Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

  “Told you he was voo-doo,” said the older kid.

  Fixx frowned and fingered the bones, nudging them a little, considering the patterns. Things had not improved; if anything, the bones told him it was worse. Quickly, he scooped them up, destroying the message. Ahead of the boat, the grey arc of the Hyperdome was becoming visible behind the buildings and Fixx stood up, scanning the sides of the boulevard for a place to alight. The original stadium that stood there had collapsed years ago, brought down by the surge tides fanned by Hurricane Mandy; the replacement sat like a dark jewel in the heart of Newer Orleans, cupped in a setting of murky waters.

  A hovercraft coming the other way floated closer and Fixx stepped on to the stern. He gave the boys a look over his shoulder. “I got some advice for your dad, when he wakes up. You tell him you’ll have more fun over the Gulf at DisneyCity.”

  “You’re going to kill someone?” asked the younger lad.

  “Never can tell,” said Fixx, and leapt to the other vessel.

  The girl’s face was reflected everywhere he looked. Holos of her dancing in the evening air over the curve of the ’dome, fly-posters in fluorescent shades three or four layers thick on the walls, her eyes winking from video billboards. Then there were the people. Men and women dressed as her, hair in various imitations of her auburn topknot, the faux-Egyptian eye make-up from her first album or the gothcore look she sported for the second disc. The crowds were a funhouse mirror for the girl, a thousand copies of her tall and short, fat and thin, dark and light. It was like a net had been cast through the universe, pulling together every alternate version that could, did or might have existed, gathering them here to coalesce at the feet of the one true original. The actual, the real, the genuine article.

  At first, the girl seemed to be a hazy idea at the edge of his mind, the vague concept of a person distant and removed, thin as smoke, fading whenever he tried to concentrate on her. But as time passed, she filled in. The sketch of her grew depth and presence, moving slowly from his deep dreams to moments awake when his mind wandered. She was coming closer, he realised, and with her she dragged a bleak thread of something that his conscious mind shied away from. The girl was connected in a way that she did not comprehend, and Joshua slowly began to understand that it was his purpose to show her how. He had jobs to do—real jobs, paying cases and ongoing investigations—but none of those kept him awake at night, cold and sweating. This was an affair of an entirely different sort.

  Fixx made no eye contact with any of the copies. He found them distracting, and this matter was of enough seriousness to him that he wanted nothing to cloud his path. He took a ticket from the pocket of a person deep in argument with a T-shirt vendor, and pressed on to the Hyperdome’s entrance.

  Over the doors in red neon letters eight metres tall, Juno Qwan told the world that she was in Newer Orleans for one night only.

  The dull reports of the support group’s climactic number built and built, reaching down through the backstage spaces in hollow, confused echoes. On the wall inside the wings, the countdown clock to the main event was inching ever closer to zero, and the tech crew were scrambling over the last few mike checks and hook-ups. There had already been six fatalities among the staff on the tour and they were itchy with short-timer’s fever. Newer Orleans was the last stop, and after they were done here tonight they would leave America behind.

  Heywood Ropé tasted the vibe in the air, the adrenaline scent messages from the roadies thick about him. They parted before the slim man, desperate to be seen to be busy, not one of them caught at rest. Good. These weeks on the road together had bred only more fear of him, and that was exactly how he wanted it to be. He reached the platform behind the stage where the band were shaking themselves down, thumbing a couple of capsules or applying derms inside their sleeves as need be. The forever-placid cast of his face tightened a little, revealing the hard lines of the skull beneath.

  “Where is she?”

  None of them answered. They all just looked in the direction of the dressing room, some sighing, others frowning.

  For one blinding instant, Ropé wanted to reach out and break someone’s neck; anyone, he didn’t care whose. A bullet of hot anger smashed into him, smouldering. His hands clenched into fists. He was so sick and tired of ministering to these pathetic children, with their paltry and ridiculous addictions, their idiotic fears and emotional fragility. In that second, he longed to stride back to the tour bus and remove the Glock subgun secreted in his luggage and start culling them. Gentiles, he thought. I loathe you all.

