VAI

I descended a few steps, and noticed that the young woman wasn't following. "You coming?"

She smirked. "No." The door whispered back into place, and I was alone on the staircase.

My volo moved erratically in the air behind me, emitting a pattern of skittering clicks that told me it had lost its connection to my okulus—which I checked. Its screen was a blizzard of static. "Volo, quies," I said. The clicking stopped. I returned my okulus to my cape. These thugs had a scrambler field up. I had never been inside a scrambler field. Until now, I'd had no reason to believe they existed. I thought they were a concoction of spy thrillers and cheap novels.

I progressed down the stairs, holding onto the handrail.

My heart twisted nervously inside my chest. I tried to turn the fear into anger. I was sure that whatever happened next, there would be violence, and maybe I even hoped so—hell, provoking violence had been my entire plan. But I'd had Warpaint by my side, and a way out—the shuttle waiting to take me to the G.E.V. Shadow. Now I was alone. No mechatronic guard. No way to contact help.

Only seconds had passed since my okulus and volo had stopped functioning properly, but already it felt like something was missing. An uncanny loneliness had bloomed in the oxygen around me. I couldn't help but breathe it in.

I reached the bottom of the stairs, and entered the room beneath the shop.

It was wide and long, much larger than the space above it. Within it there were workspaces where half-made clothes hung loosely on mannequins. The walls were lined with shelves of bolts, scraps, tools, and clothier's machinery. It looked exactly right for the storeroom of a tailor and clothesmaker, except for one thing.

At the end of the long room, Papa's well-dressed gang were all lined up, watching me as I stepped cautiously into the space. They sat on the floor or leaned against the wall. The language of their bodies showed contempt, impatience, simmering rage. There were nine of them. Mostly male, mostly Bundu-jo. In their midst, an elderly Starwatcher gentleman practiced his stabbing skills on a dressing dummy, and a Human girl, about 12, laughed as she cut herself again and again with a vibroblade, making little red stripes across her forearm. Half of them wore pistols at their waists.

To my horror, I noticed that their volos were not floating above them as they should have been, but instead had been thrown into a nearby box, where they rested unmoving atop each other like dead things.

"Where's Papa?" I demanded.

"Present." Papa stepped out from behind a rack of boots. His voice was a high-pitched rasp. Close up, he looked even worse than he did from a distance. He was the only obese Bundu-jo I'd ever seen. That wasn't a judgment, just a fact. But it was virtually physiologically impossible for Bundu-jo to carry excess weight. Over the past year, I had heard many theories about what he must have been eating to get this big—theories that started at drinking melted butter and ended at eating human flesh. It wasn't just his size that made him ugly. His pocked-up skin was a dull gray that lacked the usual Bundu-jo sheen, and his stripes looked mottled and dirty. He scraped a file over the tips of his fingers, and I noted that even they were inelegant.

He looked me over with his rheumy yellow eyes. "Oh, my. How'd a chippy slap like you find your way into my world? Big boy. You simply don't belong here."

For a split second, I hesitated. That last statement sparked an unexpected reaction. A gut thing. A weird ringing inside me. No, the truth was, I didn’t belong here. I didn’t belong in this time. Part of me wondered—did he know that? Was that why he wore that smug expression and spoke in that conspiratorial tone? Did he know something about me? Did he know about the 80 years I had spent in stasis? Did he know about my dead friends? My lost life? (I could still hear my father's voice. Vai, you have been asleep for a very long time.)

I rejected that. He was a thug, that's all. just a thug with a coincidental sense of phrasing.

"I'm here about Thrissko," I said.

"Yes," he mused.

"You have him?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"I'm taking him out of here," I said. "Get him."

Somebody over at the wall of goonery snickered.

Papa rolled his eyes. "Well that would be," he said, "up to him. Thrissko? Show yourself, lad. Someone here to see you."

Until a year ago, the K'thaktra had been monsters to me. Monsters with red faces and too-wide mouths. I had seen their kabuki-mask expressions of hate, of snarling malevolence, as they tore apart screaming children. I was far too young when the Proxima Centauri II massacre happened, but the recordings found their way to me anyway. The universe was merciless. As my father was fond of saying, The ocean doesn't care about you.

He blocked my access to any potential source of information about the war. These things were not for me to worry over, he said, they belonged to the world of grown-ups. This was the time for me to play, and learn, and be happy, and grow strong. He sang to me as I fell asleep, trying to ease my nightmares with traditional Tongan songs, old chants that had been translated into Gatherish generations earlier.

I was 8 years old, and I was afraid all the time.

My best friend Emilio forwarded the recordings of Proxima Centauri II to my okulus. The volos continued recording as their owners died. They were just machines; they had no emotional reaction to the slaughter at all.

Moving from one file to the next in an unthinking daze, I saw the red spectacle from a dozen angles before I found myself swaying into the nearest bathroom to vomit and cry and pull crazily at my hair until I was so tired and hurt I just couldn’t move.

That was 88 years ago.

