It was more than that, though. I sensed that flow as it was processed, packaged, and stored. A scalefly flitted down and I felt it scurry through a pore in my side, felt it inside me somewhere, then a faint tickle as that information, the sum of everything he observed, was transferred for distribution.
They’re watching us.
A pang of hunger gripped me, urgent and frightening. More ghost objects came flickered into focus, images of other figures, humans, walking and sitting and lying down in the distance, behind the walls that contained the world beyond the bars.
The giant leaned closer and I saw the compact squiggles of a brain appear inside the skull. Bright dots flitted inside, like spastic insects. They flashed up and down the dark shadow of the spine, sparking through muscle tissue as the giant lifted an object into view. It was a bottle. It was a surrogate formula ration whose stamp, in haan, evoked an image of a female who I recognized as Sillith. Not the Sillith I’d encountered, but an icon, an idol who had served, and been loved, for a long, long time.
The giant cracked the seal on the surrogate bottle and pulled the tube out. Its skeletal hand lowered it down into the cage from above. Nix had been a surrogate, of course. He was showing me a memory from when he was an infant of his surrogate mother.
She leaned closer still, and I felt the bottle’s tube squelch its way into an opening near my throat where complex muscles drew it deep down into my body. I felt air vent from other pores in my skin where more scale-flies burrowed and crawled. Then the gel was flooding into me, blanketing the hunger, dousing it, and spreading out through my entire being. Shriveled cells were saturated and grew fat as nerve clusters reconnected, making me whole again. It was like coming back from the verge of death.
The whole time I felt an alien sense of thanks, warmth, and a child’s worship of the only mother it knew. He wanted to touch the giant, to connect with it, and as I stared over the surface of the bottle, I saw the pigment beneath the layer of cottony skin. It was formed in an artful band around the biceps, where complex characters I immediately understood spelled out the syllables of a name.
DRAGAN.
As suddenly as the world had changed, it changed back. I was back in the wrecked hotel, stinking of Wei’s shed water. Nix released my arm.
“You,” I whispered, staring at him. He hadn’t just been a surrogate; he had been my surrogate.
“You cared for me,” he said.
“I remember you.” He’d been my second surrogate. I’d gotten that tattoo just a week before I picked him up. “You’re Xiăĭogu. My little demon.”
“Nix now.”
“I called you that because you kept throwing your bottle.”
“I remember.”
I hadn’t realized they grew that fast, but after what I’d just experienced I didn’t question it. His eyes blazed pink, the pupils like coals nestled within.
“I could never hurt you,” he said.
He took out the little tablet he carried and swiped the screen with one finger. When the gate opened, he placed the wand inside.
“When I didn’t do as they asked, I was pruned from the axial hive. When I return I will be sent back to the vats and my memories will not be preserved. I have no other purpose now but to help you.”
He handed me his tablet, and I took it.
“And I want to help you,” he said.
I looked over the tablet. The spot where the field opened was solid, glossy silver.
“Okay. Fine. You win.”
I turned the tablet over in my hand once, then handed it back.
“Little demon,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“Can you gate us to Render’s Strip?”
“No. I can only gate to and from places I have previously stored the location of, or places close enough so that the device’s scanner can set a dynamic access point. We will need to use the street network.”
“How long do we have?”
“She’ll use a twistkey to give her a direct route,” he said. “Even so, it’s a long distance, but I’d say less than an hour.”
I looked around at the mess, and wiped my face. The water that had steeped into my clothes smelled like sweat.
“Come on, then,” I said. “That’s not much time.”
Chapter Fourteen
08:10:51 BC
The sun had just started to blaze by the time we reached Render’s Strip, and already the crowded streets were beginning to brew in the heat and humidity. A nearby sign flashed a temperature of 104 as scaleflies bounced off the marquee.
I’d put the festival mask back on but pulled it to the top of my head so I could breathe. With the festival that night, the restaurant district was filling up fast with people looking to load up on chems and other illicit buys in spite of the added security. The underground food market especially thrived around festival time, and behind the backs of uniformed guards paper money changed hands all around us. I noticed splotches of red festival dye on the pavement, and on people’s clothes. By tonight, the place would be covered.
“Sam, come on,” Vamp urged. People streamed around us, some of their eyes lingering on Nix as they passed. I held up one hand, pressing my phone to one ear with the other, as someone finally picked up.
“Fang’s Café, what do you want?”
“Mr. Fang?”
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about Dragan Shao—”
The line cut. I looked back at Vamp and held up the phone. “He hung up.”
“Never mind, it’s in here somewhere.”
Down the main drag of the strip, a cordon was still in place around the shattered remains of the government ration reclamation center. The one solid, shiny structure that used to stand tall among the hundreds of bookend storefronts surrounding it had been reduced to blackened rubble. The half-burned remains that littered the site, toppled counters, and twisted electronics and safety glass melted to slag were the only indications of what used to go on inside. The bodies had all been removed, but the pavement under the boots of the guards who stood at the perimeter was still stained with dried trickles and spatters of rust brown.
I turned away from the guards and wiped sweat from my forehead as I scanned the crowded rows of little signs. Each one hung over a narrow door that led into a sliver of restaurant space, flashing bright, happy neon over old buildings covered with a lifetime of sweat, smoke, and grime.
Ninety percent of the restaurants there were basically holes in the wall where you could redeem ration punches, and tiny tables to sit and eat them at if that was your bag. The only thing that made one different from the other was what was on the TV, whether or not they had AC, and what kind of little side rackets they had going on. Signs with white tags meant they sold booze. Red tags meant they sold pills. Blue tags meant clean water, orange tags meant smokes, and pink tags meant “live entertainment.” Two pink tags meant they had girls to get you off in the back. A yellow smiley face on a black background meant street meat. A black smiley face on yellow meant scrapcake.
It was a complete mess, but I’d grown up sneaking through those streets looking for marks, and I knew where all the side streets and alleys were. The GPS marker put Fang’s Café two blocks up on the right, underneath rippling plastic tarps that had been stretched across the street from building to building two stories up.
“This way.”
There were more haan wandering Render’s Strip than I expected to see, standing a head or so above most people as they moved carefully through the flow of pedestrians, motor scooters, and bicycles. I saw a woman bump into one, and watched her apologize up and down as the haan assured her he was okay. He was fine, I realized now. There was no chance at all he’d been hurt, but his reaction seemed so genuine he still could almost convince me. The surrogate cluster even picked up a slight internal wince, a small pain he felt but kept from the woman so as not to worry her. If it was an act, it went layers deep. I watched him make an elegant bow, and the woman smiled as she watched him walk away.