Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

  The other women giggled, and began to toy with one another, taking capsules from the bowl.

  Tze rolled a blue caplet between his fingers, and despite herself Nikita licked her lips when she saw the glittering Z3N embossed on the side. There were hundreds of the pills in the receptacle.

  “Don’t be shy,” Tze smiled, offering her the tablet. The smile turned into a laugh as her free hand shot out and snatched the Z3N capsule. She washed it down with a sip of her drink.

  “Good,” he said. “We’re getting somewhere.” He nodded to the other two women. They opened a cabinet on the far wall to reveal a dozen mirror-bright arcs of surgical steel within. Giggling, they each selected a curved blade, wicked and sharp as a raptor claw. Eyes glinting, they descended to the blonde’s bare flesh and began to cut on her.

  The private chambers ranged away along the darkened corridor. Each had lights above them, some dark but most illuminated. When Frankie pressed his ear to the doors, there was nothing but silence. A chill went through him. The rooms were soundproofed. Anyone could be doing anything in there and nobody would know. He turned in place, his hand trembling, and then at random he tugged at a handle. To Frankie’s surprise, the door opened without resistance, and brought with it a draught of potent human scents. He peered in and his throat went dry.

  The room was so dimly lit that it was barely possible to be sure of what he was seeing, but he could make out the forms of men—one of them was one of the APRC officers he’d seen before, wearing nothing but his uniform jacket—coiled on the floor and snarling like animals. He saw flashes of female flesh in there, and violent rutting caught between the motions of sweating, scratched bodies. Someone was crying, and the sound of it drew Frankie’s attention to the ceiling. There was a man up there, ebony screws as fat as a finger holding him in place where they punched through his ankles and wrists. Skin hung off him in flayed strips, wet red meat showing in the half-light. The unfortunate’s face was twisted in agony, tracks of black tears crossing cheeks laced with complex scars. Frankie recognised the man: Ping, from the airport, the careless one who had lost the escort car.

  He retreated in shock, forcing the door shut, and his heart almost stopped when he realised there was someone towering over him in the corridor. A hulking mass of a man, it was another of Tze’s masked guardians.

  “Participants only,” rasped the figure. The Mask was white and black, hanging there like an apparition. The stylised face belonged to Judge Bao, a character from the Peking Opera stories of the Song Dynasty.

  “In there—” Frankie gasped.

  “What are you looking for?” said the guardian.

  “Juh-Juno—” he managed.

  Judge Bao pressed a hand into the small of his back and guided him away. “Over here, sir. I’ll take you to her.”

  Frankie stumbled on, his mind reeling, the healing scratches on his hand stinging.

  Nikita’s face was waxy with shock underneath her make-up. She was aware that her lip was trembling, and in the back of her skull she could feel the first cool tendrils of the Z3N hit unfolding. It seemed unreal, some horrific vidshow instead of a real performance happening in front of her. Tze’s women were opening up the skin of the blonde in turned petals of pale flesh. When the stink of copper touched her nostrils she gagged and stumbled back a step.

  Tze’s broad hand shot out like a striking cobra and enveloped hers where she held the glass. “No, no. You’re not going to leave.”

  She tried to deny him, but he closed his hand tighter, crushing the skin and bones. The glass made a cracking sound.

  “Don’t lie to me.” He squeezed and the glass shattered. She cried out as the fragments bit into her palm.

  Nikita looked to the others with a pleading stare, but they were busy drawing intricate shapes on each other in spilt blood, a confusion of lines and symbols.

  Tze took a handful of her blouse and ripped it off her. He drew his finger through her cut hand and used her vitae to draw a design on her trembling breast, just above her heart. Two discs, one larger than the other, connected by a line that was in turn bisected with an arc. Tze unbuttoned his shirt to show her the same shape rendered as a tattoo on his chest. The lines were made of dragons, eating each other’s tails.

  “Please don’t kill me.” She forced out the words.

  He smirked and showed her the glass rods. They were long and thin, rough-hewn. Nikita was reminded of icicles. Inside each of them was a reservoir of actinic blue liquid, glittering like stars. In spite of everything, her mouth immediately flooded with saliva.

