Ember

by James K. Decker

  “What do you mean by ‘protected?’ ” I asked the man.

  “Shut up,” another man said to the first.

  “Answer me,” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “The people who deal our product are like royalty in this country, and they own this city,” the second man said. “You’ll never know who they are, and we’ll never see the inside of a detention center, bet on it.”

  In Hangfei, “royalty” referred to the business elite and usually one of the three big corporate empires. I tended to doubt the trade went quite that high, but command had deliberately stopped us from going in. I had no doubt of that. Still, the man was wrong about being protected. They may have stalled us for some reason, but they hadn’t shut down the operation or cleared out the site ahead of time.

  “We had orders to take this place out,” I told him. “Even if what you say is true, you’re a little fish they’re cutting loose for appearances. No one’s going to help you.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Did they stall us because of the haan?” I asked him. “Did they know she was here?”

  “What haan?”

  “Were they waiting until she was clear before they let us come in?”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The woman on the hook, her sticky, tangled hair dangling, turned so that I could see her bloodless face. Her eyes, empty and glassy now, were stuck open wide in horror.

  I looked from her, down to the captives. They sat naked, nearly hanging from chained collars with their bony arms and legs sprawled. Some looked unconscious, or dead. The ones who were awake looked crazy with fear. I looked from them, to the body parts sealed in plastic, then back to the dangling woman.

  “You’re not getting away with this,” I told them.

  “You can’t stop it.”

  “I can stop you.”

  I flicked the catch on my pistol, setting it back to single shot fire. Then I aimed it at the back of the second man’s head.

  “Fuck you,” he spat.

  I pulled the trigger, and he jerked once as blood splashed from the hole in his forehead. While the first man tried to turn, I shot him, too.

  “Wait,” the last man said. “Wait—”

  I fired the third, and, final shot. When it was done, I stood still for a moment while the pools of blood grew around their heads then merged to become one. I waited to see if some aftershock of emotion would come, but it didn’t.

  “Shao, get down!”

  I turned as two shots went off almost simultaneously. One bullet grazed my neck, and would have punched straight through if I hadn’t moved. The second struck a fourth man who had entered from an open door on the far side of the room. He stumbled, and fell into the wall. The pistol fell from his hand as he slumped, leaving a swatch of blood on the concrete behind him.

  I looked back across the room and saw Liao, his weapon still aimed at the fallen man.

  “Thanks, Liao.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “Straight up crazy.”

  “Did command finally give you the okay?” He shook his head.

  “Then thanks again.”

  I stepped away from the bodies, and toward the ramp.

  “Xiao-Xing are you here?”

  In the pit below, eight people sat chained to the walls behind them. Each one had a plastic bucket to go to the bathroom in, and a water bottle with an inch or so of brown water in it. The bottles hung in wire baskets, a metal tube sticking out so they could lick a ball bearing at the end to let the drops out. I looked over the bony, ashen bodies. Three of them were young girls.

  “Xiao-Xing?”

  “Here,” an old man rasped. He gestured to the girl next to him. She sat curled in a ball, head lolling at the end of her chain so that her shoulder length hair hung around her face. Her ribs stuck out, with deep shadows between them.

  I holstered my weapon and descended the ramp, approaching her.

  “Is she alive?” I asked the old man.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Help is coming,” I told the others. “We’re going to get you all out of here.”

  I knelt in front of the girl, and put one hand on her bony shoulder. Her skin still felt warm.

  “Xiao-Xing, it’s—”

  She lunged, then, and pain lanced through my cheek. She pulled her hand back, tugging the length of sharpened wire she held back through and slashing my face as she tried to come around for another swing.

  “It’s okay,” I said, grabbing her wrist. The strength almost immediately went out of her. Her eyes were wild with fear, and I could see she thought I was one of the butchers and I’d come for her. With the little strength she’d stored used up, the wire, its tip bloody, fell from her fingers and landed on the floor next to her as tears welled in her eyes.

  “Don’t eat me,” she rasped.

  “I’m not one of them,” I told her. “It’s me, Dragan.”

  Confusion flickered in her eyes. I pointed to my name patch.

  “It’s me.”

  “Dragan,” she said. I could barely hear her.

  “Yeah. Hold still.”

  Her eyes flashed again when I drew my field knife, but she didn’t have the energy to resist. I slipped it carefully into her collar and sliced through the material. I peeled it free, supporting her so that she didn’t fall over when the chain fell away.

  “You’re okay,” I told her.

  “Jesus,” Liao said from the top of the ramp.

  I unzipped my armored jacket and shrugged it off so I could unbutton my shirt. I removed it and helped Xiao-Xing into it. The sleeves hung past her hands as I buttoned it back up and pulled the tails down to cover her before scooping her up in my arms. She hardly weighed anything at all.

  “Can you call them in? Tell them it’s all clear and get the rest in here to help these people?”

