by M. G. Herron
“Do I know you?” she asked for the second time.
“You tell me,” Ari said carefully.
“I think I do.”
Ari really looked at her for the first time, turning his face slightly so he could take in her whole figure with his one eye. She had a caramel colored birthmark on her left temple, a delicate button nose, and beautiful brown eyes flecked with green, like rice paddies in the moonlight. Ari searched his memory, and a glimmer of recognition, more like déjà vu than the vivid dream image he’d had after the seizure, moved in his mind.
“I’m not sure,” Ari said. “Maybe. Look, do you know how to get out of here?”
The girl shook her head.
“What’s your name?”
“Po.”
“I’m—” he began.
“Ari,” she finished. “I do know you. You came to my father’s farm with the magistrate. What happened to your face?”
Ari’s breath caught in his throat. He stared for a moment, then shook his head. They didn’t have time to walk down his crooked and darkened memory lane right now. He pointed at Felix. “Let’s cuff him to the table. He won’t be out very long.”
After Felix was secured, they stepped gingerly into the hallway and ran up the nearest flight of stairs. At the top, Ari looked both ways for guards. They encountered none. When they reached the next dark crossroads, Ari couldn’t recall which way the guards had brought him.
“Let’s try this way,” Po said, turning right.
Still not trusting his own memory entirely, Ari followed Po’s lead. They backtracked once when they got too close to a knot of shouting voices, and took a different tunnel that seemed to lead away from the group of people.
At last, they ducked through a crumbling brick wall and came out in a filthy sewer line. Stagnant water trickled through the middle. It smelled of bodily waste and rot.
“I’m usually good with faces,” Po said as she walked in front of him, scanning the ground and trying to avoid stepping on anything squishy. “But I didn’t recognize you. What happened?”
“I got shot. Lost a lot of my memory. Twelve years’ worth, apparently.”
“A bullet did all that?” She glanced back at him. “I mean, I’m sorry.” Po lowered her gaze.
“Did we know each other?” Ari asked, trying to move beyond what had happened to his face. “Before?”
“We met a few times,” she said. “You drove Magistrate Ming out to our farm, and we talked once or twice while he spoke with my father.”
“Was I…what did you think of me?”
“You were…kind. You asked me questions about martial arts, and let me drive your car on the farm. But really, I think you were some kind of bodyguard for the magistrate. It’s dangerous to work for the government right now.”
“How did you end up down here?”
“The rebels snuck into King Valley, where I lived. They…they took me.”
“And your father’s farm? Your family?”
Her eyes lowered again, but this time they burned with a fierce anger. “They burned the farm to the ground.”
The wind gushed out of his lungs, like he’d been punched. Had he had anything to do with that? But no, he couldn’t have, because he was with this magistrate, whoever he was. “I’m so sorry. Look, I don’t remember much of anything before about a week ago when I woke up here, but I would never do anything to hurt your family, no matter what Felix thinks I know.”
She stopped and stepped closer in the dark. He wanted to turn his face away, to hide the ugliness, but he forced himself to meet her eyes.
Eventually, a small smile played around Po’s lips. She bobbed her head ever so slightly, and they moved on. His shoulders suddenly felt loose, as if a weight had been lifted. They walked on in companionable silence.
A quarter mile farther down the sewer tunnel, their conversation came to a halt when they reached a metal ladder leading up. Ari thought they would both need tetanus shots after climbing it, and it was missing three rungs, but it led to a manhole cover in the ceiling.
“I’ll push the cover aside and look around first,” Ari said. “You keep watch down here.”
Po nodded and walked off several paces to peer down the dark tunnel.
Ari climbed up and balanced on the top of the ladder while he shoved the manhole cover up and to the side. It was night, and the air smelled fresh after the fetid stench of the tunnel.
He pulled himself up into the mouth of a dead-end alley. Smoke blew past through the crumbling brick walls of surrounding buildings, carrying with it smells of ash and gunpowder, a small but noticeable improvement from being inundated with the scent of dead things.
Ari called to Po. When she had reached the top of the ladder, he wrapped one hand around her wrist and pulled her up, too. They slid the manhole back into place.
A half dozen people ran past the alley. He caught a glimpse of dark hoodies, bandanna-clad faces, and torn jeans. None so much as glanced at two tired bystanders.
Ari stepped into the street and took his bearings. A loose gathering of people moved restlessly off to his left. A burst of red and orange lit the night sky to his over their heads. Ari could feel it in his chest, even from this distance, like a singular hollow drum beat. The explosion burned incandescent for a second, and then flickered out through a haze of smoke. Surprisingly, the crowd didn’t turn and run at the explosion. One, an old man standing at the fringe of the crowd closest to them, raised his hands to shade his eyes, and then bent and picked up a rough, round object in his hand.
Po stepped out and began walking toward the gathering of people. Ari lunged out and caught her arm.
“Where are you going?” Ari asked. Part of him was scared for her, and another part was determined not to let her go without telling him everything she knew about him. Without Felix and Dr. Neru, she was the only link connecting him to the memories he had lost.
