Jade Prophet

by Sam Abraham

  The man swung his gun at Li’s head. She dodged and felt it swish by her cheeks. She turned and ran, hearing loud claps follow her. The high fence rose beyond the next dune of garbage, and soon Li was trapped, surrounded by more men in helmets aiming guns at her.

  The first man walked up to her and pressed the barrel of his weapon to her head.

  “What are you waiting for?” Li said, glaring at him with cold eyes, steeped in betrayal. How much did Shen get paid for this? Had he even told her the truth about her parents? Maybe it had been a ploy to take her from Uncle. How many others had been taken, trusting men who betrayed them?

  The man laughed. “You’ve been sold, new girl. We own you now. Try to run, we’ll break your knees and gut you like a pig.” He pointed to figures on the trash hills. “Those women are stripping metals from old holobeads. Your job is to sort through the piles until you find beads and set them aside. Runners take your piles to the stirrers. Two meals a day, one at dawn before you start work, and one after sundown.” He turned to a tall man and said, “Shoot her if she breathes funny.” The group disbanded except for the tall man, who watched her behind his unblinking visor. Her heart in pieces, Li walked to the nearest garbage pile and began digging.

  At dusk the guards summoned her to the main house. Hundreds of women, battered and exhausted, pushed up to the bunker, where guards allowed a short line to get food. Pushing and shoving, half-crushed between dirty, lice-ridden slaves stinking from formaldehyde and body odor, Li snaked her way through the doors. Whitewall surrounded cooks serving gruel from vats. In the back, near broken windows, men sat around a concrete table in stained undershirts, sipping whiskey.

  Her eyes downcast, Li stole glimpses of these men as she accepted a bowl of gruel from a fat cook who leered at her. As Li hurried to the door, she heard a woman behind her beg for more food until a guard smashed her face. She heard a voice bark orders, and turned as guards dragged the woman’s limp body away.

  She made sure she remembered the bald man calling the shots.

  Outside, Li passed women squatting on garbage heaps. The sky cleared, revealing a waxing moon behind passing clouds.

  “Ah,” an old woman with grey hair and few teeth said, “Come here, New Girl. Let us see you before the guards deflower you.”

  A nauseous fury rose in Li’s chest, and she wanted to scream at all the invisible slavers who had stolen her future, anyone who had ever made her feel poor, small or weak. Instead, she gave her bowl of gruel to a scrawny girl. The girl looked up in surprise and began scooping the meal into her mouth.

  “You need to eat if you want to live, New Girl,” the old woman called after Li as she walked away.

  But Li was not hungry, and in no mood for pity. In silence, she skulked into another concrete skeleton that passed for a dormitory.

  “Who’s there?” came a whisper. Li saw a girl emerge from the dark, thin as a bone, with tiny breasts and short buzzed hair. “What is your name?” the other girl asked, painting Li with sad eyes.

  “Li,” she said, unsure what to feel. “From Kowloon.”

  The girl’s eyes lifted in interest. “What brings you to the edge of Dongguan?”

  “I was kidnapped,” Li lied. “What is this place?”

  “Might be a Centrist workcamp, like the laogai of old. We can’t be sure. Maybe it’s just pirates. Either way, it’s all the same. We melt down rare metals. Boss sells the ore back to foundries up north. I’m Zhu, from a small village outside of Anqing, in Anhui Province.”

  It took Li a moment to realize what she was saying. “You are from the Ghost Lands?”

  The girl Zhu looked away. “Bandits used to raid my family farm, until the land would not produce for us. Then the bandits came for us instead, and sold us into slavery.”

  Part of Li wanted to apologize, to feel bad for this pitiful girl. For the first time she was with those who were worse off. But compassion had never come easy for her, and in this place she had other needs. “The boss,” she said, “Does anyone ever talk to him?”

  Zhu shrugged. “If they want to die. We’re property, they say, so it’s no big deal to shoot us.”

  Li looked down at her muddy feet and knew that every last memory was a lie: her pretend uncle’s stories, chasing kites around the Night Market, long noodles on her birthday. She looked up at the moon through the crumbling wall, its luminous freedom out of reach.

