The terminal chimed. The customer looked at the screen, then at the box on the trolley, then back at the screen, and took his own head in both hands.
"Say," Chen Yang said kindly, "since you're free this evening. Would you like to go and have a couple of drinks?"
The man made a noise like a kettle and ran out of the store.
Two hundred years away, on the other side of a ring, a red-haired girl was walking down an alley in the city of Grey Rat with a backpack on her shoulders and a rifle across her back.
Three men were waiting for her where the alley narrowed. The one in front had a mohawk and an arm that was not an arm — a scuffed grey prosthetic with the servos exposed at the elbow.
"Hey, beautiful," he said, stepping out. "Come and play with me."
Leelu walked past him without turning her head.
"Did you see that?" one of the others said, honestly startled. "She didn't even look at you."
"Forget her face. Look at the bag."
All three of them looked at the bag. It was very full, and it was heavy enough to be pulling her shoulders down, and out here a full bag meant one thing.
Leelu stopped. She turned around.
"Get out of my way," she said. "Now."
Her hand came to rest on the grip of the rifle. "I'll use it. I'd rather not, but I will."
The third bandit's voice went up an octave. "SHE'S GOT A GUN—"
She left them standing there and did not look back, and she made herself breathe slowly all the way to the end of the street. Calm, she told herself. Stay calm, stay ordinary, walk like a woman with nothing. Panic in Grey Rat and they will tear you to pieces in the road.
She stopped in front of a wooden building with a hand-painted board over the door: WASTELAND REPAIR SHOP.
Inside, two mechanics looked up from a bench of gutted machines.
"I need a smart brain," Leelu said.
"Basic model," the older one said, wiping his hands. "Fifteen kilos of brown rat meat."
"Basic is fine."
She swung the backpack up onto the counter, and it landed with a thud that made the tools jump.
The mechanic weighed it, watched the needle settle, and smiled. "Weight's sufficient."
He put a flat matte device into her hands. "Hold onto that."
Then the second man leaned forward into the light, and his eyes were red — not bloodshot, red, all the way through.
"Since you're here," he said, "why don't you bargain with me over a few of my treasures? I've got things in the back you won't see anywhere in this city."
"No," Leelu said, and walked out.
The red-eyed man watched the door swing.
"Want me to follow her?" his partner asked.
"Leave it. She isn't worth it."
Outside, Leelu let out a long breath and let her shoulders drop for the first time in an hour. That had been close. That had been much too close.
She shifted the pack and felt, through the canvas, the round solid weight wrapped in cloth at the bottom of it. If anyone in that shop had seen what she was actually carrying — if anyone in this entire village had seen it — the whole city would have gone insane in the street.
She kept walking, deeper into Grey Rat, until the buildings got better and the alleys got quieter, and at last she stopped in front of a door and thought, with enormous relief, that she had finally arrived.
The room inside was dark. A grey-haired man sat behind a desk in it.
"Hello," Leelu said.
"Look around," he said, without getting up. "Choose whatever you need."
She went along the shelves. Serums in racks, each with a printed label, each with a level stamped in the corner. One. Two. Three.
"These are too simple," she said. "I need higher-level serums."
The man smirked at her. "You can't afford that price."
"Look at something first."
She unwrapped the cloth and set the cabbage on his desk.
The man came out of his chair as though the floor had bucked.
He crossed the room faster than she could follow. It was not a run. It was a single blurred movement that ended with him standing directly in front of her, and Leelu — who had faced down three armed men in an alley an hour ago without her pulse changing — could not react at all.
She got the rifle up between them and her voice cracked. "What are you doing?"
He stopped, and slowly spread his arms out to either side.
"I won't harm you." His aura came off him then, deliberately, filling the room like heat off a road. "But be honest with yourself. What is that going to do against a level nine enhancement?"
The blood went out of her face. Level nine. She was standing in a back room in Grey Rat in front of a level nine doctor of the Doctors' Association.
"Anything can happen in the wasteland," he said calmly. "May I look at your goods?"
She lowered the rifle. He took up the cabbage in both hands, turned it under the lamp, tested a leaf between his fingers, and held it close to his face.
"Fresh. Firm. And not one trace of radiation in it. Not one." His voice had changed entirely. "Do you know what this is? This is a heavenly miracle sitting on my desk."
He set it down with great care.
"I'll exchange it for goods of equivalent value," he said. "And I'll say this once — don't name an exorbitant price. This land does not grow vegetables. It will not grow them again in your lifetime or mine. So you understand exactly what you're holding, and I understand it too."
