James Swallow - Jade Dragon

“Hungry?” she asked. Her eyes were glassy but there was a challenge in her flat tone.

“No.”

“Liar.” She pushed into his personal space, crowding him. “You want something more plastic, is that it?” Alice walked lazy fingers over his jacket and pulled his glass from his hand, swigging the contents. “Go on then,” she snapped, turning her back on him. “Go play with your dolly.” Alice wandered away, unsteady.

Frankie glanced around. Suddenly it seemed everywhere he looked, there were bodies pressing bodies and the taint of drug haze in the air. He felt flushed and uncomfortable. Sure, he’d been at corp raves dozens of times, seen drink and drugs and sex tossed around like party favours, but here it seemed… darker.

Cautiously, he walked out of the atrium proper and into the shadows.

Tze closed the door behind Nikita and nodded at the other girls. They had been here before and they knew how things were going to play out. Nikita flashed him a look, a heady mixture of fear and arousal in her dull eyes. He showed her where the suite’s small bar was and ordered her to make some drinks. She did so, eyeing the door now and then, thoughts of bolting warring with her baser, more avaricious instincts.

He wandered about the room as the other trio took items of equipment from the hidden compartments beneath the wide, burgundy-coloured sofas. Tze feathered the dimmer control on the discreet lighting control panel-he liked the gloom to be thick and warm-and started the recorders concealed in the walls and the ceiling.

There was a bowl of blue capsules on the low table in the corner, and next to that a flat metal case the size of a hardcover book. It was cold to the touch, condensation speckling the surface. Tze tapped it lightly and the lid sighed open, letting a waft of white vapour escape before he reached in and took out two glassy rods. He glanced up. The girls had the rig fixed up, straps and spars dangling from the rings fixed to the ceiling. They played a quick game of rock-scissors-paper and the blonde was the winner. Nikita returned from the bar with two highball glasses and she stopped short as she took in the scene. The other two girls were stripping the blonde, binding her into the cruciform support frame.

Nikita blinked and backed away a step as Tze crossed to her and took his drink. “Hard to know what to think, isn’t it?”

The other women giggled, and began to toy with one another, taking capsules from the bowl.

Tze rolled a blue caplet between his fingers, and despite herself Nikita licked her lips when she saw the glittering Z3N embossed on the side. There were hundreds of the pills in the receptacle.

“Don’t be shy,” Tze smiled, offering her the tablet. The smile turned into a laugh as her free hand shot out and snatched the Z3N capsule. She washed it down with a sip of her drink.

“Good,” he said. “We’re getting somewhere.” He nodded to the other two women. They opened a cabinet on the far wall to reveal a dozen mirror-bright arcs of surgical steel within. Giggling, they each selected a curved blade, wicked and sharp as a raptor claw. Eyes glinting, they descended to the blonde’s bare flesh and began to cut on her.

The private chambers ranged away along the darkened corridor. Each had lights above them, some dark but most illuminated. When Frankie pressed his ear to the doors, there was nothing but silence. A chill went through him. The rooms were soundproofed. Anyone could be doing anything in there and nobody would know. He turned in place, his hand trembling, and then at random he tugged at a handle. To Frankie’s surprise, the door opened without resistance, and brought with it a draught of potent human scents. He peered in and his throat went dry.

The room was so dimly lit that it was barely possible to be sure of what he was seeing, but he could make out the forms of men-one of them was one of the APRC officers he’d seen before, wearing nothing but his uniform jacket-coiled on the floor and snarling like animals. He saw flashes of female flesh in there, and violent rutting caught between the motions of sweating, scratched bodies. Someone was crying, and the sound of it drew Frankie’s attention to the ceiling. There was a man up there, ebony screws as fat as a finger holding him in place where they punched through his ankles and wrists. Skin hung off him in flayed strips, wet red meat showing in the half-light. The unfortunate’s face was twisted in agony, tracks of black tears crossing cheeks laced with complex scars. Frankie recognised the man: Ping, from the airport, the careless one who had lost the escort car.

He retreated in shock, forcing the door shut, and his heart almost stopped when he realised there was someone towering over him in the corridor. A hulking mass of a man, it was another of Tze’s masked guardians.

“Participants only,” rasped the figure. The Mask was white and black, hanging there like an apparition. The stylised face belonged to Judge Bao, a character from the Peking Opera stories of the Song Dynasty.

“In there-” Frankie gasped.

“What are you looking for?” said the guardian.

“Juh-Juno-” he managed.

Judge Bao pressed a hand into the small of his back and guided him away. “Over here, sir. I’ll take you to her.”

Frankie stumbled on, his mind reeling, the healing scratches on his hand stinging.

Nikita’s face was waxy with shock underneath her make-up. She was aware that her lip was trembling, and in the back of her skull she could feel the first cool tendrils of the Z3N hit unfolding. It seemed unreal, some horrific vidshow instead of a real performance happening in front of her. Tze’s women were opening up the skin of the blonde in turned petals of pale flesh. When the stink of copper touched her nostrils she gagged and stumbled back a step.

Tze’s broad hand shot out like a striking cobra and enveloped hers where she held the glass. “No, no. You’re not going to leave.”

She tried to deny him, but he closed his hand tighter, crushing the skin and bones. The glass made a cracking sound.

“Don’t lie to me.” He squeezed and the glass shattered. She cried out as the fragments bit into her palm.

Nikita looked to the others with a pleading stare, but they were busy drawing intricate shapes on each other in spilt blood, a confusion of lines and symbols.

Tze took a handful of her blouse and ripped it off her. He drew his finger through her cut hand and used her vitae to draw a design on her trembling breast, just above her heart. Two discs, one larger than the other, connected by a line that was in turn bisected with an arc. Tze unbuttoned his shirt to show her the same shape rendered as a tattoo on his chest. The lines were made of dragons, eating each other’s tails.

“Please don’t kill me.” She forced out the words.

He smirked and showed her the glass rods. They were long and thin, rough-hewn. Nikita was reminded of icicles. Inside each of them was a reservoir of actinic blue liquid, glittering like stars. In spite of everything, her mouth immediately flooded with saliva.

“Pure,” said Tze, seeing the reaction in her eyes. “A thousand times more potent than the weak tea you’re used to.” He jerked his head at the girls, who were scooping handfuls of capsules into their mouths, crunching them down like candy.

Then he moved, quick as lightning, and buried the first of the needles through the middle of the pattern he had drawn on her. Nikita crashed to the floor, a white-hot shock rushing though her. She glanced up, hovering on the edge of awareness, in time to see Tze stab himself with the other rod.

Nikita s world broke open, drowning her in floods of chilling blue. Tze loomed over her, a towering god wreathed in noxious smoke and shimmering darts of painful colour. From behind him, tendrils of liquid night emerged and snaked over and around his body. They stabbed out and penetrated her, rushing through her flesh and savaging her mind. She could not speak.