When he approached, I could see the honeycomb pattern of his rib cage through his translucent smoke gray skin, and behind that, the shadow of his throbbing heart. His sunset pink eyes glowed softly in the approaching dusk, lighting up the inside of his skull where his two brains floated in their bath of fluid. When he spoke, the soft green light at his voice box flickered.
“Hello, Sam.”
“Nix,” I said, struggling to speak through my bone-dry throat. “You can’t be here.”
He approached and knelt down next to me so that his draping suit touched the ground. The mass of his larger brain shifted underneath the dome of his skull, while the smaller one quivered underneath it.
“It is good to see you, Sam.”
“You can’t be here, Nix,” I told him. “You died.”
“I don’t think I did.”
“You died. I saw it,” I said.
He seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he turned and looked up at the sky through the falling snow.
“You are troubled,” he said. “I can feel it.”
“Yeah.”
“About what?”
“I think I saw something,” I told him. “The other night. I think I saw a haan memory.”
“Of?”
“Eating,” I said. “Eating people. I think it was one the haanyo ng.”
“Haanyo ng?”
“It’s what I call them. People are being changed, Nix. Changed into haan.”
He didn’t respond to that one way or the other.
“I could sense his thoughts,” I said. “It felt like they were mine.”
“That is expected.”
“He said something about taking the bodies to ‘the safe place.’ … Do you know what he meant?”
“I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Why am I the only one who can see these memories?”
He held up one hand so that the flakes drifted down between his long, thin fingers. When he spoke again, his tone turned grave.
“I have been looking for you,” he said, his voice box flickering softly beneath his upturned chin.
“What?”
He lowered his hand and looked back toward me. His palm felt warm on my cold skin as he gripped my forearm gently.
“I hope that I find you, soon. You have to—”
All at once he stopped. He’d frozen, and the light from his voice box glowed steady, caught in midflicker.
“Nix?”
A whine of static jabbed into my ears, followed by a loud crackle.
“…what you are experiencing is not a dream,” a voice said. It belonged to a foreign man, American maybe, speaking in Mandarin. “…field prevents traditional communication of any kind….”
“Nix?”
“…to target the implanted alien receiver, what you term the surrogate mite cluster, in an attempt to reach…”
The voice ended in a pop of static, and Nix began to move again.
“—help me,” he finished.
“What?”
“Something terrible is going to happen,” he said. “Ava, the haan female who replaced Sillith, is—”
A loud crackle made me reach for my ears, but Nix, frozen in place, still had my arm. The signal cut out again, and he unfroze.
“What?” I asked, confused. “What about Ava?”
“Do not trust her.”
“No,” I said, and tried to pull away again. “She helped me. She helped all of us.”
“She has merged with—”
His voice cut out again, and he stuttered like a corrupt video stream.
“Nix, let go,” I told him. He gripped my arm tighter.
“Please,” he said. “Soon you will cross the point of no return. You are the only one I can turn to….”
“Nix, I said let go.”
His skin grew cold and a shiver ran down my spine as his hand turned from smoke gray to tar black. The fingers stretched like worms, slithering around my forearm as his arm began to change, too.
“Nix, let go.”
“A time will come, soon…”
His voice slowed down, growing deeper until it became nothing but a low, rumbling hiss. Clicking sounds, like the legs of many insects, began to bubble up from the white noise.
Pockmarks appeared on the tarry surface of his skin, collapsing into deep pores that scaleflies began to scurry out from. I tried to pull away, but his grip felt like iron. As I pushed back with my heels, the cold worms coiled further around me, and Nix’s arm began to divide into several others. The new appendages reached for me as well, oozing over my neck and shoulders.
“…when you must decide what it is you believe.”
His eyes, the color of a Hangfei sunset, turned to coal black as his body melted into a shivering mass. The heart inside pulsed faster, and harder, as the mound began to grow.
“Nix, let go! Let g— ”
I snorted awake to the sound of a TV feed, the room lit only by the flickering light from a screen. On it, a camera drone swooped between two buildings to focus on the faint blue dome of the haan force field, which glowed in the distance. A cigarillo sat smoldering in a glass ashtray on the sofa arm to my left, a thread of smoke trickling up toward the ceiling. Alexei lay on his side next to me with his head in my lap, where he’d fallen asleep. I felt a tickle and glanced down to see a scalefly sitting on the back of my right hand over a bead of blood where it had bitten me in my sleep. It began cleaning its legs, and I blew on it, causing it to flit away. The fly buzzed my head and I waved it away, causing Alexei to murmur something, still half in sleep.
“Sorry,” I said and stroked his hair.
I put one hand on his shoulder, enjoying his closeness. Since I’d quit the surrogate program, he’d become the closest thing I had to that kind of bond, and though I’d never say it out loud, it didn’t quite compare. I couldn’t feel his emotions through my brain band cluster as I did with the haan. I could only know what he chose to share.
The smoke stinks, he sent over the 3i chat. He’d been picking up the language pretty well, but still had a tendency to lean on the translator.
I know.
You shouldn’t smoke.
On the feed screen, the drone did a sharp dive to zoom down, past the blackened ruins surrounding the ship, then on toward the Jinzhou military base where our new governess, Cai LeiFang, stood at some posh ceremony in full military regalia. In the distance I could make out the American naval forces off the southern coast, huge ships clustered like some giant, floating city that bristled with cannons and nukes.
Cameras watched as the new haan female, Ava, approached LeiFang through rows of guards who stood at attention, her cloak flowing behind her as she went. When she reached the governess, she bowed her large head and LeiFang bowed in return. In less than a week, Ava would become the first haan to be officially granted dual citizenship, and they had a huge televised ceremony planned. It had some people happy and others furious, but it had me more worried than anything else. Ava had, in her way, helped me fight Sillith and by extension the former governor, Hwong. I hadn’t expected her to get so comfy with the Hangfei government and certainly not so soon.
“Do not trust her….”
The dream lingered, feeling too real for comfort. What could Nix have meant by that?
The marquee that crawled below speculated that Ava would make a case for the opening of the controversial Xinzhongzi colony at their meeting after the ceremony. The ticker that crawled past the bottom of the screen below the marquee showed the food index was down again by several points across all six feedlot platforms, which could only work in Ava’s favor. Only sixty-seven percent of all processed food now went to the haan. That was down almost sixteen points from less than a year ago.