The Scarlet Crane: Transition Magic Book One (The Transition Magic Series 1)

by J. E. Hopkins

  “Sarah died this morning. Her dad and I are devastated. We are posting this to tell her friends about this terrible tragedy. Please, please let this be a warning. Avoid Transition’s horrible temptation. If you don’t, you will also die and leave your families behind to suffer. We will love Sarah forever.”

  Jonah stared at the screen, stunned, and read the message a second time. He didn’t want to believe it.

  My fault. I should have helped her, somehow.

  His mom and dad knew about Sarah, but he couldn’t say anything about her death. He didn’t want to give them any reason to watch him more closely. He yelled downstairs that he was tired and going to bed, turned out the lights, and lay on top of the bed, staring at the ceiling. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes in spite of his determination not to cry. Much later he crawled from bed, dressed in his PJs in the dark, and slid under the covers.

  * * *

  “Jonah, for the last time, get up and get ready for school!” his dad yelled from the upstairs hallway. He’d already flipped the light on and off. Jonah had pulled his heavy quilt over his eyes. Now he burrowed deeper.

  He hated getting up in the morning.

  His door squeaked open. He peeped from under the covers with one eye. His dad crossed the room, tapped Jonah’s iPod boom box and left. La Donna eMobile blasted from the speakers. He and his dad played a game in which they’d share bits of an opera and quiz each other about it. Playing an overture at max volume was his final wakeup warning.

  He threw the quilt on the floor and jumped from the bed, his bare feet thumping on the cold wood. He tripped over the bed covering, dodged the books and clothes on the floor, lurched to the iPod, and shut it down. He stumbled to the bathroom to get ready for school.

  His dad waited next to the bathroom door with a satisfied grin on his face. Jonah thought he enjoyed the opera thing way too much.

  Every morning now one of his parents met him when he got up so they could tell immediately if Transition had started. His dad’s smile slid into a distressed frown.

  “It’s here,” he muttered.

  Jonah ran into the bathroom and stared in the mirror—purple eyes stared back at him, their pale fluorescent lavender an unmistakable confirmation.

  “YEAH!”

  He started leaping up and down in a circle. As he turned, he encountered his dad’s tears. His father didn’t cry. Ever.

  His delight evaporated.

  “Jonah, I know this is exciting, but it’s like a deadly disease. Let’s go talk with your mom one last time about how we’re going to manage the next month.”

  Beijing

  The People’s Republic of China

  Stony bought the two tickets for their decoy trip to Xi’an and headed for the terminal’s second level. She spotted a sign for the elevator but couldn’t get to it because the dense crowd seemed to be doing a random dance to music she couldn’t hear. She shrugged and joined the Asian tango, darting left and right, weaving around startled commuters, always pressing toward her objective.

  A corridor cleared in front of her.

  “Halt!” A vise snagged her arm from behind and jerked her to a stop.

  She twisted free, pivoting to confront a man in a military uniform. He was about six-four, bearing a smug grin and a Glock. The weapon was pointed casually toward her chest.

  Oh, shit. Militia?

  The guy appeared to be in his thirties. A fat white scar started in the middle of his forehead and disappeared over the shaved dome of his head. His shorter, muscle-bound buddy wore a similar uniform with a holstered firearm and a projectile Taser pointed at her chest.

  Nasty. Can penetrate multiple layers of clothing.

  Stony lurched back. “Who the hell are you? What do you want?” The three stood alone in the jammed terminal, the crowd flowing past them like whitewater around an upthrust rock.

  “You are being detained by the Ministry of State Security. Come with us.” The big man’s English was almost patrician.

  She spun and lunged toward the crowd. Something tapped her back and her muscles seized. She collapsed, cracking her head on the terrazzo floor, briefly registering pain before the room winked out.

  * * *

  Stony woke curled into a tight defensive ball on a freezing concrete floor. Slowly unwinding, she pushed into a sitting position, and pressed her back against a nearby wall. Mortar protruding from between the blocks cut into her back.

