Ember (6 page)

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.

R
ead on for a special preview of

The Burn Zone
,

James Decker's new novel.

Available in February 2013 from Roc.

One

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 chairs, 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.”

My face flushed, making the sunburn flare up. I reminded myself that Ling didn't know.

“Why don't you like them?” I said, nodding over at the crib.

“They don't belong here.”

“Well, they're stranded, Ling. It's not like they have a choice. Besides, we're better off now, aren't we?”

She waved her hand again, dismissive. Ling was old, and probably didn't care much about brain band, jump gates, or graviton tech. I thought she would have at least cared about the defense shield the haan were building for us, but maybe she didn't care much about that either. It was a big-ticket item for me. When the first pieces started going up in six months, I'd feel a lot better.

Ling watched Tanchi paw at the air, the scalefly buzzing in a circle above him, and sighed. “We shouldn't let them breed.”

“They have to have some or they'll die out.”

“Let them die out. Governor Hwong should put a stop to it. He would never agree to this.”

“He did, though.”

She frowned again. She wouldn't criticize Governor Hwong—her loyalty to him was too ingrained—but a look of betrayal flashed in her eyes. No one was sure exactly why the haan wanted the human-haan surrogate program, or exactly why Hwong agreed to it. Some thought the haan were controlling him. Others thought the haan had made the flow of tech and the promise of the defense screen dependent on it. There were a million theories as to why the haan would put their fragile young in our brutish hands, but if nothing else it was a good show of how little a threat they really were. They were immune to all disease and most toxins, but their bodies broke all too easily. Wherever they came from, it was a gentler world than ours.

“They know how hard they make it, Ling,” I said. “They hate how hard they make it. They'd leave if they could.”

“Your father should put a stop to it,” Ling said. I almost corrected her again, but didn't bother. “How is he anyway?”

“Okay, I guess. He's on patrol in Menggu Province and I haven't heard from him in a while. He's been kind of blowing me off.”

“Maybe he found a girl there,” Ling joked.

“He wouldn't—” I started, meaning to say that Dragan wouldn't hook up with a Pan-Slav when of course, he was Pan-Slav himself, or used to be. “He doesn't have a girl,” I snipped instead, and Ling smiled. “They've probably got him off dodging bullets, or—

I stopped myself before I went down that road again. I didn't like to think about him over there. The foreign buildup to the south and offshore was bad, but the Pan-Slav border territories, especially the Menggu and Hasakesitan provinces, were the worst. The Pan-Slav Emirates were falling apart, and they were looking across the border at us like we were the last floating straw to grab on to. All kinds of weapons, even nukes and biological stuff, had been split up by new borders, and the pieces were getting grabbed up by desperate, starving lunatics with Dragan right there in the thick of it.

“Your father is brave,” Ling said. “He is there to keep us safe, to keep you safe.”

“Once it's up we should just wipe them out,” I muttered. “We could do it then. Six months to start, another year to build, and then we should just . . . wipe them all out.”

“It's not so simple.”

“Well, not easy like Menggu or Hasakesitan, but once the shield's active, what's to stop us?”

“Those territories were spent,” she said. “Without the tech to make the space valuable, it was barren and their people were dying. They had to let us take it. This is different.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry, Ling. I'll just be glad when he's back in Hangfei. He should be in tomorrow night.”

“Good.”

“Look, thanks for covering, really. I know you don't get it, but I need this gig.”

I fished a short stack of coin along with a crumpled paper bill from my pocket, and put the coins in her hand, curling her knobby fingers around them.

“You're a good girl,” she said.

“Thanks.” I smoothed out the red bill and held it out so she could see. “Got any shine back in your place?”

She grinned, pinching the cigarette in her lips, and reached into the pocket of her knit shawl. She drew out a glass pint bottle filled with crystal clear liquid and handed it to me. As I took it, she plucked the bill from between my fingers.