There weren't many people alive now who even remembered those horrors. Just some very old folks who had been children during the war, and the few million souls who were wealthy enough and connected enough to have had longevity treatments, like my father, like Councillor Li.

For me, the war had ended only a few years earlier. The memories were still fresh. As far as I knew, I was the only person in the entire Gathering for whom this was true.

During the war, each K'thaktra warrior had been surrounded by pink smoke that followed them wherever they went, roiling eerily around them. Zek. Their sacramental drug. Until I came out of stasis a year ago, I had never seen a K'thaktra who wasn't surrounded by it. They lived inside that pink fog, breathing it in and out all the time—even while they slept—in order to bind themselves always to the killing frenzy that was their religion. The K'thaktra I remembered were conquerors, destroyers, baby eaters.

And I hated them accordingly.

Then I met Thrissko, and I slowly accepted that it was okay. It was over. The nightmares and monsters of my childhood were gone. We were at peace. These people were not those creatures; the creatures had been tamed, assimilated into our society. The stockpiles of zek and the means to manufacture it had all been destroyed. Records had been destroyed and minds had been wiped to ensure that it could never be made again. The K'thaktra had turned their collective will toward helping the Gathering become the interstellar utopia we strived for. Through my acquaintance with Thrissko I had begun to believe that perhaps they were very much like the rest of us after all.

Which is why it came as such a devastation when he moved out from behind some shelves, surrounded by rolling plumes of that pink fog, an awful leer pasted to his face, his eyes wild with hatred, and whispered in a voice that was hoarse, like he had been screaming, "Vai . . . Vai . . . it's heaven."

"Vulgar hell." The utterance was involuntary. I staggered backward, thinking that my voice sounded not angry or frightened, but terribly sad.

"Let me show you." He took a few lurching steps in my direction. For the briefest of moments the smoke moving around him seemed to flatten out into a vibrating field of particles, then vectored themselves back into the shape of that moving pink cloud.

"Stay away from me." I grabbed some kind of tailoring tool from the work area closest to me, a thing with an articulating arm and a heavy base. Wielded upside down, it made a respectable club. Not too far from Thrissko, Papa looked at us with a kind of cruel delight, like we were two snails and he was dashing us with salt. "Turn it off," I said.

"Turn what off?"

"Vai . . ." said Thrissko.

"Ssshhh. It's going to be okay," I told him. Then my eyes shifted over to Papa. "The device preventing the zek from floating away. Turn it off. Right now."

Over at the far wall, Papa's gang watched us hungrily. Even the Human girl was on her feet now, staring directly at me as she twisted the tip of her vibroblade into the palm of her opposite hand.

I thought about the pistols some of the thugs were carrying, and hoped they only had the capacity to stun. I had never seen a gun, in real life, being carried by anyone other than a peacekeeper. I had seen plenty in entertainments, in V.R. simulations, and in recordings of the war. But in real life, carrying a gun when you weren't authorized to do so was such an extreme violation, it felt blasphemous. It felt unholy. It felt evil. It introduced the possibility that I could be killed in this storeroom, trying to get this idiot Thrissko out of this stupid mess. Was I willing to do that? Was I willing to die here? For someone who wasn't even my friend?

I flexed my hand, looked at the veins bulging. And I realized, Yes—I was. I breathed slow and heavy. Seeing red. If I died here, it wouldn't be about Thrissko. I'd had friends once who I would have died for, or lived for—because living was a choice, too—but I'd never had the chance; those friends had been taken away from me by this strange future; those friends had gone on to live their entire lives while I rested in a pod. If I died here, it would be because cowardice was the thing I hated most, and courage mattered. Courage was the only thing that mattered.

"There's no device to turn off, you prancing tromp. Besides, look at the bloody fool, he likes it."

Thrissko, giggling, got onto the ground and started rolling himself along, flopping toward me about a meter at a time. "Come," he said. "Partake of the eternal promise. Burn with me. Sparkle with me." When he was as close to me as he wanted to come, he reached his claws toward me like a child, and said, "Pick me up, Vai." Pick him up? He was over 2m tall. He weighed 182kg.

Pillars and plumes of the pink smoke began to rise away from his body and arc toward me.

"No!" I screamed. I stumbled to my right, moving into the rows of shelves.

Thrissko began to rise onto his legs again. "You're not being very fun, Vai."

"I'm not feeling very fun. But I'll tell you what. If you're carrying some kind of device that's producing this stuff, or making it stick to you? Follow you? Turn it off. Turn it off and let's walk out of here. There's a coffee stand across the street. Let's go sit down awhile and talk everything over."

He stood in the semi-dark, the pink billowing around him. "You shouldn't have come here," he whispered. "They want me to hurt you." He shook his head sadly and looked down at his claws. "No gloves this time."

"Don't have to do what they want, Thrissko. You and I can beat these goofs until they're stupid. Then we can walk out of here. What do you say?"

"No. I'm just going to do it. I've always liked hurting you. It always gives me a smile. Okay," he said. "Okay. Get ready."