Let Dragan in, I said. Trust me. When he pulled me out of the butcher’s pen I’d been on the street for years, and I was a total wreck. I didn’t trust him either at first. I used to piss him off so bad, I thought he’d blow a gasket. I hit him and scratched him, ran away, came back wrecked….
That got Alexei’s interest, a little. He didn’t sit up, but he turned his head to look at me.
You scratched Dragan?
Hell, the very first time I saw him, I stabbed him in the face with a piece of wire. It’s how he got that scar.
Why did you?
Because I was scared, and I didn’t realize who he was. I thought he’d come to hurt me.
But he helped you.
Yeah, he did, I said. You know it’s funny. For a long time, it was just me and him. When I first heard about you I was actually pretty pissed.
He didn’t answer at first, then, in a quiet voice, “Why?”
I was jealous, I guess. When I heard he’d latched onto some other kid, it bugged me. Like, a lot. When I found you, I was going to just turn you over to security.
I saw him start to get angry at that, and cut him off before he could respond.
I’m glad I didn’t, I said. I’m glad Dragan found you, and took you in, and I’m glad you stayed. You mean a lot to me, you know.
He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was, it didn’t quite make it out. His face flushed, and he shrugged.
I like you, he said. But I don’t like it here.
Give it a chance.
This is not my home.
Dragan loved your mother. He wanted us to be a family. Just try and give it a chance.
He didn’t look so sure, but he nodded.
I will try.
Good.
He lay there, not saying anything for a while, then asked, Do you think Dragan will marry Dao-Ming?
I laughed, but then I saw he was serious.
I don’t know, Alexei.
Does he like her?
Yeah, he likes her.
He nodded. He looked at me a moment longer, then turned back over on his side and faced the wall. I turned and nestled in as best I could before reaching back to slap the light contact behind me.
“Good night, shitsplat.”
The overhead flickered once, then went dark.
Chapter Sixteen
“…anyone receiving this message, this is an attempt to bypass the…”
The voice whistled through a whine of static as I stood on the side of Ginzho tower, my feet planted on the graviton plating. The rows of air traffic far ahead of me were frozen over the streets below them.
Everything was frozen, even the ground traffic, and the mobs of people on the sidewalks. The LCD screens displayed static images, advertisements stuck midstream and clusters of brightly lit signs frozen in midflash. The quiet made me nervous. There were no street sounds, no voices… just nothing at all.
Static whined again. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“…we are being invaded. You will be hesitant to believe this but we have scientific proof of…”
The voice cut out again, echoing between the buildings before fading to nothing. I looked around again, across the reflective surface of the glass windows to either side of me, then turned to look toward the tower’s spires and the night sky beyond. There was no one there.
“Hello?” I called. No one answered. The static ended in a loud pop, and a whine of feedback.
Something groaned behind me and I spun back around to face the wall of city streets ahead. The cars were all still frozen, but something, a large, long shape, slunk past the corner of the base of the building that loomed above me.
“Who’s there?” I called.
I felt heat between the knuckles of my right hand and looked down to see a lit cigarillo, the cherry burned down to the crook of my fingers. I flicked it away.
“Hey, who’s there?”
“…the alien spread must not be allowed to…” The radio voice crackled. “…if it does we may never be able to shut down the field that keeps you…”
Something struck the building face up ahead of me, down toward the street. Something big, that caused the plating to vibrate under my feet. The weird shadow moved again, and I saw it slink along on the other side of the grids of frozen aircar traffic. The shape crept closer to the tower; then the building vibrated again as it connected somewhere near the tenth floor.
“…field, which continues to expand at a rate of…”
“Hey,” I called, “what—”
The vibrations got stronger as the shape moved toward me. Being oriented on the graviton plating, it seemed to be moving across the ground toward me but it actually climbed straight up the side of the tower. Whatever it was, it was big, and it moved fast.
I stepped back as the thing picked up speed. It moved through the glow of aircar headlights, some kind of massive worm the size of a metro train. Its spindly legs undulated in waves along either side as they carried it toward me, faster and faster.
My breath caught in my throat as the thing closed the distance between us in a sudden burst of speed. Something inside me urged me to run, but my legs wouldn’t work. I just stood, and stared, as the thing crept right up to where I stood, then stopped.
It loomed over me. In the light of the building’s huge neon sign I could see that the rows of legs were actually haan arms, each ending in a haan hand with five delicate fingers. There were thousands of them. They connected to the main body just under a ridge of shell that capped each of the long train of body segments. What looked like clothing, partially rendered, flapped from the shoulders of each arm.
It surged toward me again, just a little, and I stepped back with my hands out in front of me.
“Stop,” I said. “Just wait….”
It stopped, and then leaned closer, its giant head blotting out the lights of the street behind it. I could make out enormous, glassy black domes formed into clusters on the surface of its face. Where its mouth might have been, there was a writhing curtain of more haan arms, fingers working in the air as they reached toward me.
“What are you?” I whispered.
One of the black eye domes flickered, and light began to grow behind it. It began as a faint, reddish glow and quickly swelled into an intense, fiery orange that formed the saucerlike circle of a single, enormous haan eye. I froze as it stared down at me.
“THE MESSAGES YOU HEAR ARE AN ILLUSION,” the thing said, its voice so low it put my teeth on edge. “THEY ARE THE RESULT OF ELECTRICAL EXCITATIONS IN YOUR CEREBRAL CORTEX DURING YOUR SLEEP CYCLE. THEY ARE NOT REAL. NONE OF THIS IS REAL.”
“What are you?”
“…an attempt to trigger the graviton lenses which surround the ship and…”
The worm shivered, vibrations pouring off of it, and the foreign signal faded away to silence. It leaned in again, and the curtain of mouth parts began to paw in the air, reaching toward me.
“THERE ARE NO FOREIGN MESSAGES. THIS IS ALL A DREAM, AND NOTHING MORE. NONE OF THIS IS REAL.”