Wei Shengyuan’s expression, upon realizing he was going to be forced to make goldfish and crab sushi, was more than worth every step of the journey.

  “I thought you were joking,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  “I never joke,” Zan Xinyi says. Joking.

  Even though he looks so defeated about the whole thing, the sushi turns out great. It’s like his drawing. The more he claims it’s going to be ugly, the more effort he puts into it looking good.

  “This is delicious, Wei Shengyuan!” Jiang Jin says happily. “It tastes better than the sushi from those really fancy restaurants.”

  Zan Xinyi has never had sushi from a really fancy restaurant.

  Suddenly, the convenience store crab starts tasting worse.

  Zan Xinyi sighs, puts down her chopsticks and pulls out her laptop.

  That was enough of a break. All of these character and summoning menus aren’t going to code themselves. She needs to make it so that if a player summons a character, the game will remember that they did that, and store the information properly, and make it displayable so the player can see that the game remembers they did that.

  And perhaps even make the character’s abilities displayable on that menu so a player could read them and know what they do.

  Hm...no, the system hasn’t required that she do that. It’s fine.

  But while she’s done talking, Jiang Jin never is.

  “I was thinking about the zombies,” Jiang Jin says, cheeks still stuffed with rice. “Isn’t it weird that we’ve got mutants and zombies?”

  “I don’t think it’s strange,” Wei Shengyuan says, lacing his fingers together under his chin. The scales on the back of his arms shine under the dim light, a much lighter blue-green than his hair. “Aren’t the zombies just obviously mutated humans?”

  “But mutations don’t spread like a disease from one person to the next,” Jiang Jin says. “I could bite someone, but they wouldn’t start sprouting feathers.”

  “Have you tried?” Zan Xinyi asks.

  “Well,” Jiang Jin says. “Not on purpose...”

  “You did bite someone!?” Wei Shengyuan’s head jerks up.

  “No! Someone kissed me.” Jiang Jin blushes a little, tucking a blue feather behind her ear. It blends in very poorly with her dark brown hair. “And then I bit them. A little.”

  That makes more sense. Though not that much more sense.

  “And nothing happened,” Zan Xinyi asks. “No feathers. No mimicry?”

  “He confessed his love!” Jiang Jin says. “That’s not nothing.”

  “Is a man’s love worth anything?”

  “Hey,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  “Protest after you’ve had a girlfriend,” Zan Xinyi says unsympathetically. “Not that a girlfriend’s love is...Anyways. So zombies aren’t just mutated humans? Then what are they?”

  “He was super sweet!” Jiang Jin protests. “And he offered me my job back-- you know, back then my feathers had started growing in, and people thought I might be infectious, or go crazy and eat someone-- I was losing my tutoring opportunities left and right! You have no idea how romantic it was that he was willing to kiss me.”

  “He what,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  “Your employer kissed you,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “And gave me my job back,” Jiang Jin says.

  Wei Shengyuan closes his mouth over whatever sentence he was about to say next.

  “I see,” he says instead. “So uh-- what happened to him then? After the apocalypse shut everything down.”

  Jiang Jin’s smile gets a lot tighter.

  “Oh, you know!” she says vaguely. “We ended up not seeing eye to eye on everything...but underneath how grouchy he is, he’s actually a really sweet guy, you know? So I hope that in the future, now that he’s got a lot more time to spend with his son, he’ll be a lot happier. I don’t think running that company really made him happy anyways.”

  “Oh,” Zan Xinyi says, wishing this guy nothing but bad luck and misery. “What’s his name?”

  “Shi Yan,” Jiang Jin sighs. “Isn’t it such a handsome name? With such a good meaning! Talent throughout generations!”

  More like money throughout generations.

  “Good to know,” Zan Xinyi says. “And could you describe him in a little more detail. Like, if he has a distinctive facial feature or--”

  Jiang Jin’s head snaps to face the window.

  Zan Xinyi also looks out, though to her it’s simply a blank green wall of fog.

  “I just heard shots,” Jiang Jin says. “Guns.”

  “Nearby?” Wei Shengyuan says sharply. “How close?”

  “Down by the river,” Jiang Jin says. “Uh-- upriver of Wet Dog Post. There’s too much distortion to tell exactly what they’re.... Oh, I don’t know what that other sound was, but I don’t like it.”