  Vertigo tilted the room on its side, and a sharp pain ricocheted though her skull. She rolled to all fours and puked. She slowly returned to the wall, welcoming the cold surface, careful to move her head as little as possible.

  Concussion.

  She probed gingerly and discovered a wet, egg-sized lump. Her fingers came away sticky-slick with blood. The waves of nausea ebbed as her awareness of her surroundings grew. Single bulb mounted in the ceiling, steel door on the adjacent wall with a rectangular cutout about head high. The cell reeked of vomit, shit, and piss. She was appalled to realize the stench came from her.

  The only sound was the blood pounding in her ears.

  Did they get John?

  The desire to sleep was overwhelming.

  Dangerous.

  She tried to stand as a way to keep herself awake, but stabbing pain in her head knocked her down. She crawled back to the corner, folded into a fetal position, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  “Qǐlái! Get up!” A boot stabbed Stony in the side, lifted her, rolled her over. “You stink.”

  She snarled, “Goddammit, enough already!”

  Two goons—she squinted up at them; the two from the airport—reached down and jerked her to a standing position. Someone had driven a railroad spike between her eyes. Nausea lurked at the edge of her awareness, ready to pounce if she dared move too quickly.

  The tall guy with the scar asked, “Can you walk, or do we drag you?”

  Both men wore Nike Jordans, gray athletic pants, and hoodies. The short guy held a Glock to his side. No sign of the Taser.

  “I can walk,” Stony croaked. “Where am I? You have any water? I’ve gotta piss. The wake-up service in this hotel sucks.”

  They steered her through the cell’s open door and to her right, prodding her down a hallway that was about thirty feet long. They passed four unoccupied cells, two on each side of the corridor. Anemic bulbs hung from a concrete slab ceiling three feet overhead.

  Kidnapped and dropped into a gray world. Black and white would be colorful here.

  She half-turned and glanced back. Her cage was in the middle of the passageway. Beyond it lay the dark openings of four more cells. A closed door without a cutout sealed the opposite end of the hallway. Her shoulders sagged.

  A small place, vacant, except for me. Maybe not an official government prison.

  The short thug grunted and prodded her in the back.

  A ceramic toilet sat at the end of the corridor, perched on a drain the size of a manhole cover. A corroded shower head sprouted from the wall about six feet above the commode.

  “Clean yourself up. The comrade doesn’t like women who stink.” His partner remained silent.

  Getting naked in front of these guys is a really bad idea.

  “Do it, or we’ll do it for you.”

  Stony stripped, sat for the most satisfying pee of her life, then stood and scrubbed in an icy, stinging spray. She shut down the shower and sluiced water from her body with her hands. Shivering, she reached for her filthy clothes.

  Scarhead stopped her. “Leave them.”

  She bent for her shoes. “I said, leave them.” He shoved her toward the opposite end of the hall.

  When they reached the closed door, Scarhead reached around Stony, groped her breasts, then pounded the steel surface with his fist. The door swung open, and a meaty hand shoved her through, into a moonless, frigid night.

  Shattering pain lanced into her feet. She danced like a marionette on fire, trying to escape. Moving made it worse.

&
nbsp; Suck it up. Stand still.

  She forced herself to stop and look down, searching for the source of the agony. The ground sparkled, beautiful, confusing her.

  Diamonds mixed with ice.

  She slowly raised her head.

  Christ.

  She stood at the edge of a no-man’s land of broken glass. The light from miniature suns on tall poles bounced off the surface.

  “Over there,” Scarhead said, pointing toward a tall industrial building opposite them, about fifty feet away.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I can’t walk on—”

  “You rather we drag you, face down?”

  “Fuck.”

  Stony sucked air deep into her lungs and stumbled forward, each step excruciating, each worse than the one before. She jerked across the brutal ground, propelled by a fierce desire to show no weakness to the assholes who followed behind her.

  Gasping, fighting nausea, she finally reached a concrete apron in front of her destination. She stopped and picked the glass from her feet as best she could. The pain spiked, then relented as the glass shards fell with a soft clink onto the concrete. Her teeth started chattering in the freezing cold.

