The Burn Zone (6 page)

I dropped the bottle neck and took the knife out of my pocket, flicking the blade out as I made a beeline for the guy holding Dragan with no idea what I would do when I got there. I used the little blade to scrape stubborn residue off windows; it would never penetrate combat armor----

The guy used the emitter to drag Dragan toward him, ready to hit him once he was in range, and I stabbed the point of the knife through the seam at his knee. It didn
’
t go all the way in, but enough to make the guy yell and spin around. When he did, the emitter
’
s field moved off Dragan and sucked the end table next to him across the room. It crashed against the wall as he reached down and jerked the knife out.

“
You little
—
”

Dragan was back on his feet and hammered the guy in the face with one fist. He had reached back to hit him again when an armored fist closed around my arm and jerked me away.

“
Stop,
”
the woman said.

Dragan stopped in
midswing
, his eyes going wide as
she put her other hand over my throat and squeezed, just a little.

“
She doesn
’
t know anything,
”
Dragan gasped.
“
Just let her go ... please.
”

She stepped toward him and I followed desperately, toes barely touching the floor.

“
Get his wet drive,
”
she ordered. Two of the soldiers held Dragan, one of them pushing his head down until his chin touched his chest while the other parted the spiky hair at the base of his skull.

“
It
’
s not there,
”
he said.
“
He ditched it.
”

“
Search him. Find the twistkey.
”

One of the soldiers stood back and aimed a scanner, running it down the length of his body. I caught a glimpse of bones and soft tissue moving across the screen, along with buttons and equipment standing out in sharp relief.

“
He doesn
’
t have it,
”
the soldier said.
“
Just the standard-issue security override.
”
The hand squeezed my neck a little harder.

“
Where did you take him?
”
she asked, her voice an electronically altered crackle. Dragan looked around the room at the soldiers.

“
Is this how it is?
”
he asked them.
“
You
’
re going to just turn on one of your own?
”

“
Watch your mouth, traitor,
”
one of them said.

“
Don
’
t talk to him,
”
she said. She turned back to Dragan.
“
I
’
m going to ask you one more time. Where did you take Alexei Drugov?
”

Dragan shook his head, a single bead of sweat dropping from his stubbly chin.

“
That place was destroyed,
”
Dragan rasped.
“
How can it—
”

She clamped her black, scaly glove down on my neck hard then, and I gasped. I tried to squirm free, but the combat suit gave her incredible strength.

“
Tell me where you took him,
”
she said, the armor making a low whine as she slowly tightened her grip.

“
Don
’
t let her do this,
”
Dragan said to the other soldiers. My throat felt the size of a straw as I gasped air in.
“
You know me. This isn
’
t—
”

She lifted me up until my toes brushed the floor and I choked. Grabbing at her wrist to hold myself up, I tried to pull in another breath but couldn
’
t. I struggled, trying to peel her fingers back, and felt a flood of emotion surge through the mites as suddenly as a shock of cold water to the face ... anger, hatred, and disgust bled through my brain like chemical poison. Underneath it all hunger simmered, a desperate, driving hunger that made my stomach clench into a painful knot. It wasn
’
t coming from
Tānchi
. The signal was a million times stronger. It was coming from her.

She
’
s a haan,
I thought, staring down into the empty hood created by the dispersion mask. The thought
buzzed in my head
…
But they
’
re so delicate. How can
she ...

The room seemed to get darker as I struggled to stay on my tiptoes. As dark clouds bloomed in front of me, I saw a fat scalefly come crawling down the length of her arm, then out of sight below my chin. A sound like water rushed in my ears as the world around me began to fade.

“
Wait,
”
I heard Dragan say. Through the slits of my eyes I found his face, and when I did I barely recognized him. I
’
d seen what he could do the day he found me and in the days since, but now the fierceness and strength that I
’
d always associated with him were stripped away. There was only fear in his eyes, just raw fear. Not for himself, but for me. I
’
d broken him.

“
I
’
ll tell you,
”
he said again. The room seemed to be tilting, and he sounded far away.

I glanced right, swiping the 3i icons away in a streak of hot pink hearts and neon that left trails across the
blurry backdrop of our ruined apartment. My friend list scrolled up until I spotted Dragan
’
s name and grabbed it. When I tapped him, he
’
d already begun to move, and I saw metal flash as the knife at his belt came free from its scabbard.

love
u 2.

“
I
’
m sorry, Sam,
”
I heard him say.

