“Look,” Fang said, putting his hands up, “I’m not bad-mouthing him. Dragan’s a stand-up guy, but they got him. You know what happens next.”
What happened next was they executed him. Bars, and places like Fang’s, often streamed executions.
“So, fine,” I said, pushing the thought out of my mind. “I’m here in his place. I’ll get them.”
“Well, like I said, good luck.” He fiddled with the computer console, and images from his security camera went flicking by. He swept one finger across the screen, and images scrolled past until he spotted what he was looking for.
“There,” he said, pointing.
The camera was aimed at the front door to his shop, where Dragan stood with a little boy and a little girl. When I saw him, I smiled. He looked like shit, and I could see the blood spattered on his uniform, but the sight of him still made me smile.
Fang tapped at the console, and the image changed, color draining away to leave a sharp contrast grayscale. The three figures became ghosts, their bones standing out in faint, blurry black. Dragan’s gun was clearly visible, along with the rest of his gear. I could see the twist-key looped around the boy’s arm, but other than that, neither the boy nor the girl had anything on at all.
Fang tapped the image of the twistkey.
“That what you’re after?”
“Yeah.”
I was confused, though. Everything pointed to the boy’s having carried the weapon over. Maybe there was something behind his back the scanner didn’t pick up?
I looked at the girl, straining my eyes. She didn’t have anything either, although there was a strange blob of distortion just under her rib cage.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing.
“I noticed that too,” he said, leaning closer. “Just a glitch.”
“Did you notice anything weird about her?”
“Hell, the whole thing was weird,” he said. “That girl, she was sick, though. I mean, Dragan was freaked out, and the boy was just disconnected, but that girl was like the walking dead. She was sick with something. Dark circles under her eyes. Like you.”
I stared at the image a moment longer, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like it could be a bomb, or a vial or something. There was no weapon, at least none that I could see. Had the kid already ditched it? If he did, that would be it. We’d never find it in time.
“Thanks, Fang.”
“Does it help?”
“Yeah.”
The image could be a mistake, or just not clear. I decided the first thing to do was to find the kid. Even if he didn’t have the weapon, he had the key, and that meant I could get to Dragan. With a little luck I could even do it far enough ahead of the festival that we’d at least be far away from Hangfei if the sky started falling. All we had to do was get to the Pot, which was no more than a half hour away on foot.
“Come on,” Fang said, standing. “I need to get back up there before I get looted.”
“Okay.”
Fang headed over and pulled down the stairs again, the steps creaking as he started up. I stopped on the way back to take a picture of his photographs with my phone, then another quick shot of the squirming pink things in the terrarium.
“Hey, come on,” Fang called down.
I hoofed it up the stairs after him. “Sorry. I was looking at the rats.”
“Say it louder.”
“Sorry. You really are the best.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Get out of here.”
“Thanks again.”
As I moved out from behind the counter, he tossed me a free smoke and I caught it. I stuck it in the corner of my mouth and blew him a kiss.
“If you do find him,” he called, “like I said, he likes being a father. Let him be that.”
I nodded. “Come on, guys.”
Nix and Vamp exchanged glances, and then followed behind me as I stepped back out into the square.
“You got the rations?” Vamp asked as the door closed behind us.
“I got them,” I said. “If we hustle we can be there in thirty.”
“Are we actually going to pull this off?” Vamp asked. I checked the time.
“We’ll make it,” I said, and wished I was as sure as I sounded.
~ * ~
Chapter Fifteen
07:41:13 BC
At the far end of Render’s Strip, the dispensaries and eateries trickled out into a shantytown built on the remains of the Pot’s old construction site. The temporary housing structures used by the crews fifty years prior were abandoned when the money ran out and eventually taken over by squatters. Old one-room homes, storage shacks, and even portable bathrooms had all grown into a massive commune over the years, glued together by new units of varying quality that sprouted up in the empty spaces. Tarps covered leaky roofs, tied down over clusters of shacks and spanning the winding makeshift paths between structures that served as streets.
Hanging out in the packed patches of dirt that served as yards to some of the homes were groups of filthy, scrawny people dressed in Dumpster clothes. Some sat in salvaged lawn furniture, while others just sat on the ground sharing smokes and playing cards. A lot of them didn’t seem to be doing much else other than sitting back to watch the tide go out near the edge of the flats beyond, and the distant hulks of foreign ships that loomed on the horizon.
