Ember

by James K. Decker

  I’d never know. It was all classified, and it all happened before my time. Even Dragan was just a kid, drinking vodka or whatever eleven-year-olds did over in the Pan-Slav Emirates. Whatever they’d promised, it wasn’t anything they’d given us so far—the food was payment for that. Not the defense shield. Something else. Something better.

  We will save you. It’s all they would say.

  “You’re inside, right?” Vamp asked.

  “Yeah, but I have to go back out.”

  “You’re nuts. The sweep’s going to be up your ass in like an hour.”

  “I know, but I’m out of meds.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m not starting, I’m just saying a little Zen oil here and there is one thing, but—”

  “That’s starting.”

  “I’m just saying there’s a reason all that shit got legalized. They want to keep everyone fuzzy. Don’t play into it.”

  “I want to be fuzzy,” I said. “I need to be fuzzy. When I’m not fuzzy I . . .”

  I didn’t know how to put it. When Vamp and I met, I’d already been living with Dragan for a couple of years. He didn’t know what things were like before that, the things that happened to me and the things I’d done.

  “What do you want me to say?” I said instead. “I’m a mess.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I get it.”

  He didn’t, though. He thought he did, but he didn’t, and I didn’t want him to.

  “It’s not narcs anyway,” I said as a warble snuck into my voice. “These are legit meds. I don’t sleep without them, Vamp. I—”

  “It’s okay, Sam. I know.”

  The bundle of blankets had begun to get really warm as Tanchi slipped deeper into his food coma. I could feel his rising body heat against my chest and neck as I looked out the window to where the distant dust cloud formed a column, rising high into the night sky. If I was going to go, I had to get out there and back before the sweep, and before Tanchi’s last feeding.

  I realized then that I really didn’t have very much time at all, and if I didn’t make it I was going to be in for a long night.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “What about the kid?”

  “I’ll bring him with me. It’s just down the block. I’ll be careful.”

  “Okay, get going. Run the new eyebot build, though. We’re tracking the sweep live, and the more nodes the better.”

  “I’ll be back in before they get this far.”

  “Just run it. You never know.”

  I lowered Tanchi back into his crib and tucked the blankets around him, then crossed to the balcony door and slid it open. The concrete floor outside vibrated under my feet as the racket rolled across the city like thunder. A blue arc of electricity snapped up from the expanding cloud and flashed over the rim, a huge, electric tentacle that touched the bubble of light in the distance. A bright, hexagonal mesh pulsed around the strike point, lighting up the northern face of the looming ship. White-hot flakes tumbled down the side of the force field as the glow faded, and the blanket of clouds above formed a huge, lazy whirlpool over the dome’s peak.

  “Damn it,” I whispered. The streets were buzzing—I could hear it from fifty stories up. A lockdown would shut the markets down early. They’d be a madhouse right up until the point they had to scatter.

  I looked back through the balcony doorway. Should I really take him with me out there? Or would he be okay until I got back?

  “Vamp, I gotta go.”

  I turned away from the crumbling bit of skyline and headed back in, canned air chilling the sweat on the back of my neck.

  “Run the app.”

  “I will. ‘Bye.”

  I hung up and stood there for a minute, not sure what to do first. It might be safer to leave Tanchi, but it was also against the law. I crossed back to the crib and reached down to get him ready to go out.

  When the bolt on the front door snapped, I almost jumped out of my skin. The door flew open and I heard someone stumble into my gear, knocking the bucket over as heavy footsteps moved through the entryway. I turned, heart pounding, but it was just Dragan, back early. He stepped into the living room as the door swung shut back behind him with a thud.

  “Hey,” I said, switching off the TV. He didn’t answer. He was still dressed in his military uniform, his pistol still strapped to his hip. His eyes were wide.

  “D?”

  Something was wrong. His cropped salt-and-pepper hair was spiky with sweat and grease, and the lines in his face looked deeper than usual. He was pale, making the wire-thin scar on his cheek stand out raw red, and the rims of his lower eyelids were the color of a bruise.

  “Sam,” he said distantly. “Get your things.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer. He just stepped farther into the room, a kind of slow shuffle, and I noticed something, a stain of some kind, spattered on the front of his uniform.

  “Is that blood?” I asked. He still wouldn’t look at me. He was just staring straight ahead like he didn’t know where he was, or who I was.

  “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”

  “Is there any food left?” he asked.

  “One ration.”

  He nodded. “Get it.”

  “Didn’t they pay you a new ration sheet?”

  “It’s gone,” he said distantly.

  “What?”

  “It’s gone. Get the ration.”

  I crossed over to him, and when I touched his arm he flinched.