“I have to find my sister,” Po said, as if it were obvious.
“I’ll come with you,” Ari said. “You said I was a bodyguard. I also have military training. I can protect you.”
Po assessed him with a level gaze for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. Ari dropped his hand from her arm and took a deep breath.
“Well, bodyguard. Where to?”
“Not that way,” Ari said, shaking his head. The sight of the explosion and the knot of the crowd spoke of danger, and gave him a twisting feeling in his gut. “At least not until we know what we’re walking into. First things first—water, food, and shelter. This way.”
Po nodded, and took off at a jog in the direction he indicated. He ran into the war-torn city after her, seeking refuge.
Episode 3
PERILOUS JOURNEY
CHAPTER 10
DUMPSTER DIVING
Po stumbled after Ari, the large man with the scarred face she barely knew. He moved swiftly before her through the dark and endless night.
It had to have been at least ten days since she’d seen the sun, ten days since her parents had been murdered and the rebels had taken her hostage. On the fateful day that King Valley fell, her home became a dark land, a place where the sun forgot how to shine and time stretched on without end.
How often had she wished it would all just be over? She gritted her teeth. But no. She couldn’t give up while there was still the possibility that Jia, her only sibling in all the world, the sweet dark-haired little girl she had been forced to leave behind, was still alive. If Jia hadn’t found her way to their aunt and uncle’s house in Rose Petal, Po was her only hope.
She was in the open air now at least, and with a friend, even if she had only met him a handful of times, under circumstances nothing like the present. Po thought constantly of getting to safety, finding a phone, and calling Aunt Kylie. But she had been foolish. She had never thought this day would come, and so she had never bothered to memorize he aunt’s phone number. She bet she could look up her uncle’s office number if they found an internet-connected d
evice. He was a senator. If she couldn’t call, then she vowed to go to them. To Rose Petal. To find Jia.
But she had no idea which way that was.
Po’s thoughts faded into the background and she focused on her body, her movements, the wind blowing smells of trash and sulfur through the city streets. As with her karate training, once she managed to focus, everything else fell away.
Ahead of her, Ari turned down a small side street, and she followed him into the shadows. The crunching snare-drum sound of police boots on pavement echoed somewhere around the corner ahead of them, and Po darted behind a row of squat bushes in front of an abandoned motel. Ari crouched close to her and together they waited silently until the patrol passed.
As they began to run again, Po’s toe caught on a loose stone, and she tripped forward. Ari caught her with both arms, one of his big hands landing suggestively against her hip. He pulled his hand away, but Po lingered for a moment, her tired body savoring the feel of another person supporting her weight. Her hand rested on his chest, and the pulse of his blood throbbed in her palm. With an effort of will, she straightened.
Ari looked the other way. Although the wound on his face made his emotions difficult to read, the flush creeping up his good cheek put his embarrassment clearly on display.
“I’m exhausted. I don’t know how much farther I can walk,” Po said. “Can we find a place to rest?”
Ari nodded, and moved ahead again, more slowly this time. He crossed the street when an errant street lamp ahead of them threatened to expose his mangled face to prying eyes. Po saw how he kept track of her out of the corner of his good eye, good as his word to be her bodyguard, putting his body between her and the certain danger of a blind corner, keeping close. Po watched her footing carefully as she tiptoed along a sidewalk strewn with broken glass bottles, loose cobblestones, plastic ration wrappers, and dented metal canisters. A cluster of white delivery vans parked at the curb were riddled with bullet holes and stained by scorch marks.
Ari stopped under the overhang in front of an abandoned motel lobby. The doorway was deep, like a cave, and they pressed their backs to opposite walls, facing each other with only the span of a door between them.
Ari peered both ways down the street. “Do you know where we are?”
Po poked her head out of the doorway, and located the thick cluster of skyscrapers which thrust into the night sky in the distance. Those buildings marked the downtown core from anywhere in the city, like the hub of a massive wheel.
“We’ve come farther than I thought,” she said.
“We had the right inspiration.”
Po snorted a brief, sardonic laugh. She looked around.
Nearby, the buildings were much smaller, two to three stories, and more spaced out than the dense, paved jungle downtown. A few large warehouses across the street stood dark behind large chain link fences topped with barbed wire. Apartment buildings capped the end of the row, their windows still whole in their frames and protected by metal bars mounted to the outside. Only one or two held a flickering light.
This was not the poverty-stricken area of Fields, overflowing the bounds of the city toward King Valley, but it was a far cry from the stately opulence of the Rose Petal district where Po’s aunt and uncle lived—where Jia had ended up, if there was a God left in this dark world.
“I think we’re down south somewhere. Factory,” Po said, “or maybe Curbs. If we go east from here, we’ll eventually reach Dockside.”
Ari rubbed his chin, his pointer finger drifting over the seam above the corner of his mouth where his scabbed skin met the edge of the meditech polymer. “That’s near the river?”
Po nodded. “I think I’m good now. Let’s keep moving.”
