtain shut and tiptoed over to the end table in the dim light.
I’d just picked up the pistol when I heard the low crackle come from the direction of the door, and whipped around to see a point of bright white light floating there just inside it. Immediately it expanded into a hexagonal portal, a haan gate, and through it I could see the hallway on the other side of the door where a dark shape stood. I saw two pink lights and a mellow green glow that flashed near his throat as he spoke.
“Oh, you are here.”
I stumbled back, pointing the gun in front of me, as the figure stepped through the gate and into the room. I squeezed the gun’s grip like Dragan had shown me, and a thumbnail-sized display appeared floating next to the chamber. The magazine was full, with twenty rounds total.
“Don’t move,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. The gun was shaking, and I tried to steady it with my other hand. “You move and I’ll...”
My voice piddled out as I saw the pink lights were actually large, glowing eyes. At the same time, a signal came through the mite cluster like an arrow driven straight through my forehead. It surprised me, and I sucked in a breath, but it didn’t hurt or anything. It was just the opposite. The signal sought out some feel-good part of my brain, and I felt happy all of a sudden, like an old friend I’d thought was gone had stepped through the door. Relief and the joy of his being back, the comfort of being in his arms kind of washed over me even though I knew it was all just in my head.
“You’re a haan,” I said.
“Yes.”
His voice was a calm tenor, quiet but confident. The flashing light, I realized, was the flicker from his voice box.
My eyelids drooped, and a loopy smile grew on my face as the gun lowered a few inches. The tingling in my head was branching out, nudging other pleasure centers until I felt a little numb.
“I am not a threat to you,” he said, taking a step closer as the gate collapsed behind him. “You don’t need your weapon.” He had his hands held up by his head so that I could see them, black material draping from his
arms.
What with my hunger, my fear, my hangover, and his diddling through the mites, I had trouble keeping the gun from drifting. I’d never fired one before, and it must have been obvious, but I wasn’t ready to put it down just yet. I kept it pointed in his general direction while he waited to see what I would do.
I flipped on the light. My first impression of him was his eyes, which were an unusual sunset pink. My second impression was that he was short for a haan, not being very much taller than me. My third impression was, as strange as it was, that I knew him.
His face was haan-handsome, in that way that made you think of a doll or mannequin. They looked like masks, formed into something almost humanlike, except for the fact that they didn’t conceal anything and were breakable as ceramic. His brains rippled calmly around the edges behind his large eyes, and I could see the dark shadow of his feeding orifice behind his molded lips. His clothes showed off long, lean muscle underneath without being too flashy and he held himself with the confidence and balance of a gymnast or martial artist. The suit he wore was sharp, crisp, and a flawless fit.
My fourth impression was that I’d never dressed after my shower the night before, and was still stark naked.
“Do you always just gate into people’s private rooms?” I asked.
“No.”
His presence in my head trickled through to another part of my brain, maybe on purpose and maybe not, and my face flushed. As I looked into the intense pink of his eyes, the twin ribbed crescents inside his skull shifted. Two smaller masses on either side pulled back, the network of veins around them engorging slightly above his brow. In spite of myself, I was getting turned on.
“All right,” I said, trying to ignore the sudden pang below my waist. “That’s enough. Out of my head.”
He retreated immediately.
“Those are for surrogate bonding,” I said. My lips felt warm when I licked them. “They’re not for you.”
“I understand.”
“Who are you? Are you armed?”
“My name is Nix.”
“Are you armed?”
“No.” He stayed motionless, with his hands still up. I kept the gun on him as I approached.
“Open your jacket,” I said. He did, spreading the material apart so I could see.
“What’s that in the pocket?”
“My tablet.”
“Let’s see it.”
He reached into his coat and removed a slim metallic device whose screen appeared as a mirrored, metal surface. It was an Escher Field tablet. The screen was a small gate field that led to a larger storage area.
“How do I know you don’t have a gun or something in there?” I asked. He swiped the screen casually with one finger, and the metallic screen crackled, then disappeared. He handed the tablet to me.