  Gunshots? The only people still with enough guns and ammo to be shooting so recklessly are the military. But why are they down in this area?

  And why didn’t she hear anything about it on the radio? That thing used to give reports all the time, but it’s been quieter and quieter. And not because it’s broken.

  “Anything else?” Zan Xinyi asks when Jiang Jin lapses into silence.

  “No, the noise set off the zombies. Now they’re so loud that I can’t make anything out at all.”

  “Great.”

  Zan Xinyi means it sarcastically, but then she pauses for a second. Actually, it is great. For one reason.

  “We should go to Wet Dog Post now, while all the zombies are distracted,” Zan Xinyi says. “More efficient, especially if it’s a three person visit where we’re picking up a lot of stuff.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  More instruments, insulation, another wheelchair-- that stuff is large, it’s bulky, and it’s heavy. It’s either multiple trips in the boat, or they bring both the boat and the car and have to split up. Or just all drive...

  “If I hotwire a truck--”

  “Absolutely not,” Wei Shengyuan says. “It won’t be safer. No. I refuse. Unless Jiang Jin drives.”

  “Jiang Jin has a broken arm!”

  “I also can’t drive without my glasses,” Jiang Jin says. “My license says I need to be wearing them to be able to drive safely.”

  Wei Shengyuan puts his face in his hands.

  Zan Xinyi pauses. She forgot Jiang Jin mentioned her glasses being broken.

  Well, there’s still nothing to be done about it.

  “The boat will be too small for all of the stuff we ordered,” Zan Xinyi says. “So Wei Shengyuan-- either Jiang Jin drives, or I do.”

  Wei Shengyuan’s face twists, but the decision he still makes is instant.

  “You can go a little faster,” Wei Shengyuan says. He’s firmly strapped into the passenger seat, and his scales keep making a sandpaper rasp against the leather. The window is sealed to avoid inhalation of mist.

  Jiang Jin hesitantly presses the pedal down a little further. The truck goes from 3 kilometers per hour to 5 kilometers.

  “You can just go up on the curbs and run over some bushes whenever there’s too many abandoned cars,” Zan Xinyi says. She’s in the open back of the truck with all of their trade goods, and between the engine rumble and the muffling effect of her respirator mask, she has to shout to be heard.

  Most of the zombies are genuinely not in this area, but she still has to prevent the occasional mutant dog from thinking that this is free food and drink.

  She brandishes the broom at something staring at her from a dark alley, and the crimson eyes vanish.

  She’s doing so much.

  Not that anyone is appreciating her suggestions.

  “No you can’t!” Wei Shengyuan says. “We just need to take a short detour to avoid the pileup. Do not go up on the curb, there’s glass everywhere. And that plant looks weird.”

  “You shouldn’t say that plants look weird, Wei Shengyuan,” Jiang Jin says, turning them onto a different side street, lecturing him even as she relies entirely on the man to navigate. “What would Qingqing think?”

  “Qingguang can barely think about her own children,” Zan Xinyi calls. “She won’t care about a random tree. And the tree doesn’t even look that--”

  The entire pavement of the road behind them explodes as roots rise out from the ground in a massive wave, sending cars and concrete to slide and fall in every direction.

  “At least go up to 10 kilometers per hour, Jiang Jin!” Wei Shengyuan begs as the truck begins to take incredibly slow evasive action.

  ”What an ugly mass of roots,” Zan Xinyi says, and sees her broom start to glow very, very dimly as the speed of the root’s growth slows. It’s not working as well as when she’d been insulting Qingqing. Is it a distance issue? She doesn’t want to get closer.

  Maybe it’s her insults that are the problem. That would be much easier to fix.

  But just as she readies her next devastatingly incisive insult towards plantkind, Jiang Jin takes another turn and the plant falls out of sight.

  “I don’t want to drive anymore…” Jiang Jin says. “This is too much pressure.”

  “If necessary, I’ll take the wheel and you just stay on the pedals,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  ”Uh, no! I’ll keep doing all of it!”

  “Great. So, we’ve accidentally gotten too far north. For the next turn…”

  Zan Xinyi shakes her head. Another person who thought Wei Shengyuan was a reasonable individual, sadly disillusioned. He’s so stubborn over such petty things.