  “D, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and for just a second whatever else it was that was on his mind shifted to the background. For just a second, he looked at me the way he had that day he found me, and still did whenever he stopped thinking about himself and there was only me.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  My voice had turned hoarse all of a sudden, and my face began to get hot. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

  I saw the security part of him tick off that I wasn’t in any immediate trouble, and then his eyes drifted over the apartment. For just a second, irritation flared up on his face, but it died just as quick, even as he spoke.

  “What the hell did you do to this place?” His voice sounded far off, though, his words forgotten as soon as he said them. He wiped his face with his hand and stared out the big window, off toward the force field dome and the ship on the other side.

  “Dragan . . .”

  “She’s dead,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Who?” I asked, but he just shook his head.

  “We’re leaving. Now.”

  “What?”

  “Now,” he said. “Take only what you need.”

  “We can’t just leave, D. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Listen,” he said, raising his voice. “Take just what you need and—”

  Tanchi squawked from the other side of the room, and at the sound Dragan’s eyes went wide. He stepped back, crashing into the wet bar and knocking glasses down to shatter on the floor. He turned to the crib, and I saw his hand move toward his gun.

  “Dragan!”

  He eased his hand back down, still not taking his eyes off the kid.

  “Now,” he said. “We’re leaving here in five minutes.”

  His boots crunched through the broken glass as he crossed to the doorway and down the hall to his bedroom. I went to Tanchi and stroked his cheek, humming softly until the mewling stopped. His slack limbs twitched as he metabolized, still warm to the touch, but when he looked up at me from the crib, his flame orange eyes were alert. His growing fear seeped through the mites, lik
e a spastic electric current that sent jolts through my forehead.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. Dragan came tromping back into the living room, and I saw he had a second gun in his hand, which he slipped into his belt just behind the first.

  “Leave it,” he said.

  “What . . . Tanchi?”

  “Leave it.”

  “Dragan, we can’t just leave him here. If he doesn’t get fed he could die—”

  “Don’t argue with me, Sam!”

  The front door’s knob turned, and the door thumped as the bolt kept it from opening. Dragan spun around and drew his pistol as something pounded against the other side, hard.

  “Dragan . . .”

  “They tracked me,” he said to himself.

  A loud boom shook the apartment and sent an avalanche of paper trash sliding off the kitchen counter. A second crash came as the front door’s bolt tore loose from the jamb and it blew open in a shower of splinters and drywall powder. Tanchi screamed as Dragan grabbed my wrist and pulled me close, hissing into my ear.

  “When I say run, you run,” he said. I nodded. “If you don’t hear from me in an hour, I’ve arranged a transport out of the country to Duongroi. Go to Central Transport and—”

  “Duongroi? D, why?”

  “Please, Sam, just—”

  He stopped short as several figures came tromping through the doorway.

  “Nobody move,” a woman’s voice said from behind him.

  Dragan put his hand on my cheek.

  “You’re going to hear some things about me,” he said. “Don’t believe them. I love you like you were my own flesh and blood, Sam. Remember that.”

  A lump rose in my throat as two men and a woman, all dressed in black body armor, came marching into the room with us through a haze of dust. Their scaly, formfitting combat suits hummed, creating static that made my hair stand on end, and their faces were shielded by light disruptors, giving their hooded heads the look of empty black eggshells.

  Dragan turned, standing between us and facing them. He aimed the pistol, but before he could get a shot off, the closest soldier lashed out in a blur and clamped down on his wrist. Dragan fired twice, the bullets thudding into the far wall before the suit whined and I heard the crack of bone. He grunted, and the gun clunked down onto the floor between them. The goon stomped on it and kicked it back behind him with his boot.

  Still pinned, Dragan reached back with his free hand and drew the second pistol he’d tucked in his belt. He plowed into the guy who had his wrist, and fired two shots into his side while the other soldiers piled on.

  “Now!” he yelled. “Sam, Go!”

  Across the room I could see the front door hanging from one twisted hinge, offering a clear path to the hallway outside.

  “Go!”

  The two men held Dragan while the woman stepped in. A round red stamp stood out on her armor’s right shoulder plate, marking her as the ranking soldier. She took two steps toward Dragan, and as he struggled against the men she fired the heel of her boot into his chest. His eyes bugged, and his face turned purple as blood coughed from his mouth and his legs dropped out from under him.

  I looked to the open doorway again and then back at Dragan, bouncing between decisions like an ignition that wouldn’t quite catch. Fear cut deeper and deeper through the Zen fog until my brain felt like a fuse inside was threatening to trip.

  Do something.

  Spotting Ling’s bottle of shine on the floor in front of the wet bar snapped me out of it. I snatched it up and stormed toward the woman, wielding the bottle like a club. She looked over just as I swung the bottle into the blur that covered her face. The glass broke, splashing liquor, and several scaleflies buzzed away from her shoulder plates as she staggered back. I whipped the jagged neck around, spraying alcohol and blood as I slashed at her again.

