“I’m not—” I try to reason with Azhar, but a devastating blow into my stomach cuts me off.
“So, I think we might as well get started now, wouldn’t you say?” Azhar’s billionaire playboy grin goes deeper. “It’s all nice and quiet here.”
It’s a challenge not to struggle. It’s what they want to see. I know these people—they get a kick out of seeing others squirm helplessly under their boots. I’m not going to be a part of that.
At least, that’s what I think until Azhar flips out his blade.
“Three of my brothers—gone.” Azhar stabs a button on a side panel to tighten my restraints as far as they can go, and I’m being crushed into the chair. “I suppose three fingers would make up for it. For starters.” He smiles again. “Would you agree?”
My breath shivers in my throat as my chest rises and falls, sweat snaking down my spine. I try not to look at him as he stalks over and strokes my arm. “You left or right handed?”
“Either’s comfortable,” I tell him, trying to stretch out this conversation. Slab-man is setting up his palmer to film the whole thing and the others are watching with stony faces.
“You’re a funny one, Sikandar.” My glove is tugged away, leaving my left hand and fingers exposed. He rests a blade against the pinky. My stomach cartwheels and my chest feels like it’s on fire. “Or is it Bohdi? No matter, you won’t need a name for much longer.”
“Wait,” I blurt out, but he’s already made the first slice, cutting into bone. My world burns crimson. I nearly bite my tongue in half. I’m screaming with a voice that isn’t mine, thrashing against the restraints and roaring curses as he saws and saws until my finger hangs from the stump by a strip of skin. He neatly tears it off and dumps it in my lap.
And then he stops and stares at me as my screams descend to dark chuckles. Everyone’s fixed on me as I curl my bleeding hand into a fist and raise my helmeted head toward them.
“You forgot something,” I laugh with a wide grin, throat raw from screaming. “This room is haunted.” It’s only then that they turn around to notice the turret that’s folded out from the wall. Everyone freezes, confused. This whole time I’ve been waiting for the djinns to recover from the EMP blast. Now I’m watching Shamhurish line up the shots with a targeting prism from my helmet, just waiting for the moment to strike.
The turret jerks to life. The sound is deafening, hammering in my skull. I’m almost blown away by sheer devastating force as bullets rip into Azhar’s men. Someone’s screaming, but I can’t hear the words. Red liquid mists on my helmet.
Three men collapse on the floor in crimson pools. I strain as far as the restraints will allow but I can’t see the rest. They must have ducked for cover.
The turret makes a hollow click. “It’s out of ammunition,” Shamhurish says, matter-of-factly.
Then I see Slab-Man, charging my way from the shadows. A drone slams into the side of his head and he topples in a graceless tangle of limbs.
“Get them,” I spit into my helmet. The room bursts to life with a mechanical whirl. The chair rumbles as Shamhurish releases my restraints and I dive for cover. This isn’t my fight—I’d just get in the way. One of the men darts for the door, and a half-finished robot lifts him off the ground like a ragdoll and slams him to the ground with a wet crunch. Someone scrambles to his aid, and an entire display screen unhooks itself from the wall and crushes the man underneath.
Suddenly there’s a nuclear blast of pain rippling through me. A bullet is lodged in my shoulder, blood dripping down my skinsuit. Azhar fires off another shot, gouging plaster and chunks of brick from the walls. I’m about to scramble away when Azhar knocks me to the ground and straddles me, pressing the gun to my head.
“I prefer being on top, if that’s alright with you.” I earn myself a punch in the stomach for that. The metallic tang of blood floods my mouth.
“You think this ends with you?” His smug smile is gone, replaced with a fiery rage. “Na-ah. I’ll find that mud-stained, Allah-loving brother of yours and—”
I’ve heard enough. “Go for it.”
Azhar looks confused. But only for a second when the implant in his head starts flashing as Shamhurish overloads it far beyond its capacity. His eyes go wide and his head explodes in a purple-red blur. He topples to the floor headless, pieces of his skull scattered like broken iznik pottery.
It’s only when I get up that I realize that I’m shaking in a cold sweat. I don’t even want to look at my finger, but I know they’ll grow me a new one. I’m alive and Azhar’s men are not, so that’s one point to me.
