Page 145 of Coldwire
“Lia?” he replies, his voice pitching high. “What? How—”
There’s that. At least I can do that.
“Run!” I command. I dive for the front door, flinging it open. “Run,now!”
41EIRALE
I enter Kunlun, and the hole in my memory instantly trills to make its presence obvious.
The trees wave with the breeze. I’ve landed in the shadow of a tall building. Instinct tells me to look up, and I trace the high-rise to the sky, stretching beyond where my eye can follow. Its middle floors are decorated with foliage and a chrome finish. There’s enough space in between for a small aircraft to pass through. The entire building breathes with each gentle gust of wind, green vines of alveoli inflating, then contracting.
I should remember what I was doing here for my posting, but Idon’t.
“Something wrong?”
I whirl around, finding a stranger standing behind me. I’m frozen for a moment, ready to scramble for excuses and run away from this middle-aged Atahuan man.
Then he pulls his suit sleeve, adjusting its fit, and I realize it’s Nik.
“No,” I assure him. The deeper sound of my voice gives me another fright. This time I recover quickly enough not to let it show. I go into my panel settings, erasing the existing password and putting in a new one. Now the original user has been forced out for at least twenty minutes. “I forgot we would be wearing different avatars.”
We made it in. The neighborhood in Kunlun continues on per normal. No one has registered our appearance as anything beyond the natural arrival of citizens coming through the landing station.
“Did you want to take a look at yourself to get your bearings?”
I glance down at my hands. There’s a high likelihood I’m also a middle-aged Atahuan man right now.
“I think I’m good,” I say. “Where to?”
Nik inclines his head left and begins to walk. I’m entirely jarred by how bright Kunlun is, the sunshine and the smell of freshly cut grass wafting from the public parks we pass. It’s not that upcountry Atahua doesn’t have this. The system knows to adjust past the polluted readings it gets downcountry. There are definitely days where the sun peeks out and the daylight feels crisp on our faces, calculated statistics for how it used to be before skies clogged up.
I’m only not used to somuch, in such liberal helpings. The singing birds. The splashing fountains.
“There aren’t any obvious surveillance cameras,” Nik murmurs as we cross the road, “but Kunlun covers a lot of ground with traffic sensors and automated bot patrols. We only need to avoid setting them off.”
Easier said than done when I can’t seem to stop gawping at every block we pass. I nod, keeping in stride at Nik’s side. He casts me a glance. I don’t know what to make of the way his gaze lingers before he looks away again.
“Six more blocks,” he murmurs under his breath. It’s late afternoon. We pass a boxing gym with its windows thrown wide, opening its lesson onto the street. The people inside pay us no attention, the coach at the front counting a one-two with gusto. I almost stop, fascinated, but Nik tugs me to keep going, continuing his countdown as we get closer and closer to our destination.
“Four blocks.”
A woman walking two Chihuahuas passes us on the sidewalk, calling her hellos. Nik smiles and nods. I barely think to respond until he nudgesme hard, and then I manage the politest, “Good afternoon.” Not a block later, there’s another woman, dressed almost the same in highlighter neon colors, blond hair slicked back into a low ponytail.
“Stunning day,” she declares on passing.
“Absolutely,” Nik responds.
She turns the corner. I pull a face.
“This is eerie,” I hiss.
“This is Kunlun,” he responds. “Home of the richest people in the world. One more block.”
My stomach swoops. I keep quiet, searching frantically for an early indicator of where we’re going. I’m waiting for something clinical in the distance, something that resembles a data center. Instead, when Nik seems to be making a turn to cut across a lawn, my eyes land on a preschool, the gates already open to signal that the children have been let out. A girl my age stands inside the fence, changing the lightbulb on a dangling garden light.
She waves at us. She looks Medan. Her sundress flutters loosely; her hair sits neatly in two plaits. There’s almost an even split of Medans and Atahuans up in Kunlun. If there’s any place where the elite of both countries will flee to while their nations snarl and snipe and raise the prices on anything and everything in an ongoing battle, it’s here.
Nik proceeds past the preschool. I accidentally kick a pebble when I follow behind him. Nik whips around, his eyes wide, and I cast my hands up, apologizing wordlessly. My gaze is locked over his shoulder. At the end of the pathway—where our destination awaits, presumably—the front door to a small house is already ajar. If there is anyone home, they’re sure trusting to be leaving the door open like that.
