“You’re so blank and boring!” Magic Meg cried out. “Blank as the day you were born.” She spun gracefully to James. “Please let me paint you.”
Blank? Boring? That’s why Lyn had called us blanks. Apparently if you looked like a normal person, you were a blank. I took in the hundreds of people gathered in the huge room. Of course, in a place like this, we probably did look strange.
“If you can tell us where to find Mintz,” James said, “I might let you paint this arm.” He lifted his left arm with a small wince.
Lily put a hand on his arm. “Maybe after we talk to Mintz?” She gave James a serious look and shook her head the tiniest bit.
“Oh fuss and frag,” Magic Meg said. “So boring!” She stomped one foot like some of the younger kids did back in school.
“Sorry,” Lily said, stepping between James and the Outcast. “We’re in a big hurry.”
“I’ll tell you where Mintz is if you promise to come back and let me paint one of you.” She sidled up to Pol. “I’d even paint this young one.” She smiled wide and drew a finger down one of Pol’s arms.
Pol blushed and flinched.
“You know Mintz?” Melisa asked.
“Sure do,” Magic Meg said. “He only let me paint him once, but I gave him such a fiber dragon on his shoulder . . .” She trailed off, somehow lost in thought the next second.
Did these people even speak regular English? What the drek is a fiber dragon?
“And where might he be?” Melisa pressed.
“Do you promise to come back? You’re so dull.” Magic Meg stuck out her lower lip.
“Sure, yeah,” James said.
“He’s down that way,” Magic Meg waved a decorated and jangling arm toward a wide hallway that branched off the huge room.
Melisa and I turned to go. She grabbed Pol’s arm and pulled him along.
“You’d better remember your promise!” Magic Meg jangled at us one last time before stomping into her walled off space.
Once we were well into the hallway, the light from the main room faded somewhat.
“What was the big deal?” James asked. “If letting her paint me would get us answers, why didn’t we—”
Lily barked a laugh. “It’s not just about the painting.” She snorted again. “The work Outcasts do for each other is, well . . .” Lily got quiet. “It’s actually like a contract that means you will do what she wants if you let her paint you.”
“So I have to build her a nest for her head?” James asked.
“No,” Lily said. We could finally hear our footsteps over the noise from the main room. Another fifteen meters down the hallway, light spilled from an open doorway. “Whatever she wants. And she can ask for anything.”
Silence greeted that. It was a long awkward silence.
“Well, no paint for me,” James finally said. “Though I did want a fiber dragon, whatever that is.”
We all burst out laughing.
We came to the brightly lit doorway and stopped. The room had probably once been an office of some kind. Evidently, someone was still using it as an office. Or maybe a factory. Devices of all sizes and shapes littered rough blocks that were being used as tables. In one corner was a pile of scrap plasteel that looked like it was trying to reach across the entire room. A man with hair that stuck out at all angles in pointed spikes was bent over a cluttered block table. He wore some kind of lenses and was busy joining two small chips on a circuit board. A pile of fuel cells sat in a far corner.
I stepped into the room. A loud clang exploded from somewhere, filling the room and my ears with a noise that felt like it was squeezing my head. I flinched and reached for my keeper. Which wasn’t there, of course.
The man with the spiky hair looked up, smiled, and said, “Welcome.”
Chapter 32
“So who knows?” Mintz said. “That delightfully clangorous noise you just enjoyed could be the language of an actual life form.” His head nodded as he popped his wildly pierced eyebrows up and down. “The universe is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, after all.”
I had nothing to say to that. Mintz had invited us in with a kind gesture, arranged us on different sizes of rubble block and in Lily’s case, an amorphous blob of cloth that only took shape when she sat on it. She’d looked surprised at first, but then had settled in and now she looked comfortable enough to fall asleep any second. Then Lily had asked about trading for fuel cells and Mintz had promptly asked us if we’d liked what he called his ‘Welcome call.’ And he hadn’t stopped talking for a long time.
