Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

  “I hate my life,” he said in a small and heartfelt voice. He wanted to be angry, or scared, to feel something, but Ko’s world felt hollow and cold. He was empty. He needed… a purpose.

  Feng stood a short distance away, amid the rain, untouched by it. He rested one hand on the hilt of his lionhead sword, watching the teenager. “What are you going to do now?”

  He didn’t look up. “I… I’m not sure. That cashwhore Tze knows Big Hung’s boys didn’t waste me like they were sposed to. I’m marked. I’ll be lucky to see out the week… And Nikki will rot away up in that hospital.”

  “It pains me to tell you this, but—”

  “Then don’t,” growled Ko. “Don’t say ‘I told you so’ or ‘you screwed up again, Ko’ or whatever you’re gonna say. I don’t want another damn lecture.” He sniffed. “All I ever get. Lectures.”

  “Wallowing in sorrow wins no wars.” Feng walked over, holding out his hands to cup the rain, the drops passing through unhindered. “A man is only without power when he believes it.”

  Ko shot him an acid glare. “Why don’t you just fuck off and die?” he said miserably.

  Feng tapped his chest plate. “I cannot. I am already dead.”

  “No, but you can fuck off. ”

  The swordsman whipped out his blade and swung it at Ko’s neck. The thief reacted instantly, the prickly sense of the phantom sword making him flinch backwards. “You are such a weakling.” He sniffed archly. “I smell the stink of mother’s milk on your breath, mewling little baby.” Feng advanced, rubbing at the stubble on his face. “Do you know how many men I had killed by the time I was your age? How many battles I had fought in?”

  “I’m sure you’re gonna bore me with the story,” Ko replied, his ire starting to rekindle.

  Feng looked up at the grey sky. “Heaven, tell me what crime I committed that this wastrel must be my companion?”

  Ko came to his feet. “Eat shit, you corpse! I never asked to be saddled with your prehistoric ass! Why don’t you go haunt a museum or something?”

  “If only I could!” Feng snapped back, “But you’re my penance! My stinking, worthless luck to be tied to you.”

  “Luck?” Ko said bitterly. “You don’t know bad luck! You’re dead, how much worse could it get? But I’m still breathing.” He stabbed at his chest. “Every damn thing I do blows up in my face! Every choice in my life is always the hard one. There’s never an easy day for Ko, is there?” He pointed angrily at the sky. “You got a hotline to those fuckers up there, you tell them to cut me some bloody slack!” Ko shouted into the clouds. “You hearing me, you bastards? Are you happy now you made everything go wrong? I got no money, I got no future! I got nothing!”

  “You got the tickets.” Fixx said from the shadows.

  Ko reacted with shock and spun around on the wet stones. His face flushed crimson. “I, uh…” The stratojet vouchers were still in his pocket.

  The sanctioned operative stepped into the light and gave the empty courtyard a curious look. Ko waited for him to ask who he been talking to, but Fixx did not. As ever, Feng had made himself scarce.

  “What good would it do?” Ko said, after a moment. “I could take her away, but she’d still be sick. And the corps would still come after me.” He shuffled out of the wet. “That’s how they work. It’d never end.”

  Fixx nodded. “That’s right. Still. A lesser soul, he might take one o’ them rides, cash in the other and use it to get off the grid.”

  Ko’s face betrayed the revulsion he felt at that idea. “I’m not leaving my sister in some nuthouse.”

  “No, you ain’t. You may not have any luck to speak of, but you got what they call strength of character, slick. You got that in spades.”

  The youth sagged. “I just wanna get out.”

  Fixx’s eyes narrowed. “That ain’t gonna happen. Not until the story has its end. Not ’til the storm’s blown over.”

  “What storm?”

  The op nodded in the direction of the dojo, where the elderly teacher was addressing a group of kids. “Old man Bruce, he knows it. Things out there on the street, black skies over the peak. He talks about dragons.”

  Ko looked away. “He says a lot of things.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t see it too. Your gangcult buddies turning into pill-poppers an’ sheep? The blue everywhere you look?”

  “Yeah… Sometimes. Like they want people to do it, even though that zee-three-en crap is illegal.”