The knife came down in an arc as he launched toward us, and the blade struck the soldier next to him. The soldier staggered back while groping for the blade
’
s handle, now jammed into the meat between his shoulder and neck. He struck the wall and left a streak of blood as he slid to the floor.

Dragan seized on the 3i connection, his desperate reply stopping almost as soon as it started.

Forgive me—

The other soldier crashed his plated fist down on the back of Dragan
’
s head, and his 3i connection dropped as he went down like a stone. He wasn
’
t moving, but the soldier knelt over him and hit him again.

“
Don
’
t kill him, you idiot!
”
the woman shouted.

He hit Dragan again, casting dots of blood across the wall next to him, and my feet came up off the floor as Red-stamp stormed across the room, colliding with the coffee table and shattering the glass top. Before I could even get my bearings, she
’
d swung me around in a complete circle and then hurled me away. The room tilted, receding as I flew through the air.

My back hit something hard enough to force the air out of my mouth and nose in a spray of snot and spit. Then the surface behind me gave away with an
earsplitting
crash.

Everything slowed down, and I saw a million sparkles fly away from me as I passed through the cloud of glass. Shards and chunks spun end over end through glittering powder as the living room curtains rushed out after me
on a wave of cool, canned air. For just a second, it formed a faint, smoky fog as the hot, humid night breeze outside washed over me.

The balcony rail passed underneath me as the inside of the apartment fell away. Back through the broken window I could see Dragan lying crumpled and still. My momentum slowed and I fell back, staring up through the sparkling glass bits as the stars wheeled by in the night sky above. Then I plummeted away from the balcony, and the windows of hundreds of apartments whipped past in a blur while my clothes billowed and snapped around me.

Hot summer air roared in my ears as I narrowly missed the huge metal frame of a building sign and neon lights began to streak past in a stream of liquid color. Fifty stories below, past the crisscrossing streams of air-cars, the lights of the street were quickly rushing up to meet me. I screamed over the racket of graviton engines and honking horns.

Something tugged at me from behind, and my skin suddenly began to tingle. The tug grew stronger, and the rushing wind let up until the traffic sounds swallowed it. I
’
d begun to fall more slowly somehow, like I was connected to an invisible elastic band that had stretched taut.

The graviton emitter,
I thought.
One of
them ...

Hanging facedown, I dangled in midair sixty stories above the street, the tingle from the field increasing even as I felt it begin to lose its grip. I was too far away, and I was too heavy. Any second now, I
’
d fall again and this time nothing would be able to stop me.

Below, something flashed. A white point of light appeared, and then a second later the lanes of speeding air traffic directly below me were blotted out by a floating patch of empty space. A thin, bright white outline surrounded it in a perfect hexagon while the inside resolved into a view of an alley that appeared to float in midair.

What the fu—

The tether holding me snapped and I plunged, arms and legs pedaling, into the opening. All at once the city around me disappeared and all sense of movement stopped. For a minute, there was no up or down, no frame of reference at all. I just hung in limbo, like I
’
d been frozen in time.

My ears popped and then just as quickly as I
’
d gone into the hole, I
’
d come out again, still screaming, as I tumbled out the mouth of an alley and skidded a few feet before crashing into the side of a parked car. When I looked up, I saw a crowd of people who were standing under a streetlight look over in surprise.

What the hell?

I stood up, gasping as I took stock of myself. Stinging scratches crisscrossed my face, shoulders, and arms, and one palm burned with road rash, but that was it. I was alive, back on the street just outside our apartment building.

Spinning around, I looked down the sidewalk behind me. A stream of people there had stopped to look back, wondering what was happening. I did a complete turn and saw nothing but staring faces looking down at the girl who
’
d just appeared out of thin air.

Across the street, a scrawny boy sat on the neon fiberglass bug shell of an airbike he
’
d just started, gaping at me. I looked back up the sheer building face toward our apartment, too high above to pick out.

A gate,
I thought. Someone gated me down safely. Was it one of the soldiers? The haan hadn
’
t shared free-floating gate tech with us yet, but there was no way she had done it—it had to have been one of them.

Something tinkled onto the pavement, and then bits of glass began to rain down onto the sidewalk and street as the falling debris caught up with me. I shielded my head, ducking under an awning as someone hollered. A
loud pop echoed down the street as a metal rod trailing one of our living room curtains speared through the windshield of a parked car in an explosion of glass dust.

“
Shit!
”
someone yelled as the car
’
s alarm began to whistle. The wind blew the torn curtain like a flag, and as the last of the glass skittered and spun away, I snapped out of it.