  Dragan spat and managed to suck in a breath. He ripped one arm free from the guy behind him and then turned and delivered a vicious head butt. His forehead disappeared into the dispersion field and I heard a solid crunch. When the soldier fell back, blood squirted from out of the blur.

  “Control them!” the woman barked.

  One of the soldiers unclipped a graviton emitter from his belt and aimed it at Dragan. A low hum made the furniture vibrate as the field washed over him and he staggered, legs folding underneath him. The hum went up in pitch, and Dragan fell to his knees, struggling to keep his head lifted.

  I dropped the bottle neck and took the knife out of my pocket, flicking the blade out as I made a beeline for the guy holding Dragan with no idea what I would do when I got there. I used the little blade to scrape stubborn residue off windows; it would never penetrate combat armor. . . .

  The guy used the emitter to drag Dragan toward him, ready to hit him once he was in range, and I stabbed the point of the knife through the seam at his knee. It didn’t go all the way in, but enough to make the guy yell and spin around. When he did, the emitter’s field moved off Dragan and sucked the end table next to him across the room. It crashed against the wall as he reached down and jerked the knife out.

  “You little—”

  Dragan was back on his feet and hammered the guy in the face with one fist. He had reached back to hit him again when an armored fist closed around my arm and jerked me away.

  “Stop,” the woman said.

  Dragan stopped in midswing, his eyes going wide as she put her other hand over my throat and squeezed, just a little.

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Dragan gasped. “Just let her go . . . please.”

  She stepped toward him and I followed desperately, toes barely touching the floor.

  “Get his wet drive,” she ordered. Two of the soldiers held Dragan, one of them pushing his head down until his chin touched his chest while the other parted the spiky hair at the base of his skull.

  “It’s not there,” he said. “He ditched it.”

  “Search him. Find the twistkey.”

  One of the soldiers stood back and aimed a scanner, running it down the length of his body. I caught a glimpse of bones and soft tissue moving across the screen, along with buttons and equipment standing out in sharp relief.

  “He doesn’t have it,” the soldier said. “Just the standard-issue security override.” The hand squeezed my neck a little harder.

  “Where did you take him?” she asked, her voice an electronically altered crackle. Dragan looked around the room at the soldiers.

  “Is this how it is?” he asked them. “You’re going to just turn on one of your own?”

  “Watch your mouth, traitor,” one of them said.

  “Don’t talk to him,” she said. She turned back to Dragan. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Where did you take Alexei Drugov?”

  Dragan shook his head, a single bead of sweat dropping from his stubbly chin.

  “That place was destroyed,” Dragan rasped. “How can it—”

  She clamped her black, scaly glove down on my neck hard then, and I gasped. I tried to squirm free, but the combat suit gave her incredible strength.

  “Tell me where you took him,” she said, the armor making a low whine as she slowly tightened her grip.

  “Don’t let her do this,” Dragan said to the other soldiers. My throat felt the size of a straw as I gasped air in. “You know me. This isn’t—”

  She lifted me up until my toes brushed the floor and I choked. Grabbing at her wrist to hold myself up, I tried to pull in another breath but couldn’t. I struggled, trying to peel her fingers back, and felt a flood of emotion surge through the mites as suddenly as a shock of cold water to the face . . . anger, hatred, and disgust bled through my brain like chemical poison. Underneath it all hunger simmered, a desperate, driving hunger that made my stomach clench into a painful knot. It wasn’
t coming from Tanchi. The signal was a million times stronger. It was coming from her.

  She’s a haan, I thought, staring down into the empty hood created by the dispersion mask. The thought buzzed in my head. . . . But they’re so delicate. How can she . . .

  The room seemed to get darker as I struggled to stay on my tiptoes. As dark clouds bloomed in front of me, I saw a fat scalefly come crawling down the length of her arm, then out of sight below my chin. A sound like water rushed in my ears as the world around me began to fade.

  “Wait,” I heard Dragan say. Through the slits of my eyes I found his face, and when I did I barely recognized him. I’d seen what he could do the day he found me and in the days since, but now the fierceness and strength that I’d always associated with him were stripped away. There was only fear in his eyes, just raw fear. Not for himself, but for me. I’d broken him.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said again. The room seemed to be tilting, and he sounded far away.

  I glanced right, swiping the 3i icons away in a streak of hot pink hearts and neon that left trails across the blurry backdrop of our ruined apartment. My friend list scrolled up until I spotted Dragan’s name and grabbed it. When I tapped him, he’d already begun to move, and I saw metal flash as the knife at his belt came free from its scabbard.

  love u 2.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” I heard him say.

  The knife came down in an arc as he launched toward us, and the blade struck the soldier next to him. The soldier staggered back while groping for the blade’s handle, now jammed into the meat between his shoulder and neck. He struck the wall and left a streak of blood as he slid to the floor.