  Fixx nodded. “That poor songbird at The Han, she’s just a mouthpiece for ’em. She’s a shill, hawkin’ it, makin’ the kids want it. A puppet.” He tapped his bald pate. “Minds and hearts, slick. Hearts and minds. That poison gets in your head, holds the door open, lets other things in.”

  Ko gave him a sideways look. “That can’t happen.”

  “Reckon?” replied the Op. “Your sister, when she got the bad medicine, she talked, right? ’Bout mirrors an’ dragons? Snakes an’ angels?”

  Ko’s blood ran cold. “How… How could you know that?”

  Fixx ran a finger over his dark glasses. “I seen it, but just a sliver, mind. Not as much as she has.”

  Ko slumped against the wall. It seemed too much to take in. “You’re telling me, Nikita got sick because… She tripped on zen with these corp bastards?”

  “That’s the meat of it, though there’s more to it than that. You ever hear of Icarus?”

  “Yeah. G-Mek racer, 400-series. Not as fast as the Namco Solvalu, though.”

  Fixx smirked. “Mean the guy wit’ the wings, flew too near to the sun. I reckon that’s your sis, right there. Got herself too close. Took a taste of it, got burned by Tze.”

  Ko’s eyes unfocussed for a moment. “I gotta see how she is. If they tagged me, she could be in trouble.”

  Fixx reached for the Korvette’s remote. “Yeah. I’m thinkin’ we might wanna hear what she’s got to say.”

  Feng stood across the courtyard by the stone guardian dogs, and he threw Ko a nod of agreement.

  The landscape of Tze’s mind was crimson from horizon to horizon. Hills and valleys carved out of bloody wet meat, incarnadine blades of glassy grass tinkling like wind chimes in the slaughterhouse breeze. Frankie was submerged in the vision, pressed into the liquid, foetid gore. He saw streets in a city with buildings made from bone and cartilage, highways of flayed leather choked with twisted debris and vast armies of human dead. High, gelid towers climbing into a poisonous grey sky that spat screeching yellow gobbets of burning rain.

  Things moved up there, appearing in eye-searing glimpses through gaps in the monstrous storm clouds; or perhaps it was just one Thing, a creation of such unfathomable size it could envelop the earth. Floating on lace wings made from sinew, a vast and primal form, engorged with wickedness and lust. Even so far away, Frankie could feel the waves of murderous animal need emanating from it, the aching want to push beyond blood and sex and pain and desire, to tear away any petty human constructs like morality and virtue and smother itself in dark pits of depravity.

  Nothing lived that was not twisted in this nation of corruption. Contorted, lifeless trees poked up here and there with warped branches clawing at the bloated, ruined sky, and the span of the bay was barren and cracked. Across the hollows, a suffocated trickle moved sluggishly, dirty with corpses and stinking oil. Raptor-forms sewn together from the bodies of children, avian horrors with razor-sharp wings flitted overhead, vomiting flame where they spied prey. Malformed creatures prowled in shadows, eyes alight with preternatural fire.

  But the worst spectacle was the people; multitudes of them blundering through the marshy red flows in emotionless lock-step, empty and cadaverous where all flicker of being was drawn off them. This was the Nine Hells made manifest.

  Is it not magnificent? whispered Tze into his mind. The honesty of it? The world’s impiety no longer hidden but thrown to the winds, the opened flowers of blood and flesh shown to the sky… Oh, He blesses us. The King of Rapture, Danikos
et Demino, hallowed is the Lord of Bliss…

  He forced the words to the front of his mind, fighting down the mad joy the other man poured into his thoughts. “You want this? How could you possibly want this?”

  It is truth, Francis, Tze’s mindspeech was a gasp of ecstasy. Humans are creatures driven by lust. Beneath the mask of civility we want only bloodshed and fucking. Everything else is a falsehood imposed by the limited and weak, by those who believe in abstracts. Moral and immoral. Hate and love. Order… and chaos.

  “I won’t help you!”

  Fury boiled into him. Stupid child! How dare you turn your face away from me! I offer you the ultimate splendour and you spit it back?

  “Get out of my head!”