  “Pure,” said Tze, seeing the reaction in her eyes. “A thousand times more potent than the weak tea you’re used to.” He jerked his head at the girls, who were scooping handfuls of capsules into their mouths, crunching them down like candy.

  Then he moved, quick as lightning, and buried the first of the needles through the middle of the pattern he had drawn on her. Nikita crashed to the floor, a white-hot shock rushing though her. She glanced up, hovering on the edge of awareness, in time to see Tze stab himself with the other rod.

  Nikita s world broke open, drowning her in floods of chilling blue. Tze loomed over her, a towering god wreathed in noxious smoke and shimmering darts of painful colour. From behind him, tendrils of liquid night emerged and snaked over and around his body. They stabbed out and penetrated her, rushing through her flesh and savaging her mind. She could not speak.

  Tze displayed a terrible aspect. “Greedy child. You wanted to taste my air, dared to know the glory of my world, yes? It will be my pleasure to give it you. Shall we see if your pitiful cattle-mind can grasp such beauty?”

  He dominated her senses, blotting out everything. Tze opened the Stygian halls of his psyche, and let the horrors within rush to fill her.

  Nikita looked at the truth of him in the eye, and she shattered.

  Juno blinked and realised that she hadn’t heard a word of the twittering platitudes of Phoebe Hi. She found herself staring into the depths of the champagne glass in her hand, locked on the shifting shapes of the rising bubbles. They shaded black as she watched them ascend, turning into tiny ebon pearls. “Juno?” said Phoebe. “Did you hear what I said?”

  She nodded, tearing herself away. The conversation area, raised up above the main level of the atrium, was secluded and quiet; but the singer suddenly felt enclosed in there, the long shadows around the delicate lightstands growing even as she watched them. Her stomach turned over and she shivered. Juno’s hand wandered to the back of her neck, where her skin felt cold and clammy to the touch. There at the corners of her vision, dark motes swarmed, just as they had when she tried to touch her memories of the disastrous concert. She shifted uncomfortably, the wide sofa too big around her. Juno felt lost in it, tiny and small.

  “I… I’m sorry.” She forced a smile. “Perhaps it’s just travel fatigue. ”The words seemed like a lie. Colour was bleeding out of her vision in little increments, and there was a pressure in her ears. There were only a handful of people in the room, but she felt like there were thousands crowded around her.

  “Can I get you something?” Hi was watching her carefully.

  “Juno!” She turned at the sound of Frankie’s voice—and for a moment, the gloom around her retreated. He saw the look on her face as he approached, and his kind eyes clouded. “Are… Are you okay?”

  “Better now,” she said, with genuine feeling. On an impulse, the singer put the half-full glass down on a table and stood up. “I think I’m going to retire for the night. ”

  “I’ll arrange transport to your hotel—” said Hi, but Juno shook her head.

  “No. Frankie’s taking me home.” She took his arm and guided him away.

  “I am?” he said, nonplussed.

  She almost ran as she led him by the hand up towards the helipad levels. The shroud of unease dogging her retreated, and she gave Frankie a brittle smile. “I want to go,” she said. “Please?”

  “Of course,” he replied, sens
ing her disquiet. “But I don’t have, uh, clearance for a spidercopter. ”

  “I’m Juno Qwan,”she said. “I get anything I want.”

  Hi frowned as Ropé sat in Juno’s vacated seat. He toyed with her glass. “You’re not going to intervene?”

  She sneered. “Why would I? It was my idea in the first place. It’s an ideal way to expedite two problems at once. ”

  He shook his head. “You haven’t lived with the talent as closely as I have, Phoebe. You don’t see the variables, the off-pattern behaviour.”

  “This is a necessity,” she said, an edge in her tone. “The talent will do what it is told to do.”

  Ropé covered his derision with a sip of champagne.

  When it was over, when the women began to clean themselves down, Deer Child entered and dutifully handed Mr Tze a fresh robe.

