Shards and Ashes

1. R A M A

Everything is loud in the air.

Partly it is the wind. Partly it is the machine, the blades slicing the blue-black above him. Zhishengji are loud, even for sky choppers.

Partly it is his heart, pounding itself into a broken arrhythmia. Beating itself literally to death.

His breath in his ears.

The boy, Rama, sits on his scuffed boot heels, staring out into the dying day and the growing night. Beneath him, the faded sprinkling of lights that was the Southlands, that is what remains of the Southlands, spreads like the scattered beads of a snapped necklace.

Behind it, in the distant black, is the ocean. Haiyang, as they call it. There are no lights there at all. It looks like death.

Siwang. The great darkness.

How Rama imagines it.

Vivid. Lightless. Gone.

Rama steadies himself, catching his breath as the chopper twists and the metal floor panel slides backward, swinging his legs out from under him. They dangle through the open shaft, and he grips the open metal edge that much more tightly.

The lights below him blur. He rubs his eyes.

Don’t be afraid.

It’s too late to be afraid.

Everything seems important in the air.

No. It’s not that.

It’s me.

I am important in the air.

Being above something, becoming larger, makes everything smaller. But it’s an illusion; Rama knows this. It’s optics. Perspective.

I am as small as that, he thinks. I am a scattered light on the ground. I am one of many.

Why should this one drop mean more than any other? Why should one life be different?

Why should mine?

“Ready?”

The pilot shouts back to him. Rama only nods. He’s ready to jump. He’s been planning this jump for months. Nothing about this night is a surprise. But that’s not the question.

Is he ready?

Is it worth it?

To live, and to die?

This jump is expensive. They don’t call it getting high for no reason, and he’s at least a thousand feet higher than he planned.

The chopper lunges in the opposite direction.

“Goupi!” the pilot curses. “No offense, kid. If you’re gonna jump, you gotta go now.”

Rama reaches into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit, pulling out an envelope. Paper, like in the old days. The time before now, when there were things like minutes and hours and days and weeks and years.

The luxurious, indifferent time of time. The era of eras. The epoch of epochs. When life was quantitative, not qualitative. Something to be measured, not judged.

Not dropped.

Not bartered.

Not sold.

Back then, Rama thinks, I would still have my whole life ahead of me. How old would I be? Seventeen? Eighteen? In man years?

Rama sighs and turns back to the pilot. “Can you give this to—my xinfeng—to whoever? Whoever comes for me?” Rama stumbles over the words, because he isn’t sure.

Who will be left? Who will come?

Who will care enough to waste a precious tear, a millimeter of water in an economy of small waters, on him?

Probably Jai. Jai will come.

He hopes she will, for her as much as him.

The pilot nods, without even turning back to look. “Stick it in the box with the others.”

Rama looks behind him, where a metal postbox sits welded to the chopper floor. He flips open the lid marked XINFENG to see a hundred letters, no different from his own.

Nothing is different for anyone, not anymore. Not now.

I am different, thinks Rama.

I am ready.

It is finished.

I was here, and I will be here no longer. But as I drop, I will have that. I will have the rush, and the pounding, and the burst of adrenaline in my blood. And I will know that before I died, I was really alive.

I lived.

Even I could afford that.

Then, as deliberate as a last gesture can be, he folds a photograph of a girl into the paper, and drops it into the box.

“You want a parachute? I know it’s kind of pointless, but it makes some people feel better. On the way down.”

The pilot turns to look at Rama, but he isn’t there.

He’s slipping through the darkness, searching for the end of his story, feetfirst and falling.

He’s a hundred yards down before the pilot can even turn the chopper around, back toward the base.

Wondering, as he does every night, how long it will be until he’ll be making that last drop for himself.

The pilot shivers and heads for home. He has a wife and a child and a love for meat and beer.

It is nearly enough, while he has it.

To keep the drops and his thoughts away.

2. J A I

There it is.

I hold Rama’s letter in my hand.

The cat looks up at me expectantly. Purring. Perhaps she has missed him, too.

Mao is a stupid cat.

I have been waiting, watching for it, ever since he left for the Mojave Desert last week. I could see it in his eyes. He hadn’t told me his count, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew how he’d been living. I’d added up the late nights, the motorcycle trips, the sudden interest in mountain climbing. The thick rolls of tobacco leaves, bound in rice paper. The cheap Mexicali beer.

Rama was burning through beads like nobody’s business. Like he wanted it that way. Like he wanted to go.

It was my business, though. I have learned this through experience. It is always our business, the ones left behind. The business of the dead belongs to the living.

I slice open the folded paper, smiling to myself. Paper. Of course, paper. Old paper, from trees, not rice. Rama would have liked that. He would have combed the off-market shops and dealers until he found some.

Our mother was like that as well. Before she dropped. There was something about dropping that made everyone anachronistic. We looked for what was old about our lives, what came before. What things endured.