They walked on, and finally turned into an alley behind a row of brick houses. The houses had no yards and only a tiny gap between the walls of their neighbors. The windows here were also dark, and protected with thick steel or, in some cases, a slotted plexiglass box bolted to the wall. Po sank gratefully to the pavement behind a large dumpster, and took deep, strained breaths. Her whole body tingled from the unexpected exertion.
Aunt Kylie’s house did not have steel bars protecting her wide, glass picture windows. Aunt Kylie and Uncle Bohai never had a need to protect themselves. Not in Rose Petal. The city had problems, but it never came up there.
Of course, the violence had been kept out of the valley before, too. The rebels had changed everything.
Ari bent his torso over the high metal side of the stinking garbage dumpster. “Well, what do we have here?”
He pushed himself up with one hand and sank to the ground next to her, clutching a chicken carcass to his chest like a trophy.
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“Food is food. We’ve been moving at a breakneck pace for most of the night. You should eat something.” He popped a chicken scrap into his own mouth. “Not bad.”
She wrinkled her nose as she took a piece of dark meat he proffered between two fingers. It was dry from sitting in the open air, but it was a solid piece of dark meat from close to the bone. She sniffed it. It didn’t smell of much, which she took as a good sign. Her gorge rose at the thought of eating food from a trashcan, and she swallowed against the bile before it could reach her mouth.
Po lifted the piece of meat to her mouth, chewed once, twice, and swallowed. It went down, and her stomach responded by gurgling for more.
Po rubbed her dry throat. She stood and walked around the dumpster to the mouth of the alley, searching for a faucet on the outside of the rows of tenements lined up along the cracked street.
She spotted one between two thin, sickly-looking trees, but as she crossed the street to test it, a gust of wind blew her hair into her eyes and carried with it the unmistakable snare-drum crunch of boots on pavement. Several long shadows bent around a corner into the street in which Po was standing, cast forward by one of the few active street lamps.
She bolted back into the alley, where Ari wagged a plastic bottle, with a tiny sip of water in the bottom, like a prize. Po’s mouth filled with saliva at the sight, but she ignored it and gestured frantically at him with both hands.
“Did they see you?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Quick, this way.”
Stepping with long, soft strides, Ari led her toward the far end of the alley, where it turned. Coming around the corner, Po felt a tightening in her chest when she saw that the alley dead-ended at a brick wall two stories tall. A single steel-bound wooden door barred their only way out. No windows, no ladders, nothing to hide behind. The place where the doorknob should have been was covered with a steel plate so that no brand of troublemaker would be able to jimmy it open from the outside without serious firepower. Ari shoved on the door. It didn’t budge an inch.
Po put her back to the door, and snapped her head sharply against the wood.
“Trapped,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 11
RUN AND HIDE
Po was sitting to her father’s right at the kitchen table when a phone call interrupted their dinner.
“Hello?” her father said. Then his face went pale, and before he’d even set down the phone he ordered the family into his office. Hearing the tone of their father’s voice, the girls hurried to obey—not questioning, not arguing.
Her father flicked off the overhead light and crouched behind his broad mahogany desk.
Jia’s small, sweaty hand found Po’s in the dark. They hadn’t finished eating, and they didn’t clear the table before leaving. This inane fact, as out of place as the tone in her father’s voice, played over and over in her mind. It did not comfort Po. Not one bit.
Her father unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk, withdrew a sawed-off shotgun, and set it aside. Then he produced two small backup hard drives, and from the top drawer where he kept pens and pencils, a large magnet. After wiping the magnet on both sides of the drives, he set them down on the carpet, and smashed th
em with the butt of the gun.
They all watched in silence, until Po felt a pain in her hand.
“Ow!” she yelped, jerking her hand out of her sister’s grasp. She shot the younger girl a vicious look. Jia had dug her nails into the back of Po’s hand hard enough to leave narrow white marks.
“Jia, that hurt!”
“Sorry,” Jia mumbled, casting her eyes down.
Their mother made a shushing sound. Po couldn’t stay angry at her little sister, who was only ten and seemed more terrified than Po herself. She reached down and gently took her sister’s hand in her own again.
Their father breathed in through his nose and shifted his grip on the shotgun as he turned to face the girls. Though Po was observant enough to realize that something horrible was happening, no one had explained it yet. Until today, she had only seen her father use his shotgun to scare egrets out of the rice paddies at harvest time.
Her father finally broke the tense silence. “Po,” he said. “I want you to take Jia out the back. Run to the farthest rice paddy, wade into the water, and hide up to your neck in the tall grass so that no one can see you even if they come very close. No one will find you there if you stay very quiet.”
“Why?” Po worked her dry mouth. “Dad, what’s happening?”
“Daddy, I’m scared,” said Jia. The younger girl’s cheeks left wet marks on her mother’s shirt.
“I’m counting on you,” her father said. “What did I just say?”
Making her repeat her lesson was a tactic her father often employed when he wanted to teach her something important. She normally sighed at the familiar routine, but she didn’t protest this time. “Take Jia and hide in the far rice paddies in the cold water up to our necks, and be quiet.”
A heavy thudding sound came from the front part of the house. Wood cracked as the front door splintered open and intruders stormed into their home.