  “Don’t worry about the boss,” Zhu said. “It’s the guards you have to watch. Otherwise they--”

  “Take whatever they want?” Li said. She looked at the girl’s desperate eyes and swore she would get revenge on Shen. “If we can’t talk to the boss, what do we have to do to get released?”

  Zhu laughed bleakly. “I’ve never seen anyone leave,” she said, “at least not with their body.”

  The girl’s words sent a cold wind through Li’s heart. Maybe it was because this girl shared a character in her name, the one for wish. But for the first time in her life, Li felt like she had reached the end of the road, utterly alone, with no one coming to save her.

  “Welcome to Hell,” the girl Zhu said, before returning to the sweet escape of sleep.

  Each day bled into the last. The girl Zhu from Anhui kept finding Li at meals and following her around like a housecat, as if Li could transport her away from the horrors of the quarry. After Li had fasted for a week, the girl finally convinced her to nibble at a bowl of gruel. As she did, Li dreamt of soggy noodles in the Complex, or the jau gok she used to make for Uncle. But then Li would think of the man who had accused Uncle of taking her from her parents, and then she didn’t want to think of anything.

  Suffering was everywhere. Women would get sick, or stumble, and the guards would beat them mercilessly. Those who survived and returned to backbreaking labor seemed to regret not dying. One day while digging, Li saw an infant, held by his mother, convulse in a coughing fit, spit blood and lay still. Li watched the woman crouch over her dying baby, crying alone. The other women barely looked, they just continued to strip electronics. And so did Li.

  It took almost three weeks for the guards to come for her, just as the girl Zhu had warned.

  It started like any other day. Li woke at dawn. Under gray skies she lined up for gruel, half asleep. Soon she was out in the trash dunes, picking through motherboards. Suddenly, a guard appeared from behind and grabbed her arm. She tried to pull away, but the guard threw her like paper into the hard shrapnel ground. Other men appeared. Li knew they had come for satisfaction.

  One of them held her down, and she smelled the rank musk of his arms. Instinctively she bit his wrist and tore off a hunk of flesh as the man howled. She wriggled away and had almost escaped when another man caught her hair in his meaty paw, pulled her back and shoved her face into a pile of razorsharp nanosilicate. But the pain was nothing next to the waves of her rage. It was an anger she had never known, not even in the combat room. The anger was alive in her, a fiery demon, an elemental fury against everyone who had ever called her small, or weak, or unfit for destiny.

  When the man pulled her up and tried to rip off her filthy coveralls, she forced the blurring world into focus and boxed his helmet so hard she split it in two and cracked his skull.

  But then others swarmed her, kicking her in the ribs, pounding her with their boots and rifle butts. When they decided that she was too much trouble to rape, they picked her up, three men to a limb to contain her. They shoved her in a metal box barely one meter by three, slamming the sliding door shut. Li wailed inside, touching her tender bleeding face, baking in the summer heat and crying, heaving with sorrow at failing once again.

  Eventually, beaten and exhausted, she slept. And this was her dream...

  ***

  She was alone. A strange city surrounded her, a once mighty metropolis where millions had lived. But it lay empty, banners rippling in the wind. Skyscrapers that had been filled with life were now skeletal and bereft, their steel claws reaching for open air. Burnt cars lined ab
andoned streets, where gouges in asphalt turned avenues into lava field teeth.

  In the center of the city, a towering pagoda was full and bright, amber rays radiating from every window and bursting from its crown. Then she was standing at the entrance, watching its ten-story doors open. A column of light peeked from inside, growing wide and blinding her. Becoming her.

  She was in a room filled with incense. Walls the color of fire writhed around her, undulating with thousands of shimmering tiles. In the center was a figure in white, bowed, praying at an altar. Behind the altar was another door formed by giant clasping claws. It was a temple, she guessed, though to what god or demon she did not know. Sensing her presence, the figure turned, and the entire chamber spiraled into darkness.

  Beyond was a green land. Towering limestone karsts rose up on either side of a winding river. Li sat on a bamboo raft, drifting down the current. All around her, tendrils of lush canopy soaked up the sun, bursting with the chorus of birdsong. She closed her eyes in the warmth.