Because we could not.

Words, the few we could remember.

Bread, when we had it.

Babies, when they surprised us, finding their way to life in spite of every modern manner of escaping them.

The sun and the dirt and the sky, though the thick brown layer of toxins in the air made it difficult to see, sometimes. The Yanwu never clears over the Southlands, that’s what they say. It only turns our brown skin browner, our lungs blacker.

The old things matter more, when you’re dropping.

That’s what I’ve been told. That’s what it seems like, to me. I have no one to ask, now that Rama’s gone.

He was the last of my family to go. His necklace used to be as long as mine, as full of teardrops. We wept for our parents together. There was him, before, and now there is only me.

I shiver, looking at the paper without seeing it. I knew what it was. Dropletters were a painful burden. Everyone wrote them, everyone left them. It was a commonly held custom to burn them. That I could do.

I don’t know if that means I have to read it.

I don’t know if I want to.

Instead, I push my way into the smallest of the quiet, empty rooms in my quiet, empty quarters.

“Come on,” I say to myself, and the cat. “Let’s get on with it.”

Inside the tiny room, the room where my family’s secrets had always been hidden, there is only one object. An enormous cabinet.

That’s where I keep it.

That’s where we’d always kept them.

Hidden inside the top drawer of the big blue cabinet, in a box lined with velvet, in a pouch lined with satin.

I ignore the empty pouches next to it, crumpled inside empty boxes. The ones left holding nothing but empty strings.

Not now, I think.

Never.

I turn my attention back to the only true thing left in the cabinet.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathe, opening the drawer and taking the pouch with both hands. I’m talking to myself, just as I always do. Every time I come to see my necklace.

I would never let anyone else see it.

My secret.

I smooth it in my lap, crouching in the heap of clothes piled on the bed. I immediately forget everything but the pouch, as soft as water in my hands. Perfect. Cool. I wish I was the pouch. Or the box. Or even the big blue drawer.

I wish I was the thing that held my necklace of raindrops safe, never spending it, never losing it. I wish I’d keep it inside me always, the way the pouch does, never threatened in any way at all.

Never threatening.

Never anything.

How do I feel? Scared. Small. Like there is nothing I can do that will ever be worthy of the treasure inside that satin purse.

I can’t let myself think how much treasure is inside it.

And I can’t let anyone else know.

I slide to my heels next to the dresser and close my eyes, crumpling the letter in my hand.

Damn him. Damn him for leaving. Damn him for wanting to leave.

It is left to me. Time to mourn, again. Like before. Like always.

As I did for my parents.

As I did for Hana and Issa.

And now Rama.

The tears slide down my cheeks, surprising me.

I did not know tears could be so cold. The coldness of my tears frightens me. I stop crying.

Instead, I open my letter and begin to read it to the cat. Just as I did the four that came before.

Rama is waiting for me.

3. R A M A

My sister.

I know. I understand.

You are angry. You think I am weak.

I am.

I am unmoored, as lost as the little boats in the harbor after the floods.

Ropeless. Rudderless. Anchorless.

I can’t live my life like you, if you can call what you do living. I can’t hide away in our chambers, wasting my days and nights.

I know life has a cost. I know adventures are expensive.

You can get hurt, you can die, you can drop.

I know.

I know everything you want to scream at me right now.

I don’t care.

I had to see for myself.

I had to go.

In the last year, I saw every phase of the moon, from every continent on the planet. I shivered on the frozen ground in the middle of a wolf pack before the dawn, listening to them howl and scream at each other. I followed the curve of a river down falls and through gorges. I stood in the path of a mother bear. I painted chalk circles on a sacred elephant. I ran with the bulls down the streets of a crowded village. I watched the sunrise with a beautiful woman.

It was worth it.

All of it.

Once I determined to blow through my life, drop by drop, I knew I could not look back. I could not stop.

Every day of the last year was a transaction. I knew, every time I handed another precious drop into a Counter, that I was going to leave you, and soon.

The thing I realized was, it didn’t matter when I left. Not to us, our story. The bond, my heart, yours—everything between us had already happened.

Has happened.

You’re big sister; I’m little brother.

You will always be my sister. In death and in life. That was never going to change. It hasn’t now. But the rest of my life needed to. It had to begin.

I know I was your younger brother. I know you were supposed to drop first. But Jai, you’re not going to. You’re too afraid.

Let me give you this one gift. Let me tell you what I have learned.

Don’t be afraid to live.

Your life will be long, but it won’t be life.

I have loved someone. I have been loved. I have been here, everywhere.

I haven’t left a mark on the world, but is that so bad? Considering how deeply the world has marked me?

Know this.

When I drop tonight, I will be thinking of you.

I’m not scared.

I’m ready.

