The ground rumbled. An Zhe spun around and saw the armored car, which had already driven quite far away, make a sharp turn and head back towards them—Vance had finally noticed something was wrong.
He took a few breaths, then began running towards the armored car.
Vance's worried expression was visible through the car window. Before the armored car reached An Zhe, its door had already sprung open. When the armored car passed him, a pair of strong arms wrenched him up from the ground, and he scrambled into the driver's cabin in tandem with Vance's movements. Vance swiftly tossed him to the other side of the cabin, then slammed the door shut.
An Zhe said, "They..."
"There's no saving them!" Vance once again yanked the steering wheel hard, and the armored car turned back to its original direction. With the accelerator pressed to the floor, it sped northwards.
An Zhe leaned back against the front passenger seat, panting. After catching his breath a little, he looked in the rearview mirror. The mutated Anthony and the mortally-wounded Hosen were tangled up together and rolling on the ground. Anthony lifted his forelimbs, then brought them plummeting down to pierce through Hosen's torso and nail his body to the ground. Then it lifted its head and looked in their direction. Approximately five seconds later, it seemed to have given up on chasing the armored car. It lowered its head, and its long and slim proboscis pierced Hosen's head. After another fit of convulsions, Hosen's body went utterly slack.
The car drove very quickly. Before long, their figures had disappeared in the yellow sand and shrubs, never to be seen again.
Vance asked, "Anthony mutated?"
An Zhe turned his head to look at Vance and saw that the rims of his eyes were slightly red.
He bowed his head. "I'm sorry."
He was still alive, but Vance had lost two teammates.
"What are you sorry for?" Vance forced a smile. "When we come out here for work, people often die. I'm used to it. Maybe the next one to die will be me."
But An Zhe truly did feel guilty. Anthony had been infected. If An Zhe had told Vance about the drops of what he suspected to be human blood on the ant armor right after he discovered it, they may have been able to discover that Anthony had been infected in advance.
He lowered his head and told Vance about it.
Vance was silent for a while before he lowered his voice and said, "What Anthony changed into wasn't an ant. He may have been infected earlier. Before we ran into you, we encountered a swarm of mutated wild mosquitos."
"After that... was he also pricked by the armor?" An Zhe asked.
Vance looked out the car window and went silent for another long while before speaking again. "Flatland 2's pollution level is very low—two stars—so one might not be infected from getting pricked or slightly wounded. But if they speak up about it, they'll be abandoned by their team for sure, so many people won't do so until after they've been wounded."
His voice grew a bit softer. "... Because they want to go home."
"Then what about Hosen?" An Zhe asked.
If they had discovered that Anthony had been infected in advance, Hosen might not have died.
"Don't take it to heart. Hosen's death wasn't an unjust one." Vance lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. "He had done no small number of wicked things and had the blood of at least five people on his hands. This time, if it weren't for the fact that we were truly short of hands, Anthony and I wouldn't have worked with him. What was he doing at the time? Bullying you?"
An Zhe said nothing, and Vance turned his head to look at him.
In the twilight, the boy's contours seemed both quiet and peaceful, like a crystalline drop of water. For this sort of person to appear in the perilous wilds, perhaps he was dealing with unspeakable difficulties, but Vance didn't ask.
Likewise, An Zhe didn't know what to say to Vance. He was thinking of what happened prior to Hosen's death. At the very beginning, Hosen seemed to have briefly lost consciousness, only coming around once he had been stabbed.
What had Hosen done before that?
He had bitten a mouthful of hyphae.
An Zhe frowned. He actually didn’t know whether his mushroom self was poisonous or not.
Now he suspected that he was a poisonous mushroom.
As they continued forward, the vegetation became scarcer. In the boundless desert, there were no animals whatsoever, only their armored car traveling alone.
At night, when the aurora appeared in the sky again, Vance intended to stop the car and rest. He stubbed out his cigarette on the steering wheel, then opened the door connecting the driver's cabin and the rest area and jumped down. In the pitch-black rest area, his voice rang out. "Sleep first. We'll arrive at the base after driving for another day and a half."
An Zhe came to the door as well. To have a broader field of vision, the driver's cabin was very high up, whereas to save space for the storage compartment, the rest area was towards the bottom of the car and very low. The height difference between it and the driver's cabin was more than one meter, so he had to jump down.
He stood there, slightly hesitant. Merely three short seconds later, Vance seemed to have noticed his hesitation and said, "Sit there first."
An Zhe followed those instructions and sat down on the edge, his legs dangling. Then Vance reached out to hold his upper body and helped him down.
An Zhe landed steadily on the ground and said in a small voice, "Thank you."
"No problem." Vance smiled, and a slow affection came through in his voice. "My younger brother was afraid of heights, so he'd often be like this too. He was about your age."
An Zhe, doing his best to grasp the rules of human communication, asked tentatively, "Does he also come out into the wilds with you?"
"Mm-hm," Vance said. "We used to always be together."
"But not this time?"
"He's dead," Vance said. "It’s been two months since he was killed by a Judge at the entrance to the base."
Judge.
This was the third time An Zhe heard that word. The first time was from An Ze. He was trying to dissuade An Zhe from going to the human base, saying, "You can't escape the Judges’ eyes."
The second time was from Anthony. He hadn't wanted An Zhe to join their team, saying, "We aren't Judges, so we can't confirm that he's one hundred percent human."
And in the memories he obtained from An Ze, it seemed to be a word that appeared very frequently.
So he repeated, "... Judge?"
"You don't know?" Vance's voice pitched up in surprise. "Where exactly did you pop up from?"
An Zhe said in a small voice, "I haven't interacted with others before."
"I can see that." Vance twisted a knob on the car's wall, and a faint white light lit up at the top of the walls, barely illuminating the cramped space. He took out field rations from a cubbyhole in the wall, and An Zhe took out food and water from his own backpack as well before sitting across from Vance.
He heard Vance say, "The base has a system called the 'Arbiter's Code', after which came an organization under the jurisdiction of the military. It has a very high rank, and it's called the Trial Court. The members of the Trial Court are Judges. They usually take shifts at the base's gates, and every one of them is licensed to kill, so it won't count as breaking the law when they kill people."
After listening to this sentence, An Zhe dimly recalled that he had found something related in the memories he obtained from An Ze.
He said, "... They determine whether the people entering the base are human or Infected Ones?"
"Mm-hm," Vance replied. "In addition to the kind of Infected Ones that can be distinguished on sight, there are also some that can't. The mutation process hasn't yet started, or the mutation level is too high, so there are no differences from humans on the surface. The base calls those kinds of people xenogenics."
An Zhe opened his eyes wide.
If that was the case, then he was a xenogenic.