Chapter 2

Umma had been out getting groceries at Seoul Mart when Solomon called to tell her that Dad still wasn’t home from work. “Don’t be afraid,” was the last thing she’d said to him, her voice crackling through the static. “I’ll find him. If I’m not back by dinnertime, you and Adah make some kimchi fried rice. Be a good Oppa to your sister, okay, Solo?”

Solomon was four years older than Adah. For the past seven months he’d tried to be a good Oppa by making sure she was eating, reassuring her they’d be okay, and taking care of adult stuff like bills and school forms. He hadn’t stopped calling Dad’s office downtown until the FrontDesk bot finally told him his father’s absence was his problem, not the clinic’s.

“Quit harassing us. We can’t keep track of every disappeared employee.”

When Solomon found Adah curled up under layers of blankets, her forehead hot to the touch, he knew it was up to him to figure out how much seaweed to soak for the soup their mother used to boil for them whenever they got sick. Sure, the prevailing culture of the red zone insisted cooking was for women, but Adah was only thirteen, and she was the one throwing up. He wasn’t going to let her go hungry no matter what the digital sky ads said.

“I have to figure out how to put the house in my name, but I don’t think I’m allowed to do that until I’m eighteen,” he said to Adah as he placed a tray on the two-drawer nightstand next to her bed. Her dinner was one watery bowl of miyeokguk with not enough cubed chicken breast in it, thanks to the militias getting the first cut of everything that made it through the zone borders. “Careful. It’s hot.”

Adah’s face fell. She tugged at the band holding her halfro in a puff, probably because her curls had gotten knotted around it. But that happened all the time. He didn’t think that was what was upsetting her just now. Her gaze, fixed on something far beyond the room, told him she was grappling with the implication of his words, his unspoken conclusion.

“I haven’t given up on finding them,” Solomon said quickly even as his stomach sank. He wished he hadn’t brought up the house deed. It had been heavy on his mind but the last thing he wanted to do was share that weight with her, especially while she was recovering. He glanced through her bedroom window at the cold, gray street outside. A mail drone flew by, its usual fireman-red rotors buzzing. “FaceSeek didn’t turn up anything, but I’ve been talking to someone online who defected from the Philadelphia zone two months ago. I asked him to meet in person. I need some censor-free information and it’s been impossible to find anyone willing to give it to me, but I think this guy will.”

“You’ll take the yellow route?” Adah asked. She gave him a tiny smile that didn’t hide the tightness in her eyes.

He nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. And I’ll make sure you have enough miyeokguk before I head out. Anything happens, you call me. Okay?”

Two days later, on Sunday afternoon, when WhiteFunk1492 typed back yeah, I can meet at the Schenley Oval Tent, Solomon put his phone in his pocket and knocked on Adah’s bedroom door. Meeting WhiteFunk was what he’d been waiting for, but now that he was on the brink of it he found his insides were churning. He didn’t tell Adah that, though. He didn’t tell her that there was a reason why school, church, and the grocery store were the only places he wanted to let them go these days. Instead, he took a deep breath and gave her a hug. “It’s time.”

Adah dragged herself down to watch him through the open door connecting the kitchen and the garage. Umma had sung the “Lord bless you and keep you” passage from Numbers as a blessing whenever they left the house for school, and Solomon heard Adah start to sing it as he got into the car. That was just like her. To think of him even when she was sick, to encourage him the best way she could. Watching her, his shoulders relaxed a little as he directed the old-model DriveAssist to pull out of their driveway and onto the road.

He still couldn’t help but glance at every hill his car crested, at the clunkers half-parked on the sidewalks per usual and the lamp posts plastered with photographs of dead militia veterans. The explanation his father had given the scared, seven-year-old him the very first time they got stopped at a checkpoint preyed on his mind. “People have been calling it the Great Splintering because the nation split into patches of red and blue, scattered and for the most part disconnected. Some places, red militias rolled in from the fields and took over the cities. Other spots, cities held on and managed to spread that blue rule out to the country. Philly, right next door, they’re all under blue control, stretching across the east side of Pennsylvania. But not here. Pittsburgh, we fell into a red zone, and now those militias, they’re our law and our leaders.”

