“Nix...”
The dark spots were flies. Scalefly larva. They were buried under his skin. The weapon wasn’t on him; it was in him.
“They will emerge soon,” Nix said, peering closer.
“How long?”
“In a matter of hours.”
I looked at the specks. There were thousands of them. “Can we ... pick them out?”
“Not all of them. Not in time.”
“Can we kill them?”
“They are very hard to kill. Anything that would do so would kill the boy as well.”
“Shit. Shit!”
“Sam,” Vamp urged.
“I’m thinking,” I said.
He leaned close, to whisper in my ear, “We might not have a choice.”
I shrugged him off.
“Put him back in the hole,” Vamp said. When I glared at him, he held up his hands. “Just until we can figure out what to—”
“Nix, what about if we bring him behind the force field?”
“They’ll never let a human through.”
“This is an emergency, though.”
“We may not have time to convince them, and even if we do there’s no guarantee we won’t deliver him right to Sillith.”
“Damn it....”
Just hand him over, a voice said in the back of my mind. Just hand him over to the authorities, and let them do whatever they’re going to do. It can’t happen here. No matter what else, it can’t happen here and with their gate connections they could have him back to his original drop point in minutes....
Or you could just seal him back in the hole and close the gate forever.
I looked back at him. His eyes were wide and frightened. He couldn’t understand us, but he knew enough to know that his fate was being decided. I could see the defeat in his eyes, a helpless resignation. Any fight that had been in him was gone.
“He’s coming with us,” I said.
Vamp’s eyebrows jumped. “What?”
“We’ll take him to Shiliuyuán Station,” I said. “We’ve got the key. It’s behind the force field, and we won’t need permission to—”
I stopped as Nix’s tablet moved past me, and something on the scanner screen caught my eye.
“Nix, wait,” I said, grabbing his wrist. He let me take the tablet from his hand, and I angled it down the front of me, to my own belly.
My mouth dropped open. Perched on my belly was a huge ticklike construct, its abdomen sticking out like a giant egg. Its spindly legs gripped me, and I could see a tube had snaked through into my stomach where a squiggly ball had formed.
“Sam, what’s wrong?” Vamp asked.
“Take the kid over there,” I said, pointing.
“Why?”
“Do it!”
He looked peeved, but he guided Alexei away from us as I grabbed Nix’s sleeve.
“Nix,” I said, staring. “What the hell is that?”
I looked around the side of the tablet, down to my belly. There was nothing there, but when I looked back to the screen, there it was again. I began to feel woozy, and when I spoke again my voice cracked.
“Nix, what the hell is that thing? Is it real?”
He moved closer to look at the screen. “It’s real.”
“What is it?” I whispered. I glanced back at Vamp, who looked away.
“It’s ... an umbilicus,” Nix said.
“A what?”
“An umbilicus,” he said, moving the screen for a better look. “It’s sending nutrients to the mass behind it.”
“Why can’t I see it?”
“It is in jump space,” he said, “except for the point of contact inside you. You can’t interact with it directly.”
I looked at the shadowy ball of tissue the tube fed into. “What is it doing? Why is it there?”
The shape moved, just a little. It reminded me of a haan brain.
“It’s Sillith’s weapon,” he said quietly.
“But—”
“Not the one she fashioned for your people, the one she has continued to develop in secret.” He leaned closer to my belly, until I could feel the heat of his face against it.
“Get it off me,” I said. I swept at the spot, like I was trying to flick away a spider. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. “I have to get it off me right now. I can’t...”
He put one hand on my shoulder, and I felt a calm come over me as he eased through the mite cluster. Part of me was still freaking out, but it helped, a little.
“I can’t,” he said.
Out of the jumble of my thoughts, the image from Fang’s security footage jumped out. Dragan had been there with Alexei, and the girl. There had been a small distortion near her belly....
I took the tablet and pointed it back toward her. There was nothing there.
“Sam, what are you doing?” Vamp called.
I moved the tablet across the room, sweeping past the sofa until something jumped out. There, lying on its side next to the TV stand, was one of the ticklike objects. It looked dead. When I moved the tablet away, it disappeared.
“Nix, what the hell is going on?”
“I’m not sure, but the genetic material is definitely haan, and it is consuming tissue around it to fuel growth. When Sillith realized this, she must have fitted you with the umbilicus to keep it from feeding on you.”
“But she wants me dead. Why would she—”
“So you can lead her to the boy.”
