“Mr Tze would like to extend an invitation to you, to visit the Yuk Lung tower.” Her voice was a whisper, but it carried. “The choice of the state in which you arrive there is up to you.” The gun muzzle never wavered.
“A moment,” he said, carefully holstering the pistols. “If you please.” Fixx drew the bones from his pocket and weighed them in his hand, then gently rolled them out across the top of an enclosed cot. The child inside stirred, blinking at him. Small fingers stretched at the yellow-white pieces, then sank away.
Fixx studied the lay of the bones, and as he did, he noticed the feedlines dripping clean air into all the cribs. Blue vapour twinkled in there.
The woman in the mask flicked off the safety to make her point.
He smiled thinly and gathered up the bones once more. “Never been a man to argue with fate,” said Fixx, holding up his hands. “I can read the signs. I surrender.”
“I’m here,” she said to the world, and the world screamed back love for her. Juno stood inside a bowl of darkness, surrounded by a shifting sea of souls, crying, imploring her, begging her to complete them. The girl saw them through a hazy lens, reading the colour of their hearts. They burned with wild fires, but the shades were dull, tainted. They never even knew it, the dear poor people, but she could see it. Juno saw it very clearly now, the acrid blue that stained everything, the battery acid taste in her mind. She looked up and they did the same, joyful at the touch of the warm drizzle falling. The crowd were unaware of the invisible balloons floating up there, molecule-thin sheathes breathing out the drug into the clouds, seeding the blue rain.
They moved like a shoal of fish or the mindless uniform motion of a flock of birds in flight. The crowds were unified, drunk on the Z3N laced in the food, the water and the air. They were sharing, transforming as one. A totality that waited for one shining light to guide it. Her voice.
Juno’s hand strayed to her throat, feeling tightness there. Her flesh and mind warred with one another; she knew she only had to release the first note to set her nightmares in motion.
Tze spoke from the wings, and despite the roaring adulation, she heard him. “Sing,” he commanded, repeating the words of compulsion Rope had used in the laboratory. “Sing for them, infans simulare. ”
“Harmony,” she wept. “Come with me.”
The two vehicles exploded out of the tunnel and howled through the side streets of Causeway Bay, the sirens of the ambulance parting traffic before them like a knife. Burning jags of yellow light from the Vector lit up the flanks of the paramedic van, shattering lights and tearing at the tyres.
The Merc kept on him as he turned on to the back roads, screeching around the narrow bends up toward the Peak. The ambulance ricocheted off safety barriers and knocked chunks of old stone from the walls. Beams scorched the asphalt. The vehicle was getting sluggish. Ko knew he was on a loser.
Another shot flashed through the back of the ambulance and struck a pressurised gas cylinder. The shriek of escaping fumes brought the stink of liquid nitrogen to Ko’s nostrils. The smell made him panic and he jerked the wheel hard, vaulting out of the vehicle and into a gully.
The ambulance spun out as the Vector came closer. Ko had time to bury his face in the dirt as the CryoSaviour re-sus module inside exploded. Designed to flash-freeze trauma victims, the uncontrolled detonation created a plume of super-chilled vapour that engulfed both vehicles.
Clutching at the re-opened wound on his chest, Ko staggered from his place of safety to find the masked woman frozen to the inside of her car. She appeared quite dead.
The throaty rumble of a bike engine drew his attention; a kid dressed in Road Ronin armour halted and doffed his samurai helmet. “Dang! Did you see that?”
Ko kneed the biker in the nuts and tossed him from the cycle. As an afterthought, he grabbed the youth’s katana and rode on, toward the glowing summit.
The lines in blood were drawn, and overhead the sickly light of ascension was forming. Rope looked up, weighing the ghost knife in his hand, as Blue Snake arrived with the black man in custody. He searched his memory for a name.
“Joshua Fixx. You’re not unknown to… To me.”
Fixx studied him. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”
“I should say so.” Rope crossed to the wooden frame where Lam was chained.
The operative had a measuring stare. “Does Tze know?” he asked suddenly. “I’m willing to bet they think you’re a team player, right?” Fixx nodded. “But no. I can smell it on you, mister. More to you than just this zen thing, huh?”
