The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  My earlobes got so hot they started to itch a little. I was hugely aware of Vamp standing right next to me, hearing all this. “Look, this has been a great trip down memory—”

  “I liked having you around, kid,” he said. “When you left... I figured you forgot about me.”

  “I’ll never forget you...I just couldn’t come back here.”

  He frowned, and then shook his head.

  “Please, Wei.”

  He sighed, smoke drifting out from his nests of nose hair. “Is there going to be trouble?”

  “Only if they find me. No one knows we’re here.”

  He sighed again. “The zhameng stays inside, until you leave.”

  “Thanks, Wei.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He pushed a key card across the counter toward me, not bothering to include the electronic payment tablet.

  “Water still costs,” he said. I gave his old bony hand a squeeze before handing the key card off to Vamp. He nodded, then turned and patted Nix on the shoulder.

  “Come on, spaceman.”

  Nix followed him around the corner. When they were out of sight, I leaned a little closer to the glass.

  “Something else, Niu-niu?” he asked.

  “You still deal in weapons?”

  He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Weapons?”

  “Guns.”

  “What are you going to do with a gun?”

  “Hopefully nothing,” I said, “but I’m in trouble, Wei, and Dragan needs my help.”

  “And you think you’re going to need a gun?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Guns are trouble,” he said.

  “Then why do you deal them?”

  “That’s not the same thing. Come on, you’re better than that.”

  “Please. It’s an emergency.”

  He frowned, but he didn’t say no.

  “Guns cost money,” he said instead.

  “I know.”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  I looked up and down the hall, then nodded at the door to the foyer. “Let me in.”

  He reached down and buzzed me in, the bolt in the door snapping open. I opened it and slipped into the cramped space. The smoke made my eyes water and my nose burn.

  “Look, I can do you a favor,” he said, “but the people I deal with don’t deal in favors, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. I pushed an ashtray full of butts away to clear a spot on the desk between us, and put the stun gun down there. “You can use this to trade.”

  He looked it over.

  “Not bad,” he said, “but it won’t get you a real piece.”

  I dug out the ration sheet and tore a strip off, then two of the three doses of blue crystal I’d found in the safe back home. One by one I put them on the pile between us.

  “The stunner,” I said, “plus three ration punches, plus two doses of blue shard. This is all government-issue stuff.”

  Wei looked it over, nodding.

  “What kind of gun you looking for?” he asked.

  “Something small and light,” I said. “I don’t need some hand cannon I can’t even lift.”

  “I still say it’s a mistake,” he said, “but if you say you need it, I’ll get a good gun for you. When do you need it by?”

  “I’ll try and be out of your hair tomorrow morning. Can you do it that fast?”

  “I’ll make some calls.”

  “Thanks, Wei.” I leaned forward and hugged him. He kind of stiffened up for a second, but then he relaxed and patted my back.

  “Okay,” he said.

  I gave him one last squeeze, then broke away. “You’re the best.”

  “Not hardly,” he muttered.

  I caught him smiling, though, just a little, when I slipped out and shut the door behind me.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Ten

  16:11:21 BC

  I headed back to the room and was about to knock when I heard Vamp’s voice on the other side.

  “... your deal anyway?”

  “Deal?” Nix asked.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Sam arrived in Shangzho last night to return her surrogate, and claimed to have been attacked by a haan pretending to be human. I was sent to follow up with her.”

  “Why are you still sticking around? She’s in enough trouble as it is without looking after you.”

  “Because I believe I can help.”

  “Yeah, you’ve been a big help so far.”

  “My species stands to lose more than yours.”

  “If what’s on that recording is true, you guys plan to wipe out millions of us—”

  “There is no ‘we’ in this case. One haan made a deal with your species to wipe out your enemies,” Nix said, “and as terrible as Sillith’s plan is, I am facing the extinction of my entire race. So yes, my species stands to lose more than yours. No haan in their right mind would sanction what’s on that recording. I am here because I think I can help stop this.”

  Vamp made a contemptuous snort, but when he spoke again his voice was a little calmer. “If the stuff on that wet drive gets out, you guys are pretty much screwed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Still, I’m telling you straight up—if it comes to it, I’ll hand that recording over. If we don’t find that kid and fast, I’ll hand it over.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s too much at stake here.”

  “The recording doesn’t indicate where the boy is now.”

