Fallout

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Alexei, you ready? I sent over the 3i chat. His little heart icon beat in the tray that floated just in front of my eyes.

Almost. U here?

We’re here. Start packing up.

Vamp and I headed down the hallway of the Jianwei apartment high-rise’s top floor, and I could feel him watching me from the corner of his eye. When his look lingered, I pulled one strap of my tank top down to flash him a tattooed shoulder and he laughed.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, cocking a bony hip at him. “I guess I am pretty irresistible.”

He let it lie at the joke, but I’d stalled his advances for months. I’d have to get serious about it sooner or later, one way or the other.

But not tonight.

Outside the hallway’s windows Hangfei sprawled as far as the eye could see, a sea of liquid neon color and blazing white. Streams of aircars flowed past, layers crisscrossing over one another as they zipped between buildings and the congested streets below. I slowed as we passed by, and then stopped for a minute to look. I’d seen the city and the haan ship that had crashed inside it all a thousand times before, but these days it all looked different somehow. Through the window I could make out the arc of faint blue from the haan force-field dome, which glowed around their massive ship. Above it, the defense shield they’d constructed for us made a dark pocket of shadow in the sky near where the star of Fangwenzhe, the size of a large coin, shined. The clusters of hexagonal panels hung suspended high in the air, each part of a roughly spherical array. The filaments that connected them looked hair thin from the ground but I knew each panel was the size of a building’s footprint and the tethers were as thick around as railcars.

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