The Burn Zone (60 page)

Vamp moved ahead and pulled one of the doors open, waving away the cloud of disturbed flies so I could shine my light through. The way looked clear.

The chamber on the other side had been sheared in half, the floor coming to an abrupt stop off to our left in a wall of packed dirt and stone. The ragged ends of three huge pipes jutted out there up near the ceiling, torn free from their joints during the collapse. Lime had caked around their rims where brown water condensed and dripped under the slow escape of steam.

“
Sam
—
”

Another surge in the vibrations drowned out Vamp
’
s voice. They got so intense that the 3i cut out and stemmed off Dragan
’
s text messages, which I was kind of glad for. The pipes shook, and something above us creaked, low and ominous. I pointed the flashlight up toward the ceiling and saw spindly haan constructs creep through the exposed wiring and ductwork. Snaked in and around the old electrical system were shiny coils of filaments like I
’
d seen in Shangzho. Nestled in and among them were unfamiliar devices that hung like flies in a spider
’
s web.

The room, or what was left of it, seemed to have once been some kind of control center. The hunkered shapes of computer consoles and equipment, long dormant and speckled with mold, sat in the gloom with stools and swivel chairs at the helms. Wires hung from the damaged ceiling, while power and data cables ran from the workstations, through the grime to disappear into the rubble. The far wall of the hub was dominated by three huge rectangular windows that looked on into blackness, huge fractures marring safety glass
that must have been a meter thick. I shined the flashlight around, until it swept across a soot-streaked sign mounted on one crumbling wall.

DEEPWELL BIOTECH LAB: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“
Deepwell,
”
I whispered.

The echo of the humans who
’
d run the place lingered here—coats draped over chairs, personal photographs, and wrinkled, overlapping newspaper printouts whose edges had warped were taped up here and there—but like Shangzho it now carried that distinct haan fingerprint. Graviton plates covered a section of wall, disappearing through a dark hole in the ceiling, and black, shiny scales had formed over the floor in clusters. Scaleflies crawled over the abandoned equipment and swarmed through the air, carrying their messages to and from haan who no doubt lurked somewhere nearby.

A row of glass domes, some kind of specimen jars, covered a work surface that ran the length of the room
’
s far side, and I could see clouds of flies bouncing around
inside. The jars were fixed to bases where pinprick indicator lights flashed, and slimy tubes trailed to a bank of haan equipment behind them.

I moved farther into the room, sweeping the flashlight over the news clippings. I peeled one of the stained photos off a soot-covered console and wiped it on my shirt. It showed an apple, floating in midair. I held it up so Vamp and Nix could see.

The apple floated in the middle of a makeshift wooden shack that had been surrounded by a sandbag enclosure where armed soldiers stood guard. Across the other side of the sandbags, people had gathered near a row of sawhorses, and through the wooden shack
’
s open doorway a hanging plastic tent was visible. Hazy figures stood inside.

SECURITY ERECTED AROUND
“
FORBIDDEN FRUIT,
”
the
headline read. I tossed it down onto the desk and looked at the next, which showed a picture of Fangwenzhe, shining brightly above the Hangfei skyline.

NEW STAR APPEARS IN NIGHT SKY.

“
New star
…
”
The date on the article put it fifty years or so ago. I blew dust from the paper, trying to make out the writing underneath.

...
no
explanation for the sudden appearance of a previously uncharted star closer than any recorded... astronomers are unable to explain...
”

“
This doesn
’
t make any sense,
”
I said. I looked at Vamp, the paper still dangling from my fingers.

Fangwenzhe had always been there. Stars didn
’
t just come and go. They didn
’
t just appear from out of nowhere. It wasn
’
t possible. Even if it somehow had, people would know.
Astronomers ...

“
What are you in here for?
”

“
Telling the truth.
”

“
Sam, we
’
ve got to move.
”

“
He knew,
”
I said.
“
That guy, Jin, back in the prison. It
’
s why he was there.
”

Vamp tried to take the paper and I snatched it away. I folded it and slipped it into my pocket.

“
Sam, which way?
”

I looked around the room, trying to think back to the images on the video recording. They
’
d had to climb before they arrived in this room. They
’
d scrambled up a collapsed section of floor
...

“
There.
”
I pointed toward the corner where the tiles sank, sloping down to a big fracture that had opened up into a large open space below. Electric light flickered down there, casting jerky shadows.