  So be it. The voice snaked and rasped through his skull. Willing or unwilling, your part is cast. You will be what you were bred to be, lad. What your bloodline was made to be. Harsh laughter boomed about him. Lam… to the slaughter…

  “This is very irregular, Mr Chen. I’m sorry, but I have other concerns at the moment. We’re swamped.” Dr Yeoh’s face was drawn and pale, the dull hollows beneath her eyes a sure sign that she hadn’t slept in days.

  Ko had seen the disorder in the hospital as he followed Fixx into the building. The sanctioned operative turned up his collar and hunched forward, as if he were walking into a rainstorm, bracing himself. Ko picked his way through the waiting room; there were dozens of people there, some of them staring into space baring wounds that were raw and self-inflicted, others babbling and weeping. There were more in the corridors on gurneys parked along the walls, and Ko had to duck to one side to avoid a big guy wearing a construction worker’s overalls who blundered heedlessly past him, clawing at his arms and mewling. There had been a moment when Ko thought he saw Poon, wrapped in a stained paper smock and shouting at shadows; but then a curtain was pulled and he heard the smack-hiss of a spray-hypo.

  He blinked at the woman. “Doc, please. I’m not asking you to do anything. I just need to see her. ”

  Yeoh looked at Fixx with a wary sniff. “Visiting hours are over.”

  Fixx spoke without turning away from the sight of the sick and the maddened. “How long has it been this bad?”

  The doctor sighed, sagging against the wall. “Day or so, I think. I’m losing track. We used to get one a week. Then it was every other day, now it’s hourly.”

  Orderlies pushed a mumbling old woman past in a wheelchair. She appeared to have chewed off her own thumbs. “They’re all like Nikita?” said Ko. “All dosed with zee-three-en?”

  “Some,” said Yeoh. “Maybe one in six. The others show the same symptoms but there’s no root cause we can find.” She sighed. “I contacted the State Medical Commission in Beijing, the United Nations Centre for Disease Control, in case… They’re looking into it.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Ko snapped.

  She met his gaze, tired and frustrated. “Realistically? It doesn’t mean shit. ”

  “It’s in the water,” said Fixx quietly.

  “Zee-three-en is a street narcotic. You think it’s in the drinking supply?” Yeoh shot him an incredulous look. “We can’t be sure that—”

  “Be sure,” he replied, tapping Ko on the arm. “Where’s Nikita?”

  The doctor did nothing to stop them as the youth led the black man away down the corridor.

  The roll of yuan she had given Ko for the rent had gone to pay for Nikita’s private room. Now, with the hospital filling by the moment, the expense seemed even more worthwhile. Ko closed the door behind him, shutting out the sounds of weeping. Beside him, Fixx took in a long, careful breath. He seemed uncomfortable in the armoured coat, a new and slightly worrying aspect of the otherwise unflappable operative.

  “Don’t like hospitals,” he said, by way of explanation. “Too much hurt hereabouts.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Ko. Even as a boy, he’d been unnerved by visits to the block clinic for checkups and N-SARS vaccinations. It was as if all the agony and the sickness of the patients who went through the building got left behind, like an invisible stain on the walls.

  Fixx sniffed the air. “Brings out the jackals. They can smell it when you’re weak, close to death comin’.” He crossed to Nikita and tenderly stroked her face. “She’s pretty.”

  “Yeah,” Ko repeated, the word catching in his throat.

  Fixx pulled back the mask and used a damp cloth to moisten the sleeping girl’s lips. They were cracked and dry where she was still speaking in quiet church whispers. He listened closely to her for a few moments, nodding. “She’s seen it. She knows how it’s gonna play out.”

  Ko came closer, blinking back tears. “I don’t get it. Why would that bastard Tze tell her?”

  “Didn’t tell her,” Fixx dug in one of his pockets, “Showed her.” He drew out an ornate little pillbox decorated in green and gold enamel. Ko recoiled at the sight of the blue capsules inside. “We gotta know what she does, slick. We gotta see it.”

  Ko stabbed an angry finger at him. “You give that shit to her and I swear I’ll break your fucking neck—”

  Fixx shook his head. “Not for her.” He held it out to the younger man. “You an’ me.”

  Colour drained from Ko’s face. “What?”

