“What are you going to do?” I asked, staring. Nix sat, staring down at the floor in front of him, while the men circled.
“That depends,” he said. “Are you going to open the tablet?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I need—”
Hwong spoke into the microphone again. “Start with the haan.”
The man with the saw pressed his thumb to the contact on the side and it roared to life. The circular blade spun into a blur underneath the guard as the soldier hefted it into position. One of the other men pointed a remote at Nix and triggered it, causing light to flash from the shock pin in his neck. He went rigid for a few seconds, then slumped as the man let go of the button.
“Don’t!”
While he was dazed, one of the guards unshackled Nix’s left arm and slammed it down onto the block next to him. He held the wrist and leaned back, pulling the arm taut.
“No! Wait!”
The man with the saw lowered the whining blade down onto the meat of Nix’s arm, which burst into a spray of blood and sinew.
The horror and pain that drilled through the surrogate cluster paralyzed me. It wasn’t just the empathic flood of agony that bored deep into the flesh and bone of my own arm, but the terror that followed it. Rapid flashes of desperate denial arced over the sickening knowledge of what would come next.
That isn’t faked, I thought. What I’m feeling couldn’t be faked. Could it?
The saw’s whine lowered in pitch as it dug deeper, shattering bones and spraying mists of blood until it cleaved straight through at the elbow and the meat separated.
I scrambled for the monitor, pushing against Hwong’s hand, clawing at him as he held me back. Nix stared at the arm in shock while Vamp, his eyes wide with terror, struggled to free himself from the chair.
“Stop!” I shouted, but my voice broke. “Stop it!”
The guy holding the severed arm stumbled back when it came loose and dropped it. When he did, the limb seemed to go rubbery for a second, writhing in the air as it fell. When it hit the floor, it seemed to shatter almost, or split apart. I didn’t get a good look at what happened exactly, but the next thing I knew there was not one but three severed arms lying on the floor next to the table. They were all identical, right down to the suit sleeve and cuff.
“Incredible,” Hwong whispered. For a second, even I just stared.
The guard nudged one of the severed arms with the toe of his boot, and I saw the look on his face had changed. He looked a little scared now. A few seconds later, the air around the arm warped and it vanished with a bang that made him jump back. The other two limbs on the floor popped out of existence right behind it.
The guard looked back at the camera as if to ask Hwong what to do next. Behind him, I could see that somehow Nix’s arm was still on his body, hanging by his side, as his eyes began to open again.
“Well,” Hwong said quietly. “This just got interesting.”
“Wait,” I said. “Just wait.”
On the monitor, the guy with the saw had hefted it back, blood dripping steadily off the circular blade as he got ready to cut again.
“Stop it!”
“If you want them to stop, then open the tablet.”
I gripped the tablet in my hands, frozen. They were going to kill him. That man was going to cut Nix into pieces right in front of me, and Nix knew it too. When they were done, they’d do the same to Vamp.
Hwong turned back to the microphone. “Again.”
“Wait!”
The man lowered the saw, bringing it down on Nix’s knee this time.
“Wait!”
He angled the saw and the blade’s shriek lowered to an angry, gurgling buzz as he pushed it in farther. I covered my eyes with my hands and tried to back away, but Hwong had me. He pulled my hands away from my face and held me as the saw came down again. As I squeezed my eyes closed, Nix’s heart icon turned pink and began to beat. The 3i window appeared, floating in the darkness behind my eyelids as the blade ground down again.
Don’t do it.
Nix, I have to.
None of us are ever lost. Don’t.
Vamp was screaming. The man with the saw stared stonily as he worked, lifting the blade away from the severed leg and then pushing it into Nix’s rib cage with no trace of emotion whatsoever. My stomach rolled and I gagged, coughing spit through my teeth.
“I’m going to puke,” I groaned. “Let me go. I’m going to puke.”
Hwong shoved me toward the desk and I fell down on my knees next to it. Through a blur of tears I found the wastebasket and dragged it in front of me as I wretched, watching the precious nutrients splatter into the plastic liner.
“Stop,” I moaned when I could speak again. Cold sweat rolled down my forehead as I spit into the mess.
“Hold it,” Hwong said into the microphone. I lifted my head and saw the guy raise the saw back up, spitting red as the blade wound down. Blood gushed down onto the floor around the chair where Nix hung limp in his restraints, not moving. When I looked back to the 3i window, his heart had turned gray again.
“Please stop,” I said.
“Will you open the tablet?” Hwong asked. “Or do I have him start on the boy?”
“No,” I rasped. “Please. Stop. I’ll do it.”
He stared at me for a long minute, and his face didn’t seem human. The acts that had reduced me to jelly in less than a minute didn’t affect him at all, not even a little, and I realized they never would. I held one shaking finger over the tablet’s screen, and felt a warm tear run down my cheek.
