Home, to me, was one of the cement apartment complexes next to the New Greenland terraforming site. I was fortunate to live there, rather than in the cheaper, but far less secure, tents.

  That was all thanks to my younger brother, Lore. He had earned himself citizenship three years ago, and he sent me some of his salary every month, which was a hell of a lot more than I made. I didn’t want to take it, but he insisted. You’ve taken care of me since Mom left. Let me take care of you back.

  The apartment made me a lot less likely to get stabbed in my sleep, so I’d seen the sense in it. Currently, Lore was in space, on a habitation ship headed for Mercury. I hoped that meant the Collapse hadn’t affected him.

  I was starting to call it that, in my head: the Collapse. The Collapse of all those people, and apparently, the Collapse of human civilization as we knew it.

  “Watch for incoming,” I told Dave, setting the aircar to autopilot and pivoting my seat to face the glove box. I hammered it with an impatient fist, and it popped open. Receipts tumbled out, and I dug through napkins and disposable bioplastic sporks until I got to the bottom.

  “Bingo,” I said, letting myself grin as I closed my fist around a folded butterfly knife. Citizens weren’t allowed to have guns, but the unshaven guy with the stained shirt struck me as the type to think butterfly knives made you look intimidating. He’d probably bought this, realized he’d never figure out how to perform tricks with it, and then stuffed it in his car “for protection.” As if anyone ever carjacked anyone else in the City. There were too many cameras, and the police weren’t known for their tolerance.

  With the knife in hand, I turned my chair around to face the guy in the back. He remained on the floor, with Dave sitting strapped in on the seat above him. The car would arrive at the leech town any minute. I didn’t have long to do this.

  The car’s owner lay on his side, his butt slightly raised up and his cheek pressed to the sticky-looking floor. The man was overweight, in his twenties by my guess, and he wore plaid pajama pants and a stained anime T-shirt. It was cotton, though, not bio-fabric. Expensive. I didn’t recognize the anime girl that it featured, but I rarely spent credits to cast TV anymore. I used to do that for Lore, back in the day.

  He drooled, but didn’t snore. His hair was short and dark, but not greasy like I expected. He did shower, then. The prickly scattering of hairs on his face might turn into a beard before the next century, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Dave said. “You can’t conscript Cored people.”

  I reached for the guy’s forearm. “What about Cored people who’ve had their IDs removed?”

  Dave did not answer. I flipped open the knife.

  “You’ll just kill him,” Dave warned me. “Humans are weak at the wrist. We got that in our initial Hunt briefing.”

  I leveled the seatbelted bird with a look. “And what will happen to him if I don’t conscript him?”

  Dave’s beady eyes looked at me. He didn’t reply.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. A bloody wrist was better than whatever the aliens had in store for him.

  So I drew a breath, and pressed the knife to flesh.

  #

  I couldn’t have done it in a wheeled vehicle, but the aircar flew smooth as cream while I cut the guy. The moment I was able to pop the chip out, his eyes sprung wide.

  He screamed.

  I backed off, keeping clear as the guy flailed with his bloody arm, trying to get his bulky frame onto the seat, but failing monumentally due to his panic. The whole thing might have been comical if I hadn’t known exactly how painful this shit was. I’d seen other people do it to themselves.

  A violet icon abruptly appeared above the guy’s head. I looked like a police badge. I dodged his flailing arms to tap it. It turned yellow, but nothing else happened.

  Dave wriggled out of his seatbelt and flapped up to the console, sinking his talons into a bunch of buttons and making them beep. The interior lights flashed on in the aircar, putting on a disco show for us.

  “We’re coming up to something,” Dave said. “Looks like gray square buildings.”

  “That’s us,” I said, spinning the chair around. I pushed the descent pedal, then had a thought. I looked at the rearview mirror. The guy had stopped thrashing to moan, gripping his arm to his chest, still not on the seat.

  “Where… what’s going on?” he croaked out. “Who are you? Did you just take my chip out?”

  “Trust me, you’ll thank me for it later,” I said.

  “What the fuck is talking to me? What’s a Conscript?” he asked.

  I glanced at him, then at Dave.

