James Swallow: Jade Dragon

Heywood Rope tasted the vibe in the air, the adrenaline scent messages from the roadies thick about him. They parted before the slim man, desperate to be seen to be busy, not one of them caught at rest. Good. These weeks on the road together had bred only more fear of him, and that was exactly how he wanted it to be. He reached the platform behind the stage where the band were shaking themselves down, thumbing a couple of capsules or applying derms inside their sleeves as need be. The forever-placid cast of his face tightened a little, revealing the hard lines of the skull beneath.

“Where is she?”

None of them answered. They all just looked in the direction of the dressing room, some sighing, others frowning.

For one blinding instant, Rope wanted to reach out and break someone’s neck; anyone, he didn’t care whose. A bullet of hot anger smashed into him, smouldering. His hands clenched into fists. He was so sick and tired of ministering to these pathetic children, with their paltry and ridiculous addictions, their idiotic fears and emotional fragility. In that second, he longed to stride back to the tour bus and remove the Glock subgun secreted in his luggage and start culling them. Gentiles, he thought. I loathe you all.

Instead, he slammed an iron shutter over those feelings and produced a thin smile that never went beyond his lips. “Fine,” he said aloud. Rope knocked once on Juno’s door and entered, locking it behind him.

There was little light inside. Most of the bulbs around the makeup table were inert, shattered and sparking. The mirrors were all gone, reduced to jagged shards. Juno looked up at him as he came closer, just for a moment, and then returned to her task at hand. She was using part of a chair leg to grind the broken bits of mirror into smaller and smaller pieces. Juno had already worked a lot of the glass into powdery fines that glittered all over the red carpet floor.

“Don’t worry,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ll be out when I’m finished. I just have to break all the mirrors in the world first.”

A sigh escaped him. Apart from that incident in the limo on the way to the studios in Chicago, there had been no sign of anything approaching this level of instability. Rope realised reluctantly that she must have been storing it up, getting away with small, concealable things like bouts of self-harm.

“Juno,” he said. “You’re on, darling. Everyone is waiting.” As if on cue, the crowd out in the dome roared as the pre-show video started up. He offered her his hand.

Her perfect face watched him, clouded with animal fear. She was wearing the schoolgirl outfit from the “Locker Room Heart” video: the exaggerated pigtails, the microskirt and bobbysox had scored huge numbers with the lolita-complex fans. “They love me. They’ll understand.”

“Understand what, sweetie?”

“I saw it.” She tapped her temple, and Rope noticed that her fingers were bleeding. “The sky tearing open. All these things flying out.” She made fluttery gestures with her hands. “A big mouth full of screaming teeth. It wants to eat the world. Darkness. All the worms and the people tearing up-”

“Juno.” Rope reached into his pocket and removed a leather case. “Perhaps we could talk about this another time.” The case opened like a book, with a puff of cold vapour. Inside there was a device that resembled the grip and trigger of a pistol, but instead of a breech and barrel there was a glass tube ending in a micropore mesh. The case had a small nest of ampoules next to the device, and Rope loaded one into the tube.

She came to her feet in a rush, the chair leg shivering in her hands. “I don’t need that.”

“Juno, love.” He concentrated on the words to make them utterly kind, totally without any accusation or venom. “I don’t want you to be upset. I care about you too much for that. It makes me sad to see you like this.”

“Heywood, you do believe me, don’t you?” The chair leg drooped. “I can see these things, sometimes in the day now, not just in dreams.” Her eyes unfocussed. She was exploring the thought. “Mirrors. I’m going to be killed by mirrors.”

“Juno, you’re a star, and stars are immortal. They can’t be killed by anything.”

She looked at him again, this time clear-eyed. “Okay. Put that away and I’ll come out.”

He smiled, guiding the device back to his pocket. “Look, I’m putting it away.”

Juno dropped the chair leg and came to him for a hug. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be any trouble-”

“I know,” he said in a fatherly voice. When she had both hands around him, Rope grabbed her pigtails and wrenched her head backward. She started to scream, but the noise died in her throat as the injector device chugged where it touched her jugular. A shot of electric blue fluid vanished into her bloodstream and Juno staggered back a step, her eyes hazing.

Rope spat and put the device away. “The show must go on,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said thickly, her doll-like face brightening. “Oh. Yes.”

Inside the Hyperdome it was blood-warm and moist with the exhalations of a capacity crowd. Juno Qwan’s star was still climbing and with a string of international hits and another album on the way, the petite Chinese singer had all the hallmarks of becoming a cross-genre smash. The music wasn’t Fixx’s cup of tea, though. It lacked soul by his lights, it seemed bereft of meaning; but he was clearly in the minority tonight. The sanctioned operative moved through the outer edges of the crowd as “Locker Room Heart” belted out across the stadium. The lights went down and came back again in flashes of colour, spinning strobe wheels and trailer spots sweeping the crowd like searchlights over a writhing human sea. From above, concealed in the steel rafters of the ’dome, misting nozzles cast a fine, cool haze over the throng. The towering holos of Juno glittered in the vapour, the giant doppelgangers following her every move.

Fixx saw her up on the stage, strutting and moving with her dancers, faking sexual positions with the backing vocalists. The band segued into “Bitch Queen” and “The Future is Now” before she threw off the schoolgirl outfit and changed tack. The atmosphere became sultry and intimate with a cover of “When the Night Comes”, calming the crowd. Fixx moved slowly and carefully through the ranks of Juno’s fans, letting the Brownian motion of their enrapt swaying push him ever closer to the rails of the mojo barrier surrounding the stage.

He crossed into the main mass of people and without warning his path was blocked by a hooded guy with a sleeper wand and a meshweave shirt that said Venue Security. The man rose from the waves of fans, one hand pressed to an ear bead, the other pointing the wand. The guard spoke but the music was too loud to hear a word of it. The letters on his top changed into a tickertape marquee.

Where the**** are you going? scrolled across the shirt, an automatic censor routine kicking in. Many of Juno’s fans were pre-teens.

Fixx pointed toward the stage as she started to sing the love song “Paper Sunday”.

Let bee sea your ticket, sun.

The audio pickup on the guard’s throat wasn’t doing the job properly. Fixx produced the pass he’d stolen and handed it over. When the man’s eyes dropped, he pushed forward.

What the duck? The guard went to grab him and jab with the arcing tip of the sleeper wand; Fixx turned his wrist and disarmed the man. With a knuckle, the operative struck a nerve point near the security guard’s clavicle and the man dropped to the floor. Uuuuuuuuuu.

Next came “Halo Kisses” and then Juno did a piece off the unreleased album called “Apple/Eye”. Fixx reached the edge of the general admission crowd and pressed into the thick of the hardcore fans, a hundred bodies deep in the mosh pit. Juno’s spotlight died and everything went dark.