  “That’s how this stuff works. Like a link-up for your mind, see. Just a quick little flick of it, little belt of the world beyond. Pop it and done.” He rolled the capsules on to his palm. “Few seconds of instant telepathy, in convenient tablet form.” Fixx traced a finger over Nikita’s forehead. “We drop these, we can go take a look-see in there. ”

  “You’re outta your mind!”

  “No,” said Fixx, “your sister is. ’Less you’re thinkin’ you got a better solution, ’less you wanna sit here and wait for the world to end, only way to help her is to do this.” He placed a caplet in Ko’s hand. “C’mon. Curtain’s up. Your cue.”

  There on Ko’s palm, the indigo sphere shone like a glittering jewel.

  Ropé was waiting at the helipad, the blurring rotors of the spidercopter thrumming as Mr Tze strode from the castle interior. He had changed into the garb of an ancient warlord.

  “Heywood,” he said pleasantly. “How is our darling diva? I understood there was an incident in the lab?”

  Ropé wore a contrite expression. “Sir, yes. I have expedited the problem.” He jerked a thumb at the rotorcraft. “I secured the talent in the cabin. She’s been pacified.”

  Tze’s eyebrow arched. “Not too strongly, I hope? We are on the cusp, Heywood. We can’t afford any more mistakes.”

  His face changed to a thin smile. “No sir, we cannot. I was forced to invoke a command imprint. I believe she was attempting to determine her own origins.”

  “Ah. How interesting. Perhaps, if there were time, we could learn something from this for use in later models.” He glanced away. “But no. When the pattern is made whole tonight, Juno’s function will be at an end.”

  Ropé said nothing, watching the sparkle of joy in Tze’s eyes.

  “Miss Hi has given of herself to whet the blade. The role of absolution now falls to you, Heywood. The young one, Lam, has been prepared.” Tze placed a hand on Ropé’s shoulder. “I rely on you to commit the deed when the moment comes.”

  “For the King,” Ropé gave the rote reply.

  Tze smiled again and boarded the flyer. Ropé watched it vanish toward the high ridge of Victoria Peak, where spotlights danced on the low clouds. In the pocket of his coat, the metal cover of The Path of Joseph tore at his skin. “Such an arrogant man,” he said to the air. To think Tze imagined he might cage a Dark One and become the master of the Desire-God. In Joseph’s name, it would be Ropé’s pleasure to show him the error he had made in trusting a secret agent of Elder Seth.

  Ko sat on the chair, blinking. “I’m not feeling anything. This is looped.”

  Fixx ignored him. “Give it time.”

  The pill had disintegrated the moment he swallowed it, and now Ko was having
second thoughts, his pulse racing and his hands getting sweaty. He sniffed the air and caught a whiff of something strong and redolent. “You smell that?”

  “Like a steakhouse.” Fixx frowned.

  Ko was on his feet, making for the door. “Where’s all the…? People are—” His bare feet (bare?) slapped on warm liquid and he glanced down. The grey tiled floor in the corridor shimmered, darkened. It became a purple-red pool, moving to fill the space before him. Tendrils of the blood-stuff inched up the walls.

  “Oh. Shit. It’s happening.”

  Fixx was following him. “Go with it. Don’t fight it.”

  Ko panicked. “No. Damn it man, this was a jagged idea, I want out.”

  “Weakling,” sneered another voice. Ko saw Feng, crouched at the pool’s edge, looking at his dark reflection. “Your first instinct is always to run.”

  Fixx rubbed his chin. “Who’s your friend?” Ko swallowed. “It’s, uh, a long story. ”

  They followed the meat smell out of the decaying hospital, past huge boles of greenish fungus that were consuming the crumbling concrete. Outside, Hong Kong had transformed into a fleshy, mutant parody of the city. Pieces of perception detached and reformed; they blindsided Fixx and hammered into his thoughts, alien invaders spitting memory-seed.

  He saw landscapes of wet flesh, the stench of boiled skins and torched meat. And so many screams; they pushed and pulled, rising and falling from sexual cries of pleasure to noises that chilled the blood in his veins.

  Fixx did not question the new arrival, this man the thief called Feng. The aura about the swordsman was strange and complex, the shades similar to Ko’s. Somewhere down the bloodline these two shared ancestry; the op wondered if either of them knew it. He toyed with the bones in his pocket. They felt spongy and indistinct.