She was dragged from the spectacle toward a field filled with crude rows of pens.
“Stay cool. You got me?” Tonya said.
“I should be the least of your worries.”
Him and his Southern honor. He had no idea how serious this was. “Spencer, I’ll be fine. I’ve faced worse than this.” For certain values of worse.
“Really,” he said, and then nudged her. “I’ll be fine, too.” He moved his hands enough to let her see he’d gotten free of his cuffs.
Her heart almost stopped. If they found out how easily he could get loose, they’d shoot him on the spot. “Spencer, not now. Lock that shit up, right this instant.”
Mr. Pistol elbowed them apart with more nasty Chinese. Tonya knew Spencer’s cuffs would fall to the ground, and he’d get a rifle butt to the head. Fortunately the cuffs stayed locked.
The pens were nothing more than wooden posts enclosed with chicken wire. They didn’t hold poultry though. They held women. At least two dozen, maybe more. They’d all been nabbed by human traffickers.
Tonya’s wasn’t the only brown face, either. Three or four of them were as dark as she was, Indians and other South Asians. Tonya was the only actual sister she could see, and Spencer was the only white person. There probably wasn’t anyone out there who could interpret for them. The foul smelling bucket in the corner just completed the picture.
Now that the show was over, the rest of the camp shambled back into motion.
“Tonya,” Spencer whisper-shouted from the cell next door, “are you ready?”
She couldn’t take him being obscure right now. “Ready for what?”
He had the nerve to look hurt. “Hello? I’m not really handcuffed anymore?”
“Hello? Those guys have guns? Your friend is selling me to keep your ass alive. Don’t screw it up.”
His face changed. Finally, the light bulb had come on.
“I’ll get us out of this. I promise.”
“Spencer, don’t do anything stupid, okay?” He loved old movie references, so she tried one of her own. “We’re like a couple of Fonzies here, right?”
He nodded, and then relaxed. “Stay cool. Correctamundo.” He was a teenager, but he was also one of the smartest ones she’d ever met. Tonya wouldn’t need to worry about stupid heroics making them both dead anytime soon.
It didn’t get them closer to an actual solution, though. The guards would shout and threaten whenever they were caught talking, so eventually they sat far apart, watching the camp as it went about its business. Darkness fell, and she just needed to rest her eyes for a bit.
Jingling and tapping woke her up. Tonya rolled over.
Shan was working the lock on Spencer’s cell. “Spencer, Spencer,” he whispered as he worked. It was full-on night now, lit only by stars and the glowing coals of near-dead campfires. “Wake up!”
Spencer was obviously awake, but stayed still.
This was the wrong time for a stunt. Tonya rolled to her feet. “Spencer,” she whispered through the wire, “get up.” His head twitched so she knew he’d heard her. “Now.”
She kicked him through the slack wire walls of the pen when he tried to charge Shan.
“Tonya, what the fuck?” he whispered.
She had no time for this, and neither did he. Shan already had the door open.
“You’re getting him out of here, right?” Tonya had to be sure.
He nodded nervously. “Yes. They kill him. I hear tonight. Make example in morning.”
“I’m not leaving without her.”
No stupid theatrics. “Spencer, look at me. I said look at me.” She leapt over her handcuffed arms, and then put them behind her again. “I’ll be fine. You need to get out of here.”
“No.”
“Damn it, you are in over your head.”
“And you’re not?”
She hated when he had a point. “Who’s the one that can put a rock through a road sign with her foot?”
The women in adjacent cells began to stir.
Shan whispered, “We go!”
Spencer said, “Like Fonzie, right?”
Tonya was on the verge of becoming a slave. An actual slave. But if the least bit of her terror leaked out, he wouldn’t leave. “Exactly right, Spencer. Stay cool. I got this. Shan, go.”
The little traitor took Spencer’s arm and they fled into the night.
Chapter 31: Zoe
She’d been provided with a new network of, not to put too fine a point on it, terrorists, by Fee’s boss, the creepy voice. Zoe’d always had his contact number; all she needed to do was call. Cut out the middleman or, in this case the middle-insane-Fee, and stuff got done in a hurry. He’d laid out the whole thing for her in less than a week, fanatics that crisscrossed China just looking for direction, which Zoe was more than happy to provide.
“Daughter has failed,” it croaked. “You will suffice.”
Fee wanted to destroy herself. Mike had vanished, and Helen wasn’t completely real. They’d all betrayed her. She wasn’t a person; she was just a thing nobody wanted to acknowledge. She was less than property. Mike had made sure of that by tearing away the pieces that allowed others to control her. Damaged goods.
It was time to set the world on fire and make them all applaud the flames.
“Ask him if he’s sure the bombs are placed correctly,” she said to Qu.
Her new lieutenant translated to the fanatic in charge of the explosives. Zoe could follow Mandarin now, but it was still too easy to get the inflection wrong for her to try to speak it.
After a brief exchange, Qu nodded. “Yes. The infidels will be destroyed.”
She dismissed the fanatic and motioned Qu to join her at a nearby table. “How many do you think we’ll get?”