“But what has that got to do with the price of fuel cells?” James asked.
Mintz cocked his head. “Nothing, but it’s certainly fascinating to consider the multiplicity of possible life forms, not discounting, of course, the vast potential for plural dimensions.”
“Dimensions?” Pol asked. I smacked the back of his arm. We didn’t need to go down another random tangent.
“Surely you know about the possibility of dimensions? You freely admit, of course” —Mintz leaned forward, the heavy lenses he wore obscuring most of his face— “that there are things you cannot perceive with your limited six senses?”
“Six? We’ve got five,” Pol said, “touch, sight, hearing—”
“Yes, yes, smell and taste. But intuition is a sense, as any thinking person knows.”
I smacked Pol’s arm again when he opened his mouth to argue. This was interesting, but we were running out of time.
“Why does your friend keep hitting you?” Mintz cocked his head.
Why did he keep doing that? Were the hair spikes so heavy he couldn’t hold his head up straight?
“Never mind,” I said. “We just need some fuel cells.”
“Whatever for?” Mintz asked. “Nobody around here uses them.”
He walked over to the pile of cells, although his walk was more of a bounce. He was so round in the middle that he looked like a ball. It didn’t seem to bother him—he still moved lightly on his feet. And he was nice, if kind of easily distracted.
“Nobody flies around here.” His lips stretched in an odd smile and his eyes flicked to a door on the far side of his lab. “Well,” he continued, “at least not yet.” He let one hand slide down a fuel cell.
“Are they fully charged?” I asked, walking toward him and closing the gap between us a little.
“Oh of course,” Mintz said. “Easily done.”
“Can we trade for five of them?”
“You certainly can,” he said. “What do you have to trade? I mean, of course, if you could trade your immunity to the Bug, that would be optimal, but biological immunity is not something we’ve figured out how to share amongst organisms.” He wandered back to his work station. “Which is a bit silly, to be honest, since somehow you Wanderers are passing it along to your progeny.”
“We’re not Wanderers,” Pol said. I bumped him again. We needed to keep this Mintz guy on track. I pictured the fires and Ranjer pods closing in on the cavern with all those young children and families.
I pulled my thoughts back. “Wait, what? Immunity? We’re not immune—the Bug’s gone.”
Mintz laughed—a playful high-pitched sound. “Nonsense. Of course it’s not. People are still dying of it if they impede their knockout.”
I held my wrist up. “We’re proof that it’s gone. I used to have a Papa like you.”
“No, you were just always immune,” Mintz said. “With or without the knockout, you were going to be fine.” He looked at each of us. “All of you were, obviously.”
“The Bug is in the knockout,” Melisa said. “Just block your knockout for a few weeks to let your immune system get rid of it—and keep your heart rate down. Then you’re safe.”
“Oh we heard that ridiculous idea, already,” Mintz said. “But you’re not proof. You’re simply evidence that immunity is real. If we could study one of you, we might be able to figure out why.”
That made me think back to the first night
, on the street in the middle of New Frisko, Bren’s last moments. I’d thought I might be immune at first, too. No, this was ridiculous. We needed to get the cells—Wait.
“How do you get your Papa refilled if you’re out here in this building?”
James nodded along with my question.
“We have proxies. Boring, blank ones, of course. They get our refills and share them out,” Mintz said.
That had to be the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. “Just do a chemical analysis of the knockout and you’ll see!” If I had the Z-stick that we’d put the evidence on, I could have shown him right then and there.
“I’m an inventor, not a chemist,” Mintz said.
“Nik,” Lily said. “Come on. This is taking too long.”
“Right,” I said. “So what do you need? We need to get those cells.”
Mintz looked around his lab, one finger tapping his lips thoughtfully. “I don’t know, really. What do you have?”
We looked at each other. “Uh, we have keepers,” Melisa said.
