James Decker - Fallout

“Probably.”

“Xinzhongzi is a pit anyway,” she said. “Let them have it. At least the place won’t suck as much.”

A message from Vamp popped up on the holodisplay between us. Sam, I’m here. Buzz me in.

Yun just showed. Hang out—I’m coming down.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks again, Yun; Dragan having to drop him off was kind of a last minute thing. Call if you need anything.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She’d become engrossed in her phone again. “Me and Lex got it under control.”

“Okay.”

“Stay out of trouble,” Yun called as I hustled out the door to meet Vamp.

The protest had gotten a lot bigger since the start of the week, and people had actually begun to camp out in front of the security wall erected around the colony. Vamp and I navigated through the square, skirting through throngs of security officers and protesters with signs. Makeshift shelters had begun to pop up, clusters of tents and wooden frames covered with sheets of industrial plastic. Groups of scrawny men and women sat in and, among them, people with signs on sticks propped against bony shoulders. They called for the cancellation of the Xinzhongzi project, the ousting of the haan, and the return of the original residents to their homes. At least, the nicer ones did. The meaner ones went after Gohan himself, his church, and even the haan. Some called for their extermination altogether.

Security aircars cruised slowly above the sea of protesters a few stories up, their blue and red lights casting an angry strobe over the square.

Guys, we’re here.

I sent the message scattershot to the four of us, and Dao-Ming responded.

Follow my marker, she sent. We’re in the square.

On our way.

A passing figure made me jump as, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a wet, black, undulating mass. It surged through the crowd around it like a living wave, but when I turned to look, I saw only a little old man on a rickety bicycle.

“Sam?” Vamp asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said, trying to shake it off. “Come on.”

I walked a little faster, forcing Vamp to keep up, slipping through a small group of haan who lingered near the street corner. Their numbers had grown over the years, some said too fast. I could see the glassy domes of their smoke gray heads bobbing among the sea of hair and sweat. The pedestrian traffic weaved around pockets of the frail, fragile creatures as if they were eggshells.

A Reunification Church gonzo caught my eye as I passed his little sidewalk shrine. He knelt before the spinning wax apple that floated above sticks of burning incense, threads of smoke trailing from the bright embers. When I passed, he looked up at me.

“Are you ready for Second Impact?” he asked.

I gave him the finger. “Screw you.”

The gonzo gave an indignant start. “Only He can move the stars, bitch.”

We made our way through a crowd that grew thicker by the step, until we reached the hub of the squatter population. The shelters had begun to cluster together there into something resembling a small settlement. Huge canvas signs propped up on wooden supports flapped in the wind over our heads, displaying whatever their messages were to the camera crews filming from above. Jin and Dao-Ming stood together near a streetlamp pole, waving for us to cross over to them.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Take a look,” Dao-Ming said, pointing up toward the face of one of the buildings that looked down on the square.

I looked up to where she pointed, a spot about thirty stories up the face of the building across from us. A group of men and women could be seen in the windows up there, all dressed in gonzo robes and waving flags with haan symbols on them.

“They’re protesting the protest?” I asked. “Can they do that?”

“Showing their support, I guess,” Jin said. “They’ve been up there for the past hour or so. It seems they’ve barricaded themselves into the adjacent offices.”

I squinted up at them, their robes flapping in the wind.

“Yeah, that’ll stop security,” I said under my breath.

Through the crowd, I spotted rows of security officers with shields. They held the line to keep the protest from spreading too far, but I couldn’t help but think that in Hwong’s day this would have never happened. If people had expressed this level of dissent, right out in the open like this, he would have sent in as many of his forces as needed to stamp them out. There would have been arrests, and people would have had examples made of them. It stood as a testament to just how different LeiFang’s governorship was that these makeshift shelters hadn’t been bulldozed.

“They should be arrested,” Dao-Ming said, watching the ledge, “and their leader, Gohan, executed.”

“They have a right to make themselves heard,” Jin said.

“Next to Hwong, Gohan Sòng is the worst thing to happen to Hangfei,” she said, her voice airy but insistent. “If he thinks he can just callously scrape off the people of this city so he can give it to the haan he’s going to learn the hard way what their limits are. Blood will come next.”

A few people looked over at that. Bad-mouthing the government or making threats could get you brought in, and doing both would almost guarantee it. None of the approaching security officers seemed to have heard, but they could have, and, if she kept it up, they would.

“Violence will only create more unrest,” Jin said. “It won’t sway public opinion, which is what we need to do in order to—”

“Nothing sways public opinion like violence, Jin. You know that as well as I do. That man has sold out his own race to gain favor with the haan, and one of these days, he’ll pay for that. He’s the head of that organization. You cut off the head, and the rest will die.”

“Guys, take it easy,” Vamp said, slipping the video flash into the bay on his phone and then triggering something on the screen. “We’re on.”

Jin opened his mouth to silence her when, as one, each of the six jumbo screens that populated the square switched off. A short murmur swelled in the crowd as everyone looked up to see what had happened.

“In three… two… one,” Vamp said.

The screens all came back on, but the images of the protest, all from different angles, had been replaced with a common image. A woman in silhouette, that woman being me, sat in front of a white backdrop. With my head and shoulders filling the giant screens, I looked huge, and in spite of myself I smiled. The protest itself was news enough to have millions of viewers. That number was about to go up.

The loudspeakers shot up in volume, creating an angry buzz that rose above the crowd, and I watched as, in a voice that had been electronically lowered, I began to address them all.

“Hello,” my murky, altered voice boomed. “You don’t know me, but I am a citizen of Hangfei, like you. Like many of you, I was born here, after the arrival of the haan.”

Everyone had begun to stare. Even the security guys had begun to stare up at the screens, and I couldn’t help it—my smile cracked wider.

“I am not here to tell you to hate the haan,” my voice continued. “They’ve helped us in so many ways, and they may even have our best interests in mind, but they have not told us the truth.”

A lot of the security troops were still stunned, but they’d begun to recover, no doubt as calls came in from their superiors demanding they shut us down yesterday. Orders were barked, and security officers began to move even with their attention still divided between the mob and the spectacle on the screens above. Even Dao-Ming looked a little awed by it.