“That was most interesting.” Shamhurish reappears in the corner of my helmet with a gratuitous puff of smoke, swords now bloodied. “Are you hurt?”
“I’ll be fine.” I turn toward the window as dawn approaches, watching a starship ascend heavenward. “It’s not over yet, though.”
Sma answers immediately. I’m sitting outside of the room now, nursing a steaming mug of coffee and trying to ignore the bite of antiseptic-soaked cloth around my finger. It’s not enough, but I guess it won’t be long before the police are called and the wound is examined.
But this first.
I wave to Sma. “Long time, no see!”
He’s as stoic as ever. “I see you’ve gotten into that building. Do you have them?”
“The djinn?” I stroke my chin. “You know, I think I’m going to keep them. You haven’t been very nice to me, and I don’t think you deserve them.”
You can almost see those grey eyes of his light up like a furnace, his armour shifting to a jet black. “You think you’re funny, do you?” He’s visibly shaking now. “I will break you, you hear me?” He warbles on with a long list of violent threats.
I just nod and smile. “Very good. But here’s the thing: I have the djinn. Who says I can’t come after you first?”
“I wish you luck in finding me.”
“I don’t need to.” I hold up a tiny plastic patch of dark blue in front of the camera so he can see. “Remember back on the station, where you cut yourself?” I sip my coffee and smack my lips. “I got a bit of your blood on me, if you’ll recall.”
His eyes narrow. “Your point?”
“Well, these djinn here can track people via their DNA. Even across space.” I wink at him and let the coffee splash to the floor. “It looks like you’ve got nowhere to go.”
By the time he realizes what’s happened, they’ve already sent software daemons to breach his room, possessing his armour. The gun unfolds from his sleeve, rotates to point at his head with him powerless to stop it.
“Bohdi! You—”
The gun discharges and I sever the connection. I push myself away from the desk and stretch my aching limbs. It’s dawn and the city’s stirring, traffic building up on the roads like a blood-clotted vein. Even through the glass, I can hear the adhan call from the mosques, the roar of space shuttles taking off. The seamless blend of old and new, modern and ancient.
I walk to the balcony garden and peer below as police cars swerve to a stop near the foot of the building. Pretty soon I’ll have some explaining to do. They’ll search nook and cranny for the djinn, but they won’t find them. Because I won’t have them.
I can’t help but marvel at their intelligence. How precise and capable of autonomy. How powerful they are.
And how dangerous they’d be in the wrong hands. How easily they could be exploited. Sma had come so dangerously close.
Shamhurish knows he and the other djinn-8s will be destroyed. In return for taking care of Sma, he asked for the djinns to be taken away from this place. I’ve done one better. I’ve removed the firewall preventing them from leaving and downloaded them into my helmet. They’re there now, dormant and waiting to be reactivated.
And now that helmet is flying through the air, where it’ll land in the river below. I’ve called my brother and told him where to pick it up and hold it for safe keeping. I promise myself that someday I’ll come back and work
on these djinns—finish what we set out to do before all this mess.
Someday. Just not today.
The helmet bobs down the river. Now I wait. I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this one to the police, but I’ve wriggled out of worse. At least my brother is safe.
I’ve never believed in an afterlife, but if Father is somewhere out there in Jannah, then I hope he’s smiling down on me.
Careful not to hurt my hand, I close my eyes and rest my head on the railing, soaking up the Middle-Eastern morning sun and listen to the muezzin’s chant.
Weaving Silk
Amanda Sun
She’s still asleep as I arc the seaweed over the flame in slow circles, trying not to burn my fingertips in the dark. The apartments that are still standing in Kamakura won’t have their hour of electricity until tonight, so I have to make do in the pre-dawn blackness, between the red glow of the propane burner and the flickering candle mounted on the counter beside the empty water kettle.
Aki mumbles, and the threadbare kotatsu quilt rustles as she nestles into it like a silkworm in a cocoon. She’s like a silkworm, my little sister—skinny, pale, delicate, and barely there, the fabric of her life woven in tight strands around her. She’s always slept in as late as she could, even before, when the schools were still open. I had to pull her along beside me, straightening her socks on the station platform and fastening her yellow hat under her chin as the train roared in.