  Dave sighed. “He has to agree to become a Conscript. They’ll have implanted a rudimentary menu in his retinas, so he’s seeing a screen with options.”

  “Holy crap, they can do that?”

  Dave nodded. I swung back around to look at the guy. “Just say yes,” I said. “If you don’t, you’re dead.” I didn’t add that he might end up dead anyway.

  The guy’s eyes widened at me, and I realized he’d read that as a threat. I didn’t have time for this. I needed to find the other eleven people.

  “Just say yes,” I said again, and he tapped the air with a shaky finger. An icon instantly appeared above his head. It was a tiny shield shape, like a police badge. I stole a moment to tap the icon, to see if I could interact with it. It’s not like he could see it, above his own head and all.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  As soon as I touched, the horny Game Host came back on.

  You have gained a Conscript! One of your unallocated stat points has been transferred to the Conscript.

  Name the Conscript? Yes/No

  The two options hovered in front of me, where I could tap them. “He has his own damn name,” I said aloud, then added, “What’s your name?”

  The guy stared at me. “Seth,” he said.

  “Okay, Seth. I know you’re confused, but—”

  I never finished the sentence, because the next moment, a laser beam flashed in an arc to my left, so close I had to spin the aircar’s wheel. If it had been a normal millennial vehicle, I would have flipped the thing, but these City aircars self-corrected. I just spun, then straightened out again. Seth whimpered.

  I looked down, remembering what Dave had said about FATE being able to see things I couldn’t. “FATE! Can you tell who shot at us?”

  I do not detect any visible life forms, aside from the corpses, she replied instantly. Laser beams don’t tend to miss, so I don’t think they were shooting at you.

  I nodded and muted her again. There was a bogey down there, but he was hunting someone else. I didn’t know if that was good news or bad news.

  Some of the haze below us cleared then, and one of the cement brick apartments appeared, still blurred behind the thick sand-dust and smoke. To my amazement, it hadn’t collapsed.

  “That’s my building,” I said. “Fuck, that’s Niko’s place! He had the corner room!”

  A dark line circumnavigated half the apartment complex, which was a one-story, blocky construction. It looked like it had been planned out on graph paper, which it probably had been. Every unit had been 3D-printed, machines coming in to make identical cement rooms.

  The laser had made a straight, black mark across the center of the corner apartment, but the upper walls and ceiling had just dropped an inch without collapsing. That’s how solid this place was.

  The exterior door burst open while I watched, and a man scrambled through. I blinked, incredulous. It was Niko.

  He hit the sand and ran. Blood spilled out behind him, buckets of it, slicking across the cement floor inside his house, down the steps, and into the sand. He was tracking some of it with him as he ran. There was way too much blood for the stuff to be his.

  I thought of his wife, Greta. I didn’t care for about ninety percent of my fellow leeches; most of us were some level of vicious, because we had to be.

  But these two had managed to get coffee once, and they’d shared it with me. They listened when I talked about Lore.

  That blood… Greta…. Had they been hiding together?

  I checked the death count.

  Remaining Targets: 10

  Whoever Niko had been with, that person had just been sliced in half. I pushed the descent pedal, dropping precipitously, so hard that the vehicle had to self-correct to keep from ramming into the sand.

  “That is a laser, my foolhardy friend,” Dave said as I heaved open the car door. “Not sure if you know how those things work, but they bisect you. Into pieces. As in, several different chunks of organs. And you don’t have your Body-Skin equipped yet.”

  As he said this, he was flapping out of the door behind me, his voice rising into a shout with each successive word, because I was running away from him as fast as my feet would carry me.

  I made a beeline for Niko, who was running like a crazy person, his face wild, his hand fumbling around inside his shirt. Yet another alien stepped out of the building behind him.

  “Get down!” I roared at my neighbor, while I fought my way up the dune that always gathered on this side of the complex.

  Niko threw himself forward, crashing hands-first into sand. Another thing about us so-called Coreless: we had more survival instincts than City people. If someone yelled get down, you got down.

  Another laser blast just missed him. I had crested the dune, a small one, but the laser passed harmlessly underneath my feet. The sand barely shifted.

  My thoughts raced. I remembered the welcome message. Returning Hunter… comes with a basic weapon… and ammo or charges….