He’d never gotten used to the checkpoints. It didn’t matter how many he had been stopped at since. He was nervous at all of them. Thankfully, Mappify’s yellow route didn’t let him down, and he arrived without encountering a single militiaman. It probably helped that it was one of those gray April days that felt like a leftover from winter. Nobody wanted to be outside when it was 38 degrees and lightly hailing. While the car parked itself by a defunct carousel that had been temporarily out of service for years, Solomon texted Adah: got here safe.

Then he got out and looked up. From where he stood next to the faded horses, the Schenley Oval Tent looked like a massive white dunce cap on stilts, except with the top of the hat sliced off to reveal a circle that was maybe two feet in diameter. He couldn’t quite tell from there. Maybe if he got directly under it, he’d be able to estimate better. Sometimes the eyes played tricks on the mind, and something that looked small from far away sometimes turned out to be bigger up close, or the opposite.

Not that now was the time to indulge his curiosity. The White guy hanging out next to one of the stilts, hands in his pockets, was probably WhiteFunk1492. On a sunny day, this plaza would be stuffed full of people, but he was the only one around at the moment. “WhiteFunk?” Solomon called out.

The guy’s head whipped around. His eyes narrowed. “You’re not an Asian girl.”

“I know,” Solomon replied, sliding in closer, getting under the edge of the tent, out of the rain. He stayed to the far side of a set of folding chairs around a table in case he had to run. “I knew you wouldn’t meet me unless you thought I was a girl. I needed to talk to someone from a blue zone. I have some questions. Can you help?”

“I fed that picture you sent me to a checksite,” the guy replied, now sounding half-wary, half-plaintive. “It said that it wasn’t AI-generated, that it was real.”

Solomon didn’t really want to explain that he had touched up a scanned print photograph of Umma from when she was young, so he didn’t say anything. Instead, he studied WhiteFunk a little. He looked like a standard White guy, blond, blue-green eyes, maybe five or so years older than Solomon. He was shorter than Solomon’s six and quarter feet though, and very thin, a loosely-fitting windbreaker almost swallowing his frame. Meeting him in person confirmed the sense Solomon had gotten from chatting with him online that he wasn’t very internet savvy, that he didn’t know as much as a guy his age should. Things like how everyone online is a dog, and how easy it was to fool the checksites if you knew what you were doing. Maybe it made sense, though. He wasn’t the first blue zone defector Solomon had tried to meet, but he was the first one who’d agreed to meet with him.

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At any rate, he no longer seemed angry. A bit wary, still. Solomon could tell that the guy was sizing him up just as he was doing to him. He could guess what was going through his mind: Brown skin, but living in a red zone? I thought a lot of them left for blue zones. What’s his story?

Then Solomon saw it. That change in stance, eyes growing sharp, that shift he had seen some White people go through when they saw his brown skin and realized, I can say anything I want to him now.

Solomon tried not to wince. He was too young to remember what they used to be like before, but his parents had told him that the White people they knew used to be too scared to talk about race at all in case they said the wrong thing. When the Great Splintering began, so did what his Dad had called White people dumping time. He’d called it this publicly at first, then just at home once the red zone militias took over Pittsburgh.

But WhiteFunk surprised him. He shrugged, then said, “Well, what do you want, then? Why’d you want to meet?”

Taking that as a sign, Solomon went for it. “Do you know if people ever get taken from a red zone to a blue zone?”

The guy’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re looking for someone?”

Solomon hesitated. How much can I trust him? He thought through what the guy had told him online. How he had grown up a good blue zone White boy, confessing his privilege or whatever it was they did over there. ISP throttling made it hard to get information originating from inside a blue zone. Solomon knew WhiteFunk had liked some random manifesto he’d found online about how the fundamental red zone philosophy was that White people should be free to be White. He had sent Solomon some of it.

It’s fine to be non-White, the manifesto had read. But no more bullshit about there being something wrong with White people, no more apologizing for being too White. Instead of freaking out because some group isn’t “diverse” enough, freak out because it’s not White enough!

“Yes,” Solomon finally said, but he didn’t want to risk saying more.

“You and half the country,” the guy muttered. “Look, I don’t know a lot, but I’ll tell you what I do know. Yeah, sometimes there are trucks from red zones that come in and dump a bunch of people of color off. They get processed. I had a friend who worked at one of the processing centers. Some of them get let go, some of them get handed camp sentences.”

