The Burn Zone

by James K. Decker

  I shook my head and rubbed my latest tattoo. I made sure to have it inked on my left arm and not my right, but I think Dragan still wasn’t sure what to make of it. I turned it up and looked it over, the redness around the edges of the band still visible in the fading light.

  NIX.

  “He’s not my friend,” I said.

  “Then why the tattoo?”

  “We’re bonded. And I owe him.”

  “But he’s not your friend?”

  I wondered where he was now. I thought about going to Shangzho, to try and find him, but I couldn’t bring myself to go there. I couldn’t bring myself to be surrounded by them, to put myself in their hands like that. Maybe he was okay, and like us he was just kind of lying low, and keeping the boat from rocking too much, but every time I checked his chat icon on the 3i, the little heart was gray.

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Is that why you withdrew from the surrogate program?” he asked.

  I shrugged. He didn’t say anything for a minute, but when he did, his voice was low, and serious.

  “Sam, what did you see down there?”

  I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Vamp.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  The haan’s deception bothered me, but I could, in a way, understand it. If that’s how they really looked, they were right to think people would freak out because I still shivered when I thought of it. What really bothered me was Fangwenzhe. There wasn’t an astronomer in the country who would say it hadn’t been there forever, and yet it had only appeared in the sky less than fifty years before. Anyone who contradicted that disappeared, like that man Jin, who escaped the meat farm with us. The haan might cloud our minds, but that lie wasn’t just theirs; it was our own. Fifty years of isolation, propaganda, and information control had made an entire population believe something the rest of the world had to know wasn’t true. They’d worked together on that, and who knew what else?

  Why?

  The foreigners, the people in the ships massed up around us, they’d been trying to tell us. They still were, through the signal Hwong had labeled a cyberattack. Outside the range of the haan’s influence, what else did they know? What were they trying so hard to warn us of?

  A fat scalefly buzzed around the overhead light before lighting down on the tabletop, drawn in by the sweetness of the liquor. It sat there, its single compound eye staring up at me as it rubbed its hooked legs together.

  “I know how important the program was to you,” Dragan said. “You love taking care of them.”

  “I just need a break from it, I think.”

  He knew me well enough to know there had to be more to it than that, but he didn’t press. The truth was that I missed having one around. I really missed it, but I couldn’t look at the haan in the same way anymore. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to again.

  Another message from Vamp popped up about the 3i tray, and began to flash an urgent orange.

  You need to see this. I looked back to Dragan, and saw concern in his eyes. He had begun to suspect something was wrong.

  “You know,” he said, “if you had seen something, something you weren’t sure you could talk about, you could tell me. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I know.”

  I hadn’t meant to use the word. It just popped out, but as soon as it did I could see that it meant something. His expression only changed a little, so little that someone else might have missed it, but it was enough. I smiled, and squeezed his hand.

  “Mind if I put some music on?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  I headed into the next room and took the opportunity to check out what it was that Vamp thought was so important. The video file was small, just a clip of something. I dropped it into the media player and moved it to the foreground as I pulled up the music tuner on the TV.

  As soon as the recording began to play, I could see it was part of an eyebot log. It was video recorded from the app after it tagged a couple of security guys. A few seconds in, I saw one of the soldiers was Pei Ligong.

  This was in the Pot, I realized. This was taken in the old man’s apartment, from my feed.

  The view turned back to the kitchen doorway as one of the soldiers stepped through. The little girl stood nearby as he approached the others, holding up the sheet of bloody remains he’d found in the trash. Part of a matted hospital gown was plastered to it, and a circle appeared around it with a message.

  The girl wore this.

  It was true. The gown was just like the one the girl had been wearing in Dragan’s wet drive recording.

  The soldier passed the girl, and behind him she and the old man, the one I was sure had died, looked right at each other. The looks in their eyes didn’t quite fit, somehow, like something was passing between them.

  Vamp, what am I looking at?

  The video highlighted the open bedroom door, and another circle appeared over the mattress, which had a big bloodstain on it. The old man knelt in front of the bed while soldiers milled around outside. The video zoomed in on him.

  I hadn’t been paying attention to what he was doing. On the recording, though, it was clear that he pulled something out from under the bed, something wet and rubbery. It was only visible for a second, but long enough for me to make out fingers and even part of a face.

  It was skin. It was the old man’s skin.

  Didn’t you sense a haan in that apartment? Vamp messaged.

  I nodded. Yes. Two. I’d noticed the first when we first entered, and the second appeared just as the old man, who we were both convinced had died, sat back up.

  On the recording, the old man bundled the skin up and hid it in the dresser.

  Vamp, where are they now?

  No one knows.

  The man stepped back through the bedroom door and for a second, just a second, his shadow on the wall seemed wrong. The shape of it didn’t line up. Almost, but not quite. Then it resolved, as the soldiers joined him.

  The video zoomed in on the girl as a scalefly landed on the back of her hand. She raised it up, close to her face as it vibrated its iridescent wings, and stepped closer to one of the soldiers.

  “Sam, everything okay?” Dragan called. My hand felt numb as I tuned into one of the feed stations. As mellow music began to pipe through, Nix’s words from just before we entered the Pot came back to me.

  “We were like you once....”

  The little girl blew out a breath, and sent the fly buzzing toward the soldier’s neck as if blowing him a kiss.

  “One day, you will be like us.”