Yang Rong takes out a cotton puff and daubs it with a bottle of disinfectant. He’s gentle as he works his way downward. First, the scratches on Noah’s forehead, at the same spot as the bump he’d gotten when he fell down the ravine. Next, the cut on his cheekbone. Thankfully, it’s shallow. He’s the type to bruise easily, Yang Rong’s mind supplies. The colonel is certain they’d been too rough when tying him up first encounter – the burn marks on his wrist were still visible days after.

Their proximity is too close. Yang Rong reaches to brush lightly against his eyelashes. Noah, deep asleep, doesn’t stir. The other injuries he had already attended to – the forearm laceration, for one, would take weeks to close up. The young man is really too reckless. A week since parting and he’d already gotten roughed up this badly.

He sighs for the tenth time tonight. There are no other noises sans the humming of the engine and the occasional pitter-patters of rain… and the soft breathing from Noah beside him.

Yang Rong remembers it clearly. Noah hadn’t taken more than five steps before he collapsed onto him, his body so fatigued he could no longer move.

Yang Rong reaches to feel his pulse. Normal. He moves Noah’s head onto his shoulder.

Someone had been callously monitoring his every movement for the past half an hour. The colonel looks up to meet his gaze. The young boy looks to be about twelve but perhaps it’s malnutrition that makes him shorter than he should be. At his age, Yang Rong remembers he’d already past 170 centimeters.

“You do not have to be this hostile,” the colonel informs him. “I will not do anything.”

“You haven’t told me who you are,” the boy says. “I have many reasons to be wary.”

Mature. He speaks in perfect English, too. Perhaps the colonel’s knowledge of the slums is distorted, but it’s uncommon for an Asian person raised in the slums to be fluent unless they were specifically taught.

“Yang Rong, a soldier, though you may have conjectured from my uniform.”

“If not from your uniform, then it would be the gun you pointed at us.”

The colonel clicks his tongue. He doesn’t think he himself was so sharp-tongued at that age. The boy had learned from Noah, hadn’t he? Ill-mannered, sarcastic, and too goddamn precocious.

“Let’s put that past us and have a pleasant conversation,” Yang Rong says. “Your name is?”

“Ming Tang.”

“Ming Tang, what is your favorite color?”

The kid looks at him strangely.

“Your hobbies?”

He still doesn’t respond even as Yang Rong fires off one question after another.

“Your date of birth, your background, places you’ve been to, where you are from…” Yang Rong says. “What I’m asking is… who are you?”

“I am a person from the ‘slums,’” the young boy answers. “There is nothing more than that, but the question you want to ask isn’t who I am, but who Noah is.”

“Very perceptive,” Yang Rong hums. “Then would you delight to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Excuse me?”

Ming Tang repeats himself, “I said I do not know who he is.”

“You two are acquainted. Where did he come from… no, how long have you known him?” Yang Rong mentally scolds himself – Christ, was he always this terrible at relaying his thoughts? He furrows his brows and continues, “Simply put, I want to know more about him.”

“—Colonel,” Jae hesitates to interrupt from the shotgun seat, “the child is too young to… Um, what I mean is that you are coming off too forceful.”

The child, twelve or thirteen, is stained with dirt and cruor. No matter how much he hides behind that stone façade, an event like that should set trauma. Though… Ming Tang is quite peculiar. Not emotionless, but not as distressed as anticipated considering the massacre that’d occurred in his own home. Still, Yang Rong isn’t very emotionally apperceptive himself, he has to admit.

“I understand,” he replies. “Then we will delay our conversation until—”

“It’s okay,” Ming Tang says quietly. “There isn’t much I can tell you about Noah, but at the very least, I can tell you of when I…we met him.”

---

[one year ago, early November]

The little girl had brought home an unfamiliar person with silver-white hair. Yu Ying busies herself with fondling his face – she has a very touchy habit of latching onto anything or anyone cute and pretty, and it seems the young man is no exception. He has the most peculiar yellow and blue eyes, and Ming Tang’s first thoughts are that he’s of a different race. Feline…canine… a mix of both, perhaps, but he doesn’t voice anything.

The other children are… examining him like a spectacle. It’s warranted. The children are so young that they’d be intrigued by such an appearance, handsome yet different. There are eight of them in this shelter, Ming Tang included, and he has three years on the oldest sister, Wu Shan. He’s eleven turning twelve and already, he’s deemed the mature brother of the group. A babysitter, if he may.

