“Fuck you,” he wheezed.
Chapter Four
28:23:51 BC
Rain had begun to fall hard and the security sweep was in full swing by the time I got back to my neighborhood. Vamp’s app displayed a cloud of orange markers moving toward Tùzi-wō, the 3i’s holomap laid over sheets of drizzle and the throngs of people hustling through street fog to get somewhere dry. If I zoomed in to the map, I could actually see the individual units strobe slowly down the streets as they were seen, lost, then seen again, and twice it warned me to take an alternate route to avoid them. It was the first time, I think, that I realized Vamp’s project was probably going to get him into real trouble.
As I slipped through knots of people on my way toward the market, I pulled up my chat contacts. I was about to tap Vamp’s heart to tell him what had happened when I saw the stack of messages from him in the 3i tray. He already knew.
I thought about messaging him back but wanted to get off the street first. Security hadn’t reached my block in force yet, but groups of local cops were out, rain pelting off their helmets and black ponchos while they watched the vendors all trying to pack up and leave at the same time. As they broke down kiosks they made last-minute sales under clusters of umbrellas, some with the cops themselves. I moved under a shop front awning with a crowd of others, nestling into a gap next to a rattling rain gutter to get the lay of the place. Red and blue lights flashed through the haze of neon from in front of my apartment building a couple of blocks away. A bunch of cops were out front waiting to see if the nut who crashed the airbike would show, and I could see an aircar hovering up near our ruined balcony, its lights flashing off the building’s glass face. Going back there wasn’t an option.
I skirted across the street and made my way down the block to the Nan Hai Hotel where Vamp and I sometimes got a room with friends if we wanted to cut loose a little and Dragan was home. It was a shit-box, and I really didn’t want to spend the money, but I needed a place to clean up and sleeping in a crash tube wasn’t going to cut it.
When I headed inside, a small crowd of people were in the lobby, dripping rainwater as they watched a TV mounted on the wall. It showed the wreckage from inside our apartment, reflected police lights flashing in time with the ones outside the hotel window. I recognized the remains of the smashed wet bar, where police were standing and pointing toward the battered airbike. The camera panned down and zoomed in on a few shell casings that were circled with chalk.
“One?”
I looked over at the woman sitting at the check-in counter. She’d checked me in before but didn’t show any sign she recognized me. Her stringy hair was streaked with gray, and her leathery lips were pinched around a thin black cigarette.
“Yeah,” I said, approaching the counter.
“Hourly or nightly?”
“One night.”
“I got two singles up on forty, no AC and no TV.”
“Shower?”
She nodded. “Sixty yuan.”
“I’ll take it.”
She swiped my card and pushed it back to me along with the room badge.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, like she’d noticed the scrapes and bruises for the first time.
“Long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
I took the card and badge and made my way to the elevator lobby.
The A.I. yammered at me as I rode it up. Something about lip injections, I think; I wasn’t listening. My clothes were wet and uncomfortable, and the chemicals in the rainwater made every scrape and cut itch. When the elevator finally stopped and the doors opened, I trudged down the hall feeling tired, beaten, and very alone.
The hotel room offered little more than a dingy closet with a single twin bed and an end table with a plastic lamp. It had its own toilet, though, and the tiny bathroom had a standing shower stall, as promised.
As the door latched behind me, I tossed my pack on the bed and peeled off my tank top. It was stained with blood and there were some holes in it, but it was going to have to do for now because I hadn’t thought to grab another one before I left the apartment. I kicked off my shoes and wiggled out of my pants, then hung the clothes on the curtain rod to try and dry them out a little, stopping for a minute to look out at the streets below. I could see my apartment down the street, where another police aircar cruised down from the sky lane to join the others on the ground.
What am I going to do?
I didn’t have a good answer to that at the moment. I just stared through the sheets of rain that washed down over the window, and watched the lights stream by until my stomach growled and I remembered the ration. There was no point saving it now.
I unzipped the pack and found that the guards hadn’t looked inside, or if they had, they didn’t confiscate anything. One piece of good luck anyway. I grabbed the ration and carried it into the bathroom, where I turned the shower dial to a single rinse. The pipes thumped in the wall, and while the water tank filled I pulled the plastic wrapper off the ration and ate the dry crunchy puck while sitting on the toilet.
As the food made its way down to my belly, the pounding in my head eased somewhat, but it didn’t do much to stop the empty ache. I felt a tickle on my cheek and wiped my eyes. Once they started, the tears wouldn’t seem to stop. They’d beaten him so bad. He was knocked out, facedown, and bleeding, but they’d just kept beating him. How could they do that?
“I love you like you were my own flesh and blood….”
Dragan never said stuff like that. He just didn’t. He pushed. He teased. He yelled sometimes, and swore. He didn’t tell people he loved them, not even when he did.
It had taken me so long to trust him. The thought chafed in my mind as I chewed bitter scalefly that was supposed to be his. I’d spent too long waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to beat me, or touch me like so many other men had done or tried to do. It felt like time wasted now, and I realized that I was starting to get scared, really scared, that I’d never see him again.
I swallowed the last of the cake. What would I do without him? Ling kept saying I should be going off on my own, that most people my age couldn’t wait to get out of the house. She acted like it wasn’t normal not to have any plans to leave, but the truth was I just wasn’t ready to go. I didn’t want to go. I wanted things to stay the way they were. I just wanted to hang out, bitch about work, and go to Fangwenzhe Festival with him instead of using it as a place to pickpocket. Even when he got on my case, there was a small part of me that kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was his real kid. What was I going to do if—
The tank thumped and the hiss of water ended in a muted dribble. I climbed in and stood under the shower-head, rubbing alcohol gel over my bare skin even when the cuts lit up like fire. The slice from when I’d picked up the glass shard burned so bad it made my nose run as I wiped my hands off in my hair, then turned the faucet and let the liter of hot water dribble down over me. I rinsed the cleanser away as best I could and scrubbed the funk out of my hair until the last drops patted down on top of my head. Then I leaned against the wall for a while, looking down my flat chest at the ridges of my ribs and feeling dizzy.
When I stepped back out into the hotel room naked, I saw an arc of blue lightning flash over the top of the skyline through the mist outside. Way off, another building lit up and began to fall as fat drops splashed off the window. I kept the light off and grabbed the bottle of shine from my backpack. I cracked it and took a big gulp, then let out a long breath and crooked my neck to reactivate the 3i feed.
Vamp, it’s me.