by M. G. Herron
“We need to take this out,” Dr. Neru said.
“Okay.”
Sasha groaned and thrashed on the bed when the doctor probed the wound gently with his fingers.
“Hold her still!”
Ari put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her hip to hold her down.
Dr. Neru jabbed a small pen into her exposed thigh where the needle had torn the fabric of her pants—a narcotic injection. After a moment, her thrashing weakened.
Ari’s eyes met Dr. Neru’s over the table. The briefest moment of recognition passed between them. The doctor gave him a tired smile.
Nianzu picked up a large pair of tweezers that tapered to small point from a table beside the stretcher.
“I hope you guys got more painkillers. That was my last.”
Ari shook his head. He looked around for Felix, who was nowhere in sight. Where had he gone? Sasha kicked again and Ari’s attention returned to her.
Nianzu sighed and bent over the woman. “Shame,” he said and lowered his gaze back to Sasha’s prone form. “The morphine will help but this is still going to hurt like a bitch.”
He carefully pushed the tweezers into Sasha’s wound. She moaned. He probed around for a minute then, seeming to get the tweezers around the projectile that had embedded itself, pinched the tweezers and looked up at Ari.
“Here, take this.”
Ari shook his head.
“I need you to do this, Ari,” the doctor said. “Grip the tweezers like I am here.”
Ari reached out and gripped the tweezers with one hand, the other still on Sasha’s shoulder.
“On the count of three, pull straight up. Not to the side. Straight up. One, two…”
On three Ari yanked the needle out. A fountain of blood squirted into the air. Nianzu shoved another device like a plastic tube with a handle into Sasha’s wound. It made a sound like putting your finger over a hose. When Ari looked back, the doctor held a device like a gun in his hand, but its long, clear tip was thin and filled with tiny white pellets. The pellets pushed out of the tip of the device and into Sasha’s belly.
When the tube came out of her stomach, her wound was filled with a clear gel. No more blood leaked.
“RNSCR seal,” said Nianzu. “The nanobots will take care of any internal bleeding. She’s going to feel nauseous for a week or two. But she’ll live.”
He used a clean cloth he produced from a cabinet against the wall to wipe the rest of the blood from around the wound and make sure it was sealed.
When Ari looked up, a crowd of people had gathered around them, many bandaged or wounded themselves, although a few of the capable, armed men Ari had seen at the switchyard earlier that night were there also, still eyeing him warily.
Ari’s eyes searched for Sasha and Felix’s backpacks. The platform was scattered with more stretchers and tables, but no backpacks filled with C-4.
CHAPTER 40
CONSCIENCE
Felix shook Ari awake an unknown amount of time later. The fluorescent lights of the underground shone in his bleary eyes.
“Come with me,” said Felix.
Felix didn’t have the backpacks with him. Ari assumed he’d stashed them somewhere. He chose not to pursue it at the moment.
He gagged when he looked down and realized that Sasha’s blood had dried on his skin. “I need to wash my hands.”
Ari stopped by a standing wash basin with dirty water and scrubbed his arms and hands with the antibiotic soap that was there. The blood clung to and stained his skin. It turned the washbasin water a murky pink color.
“Where are we going?” Ari asked as he dried his hands with paper towels.
“To meet our benefactors.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Whoever they are, they’ve been sending us food and medical supplies for months—until a few weeks ago when the army came.”
“You don’t know where your food was coming from?”
The muscles in Felix’s jaw bulged. “Don’t you get a fuckin’ conscience on me now, okay? You were fine with the situation before you lost your memory. Those supplies kept us going.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
Felix pushed one hand out into the air and let it fall, as if to say it was too far away to matter now. He hopped down from the platform and walked into the artificial orange dusk of the train tunnel. Ari followed.
“All I ever wanted to do was save this country from itself,” Felix whispered into the darkness. “Expose the government for the corrupt machine it is. Make people realize whose fault it is that they’re starving in the streets. We were already fighting that battle when the supplies started showing up on our doorstep. I didn’t know who they came from, and frankly I didn’t care. They enabled us to do more, to fight harder. But they stopped coming when the army occupied the city. When you found Sasha in the tunnels, she was on her way to send them a message. When that message never went out, well…” He looked over his shoulder at Ari, driving the point home. It had been Ari’s fault that message never got out apparently. “They sent another one asking us to meet with them instead. So here we are.”
“So why are you taking me with you?”
“I need someone to watch my back. Bishop is dead. Sasha is injured. You’re the only other person here right now who can use a gun with any degree of competence.”
Felix took a pistol and a shoulder holster out of his jacket and handed them to Ari. Though he didn’t recall ever using one of these before, he slipped into it easily. The pistol fit comfortably under his left arm, like he’d been wearing it all his life. A chill passed through his body for no reason. Ari reached up and snapped the metal button connected to a leather strap that kept the pistol from falling out. The chill passed.
“That was Bishop’s. You’re about the same size around the shoulders. Wear it well.”