The flame of the burner catches the edge of my thumb, and I wince, muttering under my breath. The newly crisp nori crinkles as I lay it on top of the others, and I dip my burned thumb into the bowl of cold salted water. A cartoon bunny smiles up at me from the side of the faded porcelain, his face surrounded by rows of dancing pink and blue flowers. The bunny looks happy until the candle flickers, and then its eyes are empty and black, its smile half melted off by too many washings.
I tear the furikake packet as quietly as I can, but the rip stirs the little silkworm, and she wriggles in the kotatsu quilt. We don’t have the electricity to heat the warming table, but the weather hasn’t turned too cold yet, so the blanket is enough when we huddle together. The apartment is too quiet now; sleeping in our room gives Aki nightmares, and sleeping in our parents’ room makes her cry. Besides, sleeping in the living room lets me keep an eye on the front door lock. I can scare drifters away before they frighten Aki too much. Usually I shout in a deep voice like my father’s and bang the broom against the door. Most of the apartments and mansions in our neighbourhood didn’t survive the quake, and accommodation is scarce. The ones that did are scarred with thick fracture lines scaling the walls like hairy beetle legs.
It wasn’t complete chaos that day, not really. Everyone was calm and helping each other. I remember the dust, so thick and unrelenting that it still settled on the counters even weeks afterwards. The dust, the silence, and the smell. It was only after that the panic started.
I pinch the edges of the seasoning packet and shake the contents into the mixing bowl. As I stir them into the sticky, hot rice, Aki rubs her eyes with the backs of her fists. She always rubs so hard her eyes turn red.
“Bonito,” she mumbles. “How’d you get a bonito packet?”
“Go back to sleep,” I say. It’s a long day ahead, made longer still by the hunger in our empty stomachs.
“After smelling bonito? No way,” she says, but her voice is slurred by sleep, and a moment later she is breathing heavily again. I want to smile at that, but I find I can’t bring myself to make the motions.
It’s hard to smile these days, not knowing what’s left out there.
It was the volcano first—Mount Ontake, the NHK news reported, off the coast of Kyushu. Plumes of smoke filled the air so densely that the planes couldn’t get in or out. Eventually the whole sky went dark with the thick black curls, and we had to hold our hand towels over our mouths to keep out the grime and dust. The quake followed shortly after, jolting and jarring us in the dark, bringing down the buildings one by one in the loudest crash of cement I’d ever heard. I thought I’d been swallowed by a tsunami’s rushing waves. I heard the roar for hours, unending tidal waves smashing against my ears every second until I was certain I’d gone deaf. I’ve been through plenty of earthquakes before, Aki and I hiding under the kotatsu table or our school’s desks as the earth teetered back and forth, but nothing had ever been like this. All the buildings in our area were quake-proofed, and all but four of them collapsed. The aftershocks went on for weeks. I don’t know what the magnitude was. The electricity shorted out sometime before dawn, and the NHK never came back on the air. No one’s phone could connect with all the ripped cables and thick volcanic ash.
My burned thumb throbs while I mound the rice into thick triangular handfuls. The warm grains stick to my fingers, and the steam wafts into my nose, but I’ve learned by now to ignore the urge to gobble one down. I know how much one onigiri can sell for, and today’s a big day for us, one that might start to turn everything around.
It didn’t really start with Mount Ontake. It started with the escalated war in the west. We didn’t want to get involved, Father told Aki back then, but we had no choice. He explained to her what allies meant, how we had to help our friends and stand up for others.
We didn’t have a chance to act because that’s when the volcano erupted, and then the quake knocked out everything else. Communications were completely lost.
I don’t know if the war is still going on. I don’t know if anyone is out there. All I know is if I think about it too much, I’ll spin my own cocoon under the kotatsu quilt and never emerge again. So instead I think of Aki first, and Aki only. I take another seaweed sheet and glide it over the hot flame.