“Let him go,” I said.
“Open the tablet.”
Sitting back on my heels, I swiped at the screen using the hanzi for “apple.” On the third try the metallic surface dissolved away. I reached in and grabbed the twist-key in fingers that felt numb.
“What about me?” I asked him.
“You can return home.”
“They can come with me?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, but still I removed the key and held it out to him in one shaking hand. He grabbed it, and I watched the only chance I had to get Dragan back move away, out of reach. On the monitor, I saw the guy with the saw hoist it up onto his shoulder, dripping blood down the back of his apron.
“Turn it off,” I said. “Please.”
Hwong flipped off the display, and I struggled back onto my feet. A wave of dizziness came over me like a dark cloud as the blood rushed back into my legs, and I stood still for a minute with one hand on the back of his chair until it passed.
Hwong turned the twistkey over in his hands, and then squeezed it in one fist. He moved around the desk and began to walk toward the office door, his back turned to me.
My fingers moved to the buckle of my belt, and threaded the cloth band back through as I raised one leg. My foot came down on the edge of the desktop and I hoisted myself up, taking a single running step down the too-short runway before launching myself off the opposite edge and springing into the air toward him.
He heard me too late, only just starting to turn as I came down hard onto his shoulders. My crotch pressed onto the back of his neck as I locked my legs under his arms and whipped my belt free from my pant loops.
He grunted, trying to reach into his coat for his gun, but my legs were strong and I kept his arms pinned back as I wrapped the belt around his neck and pulled. The room spun around me as he thrashed like a mechanical bull, trying to shake me off as I tightened the noose. The belt dug into the flesh of his neck just below his jawline, and when I looked down at him from above I saw his big eyes bugging out of his blood-filled face like veiny marbles. His mouth worked, unhinging as his tongue formed a purple peak.
His legs gave out and he dropped, stumbling back and then crashing sideways into the desk. My ribs struck the edge hard enough to knock me off his shoulders, but I held on to the belt, rolling and twisting my body around to form a tourniquet with it. His big hands groped,
managing to get a hold of the band around his throat, but he was weakening. He gave up, and one hand drifted down over his chest to reach for the gun whose grip was sticking out from a shoulder holster, but he never made it. His fingers pawed once at the metal butt, then went still.
I let go. I had no idea if I’d killed him or not, but there wasn’t time to find out. Someone could have heard the racket and be on their way. I untwisted the belt and threaded it back through my belt loops as I stood up, then hiked my pants and tightened it. I scanned the floor until I found the twistkey lying partway under the desk and snatched it up.
In the quiet, I listened and heard voices somewhere down the long hall, along with Vamp’s high-pitched panting. I started across the room back toward the exit. On my way past, I delivered a hard kick to Hwong’s ribs, then grabbed my pistol back and ran out the door, back down the hallway the way we’d come.
I had no idea what I was going to do next; all I knew was that there was no way in hell Hwong was going to let any of us out of there alive. The others must have heard the struggle, because footsteps were hurrying down the hall from somewhere up ahead. I ducked into an old metal door that had bowed back into a wall of debris, and squatted down in the shadows as the clamor got louder. Holding my breath, I pressed myself against the door as the soldiers tromped past on their way back to the office with Ligong leading the charge. When they turned the corner, I darted out and sprinted into the darkness toward a dim light that came from around a corner up ahead.
Vamp’s panting grew louder as I closed in on the light, ducking under a hanging length of rusted sprinkler pipe when I rounded the corner. Ahead, I could see the open doorway and the blood-splattered floor on the other side. The concrete saw lay there, lying on one side in a pool of red. I barreled through and almost slipped in the mess, not wanting to look but having to. Nix was slumped in the chair, not moving.
Vamp’s eyes stared wildly as I approached him.
“Come on,” he hissed. “Come on, cut me loose.”
I ran to him, flicking out my pocketknife and slashing through the zip ties that held his wrists behind the support pole. When his arms were free, I bent down and freed his ankles from the chair.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, good, let’s go, let’s go...”
I went to Nix and yanked the shock pin out of his neck, but as soon as I cut him loose he slid off the chair and collapsed onto the floor.
“Come on,” I said. “Nix, get up.”
“Go,” Nix said. The voice box flicker was faint, like his connection to it was waning. The pool of blood around him grew, slow but steady.
“We can’t just leave you here,” I said in his ear. “Come on, you have to get up.”
“No,” he said. He reached up with his one free hand and touched my face.
“Nix, come on...”
“Sam, we gotta go,” Vamp whispered. Footsteps were headed back in our direction.
“Stop her,” Nix said again. His body went slack, and the air around him warped suddenly, rippling like waves of heat.
