James Swallow: Jade Dragon

He took off his espex and gave the lady a winning smile. “Joshua Fixx, ma’am. My most profuse apologies for taking advantage of your boat.” He kissed the back of her hand with gentle reverence.

Dad had the taser in his fist now. “Just a darn minute, pal! This is our taxi!”

A SoCal accent. Fixx had the measure of these folks in a heartbeat; some midlevel whitebread splashing out on a transcontinental vacation to shut up his bored wife and whiny kids, venturing out from the west coast with little or no idea how the rest of the You Ess of Ay actually worked beyond the walls of their gated community in the burbs.

“How are you liking Newer Orleans?” He said the name of the city like N’Arlens, because that was how the touristas expected it. “She’s a peach, ain’t she?” He took in the riverine streets with a casual gesture, removing a twig from his sleeve. In the distance, a French horn was razzing the sky at a rooftop cafe deep in the Vieux Carre.

Dad brandished the taser like it was a holy cross against a vampire. “Don’t make me use this!”

“Ah, hush yourself now.” Fixx snapped the twig right under Dad’s nose and the man went slack, head lolling forward. A line of drool emerged from his lips along with a low snore. Fixx gave Mom an apologetic look and threw the taser into the water as the taxi turned on to Canal Street. She clucked and flailed over her husband, unable to wake him.

“Hey mister,” said one of the boys, the elder of the two. “Did you kill my dad?” He wore a Subburb Sux screen-T with Mall-ratz gangcult colours.

The other boy elbowed his brother in the ribs. “Doofus! He’s put him out, is all.” The younger one had a sunscreen jumpsuit and ghille hat.

Fixx smiled thinly. “Sorry about that. He’ll come around soon.”

“How’d you do that with a piece of wood?”

“Ask a favour of nature, boy. Sometimes she’ll help you.”

The eldest folded his arms. “I know what it is. It’s that voodoo. He’s a voo-doo man. He’s got what they call them loo-ahs, or something.”

“Loas,” said Fixx absently.

“Naw,” said the younger, and pointed at Fixx’s chest. “He’s an op. I seen his guns when he got on. ”The kid shuffled forward in a conspiratorial manner. “You got a pair of SunKing 10-mil longslides in a cross belt, there.”

“Good eye.”

A smug grin. “I wanna be a sanctioned operative one day. Like that Timberlake guy on ZeeBeeCee.”

“He’s not a real op.” said the other boy, “He just plays one on TV.”

“Don’t care.” The kid gave Fixx a long look. “You do interdicts? Takedowns? Highway work?”

“I go where fate sends me.”

The elder sneered. “I don’t like it here. I wanna go back to Oxnard.”

Fixx studied the younger kid. “How about you?”

The boy shrugged. “S’okay, I guess. Sometimes it smells funny. And the music don’t stop.”

The sampan rode the swell as a cigarette boat rumbled past, a languid drag queen draped over the twin fifty-cals on the prow. Fixx showed the tungsten caps in his teeth as he gave them a genuine smile, amused at the boy’s description. “That’s March’ Gras for you. These days, carnival never ends. Was a time when you could walk these streets afoot,” he said, sniffing the air. The ever-present tang of faint rot, azaleas and curdled petrochem presented itself; but there were alien scents too, ash and old blood out of place on the breeze. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and indicated where he should turn toward the Place Benville. “Back before the Cat Fives and the Big Tides, though, before you were born. Now there’s no place that don’t live off second floor or higher. The Venice of the South…” He leaned closer to the younger lad. “Parts of the city, she sank, you dig? Tempests and floods just kept comin’. Now the depths belong to the dead and the drowned.” From a hidden pocket in the long coat, he brought a handful of bleached bones, all of them careworn and yellowed through thousands of uses. Fixx bent low and shook them in his hand like dice.

“Maitre Carrefour, are you listenin’?” he whispered. “If it would please your honourable self to visit your blessing on your worthless son Joshua, so that along my day I might be obliged to serve the good of things.” He said something else that the boys could not make out and turned the bones on to the deck.

“Told you he was voo-doo,” said the older kid.

Fixx frowned and fingered the bones, nudging them a little, considering the patterns. Things had not improved; if anything, the bones told him it was worse. Quickly, he scooped them up, destroying the message. Ahead of the boat, the grey arc of the Hyperdome was becoming visible behind the buildings and Fixx stood up, scanning the sides of the boulevard for a place to alight. The original stadium that stood there had collapsed years ago, brought down by the surge tides fanned by Hurricane Mandy; the replacement sat like a dark jewel in the heart of Newer Orleans, cupped in a setting of murky waters.

A hovercraft coming the other way floated closer and Fixx stepped on to the stern. He gave the boys a look over his shoulder. “I got some advice for your dad, when he wakes up. You tell him you’ll have more fun over the Gulf at DisneyCity.”

“You’re going to kill someone?” asked the younger lad.

“Never can tell,” said Fixx, and leapt to the other vessel.

The girl’s face was reflected everywhere he looked. Holos of her dancing in the evening air over the curve of the ’dome, fly-posters in fluorescent shades three or four layers thick on the walls, her eyes winking from video billboards. Then there were the people. Men and women dressed as her, hair in various imitations of her auburn topknot, the faux-Egyptian eye make-up from her first album or the gothcore look she sported for the second disc. The crowds were a funhouse mirror for the girl, a thousand copies of her tall and short, fat and thin, dark and light. It was like a net had been cast through the universe, pulling together every alternate version that could, did or might have existed, gathering them here to coalesce at the feet of the one true original. The actual, the real, the genuine article.

At first, the girl seemed to be a hazy idea at the edge of his mind, the vague concept of a person distant and removed, thin as smoke, fading whenever he tried to concentrate on her. But as time passed, she filled in. The sketch of her grew depth and presence, moving slowly from his deep dreams to moments awake when his mind wandered. She was coming closer, he realised, and with her she dragged a bleak thread of something that his conscious mind shied away from. The girl was connected in a way that she did not comprehend, and Joshua slowly began to understand that it was his purpose to show her how. He had jobs to do-real jobs, paying cases and ongoing investigations-but none of those kept him awake at night, cold and sweating. This was an affair of an entirely different sort.

Fixx made no eye contact with any of the copies. He found them distracting, and this matter was of enough seriousness to him that he wanted nothing to cloud his path. He took a ticket from the pocket of a person deep in argument with a T-shirt vendor, and pressed on to the Hyperdome’s entrance.

Over the doors in red neon letters eight metres tall, Juno Qwan told the world that she was in Newer Orleans for one night only.

The dull reports of the support group’s climactic number built and built, reaching down through the backstage spaces in hollow, confused echoes. On the wall inside the wings, the countdown clock to the main event was inching ever closer to zero, and the tech crew were scrambling over the last few mike checks and hook-ups. There had already been six fatalities among the staff on the tour and they were itchy with short-timer’s fever. Newer Orleans was the last stop, and after they were done here tonight they would leave America behind.