My ears pricked as a door outside down the hall banged open, and Alexei cringed back farther into the cubby.
“She knows we’re here,” he said.
Several people had just entered the hallway outside the apartment and were heading in our direction.
~ * ~
Chapter Sixteen
06:59:33 BC
“Sam ...,” Vamp warned.
“I hear them.”
Heavy footsteps tromped toward us from down the hall outside. Not just two or three people, but a group.
“Down here!” a voice barked, followed by chatter over a radio.
“Sam, we have to leave now,” Vamp said.
“How the hell did they track us?”
The footsteps came to a stop outside the apartment’s front door, and I heard them take up positions there.
“Here,” a voice said. “She’s in there.”
I pressed my fists to my temples. “Shit!”
Alexei backed away and darted back through the closet door.
“Alexei, wait!” I took a step toward him and he slammed it shut.
“Cordon is secure,” a voice said. The sound of the airship outside was getting louder. “Move on my mark.”
We weren’t going to make it. They were coming in.
“Nix,” I called, snapping my fingers at him. “Your tablet. Hurry up.”
He hurried over and took it from inside his coat, swiping his finger across the screen to activate it.
I grabbed the tablet from his hands and waved my hand over the field. The honeycomb scrolled past, and I caught glimpses of his things as they went by, including the double-needled wand. I dropped the twistkey into the empty cell next to it.
“The pattern you trace with your finger,” I said. “Is that the pass code?”
“Yes.”
“Can you change it? So we can both get into it?”
He reached over my shoulder and tapped at the virtual keys until a prompt appeared.
“Ready!” a voice outside said.
“Trace a new pattern with your finger,” Nix said.
“Vamp, watch.”
I traced the hanzi for “apple” in the middle of the screen. With a crackle, the field solidified again into the shiny metal plate.
“Got it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nix said. Vamp nodded.
I headed back to the living room and they followed. I stood next to the little girl and squeezed her shoulder.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her.
“Clear!�
�� a voice outside barked. Nix took back the tablet and quickly stowed it in his coat as the door crashed open.
Two soldiers stormed in, but they weren’t in full combat gear. They were street-variety soldiers kitted out in basic patrol gear. When they entered, Vamp’s app started painting their faces and calling out transponder IDs. Names and ranks appeared as the app began recording their actions onto my wet drive.
“Freeze!” one of them yelled, his rifle pointed at my chest. The girl threw her hands up over her head as two more men crowded in after them, scanning the room through their scopes. One kicked open the bathroom door and pointed his weapon inside.
“Clear!” he said over his shoulder. One of them stood over the couch and pointed down at the blankets while another approached the bedroom door.
“Blood,” he said.
One of the men stepped forward with his eyes locked on to the screen of some sort of scanner he was holding. He moved it around the room and then settled on me. He moved in close, until it was almost touching me.
“This is her,” he said over his shoulder.
“Good,” a voice said back.
I looked, and my eyes widened as a woman in uniform stepped into the apartment. She was an older woman, pretty but severe looking, with jet-black hair in a short bob. I recognized her immediately from TV. It was Lieutenant Pei Ligong, Governor Hwong’s right hand.
“We’ve got one human male, one haan male with her,” she said into a wrist radio. “What do you want to do with them?”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Hold them for now.”
“Understood.”
“Lieutenant Ligong,” I stammered. She glanced at me. “Lieutenant Ligong, I can explain all of this.”
“Shut your mouth and get down on the floor.”
“Please listen to me,” I said. “I can explain—”
She drew her pistol and pointed it at me. “Now! All of you, down!”
My hands shot up and I knelt down alongside the girl, who cowered with her hands in front of her face. Nix knelt down next to me, but Vamp stayed standing.
“Wait,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
I gaped, trying to grasp the fact that Vamp was still standing when she’d told him to get down. Ligong sometimes carried out the televised executions herself.
Her eyes hardened as she glared at him like he was some kind of bug. “On your knees.”
“Vamp, do it!” I hissed, pulling his shirt. I turned to address Ligong, to move her attention away from Vamp. “He’ll do it. It’s okay. He’ll do it.”
Vamp’s face wavered, but he stepped back and got down onto his knees next to Nix while soldiers filed through the apartment and into the bedroom. He put his hands behind his head and laced his fingers.
Ligong stepped toward me, crouching long enough to pull Wei’s little pistol out of my pocket. She tucked it in her belt.