And I hope you will find your way to your own last drop, before your beads leave you to drop in your bed alone, a thousand years from now.

If nothing changes, and you keep going like this, you will. Live forever.

But eternity at what price, big sister?

I crumple the letter in my hand and hold it toward the candle.

The edge of the envelope catches on fire, and I drop it into the brass bowl in the center of the room.

The cat and I watch as my brother explodes into a final flame.

I try to think of something to say, something important, something befitting a life and a death like my baby brother’s.

My mind is completely blank, and all I can do is cry. I can’t bring myself to burn the rest of the paper, his paper, and I fold it into my pocket.

Good-bye, Rama.

Zaijian, little brother.

And peace.

4. J A I

I lock the door behind me, sliding my c-card through the slit above the handle one last time. I straighten my ancient army jacket, buttoning it over my clothes. It warms me, even if the edges are frayed. It used to belong to my father.

Then Rama.

Now everything belongs to me. I don’t want it, any of it.

Everything is heavy, a lot to bear. Too much to carry, or even remember.

I look both ways before I cross the busy center street of Pinminku, my ghetto. Scooters and cars and cats scatter like noisy cockroaches as I step into the street. The Southlands, where I live, are full of ghettos like mine. And Pinminku is even more full of zuifan, neighborhood criminals who will steal your drops as easily as your coins. Not the greatest people to run into.

I reach with my hand into my left pocket, fingering the bare length of broken knife blade I hide in the cloth, sewn into my jacket.

I have to protect myself now.

I am all I have.

I stay in the shadows at the side of the long, straight roads of the city. Over in the fringe, the fruit and vegetable sellers shout as I pass.

I don’t even look at them. I can’t afford it.

There is a market for drops like mine. Long life for the wealthy and the ruthless.

I have to be careful.

I have a necklace. My Xianglian. That’s not a secret.

We all have one, everyone does, in Pinminku and all the ghettos of the Southlands. A necklace of raindrops, that’s how I think of them. Standard issue, my Xianglian, right at birth. They’re not made of raindrops, not really, though I couldn’t tell you what they are made of. Not even my father knew that, and I used to think he knew everything. But I have always thought of it as my necklace of raindrops, ever since my mother read me a bedtime story about an actual necklace of raindrops.

As I duck around the corner, I try to remember.

I can’t recall the story, not exactly, but the way she told it went something like this: There was a girl who had a necklace of raindrops. Each drop was powerful. Each drop had a different power.

One by one, the girl used the drops, and the drops dissolved or disappeared. I can’t recall.

When the story ended, the girl had what she wanted, but the necklace was gone. At least that’s how I remember it.

This is like that. Only not quite so happy. More like the reverse:

When the necklace is gone, the story ends. At least, my story ends.

This is how my necklace story goes:

I have a necklace of raindrops, only it’s not made of raindrops, and the raindrops don’t have powers. All they have is time. And I can spend them as I choose, but when they’re gone, my life is over, and I will die.

I find I am standing in front of the building where I work. It is still early, but I am even earlier. I have little else to do.

I swipe my card, this time my e-card, through the doorway. I wait as the door recites my numerical code, swinging open without another greeting.

One Nine Six Seven.

Rama used to tease the door, calling it different names every time we passed through.

I try not to think about Rama.

Rama is gone, I tell myself. There are things I need to do now. Because Rama is gone.

I slip into the elevator and stand staring at the back of the faceless man in front of me.

Here, on the South Coast, we have something called death. It means you have to leave when you run dropless. When your life thread—the thin, twisted chain that holds your drops together—is bare.

You do not want that to happen, not anytime soon.

But it does. It happens to all of us.

Not all drops are the same. That would be ridiculous. But everything has a price, and everyone is expected to pay it.

The elevator opens and I move toward my cubicle.

I don’t nod at the people I pass.

I don’t say hello.

I am thinking of Hana.

Hana is crazy, I mean, was crazy. She spent her drops like nobody’s business. My parents, of course, tried everything they could to get her to stop. They dropped her out of school, kept her in her room, told her to eat her vegetables. But nothing worked. Hana, she was what some people called a Lifer. A Shenghuo girl. They just go for it.

Not me.

I’m what you’d call a Keeper. A Baocun baby, a Saver. I’m the best at keeping my drops hidden away. You won’t ever see me doing anything that costs more than a drop at the most.

I’ll be around forever.

I’m the opposite of a Lifer.

Even if what I’m leading is the opposite of a life.

I slide into my cubicle at the Shenzen Life Insurance Company, a Fanzui Five Hundred Corporation. Regulated by the FEIC, the Federal Expiration Insurance Charter.

There are no photographs, no plants. Nothing that reveals anything about me, Expiration Claims Processor #25883704222. A medium-level employee. With a medium complexion, medium-length hair, a medium build. Only notable for not graduating fifth form, not sitting for my upper-level exams, and not taking a single vacation day.