Vamp leaned over the edge and peered down.
“
Are you sure?
”

“
I think so.
”

When I turned back to him, the flashlight swept back around and passed through a large, open section of wall to his right, where a human face stared back at me from the shadows.

“
Shit!
”
I yelped, nearly dropping the light. Vamp and Nix both turned as I steadied the beam.

The face belonged to a Pan-Slav man. He looked like he might be dead, but he wasn
’
t shriveled like the other bodies. His skin looked fresh, if ashen. He sat with his knees up by his chin and wrapped in some kind of black membrane that had him stuck to the wall. His eyes stared back at me, blind and unfocused, while his mouth hung open.

He wasn
’
t alone. As I moved the light through the room, I saw there were more in there like him, men and
women all wrapped in the same kind of wet, leathery cocoon.

“
Holy shit,
”
Vamp said under his breath.

I looked over and followed his light to a series of jagged, broken tiles along the edge of a giant sinkhole. Beyond the edge a great, yawning pit in the floor dropped down out of sight, but from where we stood I could make out what looked like spines, or huge, thick bristles ringing the interior. The ceiling had a similar hole directly above it.

“
She has them in stasis,
”
Nix said.
“
Storing them for later use.
”

Through the crumbled wall next to it, electric lights flashed from an array of equipment and live monitors that displayed crowded columns of haan text. The room had been some kind of laboratory, with a big metal work surface surrounded by broken-down equipment. A light shone down onto the metal tray that trailed clusters of disconnected tubes and wires.

Mounted on the wall behind the equipment were Haan
holoscreens
that displayed a dizzying amount of information. The rows of alien characters overlapped one another several layers deep, in varying brightness and color, including blank areas that I suspected I just couldn
’
t see. I couldn
’
t read any of it, but popping from the clouds of haan text were images of human body parts ... arms, legs, heads, various organs, then tissue, cells, all the way down to the DNA. They formed the jigsaw pieces of a broken-out human figure.

The worktables and trays were filled with equipment
that included scalpels, bone saws, and hacksaws
...
Some
were shiny and new, but some were old, like the rest of this place.

“
There
’
s something behind them,
”
Vamp said, pointing at the haan displays.

I looked, and saw that there was an image behind
them. A large diagram had been on the wall, now covered by the haan monitors. I stared at the fractured image, but there wasn
’
t enough showing to get a full picture, just disconnected glimpses of what appeared to be thick black strands, and what looked like bundles of worms. I couldn
’
t piece them together to form any kind of whole that made sense. Every edge I followed showed something unfamiliar, something that had no human correlation. Panic scratched at the back of my mind as I tried to connect the dots and couldn
’
t.

“
Nix...
”

He
’
d crept up behind me.

“
You shouldn
’
t be here,
”
he said in my ear.
“
You don
’
t want to see this.
”

“
What is that?
”
I asked. He didn
’
t answer.

I looked back to the surgical equipment, the blades caked with black tarry blood and spotted now with fuzzy blossoms of mold. A row of metal coolers ran along the far wall in the gloom behind them, marked 1 through 13-A, and 1 through 13-B. Spots of mildew had grown across the walls, finding purchase on the microscopic remains of something that had once been spattered there, and then later scrubbed away.

“
This is from before the Impact,
”
I said.

“
Yes.
”

“
You were here before the Impact.
”

“
Yes.
”

“
But how?
You crashed
...
”

I looked down at the muck-stained metal tray. There were metal bands still rusting in there, restraint straps that were twisted and bent, but not broken. There were dozens of them.

“
What did they do?
”
I asked.

“
They didn
’
t know what he was,
”
Nix said.
“
They couldn
’
t have.
”

“
So, what did they—
”

“
The same thing Sillith is now doing here with your people,
”
he said.
“
They studied him.
”

I shook my head, not wanting to believe it in spite of what I saw in front of me. No human could see something as sophisticated as a haan and then just strap it down and dissect it. Men like Hwong maybe, but even then for a reason, however twisted. Not just out of curiosity.

“
Our young don
’
t recognize you as thinking creatures,
”
Nix said quietly.
“
Not at first. It
’
s why the surrogate program is so important. This was the same. You cannot form empathy for something you can
’
t recognize or understand. When our envoy stepped through the gate
—
”

“
But you look so much like us.
”

Something banged from back down the corridor behind us, and I jumped, knocking into one of the trays and sending surgical tools clattering down onto the floor.