  A rough hand prodded her forward, one man in front, the other trailing. They led her into the building, down a short hallway, and into a room about double the size of her cell. Pieces of glass embedded in her feet twisted in her flesh.

  A solitary floodlight focused on an empty chair in the center of the room. A short, wizened old man sat six feet in front of the chair, just inside the circle formed by the glaring light.

  Bad to worse. No one gives a shit that I can recognize them.

  Scarhead and his friend forced her to sit.

  “Shit,” Stony hissed with relief as the pressure on her torn feet eased.

  They roped her chest and arms; forced her legs apart and tied them to the chair’s legs, then slunk into the void surrounding the light.

  “Like what you see, you pencil-dicked assholes?”

  Her emaciated inquisitor was swaddled in a long woolen coat. A cigarette with an inch-long ash was pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his quivering left hand.

  Looks like Yoda has gone over to the dark side.

  A brilliant red scarf wrapped the old man’s throat, cascaded down his chest, and pooled on the floor. Stony stared at the crimson cloth, mesmerized. She fought to slow her breathing, her gaze sliding from the scarf to the crimson swirls on the floor around her torn feet.

  I am so fucking scared.

  She shifted her stare to the old man. “It’s rude not to talk to a guest. Where is your fabled Chinese hospitality?”

  Why can’t I keep my goddammed mouth shut?

  Yoda held up his hand and issued a soft command. One of the thugs appeared from the dark, removed the cigarette, lit another for him, and lumbered back into the impenetrable gloom.

  “Hospitality is for friends only, Ms. Hill,” the old guy said in Mandarin, then exploded into a wet, hacking cough. “Are you a friend?”

  Stony stared at him, as if she didn’t understand.

  “Come, come, Ms. Hill. I know you’re fluent in my language.”

  She continued to stare.

  “Would you like me to share your comment with my pencil-dicked friends? They might wish to demonstrate the inaccuracy of your characterization.” His voice oozed malice. “I asked you a question. Are you a friend?”

  “I don’t have to be an enemy.”

  He smiled. “We shall see.” Another barking cough. “It’s late and I’m tired. I will ask you one question. If you don’t answer satisfactorily, I’ll make you beg to tell me what I wish to know.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Now. What do you and your DTS colleague know about our operation?”

  Stony shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She had often wondered how she would handle torture, fearing she would cry like a little girl and cough up anything she knew. Now that she was confronted with the reality, she was dismayed to discover an abiding desire to keep her secrets to herself.

  Yoda’s cigarette waved in the air. One of the thugs appeared at Stony’s right, grabbed her hand and twisted her little finger until it snapped with an audible crack.

  She screamed. Her empty stomach convulsed. Dizziness spun the room around her. She prayed she would faint, but her mind betrayed her and refused to surrender.

  She spat and croaked “Damn you. I have nothing to say.”

  “I very much doubt that.” He nodded. Another goon materialized at her side. The old man extended a shaking hand covered with liver spots and indigo veins, offering his half-smoked cigarette. Before Stony had time to grasp what was happening, the goon took it and pressed the burning end against her right nipple.

  She howled, squirming against the ropes that bound her, pleading for the torment to stop.

  Her assailant pulled the cigarette away, relit it, ground the cherry-red fire into her left eye, pressing, gouging, never stopping.

  Stony felt as if the top of her head was going to erupt like an overripe volcano. This time her mind granted relief. She slid into a welcoming oblivion, free of fear, pain and cold.

  * * *

  She catapulted awake, sputtering, choking, confused, on her back; a waterfall cascaded into her face. She was drowning. She tried to swim but couldn’t move her arms. Water threatened to fill her lungs.

  The torrent ceased, and she was yanked upright. Her mind cleared, and the demons that dwelled in her wounds renewed their assault on her sanity.

  The cigarette had ignited a hellish inferno that penetrated deeper and deeper into her skull, consuming the flesh around her eye.