Why should I? Where do I have to go? And who would notice if I was gone?

Who would care?

I wonder.

I flip on my vid screen.

As I wait, the screen is blank, black.

It’s as if I do not exist at all.

It only looks that way.

That’s my secret, the thing no one can know. People would kill for a full set of drops like the one I hold in my hand.

Killing for life. How ironic is that?

I thought I had this all worked out. I thought I had a plan for myself, a way of engineering things so they were never too dangerous, never too fast—never too unexpected or creative or different.

I was in control.

I understood my place in the game.

Then Z moved in, right across the hall, in another nameless cubicle of our government-subsidized office. Here at the job I only qualify for because of my grandfather and the role he played in the founding of the FEIC, and the mass production of Xianglian necklaces.

Pioneer of the FEIC Expiration Monitors.

The shackles we all wear around our necks, hide in our boxes.

My grandfather was a doctor.

All he meant to do was save lives. That’s the punch line—or it would have been. If the Xianglian were jokes.

He sat at the head of the federal organ-donor lists. He watched while good hearts went to waste, time and again, when they were given to unfit recipients, simply because of their youth. He began to develop a database, youngest to oldest—until he computed their LC, life calculus. Junkies dropped lower, taking alcoholics and prescription-drug users with them. Convicts, prostitutes, high-risk behaviors dropped again. There were so many factors. So many reasons to be denied key organs, additional days and months and even years of human life.

Time, he realized, was a factor. Just not the determining factor.

The nature of the life, that was the true cost. That was the math that mattered.

The Feds noticed when his patients’ surgical outcomes soared. My grandfather’s agency grew.

I don’t blame him, any of them. I understand why they did it. It’s possible I would have done the same thing. My grandfather was a good man. He was only trying to help.

That’s when he realized the database had other uses, so many other uses. To think that he could imagine a new world, and bring it to life, whether or not it was right or wrong. He was as a god among men.

When people wanted to end world hunger, they didn’t consider how the ends could justify the means. When faced with overpopulation and the erosion of global resources, they didn’t perform the cost-benefit analysis.

The FEIC database did it for them.

And so our grandfather became a god, before I was even born. You know how they say we have to make the world we want for our children, and our children’s children?

I am that child.

I didn’t tell Z that. I didn’t tell him any of this.

I look up to see if he’s there. He’s not. He’s late. Of course he is.

I am never late.

I don’t know why Z works here. He’s never told me how he got the job. Only his name, over lukewarm tea in the break room, since our break isn’t long enough to steep it properly.

Laurence Horatio Hanzicker.

An old name, from an old time.

Z’s what you’d call a Stringer, the kind my mother warned me about. Bare string, nearly the length of it. World traveler. Pilot. Rebel. Thrill seeker.

He makes Hana look like a medical librarian. Like a research botanist.

Like, well, like me.

I have 99 percent of my necklace, fully intact. My life, preserved in a box. In a drawer. In a pouch. In a room so locked up and lonely, it might as well be Fort Knox.

My grandfather’s granddaughter.

I’ve memorized the database. I’ve eliminated my risk calculus, almost entirely. I’m a perfect candidate for anything.

Z is not.

He’s on his last drop. That’s what people say about him.

He’s final.

Zuihou. That’s what he says. Z for short.

I don’t know when it will happen. Any day. Any hour. Any minute could be his last.

If what they say is true, Z’s life is all used up, while I hold mine here in my hands, bagged and boxed up in satin and velvet and drawers.

I don’t know why I’m crying.

For Rama or Z or me.

My family, everyone who has gone before.

Everyone who has dropped or will.

I don’t know which one of us I’m crying for.

My screen lights up and I deaden my mind for another day at work. The interface logs me in. One Nine Six Seven. That’s all I am.

I wipe my eyes and lift them for the scan.

This is my life.

Is it any wonder Rama jumped?

5. Z

She’s there when I finally get to work.

Late as usual. The Shift Super glares at me as I walk by the front desk with my helmet stuck under one arm. She looks at me the way my old aunties did, after I came home from school. Like pit vipers.

Rough.

My hair stands straight up after I ride. I let it dry that way.

Also rough.

I see her there, across the room, in the little place where her cubicle stares at mine.

One Nine Six Seven.

She doesn’t know why I’m always late. That I ride my motorcycle all the way down to Pinminku, waiting in the alley until she locks her little door and leaves her little cat inside.

I follow her, two blocks behind. I’m her guardian angel. That’s what I told her little brother, before I set him up with the drop. I told him I’d do it. That’s how he knew he could do it. Leave all this. Her.

She just doesn’t know.

That, or how badly I wanted the job.

She’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The only beautiful thing in the room. Everything else is made of smoke.

Smoke and steel and ash.

All around us, everyone is dying, and they feel it. It’s no way to live.