Vamp was crowding me, walking with a confident, aggressive strut that said Don’t come near us, while Nix stuck close behind. The crowds of squatters were interested in us, but unlike the Row punks, none of them seemed aggressive so far. They seemed more fascinated by Nix than anything. I doubted haan ever came into their territory.
“This place is a shit-hole,” Vamp muttered, and an old woman glared at us as we passed by. She and a man I imagined was her husband sat on folding chairs in front of a little TV. A cable trailed from the back of its cracked, yellow shell and off into the maze of shacks.
“Then get the fuck out, shit-head,” the woman said.
“He’s sorry,” I told her.
“Never mind them.” The man yawned.
“You’re on the wrong side of town, assholes,” she muttered.
“You’re from the ship, huh?” a new voice asked. I looked down to see a filthy little girl tugging on the tail of Nix’s jacket. He looked down at her, and when the triad of pupils in each eye revolved in a slow circle, the girl smiled.
“No,” Nix said. She narrowed her eyes, still grinning as she put her hands on her narrow hips.
“Yes, you are,” she said. She pointed back over the roofs of the shantytown where off in the distance you could see the main tower of the ship looming up above the rest of the skyline. “You’re one of them.”
“I am,” Nix said, his voice box flashing, “but I live in the settlement of Shangzho, not the ship.”
“Why?”
“So I can be closer to your kind.”
“Why?”
“It will help us learn to live together.”
The girl scrunched her brow.
“If you want to live together, then why don’t you just take down the force field?” she asked.
“Yeah, Nix,” I said. “Why don’t you just take down the force field?”
“Yeah, just take it down,” the girl said, holding out her hands.
“Because my people are afraid to,” Nix said.
“But the failsafe can zap through it anyway.”
“True,” Nix said, “but your people would have to be very, very angry to do something like that.”
He knelt down and placed his hand on her nest of dirty hair, stroking it gently before resting his fingers along the back of her scrawny little neck.
“We will take it down one day,” he said.
“When?”
“Someday.”
She nodded, then abruptly changed the subject.
“My grandmother said you promised to fix everything,” she said. “Before you came out of the ship, you promised.”
>
“That’s true.”
“Are you really going to save the world like she said?” she asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“You are,” he said, “but we will help you.”
A woman stepped out of the crowd and grabbed the girl by the arm. She jerked her away from Nix so violently that the poor thing fell back into the dirt, half dangling from one arm as she was dragged away.
“Get away from it,” the woman hissed. Her face was pinched, and pockmarked from chronic chem use.
“Hey,” I called after her. “Take it easy.”
“Fuck you,” she spat. The girl had recovered her footing and, apparently used to the treatment, followed along after the woman without so much as a complaint. She looked back over her shoulder as they went, and waved at Nix.
“Let’s go,” Vamp said, pointing down the row of shacks. “The sooner we’re out of here, the better.”
“Hang on.”
I backed out of the GPS and tried the phone number I’d dug up for the address again, letting it ring while I plugged one ear. Up ahead was the big gate that led into the project. It looked like it might have been impressive at one time, but now it was rain rusted and corroded from exposure to sea air and scalefly spray. It still stood tall, though, with a weathered sign over the arch: ZUN-ZHE.
The skyline shot up steeply past the gate where the housing project began. Dragan said the whole thing was some effort from back before the haan to resection the city and ease congestion. According to him, all it did, though, was mass everyone whose income level forced them to take the deal into one of the most overpopulated spots in the city, while everyone who could afford not to live there got “an extra inch of space.”
“Still no answer,” I said.
“How are we going to find anything in there?” Vamp mumbled.
“We have an address,” I said, looking past the gate and into the tightly packed urban sprawl. I was a little unsure myself. “No sweat.”
The streets through the Pot were narrow with no shoulders and rows of buildings that practically scraped up against each other lined the sides. Stoops at the front entrance of each stepped right off the curb and into the street. In the cramped alleyways I saw the odd motorbike or bicycle along with scattered trash. Small windows crowded each building face, and overhead a bedsheet flapped from one of them, unable to dry in the humid air. It made Tùzi-wō look roomy.
Ten minutes later, I thought I’d located the right building. It wasn’t marked, but the one to its left was. Three stories up a plastic tarp had been stretched between several of the windows on opposite sides of the street, maybe to create shade or to catch rain from the gutter there. No one mingled on the sidewalks, and the whole area was strangely quiet. I checked the address again.
“This should be it,” I said.