  These lasers had charges. The alien would be limited on how many times he could use the beam. But I had no way of knowing how many charges he had left. That knowledge didn’t help me that much.

  But he will conserve the shots, now that he just wasted one, I told myself, spraying sand as I came down the far side of the dune.

  Below me, Niko was staggering back to his feet, reaching into the front of his shirt again. The alien behind him stepped out of the apartment door. It was amorphous and red, sliming down the steps like a sentient lump of goo.

  At first, I thought it was a blob monster, like a gelatin cube from the jungle levels of the Seven Keys game. But the blob twisted and straightened, forming legs, arms, breasts.

  By the time I raced past Niko, the thing had taken on the form of a woman in her early forties, homely, her hair blond but graying early, her skin sun-worn.

  The blob had just turning into Greta.

  I recognized the whole thing, then. The bubbling, the changing. This guy was the same breed—race?—as Remnant had been. They were shape-shifters.

  The not-Greta saw me and blinked. I lifted the ridiculous, jangling katana off my tie-belt.

  “Leave him alone! He’s mine!” I roared.

  I never had to find out if she was the type to fear the real Remnant or take revenge on him. She only had to be the type to stand there dumbly, and she did. I swung the katana across her midsection.

  It clanged off her like she was made of fucking metal.

  “Hey!” she shouted, in a feminine voice. I met her eyes, sword in hand.

  “That’s what you get, for going after my target,” I snapped.

  Before she could reply, I bolted away, into Niko’s apartment. Every moment, I expected a laser beam to chase me, but none did.

  Inside the apartment, the dimness seemed black, like it always did. The floor was slick. I didn’t look down, but I could smell death. Entrails, feces. It wasn’t pretty. I focused on my footing and ran into the kitchen, wrenching open the cupboard where my neighbors had kept their hard-won store of coffee.

  I reached into the cupboard, whirled around, and ran back the way I’d come.

  Outside, I found the non-Greta lumbering toward Niko in hot pursuit, which suggested she—it—was out of laser charges. It also didn’t plan to hand me this kill.

  Still, the alien didn’t run well on its human legs. It seemed to be calling out, saying something in a feminine voice, possibly trying to torment Niko.

  Dave swooped in at my left shoulder. “Careful. That one’s the daughter of a bigwig,” he said.

  “Something tells me Remnant wouldn’t have cared.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have. But you might want to reconsider—”

  I caught up to the alien. It turned.

  I threw the little, painted teacup full of sugar straight at it.

  The sugar spun out of Greta’s cup in a spiral, striking the changeling across the chest. Instantly its flesh began to melt. I thought briefly of the way snails bubbled when you doused them in salt. Gods, I hadn’t seen a snail in ten years.

  The shifter shrieked, collapsing. I ran up to it. Ahead of me, Niko had stopped fleeing to turn.

  I looked down at the dying alien, the second of its kind that I’d managed to kill today. I kept the katana at the ready, but it wouldn’t be useful if this thing tried to go after me. Her skin had felt like metal, and my arm was still reeling with the vibration of hitting her the first time.

  It didn’t look like I’d had to fight her, though. The alien writhed and wailed, melting away into reddish, stinking goop. Niko ducked down beside a grounded aircart about ten feet away from us, probably unsure whether he could trust me or not.

  “Wait there,” I told him. “When this thing’s dead, I’ll get you out of here.”

  The alien gave a gut-wrenching cry that reminded me of a dying animal in the woods. Rabbits, usually, but you never did know for sure.

  As the form bubbled away, losing its form and turning flat, it finally regained the ability to speak. “Traitor!” it hissed in a female voice. “You will regret this!”

  I had no idea why it thought that I—or maybe Remnant—was a traitor. Clearly these things were happy enough to kill each other, not just humans.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” I said.

  A mouth opened somewhere near the thing’s stomach, and I moved to stab it. I wasn’t fast enough.

  “He is one of us!” it screamed. “He is a shapeshifter, too!”

  I stabbed the mouth. I met resistance, so at least there was some sort of meat left to the thing. The next moment, the whole creature went still.

  “Who was she talking to?” I asked Dave, looking up.

  To find Niko pointing a handgun right at me.