She’s not dying.

She may never die.

I watch her. Her head fixed, eyes staring straight ahead. Her mind is wild, though, a thousand mountains and moons away.

Even I know that. Even from here, my desk, all the way across the corridor.

She hasn’t seen me come in. Not yet.

She’s a flower, I think, the moment before it’s cut. She’s a puddle of rain in the street, before a tire has yet to run through it.

Jai.

Even her name is a petal and a puddle to me.

She stands. She hangs her jacket on the hook behind her. Pulls something from her pocket.

Paper.

Strange.

A letter? A paper letter. Her face looks tired, drawn. It isn’t good, whatever it is.

I try to remember. Her family is gone. She has only Rama. He’ll be gone soon, if he’s not already. He’s been preparing for months. That’s why I came back.

I came because he asked me to help.

I stayed because he asked me to help her.

Her glossy black hair bobs as she reads, again and again.

Is she crying?

It’s him.

It’s her brother.

It’s either her brother, or a lover I know nothing about.

I smile at the idea of Jai, my Jai, having a lover. Jai, who would not risk the rain without an umbrella. Jai, who keeps a spare train ticket in her pocket at all times, in case she has to flee.

Then I stop.

I want to tell her about tigers.

I want to throw her into a river, and see which one of us can swim the farthest.

I want to walk her out into the ocean, one step at a time. I don’t care if we ever come back.

What does it matter to me?

What difference would it make now?

I flip on my computer.

It grunts into blank white light. Then, an animation pops up onscreen.

“Hello, Valued Employee of Cubicle Two Zero One One. We at Shenzen salute your contribution.”

“Thank you.” I look the animation in the eye. If I don’t, my terminal won’t finish loading.

I prefer the other kind of security, where they shoot the criminals in the face and don’t make the rest of us endure this. That’s how we do things in the North, where I’m from. Hinter. Here in the Southlands, where the Feds are crawling up your ass all day, that’s not an option.

The face nods, accepting my retinal scan. I guess I’m not as bloodshot as I thought.

“Begin your day, Two Zero One One. We hope you find personal fulfillment as you are of use to the world around you.”

“Super.” I hit a key, and the face disappears, my database scrolling across the screen. Name after name, number after number, risk after risk.

It’s not rocket science.

You do the math, you hit the key.

The plus sign to add a drop.

The minus to delete one.

You do the math.

You hit the key.

Sometimes it’s just a tear that drops.

Sometimes it’s a person.

That’s how it works.

You hit the keys.

But I don’t.

I never have.

I never will.

Instead, I reach around back and flip on my off-market modem.

My screen becomes another screen, and I see a face again. This face isn’t an animation, though. In fact, it doesn’t move at all.

“Jai,” I whisper, leaning closer to the microphone at the base of my monitor.

“Are you there?”

She looks down at the camera, which I know is only a blinking green light at the corner of her monitor. I know this, but it feels like she is looking at me.

When she smiles, which isn’t often, it feels like she’s smiling at me.

“Z.”

“In the flesh.”

“You’re late.”

“I’m always late.”

“You’re going to get fired.”

“So?”

“So.”

She falters, biting her lip. She looks away, but she has nothing else to look at. Not even a mug, with a cat painted on it. Not even a pen. There is nothing but me, a small blinking light above a keyboard and below a stretch of reflective plasticine.

She looks back at me.

“So. That would not be a positive contribution to the world around you.” She’s mocking the Corporation’s log-in screen, and I grin. That’s Jai, that spark deep inside. It isn’t easy to get to, and you have to work hard to find it, but I try.

I will never stop trying.

I crave it, more than anything else in my day.

“So?” I say it back to her, smiling. I straighten in my seat as the Super walks by, then slump back toward her. “What’s it to you whether or not I contribute? Whether or not I get fired?”

“It would be . . .” She smiles at her fingers, playing against the keyboard. They type and retype the same letters, over and over again. “It would be sad if you weren’t here.”

“It would?” I grin again. Say it, Jai. Her lips are pursed with a smile that they struggle to keep to themselves, like a kiss, like a secret.

“I would.”

“Meet me in the break room at the hour.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“We can’t be alone there.” She says the words, not me. I wonder what is happening to her today. Maybe it is her brother. Maybe it’s Rama.

Better and better, I think.

“Okay. Meet me outside, after work.”

She pauses, and I sit back and wait, watching the screen.

After a century, after one million years, she nods, so slightly you would have missed it, if you were not me.

Then she hits a key in front of her, and all I can see is the database once again, scrolling down my screen.

6. J A I

“What are you doing?”

I say the words to a stranger passing by me, who looks startled, but they’re meant for someone else.

For him.

The man pulling me by the arm the moment I step out onto the sidewalk, pulling me into people and traffic and passersby, dragging me around the corner until we are pressed against the side of a building hung with shadow. It is after six, rush hour, and the crush of the commute is everywhere. Not for us. We are the only ones standing still.