They aren’t related. None of them are. When the radiation blasted Huru a decade ago, every villager fled into underground shelters and then the small community of survivors scrounged up all they can manage to get by. The older men and uncles have gone to find food, and when they hadn’t returned, the women had taken up their roles. Eventually, only nine people remain: eight children and one frail grandmother.

“Yu Ying,” Ming Tang says, “when did you leave our home?”

They call it a home though it’s more a decrepit shelter with cracked walls and an empty interior. They don’t have much, just a communal bath, a makeshift fireplace, some wood thrown to the side, and then a few holes for ventilation. They all gather in the ‘living room,’ a tiny place, lacking of everything but a chair and hard, wooden bunkers.

“Ge,” the girl says, “I went to find daddy.”

Her father, Ming Tang recognized him a month ago, was quite the hard worker. A single parent to an only child and the sole person who kept them alive for so long. Hunting, gathering, planting – most was done by him and it’s only been recent that Ming Tang had to take up the mantle.

He sighs. “Don’t be rash, Yu Ying. I am not allowing you to go outside.”

“…Okay,” she says dejectedly. “Yu Ying won’t anymore.”

Ming Tang stares at her. She shrinks back, looks a little sad, then grits her teeth and rubs at the tears stinging her eyes. Yu Ying knows that her father has died – there is no way she wouldn’t because for all that she should be naïve and innocent, she’s heard all kinds of terror stories, failed harvests, sudden disappearances. Once, she’d seen a man’s corpse slung right outside the manhole.

“Then you should explain why you’ve brought back a stranger to our home. What if he’s dangerous?”

“Don’t be mean.” She puts her hands on her hips petulantly. “He is a nice person.”

The young man shifts a little. He looks intimidating, sure, but that’s only because he looks so foreign. His personality… Ming Tang cannot ascertain yet. Tolerant, potentially, from how well he’s catering to Yu Ying pulling his hair. There’s a scholarly air to him, too. Intelligent, for sure, from the way he examines his surroundings cautiously, absorbing each detail in the room.

“Perhaps it would be better if I leave,” the young man speaks finally. His voice is airy and pleasant. Fluent in Chinese.

“I didn’t ask you to leave,” Ming Tang says. For an almost-twelve-year-old, he’s sure flippant with his remarks. It can’t be helped. It’s in his nature to be guarded against everyone. “Can you tell me who you are?”

“My name is Noah,” he says.

“Where are you from?” Ming Tang scrutinizes him. “From the city?”

“No,” he replies. “From the outside. Elsewhere.”

He’s from the slums, allegedly, but his aura is so different it’d be hard to associate him with the grime and dirt of their people. If Ming Tang were to judge on first impressions, he’d guess Noah to be a wealthy citizen, like one of those white-collar elites he’d heard about in the Nexus.

“Why are you here?”

Noah purses his lips. A bit of hesitance. “I don’t know.”

Ming Tang nods. “Okay.”

He turns to leave the room. Noah is surprised by how quickly the conversation ended – he was ready to be interrogated.

“Is that all?” Noah asks slowly.

“Why?”

“You’re letting me stay?”

“You can stay, or you can leave, Noah.” Ming Tang looks at him. “But what will you do here?”

“…I will see.”

---

[present time]

Ming Tang narrates at a slow pace – “we’ve got time,” the colonel tells him, “it would be good if you recounted more details.” Truth be told, the boy has no obligation to say any of this. Yang Rong listens and observes him well.

He says with a chuckle, “Well, Noah was certainly more docile in your first meeting.”

Li Jiayun turns to him and gives him a confused look. Jae turns to him and gives him a bashful look.

“Colonel,” the both of them say.

Jae sweats. “You told me to tie him up.”

Li Jiayun coughs. “You knocked him out.”

“I did what?” Yang Rong says with a clandestine smile. “Don’t talk nonsense. Ming Tang, was it? Do not pay them any mind. The little kitt—Noah was in an agitated state and naturally, I was poised to handle him.”

Ming Tang doesn’t look convinced in the slightest. The colonel certainly doesn’t give off friendly vibes –bloodstained shirt, darkened green eyes, alpha posture, predatory in the way he smiles. If it weren’t for Noah so slumbered against him, he’d look more gangster and less soldier. Yang Rong’s personality is… twisted, and he himself is aware.