“Impressive,” said Rope. “You just clapped eyes on me and you can tell all that?”
“I’m a perceptive fellah. I can smell it. I met your kind before.”
“Yes, you have.” Rope had a blink of someone else’s memory, of Fixx wet with blood and human carrion. “I can taste it.”
“The stink from Spanish Fork carries a long, long way. What is it you all like to say? The Path of Joseph…”
“Is thorny.” Rope spun and threw the blade, burying it in Blue Snake’s chest. She sputtered and perished. He looked up at Fixx and felt the burning touch of Elder Seth behind his own eyes. “Tze makes his play. Then we’ll make ours.”
Fixx shook his head. “Can’t let that happen.”
Rope smiled, bearing more teeth than a human mouth should. “Now you’re becoming interesting. ”
The samurai’s bike took him through a roadblock at breakneck speed, but none of the guards were watching; they were crying, singing, pointing into the dark and pregnant skies.
Ko rode around the edges of the crowd, the thunder of their adulation echoing. He tasted the tingling vapour on the wind, glimpsed shapes at the corners of his vision. Sinuous things, serpents and monstrous angels, ghostly and dancing. The rapturous chorus penetrated his mind, begging him to join in.
When the lightning struck, he thought for a moment the Vector was back, but then he turned his head upwards and the sight almost stopped his heart.
In the air over the city there was a rip in the sky, and from it fell huge emerald tears. As he watched, the clouds gave birth to a thing with claws and teeth and eyes of impossible angles. It was drenched in scintillating viridian shades, scaled with jewels so magnificent they took his breath away to see them. Out of the torn maw of cloud it came, borne on vestigial wings, ephemeral but gaining solidity by the second.
Ko joined millions of people across the city of Hong Kong, watching the end of their world begin as the colossus of the Jade Dragon fell screaming to earth.
Zen, zen
I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice
I’m the perfect smile
Touch my thoughts and flow
There’s no world we can’t know
Sea of stones, sand waves
Harmony, come with me
Taste the blue
Star at dawn
Bubble in the stream
“Touch”
Vocals: Juno Qwan
© RedWhiteBlue Inc. 2026.
16. City on Fire
In the corridors of the hospital, a thousand screaming babies tore at the broken minds of the adults. Dr Yeoh collapsed, plunging into hell. In her room, Nikita slept restlessly; she was already there.
Ko stared out over the shining pinnacles of the cityscape. Juno Qwan’s voice smothered everything in a warm fog of noise. He felt her words invading him; she was crying, but he registered this in only the most distant of ways. Down in the metropolis, he could see her face everywhere, on the massive street-screens in Central, on the flickercladding of the Hotel Metropolita; her song played from radios in every apartment, every channel carried her words. The sound was worming its way into him.
He left the bike and staggered up the summit, through people screaming and crying and weeping and laughing. The freakish, sickening high he had shared with Fixx in the hospital was coming back tenfold. He could taste the Z3N in the air, the thick haze washing through his pores. It swelled
his heart, made his feet light. The ecstasy of the crowd around him spilled into his mind, getting louder, becoming stronger.
Ko stumbled, his thoughts heavy and indistinct. “Why am I here?”
“For the King!” shouted a reveller, bloody and naked. “He’s come for our love and pain!” A chorus of people mumbled the same words.
Ko looked away, afraid to look out over the bay where the phantom-serpent was forming, coalescing wings and fangs and lizard-skin. The gossamer thing resolved as the people gave it their attention. The Jade Dragon hooted, the sound flattening buildings, shaking the landscape. Ko could not look; his head turned. He could not help himself.
A stinging slap brought him about and falling to the marshy ground. Feng stood over him, fists balled and his scruffy face alight with fury. “Wake up!” he bellowed. “You must not gaze upon the beast! It wants your eyes, it needs your spirit!”
Ko was sluggish as he got up. “She was right… Nikita saw this coming.”
Feng grabbed him, pulled him close. “Sorcery, like the black man said! It lives only through the minds of others! The Dragon is the demon man makes for himself!”
