The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

  But I can’t abandon Kora. Although the sight of her doesn’t exactly cheer me up, she could be the one to save the Grist sisters and everything we hold in our bald brains from the time before. I need to know about the hand, in case somewhere in her is a bit of me, a bit of us, the deep blue genes of the grandmothers who did not make it out of Saltwater City.

  I hear boots tromp in the hallway, louder with each step. I take a deep breath. I reach in to grab her good left hand, but she darts out of reach.

  “Freaky Gristie doctor. Get away!” She punches furiously at the buttons. The doors begin to slide shut.

  The boots click louder. I hurl myself into the elevator, hit zero, and grab her arm.

  “Let go of me!”

  “I’m not going to let them take you. Whatever they’re doing here, you’ll be fodder for it.”

  Kora’s eyes grow round. “I saw them,” she says. “I saw my mother and uncle.”

  The short girl who first brought Kora to me told me that her family were all dead, except her brother.

  “Impossible,” I say, and grab her arm now, while her guard is down. The elevator comes to zero, and the doors slide open. I can still hear the boots from three floors below, tromp tromp tromp. “Come on! Do you hear those boots?”

  She whimpers. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand either. But this is not a good place.” I continue to pull. She digs the spikes of her nasty boots into the elevator floor. She might look sickly, but she is strong.

  “Come on! I know you don’t trust me, but believe me, you are better off with me than you are here.”

  “Let go of me. You creep me out!” She yanks her left hand away from me. Grabs the rail at the back of the elevator.

  I lean in and snatch her injured right. She howls. It must hurt like the dickens. I don’t care. I keep pulling. “Come on!”

  “You’ve helped me plenty, thank you very much. I saw them. I have to help them. Let go of me, you horrible Mother-cursèd Gristie!”

  “Don’t speak about Our Mother like that!” If she’s not the one I need, then to hell with her. I’ll find out right now. I unpin the bandage and give it a yank. It unravels in one long reeking piece.

  There, at the end of a slimy grey stump, grows exactly what I’d hoped. A new hand. Small and raw, it is nevertheless perfectly formed. Praise be to Our Mother! A new starfish. My heart aches for home.

  Kora Ko stares too. “What have you done to me, witchy Gristie! What hideous Grist magic is this?”

  Hope makes me twice as strong. I grip her wrist tight. “Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

  “Let go! I’m not coming with you!”

  The boots tromp louder.

  “Come with me—”

  “Never.”

  “Anything you want, just name it and it’s yours.”

  “Can you bring Wai and Charlotte back?”

  I grip her wrist tighter still.

  “No? I didn’t think so. Can you kill Marcus Traskin for me?”

  “Who’s Marcus Traskin?”

  “That crazy, scaly old man up on the dais.”

  The boots have arrived at ground zero. They are so close now. “You want Marcus Traskin’s head, Kora? Why?”

  “His death will bring my mother and uncle back. So I’ll do it. With this weird monster hand you put on me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let go of me, you hideous, disgusting Gristie!”

  I don’t see it coming.

  She leans in and bites my arm.

  “Little mother!” I thump her head so hard.

  But she doesn’t let go.

  I feel the skin break. I feel blood gush. “Stop biting me!”

  Still she digs her teeth in.

  “Look, I’ll help you, okay?” I hit her again, but the teeth go deeper. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it. Just—teeth out!”

  She raises her face, mouth all bloody, like a Mother-cursèd vampire from stories of the time before. “Whatever I want?”

  “If you come with me after.” My bitten arm hurts like heck, and blood seeps from the wound, but I don’t want to let go of her wrist to staunch it.

  Tromp tromp tromp tromp. The boots are at the corner. I’d rather not get involved, but I need my new starfish.

  “Say it.”

  “I’ll help you kill Marcus Traskin. Okay? Now can I let go of you without you running away from me?”

  Tromp tromp tromp tromp.

  She shrugs, then nods.

  “All right then.” I look her in the eye.

  She looks back and keeps nodding.

  I let go.

  She releases the rail and we run run run, fast as our short legs will carry us. Behind us, the boots tromp faster and louder. We hear them turn down another corridor and their noise diminish. There are voices ahead. We duck into a side corridor and wait for them to pass. Somehow, we make all the correct turns. Hustle quick as winter rabbits, straight to the tin-can tiger’s mouth.