It turned out that the platform used by the rebels as a field hospital was located about a mile from the switchyard, in a sealed-off tunnel. Ari had barely noticed, but they must have come through here with Sasha. Their base was connected by a fake wall and a hidden passageway to an adjacent tunnel, and from there he and Felix walked quickly back to the switchyard.
Returning to the switchyard, Ari felt like the journey he’d begun earlier that day—or was it the next day now?—had come full circle. It did nothing to assuage his anxiety, bring Bishop back, or wash the bloodstains from his hands.
And for what? A few bricks of C-4 that promised only more destruction, more death?
Feeling hollow and numb and slightly nauseous, he followed Felix into one of the dead train cars at the center of the switchyard. The inside was lit with one of the typical kinetic lanterns. The seats in the train were arranged two to a side. An aisle with a grooved floor for traction ran down the middle.
The last row was five seats across. In the middle sat a large man with narrow eyes set far apart in his head and a strong, square chin.
Ari stared. He couldn’t help it. The man looked very familiar, like seeing a familiar face from TV in person for the first time.
Felix sucked his breath in through his teeth.
And then Ari realized. He had seen this man on TV.
“Hello, gentlemen. Welcome, welcome. Good to finally meet you in person,” Senator Khan greeted them. “Please, sit down. We have a lot to discuss.”
Episode 6
EARLY WARNING
CHAPTER 41
INTERROGATION
Po methodically clenched and unclenched her jaw as she spun in the swivel chair. The wide, bullet-proof glass windows of Captain Wallace’s office were covered with slatted blinds that provided a view of the crowded, chaotic police precinct on the other side. Jia and Uncle Bohai sat in the lobby, waiting for them. Her uncle was pouring over a puzzle book with her little sister, trying to get Jia interested in it and keep her busy.
“Would you stop that?” Kylie said.
Po kicked off the captain’s desk and
spun faster. Aunt Kylie grabbed the back of the chair with two hands, immediately halting the motion.
Po lurched and caught herself from falling by gripping the seat of chair. The fire of her anger, which the spinning of the chair had blown to a low smolder, flared up again. She glared at her aunt, full of hate, in a way that she never would have imagined doing had her parents been in the room.
But they weren’t in the room. Her parents were dead. Ari had become a wanted fugitive. The city was a shambles. Everything had turned to shit.
“You’re a grown woman, Po. It’s time you started acting like one.”
“A grown woman would have kicked your ass for ratting on her friend.”
“He’s one of them, Po. He’s dangerous.”
“He’s not. You’re wrong about him.”
“You and I both heard him say he was working with the rebels. How can you still think that?”
“He’s a good person. He saved my life.”
“That doesn’t change the facts. Bad people can do good things, too.”
Po clenched her jaw and kicked off the captain’s desk again. The rubber sole of her sneaker left a scuff mark on the polished wood, which made her happy like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. Her stomach growled. They’d been in the captain’s office for hours, but the food printing machines you normally found in federally-run facilities were empty. The soylin and flavor tubes hadn’t been restocked in months, not since before the riots began.
Her father had said something a few months ago about how companies had begun to shut down their offices in Enshi when the riots got bad. They didn’t want to run the risk of continuing operations here. She paid it no attention at the time—that sort of talk had always been boring to her. But she would have given anything to be bored by one of her dad’s business or political lectures now. She fought back the tears that threatened to pour from her eyes. Po kicked off the desk, hard.
As the chair came around on its next revolution, Po dropped her feet to the floor and halted the motion of the chair.
Through the window and the crisscrossing shatterproof seams that made a diamond pattern on glass that seemed suddenly very thin and fragile, two police officers postured and pointed at each other among a crowd of mostly men. The officer on Po’s left was a short European, broad of shoulder with a permanent scowl on his white, lined face. His head was shaved bald and it shone with a red tint under the fluorescent lights from the flush that betrayed his emotion. The name tag on his chest read Officer Evans.
The officer on Po’s right was a large Chinese man. Everything about him was big, from his jowls to his rotund gut. He looked condescendingly down at the white man, then said something, just a word or two. Po couldn’t hear it through the glass but she could guess what he might be saying—eurotrash, or refugee scum, or something like that. Whatever it was, the shorter man became enraged and lunged at the larger officer. The Chinese man reached for his firearm at the same time and had it drawn halfway from its holster before the stocky white man was on him. They tumbled together to the ground.
Everyone else jumped in, pulling the two men apart and dragging them to opposite corners of the crowded room—even her Uncle Bohai, after a glance at Kylie, pressed into the scuffle. In response, Kylie ran out of the office and held Jia tightly against her body near the wall. Po tensed, preparing to defend herself, to run to Jia and Kylie and haul them from the precinct.
But someone pried the Chinese man’s fingers from his weapon while a row of ragged criminals handcuffed to a rail along the wall hooted and stamped their feet, egging the officers on. The precinct was a microcosm of the city beyond. It reminded Po that she had only been brought into Wallace’s office because all the interrogation rooms and other offices were overflowing with “perps” gathered from the protests.
