Dragon: Out of the Box (The Girl in the Box Book 37)

by Robert J. Crane

  When I was sure the coast was clear, I stepped back, leaving the window open, and beckoned him. “Hurry,” I whispered.

  He did, flapping in.

  But he didn't stay a pigeon. Oh no, he did not.

  He shifted in seconds, becoming a man, and a naked one at that, grabbing my sheets as his wings morphed to fingers. He wrapped the sheet around himself as he settled into a human form, wearing my dirty bedding as a toga. With one hand, he smoothly reached back and shut the window.

  Leaving me alone, at last, with the meta who had been saving my life all this time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  Being alone with a naked man in my bedroom felt a little weird, if only because we were strangers. And I wasn't the type to go for one-night stands with random guys.

  It was maybe made a little worse by the fact that his chest was...bulging. His hair was perfect, a black faux hawk that looked strangely like his bird alter ego, but in a good way. And his face was...quite nice. Handsome. Indisputably Asian, too.

  All in all, it made me feel awkward to be wearing just a bathrobe. And an AR-15.

  When he started to speak, I pointed to the door, then my ear. “They're listening,” I whispered, meta-low.

  He nodded slowly, then lowered his own voice, which bore a trace of an accent. “I wasn't sure you'd know it was me. I had to talk to you after what happened before. On the street, I mean.” He bowed his head. “I am sorry about your partner.”

  “Not your fault,” I said back. We kept our voices in that same range, and I moved a little closer, in spite of our light amount of clothing. Definitely not because of it. “I didn't see the footage, but...you saved me, didn't you?” The agents who interviewed me had been pretty quiet about the end of the fight, other than asking me about the albino tiger swooping out of the sky. They had my earlier accounts of the battles with Firebeetle where he'd jumped in, so...

  He nodded.

  “And you've been following me?”

  He nodded again.

  “Why?”

  There was a cloud of emotion on his face. “The man you have been fighting. The meta.”

  “I call him Firebeetle,” I said, and realized, “Uh...I don't know your name.”

  “Jian,” he said. “Jian Chen. You can me 'John' if it's too difficult to pronounce.”

  “Jian,” I said, rolling the 'j' like he did. Probably not as well, but still. “It's not too hard.”

  He nodded, looking down at my substandard carpeting. Or his feet. Or his towel. I couldn't tell which, but he wasn't looking at me or my mom-style fuzzy bathrobe. “This Firebeetle...he is an agent of the Chinese government.”

  “I kinda suspected that.”

  “When I read about your fight with him in the paper,” Jian said, “I knew who he was immediately. I came to DC right away. I had to.” He paused, but his eyes were burning, emotion welling up in them.

  “Why?” I asked. “What did he do to you?”

  Jian took a hard, ragged breath. “He pursued me through all of China. I came across the Pacific eight years ago. I escaped from a compound in China...that you are probably familiar with.”

  It dawned on me at last. “You mean the Chinese meta facility. The one that was destroyed by Sovereign.”

  He nodded slowly. “I escaped just before that happened, but...yes. That is the place.”

  I blinked a couple times. “Wait...that place was a prison?”

  “Part of it was,” Jian said, a small, bitter smile graced his lips. “You didn't think it was all voluntary, did you? Every meta the Chinese government could find, all in one location?”

  “I didn't really think about it,” I said, “since the first time I heard of it was when it was destroyed. Did they...scoop you up out of your village or something? Kidnap you and stick you there?”

  “No.” Jian's face hardened, and a flicker of unmistakable hatred ran across it. “It was much worse than that.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  Jian Chen

  I was born in a valley in Shanxi, a province in mountainous Northern China. My parents were overjoyed with my birth; they had been fearful that I would be a girl, and girls born during that period in China, well...

  By the time of my birth, my parents had seen the worst that China had to offer. Shanxi was a very corrupt province, and was rocked by scandal related to that later, in my adulthood. At the time, little was said except in quietest whispers. Still, what was there to do? My parents kept their heads down, their mouths shut, and they worked to provide a future for me.

  I grew up in the school system, learning to love the party, to love China. My parents didn't dare speak a word against the government. They'd seen how things went for those who did.

  I didn't realize how bad things were until I got to what you would consider high school age. There was a girl in my school. She came from a family that was disgraced. Not treasonous, but undesirable. Her parents had committed some sin long before I was born. They were forever marked with that shame. They never did anything bad that I saw, but there was an undercurrent. Rumors about them abounded. Children threw rocks at her, called her...well, something terrible.

  I...I threw rocks at her, too. It is a shame that will fill me to my dying day.

  My powers manifested when I was a teenager. I had grown up, made it to college age. She had grown up, too. I noticed. I always noticed her. I didn't want to...my parents warned me to stay away, but...

  I didn't know it, but she had been attending meetings with other...undesirables. I see you looking at me, wondering what that means. There's a religious movement in China called Falun Gong, an offshoot of Buddhism. At first they were embraced by the government. Then...they outlawed Falun Gong entirely, and began a campaign to eliminate it from China with every tool the state had at its disposal.

