Shine (3 page)

I couldn't watch any further.

My fingers shook as I folded up the wi-mo. Could I really say that Papa wouldn't kill him? I'd winced when I saw the video for the first time, but assumed the worst was over. After all, Xiaohao hadn't been the first criminal beaten by our father, and Little Yunhe had never executed anyone before. My brother had come here practically wrapped in the flag of Ecclesia; of
course
Papa would show him hard justice, give him a week or two in the
Whale
. But he wouldn't kill his own son.

Would he?

I tried to call Papa, got no response. Then I began to jog. Xiao's words played over and over again in my head:
are you sure? I think they might put me on a pike.
I cut through the Little Jingjiang Tent Quarter, which was quiet except for a handful of eateries. The smell of fried onion wafted from solar woks--I should have been hungry, but the thought of food made me nauseous.

The route through the Tent Quarter was shorter, but Jingjiang had suffered a milder disaster than Yunhe, and its detritus was stacked outside of every tent. Bookshelves, defunct televisions, stainless steel cages. Coffee makers, lamps, the stems of wineglasses. Leftovers of another dead town, clogging the veins of the refugee city. Twice I had to leap over fallen stacks of boxes, and once I nearly toppled an old woman selling reusable cigarettes.

Finally, the ways widened and the tents thinned. A squad of security officers in old, weathered hardsuits stood along the border of Yunhe Tent Quarter; they tensed as I approached and then relaxed when they saw my face. The squad leader nodded his respect.

Papa might have been in the Administrators' offices or he might have been in bed. Both huts were inland, but home was closer. I glanced across the water at the
Whale
and picked up my pace, drawing a dozen confused gazes in my wake as I jogged toward our house on the hill.

The door was locked. I groped for my keys, shoved the door open, and stumbled inside, where a dozen rattling fans twisted around to cool me. The lights were off, and the doors between each partition were open. In the study, Papa's favorite dishes lay dirty on his desk, and a yellowed novel sat half-open on his seat. I was certain now that he wasn't home, but I called out his name nonetheless: an impropriety that would have earned me a lecture in the best of times.

There was no response.

I hissed a curse and made to leave, then stopped short. The smart-fans squeaked, surprised by my sudden stillness. On my eyelid, the prompt flashed:
Link to device "XiXi" for data transfer?
The same prompt I'd gotten every day for the past week. I wasn't sure where Papa had hidden Xiaohao's wi-mo, but that didn't matter, did it? I was in range. I agreed to link, and Xiao's unit asked me for a password.

"Garden," I said. The world changed.

I had only fleeting memories of my grandfather's garden, but those scraps were vivid. Sunflowers like bright, tremendous trees, the space beneath their canopy a secret yellow sanctuary. I squatted in the soil with my worn, creaky kitty until Xiao, a few years older, fell onto me in a spray of dirt and battle cries. He whipped the stalks of the great golden flowers with some uprooted weed, sent me wailing out of the garden to the farm proper. I got lost in endless rows of sorghum, and when I found Papa at last, he nearly beat me for running out of sight.

Now I stood in the garden again. Sunflowers towered over my head, five or six meters tall, brighter than ever, brighter even than the flowers of memory. Birds chirped somewhere just out of sight. Up the hill, between the stalks, I could see my grandfather's house, intact and even renovated.

Yunhe. The real Yunhe, back from the dead.

This can't be fake
, I thought. Sims always left me with this jarring sense of absolute credulity. The wi-mo fed me my home through the roof of my mouth, and I couldn't help but believe it.
This can't be fake
, I thought, though I knew that it was.
I can smell the dirt.

I made my way out of the canopy of monster flowers and gasped. "Oh, Xiao," I murmured, and struggled to remind myself that nothing here was real or meaningful, that my home was still buried beneath the black flood. Grandfather's house was beautiful, and larger than it had ever been in real life: a multi-wing, three-story complex with something like an observation deck on the roof. I followed a stone path--flanked by more traditionally proportioned blue roses--from the garden to the house. The front door was unlocked, and I stepped inside.