  Instead, he slammed an iron shutter over those feelings and produced a thin smile that never went beyond his lips. “Fine,” he said aloud. Ropé knocked once on Juno’s door and entered, locking it behind him.

  There was little light inside. Most of the bulbs around the makeup table were inert, shattered and sparking. The mirrors were all gone, reduced to jagged shards. Juno looked up at him as he came closer, just for a moment, and then returned to her task at hand. She was using part of a chair leg to grind the broken bits of mirror into smaller and smaller pieces. Juno had already worked a lot of the glass into powdery fines that glittered all over the red carpet floor.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ll be out when I’m finished. I just have to break all the mirrors in the world first.”

  A sigh escaped him. Apart from that incident in the limo on the way to the studios in Chicago, there had been no sign of anything approaching this level of instability. Ropé realised reluctantly that she must have been storing it up, getting away with small, concealable things like bouts of self-harm.

  “Juno,” he said. “You’re on, darling. Everyone is waiting.” As if on cue, the crowd out in the dome roared as the pre-show video started up. He offered her his hand.

  Her perfect face watched him, clouded with animal fear. She was wearing the schoolgirl outfit from the “Locker Room Heart” video: the exaggerated pigtails, the microskirt and bobbysox had scored huge numbers with the lolita-complex fans. “They love me. They’ll understand.”

  “Understand what, sweetie?”

  “I saw it.” She tapped her temple, and Ropé noticed that her fingers were bleeding. “The sky tearing open. All these things flying out.” She made fluttery gestures with her hands. “A big mouth full of screaming teeth. It wants to eat the world. Darkness. All the worms and the people tearing up—”

  “Juno.” Ropé reached into his pocket and removed a leather case. “Perhaps we could talk about this another time.” The case opened like a book, with a puff of cold vapour. Inside there was a device that resembled the grip and trigger of a pistol, but instead of a breech and barrel there was a glass tube ending in a micropore mesh. The case had a small nest of ampoules next to the device, and Ropé loaded one into the tube.

  She came to her feet in a rush, the chair leg shivering in her hands. “I don’t need that.”

  “Juno, love.” He concentrated on the words to make them utterly kind, totally without any accusation or venom. “I don’t want you to be upset. I care about you too much for that. It makes me sad to see you like this.”

  “Heywood, you do believe me, don’t you?” The chair leg drooped. “I can see these things, sometimes in the day now, not just in dreams.” Her eyes unfocussed. She was exploring the thought. “Mirrors. I’m going to be killed by mirrors.”

  “Juno, you’re a star, and stars are immortal. They can’t be killed by anything.”

  She looked at him again, this time clear-eyed. “Okay. Put that away and I’ll come out.”

  He smiled, guiding the device back to his pocket. “Look, I’m putting it away.”

  Juno dropped the chair leg and came to him for a hug. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be any trouble—”

  “I know,” he said in a fatherly voice. When she had both hands around him, Ropé grabbed her pigtails and wrenched her head backward. She started to scream, but the noise died in her throat as the injector de
vice chugged where it touched her jugular. A shot of electric blue fluid vanished into her bloodstream and Juno staggered back a step, her eyes hazing.

  Ropé spat and put the device away. “The show must go on,” he told her.

  “Yes,” she said thickly, her doll-like face brightening. “Oh. Yes.”

  Inside the Hyperdome it was blood-warm and moist with the exhalations of a capacity crowd. Juno Qwan’s star was still climbing and with a string of international hits and another album on the way, the petite Chinese singer had all the hallmarks of becoming a cross-genre smash. The music wasn’t Fixx’s cup of tea, though. It lacked soul by his lights, it seemed bereft of meaning; but he was clearly in the minority tonight. The sanctioned operative moved through the outer edges of the crowd as “Locker Room Heart” belted out across the stadium. The lights went down and came back again in flashes of colour, spinning strobe wheels and trailer spots sweeping the crowd like searchlights over a writhing human sea. From above, concealed in the steel rafters of the ’dome, misting nozzles cast a fine, cool haze over the throng. The towering holos of Juno glittered in the vapour, the giant doppelgangers following her every move.

