The bell rang, and it was on. Another advantage to realm-based martial arts was that light contact wasn’t needed. The realm controlled the damage and kept score. Health bars appeared above them just like in old video games and shrank based on the hits landed.
Always ready to play to the crowd, Ozzie held back theatrically. Kim returned the favor. They only got serious when the clock hit ten seconds. Ozzie took the round with a surprise Baji Dan Zai that landed Kim on her back. When he pulled her up, he whispered into her ear, “It’s not a coincidence you’re here, is it?”
“No.”
The loser got to pick the rules of the next round. To please the growing crowd, Kim went vintage. Instantly her gi was replaced with purple satin, although not very much of it. It took a few blinks to get used to the vertical pupils. At least the mask was easy to breathe through.
The avatar’s horror-show grin matched her mood most days, one of the reasons she picked it. Kim bared her teeth through the fabric of the mask. Fangs, inches long, showed inside a lip-framed triangle that went from ear to ear. As one, the audience leaned away from her.
Damned right.
Ozzie transformed into a classic humanoid monster from a later version of Mortal Kombat. His face was covered with a black respirator; the dark leather and khaki outfit left his arms and chest exposed. The hook swords were going to be a challenge, but speed was what her character was all about. Teleporting kicks helped, too.
With gravity turned down a fifth and muscle response doubled, the fighting styles weren’t close to textbook. Wild spins, punches, and kicks replaced rigid forms. The floor rapidly went slick with simulated blood.
Ozzie brought out a bit of the speed he’d shown at the championships, so Kim did the same. This time she took the round, lopping his head off with a neat snick just before the buzzer sounded. She could’ve done the “Man Eater” and swallowed him whole, but she needed an excuse to get close to an ear.
Kim picked his head up. As it integrated back onto his body she whispered, “Are you a prisoner?” They bowed to the now appreciable crowd. Ozzie’s eyes were alarmed, but his face was otherwise neutral. He nodded curtly at her.
Bingo.
This time he chose to recreate their final match. Coarse bark replaced the smooth mat of the dojo’s floor. The weaker gravity and the modified low-G anatomy took them both a few moments to get used to. Ankles that were knees and arms that were way too long would’ve sent mundanes to the floor, but they were far from mundane.
The same ragged edge appeared in the fabric of the realm when they stretched to their full ability, reaching speed and power orders of magnitude above what other people could achieve. Still in full armor, they locked swords together and drew close.
“I need your location,” she whispered, and then spun away, parrying through showers of sparks.
The bell sounded with the score still tied. They immediately transitioned to a thirty-second winner-take-all that stripped them of their armor. Her Ivy costume bloomed into view, all swirling ribbons and dark patterns, while his dragon cloak billowed in red and gold. Each hit was triple damage, so their health bars rapidly wound down. This time Kim wasn’t as lucky, and Ozzie finished her with an almighty punch to the face. It spun her around twice before she hit the ground in a heap.
It stung.
He raised his hands in triumph. If it’d happened during the championships, it would’ve crushed her. But not now. That was medals. This was real. Ozzie was in trouble.
He rested his hands on his knees, echoing her exhaustion. Kim spat on the ground and a folded piece of paper fell out. That was a damned elegant hack. Her mouth had been too numb to feel it. She palmed it off the ground, and a message landed in her secure storage.
They both bowed to the crowds as the ring reset everything back to their default avatars and clothes.
After the incident in the championship, the rust-tanged slug building in her realspace mouth was no surprise, but she couldn’t exit quickly. She still had to maintain appearances with the well-wishers and autograph seekers in the realm. As soon as the last one left, Kim exited realmspace as fast as possible, and then spat blood onto the ground beside the bench.
“Kim!” Helen said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She wiped her chin, and then scraped her fingers clean under her pants cuffs. The bruise on her chest from their last fight was still faintly visible in the right light. Somehow, when she fought Ozzie like that, the damage leaked out into realspace. She tested the left side of her jaw, and sure enough, the teeth were loose. She pushed them back in, and her eyes watered under the pain.
