Back at the residential complex, Chen Yang sat on his windowsill and pondered the consequences of what he had been doing.
Carrying gold out of the wasteland by the bagful was simple, and simple was the problem. Every bar he sold was a question waiting to be asked, and sooner or later somebody with a badge would ask it. He needed his income to be legal — not clean-looking, actually legal, with a company and invoices and a tax number, so that no one ever had a reason to look twice at him.
And gold, he realized, was not even the good part.
The wasteland's real advantage was not its resources. It was its technology. Two hundred years was nothing; the war had ended within living memory of the buildings still standing out there. Whatever humanity had built before the bombs fell had not been forgotten. It had been kept, and used, and taken for granted, by people who thought a serum that rebuilt a human body was a routine purchase.
That meant specialists. A whole ruined world full of high-class specialists who would work — he was certain of this — extraordinarily cheaply.
With people like that, and technology from two centuries in the future, he would not be making games. He would be making things the industry did not have a word for yet.
His phone buzzed. The registration agent, calling to confirm that his application for the company had been filed.
"That's excellent," Chen Yang said, smiling. "Thank you for letting me know."
So: the company was moving. Next came employees, and the employees he wanted were not on this side of the ring.
Which meant shopping.
At the supermarket he pushed his trolley slowly down the snack aisle and then, after a moment's thought, pushed it straight past. Packaged snacks were a bad idea now. Every bag had a production date printed on it, and the day someone out there thought to read one, he would have questions he could not answer.
Raw goods. Bulk goods. Things that looked like food and nothing else.
"And for you, sir?" the woman behind the deli counter asked.
"Ham," Chen Yang said. "Twenty-five kilos."
She stared at him. "Twenty-five—"
"Kilos. Yes."
Half an hour later he stood at the end of the checkout and surveyed his purchases with deep satisfaction. The trolley was heaped to the handle with potatoes, corn and cabbages, and behind it stood a second trolley just like it.
Getting it home nearly killed him. He came up the stairs under a box the size of a washing machine, put it down in his hallway, and leaned on the wall.
If he had to haul supplies back and forth like this, he thought, the business would kill him before the zombies got a chance. Even with his new strength — and it was considerable — how exactly was he going to deliver food to tens of people? To hundreds?
His finger began to glow.
He looked down at it, mildly confused, and then the light poured out of his hand and spilled over the stacked boxes in a wash of gold, and with a bang and a flash the whole pile vanished.
Chen Yang stood alone in an empty hallway.
He raised the ring to his face and stared into it, and then an idea came to him. He closed his eyes and concentrated, reaching for whatever it was he had just done — and there, behind his eyelids, he saw them. The boxes. All of them, stacked neatly in a space that was not a room, lit by nothing, waiting.
The supplies had gone inside the ring.
A grin spread across his face that would have alarmed anyone who saw it. He gave a mental command, and the boxes came back into his hallway all at once, exactly where they had been. He sent them away again, and they went.
It was not a portal. It was a warehouse. He was walking around with a warehouse on his finger.
He brought the ring to his lips and kissed it.
"First-class service," he told it. "Absolutely first-class."
That settled it. It was time to go back.
A pillar of white light stood up in the middle of his apartment, and when it faded there was nobody in the room.
In a basement in District D, a girl was very carefully opening a package of dried meat.
Leelu peeled the wrapping back a centimetre at a time so as not to lose a crumb, and when the seasoning stuck to her fingers she licked it off and closed her eyes with pleasure. She ate one piece. One. And then she sat with the packet in her lap and thought about how much she would like to eat the rest.
Then she made herself be serious. Food was a resource. Food was the only resource.
She looked at what she had: two packs of jerky. She made herself count what they were actually worth, at camp prices, in a bad month — and the number frightened her. One pack of that would keep a person alive for a week. A whole week.
Which meant she had taken priceless food out of a stranger's hands and given him, in exchange, a bag of yellow metal that nobody in the wasteland would take as payment for a cup of water.
Her stomach went cold. She could see it: whoever he answered to, going through the ledger, finding that their courier had traded a month of rations for a sack of junk, and what they would do to him for it.
He was not coming back. Of course he was not coming back. Nobody would send him again after that, and even if they let him live, he would never be allowed near the district as long as—
"Little help?"
A shape filled the doorway at the top of the steps, bent almost double under a stack of boxes taller than he was.