I took it, and looked inside. Through the field I could see a gap of impossible space above a series of hexagonal compartments. Each one was several inches deep and big enough to reach into. All of them were empty.
When I put my hand in front of the screen, the field expanded and jumped forward a little. I smiled as I swiped across it with one finger, and the compartments on the other side scrolled past. Some were full, but I didn’t get a good look before I stopped the sweep and tried to backtrack.
“Pretty slick,” I said, admiring the gadget. Come Phase Five, I was getting one for sure.
“Thank you,” he said. “Though I think you would not like it if I held you at gunpoint and searched through your things.”
“I think you would not like it if I gated into your room without asking.” I collapsed the field and held the device up between my thumb and fingers. “No one asked you to come here.”
“That is false.” I tossed him the tablet, and he caught it. He stowed the device back in his coat, then lowered his hands by his sides.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You came to Shangzho last night,” he said.
“So?”
“You made a strange claim. Then you indicated you needed help.”
Right. With everything else, I’d forgotten about that.
“And they sent you?”
“Yes.”
I struggled to remember what I’d said and what, if anything, I knew about haan interactions with human security. “Does security know you’re here?”
“My capacity here is not official.”
“So they don’t know?”
“They do not.”
I thought about it, still not sure this was a good idea. I didn’t like the way he’d tracked me down like that. He’d known right where I was, and if he could find me, so could someone else.
“I think I might be okay,” I said carefully. “Just... forget I said anything.”
“Forget?”
“Security took him…You don’t have any pull with that. I don’t need your help.”
His voice box clicked, then began to flicker as a different voice, my voice, came out of it.
“Look, I need help, okay?” I heard myself say. “Soldiers took my guardian. They tried to kill me. I can’t— “ It clicked again, like static, and my voice continued. “I know you could help me. I know you could. If you wanted to you could— “
“Look, I wasn’t thinking straight last night. I don’t think you can really do anything about this,” I said, talking over my own voice. He clicked again.
“One of them was a haan,” I heard myself whisper. “She was pretending to be a human—”
I started to say something back, but stopped. His pupils rotated as he watched me.
“She sent you?” I asked him. “The female from Shangzho last night?”
“Yes.”
“Why you? Who are you?”
“I was obtained from the axial hive in Shangzho to look into this incident.”
“What, at random?”
“Not exactly. Do you—”
“Who was she? The one who took my surrogate?”
“Her name is Ava,” he said. “She is transitioning to become the new haan female.”
“Yeah, well, she’s got the rack for it.”
“What made you think one of your attackers was haan?” he said, ignoring me. “What did she look like?”
“She wore military combat armor,” I said. “Her face was covered by a dispersion mask. She looked human. But I picked her up,” I said, tapping my forehead. “Strong. She was haan.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“And you are certain this haan was female?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my forehead, gun still pointing at the floor, and sighed. “Okay. You’re already in. Have a seat if you want.”
“No, thank you.”
He entered the room, then extended his hand and I shook it. The skin of his hand felt smooth and cool against my palm.
“I am Nix,” he said.
“I’m Sam.”
“I know.”
He took his hand back and looked around the room, pupils revolving as he turned his head robotically. He followed the stuff scattered across the floor until he found my feet, then followed all the way up until he finally met my eye again. “You are naked.”
“I see they sent over their top investigator,” I said, tossing the gun down onto the mattress and turning around to grab my clothes off the curtain rod.
“What caused the lacerations?” he asked.
“I got thrown out a window.” His brains twitched, like he wasn’t sure if I was serious. “No, really, look ... you can see it from here.”
He stepped closer and followed my finger to the shattered glass hole in the side of my apartment complex. By the light of day it looked even worse, and my stomach dropped a little when I followed the path I’d fallen. It was a long, long drop.
“The haan threw me.”
“The female haan tried to kill you?”
“Yeah.”
“I do not think a haan would have the strength to throw even a sm
all human with such force.”
“She had on combat armor.” I held the smoke between my teeth as I slipped one leg into my pants, squinting as smoke burned one eye. “Look, if you asked me yesterday I wouldn’t have bought it either.”
The Burn Zone Page 8