  Liao nodded. “Yeah. Where are you going?”

  “She needs help now.”

  He nodded again and tossed me his airbike key. I carried her up the ramp as Liao headed down to help the rest.

  “Shao,” he called back, “what did you find? Any clue why they held us up?”

  I shook my head.

  “No.”

  I carried her back the way I’d come. When we got to the door, I put my mask over her face and pushed open the door.

  Liao had parked the security airbike at the end of the row. I sat Xiao-Xing in front of me, keeping one arm around her for support as I started the engine. She flinched when we came up off the ground.

  “I’ve got you,” I told her, and launched us back up through the swirling fog.

  As we crossed back over the sea of gray, I wondered what would come of my actions. They might get rid of me, prosecute me, or they might cover their tracks and commend me. No matter what they did, though, they’d never tell me what happened. They’d never explain the presence of the haan. Maybe they didn’t know themselves, but I doubted that. They’d known she’d be there. They didn’t want us to see, and I had a feeling that when I checked into it later I would find no trace of those three kids in the records of Child Services. If I wanted answers, I’d have to find them myself.

  Xiao-Xing stirred in front of me, nestling her head against my chest and reaching to take the hand I held her with in her own bony one.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her voice cracked, barely rising above the whine of the engine.

  I gave her hand a gentle squeeze as we crossed back over the wall toward the towers of Hangfei.

  Read on for a special preview of

  The Burn Zone,

  James Decker’s new novel.

  Available in February 2013 from Roc.

  One

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nbsp; 30:12:04 BC

  The elevator rattled its way up toward my floor as I leaned back, eyes closed, only half-aware of the world around me. The bitter aftertaste of Zen oil lingered on my tongue, and while it still had me pleasantly disconnected my thoughts buzzed around in circles beneath the haze. I felt like I should be upset, or afraid . . . like I should be freaking out or something, but I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t know how to feel anymore, about anything.

  “To anyone receiving this transmission . . .”

  The voice, a foreign man speaking butchered Mandarin, sounded distant, rising through a faint static whine from over the ad box maybe? Somewhere nearby.

  “. . . the race you call the haan are not . . .” More static. “. . . this is not a dream. . . .”

  I snorted as the elevator jostled me out of my trance, and shook my head to clear it. I rubbed my eyes, and as I took a wobbly step forward I saw the ad box screen mounted inside the door flicker to display a panel of cool electric gray.

  “Xiao-Xing?” a female voice asked, issuing from the speaker underneath. When I didn’t answer, it tried again. “Sam?”

  “Not now,” I said, chewing my lip.

  “Sorry, but elevators cost money, you know. I have two names on record matching your ID. Which do you prefer?”

  “Sam, I guess.” The box screen flickered, updating info. “Was that you talking, before?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Something about a transmission? The haan? I thought I heard something.”

  “It wasn’t me. Since you have a moment, though, I would like to talk to you about—”

  “Do you have any news?” I asked it. “About the bombing? Do you know anything?”

  The A.I. paused, then tried another tack.

  “Would you like to be sexy?” it asked.

  I laughed a little at that, a giggle that sounded a little more unhinged the longer it went on.

  “I am sexy,” I breathed.

  “Well, maybe,” the A.I. responded, sounding a bit skeptical.

  The screen dissolved the standby gray, and splashed the Sultrex logo while saxophone music began to pipe softly through.

  “Look, do you know anything about the bomb?” I asked again.

  “No, Sam,” it said, “but I do know this; as you’re probably aware, given your calorie allotment, it is impossible for you to naturally develop the kinds of curves all women want and all men desire, but why be a victim of circumstances beyond your control?”

  The elevator shook to a stop, and I hoisted my gear as the screen displayed two images of me. On the left, under the word before, was a shot it had taken of me when I first got on, standing there with my gear and covered in sweat. On the right, under the word after, was the exact same shot manipulated so that in place of my more-or-less flat chest was a big set of computer-generated tits. They strained against the material of my tank top, while a drop of sweat did a slow roll down into the crevice between them. I laughed again, a little.

  “Nice touch.”

  “It came out of the latest eye-tracking study,” the A.I. admitted.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For a very reasonable fee, you could be one of the most desirable young women in Hangfei—”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  “More people than you might think.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Don’t forget, there is a scheduled demolition along the Impact rim tonight,” it said. “Curfew will be in—”

  The A.I. was still yammering as the elevator door squealed open and carried the screen away with it into the wall. I stepped out under the buzzing overhead in the hallway and dug into one pocket to find my last loose cigarillo, bent but not broken. I stuck it in the corner of my mouth and crunched down on the end with my teeth as I cracked my back. With the heat wave, washing windows up on Ginzho Tower was brutal, and a day of squeegeeing biocide and smog resin off hot glass had left my brain cooked. The cool air felt like water trickling down over my burned face, chest, and shoulders.