  They came for her one day while I was walking through the village. Chinese police, moving in packs like dogs. They caught the practitioners – and her – after a meeting...worship...I don't really even know Falun Gong. They beat some of them. I saw blood dripping down the face of a man old enough to be my grandfather. They dragged away a woman unconscious.

  When I saw her, she wasn't bloody or unconscious. She just looked...her eyes were a thousand miles away. Like she didn't even know what was happening to her, couldn't believe it. Or maybe she was resigned to it by now, after all the years of hatred directed at her from the village.

  I saw her face, that look, that...resignation...and I couldn't stand by and watch her be led away.

  I stuck my chest out at the police officers holding her. Blocked them. All I could think was how my parents would be so ashamed. And scared.

  One of them tried to swipe at me, hit me with the butt of his gun.

  I knocked it from his hands. Turned into a tiger for the first time in public.

  And I pounced.

  Oh, I didn't do it like I do it now. I didn't kill him. But I hurt him. Knocked him down, knocked down another, batted a third over. But there were so many, and so many guns.

  I tried to hide in their ranks; low to the ground, moving between them. Faster, stronger. I got quite a few, but my unwillingness to kill – I was so young, so...innocent, I suppose.

  They shot me. Many times.

  I didn't die, of course. And you can see by looking at my chest, I don't even have any scars from it.

  I totally was not looking at your chest! Really. For really real.

  It's fine. You should hear all of this, though. Because when I woke up, I was in a Chinese prison in Qinghai. And that...was where things started to get really bad.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  Jian

  I thought when I woke, naked, chained to a concrete floor, a hole in the ground for my toilet and a water spout above it for drinking – I thought things couldn't get any worse.

  How very naïve I was.

  I don't know how much you are aware of Chinese prisons, but most of them make American prisons look like palaces. Decaying buildi
ngs, poor plumbing. When my water spigot failed to work, I was expected to drink from the toilet hole, and no one thought anything of it.

  Beatings. Brutal discipline. These were all parts of the service.

  There's a thing they don't talk about much in the western press, and that's how dissidents are treated in China. Even for lesser infractions. A famous Chinese actress, Fan Bing Bing, was discovered to have worked for western movie companies. She was paid an amount more than she declared on her taxes, presumably pocketing the rest.

  She disappeared. No one heard from her for months. The Chinese government did not even acknowledge having her. When she finally reappeared, it was with a long, forced apology like one of your hostage videos, you know? Reading from the script: I have shamed myself, blah blah...however you would say it. I'm not native to American ways of speech.

  I had no idea if anyone from my village, my family, even knew what happened to me.

  As it turned out...this might have been fortunate for them.

  One day the guards came for me. They took me to the prison clinic. Swabbed the inside of my mouth with one of those long, cotton-tipped swabs. Then they threw me back in my cell. I didn't think anything of it for weeks afterward. Just a strange incident in the course of brutal days, occasional beatings, and long stretches of confinement.

  I considered trying to become a worm to crawl through the prison bricks. I worked on it. Becoming a worm, I mean. It's difficult because of the mass differential between worm and human forms. It takes practice.

  Before I could, though...they came for me again. This time, they moved me to a different prison. Bag over my head, beatings before I left and along the way to keep my powers in check.

  They took me out in a camp that was impressively better than the aging dung heap I left. It was new, down to the train line that carried me there. New roads, new buildings. A sleek, modern facility, with an airstrip of its own nearby.

  Even my cell was new, with a functional water spigot and toilet straight out of modern times. I wondered what I'd done to deserve such paradise.

  Then...I found out.

  They came to me on a cold morning, frost on the edges of the cell window. I went with them, not wishing to chance a beating. My powers were ineffective against these guards, who had powers of their own. They took me across the compound to a building in the medical complex. Nurses and doctors in their sterile garb waited.

  I was given a shot just before I entered the room. A little sting, numbing me, making me ready for...what followed.

  I never really passed out, you see. I was awake the whole time. I couldn't lift my hands; I fell down on a table, my limbs no longer responding to my commands.

  “Get him on the gurney,” a man in a medical gown said.

  They did. Then they wheeled me into an operating theater.

  I tried to scream but I couldn't. My vocal chords were as paralyzed as the rest of me.

  It was a surgical team, I realized as they started.

  They took...organs. Skin. Corneas. I can only assume they had donors waiting for most or all of it, I don't even know. I passed out repeatedly throughout the procedure. I don't even know how long I was on the table.

  When it was done, they didn't even bother to stitch me up. I think they left my heart in me; one lung. Enough for me to survive.

  Then they threw me back in my cell for a week, maybe two.

  And the nightmare started over again as they came for me with a needle already prepared...and did it over...and over...again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Sienna

  “My God.”

  My whisper was already meta-low, but there was a creeping, horrified sense of awe in hearing Jian's story. It hung in the air of the bedroom, bringing with it such fresh horror that I'd even allowed myself to forget we were both nearly naked standing here, the scars of his trauma written across his face in the emotions that played there.