She hid the arms of her avatar under the table and used a pen knife construct to make gentle cuts in them. The healing contract of the realm was set to close them only on command, and she always waited until the blood started to clot. The pain cleansed, but only if she was patient. The dark pants she always wore now didn’t show stains when the blood dripped from her arms. It had soaked through the denim construct, and her pants stuck just slightly to her legs as she moved them, talking to Qu.
“They planted twelve bombs. The way the schools are constructed, we should be able to collapse all of them instantly. Praise be to God.”
World events had played right into Zoe’s hand. It all started with a remote outpost in northern India that vanished not long after she’d landed in Chengdu. Terrorism, the real kind. Every day after that had brought a new atrocity. Lose a few dozen villages scattered all over the north, and soon you were talking about real casualties. India had the evidence, and the court of world opinion decided against China. The Middle Kingdom’s pride and paranoia did the rest.
The tension between India and China had ratcheted up to a fever pitch now. China’s army was mobilizing, all headed for the Indian border. The government had no time to chase down Zoe’s new organization, and Helen’s absence meant the police couldn’t find them in the realms.
Her first strikes were simple, more to ensure the strength of this new network than to prove any real point. A warehouse here, a construction site there, small time stuff. This time she would bring real art. She wasn’t massacring random remote villages. She was blowing up schools, selected so their collapse would outline the Chinese character for blood when plotted on a map of the city.
It was time. The one thing she admired about Helen and Mike was their ability to be in more than one place at a time. Her designers hadn’t included that option. Oh, she had a ton of parallel processing capability, but it was far below her conscious control.
To keep track of it all she had to monitor the news feeds just like everyone else. Zoe triggered the healing contract and bit her lip as the cuts on her arms sealed instantly. At this level of realism, the release sent waves of ecstasy back and forth through her. The tension of previous ops had never bothered her one bit, bu
t this was the real thing. She paced back and forth.
“You need to be still, Zhao,” Qu said.
Chinese didn’t take anyone without a Chinese name seriously, so she’d accepted Zhao. It was close to what her real name sounded like. “I can’t be still anymore, Qu.” She hadn’t been genuinely still since that night with Fee. Zoe put her knife in a pocket but still played with the handle. She warmed at the thought of how they’d play when this was over.
She checked the feeds again. The regular school year had ended just the previous week; at this time of night, the classrooms would be empty. It was vaguely disappointing they only needed a small amount of explosives to bring the buildings down. In spite of decades of protests, the shoddy construction standards of their schools had not changed at all.
Keeping the haptic field of the realm at maximum allowed her breathing to feel right. The fingers of her avatar bled around her chewed nails. Zoe swore a stream of curses under her breath. It wasn’t going to work.
Qu motioned to the chair beside him. “Will you sit down please?”
She sat on the couch construct next to his avatar just as a flash from the security camera feed bathed his face in gray-white light. Zoe turned in time to see the low-rise building collapse in a cloud of dust. The other eleven feeds showed identical scenes. Her lieutenant shouted in celebration.
But then the displays went wrong. “What’s going on?”
Other nearby buildings swayed and crumbled. The lieutenant on the scene vanished, but not before shouting a single word.
“Earthquake!”
Her crystal matrix, the only part of herself in realspace, was in that city. There was no avoiding a backlash when the building that held it collapsed. The realm tore apart, and Zoe went with it. The haptic field very briefly modeled exactly what would happen if a human body were torn to pieces, and completely overloaded her.
The recovery started shortly afterward. It was the first time she’d been unmanifested in weeks. While the repair routines knitted her back together, their reports were startling. There were errors in deep registers; whole clusters had been relying on single stripe sets to function. She should’ve shut down days ago. The horror at what she’d done nearly caused a crash.
She’d wanted to kill schoolchildren.
It wasn’t just her interior states that were a mess. The realm itself wasn’t reassembling cleanly either. As soon as the haptic field got above thirty percent, a dissonant chord rang through it. It was a transmission of some sort, but Zoe didn’t recognize the way the packets were encoded. She slipped into the network tunnel that the transmission used as the walls of the realm closed behind her.
A construct filled most of the tunnel, a vast liquid analog river of hypercompressed data suspended in the center like it was in zero-g. The quantum sound algorithms were incredibly complex. Coiled, flowing silver rushed in both directions, like a cable of pure mercury. The power required to hold it together must’ve been immense. The Tau modeling alone would’ve taken all her processing power.
At one end, the tube connected with another realm; the cable continued through a vast distance.
The dissonant chord expanded in both power and harmonic complexity the closer she got to the edge. She had to decrease her perception sensitivity just to think.
The realm was a cave, vast and craggy. On the floor far below, row upon row of glowing constructs stood, almost like people, but they were too far away for her to be sure.
A light flared bright behind her and Zoe spun around. The cable was expanding, rushing toward her as it filled the tunnel completely. She didn’t have time to move out of the way before—
Chapter 32: Spencer
He’d done his fair share of moving through the woods at night. That didn’t make it easy, just possible. He’d also had his fair share of betrayals. With a family as screwed up as his, that was inevitable.
He’d left Tonya behind. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life. And it was all Shan’s fault.
