Something boomed from behind and for a moment all I could hear was a low ring in my ears. A smoking plastic shell bounced off the toppled dresser next to me, and then a second, muted boom sounded.
Covering my head, I looked back to see Wei leaned against the doorway. He supported himself on one leg, holding up the broken one as he stared down the barrel of a shotgun.
Before he could fire again, the gun leapt out of his hands, torn away by something I didn’t see. He stared, confused, and then something grabbed him and jerked him forward off his feet.
One of his shoes clipped my ear as he flew past and came down hard in front of Sillith. Vamp tried to get to his feet and was slammed back down onto the floor, pinned there by something invisible, with his face turned away. She reached down and picked up Nix’s wand, aiming the needles down toward Wei’s neck. The door slammed behind me and I heard the bolt lock, but when I turned, no one was there.
“Look!” Sillith snapped. I stared at the door, still trying to figure out what had happened.
“Look!”
I turned back toward her. She held Wei by the hair, craning his neck back so that his chin pointed up at the ceiling. The needles were an inch from the pit between his collarbones.
“Tell me where that boy is.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I kept the gun pointed away from her, but didn’t drop it.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” I told her. “I don’t know. We’re looking for him, but we haven’t found him.”
“I’m a dead man anyway,” Wei wheezed. “Just run—” His voice choked off as she pulled back harder on his hair.
“The man Shao stole a twistkey,” she said. “He used it to bring a boy and a girl back here with him, and while he was there he made a recording. I want the boy, the girl, the key, and his wet drive.”
“Is he alive?” I asked her.
“If you don’t—”
“Just tell me, is he alive?”
She punched the needles deep into Wei’s chest.
His eyes bugged out as an electric whine rose in pitch, and the veins in his neck and face bulged. They popped up under his skin like squiggling worms, until they looked ready to burst.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Wait!”
With a loud snap, Wei’s entire body erupted. I jumped back, cringing as sheets of warm rain splashed down over me. In the second before I shut my eyes, I saw a wrinkled, empty blob of skin shrink down through the collar of his shirt.
It slopped down onto the floor between us like a big, wet towel. I kept my head turned away, paralyzed, as fat drops dripped down from my hair. The front of my shirt was soaked, but it wasn’t blood like I’d first thought. It was water. Warm, salty water. I wiped it from my face as my mind reeled back to Nix’s first visit, when those needles were pointed at me.
“What’s that?”
“It will take the sample I need.”
“Is this going to hurt?”
“Turn around,” Sillith said.
I remembered Nix’s anxiety, his uncertainty as he’d moved the needles closer.
“... no, it won’t hurt.”
“Turn around,” she said again.
I turned to see Vamp, soaked and struggling, as she reached down into the wet pile of Wei’s empty clothes. From inside she pulled what looked like a big blood-colored amoeba, fat tentacles slithering out from the sleeves and pant legs while Vamp stared in shock from a few feet away.
She touched the needles to the blob, and water squeezed out of it like a sponge as it shriveled further. She held up the little mass left behind so I could see.
“What did you do—” I had started to ask when she fed the fist-sized jelly through her mask’s dispersion field.
I heard a long slurp, followed by the gurgle of a sink draining. At the same time, through the mite cluster, I felt the familiar rush I felt whenever I gave a bottle to one of my surrogates. It was pleasure, and the relief of hunger being satisfied, if only for a while. Sillith had just eaten Wei.
“This is what you are,” she said, displaying her empty hand. “This is your place.”
Vamp was jerked up off the floor, then slammed back down in front of her. His knees splatted down onto the wet floor, and his arms were pulled back taut behind him as if bound by invisible ropes. His head craned back and Sillith leaned in to point the needles down at his exposed throat.
I couldn’t speak. It was hard to even breathe. All I could think at that moment was that I didn’t have an answer for her. I didn’t know where Alexei was, not for sure, and I didn’t have the twistkey she wanted either. Even if I wanted to tell her, and if it would stop her from sticking Vamp with those needles, then I would have. I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. I couldn’t even think of a lie.
“Last chance,” she said.
“I have the wet drive,” I told her. “It’s all I have. I’ll give it to you.”
“Not good enough.”
Vamp looked over at me from the corner of his eye, his breath coming fast as the needles moved closer.
“Run, Sam,” he managed. “Don’t watch this, just—”
Out of nowhere, Nix flew across the room and planted one heel in the middle of Sillith’s chest. The force threw her into the wall, and caused her to let go of Vamp, who pitched down onto the floor. The wand spun in the air and then clattered down next to him as Nix leapt between the two. Sillith sprang back to her feet, every inch of her bristling as she glared back at him.
