“You were so upset. Ai Li spent hours calming you until you finally fell asleep, curled into a tiny space next to her. I looked into your face; even in sleep it was pinched with pain, and I decided to leave.”
“That was it?” Xin asked. “The defining moment?”
“Defining moments are the culmination of a million decisions leading up to that point. The actual moment is always smaller than it is imagined to be.” Ching Shih’s tone was cool. “A few weeks later, Ai Li and I took you and left.”
Xin frowned. Left was a ludicrous summary of what the actual experience of defecting from China would have entailed, but Ching Shih waved to the servants to clear the table, indicating that the conversation was over. “Just one last question,” Xin said as she rose from her seat. “Do you have a similar scar next to your spine?”
Ching Shih looked surprised. “Yes. How did you know?”
“When did you get it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Why? Is it important?”
Xin shrugged. The conversation was over, if only because she was not ready to continue it. She walked Danyael back to the car that was waiting to take him to the laboratory. “The scar…is it what I think it is?”
“Impossible to say without any physical evidence of what was removed, but it was probably a microchip, embedded at birth through a simple injection beneath the skin. Once in the body, it absorbs fluid and swells into its full size, making extraction difficult,” he said. “To deter people from crudely digging it out, the microchip is often implanted close to the spine. Removing the microchip would require hours of extremely precise surgery.”
“Did you ever have a microchip implanted in you?” Xin asked Danyael.
“The Mutant Affairs Council wanted to, but Lucien said no. Many people have them, though. Leaving aside its ‘big brother’ connotations, the tracking microchip is a great anti-kidnapping device. Why bother snatching the billionaire’s son for a ransom when the police, in mere seconds, will have the child’s location within five feet?”
Xin chuckled. “It does give you quite a bit to think about, doesn’t it?” she murmured, almost to herself.
“It certainly does.” He ducked his head and entered the car. “I’ll send you the revised formula when I get back to the lab. We’ll talk later.”
“Danyael…”
He looked up at her. His dark eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
“You have to kill the jiangshi.”
He shook his head. “They’re victims.”
“They’re a threat. They can’t be contained, and you have no cure.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“You’re out of time. I can release the revised formula by noon tomorrow, but there’s little point if the jiangshi are still on the loose, infecting new victims at every turn.”
Danyael stepped out of the car. The light cast half of his face into shadow. A more fanciful person might have imagined him part-angel, part-demon. Xin only saw an alpha empath—physically weary and emotionally heartsick—who drifted further out of her control with every passing day, every passing hour.
His gaze hardened. “You want me to kill the jiangshi? Should I also kill the humans, the non-mutants, infected by shuang kuangxi? They’re as infectious.”
She would have had to be deaf to miss the sarcasm in Danyael’s voice. “The non-mutants are not out there ripping through peoples’ throats with their fingernails.”
“Killing the jiangshi isn’t the right answer. There are thousands of them.”
“Thousands? This isn’t just a pandemic, Danyael. It could be a massacre. We cannot let it escalate.”
“I cannot—I will not sign off a thousand executions.”
“That number is nothing in the face of China’s billions.”
“Big numbers do not make any of them less than a life.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But that’s what you meant.” His eyes blazed with fury. “Our lives are not chess pieces on a board. We’re not faceless, nameless soldiers you sacrifice in the battle for the sake of winning the war. Every jiangshi out there has a father, a mother. They had hopes, dreams—hopes and dreams that my blood ripped from their hands.”
Xin forced ice into her voice. “Don’t let your guilt get in the way of the right answer.”
“The right answer is that no one should have to die because I screwed up.”
“You didn’t screw up. Seth stole your blood. Excelsior experimented with it and created shuang kuangxi. This isn’t your fault.”
“It’s my blood. It’s my problem. There’s no way around that.”
“Then solve the problem. You take out the jiangshi. I’ll take out the formula. We wipe the slate clean; we give Zhengzhou a fresh start.”
Danyael gritted his teeth. “That’s all you care about—the end game. Whatever gets you there fastest—that’s the answer.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t about the fastest path. It isn’t even about the straightest path. It’s the only goddamned path. Why can’t you see that?”
“Because the path doesn’t matter if you’re headed the wrong way.”
“There is no other way.”
“Killing thousands of people…victims…is never the only way.”
She glared at him. “You think reaching this conclusion was simple for me? It’s not. It isn’t. But I will not lose sight of the real problem. The formula for shuang kuangxi must be taken off the streets. The jiangshi must be neutralized. If you cannot cure them, then there is no choice but to kill them, and the sooner you come to that realization, the safer everyone else will be.” Xin drew a deep breath. “What will it be, Danyael? The thousand jiangshi or the thousands of innocent people they’ll kill as long as they’re out there.”
He stared at her. A muscle ticked in his cheek before he turned his face away from her to gaze at the dark forest surrounding the villa. “There has to be another way,” he murmured, almost to himself.
Xin hardened her tone in response to the despair in his voice. She could not let him waver. “We can’t afford the time you need to find it.”
