James Decker - The Burn Zone

Something tugged at me from behind, and my skin suddenly began to tingle. The tug grew stronger, and the rushing wind let up until the traffic sounds swallowed it. I’d begun to fall more slowly somehow, like I was connected to an invisible elastic band that had stretched taut.

The graviton emitter, I thought. One of them…

Hanging facedown, I dangled in midair sixty stories above the street, the tingle from the field increasing even as I felt it begin to lose its grip. I was too far away, and I was too heavy. Any second now, I’d fall again and this time nothing would be able to stop me.

Below, something flashed. A white point of light appeared, and then a second later the lanes of speeding air traffic directly below me were blotted out by a floating patch of empty space. A thin, bright white outline surrounded it in a perfect hexagon while the inside resolved into a view of an alley that appeared to float in midair.

What the fu—

The tether holding me snapped and I plunged, arms and legs pedaling, into the opening. All at once the city around me disappeared and all sense of movement stopped. For a minute, there was no up or down, no frame of reference at all. I just hung in limbo, like I’d been frozen in time.

My ears popped and then just as quickly as I’d gone into the hole, I’d come out again, still screaming, as I tumbled out the mouth of an alley and skidded a few feet before crashing into the side of a parked car. When I looked up, I saw a crowd of people who were standing under a streetlight look over in surprise.

What the hell?

I stood up, gasping as I took stock of myself. Stinging scratches crisscrossed my face, shoulders, and arms, and one palm burned with road rash, but that was it. I was alive, back on the street just outside our apartment building.

Spinning around, I looked down the sidewalk behind me. A stream of people there had stopped to look back, wondering what was happening. I did a complete turn and saw nothing but staring faces looking down at the girl who’d just appeared out of thin air.

Across the street, a scrawny boy sat on the neon fiberglass bug shell of an airbike he’d just started, gaping at me. I looked back up the sheer building face toward our apartment, too high above to pick out.

A gate, I thought. Someone gated me down safely. Was it one of the soldiers? The haan hadn’t shared free-floating gate tech with us yet, but there was no way she had done it—it had to have been one of them.

Something tinkled onto the pavement, and then bits of glass began to rain down onto the sidewalk and street as the falling debris caught up with me. I shielded my head, ducking under an awning as someone hollered. A loud pop echoed down the street as a metal rod trailing one of our living room curtains speared through the windshield of a parked car in an explosion of glass dust.

“Shit!” someone yelled as the car’s alarm began to whistle. The wind blew the torn curtain like a flag, and as the last of the glass skittered and spun away, I snapped out of it.

Dragan.

I pushed away from the concrete wall and crossed the street to where the kid sat stunned on his airbike.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

“I need your bike,” I said.

“What? No way, kid—”

“I need your bike!”

I snatched a shard of broken glass from the smaller pieces littering the sidewalk and felt the edge bite into the crooks of my fingers. I slashed at him with it, spraying drops of blood across his shirt as he ducked back. He tried to slide off the bike and lost his balance, tumbling down onto his butt. Before he could get back up, I threw the glass at him and straddled the still-warm seat.

“Hey!”

I cranked the throttle and then opened up the graviton emitters. The street beneath me lurched away on a rush of wind, and horns blared as I cut through the layers of traffic above. In seconds the cursing kid dwindled to the size of an ant, and then was lost altogether beneath the rows of streaking headlights.

Shit….

I pulled back on the stick as our building’s neon sign rushed back in reverse, spinning as I tried to steady the bike. I cut too quickly and the undercarriage swung up toward the sky. I clamped my thighs down against the sides as my stomach flipped in weightlessness.

“Shit, shit, shit….”

The building face sheared past as I completed the loop and wrestled the machine back under control. Wind rushed over me as I picked up speed. I spotted our balcony, where a single curtain still fluttered, and closed in.

When I cleared the railing I leaned forward and crouched below the windshield. The bike accelerated and the nose went straight back through the hole in the glass where I’d gone out. The remains of the window exploded into the living room as the bottom of the bike tore through the carpet and ripped into the floor underneath. Through the racket, I could hear Tānchi screaming bloody murder.

The undercarriage caught on something and the bike jerked to a stop, throwing me off the seat and over the broken edge of the windshield. I tumbled through the air, then rolled across the carpet and slammed into the opposite wall.

Pain shot through one leg as I pushed myself back up onto my feet. The soldiers were gone. I didn’t see anyone else except Tānchi.

“Dragan!” I yelled. No one answered.

Tānchi continued to scream as I looked frantically around the room.

“Dragan?” I lurched down the hall, but he wasn’t in any of the other rooms either.

Limping back, my shoes kicking through broken glass, I approached the spot where he’d struggled with the soldiers. There were boot scuffs left behind in the debris, heading back the way they’d come. I knelt down, my body shaking from the adrenaline, and I realized I was alone. Amid the wreckage, glittery specks of glass powder drifted slowly up from the floor in a stray graviton riptide. They twinkled, twirling in slow motion like the specks inside a snow globe. He was gone.

The only father I’d ever known was gone.

29:41:32BC

I stepped through the wreckage of our apartment in a daze, the humid breeze blowing in through the shattered window and out through the broken front door, which still hung from one stubborn hinge. Tānchi’s wails pounded through my head as I went to the crib, my shoes crunching through broken glass.

“Shh,” I whispered, kissing his forehead. “It’s okay. Calm down…”

He was so fragile. His little bones were like spun glass beneath his skin. It was a miracle he hadn’t been crushed during the attack or my airbike stunt afterward. The gate end point in the alley was probably how they’d left the building anyway; what had I even been thinking? I could have just waited there and…

And what?

“Shh, Tānchi.”

I clenched my fists and tried to calm down. Tānchi’s presence vibrated, anxious as he felt around in my head. He sensed danger, but relaxed a little at the sound of my voice.

Outside, I heard a siren chirp and when I turned I saw a streak of blue flash among the streams of traffic. Even if the soldiers didn’t come back, it would only be a matter of time before the place was crawling with security. I had to get out of there, and fast, or a detention center might be the least of my worries.

“Shh…” I stroked Tānchi’s cheek. “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”

“I love you like you were my own flesh and blood, Sam.”

My throat burned and I cleared it, blinking back tears as I stepped away from the crib. I spotted my knife, the tip still red with blood, and wiped it on my pant leg before folding the blade in and dropping it in my pocket. Lying on the floor two steps away from it was a shiny black object, like a little electronic corkscrew. Dragan’s security twistkey.