Captain Wallace stepped through the front door then. Po had met him for the first time at her house the night before, when he stayed to question her and Kylie while his men chased Ari like a dog through the streets. Wallace had ignored her pleas for mercy, despite records that showed Ari had been working for the Fields magistrate’s office. Wallace was a tall man, half Chinese, half European. He had an Asian complexion, an aquiline, European nose, and a regal bearing. The sight of his imposing, silently disapproving form silenced the room and shamed the men back into behaving like officers of the law again.
The crowd of officers and onlookers parted before the captain like a sea. Her aunt led Jia back to their chair and sat down with her. Po’s little sister stared wide eyed and frightened up at the captain as he walked by with a mix of admiration and fear. Wallace paused to say something to the two men who had gotten in the scuffle, something to the effect of, “I’ll deal with you two later.” His words caused both the European and Chinese officers to stare at their feet the same ashamed way. Stern Uncle Bohai nodded approvingly.
Po knew this wasn’t the first demonstration of internal conflict and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Wallace turned and made a beeline for the glass window behind which Po watched.
Wallace closed the door of the office behind him, pulled the blinds away from the window all the way, to signal to his men that he was still watching the precinct. Finally, he sank into the chair behind his desk with a heavy sigh.
Po watched him, saying nothing. A second officer, a detective who had been with Wallace at the house the night before, came into the room as well. After closing the door again, he leaned against the wall to Po’s left.
Finally, Wallace broke the silence. “Are you ready to tell me the truth?”
Po crossed her arms. “I have been telling the truth.”
“Where are the rebel insurgents hiding?”
“I don’t know.”
“But Citizen kept you prisoner underground, right? For two weeks?”
“As I said—handcuffed to a table.”
“Why did it take you so long to escape?”
“Because they were holding me prisoner!”
“And then you just walked out?”
“How many times do I have to tell you the same story? Ari picked his handcuffs and then, after he fought with Felix and knocked him unconscious, he unlocked mine. And then we ran away without looking back.”
“That’s pretty convenient, don’t you think?”
Po sighed and buried her face in her hands.
“Where did you come out into the city after you escaped?” Wallace asked.
“Just west of downtown. We went south, and wound up in Factory after a few hours.”
“And you don’t remember where?”
“Not exactly. It was dark. There was fighting. We ran.”
“I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”
“I am.”
“Lying to me is obstruction of justice, Po. I don’t want to have to charge you with a crime here.”
“I’m telling the truth!”
The detective, who had been silent during the rapid-fire exchange, put his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned down, trying to intimidate her with his height. “If you’re working with the rebels, you could be charged with conspiracy. Treason. You could get the death penalty.”
Po burst to her feet, her shoulder driving into the larger man’s solar plexus. He stumbled back and swore.
“You little—”
“Enough!” Wallace’s voice cracked so loud that a dozen people on the other side of the window swiveled their heads to look at the office. He waited while they returned to their business. Through the window, Po caught Aunt Kylie’s eyes. Kylie made a movement as if to stand. Po shook her head once, and returned to her seat. Kylie sank back down as well, and entwined the fingers of her hand with Uncle Bohai’s next to her on one side, and with Jia on the other.
“I’m not working with the rebels,” Po said, leaning back in the chair and gripping the arms tightly.
“But your friend is. According to your aunt.”
Her hands shook with anger. “No, he’s not.”
<
br /> She said it because she wanted to believe it. She said it because she had to reassure herself that it was still true. Yet, in spite of her best efforts, after hours of this line of questioning, she was beginning to doubt herself.
It was not lost on her that the primary reason she was in this office and not locked up in a cell with a dozen hardened criminals, or in solitary confinement, was due solely to the political clout of her uncle. But security forces like the Enshi police had a responsibility, too. Their first priority was to restore order. And as long as they didn’t hurt her, Uncle Bohai couldn’t stop them from questioning Po.
If she were any of the other suspects out in that lobby, if her family didn’t still have some power in this situation, Po had no doubt she would already be bruised and bloody with the “interrogation” techniques they normally used.
A loud slamming noise startled her. Po drew a sharp breath and jumped. The officer to her left had slammed his palm flat on the wooden desk. A printed photograph lay under his hand.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked. He lifted his hand.
Po clenched her jaw as she leaned over the picture. It was a dark view of a landscape. A winding road ran up the middle. Firetrucks and police cars sped up the road, their forms a streak of red or blue as the camera caught them in motion. The frame was too wide, and seemed to be shot from a security camera placed high up. Fires dotted the hills in the background.
“King Valley,” Po finally admitted. “The night of the fires?”
Wallace stood from his chair and leaned over the photograph. “It was taken from the bridge. You were there that night, weren’t you?”
“So were you. Wasn’t it your job to guard the gate?”
“It was my job to protect innocent civilians. But I can’t do that when people help and hide a faction of reckless anarchists who want to destroy this country!”
The captain pointed a finger at Po and jabbed her in the shoulder. “If you don’t tell me everything you know, then you might as well be working with the rebels. If you protect them, your parents’ blood is on your hands.”