“Kim, that’s not...that’s not possible.”
“No, it’s not.” The point of realmspace was how harmless it was. Nobody in their right mind would plug into something that could kill them. The protocols were engineered to make real injury impossible, and now it had happened to her twice. The side of her face felt like boiling water had been poured on it, and her cheek was swollen tight as a balloon. “I need you to find me a dentist, one that’s open right now.”
“Are your teeth cracked? Are you okay?”
“Damn it, Helen. I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to them why they can’t touch me. They need a class-four laser around, too.” The bruising would be the hardest part to hide. With therapeutic lasers, nanocreams, and makeup she might be able to pull it off.
“Kim you have to tell someone. This isn’t possible.”
“I’m not telling anyone, and neither are you,” she said as she walked out of the park. “Now get on Weibo and find me a dentist.”
*
Mike stared at her a couple of times over breakfast, but apparently the treatments and makeup did the trick. The dentist promised she wouldn’t lose any teeth. Thank God for small favors.
Ozzie’s message was simple enough: I live in the Fenglong sanctuary in the mountains east of Chengdu. I have been an unwilling resident for many years. No one in China has been able to get close to me. You are the first person I can trust with this information. Please help.
This was too big to risk discussing inside the hotel. She found a shaded cul-de-sac in the park surrounding the Global Center for everyone to meet and talk.
It turned out they mostly listened to Helen rant. “It’s impossible,” she repeated. “China isn’t like this. We don’t lock people up for no good reason.”
“Then how do you explain the message?” Tonya asked.
“It has to be a trick; some sort of conspiracy to embarrass my country.”
Spencer rolled his eyes. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Jesus, Helen, our government tries to hold people in secret.”
“Yes, it would be common in America. Decadence breeds anarchy.”
Shan leaned over to ask Kim in Mandarin, “Fang Hua really thinks the government can’t be behind this?”
Kim nodded, wincing a bit at the pain that made it through the Alleve she’d taken this morning.
Shan stood. “I am sorry, friends,” he said in English. “If Miss Trayne translate?”
Kim signaled for him to go ahead.
“Detective Zhan, I do not tell you this as some sort of indictment against our country. I deeply apologize for speaking out of turn. China is good and prosperous, but when you go away from the cities, when you move to the countryside, corruption is rampant. Officials prey on ignorant peasants and do terrible things.
“Zhan Fang Hua,” he said in steady, carefully picked out Mandarin, “I am the third child in my family.”
Helen stopped pacing.
“I am from a remote village south of the city. After my eldest brother turned seventeen, Mother went on antibiotics to combat an infection. Three months later, she found out she was pregnant. The local party chief and the head of the Family Planning Commission visited our house once word had spread. When they found out Father had no money to pay the fines and the bribes, they left. The next day a truck came for her.”
“You li
e,” Helen said. “They changed the rules years ago. One child is history.”
“It is in the cities. Places in the countryside didn’t know, still don’t know. Father said Mother cried for weeks over,” he choked to a stop, and then continued, “over what they did. A year later my brother was killed when the road his tractor traveled over collapsed. The bribes Father had to pay so they could have me—”
“There would be no bribes if your family was childless at the time.”
“The bribes he had to pay to get the right stamps on the right paperwork, so they could have me, forced them to sell their farm. My grandfather died of heartbreak because he would not be buried on the land he had purchased from the collective.”
Shan held up his hand when Helen sputtered into another protest.
“Detective Zhan, Fenglong sanctuary is deep in the mountains. Very few people live there. Isn’t it possible that a neo-warlord, some wayward governor, is holding Mr. Xian against his will?”
Kim’s voice ran dry keeping up with the translation. When she was done, the only sound was the sprinkler system slapping water across the gardens, spattering on nearby sidewalks. Everyone stared at Helen.
