James Decker - The Burn Zone

I fished out Dragan’s spare badge I’d found in the safe and showed it to them. “My guardian is military. We’re part of the surrogate program,” I told them.

His eyes glanced from the badge, down at the kid. “Then take it to Shiliuyuán.”

“I’ll never get there and back before curfew. It’s an emergency.” He frowned. “Look, my ration kit got stolen, no thanks to you guys, and he can’t go a whole night without—”

“You really Dragan’s kid?” Liao chimed in. His partner shot him a dark look.

“You know him?”

“Where is he during all this?”

“On assignment. I’m alone and I need help.” Liao frowned again, like he thought he might be making a mistake, but he sighed.

“Let’s see your papers.”

Sun rolled his eyes. “For shit’s sake…,” he muttered, but Liao waved him down.

“I don’t have them on me,” I said. “Look, I can’t take care of the kid anymore. Shangzho has a surrogate center, right? I’ll just drop him off there.”

“You need your papers at least,” he said, shaking his head.

“Okay,” I said. I bluffed, holding Tānchi out toward him. “I’ll just leave him here with you while I go back—”

“No, no, no,” he said, holding up his hands like I’d just handed him a dirty diaper.

“Then can you take him in?”

“We can’t leave our posts. It’s a security lockdown.”

I waited, holding the kid while they glanced at each other and Sun shook his head. After a minute, though, Liao sighed again.

“You’re killing me, kid.”

He reached through the guard station window and scribbled something on a little pad of tickets. He thumped his palm down on the flat red button next to the pad, and the main gate opened a few feet, trailing what looked like a length of toilet paper in the breeze.

“Here’s a temporary pass,” he said, holding the ticket out along with my ID. “Go to the center, drop it off, then come right back.”

“Thanks.”

He blocked me with one arm when I tried to pass. “Backpack stays here.”

“But I—”

“No buts.”

I didn’t want to leave it with them, but I didn’t have much of a choice, it looked like. I dropped it just inside the guard station doorway, and he lowered his arm.

“Thank Dragan next time you see him. You got thirty minutes, but leave time to get home before curfew.”

“What happens after thirty minutes?”

“Then your temporary pass expires,” Sun said. “You’re officially in violation of border security.”

“Then what?”

“They eat you, I think.”

I snatched the ID and ticket back and slipped through before they changed their minds. The two chuckled, and one of the protesters yelled something unintelligible after me in a hoarse voice.

Racist assholes.

The gate clanged shut, leaving me alone inside.

29:07:22 BC

I’d seen three of the settlements from the outside, small chunks of the city given to the haan when they began to outgrow the ship, but I’d never actually been inside any of them. The other ten were outside Tùzi-wō, but Shangzho, while not the first, had over time become the largest and the most well known in Hangfei.

People come here all the time, I told myself. It’s no big deal.

They came during the day, though. As I made my way across the empty, stone-paved plaza, the whole place looked and felt abandoned. Part of it was the darkness— haan almost never used visible light, so the only real light to see by came from whatever bled over from the surrounding city, the moon, and the pale glow of Fangwenzhe. Shangzho sat like a dark hole in a sparkling sea, but at ground level it was downright eerie.

Up ahead I could make out the ornate entryway of what used to be a school, with a deserted playground carved out in front of it where the occasional scalefly flitted from shadow to shadow. A lopsided carousel and a rusting swing set cast shadows across the stones, and when I looked closer I could make out the names of children etched on their surfaces. A tourist sign hung from a metal arch in front of the whole thing, where calligraphy characters spelled out Peace Bricks.

It marked the spot where, back before I was even born, the first haan to die on Earth lost his life. Five construction workers beat him with lengths of rebar while he’d clung to those carousel bars, and onlookers cheered. They shattered his bones like glass until his corpse disappeared, gated back to the ship. He never even lifted a finger to fight back. Maybe he couldn’t. He might have been unconscious after the first couple of blows. At least, I hoped he had been.

The names on the peace bricks, put there by the schoolkids who had sat by helplessly, were old and worn now. My footsteps echoed softly as I crossed over them, the only sound except for the street noises back on the other side of the wall. Particles of grit rose lazily from up from between the pavers here and there, floating up through the ambient light like rain in reverse as a graviton eddy coursed through.

“Look,” I whispered to Tānchi. “Look where we are.” His eyes were fully lit now, looking curiously into the darkness up ahead. I heard a low note twang overhead and looked up to see a little haan construct, its purpose unknown, creep along a taut power fine. Tānchi’s gaze followed it until it disappeared down an alleyway.

The buildings that loomed around the square were human built, but without any trace of smog stain or biocide residue anywhere. No trash littered the ground, and no graffiti marked the walls. Every window had been glossed over black, and some kind of smooth honeycomb scales covered just about every vertical surface. Above, through the framework of unlit signs and currents of swarming scaleflies, I could make out irregular clusters of shadows that hung from the building faces like big urban barnacles.

I couldn’t see any haan, but they were there. A haze of signal bled through the mite cluster constantly, pooling in the back of my mind. There were too many to pinpoint any one specific feeling or intention, just a constant tide of brain stew that was as palpable as the summer heat.

I pulled up the Shangzho map on my phone and pushed it around with my fingertip until I found the surrogate center. I plotted a route and then hopped onto the glassy surface of a moving walkway. Once I had my footing, it picked up speed, and the building faces on either side of the street began to streak past as it carried me into the darkness.

As a humid breeze coursed over me, I sat down on the conveyor and held Tānchi to my chest while empty outdoor cafés, bars, and shop fronts flowed past us. I cracked my neck and let out a deep breath, then watched myself in a street-length window as we sailed past. The scratches that crisscrossed my skin looked black, and I could make out pale skin peeking through holes in my shirt. A mixture of half scabs and wet blood covered my face and neck like war paint. I followed it with my eyes, staring back at myself as the belt turned away, and caught a flicker of red light from somewhere up above, behind me.

I turned around and looked up to see a pair of flame red eyes staring down from the face of the building across the street. They were coming from one of the barnacle shadows that hung there. As I watched, several more pairs of eyes lit up around it, and in the resulting glow I saw that the shapes were actually haan. They were sitting on the layer of hexagonal scales as if they’d been glued there, staring down at me.

Graviton plating. They sat in groups, some twenty stories above. More and more of the eyes were lighting up, a mixture of reds, oranges, and yellows. There were hundreds of them up there, all watching me.