James Swallow - Jade Dragon

“Out!” Ko screamed. “Get me out!”

He felt Feng’s fingers around his wrist and then…

Ko hit the ground and felt asphalt beneath his fingers. He barely got to his feet before he vomited explosively, bringing up thin, watery bile.

Fixx was nearby, sitting on his haunches. It took a moment for Ko to realise that they were on the roof of the hospital building. “How did we get up here?”

“Sleepwalkin’,” offered the op, casting the bones and reading them. “Damn. That was heavy.” He looked up. “Your buddy, Feng. Got us free of it.”

Ko looked at his feet and shivered. “Is Nikita all right?”

“No change. Same for all those poor fools.”

The thief found his attention drawn up to the distant shadow of the peak. “All that was true… That mad bastard is gonna summon a demon, rape the world…” Ko grabbed at Fixx. “We can’t let that happen!”

But the op’s attention was elsewhere, staring down at the hospital parking lot. “First things first,” he said, pointing. “We got company.”

A silver Mercedes Vector drew to a halt, and from inside came three distinctive figures. A man and two women in identical suits, faces hidden behind gaily-painted opera masks.

The Road to the Shining City must be marked out

For the Dark Ones and their Servitors

Just as landing lights mark out an airfield runway

The spilled blood would guide the Dark Ones to the Earthly Plane

To the Last City

Message embedded in Happy Carp beer commercial, origin unknown.

Blue Snake came into the hospital first, with her sister White Snake and Qin Hui following close behind. Blue and White had not been born as siblings, but in their service to the Cabal they had been made so, in manners far beyond the level of crude genetics. Their masks were negative images of each other. Where her visage was dominated by azure colours, honeyed filigree and pale trim, her sister’s facade was white with blue and gold detail. Their masks were the faces of two mythic characters, serpent-spirits who guarded a mountain in legend. By contrast, Qin Hui’s face was dominated by death-white, with facets of black and pink; his name was taken from a perfidious politician of the Song Dynasty, whose hands bore the blood of the renowned hero Yue Fei-if the stories of the playwrights were to be believed.

They advanced through people who wailed and rocked. Blue Snake felt a pang of envy for them that was quickly excised; these wretches did not yet understand the gift they had been given.

A nurse approached, her expression frayed. She had the hardened aspect of someone who had seen much trauma but still kept a kernel of humanity within, refusing to become cold to it. She wore the kevlar uniform typical of an Accident and Emergency staffer. “What do you want here?”

White Snake showed the nurse a datascreen. “Have you seen these two men? The black man’s name is unknown to us, but the youth is Chen Wah Ko.”

The nurse shrugged. Blue Snake saw the lie instantly, the slight dilation in her eyes and the change in her blood capillary flow. The mask fed the data to her, direcdy into her thoughts; it went to her sister and to Qin Hui as well.

White Snake took the nurse by the arm and spun her about, dislocating her wrist in the process. With her other hand, the Mask produced a sprayhypo loaded with Z3N doses. White Snake fired twenty ccs of the blue into the woman’s neck and let her drop, stuttering, to the floor.

Mr Tze suggested that they be careful not to terminate anyone already in the early stages of the rapture, that they take every opportunity to induce more to the glory should the opportunity present itself. To this end, Qin Hui tossed a slow-release canister of aerosol Z3N into the air ducts while Blue Snake examined the hospitals computer system. Her mask extruded a wire into the reception terminal’s interface socket and she sat motionless, the monitor in front of her flashing through pop-up permissions screens.

White Snake ensured that the channels on all the hospitals d-screens were tuned to the live feed from Wyldsky. They had learnt only recently that one of the clinic’s doctors had been causing problems, attempting to interfere with the pattern. It was of course no accident that this same doctor had made contact with the Chen boy. This was the way of things, the play of designs laid down by the King and his brethren.

The canister began to hiss; thousands of others, some spraying mists, some dripping thick blue liquid into reservoirs, were doing the same across the city. The Masks had been planting them for months in places where they would lie undiscovered. Metro stations and schools. Shopplexes and parks. Trams and taxis. Everywhere.

But this was only the secondary objective; the primary was to locate the targets. This directive was also broken into two elements. The first was to Isolate and Apprehend. The second, the simpler of the two that would come into play if the first could not be achieved, was to Kill.

“I have them,” said Blue Snake. “Eastern quadrant of the building, emergency exit stairwell number four. They are together, descending from the roof.” Before her, grainy video feeds from monitor pods showed a pair of blurry figures.

“Hey!” shouted a voice, attracting White Snake’s attention. A security guard with a large taser hove into view, his expression confused at the trio of incongruous porcelain masks. “Step away from the computer!”

White Snake adjusted something on the hypo, and aimed it at the guard. Reconfigured for dartgun mode, the device coughed, and one of the cartridges embedded itself in his right eye. The man screamed and clawed at his face, foam forming at the edges of his lips.

“Moving,” said Qin Hui, producing a flechette pistol and pointing. He didn’t need to speak; none of them did. But the public relations department felt that, at least around humans, they should converse in a normal fashion. Alienation of the client base was never good for business.

The Masks moved into the hospital corridors, laying people down as they came across them.

Ko grabbed the op’s shoulder and pulled. “Come on, man!” he cried. “What are you waiting for? We’ve got to run, get distance… Get Nikita out of here!”

But Fixx hesitated, thinking. “They don’t want her. She’s already dead in Tze’s eyes. They’re here for us.”

“What?”

The other man rubbed his chin. Yeah. It was making sense to him now, the pieces of sensation and distant, weird vibes he’d been collecting over the past few months at last starting to cohere into something tangible. The waking dreams that led him to the singer in Newer Orleans, the fragments of deep fear that bled across the night from the Eastern sky. The words of the old Sifu and the steel-sharp determination in the eyes of this streetpunk. All of it reflected in the psychic aftertaste of the man who had violated Nikita’s mind, the man called Tze. In The Han, they had looked at each other for a fraction of a second, and Fixx knew. There were other clouded souls and dark forces at work here, but this monstrous plan had Tze at its heart. He glanced at Ko, and felt a sudden understanding, a sharp and painful realisation. As much as he wanted to, as much as it seemed Maitre Carrefour had brought him here for it, Fixx at last saw the role that he was to play. The final pages of the script for this night became clear. “You have to stop Tze,” he told the teenager. “He has to die by your hand. ”

Ko’s jaw dropped open. “Me?”

“Listen,” Fixx lent close to him. “World turns, she’s gotta a pattern, see? Layers and levels, moves like clockwork. The whole of life works on one principle, slick. Right man, right place, right time. When one of those is off, all hell breaks loose.”