Nix closed the distance between them and I heard a chirp as he punched through the spot underneath her chest plate.
His fist went straight through, and splintered the latticework bones underneath. I expected to feel agony from her, but it didn’t come. Even when he wrenched his fist free and I saw he had dragged something out with it, I sensed no pain. Instead, she looked down at the wormy mass that pulsed between his fingers and I felt fury from her, and something else ... betrayal maybe.
“You—” she started, when all at once the air around her warped and shimmered like water. The ripples grew, and then she vanished.
I jumped as air rushed into the vacuum left behind with a loud bang, and then everything was quiet. Nix turned from the empty space where Sillith had been, his eyes leaving pink trails in the air as he looked down at me.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I nodded, staring at the thing in his hand. The air around it had already begun to ripple when he tossed it away. Before it could hit the floor, it popped out of existence.
“Where did she go?”
“When a haan dies, the body and anything else caught in the warp bubble is gated back to the ship for processing. I tricked the mechanism into believing she was dead.”
“So ... she’s not?”
“No.”
I looked at the hand he’d punched her with. It was clean, and dry, with no evidence of what he’d done. I could almost have imagined it.
“What did you do to her?” I asked him.
“We need to leave,” he said.
“No, answer me.”
She’d hit him hard—hard enough to kill him, easy. Some stupid street dreg broke his arm in two without even trying, but even though he’d hit the wall hard enough to break through, there he stood like it never happened.
Vamp backed away from the wet clothing and wiped his face, flicking the salty water away.
“What the hell was that?” he asked. “What did she do to him?”
“Organic nutrient condensation,” Nix said. “It’s food processing technology. Part of the Phase Seven package, though it isn’t meant to be used on living creatures.”
“You okay?” Vamp asked. He put his hands on my shoulders, but I was still staring at Nix. “Sam, what’s up?”
“I know what I saw,” I told Nix.
“The inertial dampener was able to—”
“That wasn’t the dampener—”
My voice faded as he approached me on a wave of signal that drilled
straight into my brain. I felt the confusion and the fear drift away.
“It was the inertial dampener,” he said again. “We have to go.”
“So she’s on the ship?” Vamp asked.
“Not for long,” Nix said. “She’s already on her way back, I guarantee. The trick won’t work a second time.”
I looked at the crack in the wall where Nix had struck it, still unsure.
“What is it?” Vamp asked.
I looked from the splintered wood back to Nix. He’s lying. Again, he’s lying.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s right. We have to get to Render’s Strip. If Dragan did cash in his ration sheet there, Fang might know something.”
I picked the pistol up off the floor and stuck it in my pocket, then gave Vamp a hug. We were both still wet.
“Thanks for trying to cover for me,” I told him, “but she’s dangerous, Vamp. Don’t mess with her, okay?”
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“I had to check something out. I didn’t want to get you guys involved.”
“I woke up and you were gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
I looked back down at Wei’s wet clothes and saw the needles lying on the floor next to them. When I reached down to pick them up, though, Nix intercepted and snatched it away.
“Vamp, wait for me outside,” I said.
He looked from me to Nix, wary, but he did as I asked. When I heard him moving down the hall, I moved closer to Nix and lowered my voice.
“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.
“I’ve told you everything I can.”
I sighed, and I think he knew what was coming next. I could sense his unspoken protest, his dismay, in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of Tānchi.
“Nix, thanks for all your help, but I think I’ll take it from here.”
“You are sending me away.” Again, the thought of Tānchi jabbed at me, that look he gave me as he looked back from the hopper.
“Yeah. I guess I am. No offense, Nix, but I’ve got enough going on right now without having to watch my back.”
“But I—”
“Tell me,” I snapped. “Give me a straight answer. If you can’t give me one straight answer, then leave. I mean it.”
He was quiet for a minute, and I sensed him as he struggled with something. Then he raised his arm, the injured one, and ran his finger along the seam of his sleeve. When it peeled apart, I could see his arm was fine. No break. It was as if it never even happened.
“I wasn’t sent to help you,” he said. “I was sent to kill you.”
It was the truth. I could tell. This time, it was the truth.
“Why?” I asked.