I don’t dare look at him.

I haven’t seen him all day.

I drank my lukewarm tea alone at break, ate my Spam roll alone during lunch. I kept my book with me, a statistical primer of risk calculation. I didn’t read it. I only pretended to read, so I didn’t have to talk to anyone around me.

There was no reason to speak, because the only person I wanted to speak to wasn’t there.

He disappeared right after we talked in the morning. His chair sat empty all day, his cubicle dark. Two Zero One One had been logged out, flagged a sick day, the seventh this month.

“Why did you go?”

“I was sick.”

“You aren’t sick.” I glance at him, sideways, though I know even before I look at him that he’s perfectly fine.

“Of course I am. I’m dying, One Nine Six Seven. We all are.”

“Jai. Call me Jai.” I say it quickly, and he smiles.

“I know your name, Jai.” His lips curl as he says it, and I want to touch them. Instead, I wrap my hand around the blade in my pocket. I grip it so hard I am afraid I will cut myself.

“I know your name better than they do, Jai.” He curls himself around my name again, looking up at the building behind us, and I realize it is the far corner of our own building. We haven’t gotten very far.

I shiver.

“Very funny.” I don’t smile.

“Your grandfather didn’t think it was. Your grandfather thought it was very smart, the database.”

I feel myself growing colder.

“His database,” Z says, again.

“Z.” I stiffen and pull my army jacket more tightly around me. I don’t want to talk about that. Not with him, not with anyone.

This was a bad idea.

All afternoon, I have imagined this meeting, this time we have. I have imagined it so many times. The two of us, together at an out-of-the-way teahouse or, even more daring, a bathhouse.

The two of us, riding on the back of his motorcycle, my hair streaming in the wind behind me.

Of course, that would be impossible.

I would have a helmet. We both would.

It’s little improbabilities like that—impossibilities, really—that are why fantasies are so stupid, and why I don’t have them anymore.

“I should go.” I look toward the busy street. The night is thick and humid, graying in the fading light. It looks as sticky as it feels, as if I am standing in the shower, letting the steam roll into the world beyond me.

“I’m sorry.” He slips his hand into my pocket, uncurling my fingers from the knife. “I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t want your necklace. I don’t want anything that belongs to anyone but me.”

Then he leans toward me, as if he’s going to kiss me, but he doesn’t. Instead, he whispers something, so softly I almost can’t hear it.

“What do you want, Jai?”

What do I want? To run away. To grow a vegetable garden, with weeds and flowers taller than my own body.

To run wild in the sunshine. To jump, fly, shout in the air, in front of strangers.

To wander. Travel. Love. Live forever.

To tell my brother I love him, one last time.

To kiss the man who stands in front of me, whether or not he wants me to.

To know. To be sure.

Of him, of me.

Everything.

I say nothing.

I wish I knew.

And even if I did, there’s nothing I can say. No words to say it. Only numbers, only the system of our own making, my own father’s father.

I can’t speak the truth.

I’m not brave enough.

I can only feel it, in the flush that creeps into my cheeks and the way his warm fingers burn against my cold ones.

Then I’m ashamed of myself, of what I’m saying, even if I can’t bring myself to say the words at all. I don’t think he needs me to say them.

I think he knows.

I draw my hand away from his, out of my own pocket. I clutch the collar of my jacket, holding it close.

His eyes follow me.

“Let’s get out of here.”

7. Z

I have dreams that go like this. I must be dreaming.

We ride on the back of my motorcycle, Jai holding me with small hands. Her hands are warm, even though the night is growing cold. She shivers against me, and I can feel her breathing, her heart pounding. She wears my helmet. It still smells like her, when she hands it back to me.

At least, it will.

That’s how it starts, how it always starts. When I dream of One Nine Six Seven, of Jai.

I dream of her almost every night.

Only none of this is a dream. All of this is happening. I shake my head, wondering to myself how one conversation in a lost roadside bar on a faraway continent with Rama could change so much.

But she is real.

I know this, because she clings tightly to me, behind me. And her hands are warm, the way I want to remember them.

The broken streets of Pinminku disappear behind us, then widen and open into the vacant stretch of empty highway that will lead us up and into the foothills, circling back on itself until we reach the reservoir.

Everything is ready. It took all day and every penny I had, but I have seen to that.

It has cost me more than the day—probably my job—but I don’t question it now. I have other jobs, another job. Not that I will need a job much longer.

I question nothing now.

It’s too late for that.

The shade is thick, and the water is fringed with trees. I take her by the hand, leading her to the cliff rock where I have left everything I could find, in a bucket resting on what used to be my bedcover.