The Road Ronin’s sword was heavy in his hands. “I can’t fight that…”
Feng pointed toward the stage, to a place half-hidden in pools of sickly light. Ko saw Tze up there, lurking in the wings. “Then fight him! ”
Sifu Bruce called the boys to him, had them bolt the doors to the dojo tight and close the storm shutters. They gathered sticky rice to scatter around the perimeter of the building while the old man worked with quick and deft movements, drawing wards on paper banners in sweeping strokes of his brush.
The Jade Dragon arched its back and threw off rimes of frozen interstellar hydrogen. Blood spilt from hundreds of willingly slit throats came together in a wet cloud for the beast to suck in through its teeth. Clawed feet found purchase on skyscrapers; they did not yet fully exist in the plane of flesh, and so they moved ghost-like through the stone and steel, cutting out the souls of those they touched but leaving animate flesh undamaged. The mere presence of the Desire God’s aspect caused spontaneous blood orgies across a ten-kilometre radius from the demon’s point of intersection. Emerald chemicals of a kind that had never existed in this dimension dripped from the tear in the clouds and burned like acid into the streets. The Dragon was slowly unfurling, shaking off the dust of eons. Newborn and yet impossibly ancient, the King of Rapture was pleased to be here once again.
The girl performing oral sex on Hung never surfaced from the shimmering water, and he tried to shift his bulk to see the source of the light flooding in through the windows of the bathhouse. One by one, the other girls turned to him, and where their pretty faces had been there were only nests of worms.
Fixx kept his hands steady, waiting. Rope crossed his eye-line, without apparent concern over the fact that Blue Snake had not disarmed him. The op understood. Rope clearly didn’t think that detail was of any import.
“I’m curious,” said the thin-faced man conversationally. “Do we know the same people?” He recovered the ghost knife from the Mask’s corpse with a sucking pop.
Fixx turned in place, watching him. “Could say that. Crossed paths with the Josephites once or twice.”
“And you’re not dead. That says something for your strength of character… Or perhaps that you’re good at fleeing.”
He shrugged. “Little from Column A, little from Column B.” Fixx shifted his weight. He could get the crossbow from the stance he was in, but he doubted it would do more than just piss the guy off. “Papa Legba always said there’d be a price to pay for that. Just didn’t think it would be today.”
Rope sniggered. “What sweet delusion. As if pieces of cardboard and chicken bones could augur the future!” He made a dismissive gesture. “You think your silly gutter godlings sent you here, is that it? To what end?”
“To stop Tze. I go where fate sends me. I’m the fly in the ointment. Monkey in the wrench.”
“Then we want the same thing, Joshua. It has been my honour to serve the vision of Elder Seth, who sent me on my way so long ago from the Promised Lands of Deseret to this festering anthill,” he bared teeth in a sneer, “here, where I lay in silence, waiting for the day that Tze would recruit me, just as Seth knew that he would. I made myself the perfect minion. We play a long game, Joshua, a very long game. I am here to disrupt the plans of Tze and his conclave of idiots.” He balanced the knife in his grip. “I will stop them from binding the Jade Dragon to their will.” Rope pointed at Frankie with the blade. “This poor wretch, bred from antiquity to be a vessel for the blood that will cage the Lord of Bliss. He’s the last, and when he’s dead, the ‘pattern’ will fall apart. Tze will have nothing. He has compounded his error in trusting me with so vital a facet of his plan. ”
Fixx’s eyes narrowed. “Missing a bit o’ the tale, I reckon. You left out the part where you take the reins of that monster instead. Step in at the last second and leash the beast for yourself. Am I close?”
Rope let out a bark of laughter. “Why would we ever want to put a collar on such a magnificent beast? The Cabal thought they might treat the Jade Dragon like a milk cow, feed it the odd city and in turn suckle themselves off the beast’s teat. Such limited imagination. No, dear fellow, we’re going to release it. Can you imagine what will be wrought in His wake, the world in a rapture of sex and blood?” He licked his lips. “It arouses me just to think of it.”
Fixx eyed the other man. “I’m gonna kill you, you know that.”