It wasn't the home I remembered. Somehow it was more than home, the
idea
of grandfather's place writ large. There was space for dozens in the dining room, seats arrayed around three beautiful wooden tables. On the ground floor alone there were two kitchens, a full bar, and a game room. Xiao had connected a library to grandfather's study; Papa's favorite painting of the War Above held a position of honor over the reading couch. The house's additional stories were given over to bedrooms, enough to sleep our entire extended family and several more families besides.

It's a dormitory
, I realized. Grandfather's house transformed into a dormitory. Was this how citizens of Ecclesia lived? Like wealthy college students?

I took the elevator--
the elevator--
to the roof. Lawn chairs encircled a small herb garden, and at each edge of the roof, telescopes gazed off into the distance. The day was preternaturally clear: no smog, no fog, and not a single cloud in the sky. I could make out individual trees on the blue mountains that towered around Yunhe. If I'd wanted, I probably could have found the mountaintop waste lake that had laid my town to waste.

Instead, I looked out across the Yunhe that Xiaohao had made. His model world. As far as I could tell, there were no traditional homes here; in their place were half a dozen more dormitory houses, each surrounded by vast tracts of vibrant farmland. Here and there in the fields stood enormous, gleaming towers: new model accumulators hybridized with wind turbines. To the south, at a point roughly equidistant from each of the dormitories, I saw Xiao's vision of a town square. Open air market, playground and pool, small restaurants, even an amphitheater. Everything was linked by a web of red brick paths. It was lovely. The gardens, the farms--everything was lovely.

I shut down the sim.

Yunhe disappeared, and I smelled the ocean again. Smartfans surrounded me in an eager semicircle, cooled me with a kind of mad mechanical enthusiasm. Ships' horns sounded in the distance. I took three swift, deep breaths--a trick I'd learned in college for exiting sims as quickly as possible--and ran out the door. Somehow it was easier to believe in the real world with a full pair of lungs.

The security officers outside of the Administrators' offices were less genial than the ones on the border. They surely knew my face, but still they held their position in front of the door, and they neither smiled nor nodded. There was even a little smirking twist in the corner of the squad leader's mouth--my panic must have leaked out of my eyes, visible to everyone.

"State your business," said the squad leader, plaintive and automatic. He was short, broad-shouldered, and wore a few days' stubble. I briefly wondered if I could force my way past him, gave up on the idea as quickly as I'd conjured it. Dozens of people decided that they had business with the Administrators every day: accusations of chicken theft or wi-mo hacking, petitions for divorce or consolidation of tent-space. This man's entire job was to stand in the way of desperate people's grievances.

"I need to see my father," I said.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"He called me. Asked me to come as quickly as possible."

"You won't mind if I confirm that," he said.

I smiled sweetly and said that I wouldn't mind at all. I had an understanding with Jung, my father's secretary. The squad leader unfolded his wi-mo, carried on an extremely short subvocalized conversation with an invisible party, and then frowned.

"Go on, then," he muttered.

I stepped inside the Quonset hut. The place was sweltering. Two parallel rows of secretaries glanced up from paper-plastered desks, every sweaty face transparently terrified that I had come to make more work. I found Papa in the back of the hut, softly berating Jung over something to do with ledgers. Jung looked relieved to see me.

"Papa," I said, "may I speak to you in private?"

He raised an eyebrow but nodded, beckoned me to his office and closed the door. We sat on either side of his desk, and my eye flicked to the painting behind his head: a battle scene from the War Above. Murmured arguments about fishing zones floated from the office next door; the partitions between offices were more of an affectation than a proof against sound. I spoke quietly.

"When will Xiao go free? He looks awful."

Papa sat back and sighed. "Yuen. It's not clear that he will ever go free."

He didn't blink as he said it. His eyes were always wide and wary and unblinking, as if he'd never stopped looking down on the entire world at once, never given up the divine-eye view from space. He ran one hand across his gray-black beard, which had only recently started to fill in. "You know we can't look the other way on this, sweet. We'd countenance sedition and burn every scrap of our credibility all in one clean sweep. Xiao made his choices, and he's left us with none."

Goosebumps raised across my neck. "So," I said, barely a whisper, "you're going to kill him?"

Papa was silent. His face was utterly still, and he didn't blink.

