Never mind.
“When they gonna just gas those protesters already?” someone muttered.
“You believe LeiFang is going to make that freak a citizen?” another voice grumbled back. The first man snorted.
“Citizen. They should be locked in cages.”
The image on the feed screen changed, and a flicker of gore registered, catching my eye. I turned and saw footage of a security officer’s helmet feed, looking down into a room that part of my brain recognized right away.
Look, will you just go home, please? Dragan and Dao-Ming are worried about you.
You’re not.
I am, too, I said, but I’d been distracted by the footage on the screen.
That’s one of Wei’s rooms, I realized. The camera scanned back and forth across the filthy floor, lingering on a trunk of weapons and a few expended shells. Against the far wall next to the room’s bunk, several automatic rifles were propped against the wall. My mouth dropped. It was the room the arms dealers worked out of, the same room where I’d gotten the guns, and the explosives.
The camera followed a wandering trail of blood that joined up with a large pool near the toilet’s privacy screen. A bloodless hand peeked out from under the plastic, fingers curled like a dead bug. A cloud of scaleflies swarmed behind the curtain.
“Shit,” I said under my breath.
When they moved the curtain I saw the guy, the one that smoked, with a bullet hole where his left eye had been and half his head blown off. A deal gone wrong, it looked like.
My first thought, that at least I didn’t have to worry about them identifying me now, wasn’t my most charitable. My second, that at least I hadn’t been there when it happened, wasn’t much better. Still, I couldn’t say it upset me too much the men were out of the picture.
That must have happened last night, I thought. Last night or early this morning. Who could have—
“Race traitors!” a voice shouted from somewhere down the street, cracking as it rose over the general din of the place. I huffed through my nose.
Just stay out of it, Alexei said.
No. When you pull this shit he worries, and so do I.
The heart beat some more while the rattle of Fang’s ancient air-conditioner played in the background, competing with the chatter from several of the wall-mounted television sets. I watched the wobbly ceiling fan spin overhead while I waited for him to answer. He didn’t respond, but he didn’t disconnect either. He had something to say, I thought.
The gonzos are trouble these days, I told him. I just don’t want to see you get sucked in.
No, they aren’t.
Alexei—
They didn’t try and kidnap you, I know you’re making that up! I can take care of myself!
“You’re all a bunch of race traitors!” the distant voice screamed again.
I turned and peered out through the window shutter behind me. Down the crowded street at the main intersection I could make out some kind of assembly, a band of Reunification gonzos it looked like. They had signs, and yellow incense smoke from one of their little shrines drifted up from out of the crowd.
Yeah, they’ve got a group in Render’s Strip right now, not causing trouble.
Leave them alone, okay?
What if I don’t?
A wiry guy in a pastel green tank top was standing silhouetted against the blue field in the distance, making a fist at the gonzo crowd. Way off down the street behind them I could see the shimmering haan force-field dome and the shadow of the massive structure underneath it. At the surrounding wall, long turret barrels jutted up into the air like giant spikes and I could see the one of the two-story black balls sticking out from behind a building there, one of the graviton lenses ready to wash the site in a field strong enough to squeeze everything inside into slag.
“Go back to Shangzho, haan lovers!”
Just leave me alone.
The words floated there in front of the scene through the window, but again his little icon pulsed, waiting.
You got something you need to say? I asked him. Cheers surged from one of the TV sets nearby as the icon continued to beat. Down the street, the man tried to grab the gonzo’s sign from him.
Alexei, if you have something to say, say it, I told him. I let the heart beat ten more times, then got fed up and disconnected.
Pain in the ass.
My mood shifted from bad to worse. My stomach growled as the smell of opened ration bars seeped through the miasma of smoke, bad breath, and sweat, and I swallowed saliva.
“Sam, it’s us,” Dragan called. “We’re up.”
At the counter, Dragan stood in front of Fang, looking back my way and trying to see out the window.
I felt a jab at my neck and slapped my hand down over it, causing a couple of tired faces to turn in my direction. I looked into my palm and frowned at the smear there, a broken black shell in a gob of red- and plaque-colored guts. The scalefly’s compound eye stared back at me over a needle-sharp stinger.
“Stupid bloodsucker.” I scraped it off under the edge of the counter beneath the TV.
“Hey,” Fang called over. “People eat in here.”
“They eat scalefly.”
“Processed scalefly. What are you, a barbarian?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I squeezed my way over to join them around the dangling fly strip that hung over the register. The strip swayed a little in the current of the overhead fan, specks of amber glue peeking through the coating of black bodies, wings, and legs. Behind Fang, several flyers hung. More faces, more contact info, and more offers of reward for anyone who could help find the missing who, according to security, didn’t exist.
“Gonzo, you look like shit,” Fang said. I smiled, but still gave him the finger.
I winced as a stray signal jabbed in through the mite cluster… It was close, probably just outside passing by. A pang of hunger slithered down deeper into my belly, and I caught a whiff of a haan’s stinky, fermented tofu breath as the signal faded and cut.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I rubbed my forehead.
“Phase six in three weeks,” Fang said. “It’s going to be good this time.”
“You going to genetically double your dick size?”
“If I can afford it,” he said without missing a beat. I figured he’d come back with a crack about my flat chest but he didn’t.
“So, except for looking like shit how you been?”
“Okay.”
“How’s your friend, the guy with the tattoos?” Dragan gave him a little head shake.
“Vamp,” I muttered.
“What’s the matter, you don’t like him no more?”
I bristled. “Stay out of—”
“Okay, okay,” Fang said, putting up his hands. “I get it. What about your haan friend? The one who helped you when you—”
“Nix,” I said.
Dragan seemed to decide that maybe the time had come to get me out of there and pushed three pink tickets across the counter toward Fang. “Can you take these?”
Fang peered down at the tickets, peeling them off the counter and looking them over.
“Security’s treating you guys well.”
“Got any left?”
“Yeah, I got some left. You know the phase six rations are supposed to be even better.”
I snorted through my nose.
“Pinch me.”
Fang reached under the counter and rustled around in a box before placing three fat bars in plastic wrappers marked with the Shangzho haan district’s official seal. One of the men in the crowded room glanced over from his table, and watched Dragan drop the bars in a plastic bag. After a decade of powdered kelp, krill, and scalefly cake, the new rations bought the haan more points than probably anything else they’d done so far. At least among the people who could afford them, which in Hangfei, were the people who mattered.