The sun lifts so slowly I almost don’t even notice when light overtakes the candle and the propane burner. I mould and shape the rice over and over, wrapping the triangles in the freshly roasted nori sheets from the stack. At first I used to wrap them in the convenience-store style, completely covered in a triangle of nostalgic dark green. But it’s getting hard to find supplies now, and nori is scarce, so instead, I put small thin strips of it on the bottom of the rice balls. Just enough to bring back the melancholy taste of before, to forget for a few small bites what lies ahead.
I pack the onigiri in Mother’s old picnic basket, the red-and-pink floral cooler we always filled to bursting for the cherry blossoms in Genjiyama Park—cool, sweet watermelon speckled with ebony seeds, sticky white dango on thin wooden sticks, steam buns dripping with red bean paste and custard, and onigiri—lots and lots of onigiri, Aki and I stuffing our mouths full as the papery cherry petals tumbled into our hair and onto the blue tarp stretched beneath us.
Barely any sakura bloomed last spring because of the volcanic ash. And now autumn has come, a long slow autumn with a harsh chill in the air and the crumple of brown leaves on the ground.
I nudge Aki awake, and she rubs her eyes as I cram the last of the onigiri into the picnic basket, sealing the lid with the plastic slide locks. I’ve wrapped two onigiri separately in a tiny black box, tied around with a Totoro handkerchief, Aki’s favourite. We have a bucket of water in the bathroom, and Aki splashes her face with some while I pull at the tangles in her hair. She tugs one of my sweaters over her dress, and we roll the sleeves up and up and up. She’s grown out of her own things, but mine are still too big for her. I pull on my sweater, the sleeves tight and short, and then I retrieve two bandanas from the top drawer of my dresser. I wrap one over her head and tie it at the nape of her neck, to keep out the dust that still seems to drift over everything outside. We slip our shoes on, Aki’s pinching her toes, and step out onto the balcony.
It’s not completely true that our apartment survived the quake. The cracks and fissures run up the sides of our building like shattered eggshells; piles of rubble and broken furniture crumpled around the foundations. The complex has been condemned, but we don’t have anywhere else to go. Our neighbours tried to help us in the beginning, taking us in like
little baby magpies. “How sad,” they muttered to each other. “Their mother and their father? Tragic.” But when the food got short, so did their patience. We politely promised we were going to our aunt’s house in Tokyo, then snuck back into our own apartment. It’s still safer than sleeping on the street. It hasn’t collapsed yet, and anyway, if I die, I’d rather die somewhere I belong, surrounded by my own familiar things.
Half our balcony has given way to the balcony below us. We climb carefully down the rubble. From the neighbour’s terrace we can lower ourselves over the side and down to the ground. I go first, and Aki throws me the picnic basket. Then she dangles from the concrete edge before letting go and tumbling onto the grass. The first time we did it, she cried. Now she gets up and smooths her hair back, a small bag swinging from the crook of her tiny silkworm elbow.
It’s not far to the train station, but every step is a risk. We never sell our rice balls in Kamakura. It’s too dangerous. What if someone tracks us home or threatens us? We tried to help others in the beginning too, like Father would’ve wanted. We took in a woman, plump and pleasant with a red face and thick fingers. “Call me Grandmother,” she said, and she tied on our mother’s red apron and sliced tofu with our mother’s kitchen knife. We let her sleep in our mother’s bed. She made us miso soup and bread for dinner, and we went to sleep with friendly words and full bellies. We awoke to find our rice and tofu gone, our tin of tea powder emptied, and our last watermelon stolen. She snatched our mother’s beautiful blue kimono, too. Grandmother made the bed before she disappeared with our things. I always found that the most curious of all.
Now we don’t talk to anyone, and we try to look as starving as everyone else. Sometimes people shout to ask what’s in our picnic basket. I say water, or books, or daruma dolls. Sometimes I say my mother’s bones. Then no one asks any more questions.
We are her bones, though. We are the tiny eggs left from the gleaming moth, from the beat of her wings and the curl of her tired legs. We’ve awoken ravenous among the dark foliage, with only two thoughts in our heads—eat, survive. Eat. Survive. Silkworms, both of us, spinning our cocoons to blind ourselves. Don’t look at the sadness, the devastation. Don’t look at those calling out to us. I grab Aki’s hand tightly and quicken our steps to the station.
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 5