  THE MOUTH OF THE TIN-CAN TIGER IS PACKED WITH MEN—ALL WEARING the dark blue uniforms of Arm-a-Gideon Security. But the men’s heads are shaggy and jammed with scales. This is not the return of Arm-a-Gideon.

  “Form a line! Form a line!” I hear their marshal shouting.

  Outside, it’s raining, windy, and brutal dark. The people look miserable. Above the clamour, coughing, and hawking, a woman’s plaintive voice: “My husband has no time to form a line. He’s got mere hours. Please …”

  Three young women—her daughters, maybe—raise a plank above their heads, atop which lies a thin and wasted creature covered with a tattered blanket. The rain falls without mercy upon the gaunt shape.

  “Form a line!” the marshal shouts. “Form a line, or he has mere minutes!” The tiger soldiers raise rifles from a stash perhaps belonging to the militia that used this parkade as a staging area a hundred years ago.

  The motley mob stretches back down the road as far as I can see. We are not going to escape out the tiger’s mouth.

  The boots are almost on us. Tromp tromp tromp tromp.

  I pull my new starfish into the shadows. She’s fiddling with something. “We have to go back,” she says.

  “What you got there?”

  “An open scale.”

  “I have one of those too.” I reach into my pocket to see if it’s still there.

  “It was my brother’s invitation to this place. Now there’s a message. Or something. There’s just a point on a map of the Pacific Pearl. It’s blinking. I think my brother needs help.”

  “How do you know it’s from your brother?”

  “He gave me the scale. This kind only works from one person to another in a single direction.”

  “Didn’t your brother just try to kill you?” I don’t understand fully what that awkward boy is up to, but whatever it is is not nice.

  She hesitates. “He tried something strange and not entirely loyal.”

  “So to hell with him! Let’s go.”

  She follows me, out of the shadows again, but her feet drag. “He might be in danger.” She casts a map from the scale into the air—very pale so as not to draw attention. It shows precisely where her brother is with a blinking orange dot.

  “Looks like a trap to me,” I say flatly. “Forget about him. He doesn’t love you. Let’s go before it’s too late.”

  “Of course he loves me, you ignorant Gristie,” Kora says.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay. But we are going to find him.”

  “By Our Mother’s feet, why?”

  “He’s the only family I have left.”

  The hallway is impossibly dark. We scuttle down it like crabs, feeling our way. My hand brushes something and there’s a clattering noise. I hurry farther, not wanting to know what toxin or danger I’ve unleashed in Traskin’s unsettling hellhole.

  “Wait, wait!” calls Kora Ko. She presses one of the fallen objects into my hand. “These are infrared go
ggles. We learned about this in Dark Spaces dance class.”

  What is this place? I pull them over my head, and Kora does the same. A rabbit warren of back passages lies before us.

  In the distance, I hear groaning. I don’t want to know about it. I choose a passage that moves away from the noise, one that might lead to a quieter exit. But Kora pulls me towards the noise. “That’s where the map points. It must be him. He’s in trouble for letting me go.”

  “By the sweet blue light of Eng. We can’t help him.”

  The groaning grows louder.

  “We have to try,” the girl says.

  I allow myself to be led down a very narrow hall. Halfway down, there’s a door on which, somewhere in the mists of time, the word “Electrical” was painted. I help the girl pry it open. In the small, dimly lit space, tied to a chair and firmly gagged, sits a young man, a boy, really, who looks very much like Kora Ko—at least, as much as any Salty breeder can look like another.

  “K2,” she whispers. Then she turns to me. “I told you. My brother.”

  He continues to moan, but softly.

  We untie him, pull the gag off, attempt to help him up. He doesn’t budge.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I say.

  The boy says, “I’m staying. I’m thinking.”

  “K2, have you lost your mind?” Kora says. “Let’s please get out of here!”

  “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “You signalled me.”

  “I did not signal you. Remember we said we’d go our separate ways? You’re interfering.”

  “I’m helping you!”

  “I have a decision to make.”