Rope beckoned him from across the room. “I so want you to try.”
He went for the crossbow, and in the other man’s hand the ghost knife unfolded like a steel flower.
Ko kicked down the backstage door and vaulted inside, feeling Feng at his side. The sickening riot of sounds from the stage and the audience beat at him. He shook off the sensation.
“Danger-” said Feng, as part of the shadows detached and grew definition.
Monkey King appraised Ko with his expressionless mask, taking in the shabby go-ganger jacket, the Road Ronin katana. Ko thought of the white-masked woman in the parking garage, of her incredible speed; as if Monkey King had been waiting for that moment, the guardian attacked. He punched Ko down, dodging clumsy sword blows, making impact craters where his fist struck the floor.
Ko rolled away, swinging wildly. The Mask watched, measuring his movements, then came in again. Monkey King’s blows were swift, efficient, designed to break and maim. The youth took a glancing hit and stumbled.
“Aim for the weak points,” snapped Feng.
“Can’t,” Ko slurred. “Not a… swordsman.”
Monkey King paused, listening to him speak, then came on, preparing to strike a killing blow.
Close to his face, Ko smelt old leather, sweat and iron. “Then let me,” said Feng. The warrior’s hand slipped into the youth’s and faded into the skin. Ko jerked away “No! Get out!”
“Listen to me!” said Feng. “I know you, better than you know yourself! I know what you fear, why you hate those fools who warp their minds with drugs and wine-because it was one of them that killed your father!”
“Can’t ever lose control,” Ko muttered. “Can’t ever become like those animals!”
“And you won’t,” Feng was becoming smoke, melting around him. “We won’t. Let me in, Ko. Let me in. ”
A lifetime of restraint. Never once had Ko allowed himself to slip, to fall into the easy path that so many of his friends had taken. He had rejected it always, the moment of belief becoming crystal-hard when Chan had informed him, grave-faced and quiet, that his father had been murdered. The child he had been vowed never to have a waking moment where it wasn’t him in charge, in control. But now he felt Feng’s soul pressing into him, filling his body like water into a bottle.
Trust me!
I do, Ko replied, the answer surprising him.
The Mask grabbed a handful of the boy’s jacket and dragged him off the
floor. Ko’s eyes snapped open and what Monkey King saw there made him hesitate. A new and iron-hard determination, ancient and inviolate.
The katana spun in an arc and took off the guardian’s hand at the wrist.
“It’s been a while since I cut meat,” snarled the youth, a strange dissonance in his words. “But you never forget how it’s done.”
The bodyguard fell back, momentarily confused, and the youth attacked with skilful, aggressive motions. Monkey King’s mask broke with a bone-snap crack as the polycarbonate samurai blade sank into his skull, cutting clear across the orbit of his right eye.
Old Yee hobbled from the cracks forming in the street, his barrow falling into a void spitting with noxious smoke. The noodle seller tripped and fell. Overhead, in the low and hateful clouds, he glimpsed something huge and monstrous. A tail the size of a metro train clipped the hippo Centre in passing, and the old man died in the rain of glass and concrete.
The quarrel lodged between the second and third of Heywood Rope’s ribs, to no ill effect. Fixx discarded the crossbow and vaulted away from the Josephite’s attack, rolling and drawing the SunKings. Selecting three-round bursts, he followed Rope across bookshelves, blowing fists of confetti from the rare and antique volumes.
“Philistine,” snorted the killer. Rope jerked his wrist and the blade of the ghost knife shot out on a wire, hissing furiously. Fixx fired at the thing, but it wove around the bullets and cut dozens of shallow nicks before retreating. He moved and went to fully automatic; a metre of yellow flame shrieked from the muzzles of the pistols as he unloaded the rest of the magazines. High-impact armour-piercing rounds punched chunks from stonework and blew out windows as the Josephite evaded. The op adjusted aim on the fly and found his target. Bullets ripped away great ragged lumps of Rope’s left arm and shoulder, drawing out a howl. The breeches on the SunKings locked open, spent and fuming. Fixx let the empty guns fall from his hands and went for his sword.
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