“But you are a dog?” JD said with a smirk.
A guttural noise leaped from Red’s throat—he barked, grinning when JD flinched. JD stepped back and Red closed the gap, leering and silent, his chest puffed out like a pigeon in mating season. A mix of sweat, dirt, and adolescent pheromone filled JD’s nose, smelling like frenzied masturbation and teenage heartbreak.
“I don’t need this shit,” JD said. He turned from Red and started walking; hyper-aware of his limping gait as he felt the teens watching.
Soo-hyun dodged past Red and put an arm around JD’s shoulder. “Ignore the asshole, hyung,” they whispered. “He wants you gone so he can do it his way. If that happens, a lot of people are going to get hurt.”
JD stopped and let Soo-hyun turn him around.
He nodded to the homemade arsenal held by Red’s gang of miscreants. “Those things look dangerous,” JD said.
“Bet your fucking life they’re dangerous,” Red crowed, to snickers from the rest.
“To whoever pulls the trigger,” JD said deadpan.
Soo-hyun bumped against JD’s shoulder and grinned. Even a couple of Red’s goons had to smile at that.
Red chewed his lip and scowled. He spat on the ground and nodded over his shoulder. “Kali wants to see you, and that’s the only reason you’re welcome here. If you step out of line while you’re here, I’ll be waiting.”
“Eat your own shit, Red,” Soo-hyun said. They put their arm around JD’s shoulder, and led him past the gang. “Just choke it down.”
The two of them walked toward a beacon of orange light glowing ahead. The hacked police dog followed, the high whine of its actuators accompanying the distant drone of traffic like waves crashing on the shore.
When he was sure they were out of earshot, JD said, “ ‘Eat your own shit’? I haven’t heard that since the last time Dad drove me anywhere.”
“I thought I might bring it back.”
“He’d probably like that.” JD put his arm around Soo-hyun’s waist and they rested their head on his shoulder. “Remember when you said it to your teacher?” he asked.
“Oh, shit,” Soo-hyun said with a giggle. “I was, what, eight?”
“Give or take.”
“I thought Mum would never talk to me again.”
“And afterward, when Dad drove us home from the parent-teacher meeting, it was dead silent, like a funeral in a library. We stopped at the lights and he just burst out laughing.” JD chuckled at the memory.
Soo-hyun laughed and turned to JD with tears in their eyes. “And Mum kept slapping him on the arm, ‘It’s not funny, it’s not funny!’ ”
JD sobbed with laughter. “But she was laughing as she hit him.”
“We all were.”
JD waited for his breathing to settle. He wiped his eyes. “That marriage was a disaster.”
Soo-hyun sighed—a high-pitched sound to expel the laughter. “But we still have each other.”
JD stepped on a loose patch of gravel and winced as pain shot through his damaged knee. “We sure do.”
CHAPTER THREE
The landscape changed incrementally with each step they took toward the central light of Liber. The cement rubble had been swept aside to form paths; cracks in the roads and footpaths were patched with black asphalt still sticky underfoot. Buildings at the commune’s outskirts sat abandoned, used as little more than elevated rooftop gardens to catch the sun, but closer to the heart of the place, renovated apartment blocks breathed with familial life. Children ran down streets empty of cars, shouting and squealing as they played cops and robbers, watched over by stolen police drones, immune to the irony. The air hung heavy with the smells of cooking and the scent of animal manure, while conversations drifted along empty streets in half a dozen languages. People whistled to the dog following close at Soo-hyun’s heels, but it didn’t stray.
JD wondered if the canal area where he had run into Red was a front—deliberately untended to keep the commune hidden behind that desolate no-man’s-land.
“How many people live here now?” JD asked.
“Just over three hundred at last count,” Soo-hyun said. “We have a lot of kids from North Korea, orphaned by the work camps. It was either go into the camp as well, or flee south.”
The commune glowed a warm orange with the light of candles and fires. JD stepped over cables that split from solar batteries, but the strobing blue-white of artificial light was rare. The most prevalent sign of electricity came in the form of disparate soundtracks playing over the scene of communal living—K-pop, experimental jazz, and classical music reached JD’s ears in small snatches like a radio flicked rapidly between stations.
“Kali will be giving one of her lectures,” Soo-hyun said, “but she wants to see you as soon as she’s done.”
“Who is this woman?”
“She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before. She’s smart, grounded, wise …” There was a pause. “She’s beautiful.”
JD shot them a knowing glance and Soo-hyun winced.
“You’ll see what I mean.”
They walked beneath dim, solar-powered lamps leading to the grounds of a repurposed school, abandoned during the flood. Drying clothes hung like limp flags from the windows of classrooms converted into living spaces. People milled in a small courtyard, bathed in the light of cookfires—would-be-homeless, crustpunks, anarchists, and the working poor who couldn’t afford to rent in the city proper. The school’s staff car park had been torn up, vegetables and herbs planted in the wound, while a stricken orchard of fruit trees bloomed on the small football field to the south.
“Come on,” Soo-hyun said.
Bright light spilled from one of the school’s large central buildings, and crowds gathered outside each window, craning to see inside. Soo-hyun gently shoved their way through the throng, dragging JD by the hand. He uttered apologies as he went, occasionally feeling the cold metal nose of the dog drone nudging him forward.
They arrived at a doorway opening onto a long auditorium, filled with hundreds of people, some seated, others cross-legged on the floor, even more standing at the back of the hall. If it was a real theater, and not a converted school space, JD and Soo-hyun would have been standing at the backstage door, watching Kali on a small raised platform, radiant under stage lights. She had too-white skin, and dark, wavy hair that rested on one shoulder. She wore a flowing gray dress, layers of sheer fabric that suggested a naked form swimming somewhere within. Streaming drones flitted through the air ahead of her, catching every angle, every smile she offered the crowd, every word she uttered.
“—take what they will not give us. They do not care about you, or me. We sit outside their system of capital and control. They have no use for us, and even if they did, we are too enlightened to return to their paddocks.”
Her words carried clean over the audience, amplified by speakers embedded in the ceiling and messily wired to a small black audio desk at the rear of the hall, smothering the sounds of commune life outside. Her accent was American–West Coast, JD thought. There was something reassuringly Hollywood about her, a parallel to all the voices that had raised him, emanating from the flat slab on the wall of his childhood bedroom.