"The price is high because it's rare," Leelu agreed evenly. "Not because I'm greedy."
"Good." He grinned. "I'd hate for my new partner to turn out to be an unprincipled scoundrel."
"I have enough sincerity to close a deal."
"Then let me show you mine."
He pressed a red button set into the desk.
A hologram unfolded in the air behind him, and Leelu's mouth opened.
"A full set of enhancement serums," he said. "Level one through level six. Complete."
The image turned.
"Next: a healing potion. It cures every disease caused by cell mutation. Every one, without exception."
The image turned again, and this time it showed a suit — matte black, segmented, layered at the joints.
"And as the main course: a set of new carbon-fibre bio-armour."
"All of that," Leelu breathed, greedy and embarrassed to be so obviously greedy. "All of that is mine?"
"Of course not," the man said, and gave her a little push on the shoulder.
He pointed. "Those two. The serums and the potion. That's what a cabbage buys."
"Then why did you show me the armour at all?" she demanded, outraged.
He smiled slightly. "Preparation. For our second deal."
"Second—"
"You want the armour, you bring me more cabbage. Or something other than cabbage. Vegetables, girl. Bring me vegetables."
Leelu went cold. "How could you possibly know I have others?"
"Because that one is too perfect." He tapped the desk beside it. "It isn't a scavenged find, it's produce. Nobody digs a flawless Chinese cabbage out of a hole. And besides —" he spread his hands — "any faction that had recovered cultivation technology would not be growing only cabbage. It's the least interesting thing they'd grow. So there are others."
"I found it in the ruins," Leelu tried. "From before the great cataclysm—"
"In ruins two hundred years old." He looked at her with something close to pity. "One head of cabbage, survived down there, crisp as morning. No. Go and discuss it with your people, and hurry."
He gathered the cabbage up under his arm and turned to go.
"Fine," Leelu called after him. "But be clear about it — vegetables are obviously less use to us than a suit of armour, so the value is in our favour and we both know it."
Then she sighed and, much more meekly, added: "Keep it safe for me. Please. I'll come back as fast as I can."
When she had gone the man sat down again with the cabbage in front of him.
A power struggle, he thought. That was all it had taken. Lose one round of a power struggle inside the association and they exile you to a hole like Grey Rat and forget your name.
He turned the cabbage under the lamp again.
Good fortune found in misfortune, he decided. That was the phrase for it.
In a service alley behind a supermarket, a delivery truck was backing up with its warning tone going.
"Mr Chen?" The courier came around the tailgate with a tablet. "Where do you want it?"
"Down there." Chen Yang pointed deeper into the alley, at the blank stretch of wall past the bins. "Stack it against the wall."
The loaders started walking boxes down. Halfway through, one of them straightened up and looked at the invoice taped to the top carton.
"Twenty thousand yuan of meat," he said. "Who needs twenty thousand yuan of meat? What's he going to—"
"None of your business," the other one said. "Work."
The last box went down. The courier had him sign, wished him well, and said to call any time. The truck pulled out of the alley and left him alone with a wall of cardboard as tall as he was.
Chen Yang looked both ways. No people. No cameras. Not a single lens anywhere along the whole length of it — which was exactly why he had chosen it, because otherwise he would have had no idea on earth what to do with all this.
The stack began to glow.
Gold light ran up the boxes from the ground, the whole pile went bright, and it dissolved into a swirl of light and was gone, and the alley was empty.
He stood there a moment, thinking.
This was not a long-term solution. Buy at this volume for a few months and somebody would notice — a supplier, an accountant, a competitor wondering where the tonnage went. And if the company took off, if he became someone worth reading about, then people would start digging into him properly.
As a temporary measure, he decided, he would rent a private factory unit. Somewhere with a loading bay and a locked gate and no eyes.
And in the longer run he needed a partner. A food plant of his own, or as good as — someone who could produce variety instead of whatever the supermarket had on the shelf.
While he walked, he checked the warehouse in his mind, and stopped in the middle of the pavement.
The food inside it had not aged. Not by a second. Time in there was not running slowly; it was not running at all.
It would never spoil. Nothing he put in there would ever spoil.
Extremely pleased with himself, he bought an ice cream and ate it as he walked, and his phone rang while he was still on the second bite.
The registration had been approved.
He stood in the middle of the street with a cone in his hand and grinned at nothing at all. As of this morning, he was officially the founder of his own company.