You don’t have time to worry about this now, I told myself. There’s too much going on. Just put it out of your mind and worry about it later.
I did worry, though. I worried that there might not be a later. Whatever was forming between Vamp and Shuang was happening now. If I didn’t say or do something soon, I might not get a chance to worry about it later. For all I knew, it might already be too late.
As I approached the restrooms, I spotted a woman in a white gonzo robe standing against the wall off to my right. Her eyes followed me as I approached and I looked away.
Here? Are you kidding me? What the hell are they doing here?
When I glanced back a moment later, I saw that she’d begun to follow me.
“Oh, goddamn it, not now…”
I kept walking. When I got to the restroom I banged a right to head into the women’s room, but before I could open the door I felt a cold hand on my wrist.
“Wait.”
I turned and saw the gonzo had a twitchy, scared expression on her face. She tightened her grip, and guided me toward the wall with her, out of the flow of foot traffic.
“Look, I’m not interested,” I told her. “Shouldn’t you be hassling people in a gate terminal somewhere?”
“I know who you are,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Your father is that security officer.”
That gave me a start. I realized then that she didn’t act like a typical gonzo. Usually they seemed kind of out of it, like they were in some kind of trance or something. They were always calm, no matter what you said or did. When I looked at this woman, I saw real fear in her eyes.
“Who the hell are you? Have you been following me?”
She took out a gonzo pamphlet and handed it to me.
“No,” I said. “Keep your pamphlet because I’m not joining—”
“I don’t want you to join the reunification movement,” she said. “I want you to stop him.”
“Stop who?” I asked her. “What do you mean?”
“Gohan is insane,” she said.
“Yeah, no shit.”
“He’s going to do something crazy.”
“He’s always doing something crazy.”
She gripped my arm harder, hard enough to make me wince, and pulled me a little closer.
“I mean it,” she hissed. “I don’t know for sure what, but he’s going to do something bad. He’s working with the haan.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just listen—he wants you in the new colony. You might have a chance to—”
She jumped as a man grabbed her arm from out of the crowd. Two other gonzos had caught up with her, and neither of them looked happy. The woman’s eyes widened in terror for a moment, but she forced a smile.
“Only He can move the stars,” she told me.
The man who had her arm pulled her away, and I snatched the pamphlet out of her hand as they herded her back into the crowd, toward the club’s exit.
“Wait!”
I started to go after her, but before I could get halfway to them they’d taken her back out into the plaza. I watched through gaps in the crowd as they hopped a walkway and were carried away, passing two security guards as they went. I turned back before they could see me, and slipped into the bathroom.
Inside I headed down the row of women touching up makeup in the mirror and took the first empty stall where I sat down. I folded a length of toilet paper, and pressed it to my forehead, wincing as the blood soaked through to my fingertips.
I dropped it into the toilet and applied a fresh one, then checked out the pamphlet the gonzo gave me.
ONLY HE CAN MOVE THE STARS.
Underneath, there were two images of the planet, eclipsing one another, with the gonzo symbol over the spot where they overlapped.
I opened it and found more pictures inside, along with blocks of text. I didn’t read any of it, but the illustrations showed the Earth with a dot on it where the Impact had occurred. The pictures that followed showed a ring expanding out from the dot, growing until it split the globe into two halves, then all the way around to make another dot on the other side.
That surprised me. They’d depicted the Impact, but not the Impact as most people believed it. The diagram suggested the event Sillith described to me, one planet being consumed by another. The haan home world being replaced with ours, leaving only Shiliuyuán. I remembered the gonzo protesters in Xinzhongzi, the ones who jumped.
“…you are being lied to…. They have lied about the haan, and they have lied about the Impact….”
“Look at my face. This is the face of belief….”
The image of Shuang locking lips with Vamp bubbled up, in spite of everything and I clenched my fists, trying to scrub it out of my brain. The sad thing was that Shuang, in a lot of ways, was probably a better match for Vamp and not just because of her looks. Vamp liked me, sure. Maybe it was true and I was his first choice, but that woman connected with him on a level I never could.
The screen on the inside of the stall door flickered.
“You look like you could use some male companionship,” the A.I. said.
“I’m fine,” I growled.
“Desirable, powerful men are available right now for discreet—”
I dropped a coin into the ad box slot to opt out, and the A.I. retreated so that a TV feed could take its place. A news stream began to play, showing footage of the Render’s Strip bombing. It looked like the bodies had been cleaned up, but the area had been cordoned off. Groups of officers moved through the square, setting markers and taking samples from the rubble.
I opened the pamphlet and saw more gonzo propaganda… how the haan are superior, how they are more deserving of the planet, and how we should aspire to remake ourselves in their image.
“You guys have no idea….” I said to myself.
Down near the bottom of the pamphlet, under a photo of Gohan, I spotted a small block of neat handwriting.
The cathedral houses something he calls Rapture. All I know is it will let the haan wipe us out. I believe it. So does Gohan. I know your father was UDF. You must convince him to destroy the cathedral before it’s too late.
It was true, then. Gohan had built something, some kind of weapon or something, and given them the means to power it with the new substation. If the gonzo had pinned her hopes on Dragan, though, she’d overestimated him. Dragan couldn’t just destroy the cathedral. Best case he might be able to bring a team in there to check it out, but even that was a stretch, given his history with Gohan.
Rapture.
He’d picked a Western word, an English word. It had to have some significance. When I ran it through the translator the closest match came back as kuángxı, or ecstasy, but a little more digging revealed it also referred to a religious event. I brought up the first link I could find on it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be some kind of end-of-the-world deal. The second coming of a Christian god, maybe? I remembered the gonzo with the bullhorn, in Xinzhongzi.
“The haan will return…. Rapture will see the return of the haan to their rightful place….”
“The return of the haan,” I said to myself. What did it mean?
An image on the feed distracted me, and I looked up to see the inside of the smoke shop where I’d found Alexei after the bombing, the place swarming with officers. One talked to the shop owner while others had collected around a spot at the end of one of the aisles.
I recognized it. They were grouped around the same spot where I’d found Alexei, sitting in a ball by the magazine rack.