“You knew a haan had murdered, or attempted to murder, several humans. Our leaders were afraid of retaliation by your government. The ones who sent me reasoned that you were thought to be dead already, and loss of one life would be better than the loss of many.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“Because I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He took my wrist, his long fingers closing around it with a firm but gentle pressure. I had opened my mouth to say something when he reached out through the surrogate bond and I froze.
His presence surged through like an icicle pushing into my forehead. It was more intense than anything I’d ever felt before. Even the dream images that had bled over from Sillith were nothing compared to the way he poured into my mind and filled it.
The hotel room disappeared, and I was somewhere else as suddenly as if I’d been gated there. I knew at once that I wasn’t seeing through my own eyes, that this was something Nix was showing me, a memory he had plugged directly into my consciousness somehow. Ghost images flashed throughout the room, towering bars, and a large figure that loomed next to me. It was a giant human skeleton, the gray bones surrounded by the cottony blur of transparent soft tissue. Large, translucent orbs rolled in the empty, saucer sockets of the skull face as it looked down at me. Tiny points of light, electrical impulses, flashed through the wrinkles of the giant’s brain, flowing up and down the spinal column and coursing along the vast network of nerves that branched from it.
It’s not a giant, I realized. It’s not big. Nix is small. This is an old memory.
Pulses of light flashed through household wires, inside appliances, and even through the air where drifting particles carried scents and pheromones. The amount of information pouring in was overwhelming, like a flood that threatened to carry me away.
This is how he sees the world, I thought. How the haan see our world.
It was more than that, though. I sensed that flow as it was processed, packaged, and stored. A scalefly flitted down and I felt it scurry through a pore in my side, felt it inside me somewhere, then a faint tickle as that information, the sum of everything he observed, was transferred for distribution.
They’re watching us.
A pang of hunger gripped me, urgent and frightening. More ghost objects came flickered into focus, images of other figures, humans, walking and sitting and lying down in the distance, behind the walls that contained the world beyond the bars.
The giant leaned closer and I saw the compact squiggles of a brain appear inside the skull. Bright dots flitted inside, like spastic insects. They flashed up and down the dark shadow of the spine, sparking through muscle tissue as the giant lifted an object into view. It was a bottle. It was a surrogate formula ration whose stamp, in haan, evoked an image of a female who I recognized as Sillith. Not the Sillith I’d encountered, but an icon, an idol who had served, and been loved, for a long, long time.
The giant cracked the seal on the surrogate bottle and pulled the tube out. Its skeletal hand lowered it down into the cage from above. Nix had been a surrogate, of course. He was showing me a memory from when he was an infant of his surrogate mother.
She leaned closer still, and I felt the bottle’s tube squelch its way into an opening near my throat where complex muscles drew it deep down into my body. I felt air vent from other pores in my skin where more scale-flies burrowed and crawled. Then the gel was flooding into me, blanketing the hunger, dousing it, and spreading out through my entire being. Shriveled cells were saturated and grew fat as nerve clusters reconnected, making me whole again. It was like coming back from the verge of death.
The whole time I felt an alien sense of thanks, warmth, and a child’s worship of the only mother it knew. He wanted to touch the giant, to connect with it, and as I stared over the surface of the bottle, I saw the pigment beneath the layer of cottony skin. It was formed in an artful band around the biceps, where complex characters I immediately understood spelled out the syllables of a name.
DRAGAN.
As suddenly as the world had changed, it changed back. I was back in the wrecked hotel, stinking of Wei’s shed water. Nix released my arm.
“You,” I whispered, staring at him. He hadn’t just been a surrogate; he had been my surrogate.
“You cared for me,” he said.
“I remember you.” He’d been my second surrogate. I’d gotten that tattoo just a week before I picked him up. “You’re Xiăĭogu. My little demon.”
“Nix now.”
“I called you that because you kept throwing your bottle.”
“I remember.”
I hadn’t realized they grew that fast, but after what I’d just experienced I didn’t question it. His eyes blazed pink, the pupils like coals nestled within.
“I could never hurt you,” he said.
He took out the little tablet he carried and swiped the screen with one finger. When the gate opened, he placed the wand inside.
“When I didn’t do as they asked, I was pruned from the axial hive. When I return I will be sent back to the vats and my memories will not be preserved. I have no other purpose now but to help you.”
He handed me his tablet, and I took it.
I looked over the tablet. The spot where the field opened was solid, glossy silver.
“Okay. Fine. You win.”
I turned the tablet over in my hand once, then handed it back.
“Little demon,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Can you gate us to Render’s Strip?”
The Burn Zone Page 20