A tight knot was forming in his throat, but Solomon still listened quietly to everything WhiteFunk was saying. Initially, he and Adah had clung to the hope that Umma and Dad had been sentenced to a red zone prison camp. But as the months passed by without a dispatch about either of their arrests, he’d started to believe the worst had happened. WhiteFunk’s words were mitigating his darkest fears. It was seeming possible that some militiamen in the All-White faction had gone rogue, abducted Umma and Dad, and dumped them across the Susquehanna River into the Philadelphia blue zone.

Maybe they were still alive.

Solomon managed to swallow it down; he didn’t cry as easily as he used to. “Do you know where they store the data from processing centers?”

WhiteFunk shook his head. “Sorry, man, I don’t.”

Solomon looked up at the tent sloping above their heads, trying to think. I could try to hack their network, run some common exploits... But even assuming that works, what then? Search through the files looking for their names?

“Do they even store people by their names?” he asked WhiteFunk.

He shook his head. “They don’t record names or anything in those centers, just DNA and a prisoner ID number. And the ones they let go, they don’t record at all.”

A shiver traveled down Solomon’s back. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets. He’d been trying to ignore how cold he was, but the rain had turned back into hail. He should have brought a hat, but his hair didn’t have kink like Dad’s so he tended to leave it uncovered in order to make White people less nervous. “Okay,” he said. “How big are the processing centers? And how many are there?”

Slowly, question by question, Solomon pulled all the data he could out of WhiteFunk. He was very surprised the man was being so helpful, but he wasn’t about to question why while he was getting answers. Not yet, anyway.

Since WhiteFunk wasn’t a bot search agent, though, he couldn’t give Solomon precise numbers about anything, so it ended up taking a while. By the time he was done, Solomon had no actionable information, the dim shadow of the white tent had stretched from nothing to long and fat along the sidewalk, and his stomach was growling.

And then WhiteFunk delivered the final blow. “Listen,” he began abruptly. “If the person you’re searching for was taken to a blue zone, I hate to say it, but you’re never going to find them. Crossing the zone borders is basically impossible. The militias control all movement in and out, and they don’t let just anybody pass through.”

Solomon felt his shoulders slump. It was all for nothing then. He’d come this far only to hit a dead end. “Got it,” he said quietly. He pulled out his phone to text Adah that he was still okay, and looked back up at WhiteFunk. “Thank you.”

After that, he wanted to head back to his car, but he hesitated. Even though it had ended up being pointless, he felt like he should offer WhiteFunk something for enduring the long interrogation, and after he’d lied to him about being a girl, too. “You… you need anything?”

“I’m fine,” WhiteFunk said. “They treat defectors okay here. The hotel is nice, the food is good.”

Solomon nodded. “For now, probably.”

All at once WhiteFunk’s face tightened. “What do you mean, for now?”

The tension in his voice startled Solomon. “Oh, I just meant, historically speaking,” he explained quickly. “Like in books. The Limbo Files, Phantom Loyalties. I read that in wartime conditions, it’s common to treat defectors well initially, then later arrest them as spies.”

WhiteFunk’s posture softened. A smile touched his lips. “You read history books? For fun? They don’t have XR games in this zone?”

“No, we do! Or, did, anyway. AR visors have been banned here since the Splintering. You know, because the militia council thought AR platforms encouraged too much political engagement, which, I’ve read they do.” Great, now Solomon sounded like he was making excuses, defending a council decision he’d never liked. “They save most of that kind of tech for the militias, anyway,” he muttered, shrugging.

“Well, at least they let you read anything you like here, huh?”

Solomon knew what WhiteFunk was implying. The other blue zone defectors he’d talked to online all seemed eager to think of the red zone as a place of freedom, especially of thought. Solomon hadn’t gotten the impression that any of them particularly wanted their assumptions corrected. He shrugged again.

WhiteFunk chuckled. “I am going to like this zone. I can tell that already. Anyway, it’s cold as balls out here. Want to know anything else?”

He did, actually. “How did you cross the zone border?”

The mirth in WhiteFunk’s eyes faded. Solomon watched him glance down at his worn sneakers. “By killing someone.”

Solomon didn’t really know what to say to that, but now he definitely wanted to leave. “Um, well, thanks again, WhiteFunk.”

WhiteFunk scoffed lightly. “Sam.”

Solomon didn’t think he should give him his name, because it was weird and therefore more easily searchable, but he still felt like he owed the guy something for his time. “Solomon.”

“Solomon,” the guy repeated, pausing for a moment. “Well, it was good to meet you. Have a nice life!”