  “No, but it will let our people know what’s going on. Even if the burn starts, if they know how it’s spreading they might be able to stop it.”

  “I understand, and I won’t try and stop you.”

  Vamp didn’t believe him. I couldn’t see him, but I could picture the look on his face.

  It got quiet again, and I was about to knock when Nix suddenly spoke again.

  “Do you plan to mate with her?”

  “Who? Sam?” Vamp asked. He laughed a little, and I felt my face flush.

  “Yes.”

  Vamp’s laughter petered out, and I waited, leaning against the wall with my forehead on the door.

  “I wouldn’t, you know, put it that way,” he said, “but yeah. I mean, I want to.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Vamp said. “Why are you asking me?”

  “I’m just curious. I sense your arousal when she is near. You seem determined to hide this from her. I just wondered why.”

  Vamp didn’t say anything for a while. I waited, feeling guilty for eavesdropping, but not guilty enough to stop. When we first became friends he didn’t have any interest in me physically at all—zero. It was why we worked because at the time I couldn’t handle being touched, not by anybody. I wondered what it was, what I did, or said, that changed his mind.

  “It’s complicated,” Vamp said. When he said it, his voice was soft, distant, thoughtful... all of the things that he wasn’t. “We’ve been friends a long time. I didn’t mean for it to happen, just... something changed. I don’t know if she—”

  My hand jerked toward the door like it had a life of its own, and rapped on it three times. The voices stopped.

  Vamp opened the door and I saw Nix standing near the basement window where flickering electric light trickled in. The room was a cramped box of water-stained dry-wall and yellowed paint. There was a single bunk, a musty, flat mattress laid over a wire spring mesh with only a sheet to cover it up. Across from it a tiny TV sat chained to a stand of peeling fake wood, and to its left a plastic curtain hid the chemical toilet. It hadn’t changed a bit.

  “You two getting along okay?” I asked them.

  “Yes,” Nix said. “I was just asking if—“

  “So, you were a housekeeper?” Vamp blurted, tossing me a bottle. I caught it, then twisted the cap off and flicked it back at him. It bounced off his shoulder and skittered across the floor.

  “Hey, watch it,” h
e said. “I’ll have management send you in here to pick that up.”

  We laughed a little. Not long, but it felt good.

  “Nix, let me see your arm,” I said.

  “It will be fine.”

  “Let me see it.”

  He held out the arm and ran one spindly finger down the seam of his sleeve. In response, it split and peeled away like the petals of a flower to expose his forearm. Against the light of the table lamp, I could make out the bones inside. Two of them were broken, splinters lodged in the meat around them.

  “Shit, Nix,” I said, holding the arm carefully and leaning closer.

  “It will heal,” he said. He angled the arm closer to the light so I could see better, and when I peered through the skin I could see that already little tendrils had begun to form across the break.

  “How long?” I asked him.

  “By morning.”

  He moved his arm away and touched his sleeve again. It closed back up, hiding the injury.

  “I talked to my folks about getting out of Hangfei,” Vamp said. “You know, just in case.”

  “Yeah?” He nodded.

  “I didn’t say anything about the recording, but I convinced them the feed rumors are true. They’re making arrangements, and you’re in, if you want in.”

  “Dragan comes with us,” I said, taking a swig from the bottle. It was fizzy, and burned going down.

  “If we can find him.”

  “His message came from Shiliuyuán Station,” I said. “I don’t know how that’s possible, but that’s got to be where he is now.”

  Vamp shrugged. “Parts of it could still be there,” he said: “Since the Impact, no one’s been in there to see for sure, and that other name on the recording, Deepwell, fits. I did some digging and Deepwell was the name they gave the site after the station got locked down.”

  I remembered the story, or the sanitized schoolroom version anyway. Everyone knew the story of the husband and wife who parted at the station, and how she threw him an apple to eat on the train. It stuck in midair, spinning like a tiny planet. Video of it went viral, and people came from all over to see it, but by summer the site was secured. The entire station was enclosed, and the only people ever to see the inside were killed in the Impact.

  “Could it have survived it somehow?” I asked Nix.

  “I wasn’t aware of it,” he said, “though the recording indicates it has, at least in part. That would explain how Sillith has been able to operate in secret, away from both Hangfei and the ship.”

  “Then he’s in the Impact zone,” I said to myself. “Past the rim.”

  “Right.”

