“Wait,” I said, choking on the word.
“Get on the scale!” he barked, and I raised my hands between us as he took a step toward me.
“Okay, okay,” I said, my voice wavering.
The room seemed to tilt as I walked toward the scale, looking around as I went. There was only one way in and out, through a green metal door back behind me. The two guys who’d carried me lingered near it, and could close the gap in a second if I tried to run.
The metal was cold under my bare feet as I climbed up onto the scale. A warm light snapped on over my head, and then a pattern of red laser dots appeared on my chest as the scale numbers flipped around. The scanner traveled down my stomach, flickering on and off before going dark. The old man consulted the screen of his electronic tablet.
“Ninety-two,” he said. “Body fat four point three percent. Barely worth the fuel to run the equipment.”
“Call the prison back and see if she’ll give you a refund,” Green-eyes taunted. The old man didn’t take the bait.
“Take it out back with the rest and see what we can render out,” he said. “Cut it with machine oil if you have to.”
An empty pit formed in my stomach. The distant hum that I felt through the floor and the slow whistle of steam were variations on white noise that had been burned into my brain years ago, and never quite forgotten. The smell of cooking meat in the air, the smell that made my mouth water, came from the steam of a rendering vat. Hwong was selling prisoners, people he needed to disappear, to meat farmers.
“You’re cannibals,” I whispered.
The others ignored me, but not Green-eyes. His brow lowered and before I could react he lashed out and slapped me in the face with one big palm so hard I almost fell off the scale.
“Hey, you’re fucking up the scan,” the old man complained. Green-eyes shoved his index finger in my face.
“I’m no goddamned cannibal,” he said, “and even if I was, it’s better than being a terrorist.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” I said. I tasted blood in my mouth.
“I know,” he mocked. “The government’s evil, and all you dissidents are just misunderstood.”
“Don’t talk to it!” the old man barked.
Green-eye’s face grew darker, and his body was wound like a spring. The hand he’d slapped me with curled into a fist.
“Some are going to eat, and some are going to starve,” he said. “The only thing on this sorry planet we got a surplus of is idiots, drug addicts, and separatist assholes. We solve two problems at once here.”
“I’m a human being,” I said, looking around the room at the faces there. “My name is Xiao-Xing Shao. My father is—”
“Damn it, shut your mouth!” the old man snapped at Green-eyes. “I said don’t talk to it! Don’t talk to it means don’t talk to it, not keep talking to it!”
Perched on the scale, I looked from face to face but didn’t find anything like compassion in any of them. The old man and Green-eyes were angry, righteous. One of the other two looked amused. The last one looked bored. None of them were going to help me.
I scanned the room for something, anything that might get me out of there. On the folding table was a cardboard box, and through a gap in the top of it I could see the buckle of my belt shining under the overhead work light. They’d thrown my clothes in the box and brought it in to pick through. My knife might still be in my pants pocket. It wasn’t much, but it was sharp, and better than nothing.
“Hold it,” the old man said. His tone changed suddenly as he frowned down at a screen that faced away from me. The red laser dots had stopped their sweep and were doing a slow circle around my belly button.
“What’s that?” Green-eyes asked.
“I don’t know,” the old man said.
Green-eyes crossed to join him and squinted down at the screen while the old man tapped it with his finger. “Something wrong with the scanner?”
“No,” the old man said. “It’s localized right there. A dispersion field or something.”
“What… in there?”
“Something’s implanted in there,” the old man said. He sounded a little nervous now. Green-eyes just looked annoyed.
“Like what?” he asked.
“They’re fucking fanatics,” the old man hissed, glancing over at me. “It could be a goddamned suicide bomber for all we know!”
Some of the annoyance melted away from Green-eyes’ face, and his eyes turned calculating as he looked back at me. I looked at the other two men, who no longer appeared amused, or bored.
“Take it outside and shoot it,” the old man said. “If nothing happens, bring the body back and—”
I jumped off the scale and lunged for the table. The two guys by the door had expected me to go that way and stepped in to block me, while the old man seemed surprised and actually backed away. Green-eyes had my number, though, and took a swing at me. The only reason it missed was that my ankle gave when I hit the floor and I dropped under his passing fist. I felt it graze the hair on top of my head as I pitched forward and fell headlong into the table. The legs on the far side of it collapsed and folded back in, causing the whole end to crash down onto the floor.
My hips slammed into the edge of the table and I flipped forward face-first onto the sloped tabletop. The momentum threw my bare ass up over my head and I landed on the edge of the box, crumpling it underneath me.
“Grab it!” the old man shouted, backing away into the wall behind him like I was some kind of wild animal that’d just gotten loose. One of the guys by the exit threw open a locker door and grabbed a machete from inside.
I rolled off the box and pulled it open as someone got a fistful of my hair. He yanked back, but it was too short for him to get a grip on and I was able to slip through his fingers. As soon as I did, the heel of a boot came down hard on one of my shoulder blades, bowling me over and sending the contents of the box spilling out across the grimy floor. My sneakers rolled away as my pink tank top and cargo pants flopped out after them. I hauled myself up onto my hands and knees and made a mad crawl forward, grabbing my belt as the boot stomped me in the ass from behind.
The force of it hurled me forward into the lockers, and my forehead collided with one of the metal doors hard enough to make it spring open. For a second I saw stars as equipment from inside fell out and crashed down around me. The point of a machete thumped into the tile next to my hand, and then it clattered down onto the floor as a box hit me in the back of the head. It popped open, spraying plastic zip ties across the floor as I spun around and pulled my pants toward me.
“Hold it!”
I looked up and saw Green-eyes as he towered over me, glaring down out from beneath the shadow of his heavy brow. He raised his foot, ready to stamp me out like a cockroach, and I kicked away, my back slamming into the lockers behind me. I scrambled to find the pockets of my pants, but they’d turned into a tangle of material and my brain had begun to short-circuit. I slid to one side, rust and metal scratching my bare back, as the boot crashed into the locker door next to me and made the whole row shake. One of the guards was coming up on my other side while the last one blocked the door.
There was nowhere to run. My hand found one of my pockets and reached in. I felt my pocketknife in there and I when I pulled it out the sheet of blue crystal I’d taken from Dragan’s safe flipped out onto the floor after it, along with a tube of lipstick. I flicked the blade out and jabbed it into the first piece of skin I saw. Someone swore and jerked back out of range with the knife still stuck in his forearm.
Before anyone else could grab me, I snatched the lipstick up off the floor and popped the cap off. I squashed my thumb down over the protruding red end of the stick, then held my fist out in front of me like the tube was a cross to ward off vampires.