"I want to show you something," I said, newly careful with every syllable. I didn't know how precarious a line I was walking anymore, and I couldn't be sure that Papa wouldn't throw me in the
Whale
for collaboration. But I also couldn't let my brother die. I queued up the sim, prepared to send--

"If it's Xiaohao's new Yunhe," said Papa, "I've seen it and don't want to see it again."

I froze. "You've seen--"

"He sent it to all of the Administrators the day he came back."

"And you saw," I said. I felt clenched and cold.

"I saw enough."

"You saw the garden. You saw the painting in the library."

Again, Papa was hard-eyed and silent and absolutely still. And I finally understood. I'd thought that he was furious with Xiao, disappointed and sore with wounded pride. But incredibly, terrifyingly, this wasn't a matter of emotion. It wasn't personal at all.

Papa was
unwilling
to make it personal.

He'd never been particularly traditional. He might have forgiven Xiao for simply running away with a professor. Even if the professor in question was male and Filipino and given to lectures on crowdsourcing microprotest. Xiao's romances were a family matter. But he had fled to a metanation, and that made his choices the business of the state. That was
defection.
Dereliction, sedition.

Papa couldn't forgive sedition.

"His world means nothing," he said softly. "It's fantasy. That's all."

"I think Xiao believes he can make it real."

"Your brother believes a lot of stupid things." He stood with a grunt, finally turned his wide eyes away from me. "You have a gentle heart, and I admire that, but today we can't be gentle. I trust you're smart enough not to be moved by other people's stupidities."

I struggled to make my face as opaque as his own. "Yes, Papa," I said. My intentions must have leaked out of my eyes. I stood and opened the partition door, but Papa stopped me.

"One more thing, sweet." He gripped my shoulder. "You mustn't give away your honoraria. Word travels, and it makes us appear ungrateful. Arrogant. We can't afford that kind of reputation at the moment. Do you understand?" He smiled his disarming smile.

"Yes," I said. I understood.

I flipped on my arc knife. The blade hissed and lit up the creaking, deathtrap stairway of the
Whale
, cast my skin in electric blue. I jumped past the the last two steps, and my landing echoed in rattling metal. There was no time for caution. It was time for knives.

I'd stashed the tools in the soles of my shoes, but that proved unnecessary: Zhu didn't give me trouble, didn't even ask me to pull out my pockets. I hoped he would be just as accommodating on our way out. We could cut through the hull if it came to that, but I didn't exactly relish the thought of sinking a ship while Xiaohao and I were still inside.

I hurried down the hall of open doors, swinging blue light at my side. Xiao's eyes appeared in the grate, bright first with panic and then confusion. "Yuen? What do you--"

"Step back," I said. "As far back as you can go."

He obeyed. I cleaved the thick padlock with one swipe, turned off the knife, and hauled open the heavy door. Inside, Xiao pressed himself flat against the far wall. He was dressed in a dirty undershirt and too-small black pants. He looked stricken.

"Yuen--" he started.

"You were right, Xiao. I was wrong. We have to go."

He blanched. "They're going to kill me?"

"I don't know. I have no idea what they'll do anymore." I pulled off my left shoe, peeled open the sole, and drew out a second arc knife. "Take this."

Xiao frowned at the knife for a moment. Then he took it.

"What's your plan?"

"We leave the city. Make for--I don't know. A
real
city. I have some money. Maybe we go to your Ecclesia. If it comes to that. Maybe..."

Xiao's frown deepened. "Your money's worthless," he said quietly.

"We'll get by."

He bit his lip and fiddled with the arc knife. Flicked it on and sat down on the wireframe monstrosity that must have been his bed. He watched the blade burn and hiss. "Your money's worthless," he said, "and there's no going to Ecclesia. I pissed them off in order to come here."

"You pissed them off."

He shook his head, sighed. Cursed under his breath. The knife-light cast long shadows under his eyes. "Yuen. I hate it, and I thank you, but I think I need to stay here."

I opened my mouth, but no sound came.

"I know it's stupid," he said. His jaw was tight, and his hand shook slightly. "I know. Listen. I thought about what you said. How I came here without understanding the place or the people. You were right. Absolutely, awfully, irrefutably right. But now I know the mistakes I made, and I think I can make this work. If I run away--that's an admission of guilt. I lose every single scrap of credibility I ever had. Two years of preparation, one furious metnat, and all for nothing. I have to try again, Yuen."