His rage boiled over just as Shan tripped on a hidden root. Spencer jumped on his back, beating his head into the ground. “Hate you, goddamn it, motherfucking hate you!”
Shan tried to throw Spencer off, but he wouldn’t let go. Spencer switched to a chokehold. Two sharp elbows cracked into his sides, and he couldn’t hold on anymore.
Shan leaped up and vanished into the darkness. “It not my fault!”
He hadn’t gone far, but he was still moving. It was too dark to see tracks, too dark to see much of anything really, so Spencer couldn’t tell where he was anymore.
“You no idea what countryside like, Spencer. No money, no women, government move us wherever they want.”
And so he works with slavers. Such bullshit. “That’s not my problem, Shan.”
“No, it not, I sorry, I try save rest. Helen and Kim sick. No good.”
They circled each other in the dark. He was as invisible to Shan as Shan was to him. “Right. You’re a real hero.”
“I do what I need for survive. You think I got job by myself? Car? I no money, I no girl.”
“There’s more to life than girls and cars, Shan.”
“For rich American, maybe. How many car you have, Spencer? How many computer? How many girlfriend?”
Three of each, a point that briefly distracted him. “You sold us out. Your friends are slavers.”
He’d left Tonya behind, running away like a little bitch.
“I not stupid. I keep hurt girl safe. Kim and Helen, yes? Boss shoot them, broken. Spencer, they shoot them, just like you.”
Jesus, this was such shit. He’d left one of his best friends in a goddamned chicken coop, and now he was feeling sympathy for the guy who put her there.
“So I’m supposed to think you’re doing us a favor?” Shan’s voice had stopped moving, but Spencer needed to keep him talking to figure out exactly where he was.
“No. I sorry, Spencer. Really sorry. I protect much as can, but I need things, yeah? Apartment, car, place for parents? This my last run. Tonya not what boss want, but he pay enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“I get out now. I keep you alive, and Tonya pays for real friends. Why you care so much anyway?”
That brought him up short. “Excuse me?”
“Spencer, come on. Tonya black ghost. Not as good. Not same.”
This wasn’t happening. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“She not as good as real friends. Different name, skin color.”
He knew exactly where Shan was now, but Spencer waited, trying desperately to deny just how badly he’d misjudged him.
“Tonya just nig—”
Spencer charged into Shan’s chest, but they didn’t thump onto the ground.
They fell.
After a sickening drop his world turned into a confusing series of collisions and crashes. They sailed into the air, this time tumbling to land head-first. Spencer took the blow on his shoulders, almost losing his grip on Shan. A sharp rock bashed heavily into in his side, then he rolled down some sort of embankment and launched into the air again. Spencer saw Shan, his head at a completely wrong angle, his eyes glassy, and then a cold wall of foam crashed over him.
Chapter 33: Mike
Mike was an early riser. He'd never understood why anyone would choose otherwise. Sunrises were glorious, and sunsets were easy enough to catch after that. Clubbing was never going to be Kim’s thing, and Mike really didn’t see the point. Expensive drinks, smoke, and a sound system turned up way too loud didn’t work for him. True, it made seeing meteor showers a challenge, and Spencer still made fun of how he went to bed before midnight, but none of it ever compared to that giant ball of gas serenely rising over the horizon, slowly heating the planet that was his home.
They’d been at the monastery for four days now. Mike was always the first one out, but not this time. Someone was already chanting on the porch. As he got closer, he recognized the voice.
Mike
edged the door open, and there was Kim, sitting precisely on the spot Taranathi had on the day he’d died. Her robes were correct, her posture perfect, and the chant was humble and amazing. He had no idea she’d paid the slightest attention to what they were doing, and yet here she was, chanting better than most mid-level novices.
Something scraped behind him.
The monks had stacked up at the door. He whispered to Li, “Can you get them out there without disturbing her?” Mike had to nudge him, but he agreed.
Kim could be a brass-plated pain in the ass, there was no denying it. But here she was all on her own, trying to greet the sunrise with a chant he’d taught her. The same one he’d chanted on their apartment balcony the night after they first met.
She finished and smiled when he started the next chant. The other monks joined and startled her, but she recovered gracefully. He knew better than to laugh or smile, but on the inside, it was a wonderfully candid moment to see her surprised and just a little vulnerable.
During a pause, she leaned over and whispered, “I lost track of time. I didn’t mean to ruin your ceremony.”
He shook his head. She worried about the strangest things sometimes. “You’re fine.”
Sun suitably greeted, they moved to the cafeteria. Mike had learned very quickly that he got between Kim and breakfast only at his peril.
She set her fork down. “Any word from Spencer or Tonya?”
In addition to fixing Spencer’s insatiable cigarette craving, he was hoping the Wumart would have phones for sale.
In the big cities, Wumart stores really were like a Chinese version of Walmart, but out in the countryside they were more like convenience stores, carrying a little of everything but not much of any one thing. There was no guarantee there would be any in stock.
“No, not yet.” Now there wouldn’t be any word from them until they got back, late this afternoon at the earliest.
Ozzie plopped down on a chair next to Kim’s. He scooted it noisily away from her, but not as far as yesterday. The training must have been helping.
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