“Oh, no, I don’t need weapons,” Mintz said. “No, that would never do.” He lifted the lenses off his face, revealing a vividly painted left cheek. It was a lizard or something, in bright red and gold. “Did you say you have a pod?”
“Yes,” I said. “We might have some—”
“I’ll take it,” Mintz said. “I’ll give you five fuel cells for the p—” He laughed. “Oh, now I’m being silly.”
Bugging spam. “We have stuff on the pod. Protein paste, ammunition, some seats and benches, clothes.” I looked at the others. Help me out.
“Uh, some medical equipment,” James said, “sensors and windows, lockers, a big smart gun.”
Mintz said nothing, but he didn’t really need to respond. His face said it all.
“There are some Ranjer uniforms too,” Melisa said. “You know they blend in with their environment?”
Mintz’s eyebrows slid almost to his hairline. “Ranjer uniforms you say?” He licked his lips and his wide eyes rotated left and right. “Yes. Done. Bring me one uniform for each fuel cell.”
“We’ve only got three,” Lily said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’ve been through all those lockers and cubbies,” Lily said.
“That’s fine, three will be just fine,” Mintz said.
“Great!” I said. “Who’s going back to the pod for them?”
Lily stood. “I’ll go. And someone else with an EarCom, just in case.”
“Yup,” James said. They took off running.
Melisa, Pol, and I watched them disappear down the wide, smooth-stoned hallway into the chaos of the Outcasts.
Mintz smiled. “All right. Feel free to pick some fuel cells.” He pulled the lenses back over his eyes. “I have a hammock to make in exchange for some nano gel.”
We started sorting through the pile, looking for the least beat up cells we could find. “Nano gel?”
“Yes.” Mintz straightened. “I’m getting a triangle on my chin today. I have a circle on my chest, at least for another few hours, would you like to see?” His hands went to the wide collar of his shirt and yanked down, exposing a raised circle under his skin.
“Wait,” Pol said, “what did you call that?”
“A circle,” Mintz said.
“No.” Pol sighed loudly. “No, I mean, what’s it made of?”
“Nano gel, of course.”
The three of us exchanged a look. I wanted to ask “What’s nano gel?” but I figured it out right before the words left my mouth. “So that’s some kind of gel made of nanos.”
“Precisely,” Mintz said. “Controlled by this beauty Evum over in the north hall.” He flicked his left wrist and a holographic rectangle appeared above a thin black strap he wore next to his Papa. “Watch my chest,” he said.
Which had to be the strangest thing anyone had ever said to me. But we did so.
Mintz tapped the hologram and the circle slowly changed, growing longer and narrower along the top. “Now it’s an oval.”
“That’s blaze,” Pol said. “Can it get any more detailed?”
“Of course,” Mintz said. “But simple shapes are where the true beauty is.”
“Is it permanent?” Melisa asked. She was absentmindedly tapping at the base of her neck. She looked uncomfortable.
“No. It lasts only a few hours. The nanos are injected into a silicon gel, which is of course water-soluble, so the tissues of the body absorb it fairly quickly.” Mintz slid a finger along one side of his oval. “There’s a certain ephemeral beauty to that too.” He tapped the hologram and the oval reverted to a circle. He flicked his wrist and the faint rectangle winked out. “Evum got a lot of cred for this invention.”
“How are you doing all this?” I asked. I set the five fuel cells we’d chosen onto a nearby block. “Where do you get the resources to make these things?”
Mintz tapped the side of his head, then returned to his work. “Our cerebrum is our greatest resource.”
“Yeah, but your brain can’t just pop out computers and nano gel,” Melisa said.
Mintz chuckled. “True. We have wonderful printers that we fill with scrap material. Our proxies in Mento bring us parts, too. You’d be surprised at what you can find if you look hard enough.”
I wandered the lab as Pol slid closer to Mintz.
“What’s a hammock?” Pol asked.