She wavered under pressure. In English she said, “I should ask my superiors for permission.”
Mike finally weighed in. “We’re not sure who we can trust now. If you ask, it may make things much worse.”
His advice at least seemed to get through to her. After a moment she nodded. “If such criminal acts are being perpetrated, they must be stopped. I will come with you. We will find and expose this corruption.”
When they got to the car, the entire group turned and stood shoulder to shoulder in a wall between Kim and the van. Helen’s hologram joined in, arms crossed, her stern expression only a little ruined by the scenery Kim could see through it.
“Come on guys, move aside. Driver coming through.”
Tonya was all business. “No, Kim, not this time.”
Spencer agreed. “If we’re going to do this, we need to be discreet.”
Right. Baiju Boy was lecturing her on discretion. Clenching her jaw shot hot spikes through her teeth. “Really?”
Mike joined in. “Really, Kim. We have to blend in at the sanctuary, and I can’t think of anything more conspicuous than you driving a Chinese van.”
One stinking thing. Kim needed one stinking little thing to get by. “I’m driving. End of discussion.” Nobody moved, which ratcheted her pulse up another two notches.
“Miss Trayne,” Shan said timidly in Mandarin, “I’m a very good driver. I grew up around here.”
“You said you grew up in the country.”
“I was born in the country. My parents moved here when I was small. Really, they’re right. You’ll attract attention if you’re behind the wheel. Please. I can do this; I want to help.”
The worst part was Shan had the keys.
No, the worst part was they were right. She yelled at the sky, loud enough to hear it echo across the park, and then slapped her hands to her sides.
“Fine! Just fine!” Kim stomped forward, making them all stumble out of her way. She climbed up and over seats to get into the back. “This one is all mine. Got it?” The doors were open, but it was still hot. “Jesus, don’t just stand there. We’ve got rescuing to do!”
*
The sanctuary itself was clean and new, just like every other part of China they’d seen so far. The bamboo formed thick green walls around wide, slate-gray concrete footpaths. They were about fifteen hundred feet higher than the city, so the air was cooler, but her clothes still clung from the humidity. Spending time in a city full of shallow sewers let her appreciate the clean air. She’d gotten used to downtown Chengdu’s stench.
Kim organized her armor as a tour bus pulled up behind their car. The babble of tourists followed quickly, German this time.
“Oh,” a delicate, familiar, female voice said in lightly accented English, “Hi, Mike!”
Kim stood up very slowly. It was the interpreter from Leshan, the one who’d put her card in Mike’s pocket. She was very small and very pretty—next to her, Kim was a fat, hairy barbarian.
“Wow, Sally!” Mike laughed. “Small world!”
“I know! I had such a good time last night!”
That’s what he’d been doing while she was contacting Ozzie, almost getting her teeth knocked out. Mike had gone on a date.
He smiled easily at her, at Sally, like she was the most charming thing in the world. The girl practically melted into his arms.
Spencer had been trying to get her attention, but whatever he wanted to say died when Kim looked at him. It didn’t matter. Suck it in. Ice princess all the way. The girl blanched at Kim’s approach. Her assessment of Sally jumped up a few notches when she backed away from Mike like he was radioactive.
If only.
Mike asked, “What?”
Kim kept her voice steady, barely. “I’m very happy you two had a good time last night, but we have a job to do. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”
“Kim, it wasn’t like that; we all went bowling.”
Whatever. She was encased in ice. There was a job to do, and the rest of them could chew on her frost.
It made slipping into old habits easier. Six years after retiring as a professional thief, Kim still knew how to case a target. Unfortun-ately, nobody else did. They were supposed to split up and check out various parts of the sanctuary. Instead, they concentrated on the wrong thing.
Tonya found her first. “Kim, really. It wasn’t a big deal. We were having fun.”
“You need to find where the exits are, and don’t talk so loud.”