  Something cold and wet lay against her cheek.

  The left side of the room was gone. She moved her head toward the pain and the door panned into view, as if through a single-lens camera.

  The mess hanging against her cheek wobbled back and forth.

  The lunatic bastard ripped out my eye!

  She moaned in shock and horror, sobbing. “You pigs. Fuck your ancestors. Every generation, for all time.”

  Yoda leaned forward, as if to tell her a secret.

  “Here’s the situation, Ms. Hill. I have—”

  Stony spat a wad of hot bile at the old man, striking him in the face, driving him back. Two of the thugs leaped at her, knives flashing, then froze as their leader raised his hand.

  The Chinese Torquemada wiped his face with a cloth offered by one of the other guards. “Shall I take your other eye? You don’t need sight to meet my demands.”

  Stony grimaced and didn’t respond.

  “Beg my forgiveness for your foul act.”

  He’ll kill me to save face. Don’t be stupid.

  She whispered, “Duìbùqǐ. I can’t imagine why I did such a reprehensible thing.”

  Maybe the sarcasm gets lost in the Mandarin.

  Yoda stared at her for several long seconds. “Very well. I was explaining your situation. You and your colleague are my prisoners. My men will hone their various talents on each of you until I get answers to my questions.”

  He has Dish? God, oh God, please don’t let that be true.

  “Then what?” Stony choked. “I’m supposed to believe you’ll let us go?”

  “You’ll be transferred to a prison that holds enemies of the people. Perhaps your government will ransom you.”

  Right.

  “So, I ask you a final time. What do you know of our operation?”

  I want to answer him so much it terrifies me.

  Stony straightened and stared into the devil’s dark eyes. “I wouldn’t even give you the time of day, you son of a whore.” She paused. “What time is it, anyway?”

  He glared at her. “This isn’t like your American TV. You will talk. Everyone talks. I’ll return tomorrow to continue our conversation. Enjoy your time with my comrades.” He pushed himself upright and two of the guards moved to his side. He barked several commands
in Chinese, shuffled into the darkness, and disappeared.

  Another guard stepped in front of Stony, holding a Taser tipped with electrodes like the jaws of a massive spider. He bent, shoved the probe against her vulva, looked her in the eye with a smile, and pulled the trigger.

  Hoeryong

  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

  Senior Colonel Zhi stood before the tall windows in his darkened office, staring into the North Korean night. The glow from the Crane compound threw the tips of the tall grasses protruding above the snow into stark relief.

  Three days. Thanks to Eng’s success with the children, in three days I’ll use magic to cure Wu and bend him to my will.

  Zhi turned toward the soft click of his door being opened. Eng stuck his head in and said, “Comrade Wu is calling on the secure line.”

  Zhi glanced at his watch. It was almost 2200. He and Eng planned to drive to Hoeryong and enjoy the strippers at a new underground lady bar.

  “I assume this will be quick. We’ll leave after.”

  Eng nodded and closed the door.

  Wu never called this late. Puzzled, Zhi strolled to his desk, sat, and punched the button on his speaker console to connect the call.

  “Good evening, Comrade Wu. I hope the late hour doesn’t indicate some sort of problem.”

  Wu hacked and coughed. He sounded exhausted. “No, Senior Colonel. I have news that I thought you’d want to hear promptly. We’ve captured one of the American agents. The woman. We’re holding her in an abandoned factory outside the city for questioning. I am returning from there now.”

  “What? Where did you find her?” Zhi asked.

  “At the Beijing airport.”

  “What of the old man?”

  “They split up soon after reaching the departure terminal. My men followed the woman and grabbed her as she was leaving the ticket counter.”

  Zhi smacked his desk in frustration, caring little if Wu overheard him. “They followed the woman? Both should have been taken, but if they could only grab one, it should have been the man. He’s the leader. Your team was poorly briefed and out of position.”

  Wu’s voice was harsh. “Don’t presume to lecture me, Senior Colonel. This call was a courtesy.”