James Swallow - Jade Dragon

Ise snorted. “That’s jagged, man. You keep your sick fantasies to yourself.”

“Hey,” said Ko as he approached them.

It was as if a switch had been flipped. The mood changed instantly, the air becoming chilly by degrees. People looked away, composing themselves.

Gau met his gaze. “Hey Ko. You drive in?” It was the standard conversation-starter in go-ganger circles, but it seemed stilted and forced.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the shop. ”That was a lie; Ko’s Ranger was parked in a multi-story a few blocks away, hidden behind a ferrocrete stanchion. He hadn’t wanted to turn up on the street with it sporting the busted headlights that were Nikita’s payback for destroying her Z3N stash.

“Huh,” said Gau. “Right. Didn’t think we’d see you tonight.”

“Not after what happened…” added Ise, without looking him in the eye.

The air of easy banter had evaporated the moment Ko opened his mouth; now the vibe was frosty and strained. Everyone there wanted him gone.

“I’m missing something.” Ko said in a low voice, the first flickers of annoyance catching inside him.

“Got that right,” Poon said it so quietly he almost didn’t hear her.

Ko fixed Gau with a hard look. “You want to help a guy out?”

Gau looked away. “Don’t think I can, man.”

Ko opened his mouth to speak, but Little Chung bounced to his feet and broke in. “Look, Ko. Out at the airport, that was off-book.”

“What?” he retorted. “Like to see you jack a corp ride like that!”

“Yeah, but it was zero, chummer! You never did something so airhead!”

“Ko, man,” said Gau, “Rikio was by earlier tonight. He said about what Hung did. You’re giving us a bad rep. You shouldn’t have popped a corp’s car, that makes shit for the rest of us.”

“You gutless fuckers,” whispered Ko. “You’re always on about a big score, but you never do anything except…” He swallowed hard as the conversation he’d had in the Vector came back to him. Making yuan off races and taking pinks where you can. “All I’m saying is,” Gau continued, ignoring the outburst, “you might want to go dark for a little while, man. Just… Stay off the scope.”

“Stay away from us,” added Poon, just in case the point hadn’t been made strongly enough.

“Shit like racing we can get away with,” said Ise, “boosting the wheels off some ubersuit gets us all ass-screwed.” He finally looked at him. “You make it risky, Ko. You oughta cool.”

He backed off a step and looked at the group. Poon, her face hard with dislike; Gau, morose and obdurate; the Cheung brothers indifferent to all; Ise angry with him. In that moment, Ko had never felt so disconnected from them, these people he called his friends. They were turning away from him to protect the stupid little bubble of their road-tribe.

The doors to Second Lei’s Kaze gull-winged open and released a pulsing musical beat. Ko recognised the chorus to “Doppler Highway”. Lei emerged from the car buttoning up his shirt, two girls in Mongkok Sabre colours following him out. Their lipstick was smeared and their eyes distant. Second spat into the gutter and rolled something small and glassy between his fingers. Even from a distance, Ko could see it was an injector syrette.

Lei threw him a snide look and grinned. “Lost your way, spooky? Want me to call you a cab?”

“You’re a cab!” chorused the Sabre girls, giggling in breathy unison.

“Or maybe you’d like something else?” Lei approached him, rolling the injector over his fingers. He sniffed. “Just in. Better than gel caps. Just pop it to your neck and-”

“Ooooh.” the two girls mimed the action. “I’m the pretty voice… ”

“Pure,” he grinned. “First one’s free.”

“Get lost,” Ko snarled.

Lei’s grin widened. “You should take a page from Niki-Niki’s book, Chen. Be polite like your sister.” He licked his lips. “Do me a favour? Tell her I got a new shipment, I’ll give her a discount for her regular custom-”

Ko’s punch landed squarely on Second’s jaw and he staggered backward, bouncing off a parking meter. Ko’s vision hazed red. “You give that poison to my family, you piece of shit?”

Second recovered and sneered. “Don’t give it to her, spooky. She pays for it.”

Ko threw himself at the bigger youth and swung out, his anger making the attack clumsy and poorly aimed. Second deflected the blow and landed a heavy fist in Ko’s stomach. Ko recoiled, coughing.

“Is this guy not the dumbest fucker in the world?” Second asked the assembled gangers. “Brains of a wooden duck!”

Ko spat and hauled himself up. Second beckoned him to keep going. In the back of Ko’s mind there was a voice that begged him to do what he always did whenever he ended up facing off with Second. Let it go. Walk away. If he took his licks and went home, if he stayed off the streets for a couple of weeks, they would take him back in and nothing would change. It had happened before, it could happen now. If he just walked away. If he just let Second keep his top dog place, if he just took the easy way out. He glanced at the others. They made no move to intervene, content to let the conflict play out and follow the dominant alpha.

“Be smart, spooky,” said Lei, licking his lips. “Just walk away.”

“I am sick of the easy way,” said Ko, earning him a confused look from his opponent. With a jerk of his legs, Ko spun about and struck Second with a spin-kick that hit like a tornado, knocking Lei off-balance. Ko heard Gau swear under his breath.

The other ganger hit out blindly and Ko caught it, air blasting out of his lungs in a whoosh of sound. Lei’s girls released a short twin scream, like the bark of a vixen. Second came up and retaliated with a showy foot-sweep that missed by inches; Lei’s fighting was all style and no substance, based on the repeated viewings of a million fight films. Ko, on the other hand, had been sent to a Jeet Kune Do school by his father when Second Lei was still in shorts watching Seizure Monster anime. Ko’s style was all about application of force, hard, direct and instant. He threw punches inside the “gate”-the zone of body mass where the nerve points congregated-and felt a satisfying crunch as a dozen expensive plastic ampoules shattered inside Second’s pocket. He shouted at Ko and hit him across the cheek with a glancing, sideways blow.

Ko rocked back, stars of pain glittering in his vision. He chewed them down and sent a sharp kick at Second’s shin. The bigger youth shrieked as Ko’s shoe tore open the skin and fractured bone. Ko followed up with a strike that impacted Lei on the cheekbone and slammed his face into the driver’s side window of his emerald Kaze. Glass shattered and the car alarm began to wail.

The sound was the cue for the gang to disperse, and suddenly Gau and Poon and the others were running for their vehicles, but Ko was ignorant of all that. He was on Second as the drug dealer tried to stagger away, hands clutched to the cuts on his sour moon face.

“No-” Second said, but Ko ignored him. Ko’s mind was somewhere else now, in a place where every insult and hurt he had ever weathered was now being paid back tenfold on his tormentor.

By the time the police pulled Ko off and tasered him, Second’s expensive Soloto mocksilk shirt was a blood-streaked ruin. The greenjackets threw him in the back of the drunk-tanker and the robot patrol wagon drove him into the holding cells.

Fixx got to the fence of Barksdale Field without tripping any of the Air Force surplus scent-sniffers that ringed the compound. Like almost everything within the chain link barrier, Barksdale was a junkyard of elderly and dysfunctional leftovers from the American military machine of the Nineties; barely fifty per cent of the hardware worked correctly, but the trick was knowing which half did and which didn’t.