  Fixx saw her up on the stage, strutting and moving with her dancers, faking sexual positions with the backing vocalists. The band segued into “Bitch Queen” and “The Future is Now” before she threw off the schoolgirl outfit and changed tack. The atmosphere became sultry and intimate with a cover of “When the Night Comes”, calming the crowd. Fixx moved slowly and carefully through the ranks of Juno’s fans, letting the Brownian motion of their enrapt swaying push him ever closer to the rails of the mojo barrier surrounding the stage.

  He crossed into the main mass of people and without warning his path was blocked by a hooded guy with a sleeper wand and a meshweave shirt that said Venue Security. The man rose from the waves of fans, one hand pressed to an ear bead, the other pointing the wand. The guard spoke but the music was too loud to hear a word of it. The letters on his top changed into a tickertape marquee.

  Where the **** are you going? scrolled across the shirt, an automatic censor routine kicking in. Many of Juno’s fans were pre-teens.

  Fixx pointed toward the stage as she started to sing the love song “Paper Sunday”.

  Let bee sea your ticket, sun.

  The audio pickup on the guard’s throat wasn’t doing the job properly. Fixx produced the pass he’d stolen and handed it over. When the man’s eyes dropped, he pushed forward.

  What the duck? The guard went to grab him and jab with the arcing tip of the sleeper wand; Fixx turned his wrist and disarmed the man. With a knuckle, the operative struck a nerve point near the security guard’s clavicle and the man dropped to the floor. Uuuuuuuuuu.

  Next came “Halo Kisses” and then Juno did a piece off the unreleased album called “Apple/Eye”. Fixx reached the edge of the general admission crowd and pressed into the thick of the hardcore fans, a hundred bodies deep in the mosh pit. Juno’s spotlight died and everything went dark.

  “Zen, zen,” sang the girl. “I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice.” The crowd erupted into a storm of cheers and Fixx blinked as he felt a light rain on his face. “Touch” was the song that had made her career, the hit that had stayed at number one on the Billboard chart like it had been nailed there. “I’m the perfect smile,” Juno crooned, the Hyperdome singing with her. “Touch my thoughts and flow, there’s no world we can’t know.”

  As the bassline kicked in, the stage went supernova white. Lasers fanned across the arena, cutting shapes, numbers and letters into the misty air. The holograms of Juno morphed and changed, flickering between her different outfits. Her face came forward off the holotank podium and wove patterns of fire above them. People cried out in surprise and tried to touch them. Angels. Fixx could see angels up there, made from glass and light.

  The skin across his face was tingling and Fixx shook his head, hard. When he ran his fingers through his close-cropped step-cut they came back wet. The artificial rain was warm, speckling the shoulders of his coat. He could see some people tipping their heads back and welcoming it with outspread arms.

  “Sea of stones, sand waves,” Juno’s voice echoed in his skull. “Harmony, come with me.”

  “This is wrong,” he said aloud, but his voice vanished into the roar of the crowds.

  “Taste the blue,” sang the girl, each word a shock to his heart.

  The glass angels in the rafters fell toward the crowds and as they came they changed; bright wings became masses of writhing serpents and faces fell apart into knots of maggoty flesh. Fixx struggled to find his guns but the press of people about him was so great he could barely move. Juno was still singing, and in the spaces between the words a woman in lolicon gingham shouted “Isn’t she great?” into his ear, wild with the thrill of it all. “My eyes are golden!”

  “Star at dawn, bubble in the stream. Zen, zen, I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice.”

  The laser fans turned to ropes of blue and green fire. Crossing in the air, the beams fell into the masses and laid lines of screaming, burning bodies in their wake. The smell of burnt flesh reached Fixx’s nostrils and sense memory engulfed him in a flood. For one shuddering instant, he was—

  —there with Cajun Pork Cathy and her Longpig Boyz out on the rusted Gulf Coast oilrigs as they did the work of the Dark Ones, turning ferryboat passengers into chum for Deseret’s blood rites. His guns hot in his hands. Cathy’s head clean off at the neck. Crimson fountain. The Queen of Cups, inverted. Screaming. The meat smell.