  “I have ascertained the origin of the stolen smartcard,” said the Mask. “It belonged to a grade three accounts executive in Section F. What manner of severance package would you prefer me to implement?”

  Tze gestured at the bloody walls. “Bring him up here. Keep him for our next recreation.”

  “As you wish.” Deer Child gave a slight incline of his impassive porcelain face toward Nikita’s pale, trembling form. “Disposal for this one?”

  Tze considered the question for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “Throw her back. An object lesson to be seen and considered by any other pickpockets or grade three executives with poor judgement.”

  “Your will.” Deer Child picked up the catatonic girl and carried her away.

  Tze watched them go, fingering the spot where the wound in his chest had already healed.

  See these mighty buildings, all shall be torn down, shattered, splintered, split.

  [static]

  The Earth herself will tremble and the masses will go hungry.

  Their bellies bloated, skins hanging in folds.

  The sky will open upon itself unto darkness.

  These are the birth pains. No flesh will be spared.

  No flesh will be [static]

  No lives will be spared but for the Elect. No lives but the Cabal. And they will know The Coming.

  And the Beast will task his agents to a mission to gather together their cohorts.

  The city of the sleepers will dream in their name, [static] war between the agents of blood will conclude. The new void will rise to smother the old.

  Intercepted transmission #5932–02, recorded by Maritime Offensive Force submersible Ameratsu, broadcast location unknown.

  8. Young and Dangerous

  Ko had the small of his back pressed into the corner of the holding cell, legs pulled up on the foam cot, knees to his chest, his head flat against the cold wall. With mechanical boredom he was ripping pea-sized balls of material from the mattress and flicking them across the short distance to the stainless steel toilet bolted on the far wall. The dots of foam landed in the murky, stinking bowl one after another. The plastic-coated sides of the cell were made of some kind of wipe-clean germicidal supersynthetic that was way past the need for replacement. Decades of enterprising criminals had whiled away their confinements scoring their names into the plastic or leaving obscenities that railed at their petty injustices. Mostly, the graffiti was of the kind that suggested certain law officers engage in anatomical impossibilities, or attempt sexual congress with their mothers.

  The depressing familiarity of the narrow room weighed down on the young man, and he masked a heartfelt sigh with a move of his hand, letting his fingers wander across his face and through the dark spikes of his hair. Ko carefully probed the places on his ribs and legs where the coppers had struck him. There would be a colourful horde of bruises there to greet him when he undressed.

  He considered Second Lei for a moment. How badly had he punished that half-witted fool for his arrogance? Something had opened a floodgate to every jibe and ridicule Ko had ever turned a blind eye to. He’d always thought he was big enough, cool enough to rise above that sort of thing; Ko imagined that the slights and snipes just rolled off him, vanished into the air. But that wasn’t how it went at all. On some level, deep in his marrow, he remembered every one—and when the moment came, they returned in a hurricane of fury. Even now, here in this small place, hurting and cramped, a faint smile came to Ko’s lips as he thought of how much he had enjoyed beating seven shades of shit out of that fat prick. The smile faded as he imagined what Poon and the Cheungs and the others would say about it, though. Ko had broken a Rule. Quite how or where the Rules got codified or created was beyond him. Somehow, the group would unconsciously come to accept that a certain thing was just the way it was, that certain words or deeds would not come to pass within the sphere of their tribe. Mouthy, overconfident Second was a living avatar of that mindset. He was the self-styled big dog of the Pak Sha Road Posse, a braggart whose only real superiority over the rest of the gang was that he had slightly more money than the rest of them. Truth be known, if Second was so damn cool, then why the hell was he hanging out on street corners, fucking kogals and hustling Z3N? Second’s ambition ranged to getting recruited into the 14K triad and that was about it. Ko didn’t dwell on the fact that his own life goals were even less defined.

