“I totally swear!” said Azizul the Map. He crossed the piebald patches on his bare chest with a brown and white finger.

The children slunk along in single file. The evening air was warm and still. They passed under a tall, bitter-scented teak tree. The jungle was lush here. It had overtaken much of the corporate campus buildings from India’s economic boom. The even chirps of nighttime crickets echoed in the darkness. Far away, birds trilled at each other from the high branches of eucalyptus trees.

“Hush,”said Shesh. “There are still functioning turrets, and the bloody security drones, idiot!”

Sana smiled in the darkness, “Maybe they will blow off his hands. So, we don’t have to hear any more tales of his pickpocketing skills.”

“If you all don’t quiet down, we’ll lose more than our hands, tonight,” hissed Pratik. His eyes were wide, taking in all the light they could in the jungle’s darkness.

He was right. Everything beyond the dam they left an hour ago was in the Red Zone. This was the sort of trespassing that merited serious punishment. Tonight, they were much deeper into the Zone than they’d ever gone before.

Shesh knew there were drone patrols all over the place. The mercenary robots made distinct thrumming noises, though. He hadn’t heard anything of the sort, so far. In the past, he’d seen air drones that swept through the high canopy of the trees, scanning for intruders.

There were also the Rust Dogs.

The Dogs stalked in packs on the forest floor, and through the crumbling facilities. The machines were programmed to defend the long abandoned labs and offices. He was also aware that some of the wealthier corporations had left other automated security behind, as well. Salvage was dangerous and sometimes deadly work.

The gang stopped and crouched up against a short designer concrete shelf that was being consumed by ferns and other large leafy brush.

Sana cursed quietly and threw a fat spiny millipede away from the group.

“What do you see, Basir?” asked Pratik.

“This looks like an old parking lot. It goes underground over there. The campus is two buildings, maybe three.” Basir whispered. He craned his head around the large, once fancy, corporate planter. Trees, bamboo, and tall shrubs blocked much of the view. There had been a huge typhoon, many years ago. Silt and mud from the floods brought seeds and soil into all of these campuses. No one seemed to care to come back and tend to the overgrown structures in the Red Zone.

“It looks like the closest building has an opening. The glass has been shattered on one corner. May have been looters. I don’t know,” said Basir.

“Or, Rust Dogs,” said Azizul the Map.

“It looks empty,” said Basir.

“Does it sound empty, Big Ears?” asked Pratik, with a devious grin.

“Yes,” Basir said, with a sniff.

They all looked at each other and quietly nodded. The five children silently padded toward the building, staying well below the shrubbery.

Dangerous though it was, kids were the most common scavengers. Their heat and radar signatures, much smaller than adults, were far less likely to trigger a security response. Walking drones and the wall turrets were designed to ignore the common animals that prowled the jungle. Conservation subroutines or something like that. The children stayed low, just the same.

The moon lent a bluish cast to the wide green leaves around them. Shesh could finally see what Basir had spotted. The dark glass of a two or three story building reflected the forest so perfectly in the dim light, it was almost invisible. Drawing near, they could see their own reflections on the slightly iridescent surface.

Five skinny Mumbaikar slummers. A boy in a holey black polo. He was taller than the rest, with a slow looking face. A girl with one dead eye and a determined glint in the other. A walleyed boy with clever, ratlike features. A bare-chested boy with patterns of vitiligo spattering his body like natural camouflage. Shesh was wearing his rag of a tee-shirt, eyes large and glittering in the darkness. They nestled under thick black eyebrows, and his small dark lips looked nearly purple in the moonlight.

The group moved slowly along the shrub line, until they were in front of the hole in the windows. It was an entire floor to ceiling panel that had been shattered, likely by mud. Flash flooding during a typhoon must have brought a big stone or chunk of a tree crashing into the corner of the building.

Pratik took the lead and sneaked into the office. One at a time, the rest followed. Shesh, last through, made a final scan outside. All was clear.

“Rock…Tiger…Technologies is a…diversified company that…provides a broad range of high-tech products and services…to the global…aerospace and…blah, blah, blah,” said Pratik. He haltingly sounded out the words he didn’t know. He was holding a binder filled with moldy papers, under the weak light of his cartoon mouse keychain. He slapped the book shut and tossed it into the small pile of discarded objects. The mildewing carpet oozed the sour odor of decay.

“Airspace?” Sana asked. Pratik looked at Basir. Basir looked at Azizul. They both shrugged.

The gang was now on the second floor of the building. They were in a small metropolis of grey cubicles. Dark wood lined the walls and on them hung prints of jungle scenes, at skewed angles. The five of them rummaged through all the files and drawers that the owners had deemed unimportant enough to leave behind.

The skirmishes and corporate funded battles that happened after the collapse must have hit very quickly. These buildings always looked like there had been a nuclear meltdown. There seemed to be no end to scattered printouts and overturned chairs. Shesh wondered what happened back then. Some buildings they had looked through in the past even looked bombed out. He shrugged. There was no way of knowing what really happened back then. Not the truth, anyway.

The kids had managed to gather a few hard drives and salvageable metals from dusty and corroded computers. It was an acceptable run. They had enough to get by for a while, but after a couple of hours in the building, had hoped to turn up more.

Shesh walked into what must have been some manner of meeting room. His feet squelched in the moistly rotting carpet. One side of the room had a curving glass wall that looked out over the foyer of the lower floor. The center was occupied by an impossibly heavy wooden table. It looked as though some animals had seen fit to climb up on the its surface and leave a shit. At least, Shesh hoped it was animals.

There was a massive monitor mounted on the wall, with several impact cracks in it.

“Come see what I’ve found,” he called to the others.

They gathered in a semi-circle around the two hundred and fifty inch display.

“This is a great find,” Pratik said.

“We can dig out the copper and aluminium! Even the mount!” said Azizul, a wide smile split the map of his face.

“Of course,” said Sana. “But, don’t forget! A monitor like this is bound to have lots of gold in it, too!” The five of them looked at each other with excitement. This was going to be a magnificent haul!

Without warning, they were all blinded; the darkness shattered by brilliant white light.

The meeting room they stood in was engulfed in dazzling luminescence. all five children used their hands to block their squinting eyes from the invading light. Their tiny silhouettes cast tall shadows on the monitor and walls behind them.

The security lights were coming from below, down at ground level. The eye-watering cores of the lights were outside of the office building. they were looking up through the front windows, directly through the curving pane that ran the front length of the meeting room.

“Do not try to run,” a recorded voice said in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Chinese, and then English. “If you attempt to flee; you are, through your action, agreeing to the suspect/perpetrator agreement as outlined in the DevaGuardians Security Company Suspect/Perpetrator Liability and Admission of Guilt Form, version number five a point three two six. A text readable copy of this contract can be downloaded from DVGSC Security’s website at DVGSC MumbaiSec dot com slash documents slash suspect dash perpetrator five a three two six.”

The voice had mechanically spelled out the entire web address in each language. “Please present your hands in the air, and get on your knees for retinal processing.”

The children scattered, like cockroaches, then tore through the jungle on the other side of the building.