There was no lock on the front entrance, and it opened into a dimly lit cubby whose walls were lined with little mailbox doors. Each one required a key and a few hung open. Through a doorway up ahead, a feeble light shone over the landing of a narrow stairway leading up. Two elevator doors on the wall across from it were plastered with faded recruitment posters. Pasted over those was a strip of plastic tape that read Out of Order.
After nine flights, I thought I might keel over. When I finally pushed through the stairwell door, I had to stop and lean back against the wall to catch my breath.
“Gonzo,” I muttered. I looked over at Nix, who, obnoxiously, didn’t seem fazed at all by the climb. Even more obnoxiously, Vamp didn’t either.
“Aw, you tired?” he asked.
“I’d hate to be an old person and have to make this climb every day.”
“You are not an old person,” Nix pointed out.
“I didn’t say I was.”
“Your body is substandard because you smoke and take too many chems,” he added.
Vamp laughed suddenly through his nose.
“Shut up,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow with my equally sweaty wrist. “Haan have better stamina...That’s just, like, physics.”
“Biology.”
“Whatever.”
I shrugged him away and stomped down the hallway. The apartment doors were crowded together almost like lockers and as we passed by each, I could hear activity in some of them, TVs, radios, snoring, and talking. Number 9112 was down near the end of the hall on the right, a TV blaring behind it.
I knocked on the door. No one answered. I knocked again, harder this time. When still no one answered, I tried the knob, but it was locked.
Nix stepped closer to the door, moving me gently to one side, and put one hand on its surface beneath the spy hole. He moved his face close to it.
“Someone is inside,” he said.
His chest expanded, his suit ruffling as he drew air in and then vented it with his quiet rattle. The mites delivered an anxious tingle.
“Someone has died,” he said.
“Move, I’ll kick it in,” Vamp said.
“You’re not going to be able to kick it in, Vamp,” I said. “We’ll get the super, just—”
The door unlatched, and then opened. Standing in the doorway was a little girl, the same girl from the wet drive recording. She was wearing slightly oversized pajamas, like they had belonged to someone else once. She looked up at us, her eyes wide, as she held the door open.
“Hey,” I said. I tried to sound soothing, but she was looking at the scrapes on my face and shoulders with unease. “Hi there.”
She didn’t say anything. Over the TV I heard the buzzing of flies. I looked past her and saw a small cloud of them swarming around a sofa that faced a small TV set, perched on a wooden crate in front of a small window. It was showing some news program, the announcer yakking on about the festival while cameras showed different floats being built. There was a door inside on the left, and two on the right, one closed and the other an open doorway.
“Can we come in?” I asked the girl. She looked to Nix, then back at me and nodded.
I moved past her and stepped into the living room. Inside, a faint stink lingered in the air and I waved the air in front of my face as I looked over the back of the sofa. Blankets were piled over it as if someone had been sleeping there, and what looked like dried blood had spotted the edge of one. I tapped the TV’s contact and switched it off.
“Are you alone here?” I asked her. She glanced toward the closed door on the right and I heard a low, raspy moan come from behind it. She shook her head.
Just then a signal trickled in through the surrogate cluster. It was strained, like its source was trying to pinch it off, but it was haan for sure.
“There’s a haan nearby,” I said.
Vamp tensed, looking back toward the front door. “Sillith?”
“No.” I felt pulses of apprehension, fear, and hunger. It wasn’t Sillith, or Nix. “Nix, are you picking that up?”
“Yes,” he said. “A surrogate maybe?”
I found it hard to believe anyone who lived in a place like this would be part of the program, but if there was one here, it could be in big trouble.
“Was a haan here?” I asked the girl. She didn’t seem to understand, so I pointed at Nix. “A haan, like him?”
She shook her head. It was strange. There was a current of fear in the signal, but there was a weird vibe to it. A surrogate who’d been left alone would want to be found, but this was the opposite. The haan was hiding. It was scared that it might be found.
“Vamp, Nix, look around for—” The signal winked out and was gone. Had it moved out of range? Nix moved closer and spoke in a low voice.
“The boy,” he prompted.
“Over here,” Vamp said, leaning to look through the doorway to the right.
I headed over and flipped on the light. It was a bedroom, with a single twin bed jammed into one corner. A squat dresser took up a chunk of the precious free space near the head of the bed.
“Nix, keep an eye on the girl,” I called.
“Dragan?” he whispered.
The walls were covered in pictures, almost every inch of them. Each one had been printed and put in a plastic frame. Most of them were close-ups of men and women in uniform; some were groups of uniformed soldiers or photographs of ships or planes. One of the pictures was of a man I recognized, a young Dragan.
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