  “They took my organs...twenty...fifty...I don't even know how many times,” Jian said, still looking at the floor. “Eventually, this new woman came to the prison. Her name was An. She yelled at the guards about how they treated me. She demanded my release, and they moved me to the meta compound in the north. Or she did, at least. Only her. No other guards were on the train. I was still young and foolish enough to believe she liberated me from the hell I'd gone through.”

  I was coming to some slow realizations in the midst of all this horror. “She worked for the government?”

  “Of course,” Jian said. “Everyone does. Or so it seemed to me at the time. She seduced me along the journey. It had...been a long time.” His face fell with shame. “She took me to the compound that Sovereign destroyed. Told me 'these people are different.'” His face hardened, twisted in hatred. “They were the same. It was a re-education camp. They wanted me to learn to love the state again so that I'd work for them. She left me there. With them.”

  “But you ran?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly. “Not at first. I played along, because I was afraid if I didn't, they'd send me back to the hospital prison and harvest me forever.” He shuddered. “The screams in that place at night...”

  “So you bided your time.”

  “And escaped when the moment presented itself,” Jian said. “But this Firebeetle, as you call him? I knew him. He trained with me.”

  I blinked. “He was in the reeducation camp?”

  Jian shook his head. “Just the meta training section. His loyalty was not in question like mine. He came straight out of the People's Liberation Army.” Jian smiled, ghostly. “I came out of a prison where dissidents had their organs harvested for 'fun and profit' as you would say. When I escaped, I had to make my way across China, on foot, stealing and scraping until I snuck into Hong Kong. I managed to get on a ship, come to America, declare myself and request asylum.” He let out a low breath. “I've been here ever since. And been fine...until I heard about your fight with this Firebeetle. Though I knew him as Cheng Yu.”

  Cheng Yu. Hadn't that been the name on one of his passports? “He's a pretty stoic fellow,” I said. “I don't know that he's said much to me in our fights. Does he speak any English?”

  “Definitely,” Jian said. “We were all trained, in the compound.” When he caught my surprise, Jian didn't hesitate to explain. “It was understood in our training that we were working so that we would be used against America.”

  “That's not subtle,” I said.

  He shook his head. “And now this man is kidnapping Chinese citizens over here. But that's not all.”

  I hung my head. “For crying out loud. Of course it's not. Nothing's ever easy, no matter how it's presented.” A simple kidnapping and it had ballooned into a Chinese plot to snatch people from a foreign country.

  “Do you know why they're kidnapping these people?” he asked.

  I had a suspicion. “How many metas did China have left after Sovereign destroyed that compound?”

  “Very few,” Jian said. “Firebeetle – Cheng – only survived because he was chasing me at the time. And he redoubled his efforts once the compound was destroyed.”

  I nodded slowly. “Because metas are a valuable resource to China.”

  “A strategic and tactical advantage that is indelibly interwoven into their long-term planning,” Jian said. “China has a fifty-year plan to become supreme over the world. How can they do that if they have no superpowered people?”

  “You can't replace a population like that naturally, not in fifty years.” I shook my head slowly. “The metahuman serum.”

  “That would be my guess,” Jian said. “They need subjects to inject. Metahumans to become their new army.”

  “This is the part that is confusing to me,” I said. “Why kidnap here? They have plenty of citizens back home they could dose, right? A billion people. Presumably more loyal than these people who have fled their country.”

  “I don't know,” Jian said. “I have some Chinese connections I have made since arri
ving in America. People who talk with their family still in China. There is something going on in this vein. Outside the normal unexplained arrests that China makes.”

  “Then why expand the franchise to America?” I asked, pacing around my bed as I thought. “I mean, this sounds like some pretty evil shit. Like, maybe the most evil I've ever encountered, other than this one Scottish bitch who – sonofa!”

  And the idea hit me like a lightning bolt.

  I thought of Rose and her endless vials of serum in her secret room in Edinburgh. Of how she'd harvested thousands of people to accumulate the right collection of powers to crush me.

  A Rakshasa for the power of illusion.

  Wolfe for his rapid healing.

  An Achilles for the invincibility.

  “They've got a billion people back home,” I said. “Lots of genetics to work from, but these powers...lots of them are uncommon.” I looked at Jian. “What if they needed to trace down certain genetic lineages – family lines – in order to get certain important strategic powers – like telepathy for instance?”

  Jian considered this. “That would be a good reason to take the risk of operating overseas.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They're not just randomly snatching people, though. They've gotten their DNA somehow, and that's the targeting vector they're using to determine who to grab.” I clenched my fist. “That's why they're doing it. They're building an army. I don't see how this works, loyalty-wise, but they're rebuilding their meta army with these people.”

  Jian was quiet for a moment. “It may not be as simple as that.”

  “What do you mean?” I was already feeling a cold chill from these dark thoughts and plans, but something about the look on Jian's face made my blood temperature fall by another ten degrees.

  “There was...something else that went on in that camp,” Jian said, his eyes low. “Some of us, we were...intractable. Not me, I went along, kept my plans to myself, mouthed the pieties until I escaped. But some...didn't.”