In the bucket is everything I know about her. A daisy. A thermos of tea. Rice rolled with meat, how she takes it in the lunchroom. A cluster of grapes that I found off-market, at the cost of my old receiver.

The flask of wine, that was a question. Not something I know; it’s there for me.

For courage.

“Do you trust me?” I pour the contents of the flask into a tall plastic glass. She stops me, wine splashing across her hand.

“No.” She smiles down at the glass, and I lower the bottle to the tattered blanket on the grass between us.

We are alone now, here at the edge of the reservoir at the far reach of the district. Her ghetto is faraway, her old life even farther.

“I don’t drink.” That’s all she says.

“At all? Ever?”

She shakes her head. “Maybe if you have some water. I sometimes pour a little in. See, like this?”

She fills her glass with water, splashing wine inside. It turns red, not so red as blood, only a faint red, the color of a spilled pomegranate.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I like to feel—like myself.” I’m scared. She doesn’t say that, but I hear it.

I shake my head. “Not me. I like to feel drunk.”

She laughs at me, but her eyes aren’t smiling. They’re big and dark and staring at me, as if she isn’t even thinking or talking about wine at all.

“My brother dropped.”

I try to act surprised. It only seems polite.

“When?”

“I don’t know. I have his dropletter—I mean, had it. I burned it, most of it. It wasn’t dated.” She shakes a little, bringing the water to her lips.

I nod. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It’s what we say. I eye her closely. “Did you . . . know?”

She puts down the glass of red water.

“Yes. No. I’m not surprised. But I miss him. He was everything, all I had left of my family.” Her voice catches on the last word.

“I understand.”

“Tell me what it’s like.”

“What?”

“This. To live. To be at the end, like you are. Like Rama.”

“The last drop?”

She shakes her head. “Not that.” She looks at me more closely. “This.”

“Before. You mean, the end of the necklace?”

She nods. “The necklace of raindrops.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“In my family. It’s what we always did. Even my grandfather.”

“It’s hard to imagine your grandfather was a poet.”

“It was from a story.”

I hold up my wrist. On it is a twist of brown string, weathered to the point where it looks like frayed twine. A single clear bead shines from where it is caught in a single loop. I shake my arm in the air between us, rattling it.

“There it is. My whole life, all I have.”

“You just wear it like that? Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind?”

“Nope.”

“What if something happens to it? What about you?”

“If it goes, it goes. If I go, I go.” It really is that simple. Each drop of the necklace controls a corresponding nanograin of encapsulated biotoxin, swimming silently in my bloodstream. We get the poison injection when we get the necklace. When a drop’s signal dies, whether by command or by being destroyed or lost, the capsule dissolves, and we grow one step closer to the end.

Drop by drop.

One by one by one—until there are none.

When that happens, we die. It’s only a matter of time. They’re finite and irreplaceable, the drops. They could never be made.

Not by us, anyway,

Only Jai’s grandfather and his coworkers—the other gods of the Shenzen Life Calculus—could do that.

Jai knows it. She just doesn’t want to hear it.

Her eyes flash dark. “I don’t understand you, people like you. Even Rama. Why do you want to leave? Why do you want to go from something to nothing? No matter how bad something is, isn’t something enough?”

“You know what your problem is?”

“I have a problem?” She looks irritated.

I nod. “You don’t know what everything feels like.”

“I don’t?”

“You don’t know what everything tastes like. The flavor it has, the sound of it. The particular sharpness it brings. The colors.” My voice sounds like I am in a dream, and I wonder if I am.

Her breath seems to catch as she looks at me. “What’s that? Everything?”

I lean closer, hanging over her upturned face. “It feels like sunlight on the water, shuddering in a breeze that ripples everything, even things it shouldn’t.”

I slip my arms around her, gently pulling her toward me on the blanket.

“The way it moves the leaves in and out of all colors of green—uncurls the sky in all colors of blue.”

She leans against me.

“The way the water can cut through trees and shadows like thick sections of chocolate cake that catch in the back of your throat.”

She closes her eyes, settling against my chest. I feel her heart pounding, just over mine.

I don’t stop.

I lower my hand to her neck, my mouth to the edge of her jaw. My words become a whisper between us.

“The way a single word, a tiny sound can drift over and around the smallest blade of grass between you and the horizon.”

I pull a curl of hair loose from her clipped, black braid.

“The way that glass of wine, right there, can taste like everything you’re seeing and nothing at all.”

“Water,” she says, looking up at me. “It’s only—”

Then she says nothing at all, because our lips no longer feel like talking, and there are no more words on our tongues.

It is you, I think.

It was always you.

I could tell her about the deserts I have walked or the mountains I have climbed. I could tell her about the crowded marketplaces and the tents stitched from scarves. I could tell her about beetles that taste like saffron, about creatures that fly when they should swim, swim when they should fly.

The men who ring bells. The bells that bow men.

I tell her nothing, because none of it matters.

