James Swallow - Jade Dragon

She smirked, content at having been able to raise a flicker of anger from him. “Back to the fans, then. The other question on their minds-and on ours, of course-is the truth behind the rumours that Juno will headline the so-called WyldSky concert on Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. What can you tell us, Heywood? True or false?”

Rope waited for a count of three before answering. “Tammy, Juno is a very private person, as you know, and she certainly has a lot of respect for the independent positive-future groups involved in WyldSky. But I couldn’t possibly comment as to her intentions on this matter.”

“Here at ZeeBeeCee we’ve heard that Juno’s publishers are actively trying to dissuade her from having any connection to WyldSky given the markedly anti-corporate stance of the event-”

He held up a hand to interrupt. “Tammy, Juno is a strong-willed and very intelligent young woman. She isn’t going to let some suits tell her where and when she can’t sing. ”

“So you’re saying she’s going to be there?”

A broad smile. “I’m saying anything is possible, Tammy. That’s what I love about my job… I get to see the impossible happen. ”

The interviewer laughed. “Cryptic as ever, Heywood. Well, that’s all we have time for…” The woman turned away and the screen stuttered into blackness. The remote’s red eye dimmed, and Rope saw one of the techs make a throat-cutting gesture. He stood, resisting the urge to spit.

“Are we done?”

The tech nodded. “Good job, Mr Rope-”

“Don’t natter me,” he growled, the face he’d worn during the interview shifting into something cold and immobile. “Where’s our diva?”

“Still in her cabin. Her telemetry is a little wavy but it’s inside normal tolerances.”

Rope bent to take a look out of the nearest window. Through the oval he could see glimpses of a black glass ocean and the steady blink of a red running light on the tip of the jet’s delta wing. He turned away and made for the compartment where his mobile office was located. “Don’t disturb me for anything less than the end of the world, understand?”

The bed enveloped her with coils of warm rope, sweat-hot sheets finding places for themselves to knot about her pale skin and torso. Juno tried very hard to remember how to make herself scream, but the method of it was lost to her. In a broken, detached way she saw the component parts of her thought process fall out of her mouth in coloured blocks of sound. They broke into pieces that smelled like dark.

Eyes where her mouth should be, words for tastes and noises for colours. Everywhere there were mirrors. Talking mirrors that screamed and cried or made sounds that could have been songs. She carefully recited the lyrics to “Halo Kisses” but discovered she could only remember them backwards.

Juno dragged herself off the bed and her bare feet touched the floor. She felt the singing of the wings through the fuselage, and imagined the footless depths of sky around her. She giggled and opened her arms wide. Closed her eyes and drifted over a mirror sea. Mirror see. See mirror. Mirror. Mirror She was on the floor in the corner of the room.

Flash/blink/change.

Coiled up like a foetus, shivering and afraid. Clothes ripped. Air heavy with fear. Juno’s breath came in bolts, she forced it through her throat. There were invisible hands at her neck, twisting.

The girl pulled at her own hair and felt the way the flesh on her face moved. She felt wrong in this skin, the shape too tight, hung wrongly across angular bones. Juno watched the worms gather in the shadowed corners of the room. They didn’t know she could see them. In the dark places they were piecing together the mirrors she had broken, fixing them when her back was turned. They left the little pieces on the floor where she could stand on them. The fragments would slip beneath her skin, work their way to her heart.

Blood taste on her tongue. She remembered being inside the egg floating in the dark waters. She remembered the screaming people who loved her. There were the angels of pain overhead-and there was the dark-skinned man. Dark like blood. Dark like sky. She would never see him again.

She began to cry as the walls grew teeth and the worms marshalled their forces. At her feet there was the needle, shiny and long and candy-bright. It ended in a bulb of perfect blue, beckoning and glistening, calling to her. With shiver-tremble hands she probed to it and gathered it up. It almost fell into the sky, she could barely keep it in her clammy fingers. “Buh-bubble inna stream,”

Juno discharged the injector into her eye and went into quiet shock.

The cabin door sealed behind him and in the gloom Rope crossed to the desk and took his seat. The window blinds were open slightly, slow-lidded eyes peeking a faint sky glow into the compartment. He licked his lips and touched a hidden control in the desk; obediently, a silent panel yawned open to present him with a drawer lined in rich purple velvet. Nestled inside was a book made of rusted steel. As they always did, the edges of the pages cut him when he removed it. Rope clasped it in both hands and felt the thin streams of his blood pooling in the pockmarks and scored channels in the tome’s cover. His thumb was ripped gently as he stroked the meat of it over the spine of the book. Where the blood marked out the age-worn letters it was possible to see something of the title: The Path of Joseph.

Rope very much wanted to open the book, but that would have taken more of him than he wanted to give at this moment. There would be time, later. Time enough. A device in the desk chimed, and he bared his teeth. “I said not to disturb-”

Already a screen was erecting itself out of the desk’s featureless top, and blinking in the corner of the display was the oval logo of RWB. This was an incoming call, a live feed overriding all his personal lockouts. There were only a few people who could do that.

He had the book concealed and his hands knotting beneath a towel when Phoebe Hi’s face blinked into life before him. Rope always thought she resembled a misassembled Darbie doll, a perfect It-Girl head wrongly attached to a tubby little body. This he kept to himself, showing the required degree of deference to his superior.

“You spun that Popeldouris bitch well. The political opinion we could have done without, though.”

He shrugged. “It seemed right for the moment. It also allows RedWhiteBlue to distance itself from me. You know, ‘these views are the personal opinions of Mr Rope and not those of RWB, et cetera, et cetera.’ I’m providing plausible deniability.”

Hi shook her head. “Don’t build up your part, Heywood. Your job was to ensure that the consumers will accept the talent’s appearance at the Victoria Peak event as spontaneous on her part, an expression of free will.”

“I doubt she even understands the meaning of those words.”

“We want the consumers to feel unfettered, Heywood. You understand how important that is to the work.” She paused. “How have things progressed since we spoke last? Any improvement?”

Rope gave a dry chuckle. “If anything, she’s grown worse. I’d like to remind you that I was against the idea of an American excursion. Too far from safety, too many distractions, too much input too soon-”

“Those choices were not yours to make,” she broke in. “You would do well to remember that.”

“Of course,” he allowed. “Fix the problem, not the blame, neh?”

“Exactly.” Hi leaned into the screen, filling it with her face. “We have the remote feed here, Heywood, and Tang’s people concur with you. The instability you brought to our attention is of great concern, and I think at this stage we cannot proceed without instigating the more serious of options.”