  As I started down the hall, I crooked my neck, a motor cortex key that brought up the 3i front end. The braided lanyard from my wet drive implant brushed my shoulder as the holographic display appeared in front of my face with its candy pink neon borders, and immediately social taps from friends, notifications, and ads sprinkled into the foreground. The word cloud that formed in the corner of one eye was ugly, full of variations on bomb, suicide, attack, and dead. That last one flashed on headline tickers, the feeds a fever of rising death counts while laying bets on what horrible thing might come next. I glanced left to screen out the static, and most of the little icons scattered. I tapped friends back to let them know I was okay, and then tuned out the tide of chatter as I headed down the hall toward home.

  The other apartment doors were all showing red locks, and I clomped past them, searching my pockets for a light. When I turned the corner I heard my surrogate haan, Tanchi, crying, and his low, shuddering keen snapped me out of it a little as it carried down the hallway. Already I could sense him, a faint haze of anxiety, fear, and hunger—always hunger.

  I sent him a single ping and immediately the wailing stopped. His mood turned on a dime, and the cluster of haan brain-band mites tingled deep in my forehead as he reached out to make contact. Requests started trickling in and getting rejected by the 3i’s junk call filter as he picked at any and every open socket, trying to say hi. When I got a little closer the mites locked in fully on his signals and he was there, like a tickle at the edges of my mind. An excited signal spiked through and nicked my visual cortex, causing two ghostly scaleflies, their single compound eyes flashing, to jitter through the air in front of me along with a brief, flickering image of a surrogate formula bottle that quickly faded.

  “Mommy’s home,” I singsonged around the cigarillo.

  He heard me and I felt a surge, a happy bubbling that always made me smile no matter how bad my day had been.

  It faltered as I approached the front door, though. I could see the spray paint from down the hall. Tanchi was my third surrogate so far since we moved here, and I’d thought the people in our building were starting to get used to it. As I got closer I could make out the sloppy squiggles of hanzi that had dribbled before drying.

  They eat—we starve.

  I abandoned the cigarillo, tucking it behind one ear and spitting out a fleck of tobacco. My mood soured, and pulled me from Tanchi’s happy little wave, but I tried to shake it off. It was just paint. I didn’t want get Tanchi upset with a bunch of bad bleed-back, and it wasn’t like there wasn’t any truth to it. With the world population at just under fifteen billion, food scarcity was a problem even before the haan showed up. Even our country had been affected, and now there was no getting around the fact that the haan took the majority of the food we produced just to survive. The gamble would pay off in the long run, or so they said, but it was easy to forget how much they did for us when you went to bed hungry every night like some lost worlder.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slow. It wasn’t worth scaring Tanchi over. It wasn’t a bomb, say, or something even worse. It was just paint.

  I used my badge to trigger the lock and then pushed open the door, feeling the anticipation rise from the direction of the junkyard crib across the room where a single scalefly buzzed in a lazy circle around a hanging mobile. It lit down on the edge of the crib’s backboard, scraping its wings together as it used its hooklike forelegs to preen its stinging proboscis and its black marble eye. The shadows of Tanchi’s spindly, delicate little webbed fingers danced on the wall next to it.

  I put down my washer rigging, along with the bucket of squeegees and glass cleaner, next to the worn counter where a tin pot sat still dirty on the hot plate. Even in the dark I could see the clutter that had built up. Dirty clothes were draped over the sofa and ch
airs, and pretty much every counter and tabletop had hit capacity. I had some major cleaning to do.

  Ling hobbled out from the kitchen, peering up at me from under heavy, wrinkled eyelids and looking tired. She noticed the spray paint on the door as it swung shut, and put one hand over her mouth.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s no big deal.”

  “I didn’t even hear—”

  “It’s okay, Ling, really.” I glanced back. “I bet you anything it was that little Heng shit. Punk’s going to end up in jail for sure. Everything go okay?”

  She nodded and wrinkled her nose. “I fed it at the times you said. I entered the log too, like you said.”

  I peered through the bars of the crib, the worry an unconscious habit. Ling noticed and added, “I know they’re delicate. I was careful.”

  “Sorry, I know. Thanks for doing it.”

  “They’re so ugly.” She frowned, the wrinkles in her face deepening. “Do you need the stipend that bad? Doesn’t your father take care of you?”

  “Guardian,” I corrected. She waved a bony hand at me. “We both work. What do you want?”

  She looked at me critically.

  “You’re twenty now,” she said. “Why are you still here anyway? You should be on your own.”

  “I was on my own until I was twelve. Cut me some slack.”

  “You’re not twelve anymore. You’re a woman now.” She shook out a cigarette of her pack, staining the end pink as she held it between her lips.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Find a man,” she said, lighting the smoke and sucking down a small gray cloud. “Get on the list to have a real baby, not one of those.”