I know that now.

It wasn’t life.

Not for me.

My pathway, that pathway, led only to her. To an empty cubicle on a crowded street in Pinminku. To the worst job of my life, and to her.

Jai.

One Nine Six Seven.

She kisses me. I kiss her.

We are a circle of pathways and arms and eventualities, stitched together with scarves and bells and saffron.

We are more than eight numbers, more than beads in a drawer.

We kiss and I feel my life begin, and the joke is on me, because I suddenly, desperately, want nothing more than to live.

For the first time in my hard-worn life.

I don’t tell her that.

I pull her closer, letting her twist in my arms, letting myself twist in hers, until we are swimming in water and wine and kisses and blankets and she tastes like everything and there are no doubts anywhere, for anyone at all.

8. J A I

I become careless. Sloppy. Happy.

I suck in my breath for no reason, gasping at the wonder that is my life.

In the shower, I scream.

When I have nightmares, they are not of death and dropping. They are of my life, before I met Z.

When everything was nothing, sand on my lips.

I forget to buy milk for my tea. I sleep through my first and second alarm.

I wonder if anyone notices.

9. Z

I never understood anything. Now I know that.

I wish it didn’t have to end.

I wish I could tell her.

I wish I could ask her brother.

10. J A I & Z

Everything is brighter in the air.

Partly it is the sky, how clear it is, how close they are to the sun. Partly it is the machine, the light shining off the spinning blades above them.

Zhishengji spin quickly, even for choppers.

Partly it is their hearts, pounding themselves into one. A rhythmic arrhythmia, a new beat. Beating itself literally together, and to death.

His lips pressed against her.

His breath in her ears.

The girl, Jai, sits on her scuffed boot heels, staring straight into the sun. The boy, Z, circles his arms around her. To him, she is the sun.

Beneath them, the light glints off the silver rooftops that were the Southlands, that are what remains of the Southlands, spreading like the scattered beads of a necklace that was meant to be broken. Scattered like petals, like leaves in the wind.

Behind them, in the distant blue, is the stripe of ocean that lines the sky. Haiyang, as they call it. There are no rooftops there at all. It looks like life, like endless life.

Siwang. The great river.

How Jai imagines it.

Vivid. Dazzling. The ever-present oblivion.

That which is constant.

That which remains.

Love.

Z steadies himself, steadying her. He catches his breath as the chopper twists beneath them.

“Don’t be afraid.” He kisses her cheek, a soft place he has found next to her ear.

“I’m not.” She leans back against him. A touch that is itself a kiss.

“We’ll be together.”

“You don’t know that.”

He smiles at her.

“At least we won’t be apart.”

“Ready?”

The pilot shouts back to them. They only nod. The pilot doesn’t care. He gets paid either way.

They clasp hands, ready to jump. Z takes one last look around the chopper. Everything is as it should be. He has been planning this jump for months, since before he knew her. Since the day he met Rama, and they made their plan.

Nothing about this day is a surprise. Nothing except the feeling in his chest. But that’s not the question.

Is she ready?

She squeezes his hand, as if in answer.

The chopper lunges in the opposite direction.

“Goupi!” the pilot curses. “No offense, kids. If you’re gonna jump, you gotta go now.”

Z reaches into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit, pulling out an envelope.

“For my parents.” He drops it into the box. She smiles, without letting go of his hand.

He knows she has no dropletter. She doesn’t need one. She has no one left to tell.

Nothing remains for her but him, but this.

The drop.

“You want a parachute? I know it’s kind of pointless, but it makes some people feel better. On the way down.”

The pilot turns to look at them, but they aren’t there.

They are slipping through the darkness, searching for the beginning of their story, feetfirst and falling.

They’re a hundred yards down before the pilot can even turn the chopper around and head back toward the base.

In his haste, he doesn’t see the two parachutes missing. He doesn’t know about the deleted records, the hacked system that can no longer tell Two Zero One One or One Nine Six Seven when to end their lives.

He doesn’t know it is time to begin them.

He doesn’t know the biggest secret of all.

That Rama is waiting, that he has always been waiting. That he is every bit his grandfather’s grandson.

That he can imagine a new world, and bring it to life, whether or not it is right or wrong. That he can find the man who will bring him his sister for a price, or in the end, for no price at all.

That Rama and his rebel encampment await them in the stretch of oblivion that is the Mojave Desert. In every way, it is the opposite of death.

It is, for the very first time, life.

An uncontrollable storm, more precious than any necklace of raindrops.

The pilot flies on, unaware of the cloud pattern building beneath him.

Instead, the pilot is wondering, as he does every night, how long it will be until he’ll be making that last drop for himself.

The pilot shivers and heads for home. He has a girlfriend and a dog and a love for bread and butter.

It is nearly enough, while he has it.

To keep the drops and his thoughts away.