"Seriously," Chen Yang wheezed. "Help. Now. Please."
"BOSS!"
Leelu came off the floor like a shot. She hit him at full speed, the boxes went everywhere, and the two of them went down together with her sitting squarely on top of him.
"You came! You actually came!"
Then the tears started, which was worse. "I thought you'd tricked me. I really thought it — I was sitting here thinking you'd never come back—"
"Why," Chen Yang said from underneath her, entirely at a loss, "would I cheat you?"
"Because the trade wasn't equal!" she wailed. "Because it wasn't anywhere close to equal and I let you make it, and they could have punished you, they could have—"
He got a hand free and put it on top of her head.
"Listen to me. My status is high. Nobody punishes me." He waited until she was looking at him. "And I need gold far more than I need food. That deal was profitable for me. Genuinely. You did well."
"Oh," said Leelu, sniffing hard.
"Also you're sitting on my ribs, and we have about forty kilos of groceries on the floor, so if you could—"
She scrambled up and started gathering boxes, and it was while she was righting one that had split at the corner that she stopped moving entirely.
Inside, packed in a row, were cabbages. Fresh, firm, pale-green, faintly damp.
Her hands began to shake. She lifted one out and held it in both palms, and her eyes went enormous.
"You can grow vegetables?" she screamed. "You know how to grow vegetables?"
Chen Yang looked at her, and then at the cabbage, and then at her again. "It's a cabbage."
"After the disaster nothing grows!" Tears were running freely down her face now. "Nothing. Not in this soil, not in any soil anywhere near here. Nobody has seen one—"
"All right, all right." He held up both hands. "Calm down. You can have it. Take it, I don't mind."
She stared at him. "You're giving them to me. You. Are giving. Them to me."
"That's what I said."
Leelu hugged the cabbage against her chest as though someone were going to take it off her. Then she went down on her knees on the concrete floor and held it back out to him.
"I can't accept this. It's too valuable a resource. You're a good person and I'll remember it for the rest of my life, but I only take what I've honestly earned."
Chen Yang stood there completely at a loss. A good person, he thought, bewildered. Why is she calling me a good person? I've been robbing this entire district blind for two days.
"Then let's not call it a gift," he said. "You wanted a discount on your commission. Forget the discount — take the groceries instead. That's payment for work. That's the best payment I can give you, and frankly it's cheaper for me."
He put a large piece of meat into her hands on top of the cabbage.
"And if you need anything, you call me." He grinned at her slyly. "In exchange, you work harder."
Leelu smiled up at him, wet-faced and radiant, and promised she would do her absolute best.
"Good. Because from today you're not my guide, you're my personal assistant." He sat down on the edge of the bed. "Which means when I ask questions, you answer them."
He unloaded another armful of food onto the table while he said it, and then got to the point. "I need to hire people. A lot of people. Help me find them."
"People?" She blinked. "What kind? Do you have requirements?"
"First requirement: dedicated. Second: capable. In that order."
"Then we go to Grey Rat," Leelu said immediately. "There are ten thousand survivors in that city, easily. Whatever you're looking for, somebody there is it."
"Hold on. What does Grey Rat have to do with District D? Why is your camp called D at all?"
"Ah." She brightened. "I'll explain everything."
She dug out a map, worn soft at the folds, and spread it on the bed. At the centre sat the city. Around it, in a rough ring, twelve settlements, lettered A through L.
"Twelve districts. All twelve of us survive off the city, one way or another — everything scarce comes from there, so everything eventually goes there. That's the whole world, boss. That's it."
"Right." He tapped the city. "Then are there programmers in it? People who can write code and build games?"
Leelu's face went blank. "Com... puter?" she repeated, as though he had coughed.
She flipped the map over, hunted through a stack of clippings, and produced a photograph of a boxy grey machine with a fat glass screen.
"Do you mean this ancient thing?"
"...Yes," Chen Yang admitted. "That ancient thing. So they're outdated here, which means people who understand them are going to be hard to—"
"Very hard." She shook her head sadly. "We were using smart brains even before the disaster, boss. Nobody's touched one of those in a hundred years. I don't think you're going to—"
She stopped. Her whole face changed.
"Wait. Wait! There's a man in this camp who used to lead an entire department of ancient technologies!"
She grabbed his hand and hauled him bodily toward the stairs.
"Let go of me!" Chen Yang howled. "I can walk! I have legs! I can walk on my own!"