  Soon a mountain loomed closer, its summit hidden in mist. Li saw a shadow rise at the base of the mountain. It was a cave. She sat calmly on her raft as the river wound under a roof of delicate stalactites. Past curtained sparkling fringes and through tight rock hallways the cavern river wound, until it spit the raft into a great underground lake. Ripples of dark water reflected a glittering spectrum of light, as if clouds of aquatic fireflies swarmed beneath her raft. All around her, the walls and ceiling glittered with countless angles of quartz and selenite, their lucid surfaces as smooth as glass. The broader facets reflected her body as the raft floated past, as if she had floated into a cave of mirrors.

  Li closed her eyes, feeling the glow reach into her center. She opened them again when her raft slid up onto the lakeshore. Adjusting to the glare, she saw that she was not alone.

  With her in the cave was an entity made entirely of light.

  Li could just barely make out the contour of its head and body, its limbs lost in silent blaze, its damask robes melting into mirror crystals. Its presence should have unnerved her, but instead she knew only bliss in its countenance. A peace more tranquil than she could ever remember.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  I am the Holy Spirit, its voice echoed, melodic and alien, the tinkling of ten thousand flutes. I am The Lady in the Moon. I have been watching you since before you were born.

  “What am I worth to be so studied?”

  You are the Youngest Daughter of the Eldest Daughter. You alone can return the Elixir of Life to the Middle Kingdom. For too long your mother has languished on the moon, banished for saving the meek from the arrows of a tyrant. Join me, young daughter, old soul, and we will bring her home.

  Li reached out and became one with the luminous entity. Its brightness burned through her eyes and became kaleidoscope children in rainbow robes, holy soldiers with emerald armor, farmers and pilgrims, harlots and empresses dancing the great dance. They were her limbs, her heart, all the fragmented memories of her past, and she was everyone, everything, for a brief fraction of forever.

  Chapter 10 – Lu (履)

  Treading On The Tail Of The Tiger

  When they pulled her of the box out two days later, her face was covered in scabs. Li got her wobbly feet under her, and stumbled back to the dormitory as guards jeered behind her back.

  At meal time, when she had taken her bowl of gruel, she went in search of the girl Zhu, for she had not seen her since the attack. Searching the courtyard, Li found the old woman who had called out to her on her first night. The woman tried to avoid Li’s eyes, for she knew about the trouble Li had caused. But Li went to her and asked, “Where is Zhu, the girl from Anhui?”

  The woman pulled her dirty shift around her to ward off mosquitoes, and said, “That was a stupid thing you did. Zhu is gone because of you. They knew she was your friend. When you hurt them, they took it out on her.” She sighed and left Li, returning to the ragged day.

  Li stared down at the dirt, waiting for tears to come, but none did. She felt no loss, only a hollow expectation for fragile beings to break. She thought of Uncle’s drinking, and the bastard who had sold her into slavery, even the lost girl Zhu, and realized a cold truth, deep in her core. Only one person had ever really cared for her without desiring something in return. Her mother, somewhere far away, must have loved her to record holos of so many lessons and stories for her, must have hoped that one day they would find each other again. If the world broke everything else, it was nothing to her. As far as she was concerned, the feeling was mutual.

  Month’s end had come, and the days had grown hot. The same bleak sun shone through the same low clouds as Li stood in line with the other slaves waiting for their daily gruel. The same men sat at the same concrete table, sipping whiskey, and to them it must have seemed like just another day.

  But Li felt the touch of the Lady in the Moon, and decided that today would be different.

  Three women ahead of her dwindled to two, then one, and then she came face to face with the fat cook, who grunted and lifted his ladle.

  “I want to speak to your boss,” Li said softly, her downcast eyes covered by strands of hair.

  “Take the food, runt, and get back to work,” a guard growled.

  “There’s been a mistake,” Li said louder, looking up. “I don’t belong here.”

  “Well, now you’ll learn some manners!” the guard roared. He swung his rifle at Li’s head.