“Ming Tang,” he says with a discerning gaze in his eyes, “you do understand the risks of being associated with a human hybrid?”

The teenager doesn’t back away. “Are you so sure about him?”

“Positive.”

“Then, do you think he is dangerous?”

“Potentially.”

“I have thought about it,” Ming Tang says. “If he’s human or not. Even if he isn’t, in the year since I’ve known him, Noah did not show any strange signs. He also doesn’t want to infect us. He doesn’t share food or saliva, he avoids sneezing in our direction, and he doesn’t let us treat his wounds. Even though the chance of radiation is extremely low through those methods, he was cautious around us… I want to ask you, Yang Rong, why are you so comfortable with cleaning up his blood?”

“It’s Colonel Yang,” he replies, though he doesn’t answer the question. “You are very open to telling me about his peculiarities. Are you trying to convince me?”

“Why is Noah so hostile toward you?”

The colonel considers it. Noah, so wispy and slender-framed, is inexplicably aggressive when Yang Rong draws nearer – there’s a boundary he can’t cross, and he doesn’t know what it is yet. Asleep, Noah is clingy and quite cute, but when awake, his demeanor splits off one-eighty. Perhaps it’s just in front of him.

He brushes his hand against a lock of silver hair. It’s mottled with blood. “I wanted to bring him to the Nexus.”

“To study him as a specimen.”

“Genetic testing,” Yang Rong tells him. “You should know how significant it is to find a hybrid with full cognizance. Has he shown signs of turning?”

“No,” Ming Tang says.

The colonel studies him. The boy is lying. He had replied too fast. His micro expressions are too stoic. Yang Rong is unfamiliar with emotions, but he is certainly familiar with the slightest shift in expressions, the small, exterior abnormalities that both people and anomalies display. In fact, he can even be considered the best at this craft – identifying the infected, that is – and has learned to tell from one abnormal facial twitch to the next.

It’s why he comes off so interrogative.

“I see.”

The car is pulling up now. Yoo Seok parks in an underground lot. Located in thankfully not the middle of nowhere, District 42’s bomb shelter is a tad bigger than the one they’d stayed in previously. The temperature’s gotten warmer, too, away from the Nordak Mountains and the frozen tundra they’d trekked for weeks.

Noah still shows no signs of waking. The colonel undoes his seatbelt and supports his body, preparing to carry him out of the car. It’s not the first time Yang Rong’s thought this, but the young man’s waistline is so… thin. Through the clothes, Yang Rong feels that he’s curved and angular all the same.

He lifts him up easily. Despite Noah’s mildly tall build, he weighs close to nothing – of course, the colonel packs muscles and strength, so some tens of kilograms are easy to handle.

Ming Tang follows the soldiers out the vehicle. Li Jiayun assists him as he limps with his non-injured leg. The young boy is silent all the way.

Such a dark, grotty place, yet he’s staring at it with wonder.

---

“You can stay, or you can leave, Noah.” Ming Tang looks at him. “But what will you do here?”

After all, for all that Noah might want to stay, Ming Tang himself wants to leave. Beyond the shelter, outside of this place he feels so confined in and down southward, somewhere he wouldn’t feel so suffocated.

“…I will see,” Noah says.

So, the young man stays. Except, he’s hardly here once a week – and that’s a conservative estimate. The children have grown fond of him and Ming Tang, too, appreciates the food, the clothes, the books and the miscellaneous snippets he brings back. It informs him there’s more that awaits outside. It informs Ming Tang that he really, truly wants to leave.

Many times, he thinks they’re a liability to Noah – does he enjoy the company of children or does he crash in because he doesn’t have a place to be? Or, perhaps, Noah pities them. Ming Tang doesn’t care. He simply wants to know more about the border, the city, just anywhere that’s not the slums.

And Noah has connections, that’s for sure. When he leaves, he comes back with things that are too uncommon to find here. Say, for example, city magazines, little trinkets and toys, batteries, unknown medicines in red vials – though lately, Ming Tang had a hunch when he caught him downing several in one draft. His origin is out of the ordinary.

“For your cold?” Ming Tang had asked knowingly.

Noah had turned, chuckled and licked the residues off his lips. “Don’t ask too many questions or I might end up scaring you, Ming Tang.”