Spencer’s version of inconspicuous apparently included being shooed away by guards. He was also hopeless at lying. “Kim, fuck, Mike is an idiot, but I was the one who invited Sally.”
“You need to locate the quantum nexus,” she whispered to him while they watched the pandas play on a gray-green hill.
Shan, at least, seemed to be on the same page. “Miss Trayne. Did you see the infants?” He pointed out not only the baby pandas, but also the cameras and guard posts. He was a lot more observant than she’d counted on. In case anyone was watching, Kim made sure to be deeply fascinated by whatever he said.
Helen had been with Kim last night instead of out having fun. When she contacted Kim about what she’d found of the area’s realmspace connections, Kim asked if she had gone on the bowling trip, too.
“No, I wasn’t with them. I wasn’t invited.”
“But you can go anywhere, be in more than one place at once.”
“Only if I concentrate, and only if I’m ready for it. Surely Mike explained this to you?”
Mike hadn’t explained much to her lately, that much was certain. “No, he never mentioned anything like that.”
“We don’t exist everywhere at once. We’re not gods. Splitting is a conscious decision for us, and it’s not easy. One of my first jobs was working realm security for the New Shanghai Olympics. Splitting reminded me most of what synchronized swimmers do, or perhaps the relay racers. Maybe both at once.” She sighed. “It’s complicated.”
Kim was sitting in the middle of a panda sanctuary, in China, trying to free someone else who couldn’t be touched, still nail-spitting mad at Mike, and this one talked about complicated.
Helen cocked her head. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nevermind.” The professional inside clicked back into gear. “What have you found?”
A little later, Kim gathered them all up for summaries and planning at the preserve’s veranda over lunch. “I don’t like this.”
“What’s wrong?” Tonya asked.
“It’s too easy. Someone being held captive isn’t going to be stuck in the center of a bamboo forest full of pandas. Spencer even got busted by the guards,” she ignored the indignant gasp, “and they haven’t bothered reconfiguring the security grid at all.” The whole thing made her itch.
“I disagree.�
� Helen’s holo leaned over the map floating on their tea table. “The realm connection is much larger than they’d need to just monitor pandas. It’s like I’m wandering alone inside an airplane hangar out here.” With a flick of her fingers, markers for all the cameras Shan had found sprang to life. “Pandas don’t need a perimeter like this either. On the other hand, I checked, and the sanctuary’s security detail is a joke. I could scoop a dozen pandas up with a remote-controlled bulldozer and be out of the mountains before anyone stopped me. I hate to say it, but you’re right. This is some cheap warlord or corrupt governor. No wonder Ozzie’s so rude. If my records are correct, he’s lived here his whole life.”
Kim couldn’t believe Helen would risk such a security breach. “Please tell me you didn’t do searches for this.”
“Give me some credit, Kim. I’m a graduate of the People's Armed Police Force Academy. We know how to run searches without setting off alarms.”
“Well,” Shan said, slurping through his noodles, “what’s our next move?”
They set out for the most likely entrance to Ozzie’s prison.
Back in the day, Kim never would have called her original crew, The Machine, professional. Mark was a klutz, Lourdes kept fussing over her shoes, Michiko tried to be a ninja, and the rest would mutter “hut, hut, hut” under their breath and laugh.
That said, they were freaking Ocean’s Eleven compared to what she had to work with now. Keeping everyone coordinated and going to the same place was at least three times harder than it should’ve been.
“Spencer, stay low. Shan, look out for the cameras. Tonya, against the tree, now!”
Mike was the worst. He could vanish in broad daylight. Had vanished in broad daylight. And she was still incredibly pissed at him. “Damn it, Mike, where are you?”
“Bull’s-eye five o’clock, thirty meters.”
They’d made Ozzie’s prison the center of their map, and all references were to that point. Once this was over, she’d have to compliment Mike on the idea. He was to her right, about a hundred feet ahead. He broke cover to wave at her.
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