  She sits back, letting the conversation blur on until another cascade of shots rings out, accompanied by the squeal of tires.

  ”They’re close!” Jiang Jin gasps. “They’re coming! Oh, why are they coming this way!? Shouldn’t they be way further north? We need to tell them to stop shooting, it’ll make my ability to redirect the zombies way more difficult!”

  ”We can’t tell the military anything without being shot at for also being mutated,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Just keep going. We’re only ten minutes away from Wet Dog Post.”

  “That’s even worse, they’ll drag the zombies towards Wet Dog Post if they keep making such a racket in this area!”

  That is much worse.

  “Are they going to intercept us on our current course?” Zan Xinyi asks.

  “Probably! Oh, they’re going so much faster than us. If we pull over, they’ll catch up to us in a jiffy.”

  ”I’ll talk to them, then. Both of you just…stay back.”

  ”Are you sure that’s going to be okay?” Wei Shengyuan says. “With their mutation index scanners…”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  “That’s got nothing to do with me,” she says.

  If anything, Jiang Jin understated how close the military car had actually been to them. Within minutes a car screeches into view, four badly injured men in uniform perched everywhere with rifles while a fifth drives.

  “Stop shooting!” Zan Xinyi yells at them. “You’ll drag the zombies towards the trading area.”

  The car stops as the driver pauses in front of them, staring at her in evident shock.

  What? Never seen someone fighting with a broom before? It’s got reach, it’s got weight, it’s got magic powers, it doesn’t act as a summoning beacon for zombies.

  It’s way better than whatever he’s got.

  “Ma’am, are you alright?” He says. “Do you need rescue? This is a highly dangerous area! I’m authorized to escort anyone who’s still normal—“

  He holds his hand out to her. On his wrist, a military grade index checker, way more expensive than the ones she’d used to sell scared people who thought of themselves as middle class.

  She looks at it.

  He looks at it.

  For a mutation index over 50%, the ones she sold flashed red. For between 25% and 50%, they flashed yellow. Under 25%, green.

  For a second, it really does look green. Then the guy brings it up to his face, squinting.

  ”An error message?” he says.

  ”I’ve never seen an error message on one of these things in the two years I’ve had one,” one of the other guys says. His hand tightens on his gun.

  “And I don’t need rescue,” Zan Xinyi says quickly, trying to pull them away from that rabbit hole. It is weird that the scanner didn’t work on her. “I bet the mist is fucking with your scanners. Things get weird in here. That’s all I wanted to tell you— because it’s hard to see, the zombies in here are way more responsive to sound. Even if it’s fine to do it in other parts of the city, in here. Stop. Shooting. You’ll get hordes on you.”

  ”No offense, ma’am, we shoot because we gotta live. These are our weapons. It’s the price of staying human.”

  If the price of staying human is called being an idiot who doesn’t take good advice when offered, then sure.

  But…if it’s not a problem with the mist, but a problem with her, getting into the military base has gotten even more complicated. Fuck her life.

  “Okay, then I’ll head off,” Zan Xinyi says. “You guys need directions?”

  She doesn’t know how to get anywhere, but she’s willing to point them wherever is furthest away from her own destination.

  More glances exchanged between the guys.

  “You know the general hospital? We’re trying to—“

  Wow, they are actually lost. Is the mist that hard to navigate through?

  ”You’re in the completely wrong direction,” Zan Xinyi says, and she doesn’t even have to lie. “This is the river side of Zone A. You want the old highway exit. Though it’s completely blocked by rubble, so driving out is difficult.”

  Some swearing.

  “Well, see you,” Zan Xinyi says, hoping to never see them again.

  “Wait!”

  What now.

  “There’s….a different squad has gone completely missing after they were doing a mission upriver. The base is offering a thousand credits bounty to anyone who finds them and brings them back to safety. If you’re staying here by choice, then…spread the word. Even to the Reclaimed.”

  “The what?”

  ”The mutants. You know. Reclaimed is the new PC term. ‘Cause nature took them back.”

  Is that so.

  “No one’s taking anything back from me,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “You said it, ma’am.”

  She’d said it, but he hadn’t heard a single thing.

  They haven’t even driven one street away before the shots start ringing out again in the direction of the giant mutant plant.