Their eyes met over a foot of physical space. Emotionally, mentally, they stood on opposite sides of a great divide. Danyael was too practiced to allow his emotions to seep through his psychic shields, but Xin did not need to be psychic to sense his disappointment, and worse, his distrust.
Without another word, he stepped into the car. He did not slam the door, which only made it worse. She would have preferred his quick snap of temper than the slow, simmering anger.
How many times can you shatter Danyael’s trust before the pieces are too small to pick up, before it’s forever lost?
Her gaze drifted to the lights of Zhengzhou in the distance. It seemed brighter than usual as if the city had come alive with celebration. After all, it was the fifteenth night of Ghost month, the height of the festivities.
How many of those people out there were high on shuang kuangxi?
Xin’s jaw tensed. She would have to make sure Danyael arrived at the right decision, one way or another, but in the meantime, she had to get the formula off the streets. Returning to the pagoda, she climbed the stairs to the highest floor and sat down at her computer.
The promised file with the altered shuang kuangxi formula arrived via secured e-mail within a half hour. It had no accompanying note.
She did not even realize she had been hoping for one until disappointment speared through her. Xin ground her teeth. She would not allow Danyael’s sulky fit to affect her mood. She had enough work of her own.
Minutes turned into hours, and the evening to night. The sound of crickets and frogs filled the silence vacated by the songbirds, although scarcely audible over the low whirl of the computer’s cooling fans.
The silence was broken by a steady step on the stair. Her mother’s familiar voice called out. “Xin?”
Xin blinked, her concentration shattering. Scowling, she leaned back in her chair
. “What is it?”
“Tea, for you.” Ching Shih walked into the room with a porcelain teapot and cup balanced on a bamboo tray.
Xin tried not to sigh aloud as her mother poured the tea for her.
Instead of leaving immediately, Ching Shih asked, “How is your work coming along?”
“It’s almost complete,” Xin said.
“What is it? What will it do?”
“It’s a computer worm, unique from a virus in that it doesn’t need a particular application to propagate itself through the Internet. Once I turn it loose, it will spread from computer to computer.”
“Doing what?”
“Absolutely nothing—unless it finds a copy of the formula for shuang kuangxi.”
Ching Shih nodded. “Then this…worm…changes the formula.”
“That’s right. It rewrites the file, replacing the old formula with the new.”
“And then?”
“That’s its sole purpose—to replicate itself into every computer, every network in the world, and to replace any old versions of the formula with the new.”
Her mother chuckled. “It is remarkable what you can accomplish alone.”
“I’m not alone.” Xin waved at the computer. “I’m not surrounded by men on horses carrying battle-axes, but I have an army—not of blood, but of zeroes and ones.” She managed a tight smile. “In the end, it may be that the latter are the more reliable. I can count on them to do what I tell them.” Unlike Danyael.
Ching Shih’s eyes narrowed. “You and Danyael argued.”
Xin’s laughter was part sigh. “How can you tell?”
“You could not have avoided it. You are too unalike.”
“No more so than Zara is from Danyael.”
“He accepts and cherishes what makes her different from him. Not so with you.”
Xin sucked in a deep breath. Her chest trembled as she exhaled. “He thinks I’m a heartless bitch.”
“Are you?”
“Only 90 percent of the time, but there are reasons.” Xin set her cup down and leaned back in her chair. She interlaced her fingers over her stomach. “Danyael’s an empath, but I’ll grant that he’s more logical and rational than most people, certainly more than Zara. Even so, he makes decisions because ‘it is the right thing to do.’ But right for whom?” She flung the words out like a curse. “Right for him. For his beliefs, his morality. What about the hundreds, thousands, millions of people affected by his decision? What about their beliefs and their morality, which may be nothing like his?”
“And are they anything like yours?”
Xin’s shoulders slumped on a sigh. “I don’t think Danyael and I have ever seen eye-to-eye on anything. Even when we’re headed in the same direction, we don’t agree on how to get there.”
“Agreement is not the goal. Respect is. Do you respect him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Does he respect you?”
Xin’s gaze flicked to the narrow window. The truth curdled in her stomach. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Respect manifests in different ways.” Ching Shih tugged her thin cardigan around her shoulders. Sadness touched the curve of her lips; memories darkened her eyes.
As does love.
Could I have been wrong about her?
Xin did not turn to face her mother. “I’m surprised Ai Li let you take me when you left Wuyuan.”
“Let?” Ching Shih’s tone rose with scorn. “What say did Ai Li have in it?”
“She was my mother.”
“Her womb housed you for nine months, nothing more.”
“You said she loved me. What I haven’t figured out is what I was to you. I was Ai Li’s daughter. I usurped your place as the superstar in the household. Why did you care what Yi Shen did to me?”
Ching Shih’s eyes narrowed. “I held you the day you were born, and every day after that. Ai Li may have carried you in her heart and arms.” Her mouth twitched, and her voice took on a defiant edge. “But so did I.”
17
The live video feed from the morgue panned over the grimy body of a jiangshi—in death indistinguishable from a human—before zooming in on the gouged faces and torn throats of the slaughtered soldiers.
