Frank Schätzing - Limit

Why had she done that?

Oh yes, he’d been dreaming. Something terrible! Why would anyone dream something like that? He, Ziyi and Tony had driven over to the blast furnace, following Maggie’s call, when two of those flying motorbikes, which were too expensive for him ever to have afforded one, had landed on the control centre platform, where a third one already stood. Amazing. As he approached, he had tried to get through to Maggie, to ask her what kind of guys these were, but she hadn’t replied. So they had decided to take the guns out of their saddle-bags, just in case.

A funny dream. They were having a party.

They were all enjoying themselves, but Jia Wei couldn’t really join in, because there wasn’t much left of him, and Maggie had a sore stomach. Tony was missing half of his face, oh dear, that seemed to be why Ziyi had started screaming, now everything fitted into place, and what on earth kind of people were these?

Daxiong opened his eyes.

Xin exploded with fury.

With simian agility, he leapt back down over the scaffolding, struts and steps. His airbike was still on the platform, engine running. Far below, the detective was wrestling with the hijacked machine, busy driving himself and Yoyo to their deaths.

Jericho, that thorn in his side!

He’s on his way out, Xin thought. I’ve got the computer, Yoyo. Who can you have spoken to apart from your few friends here, and they’re dead. I don’t need you any more.

Then he saw Jericho wresting control of the machine, gaining height, moving away from the blast furnace—

And being forced back down again.

The blond guy!

Kenny started waving both arms.

‘Kill them all!’ he yelled. ‘Finish them off!’

He didn’t know if the blond guy had heard him. He leapt energetically over the edge of the walkway, landed with a thump on the steel of the platform, and ran to his bike. The turbine was running. Had Jericho been fiddling around with it? Before his eyes, the two bikes set off at great speed, and disappeared into the intricate labyrinth of the steelworks. He pivoted the jets to vertical. The machine hissed and vibrated.

‘Come on!’ he shouted.

The airbike was slowly lifting off, when something whistled past his head so close that he felt the draught. He turned the machine in the air and saw the bald-headed giant from the control centre, a gun in each hand, firing from both muzzles. Nosediving, Xin attacked him. The giant threw himself to the ground. With a snort of contempt he pulled the airbike back up and flew after the others.

Daxiong sat bolt upright. His heart was thumping, the sun was beating down on him. Across the shimmering fields of slag the vanishing airbikes quickly gained distance, but one of the bikes was unmistakably hounding the other and trying to force it to land.

One of the hitmen was dead in the control room. So who was that on the fleeing bike?

Yoyo?

While he was still thinking about it, he clattered down the zigzag stairs. Apart from him and possibly Yoyo none of the Guardians had survived the massacre. The remaining City Demons knew nothing about the double life of the six of them, even though they might have guessed at various things. Yoyo and he had originally brought the Demons to life as a disguise. A motorbike association aroused no suspicion, it wasn’t considered intellectual or subversive. They could meet easily, particularly in Quyu. Three more members had joined the previous year. Perhaps, Daxiong thought, as he lowered his full three hundredweight onto his motorbike, the time had come to initiate them. Strictly speaking, he no longer had that option. Whoever their opponent might have been, it was clear that the Guardians had been busted.

As he drove off he selected a number.

There was a ringing noise. It went on too long, far too long. Then he heard the boy’s voice.

‘Where were you, damn it?’ snorted Daxiong.

Lau Ye yawned and talked at the same time.

Then he asked a question.

‘Don’t ask, Ye,’ Daxiong snorted into the mobile. ‘Get Xiao-Tong and Mak over here. Right now! Go to the blast furnace and clear the control room, everything you find there, computer, displays, the lot.’

The boy stammered something which Daxiong took to mean that he didn’t know where the others were.

‘Then find them!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll explain it later. What? No, don’t take the stuff to Andromeda, and not to the workshop. Then think of something. Somewhere they won’t connect with us. Oh, and Ye—’ He swallowed. ‘You will find corpses. Brace yourselves, you hear?’

He rang off before Ye could ask any questions.

Jericho’s machine took a blow when the blond guy’s airbike collided with its chassis. Time and again he had tried to steer towards the airspace above the steelworkers’ housing estate. Every time the blond guy forced him back, stared wildly over at them and tried to take aim. The lunar landscape of the slag-fields sped along beneath them. Once again Jericho tried to turn off to the left. The blond guy speeded up and forced him in the other direction.

‘Where are you actually trying to get to?’ Yoyo’s voice rang in his ears.

‘We’re outdistancing him!’

‘You haven’t a hope out in the open! Tempt him into the plant.’

The blond guy’s airbike shot upwards and immediately plummeted back down again. Jericho saw the machine’s fish belly right above him and then dived. They wobbled along just above ground level.

‘Be careful!’ Yoyo snapped.

‘I know what I’m doing!’ Rage welled up in him, but he was actually by no means sure about what he should do. Right in front of him a huge chimney rose out of the ground.

‘To the right!’ screeched Yoyo. ‘The right!’

The blond guy drove them further down. The bike scratched along dried-up slag, started skipping, went into a violent roll, then they were around the chimney, only to find themselves in front of a hangar-sized warehouse. They were too close, far too close. No chance of avoiding it, of turning away, of avoiding a collision.

No! The warehouse door was open a crack.

Just before the threatened impact Jericho pulled the machine to the side and shot through it.

Lau Ye dashed through the gloomy concert hall of the Andromeda. He ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him.

Don’t ask any questions. Just don’t ask.

He was used to this from Daxiong, and he had never complained. Lau Ye was a novice in the order of the City Demons: he had been the last to join and he was by far the youngest. He respected Daxiong and Yoyo, Ziyi and Maggie, Tony and Jia Wei. He also respected Ma Mak and Hui Xiao-Tong, even though they had only been admitted to the club subsequently. Subsequently in that the others had set up the association together, with Daxiong as founder and Yoyo in the role of Vice President.

But Ye wasn’t blind.

Born on the estate just after the steelworks was closed down, with no school education, but more intimately familiar with Xaxu’s peculiar qualities and those of its inhabitants, from the very start he had refused to believe that the Demons were just a bike club. Daxiong was from Quyu, too, but he was seen as operating somewhere between the worlds of the connected and the outsiders. No one doubted that he would wake up on the other side one morning, rub his eyes, drive a smart car to an air-conditioned high-rise skyscraper and pursue some well-paid job there. Yoyo, on the other hand, Maggie, Ziyi, Tony and Jia Wei belonged to Quyu about as much as a string quartet belonged in Andromeda. In the control room they’d set up a kind of Cyber Planet for the privileged, and Yoyo had packed all the super-expensive computers full of brilliant games, but she was from a different world. She went to uni. They all went to uni to study something that parents considered sensible.