“Look,” Alexei said.
I turned, and saw the floor had been covered in some kind of mostly dried muck. An empty shirt had been strewn there, along with a discarded pair of pants. They lay in the approximate shape of whoever had worn them.
Why are they there? Alexei asked.
I followed the outfit toward the opposite side of the room and saw another shirt, and another. More pants, shoes, and stockings lying atop one another in the gloom. Something had been feeding down here.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Come on, we’re leaving here. Right now.”
I boosted him out of the window and crawled out after him. With security off of our trail, we ran away from the Ginzho glitz until the streets grew narrow underneath a canopy of faded plastic blister signs in a mishmash of Hanzi, English, and Pan-Slav. Vendors stood outside shops and hawked their wares under canvas tarps that flapped in the humid breeze.
It took twenty minutes to get there while avoiding eyebot’s security markers, but by the time we did I felt confident we’d lost them. When I spotted the arch of cheap filament bulbs over the grimy plastic sign I recognized it right away. It looked like the site of a demolished building, an empty, building-shaped patch of relatively fresh blacktop in the middle of a tight cluster of towers.
The gate was open, coiled razor wire bordering a rusted sign that read BAISHAN PARK. A few kids played jianzi in a patch of flickering neon next to the check-in station, the shuttle’s colored feathers bouncing between them while the guard watched something on his phone. Past the station were stacks of sleep tubes, coffin-shaped pods arranged in rows, and topped with sheet metal.
Long ago, I’d lived there for years with my mother and father, one of the many families that rented a pod week to week. I thought I’d forgotten most everything about it, but it hadn’t changed much at all and I found myself slowing down, not quite sure I wanted to walk under that arch again.
“Is this okay?” Alexei asked, a little unsure.
“Yeah.” I pulled him along, thinking that in another few years I wouldn’t be able to get away with that. He would be bigger than me before long. I approached the check-in station and slapped my cash card down on the counter in front of a long-haired guy with bad teeth and bad breath. He slid it through the reader and studied the screen in front of him, peering down through a pair of cheap wireframe glasses that sat on the end of his beaky nose.
“How many?” he asked.
“Two.”
He punched in the fee and slid my card back to me along with a magnetic key.
“Unit sixty-seven.”
“Thanks.”
It felt strange, being back there. I’d walked the route more times than I could count on my way back from school, but that had been in another time, and another life. The residents had mostly changed, I thought. I didn’t see Mr. Chen’s bicycle and lawn chairs, or Ping’s card table—but they’d been old men. I wondered if maybe they hadn’t died. A group of younger men hung out just outside the range of one of the flood lamps, smoking and talking in low voices. They stopped, and watched us as we passed.
Alexei followed, sticking close as we headed down the first narrow row of crash tubes that were stacked five high. They’d arranged them in a mazelike pattern to maximize the use of space, but the route through had been hardwired in my brain. Dirty people in dirty clothes watched us from some of the open tubes as we moved down the rows, none of them familiar.
I don’t like this place, Alexei said.
We’ll be okay, trust me. Don’t worry.
I took him around two tight corners and down another row until we got to the sixties where I noticed the old woman’s paper lantern. I’d never known her name as a kid, and I’d forgotten that lantern until just then, but a strange, bittersweet feeling rode in on the memory. She’d been a tiny, bent old thing who used to sit on the edge of the open tube and watch TV on her phone. She’d held the screen right in front of her face, but would wave every time I came through, and I’d wave back. The lantern swayed in the breeze, bumping against the closed hatch of the tube as we passed.
I found the stack in the middle of a crowded block. One of the bottom tubes hung open there, where an old woman hung laundry on a rack. I counted up, and spotted unit sixty-seven halfway up the stack.
“Okay,” I said, handing him the key. “Up. Let’s go.”
Alexei climbed up the ladder and opened the lock, pushing the unit’s hatch open with one arm and holding it while I scrambled past him. As we crawled into the cramped space, a light stick flickered on along the length of the ceiling.
Inside the tube was a single mattress with sheets that looked more or less clean except for a permanent yellowish stain that looked as old as the bedding itself. The far side of the unit was molded into a shelf where you could put your stuff, and Alexei tossed the surrogate kit down onto it with a hollow thud.
I crawled back to the end of the tube where the pillow was, and threw it over at Alexei, hitting him in the face. He acted annoyed, but I saw him smile a little.
“Take it,” I said. He tossed it back.
“You take it.”
“Thanks.” I put it in the corner and patted it down. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed, looking down at the bedding between us.
“You sure?”
I’ve seen people get blown up before, he said.
“Oh,” I said. His eyes looked harder, and more resilient than any young boy’s should. It made me sad to see. “I didn’t know that. In Lobnya?”
He nodded.
People died all the time there. When they pushed us out, they sent tanks. My father, my real father, put a bomb in the street to blow them up, but it went off when he tried to set it.
He’d never talked about his time in Lobnya to me before. He may have to Dragan, but if he did, Dragan never told me about it. He didn’t cry, or even get teary. I would have felt better, I think, if he had. Instead he just sat there with this sort of bitter resignation on his face.
I’m sorry, Alexei.
We die all the time, he said. My father, my uncle, my brother. Even my mother. Everyone dies. I didn’t know those people in Render’s Strip.
“Alexei…”
I pulled him closer, and he let me do it but he no longer seemed to need, or want to be comforted.
Dragan couldn’t help her, he said.
He looked down at the flattened bedding between us, and there, just for a moment, his eyes shone. Then he pulled away and nestled himself at the opposite end of the tube so that were feet to feet. I pulled the hatch down hard enough to make the bolt snap into place.
“He tried to save her,” I said.
He pulled the sheet tighter under his chin.
Don’t talk about my mother. You weren’t there.
That’s true, but I saw the whole thing.
I caught the glint of his eyes as they opened in the dim light. I waited to see if he’d shut me down, and when he didn’t, I continued.
When I tracked you guys down, I found the security recording on Dragan’s wet drive. It’s how I knew where to look.
I’d never talked with him about it before, but I’d never been able to get that recording out of my mind. It wasn’t just because of the way she died, the way her head splashed apart like an egg, it was Alexei’s reaction. He saw it happen, and even though I didn’t know him yet, the look on his face had always stayed with me. He’d called for her, it was all he’d said, but through the shock I could see in his eyes that he’d understood. He’d understood that the thing he’d loved most in this world, needed most in this world, had been squashed out in a second, without even a chance for good-byes.