  Kora says, “You’re not making any sense, big brother. We need to get out of here now. Isabelle Chow has Charlotte and Wai at a place called Quay D’Espoir on Eng, and we need to take out Marcus Traskin to keep them safe.”

  The boy chuckles, too bitterly for one who has seen the new monsoons only twenty times. “Marcus Traskin has a cure for the flu. He is going to save Saltwater City. He is a hero, and you should want him to live. We all should. I’m a tiger man now. I have a direction, a place, a way to live now. Don’t you see?”

  “Tiger man, my eye. If you’re a tiger man, how come you’re tied up and screaming? You’re a child. You have no respect. Didn’t you hear me? We need to help Charlotte and Wai. So can you please forget your silly boy delusion and come with us now? Or we’ll tie you back to the chair, I swear we will.”

  “Charlotte and Wai would be okay if Marcus took control of Eng …”

  “Is that what you think? Marcus Traskin is not a good man.”

  “Marcus Traskin is a victim of our family’s greed. If they had stopped breeding those tigers, if they had stopped making that wine …”

  “What tigers, what wine? Grandpa’s time is over.” Kora throws up both her old left hand and her new right one.

  “Where do you think all of Uncle Wai’s precious jars came from, Kora? You think he was just some sweet old rooftop gardener growing cabbages and potatoes to survive the coming apocalypse? You’re naive, you’re a child—no, you’re wilfully ignorant. You see only what you want to see and close your eyes to all the rest.”

  “What rest?” Her eyes bug wide, and so do mine.

  “Tiger farms, Kora. And tiger-bone wine factories, hidden all through Saltwater City and the quarantine rings. All operating smooth as silk. You think I was working at an elk farm? Why do you think the flu epidemic keeps getting worse? They are making it worse and trying to export it to the UMK. It’s not just hangover trauma from some time long past. It’s happening over and over again, right now. For the love of Chang, how could you not know?!”

  The girl stares at him. “It can’t be true.” Her tendril scales writhe atop her head, cogitating.

  “You know it’s true, or you wouldn’t deny it so hard, sister. You know it’s true.”

  The scales quiver. Kora doesn’t know what to think. She closes her eyes, then draws in a great breath of air. “Please come with us.”

  “Not a bad idea, boy,” I say. I want out of here, and I want the new pink hand to come.

  “Can’t. You just helped me make up my mind. Tie me back up. Marcus has made me a wonderful offer. I have a debt to pay and a gift to receive. I’ll take my chances with the tiger men.”

  “You’re a fool,” I mutter.

  “We’re not going to tie you back up, you idiot!” she wails.

  He sits back down in the small wooden chair, so hard that it scrapes back several inches along the dry floor. “I’m waiting,” he says.

  “I’ll do it,” I say.

  “Don’t hurt him, please, Dr Gristie,” says Kora in a very small voice.

  “Kirilow,” I say. “Call me Kirilow.”

  33

  PERFECT MONEY MACHINE

  KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: MINOR HEAT

  DAY: 3

  THE LOCKSTEP CLIP OF BOOTS IN THE HALLWAY INTENSIFIES, LEFT right left right. Kora watches the hands of the Gristie doctor wind rope around K2 and his chair, tie an elegant and practised knot, then wind again.

  Tromp tromp tromp tromp.

  “Hurry up, or they’ve got us for sure.”

  Kirilow’s hands fly.

  Left right, tromp tromp. But which direction is the noise coming from?

  “I’m outta here,” says Kora.

  She makes for the door. In an instant, the Gristie doctor is behind her. Kora pulls on her infrared goggles, opens the door, looks left. Already, Traskin’s police are rounding the corner. She turns right. Oh no. The men are coming from both the left and the right.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” says Kora. Now what? They pull back into the electrical room. There is nowhere to hide.

  “Filthy, traitorous Salty,” Kirilow hisses at K2.

  Kora just stares at him, not comprehending.

  K2 says, “I’m sorry, I had to make a choice.”

  Kora’s tendril scales shudder and undulate. The flat ones vibrate and shimmer a horrified blue. “You sold me out? My own brother?”

  K2 shrugs. “I’m saving your life. What more do you want from me?”

  “I should have left you to those wild dogs.”

  “You think I owe you? I saved you from the LïFT.”

  Tromp tromp tromp tromp. The beasts are at the door.