  The weird state of grace in the group, the idiotic dynamic of it, the whole thing seemed progressively dumber the longer Ko thought about it. Second didn’t deserve to be the top gun. He had a good car, sure, but he wasn’t that hot on the road; he was like the annoying kid who owned the ball when you wanted a kickaround. You had to let him play and throw his weight about, just because he could take it home if he wanted to. Everyone just turned a blind eye to it, they just let it go because it was easier to eat his shit and ignore it than it was to deal with the alternative. And now, Ko had crossed that line and extradited himself from the only friends he had.

  “Friends? That’s a joke.”

  He saw it now, plain as daylight. It was inevitable that one day the button would have been pushed, that Ko would lose it and turn the kung fu he’d learnt under Sifu Lee’s tutelage on the supercilious asshole. Second hadn’t even put up a good fight. If the police hadn’t come along, there was no telling how it might have ended.

  He glanced up and there was Feng, rail-thin and glum, standing in the opposite corner of the cell. “Those people are worthless,” said the swordsman. “Be glad you’ve left them behind. You were wasting your life with them.”

  Ko wanted to be; but instead Feng’s words annoyed him. “I don’t want another bloody lecture from beyond the grave.”

  “You know it isn’t a lie. Those fools were all wastrels.”

  “And you’re not?” Ko snapped, the anger of the evening returning to him. “The proud, noble ancestor, warrior of the ancient days?” He mimicked Feng’s voice. “Things were better in my time. We had honour and courage. Did you shit! You’re just as bad as me, greedy and self-indulgent!”

  Feng’s face clouded. “Don’t take it out on me because you’re a failure, boy!”

  “Why? What are you gonna do, haunt me some more?” Ko shook his head. “You ain’t gonna do that, who would you get to buy you smokes?”

  In spite of himself, the swordsman licked his lips.

  Ko’s head drooped, his anger fading. “Ah, screw it. This is it.” He prodded the ragged mattress with a finger. “Enough is enough. I’m getting out of here. I’m sick of living like this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This place, Hong Kong. I’m done. I’m going to escape from this city even if it kills me.” He leaned forward. “I’m going to get money and go, take Nikita and leave it behind.”

  “How will you do that, exactly? You’ve got, what? A dozen yuan to your name?”

  Ko gave Feng a hard look. “I’ll find a way.”

  The warrior’s head snapped up to face the heavy steel door. “Company.”

  The observation slot in the metal hatch irised open to reveal a bored-looking trooper in APRC fatigues behin
d an inch of armoured glass. “On your feet, citizen.”

  Frankie rolled over as gently as he could manage, keeping his eyes closed. He wanted to make sure that it hadn’t been some kind of strange fever-dream, a weird melange of fantasy created by too much jetlag and too little sleep; but no, as impossible as it seemed, there she was at his side. Her chest, unblemished like newly fallen snow, rose and fell above the edge of the silk sheets, and gentle breaths escaped the pursed flower of her lips. Juno Qwan lay naked beside him, as stunning in repose as she was on the billboards around the city.

  “Wah.” Frankie whispered, and a grin emerged on his face as the evening rewound in his mind’s eye. They had fallen into the apartment entwined around one another, a peculiar hunger for human contact compelling them. Her kisses were electric on his lips and her skin, her perfect flawless skin, rose up under his touch. She discarded clothes worth more than a year of his former salary in ragged heaps as they crossed the lounge. With steady hands, she steered him toward the bedroom. They fell into each other, and with the lights of the city cast through the windows of the chamber, Frankie and Juno had made love, orbiting the room until they set down on the bed and began again.

  He saw it in snapshots: the strobe of a passing advertisement blimp painting red and blue across her breasts as her back arched. Her hands on him, guiding him in. Juno’s hair, free and wild, crossing his chest. The taste of her. The sparkling chemical impact as they met orgasm together, synchronised and stormy. Everything else but her seemed faint and pale in comparison, faded images held against a vivid holograph.

  Frankie felt the lazy beginnings of an erection as the fresh memories surfaced; but there was more to it than the sex. He felt strange, a peculiar sense of ease here with her, a realisation that there had been a missing piece to his life and now here she was, completing him. He shook his head and looked away, smirking. Where did that come from? he wondered, I’m mooning like some love struck idiot!