My mind kept returning to the nano gel. Why would you want to make weird shapes all over your body? Or shove metal or pieces of wood through other parts of your body? There had to be a bett—
Bug me. “Guys, I have to go find Evum.”
“Wait, what?” Melisa said. “Why?”
“I need some nano gel.”
Chapter 33
“So all I have to do is input the specs for a picture, and it could do that too?” I asked.
Evum nodded. She was a tall woman with a completely shaved head covered in clusters of intricate geometric patterns. She wore exactly two pieces of cloth, one wrapped around her chest that hung down to her navel and one wrapped around her waist that hung halfway down her thighs. Every centimeter of her body was covered in swirls of blue and red and orange paint.
“It’s nano gel. Smarter than most people. It will do what you tell it.”
“Can I get some?” I heard running footsteps from outside. Melisa and Pol must have been catching up. Took them long enough.
Evum smiled. “Definitely.” She reached for a clear tube that reminded me way too much of the vials that had held the knockout in New Frisko. “One tube should be enough.” She grabbed a slotted tool with a handle and trigger—and a long needle extending out of the front.
I stuttered and swallowed. “Uh, I don’t need it now.” I stepped back. “I don’t want it to wear off.”
She set the tube into what had to be the injector. Drek, that thing could go all the way to my brain. Evum pulled a thin black controller for the nano gel out of a pile. “That’s fine too. We can start with this one and see how you like it. Then we’ll do more when you’re ready.”
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, remembering what Lily had said about getting ‘work’ done here in Dome Town. Maybe this wasn’t the great idea I thought it was.
“Nik.” Melisa burst into the room, out of breath. “We have to go, now.”
Pol showed up, breathing hard.
“Just a second,” I said. “Evum, I don’t really know how—I mean—I don’t have time . . .”
Evum raised one hairless eyebrow. Basically she raised the triangle above her left eye. “You are far too young for me,” she said. “But anyone can paint.” She turned and pointed at a blank patch on the back of one calf. “Paint me something there.”
I nearly collapsed with relief. “Oh, okay.”
“Nik, no, we have to go.” Melisa wasn’t just out of breath. Fear dripped from every word.
“What?” I saw her eyes. No. “Ranjers?” My heart flipped and
dove for my stomach.
“James and Lily saw them. A pod landed next to ours,” Pol said.
“Oh, don’t worry about the Ranjers,” Evum said. “We have an agreement. They leave us alone as long as we behave.” She looked around. “And we behave, because if we don’t . . .” She slid a long, bony finger across her throat.
“Then why are they here?” I asked.
“They stop and patrol all the time,” Evum said. “But there’s nothing to worry about. We’re behaving.” Then her eyes went wide and her face lost all of its color. “Did—did you say next to yours? You came in a pod?”
“Yes,” Pol said. He closed his eyes and looked like he was about to collapse. “They—they won’t really . . . kill you, right?”
Evum nodded and sat hard on a suspended fabric chair. “We’re supposed to be in Mento or one of the other cities, but they’re too restrictive. Thing is, as far as the Ranjers are concerned, we still do everything we’re supposed to do, just in our own way. And nobody really knows about us, as far as the Ranjers know. The Enforsers in Mento don’t even know about us. So they leave us alone.” She put her shining head in her hands. “But they must have seen your pod. Which means they know someone knows about us. And that means we’re dead.”
Melisa looked like she was going to throw up. “We did this.”
She was right. We did this. “Where are Lily and James?” I asked.
“They’re staying out of sight. They were almost at the pod when they saw the Ranjers,” Pol said.
“What do we do?” Melisa asked. “Can we fight them off? I mean, we don’t even have our weapons!”
“Let’s go get them,” I said. “Right now.” I reached for Evum’s hand. She was crying, tears dripping to the table. “We can do something. Is there a place you can hide? I mean, all of you?”
Evum shook her head. “It’s no use. They’re Ranjers. They’ll find us.”
Push (Beat series Book 2) Page 21