  Fixx snapped back as the crowd picked him up. He was driftwood in the swell, the panic alive about him. The operative shouldered against the flow and slid back, standing his ground as the screaming hordes washed around him. The lasers sputtered and shrieked, darts of murderous coherent light striking like thunderbolts. The angel-things fluttered and shredded into storms of snakes, vanishing as they fell or slithering into shadows.

  As “Touch” reached its crescendo and faded, the sound of sirens pealed over the crash of feet and breaking glass. Fixx shook his head, the wet fog clutching at his mind, making him feel drunk and slow. Fat droplets spattered about on the floor, sparkling in the spotlights.

  More men in the talking shirts were sweeping Juno and the band off the stage. Impossibly, there were fans in the circles and the skyboxes on their feet and applauding, tears of elation streaming down their faces. Fixx threw himself at the mojo barrier and fell short, rebounding off the metal with a tingle from the stunner field.

  Juno Qwan saw him. She turned and looked at him with those eyes, the porcelain face that clogged every instant of television airtime, every billboard and viddy. Fixx tried to find her name but his throat tightened. The girl looked down on him, beatific and empty.

  Then the men in hoods were taking her away, and darkness settled inside the dome like the end of the world.

  Tze discarded the suit like a shed skin and dressed himself once more in the kingly robes of blue and gold. The only conceit to the present day world were the handmade Italian shoes beneath the flaring curve of fabric. There were many vices that Mr Tze granted himself, but sometimes the simplest were the ones that provided the most pleasure. The shoes fitted him as perfectly as if he had been born with them, and with a sigh playing about his lips, the CEO of Yuk Lung Heavy Industries dismissed Deer Child and gathered himself.

  He viewed the painting of the battle at Tsing-hsien on the far wall, cocking his head so that the clock concealed in the artwork became visible. Time, then. Time to consult once more with the players in the game.

  Tze spoke a command word and the window glass went opaque, painting the room with thick pools of shadow where the light of the lanterns failed to reach. The door opened to admit the Hi woman and he gave her a cursory nod.

  “Sir,” she replied, her mechanical smile snapping on, then off.

  Tze glanced at his hand, the one he had used to press Francis Lam’s fingers into the blades of the ghost knife. �
�We have a moment before we begin…”

  “The augurs report a perfect match, sir.” She knew what questions he had before they were voiced. Tze liked that about Phoebe Hi. It was one of the reasons why she wasn’t dead. “Genotype correlation is very good. Professor Tang was positively beaming when he gave me the news.”

  “I imagine he was,” Tze noted dryly. “Where is Francis now?”

  “Alice has taken him to Alan’s apartment. She suggested we allow him to take the residence for himself. A good solution. Far easier than setting up another secured environment from scratch.”

  Tze nodded. “Commend her. Forward thinking should be rewarded.” In the middle of the room was a shallow ceremonial bowl. The executive mumbled a cantrip beneath his breath and bit into his knuckle, letting a couple of drops of blood fall into the brass basin. “Link,” he said to the air, and from hidden slots in the ceiling a cluster of projector heads emerged on silent spider legs.

  A series of holograms blinked into life around the room, appearing in a circle around Tze and the bowl. Most of them were human, but one or two were simple black monoliths bearing the character for “silence”. Hi found her place among them and bowed.

  Tze gave the phoenix-eye salute. “Kindred, I have good news. Our pattern continues unaffected by the trials of recent days.”

  “That is gratifying to hear,” said a figure in the uniform of a general in the APRC. “Contemplation of other conclusions was very nearly implemented.”

  Tze studied the man for a moment. Other conclusions, indeed. He knew for a fact that the general had prepared an attack by stealth bomber on this building, in case Tze did not give the answer he wanted. The executive bowed. “We move forward along the path the Dragon cuts for us. His ascendance is cemented.”