She pointed at a doorway in the side of a low building. "That's mine. Come in and rest for a bit, boss."
Chen Yang followed her with a smug little smile on his face. A pretty girl was inviting him into her room. There were worse ways for a day to end.
The doorway went down, not in. He came off the last step into a basement: bare concrete, water stains, a mattress on a frame of welded pipe, a curtain that had been a shirt. It was wretched, and it was falling apart, and the smell of damp came up through the floor.
His face twisted with horror and disgust before he could stop it.
"Sit down," Leelu said happily, noticing nothing.
He knelt awkwardly on the floor beside the bed, because there was nowhere else.
She poured him tea from a dented kettle, chattering the whole time. "Our neighbourhood's small, but it's cosy. Everything you need is right here, honestly. You get used to it." She finished with a smile and pressed a cup into his hands.
Then she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, all business. "So. What do you want to exchange the food for? Tell me and I'll get it. Anything."
"Gold," Chen Yang said casually. "And silver. You know what those are?"
Leelu's face went blank with sincere surprise. "Why would you want that useless junk?"
He nearly bit through the cup. Useless junk. In his homeland that useless junk cost more than a man like him earned in a year.
"Before the great catastrophe I think metals like that meant something," she went on, kindly, the way you explain the world to a child. "Maybe. But now everything's natural exchange — food, water, weapons. That's it. That's all anybody takes." She shrugged. "You can't eat gold."
He breathed out through his nose and let it go. The point of this first deal was not the margin. The point was trust, and a partner who would still be working with him next month.
"Then let's trade," he said, and swung his gym bag onto the floor and opened it.
It was packed to the brim with shining foil packets. Red and gold and silver, layer on layer of them, more food than she had seen in one place in her life.
Leelu's eyes lit up.
"One tenth," Chen Yang said. "One tenth of everything in this bag is yours as commission, if the deal goes through."
She went red to the ears. "One tenth," she repeated quietly to herself, like a woman checking a sum she did not dare believe. "One tenth of that."
Then she frowned. "Boss, are you sure? Because if you're wrong about the price—"
"Just do what I say."
He stood, brushing off his knees. "I'm relying on you completely. I'll wait here until you're back."
Leelu clenched her fist and held it up in front of her chest. "I'll justify your trust. I swear it."
She shouldered her rifle, hauled the bag up onto her back, and went out, promising over her shoulder that she would be very quick.
Chen Yang listened to her boots go up the steps. A hundred yuan, he thought. That whole bag was the last hundred yuan he had, spent on discount snacks, and there was no possible way this deal did not go through.
He lay down on the bed and was bored inside four minutes. No internet. No signal. No anything.
His gaze drifted up the wall — and stopped.
Newspaper clippings, yellowed and brittle, taped up in rows. He rolled onto his elbow and read the nearest one, and then the date at the top of the page.
2235.
He sat up.
The great disaster. Nuclear bombs — a count of them that made no sense as a number. A photograph of a scientist whose face had come apart under the effects of gene pollution, staring out of the paper at him. Another column, further along, about the dead that were now walking everywhere, and what to do if you met one on a road.
An hour later he came off that bed like the mattress had bitten him.
He was on the Blue Star. He was standing on his own planet, two hundred years from the morning he had been fired.
The great disaster Leelu kept mentioning had been a nuclear war. Tens of thousands of warheads. Half the population of the planet gone in it, and the ecosystem itself rewritten afterward, until what was left was this scorched, grey, endless wasteland.
He had not moved through space at all. He had moved through time. The horror of it stood the hair up on his arms.
"I'm back!"
Leelu came down the steps with the bag banging against her hip and her whole face lit up.
"There was almost no gold and silver in the entire camp," she said, dropping it in front of him. "Nobody needs it, so nobody keeps it. I had to go door to door."
Chen Yang crouched and opened the bag.
It was filled to the brim with gold bars.
The smile that spread over his face was not a nice one. It was mad, and it was greedy, and he could not have stopped it if the whole camp had been watching. He put his hands in among the bars and let the light run over them.
Without me, he thought, chuckling, this endless night of theirs would never have ended.
"The food cost a lot more than the gold and silver did," Leelu said sheepishly behind him. "There was change left over. A lot of change. So I swapped the excess for this, because it was the only thing worth having and there was no risk in it."
She held out a sealed vial of clear liquid.
"Tier one enhancement potion. Pure." She looked at him with open doubt while he took it. "You seem like an ordinary person, boss. No offence. But with this you'd be able to handle a couple of zombies at least. Two. Maybe three."
Then she pushed something else into his hands as well — a heavy, flat package wrapped in cloth.
"And take this too. You can't rely on luck forever."
"My organization is very powerful," Chen Yang said grandly, tucking both away. "But I appreciate the thought. Truly." He hefted the gold. "Our first exchange went well. I should get back."
"Already?"
"I'll come tomorrow, and I'll pay for the meat then."
He climbed the steps into the grey light. Leelu stood at the bottom and watched him go, thinking that for a man who talked so much, he had an awful lot of secrets.
She looked down at the dried meat in her hands — her share, her honest share — and decided that in the wasteland, everybody had secrets. It did not make a man bad. It only made him a man who was still alive.
She ate it slowly, with enormous relish, hoping very hard that he would keep coming back with more.
Chen Yang walked out through the deserted ruins beyond the camp, checking over his shoulder twice, three times, until he was certain there was no one anywhere around him.
Then he raised his hand and activated the ring.
The space around him folded and distorted, and the wasteland went out like a light.
He came back standing in his own apartment with the bag at his feet, and he tore it open and laughed out loud. Gold. Real gold, still here, still solid, having crossed two hundred years and come out the other side without losing a gram. He picked up a bar in both hands to prove it to himself and could not stop grinning.
Now all he had to do was turn it into money.
He lay back on the floor and let the picture come: a mountain of cash, and himself lying on top of it, and a beautiful girl lying next to him. Rich. Actually rich.
Then the practical part of his brain caught up. Careful, he told himself. A young unemployed man walking into a bank with a duffel bag of bullion was a young unemployed man being interviewed by the police that afternoon. He had no plausible story for where any of this had come from. Sell it quietly. Sell it in pieces. Do not attract attention.
He let out a slow breath and let the weight of his sudden fortune settle on him.
That left the vial.
He turned it over in his fingers, watching the liquid move. Should he use it? His body was a joke — he had nearly died out there twice in one afternoon, once to a stone and once to a slope. If he was going to keep going back into that world, and he was, then he had to be stronger.
The only thing that bothered him was that the vial had come with no instructions of any kind. No dosage. No warnings. Nothing.
He thought about it for a long minute.
Then he decided to take the risk.