Seeing the mercenaries' shapes in the distance, Lin Xun turned to look at Ning Zhe beside him. "Brother Zhe, if mercenaries are showing up here, something serious must have happened. Should we still head home?"
"I think they're after us. We robbed one of the city people earlier, and these guys must feel like they lost face over it. They want to hunt down whoever did it." Crouched behind a mound of earth, Ning Zhe laid out his reasoning.
Ning Zhe was one of the rare educated men in the refugee zone, but back then, what he and the others had learned from Old Man Lin amounted to little more than basic arithmetic and how to read and write.
As for science, in an age when culture itself had been broken and lost, it was a power only the great conglomerates and the powerful elite could grasp and monopolize. So even though Ning Zhe knew what the water purification chip did, his limited store of knowledge made it hard for him to grasp just how important that small crystal cube really was.
"No way. How could these guys possibly find where we live? We took a long way round just to shake off anyone tailing us!" Lin Xun didn't buy Ning Zhe's reasoning. He found it even harder to believe the mercenaries could pin down their location so precisely.
"They might not be able to confirm exactly who we are, but finding us wouldn't be hard. The refugee zone's too dangerous at night. Not everyone dares to leave home after dark. All they'd have to do is start from where the robbery happened, sweep outward through the surrounding settlements, draw up a list of everyone who was out that night, then round them all up and beat the truth out of them." Ning Zhe thought it over before giving his answer.
"In that case, shouldn't we go hide somewhere?" A flash of nervousness crossed Lin Xun's eyes at the thought.
Over the years, he'd seen plenty of how stronghold people dealt with refugees. He didn't need to look far. The withered poplar tree at the heart of the settlement alone had seen countless people hanged from its branches, never given a trial, guilty of nothing more than suspicion.
Born into a world in chaos, a refugee's life was worth no more than a blade of grass.
"No. Looks like they haven't reached our part of town yet. We need to get back fast, before they do. Once they start picking people out for questioning, things get a lot more complicated." Ning Zhe thought it over, then swiftly vaulted onto the roof of a nearby house, moving with lithe, practiced agility. He had no wish to flee, and no way to, either. Out here on the wasteland, a lone wolf without a den had little hope of surviving.
Seeing Ning Zhe move, Lin Xun, heart pounding with unease, followed without hesitation all the same.
The strongholds across the wasteland were all controlled by the great conglomerates and financial powers. Each one was a massive city ringed by towering walls, home to the happiest people in this world. Inside, no one had to fear beast attacks, natural disasters, ball lightning, or rain, snow, and fog laced with pathogens and acid.
Of course, that was just what people said. No one from the refugee zone had ever been allowed inside a stronghold, so no one really knew what it was actually like in there. As for that talk of the "happiest people," Ning Zhe had always sneered at it. He found it hard to believe there was any place in this world where everyone was truly equal. He'd never set foot inside a city, but he could guess well enough that it had to be layered with its own hierarchy of classes, high and low.
Stronghold 87 was laid out like a box within a box: a walled ring of factories forming the outer band, with the city district sitting sealed inside at its core. Covering an area of more than a thousand square kilometers, the stronghold's outer wall had several dozen gates.
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Besides the factories, the stronghold also had mining zones, though these lay hundreds, even thousands of kilometers away. Living conditions out there were said to be brutal, and the workers sent to those remote sites were nothing but convicts and refugees press-ganged into labor.
For more than ninety percent of the people in the refugee zone, the only way to survive was to work for the stronghold: two meals a day, a single potato for breakfast, a black bean cake for lunch, one liter of drinking water per person per day, and a wage of five yuan.
Prices in this age were sky-high. Even a padded coat, its cotton cut with jute fiber, started at three hundred yuan.
It took months of work just to save enough for one winter coat, and if you fell ill, medicine, scarce and priced at absurd extremes, was far beyond reach. There was nothing left to do but wait to die.
The conditions refugees survived under were harsh in the extreme, but that was exactly the point, as far as the city's powerful elite were concerned. They wanted refugees kept in this half-alive state, scraping by on the barest thread of survival, so as to provide themselves with an endless, inexhaustible supply of labor. Better jobs, better living conditions were reserved for stronghold citizens alone. Only the people inside the city counted, in the eyes of the powerful, as true subjects.
People in the refugee zone were desperately poor, and yet even in poverty this deep, new children kept being born. Ning Zhe had once asked Old Man Lin about it, and the old man had told him that reproduction was an instinct written into every animal's genes. But for refugees, a new life could also bring with it a kind of hope. What exactly that hope amounted to, though, even Old Man Lin couldn't quite put into words.
As for fleeing, out on this wasteland, riddled with danger and barren of life across most of its expanse, not everyone had the grit and the will to survive that someone like Ning Zhe did.
The strongholds always claimed it was they who sheltered and protected the refugees nearby, but Ning Zhe saw it differently. Those stronghold people wouldn't last a week surviving out on this barren land. In truth, it was the refugees who kept that pack of bloodsuckers inside the walls fed.
All told, among the uncountable multitudes of refugees, Ning Zhe was one of the rare few who felt no real longing for the strongholds. He'd never set foot in a city and had no idea what it looked like inside, but he understood clearly enough that even if he made it in, as he was now, he'd still be nothing but a slave.
A slave who'd lost his freedom, no less!
Ning Zhe and Lin Xun pushed on swiftly through the night and finally made it back to their bare, threadbare home before the search parties arrived.
The two of them lived on the edge of the settlement, in a cramped communal courtyard, a small mud-brick house with a heated kang. Though small, it somehow still had two rooms and a common area. The construction was far from neat, but it kept out the wind a great deal better than the shanties of the refugee villages.
"Whew!" Once through the door, Lin Xun finally let out a heavy breath, the tension coiled inside him easing away.
"Don't just stand there! Get the coal brazier going, now! Move!" As he spoke, Ning Zhe hurried over to the kang and began spreading out the straw that served as bedding, at the same time using the notched metal knife he'd taken off the bandits to pry loose the cloth wrapped around his feet before lying down on top of it.
Most refugees didn't own shoes at all.
"Brother? We're already low on coal. Why waste it?" Lin Xun's eyes were full of confusion at the words.
Supplies were scarce for refugees. What coal they had was normally saved for cooking food, and had to be kept in reserve for warmth come winter besides. The climate had swung wildly this year, and within a thirty-kilometer radius, every last dead tree left over from the old world had already been stripped bare and cut down. It was easy to guess that this winter, too, would freeze many more people to death.
"This room's too cold. If anyone comes in to check, they'll spot something's off in a heartbeat. This is life or death, don't worry about the coal!" Ning Zhe ran a hand over the straw beneath him and realized it wouldn't heat up fast enough this way. He stripped off his clothes and lay down on it bare, then, after a moment's thought, got back up and pissed on his trousers.
Watching him, Lin Xun ran to the corner of the room, scraped away the loose earth on the floor, lifted the hidden board beneath it, and pulled out the coal stashed there, pouring it into the clay brazier.
"Tramp, tramp, tramp!" Just as the two of them were finishing their preparations, a squad of mercenaries, led by a middle-aged man, burst into the courtyard as one and surged straight toward the mud house where Ning Zhe and Lin Xun were.