  I felt hope dwindle away. I tried to hold on to it, but this was a major obstacle. No human had ever gotten through the force field, and to even try you’d have to cross the rim to get to it. The ruins were buried in toxic ash, and the few places you could get to were taken over by drug labs and meat farms.

  “Nix, is there even any way to get through the dome?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “None? How do you get through?”

  “The only way in or out is through jump space,” he said. “The routes are carefully controlled. No human has access to them.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “However,” Nix said, “on the video, your parent clearly traversed a gate.”

  “So?”

  “Whatever Sillith is doing, she’s acting in secret. It stands to reason that her jump-space routes are not part of our existing network. If she is moving between Shiliuyuán Station and the rest of Hangfei, she must have a twistkey that allows her to use the existing gate network as access points.”

  “Search him. Find the twistkey.”

  “He doesn’t have it.”

  “They were looking for it,” I said. “Sillith and the others. It’s the blue key, the one he had in the video.”

  “Keep it safe for me. I’m going to take you someplace safe...”

  “He left it with the kid. If we find him, we find the twistkey.... I can get to Dragan, and we turn the kid over and stop the attack too.” I thought about it for a minute. “Shit, he contacted me. I had him on the damned line.”

  “Who?”

  “The kid, the little Pan-Slav shit from the video. Dragan’s wet drive synced him to my contact list when I plugged it in. He must have seen my name pop up at some point, and he messaged me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He didn’t say, but it means he’s still alive, right?”

  “What did the location tag say?”

  “It said ‘Out of range.’”

  Vamp pursed his lips. “Out of range,” he said to himself. “That can mean any location the chat network doesn’t have in its database. It doesn’t necessarily mean out of range.”

  “But he’s got to be in Hangfei somewhere. How can it not be in the database? Can you track him?”

  Vamp looked a little leery. “Through the 3i chat client? Not easily, if at all.”

  “Then if eyebot doesn’t come through, we’ll have to hope he comes back online and see if I can get it out of him. Either way we grab the key, tip security, and while they’re busy moving in on him, we’ll grab Dragan.”

  Vamp looked uneasy. “That means going down there.”

  “Right.”

  “To the same place where that woman got squashed into oblivion.”

  “What do you want to do, then? Leave him down there?”

  “Let Hwong go in and—”

  “And what? Execute him for treason? If we can get him to Duongroi with us, we’ll be out of Hwong’s reach until we can get it sorted out.”

  “Sam, you saw that recording. You know what’s down there.”

  “If you have a better idea, then let’s have it.”

  “I’m just saying you don’t even know for sure if he’s there.”

  “It’s the best lead I’ve got,” I snapped, holding out my hands and slopping whiskey fizz onto the floor.

  “And what are you going to do when you get there?”

  “I’m not leaving him there!” I barked.

  Vamp just sighed and crossed his arms. “Look,” he said. “There’s more to this.”

  He sent over a message that popped up on the 3i screen. Two stamp-sized holodisplays, each of a man’s face with contact info underneath it, appeared in front of me.

  “I don’t get it. Who are they?”

  “Two of the soldiers who raided your apartment.”

  I looked back at the pictures, heat rising into my cheeks. “Where are they?”

  “Dead,” he said. “Their remains were found earlier today, in different parts of the city.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “They were found in their homes. Their arms and legs were pulled off, Sam.”

  “Cut off?” I grimaced.

  “Not cut off, pulled off. Twisted off. The coroner report says they were alive when it happened. That’s not some weird coincidence. I was able to isolate three of the four soldiers who took Dragan in from the eyebot data, and at least two of them are dead. I’m working on tracking down the other male soldier, but nothing at all so far on the woman.”

  I looked at the images, the men who’d help take Dragan from me. They were dead. In my mind I’d wished suffering on the people responsible for his abduction, but the thought of being quartered alive left me queasy.

  “She’s killing them,” I said. I imagined the whine of combat armor as joints were pulled free from their sockets. “They know the weapon is here, so she’s killing them. She doesn’t want it tied back to her.”

  “Sam, be realistic,” Vamp said. “Your face is plastered across every channel now. They’re calling you a cannibal and a dissident, and they’re offering a reward for your capture. If you stay in the city you’re going to get arrested. How do you know you can trust that old man at the desk? He could be collecting on you right now.”

  “He’s not.
” I let out a long, fumy breath. “Look, I know it’s bad. I wouldn’t blame you if you took off. So if you want out of this, you’d better go now.”