  “You at least owe me an explanation.”

  The door flies open.

  “I control the tiger farms now, Kora,” K2 pronounces, so arrogant smug. “Kai Tak left them to me, on the condition that I dispose of you, our whore of a mother, and that adulterer, your father, Kai Wai. Now that Everest is dead, Kai Tak’s invited me to run Jemini with him. That means we can clone as many test subjects as Marcus wants for the LïFT upload. And we control the wine factories. That means we can infect as many desperate flu birds as we want. And Marcus Traskin controls the cure. So we can make those suckers pay and pay and pay some more to save their precious little minds, if not their bodies. We have built a perfect money machine. Together, we will be the richest and greatest men in Saltwater City, as well as on Chang. In time, we will capture Eng too. We will be kings!” His eyes glow beatifically. “I do love you, sister. I wouldn’t have done it for anything less.”

  “You don’t love me!” says Kora. “You’ve run out of both love and sense.” Her voice is level, but her emerald eyes are gassing out in rage. “What will you spend your money on if everyone is dead?”

  A burly guard yanks Kora’s hands behind her back. A slender but unexpectedly strong one grabs Kirilow.

  Kirilow horks a great wad of phlegm up from the depths of her lungs and spits in K2’s eye. The glob of mucus slides wetly down his cheek, hangs on his chin, then plops to the floor.

  “I am the grandchild of Lennox Ko too,” Kora whispers, so soft that Kirilow can barely hear. “So part of those dirty factories is mine.”

  A third guard, one with the round face of a baby, clips handcuffs to her wrists, but
her new right hand is too small to stop it from sliding off. A fourth man produces rope, and the baby-faced one binds Kora’s arms behind her back at the elbow.

  “Charlotte and Wai wanted better things for you,” K2 says. “That’s why you were sent to the Cordova School. Lennox Ko willed Jemini to his younger son, Kai Tak. Then to Kai Tak’s eldest son, Everest. And then to me, in the event of their deaths. Only then to you.”

  The guard who provided the rope now draws a set of leg shackles from his black bag. He and Babyface bind Kora’s legs together.

  Kora’s dirty scale tendrils wave at the injustice. “Better things? We were slowly starving to death. Why would he will Jemini to his younger son?”

  “Because Uncle Wai is a wife-stealer.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Kora says, as two booted men grab her, hands hooked in armpits. “Old Lennox willed it to Uncle Wai, didn’t he?” They begin to drag her away. “I bet he did. I know he did! And he’s my father—” What she’s always half known now dawns on her as gut knowledge. The tendril scales wave in righteous indignation. Through her N-lite fog she see a garden of earthen jars. Her vision sharpens as her mind’s eye shows her Kai Wai and Charlotte on the rooftop of the old Woodward’s Building. She sees the dead goat swinging from the roof of its shed. She sees Charlotte whirl a tattered tiger rug above her head. Run! her father-uncle shouts in her head.

  Life after life

  After life after

  “He’s still alive,” she breathes.

  “Not for much longer, beloved sister. Not Kai Wai and not Charlotte. And in the meantime, they can’t exactly run the factories, can they? You behave now. If you don’t, I’ll be forced to kill you too.”

  34

  LONELY TIME

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: MINOR HEAT

  DAY: 3

  DEEP IN THE BOWELS OF THE PACIFIC PEARL PARKADE OUR LEGS ARE unbound and we are thrown into a damp cement room that reeks of fish and ammonia. We are supposed to be grateful that the dirty Salty boy K2 Ko has allowed us to live. How did this happen to me? All I wanted was a new starfish for New Grist Village. And to get my mother double back. I didn’t ask for Peristrophe Halliana to come back from the dead. Is Old Glorybind alive and well at Quay D’Espoir on Eng with Kora’s mother and father? It’s more likely she’s a captive on Marcus Traskin’s Chang. In mind only, without her body. I can hardly bear to think of it. I’d rather think of her as dead. This strange killing and rebirthing is Salty business. We Grist sisters have no faith in such things. If the body is dead, then so is the woman, whatever these occultist Salties think they have copied. Our Mother of fish and roses, I prayed for what I thought I could reasonably have, not for everything I ever wanted. Why do you treat me this way?