In the bedroom one of the men shined a light down on the old man while the little girl watched from the foot of the bed. The other one leaned in to check his vitals.
“He dead?” Ligong called. The man had turned to say something when a loud, wet snap made them all jump. He whirled back to the bed, but I couldn’t see what made the sound.
Ligong furrowed her brow. “Is he dead or not?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she cocked her head all of a sudden just as I noticed the signal myself. It was another haan, maybe the same one from before. The signal was hesitant, like the first one. Like it was trying to stay quiet.
She has a surrogate cluster, I thought, watching Ligong. There was no way she was a surrogate, though. She used it to keep track of the haan.
“I just picked up an unidentified—”
The signal disappeared. Ligong paused a minute longer, then signaled to one of the soldiers nearby.
“There’s another haan around here somewhere. Find it,” she said in a low voice. He nodded, and signaled to another to join him as he left the apartment.
Ligong turned back to the bedroom, where, to my surprise, the old man sat up, peeling the sweat-soaked blanket off and dropping it onto the bed beside him. He looked up at the soldier.
“Are you okay, sir?” the soldier asked. He still looked a little confused. The old man nodded. He looked to the little girl, who managed a weak smile.
I met Vamp’s eye and he shook his head, not sure what to make of it either. I’d sworn he was dead.
“Get him dressed,” she called in. “Take both of them back to central.”
The soldier nodded. He swatted a scalefly on his neck and approached the bed as the old man fussed with something underneath it.
“What’s happening?” I asked again as they helped the old man to his feet. “Are we being arrested?”
A shadow passed over the window, and the whistle of an airship got louder as the curtains flapped at either side of the TV screen beneath the sill.
The lead soldier took out a scanner and aimed it down at Vamp. He swept it up and down him, then did me and Nix, frowning at the display. As one of the men helped the old man out into the hallway, he clipped the reader back on his belt.
“Okay,” he said to me, “we know you know where the kid is. Talk.”
Realization set in, and I frowned. “Kang.”
Sillith hadn’t sent these guys; Kang had. She was tailing us too, and might even be nearby watching, but if she was she couldn’t move now. Ligong pushed past the soldier and looked me square in the eye.
“Tell us where—”
“How’d he do it?” I forgot myself, and interrupted her. Anger flashed in her eyes, but she kept her voice even as she spoke.
“He spiked your drink with a tracker isotope,” she said. I shook my head, my face burning.
“Son of a bitch...”
“He might have just saved our entire country,” she said. “Show some respect. Now, where’s the kid?”
“Listen, please, there’s more to the story,” I said. “A group of soldiers were conspiring with a haan. My father, Specialist Shao ... he’s loyal. He tried to blow the whistle on them and so they pinned that charge on him. Please, I need to—”
“We got him!” a voice boomed from the kitchen. “It’s the kid!”
“What in the hell is that smell?” another voice said in an aside to the first.
Ligong peered through the kitchen doorway to get a look at Alexei, who was still cowered in the closet. “Get him out here with the rest!”
She spoke into her wrist radio again.
“We’ve got him,” she said.
“Ow!” the voice grunted from the kitchen. “He fucking bit me!”
“Soldier, secure that kid and get him in here now!”
There was a struggle, and then Alexei began babbling in Pan-Slav as the soldier hauled him back into the living room by one wrist.
“Alexei Drugov?” Ligong asked. Alexei nodded, his face pale.
“Shit,” a soldier spat from back through the doorway. He coughed, and flies buzzed.
“What is it?” Ligong asked.
The soldier stepped back into the living room, his face twisted into a grimace. What looked like a bloody towel hung from the barrel of his rifle, and I realized it was the remains I’d seen in the trash bin under the sink. I caught a glimpse of what looked like limp, rubbery skin and matted hair before I turned away from it. The little girl looked over at the old man, who looked back.
“What the hell is that?” Ligong asked. She crossed past us, and the other soldiers followed. For a moment, they stood around whatever he’d found, their backs to us, and Alexei, forgotten for a moment, off to one side. I looked at him, and our eyes met.
“Damn it!” one of the soldiers spat, slapping his neck to swat a scalefly.
They were as distracted as they were going to get. I crooked my head, hearts scrolling across the 3i display until I saw the one for Nix and grabbed it.
Nix, can you gate us back to the ship?
The Burn Zone Page 24