He’s dying, I thought. His body is going to gate back to the ship....
“Stop right there!”
I looked up to see Ligong storm through the doorway, the others right behind her. She held a pistol in one hand.
“Drop that fucking key,” she growled, aiming the gun at me. “Do it now!”
The air around Nix warped again, and before she could do anything else I put the twistkey in Nix’s free hand, curling his long fingers around it. Ligong barked from across the room, “I said—”
Nix’s body vanished. My gun hand had been resting on his chest, the side of the pistol pressed against him, and my palm tingled as the weapon gated off along with him. Air rushed into the vacuum left behind with a loud crack that I felt in my chest, and the ties that had held his wrists and ankles clattered to the floor in a heap. Nix, the twistkey, and the pistol were gone.
“There,” I heaved as Ligong stalked toward me. My head was spinning. “Now nobody—”
She threw a right cross that caught me hard on the cheek and sent me sprawling, unconscious, onto the bloody concrete floor.
~ * ~
Chapter Nineteen
04:11:53 BC
I woke up with my face pressed into some kind of rough material, canvas maybe, while heavy footsteps clomped around me. My whole body was wrapped in it, and I swayed as though in a hammock. Through the cocoon of fabric I heard the clang of machinery in a large open space, and the whistle of escaping steam. Pain throbbed at the base of my skull.
“What the hell... ?” I mumbled. I tried to reach out, but my arms were pinned.
“She’s awake,” a man’s voice said. It came from somewhere behind me.
I’m in a bag, I realized. I was facedown in a canvas bag, hanging between two men who carried me like so much deadweight.
“Doesn’t matter,” another voice answered.
Up ahead, a third someone pushed a door open and then the footsteps around me changed as we entered a room.
“The second dissident,” a voice said. “Female.”
“Get it on the scale,” a fourth voice said.
The guy carrying the foot end of the bag dropped it and my hip crashed down hard on the floor. The other guy up front dumped me out like a load of laundry or trash, jerking the bag away once my head was clear.
The hard, tiled floor felt cold under my bare ass, and I realized I was completely naked. Four men stood around me in a big white room that was lit by work lights that hung from hooks. The floor was covered with a gritty film, and stained with green-black mold that also spotted the walls. A row of lockers were set up along one wall, and one hung open so I could see a set of work coveralls that hung inside. There was an old, lime-caked dry-scrub station next to that, and an electronic medical scale set up in one corner that looked newer than everything else.
To my left and right were two big shirtless guys, their skin covered with ornate tattoos. One of the men was bald, and the other’s hair was gelled back into spikes. Both of them had festival jiangshi masks hanging back behind their heads like they were getting ready to go to the parade. In front of me, a foreign green-eyed man stood holding a stack of papers and in front of him a short, ugly man with a comb-over and dark freckles sat behind a big folding table. He wore a pair of long shorts and a colorful, draping shirt sporting a tropical palm pattern.
“The scale,” he said again. One of the men dropped a greasy cardboard box on the table in front of him.
“You heard him,” the green-eyed man said.
“Where am I?” I rasped. “What’s happening?”
Green-eyes nudged me with his knee and I lost my balance, falling forward onto my hands.
“Where’s Vamp?” I asked. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Don’t talk to it!” the old man snapped. “Get it on the scale!”
The man sighed, like he’d been scolded by his father.
“Get on,” he said, pointing toward the scale. I stayed on the floor and shook my head. He raised his voice. “I can weigh you whole or in pieces, but you’re getting weighed.”
I knew where I was then. I sniffed the air and smelled cooking meat, along with the metallic tang of blood. I was in a scrapcake factory. The smell came from rendered human flesh.
I stood on shaky legs, my mind clutching at any denial no matter how flimsy, but I knew it was true. The scale seemed far away, like it was at the end of a long tunnel.
“Wait,” I said, choking on the word.
“Get on the scale!” he barked, and I raised my hands between us as he took a step toward me.
“Okay, okay,” I said, my voice wavering.
The room seemed to tilt as I walked toward the scale, looking around as I went. There was only one way in and out, through a green metal door back behind me. The two guys who’d carried me lingered near it, and could close the gap in a second if I tried to run.
The metal was cold under my bare feet as I c
limbed up onto the scale. A warm light snapped on over my head, and then a pattern of red laser dots appeared on my chest as the scale numbers flipped around. The scanner traveled down my stomach, flickering on and off before going dark. The old man consulted the screen of his electronic tablet.
“Ninety-two,” he said. “Body fat four point three percent. Barely worth the fuel to run the equipment.”
“Call the prison back and see if she’ll give you a refund,” Green-eyes taunted. The old man didn’t take the bait.
The Burn Zone Page 27