  She ducked it and sprang forward, jamming the edge of her hand into the guard’s jugular. He dropped, clutching his throat, but another guard caught her in a choke hold, his strength pinning her down. She tried to pry his arms away, but she felt weak, slipping, failing, just like she had in the work-yard, unable to break free. The bald one, the boss, watched her suffocate from behind the concrete table. She sank to her knees and heard her attackers laugh.

  That was when Li felt an alien voice down her spine, swarming through her in a wave. Suddenly there was brain-splitting pain, and she screamed as her hands flared white and unleashed a storm of electricity that rippled out in a ball of lightning and tore the room apart.

  Standing, shaking, she saw the man who had been holding her now curled up, his charred corpse smoking. The floor and ceiling were singed black. But before she could be amazed that Shen was right, that there was untapped power within her, she heard clicking, and something inside her twitched. She dove into a roll as pulse-fire sprayed over her head and punched lead into walls and the line of slaves waiting for food. Then she scooped up the rifle of the electrocuted guard, and pivoted toward the men pointing hand cannons at her. She felt time slow as she brought the rifle to her shoulder and inhaled. Pap pap pap, the muzzle belched. The guards were down, groaning at the new holes in their chests.

  Li caught her breath, her ears pounding. She heard shouts from the yard and sprinted to the door, slamming it closed. Something in her juiced with that same alien voice, as she gripped the massive concrete table and flipped it up against the door. Turning, she saw the bald man run from the room. Sprinting after him, tackling him to the ground, she punched him in the face until his nose gushed with blood. “Let me out of here!” she screamed.

  “The door is down that hall,” he said with a sneer. “Don’t sleep, or you won’t see me when I come to slit your throat.”

  “You’re right,” Li said. “I won’t.” She lifted the rifle again and put a pulse in his brain.

  Looking around, she saw the ground littered with bodies. A few laborers huddled by the door. “What have you done?” a squat woman yelled at her. “Where are we supposed to get food now?”

  Li wanted to tell them to run, to hide in the hills. But she only stole the shoes from the man she had killed and left the room.

  She fled the recycling quarry as fast as the clumsy shoes would let her. Once outside, stumbling through misty alleys on the outskirts of the Pearl River Delta, she reluctantly dropped the rifle, knowing it would only attract unwanted
attention. Pretending to be just another poor laborer on the edge of Dongguan, she wandered towards the domes of downtown, their polymer surfaces reflecting the underbelly of rose-colored clouds.

  It took her days to hike back to Old Guangzhou from the industrial outskirts. As the sun set, Li eventually came upon the crisscrossing skylights of the maglev train station, tracks winding to the horizon. She found the station packed with police manning bomb scanners, protecting businessmen and tourists and rich women shopping in the upper terminal from packs of migrant workers traveling from the Ghost Lands with nothing but nylon satchels. Rich and poor would only converge at the platform, pushing onto the sleek white sonic trains that slid into the station.

  Li haunted the entranceway, staring into the station with sunken eyes. Acid rain started to fall. She wanted nothing more than to run through security and jump on the first train to anywhere.

  But the nightmares of the quarry were still too fresh. Breaking into the station was trouble, and she couldn’t imagine fighting a squad of cops. So she crouched in a corner among hundreds of other travelers, exhausted, just another vagrant in a nameless sea. As she planned how to steal a ticket from any number of touts, she watched them morph into faceless, metal men, and was swept out to sleep.

  Chapter 11 – Tai (泰)

  When Ribbon Grass Is Pulled Up, The Sod Comes With It

  Li’s eyes snapped opened as cops shook her and shouted at a man in a suit. She was still groggy, but Li recognized the corporate man, a yellow cigarette hanging from his lips, his hair combed back. Shen’s tan cheeks broke into a wide smile as he saw her wake.

  She launched herself at her teacher before she could stop herself. The cops held her back, though it took ten of them to do so.

  “I understand that you may be a little out of sorts,” Shen said coldly. “But I wanted to tell you personally that you passed your final exam. We want you to work for us.”

  “I’ll rip off your balls, you heartless bastard,” she growled, silver crackling in her eyes.