Police chief Chen’s throat worked as he shifted in his seat. General Wang’s gaze flicked away before returning to the larger-than-life screen. The surviving solders huddled against the wall, exchanging stricken glances. Their pale, pinched faces bore mute testimony to the trauma of the attack.
Evidence.
Witnesses.
Yu Long signaled to his assistant. The video feed disconnected and the florescent lights blazed on. He strode the front of the conference room—the same location of his unsatisfactory confrontation with Chen and Wang the prior day, only now, the conditions were different.
General Wang spoke first. “These…jiangshi in the service tunnels—how many are there?”
“I estimate that between twenty and thirty attacked us. Half, or more, got away.”
“And you know where to find them?”
“I know where we found them. We’ll start there and expand out.”
“We?” The general’s eyes narrowed.
“We—because I need your soldiers in the search teams and your men—” Yu Long looked at the police chief. “—to take up positions at key tunnel entrances in case the jiangshi make a break for the city.”
Chen scowled at the general. “As long as the jiangshi remain within the city limits, I will not permit any military action in Zhengzhou. It is entirely my jurisdiction—”
“This isn’t the time to let pride get in the way of getting things done.”
“Tonight is the Feast of the Hungry Ghost,” Chen continued. “The streets will be crowded; the festivities will last well into the morning. The Angie Ma concert begins in two hours. The premier and his son will be attending it. How do you think the people will react when military trucks drive through the city?” The police chief glared at Yu Long. “They will panic, and then we will really have a crisis on our hands.”
Yu Long shook his head. “The mission cannot wait, and the military is far better equipped to fight the jiangshi than your average traffic policeman.”
General Wang chortled. “For once, I actually agree with him.”
Police Chief Chen pushed to his feet. His bulk seemed to expand to fill the small conference room. “My men are exceptionally well-trained.”
“To handle police matters,” Yu Long said. “This situation isn’t something they’ve ever trained for.”
“Neither has the military.” Chen shrugged his beefy shoulders. “I will not permit a military excursion in my city, especially not when the premier is here!”
Yu Long slammed his hand against the table. “We have a crisis on our hands, and you’re arguing over jurisdictions?”
General Wang shrugged as if deferring to the police chief, but Yu Long sensed that the general’s magnanimous action was intentional; it allowed Chen to dig himself into a deepening hole.
“My police special forces will hunt down the jiangshi,” Chen continued. He turned to stare at Yu Long. “You will show us, on the blueprints of the service tunnels, where you found the creatures.”
Yu Long stiffened. “Less than forty-eight hours ago, you refused to believe it was worthy of your attention. You made it my problem; you’re not taking it back now. Your men will report to me—”
Chen’s face flushed as his eyes bulged.
“—or should I contact Beijing and have them dispatch the mutant units?” Yu Long kept his face expressionless. Don’t call my bluff. I can’t risk sending mutants up against the jiangshi.
Chen’s outraged expression melted into a scowl. The jerk of his head might have been a nod; Yu Long decided to accept it as such.
“How many men do you have in your special forces units?”
“A little over two hundred.” Chen’s upper lip curled. “More than enough to take out those
creatures.”
“And we’re going in with an edge,” Yu Long said. He squared his shoulders against the clawing grip of tension. “We’ll lace our bullets with a drug specially designed to kill them.”
“No, you can’t have it.”
“Why the hell not?” Yu Long stared at Dr. Shen, not in the least intimidated by the fact that he stood in her office at Excelsior. He placed the palms of his hands on the edge of the desk and leaned into her personal space. “The police special forces teams are gathering right now to hunt down the jiangshi. We need the chemical coating for our bullets. You said it would be ready.”
“And it is, but Danyael’s not convinced it’s the right way.”
Yu Long’s eyebrows drew together. “Not convinced?” He flung his hands into the air. “How many more people must die before he’s convinced?”
Dr. Shen sighed quietly. “He says the jiangshi are also victims.”
“From where I stand, victims don’t run around tearing out someone else’s throat. Besides, we’re talking about twenty jiangshi. Thirty, at most. Where is Danyael?”
“In one of the labs, running tests on the recent blood samples. Do you want to talk to him?”
Yu Long drew a deep breath. “No, I don’t.” He had strong psychic shields, but he did not trust them to hold up against Danyael’s empathic powers. “Danyael’s not one of us. He doesn’t get to decide what we do here in Zhengzhou. The chemical, Dr. Shen. Give it to me.”
“It’s not fully tested.”
He sighed, the sound swamped with irony. “Apparently nothing we’ve been doing for the past year and a half has been fully baked; you’re not telling me anything new. I want the chemical.”
She hesitated. “I…should talk to Danyael first.”
Hell, no. The last thing Yu Long wanted was a philosophical debate with Danyael; he had a jiangshi hunt to lead. “Dr. Shen, I expect your cooperation. You’ve sabotaged key research projects in the past, most notably the project on the historical clones of Zheng Yi Sao and Fu Hao.”
Dr. Shen paled. Her trembling fingers pressed against her mouth, as if to contain a confession or a plea.
“The consequences for a repeated offense will be severe. However, if you can prove your willingness to cooperate and assist with the government’s current initiatives, I’ll put in a good word for you.”
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