James Swallow - Jade Dragon

Two pale masks were visible through the windscreen. The driver had the ram plate deployed from the bumper and slammed the ambulance hard, trying to force a skid. Ko took the bite out of the attack by chopping the throttle and drifting off the axis. The Mercedes sideswiped a motorcycle and the bike flew away like a fish jerked on a line.

The roar of engines turned hollow as they entered the tunnel, and the Vector came at him again. This time, one of the Masks was out of the window, crawling on to the roof, swarming over the dented hood. Ko swore as he lost a second of concentration, barely missing a snake-bus filled with clubbers. The masked man threw himself at the ambulance and caught on, clinging to the driver’s side. He used clawlike fingers to advance up the outside of the vehicle.

In the wing mirror Ko saw a chilling, expressionless face in blinks of reflected blue light. He threw over the steering wheel, hard. The screaming ambulance bounced off the inside of the tunnel with a blast of sound and tearing metal. Ko did it again, seeing the Mask disappear for a second into the shower of sparks and glass. The wing mirror tore away as he pressed the ambulance into the tunnel wall and held it there. Panels sheared off, and a crimson wash streamed over the tiles.

Behind the vehicle, the distended and broken body of Qin Hui spun away, bouncing up off the bonnet of the Vector and landing behind. The robot bus rode over the guardian, grinding meat, porcelain and arcane metal implants into the road.

White Snake activated the lasers in the headlights and opened fire.

Fixx was not happy about the place he found himself in. Looking for somewhere to make a stand in a hospital was never going to be a good idea. Too much chance of collateral damage, too many civvies. For a second he smelt the toasting flesh from the ferryboat massacre, saw Cajun Pork Cathy’s dead, dead eyes. Fixx blinked the thought away, and rested his hands on the edge of the nearest cot. There were ranks of bassinets in tight rows filling the ward. Each crib was cooing quietly to the sleeping babies within, monitoring them, turning them with piezoplastic paddles to keep the children content and prevent cot death. Fixx felt uncomfortable here with the SunKings in his hands, and when the door opened to admit the woman in the blue mask, it was almost a relief.

She carried a flecher, a Krupp by the looks of it, with a fat snail drum magazine. Two seconds of pressure on the trigger would murder every newborn in the room, should she wish it. The Mask nodded slightly. Fixx guessed she was listening to a comm-link.

“Mr Tze would like to extend an invitation to you, to visit the Yuk Lung tower.” Her voice was a whisper, but it carried. “The choice of the state in which you arrive there is up to you.” The gun muzzle never wavered.

“A moment,” he said, carefully holstering the pistols. “If you please.” Fixx drew the bones from his pocket and weighed them in his hand, then gently rolled them out across the top of an enclosed cot. The child inside stirred, blinking at him. Small fingers stretched at the yellow-white pieces, then sank away.

Fixx studied the lay of the bones, and as he did, he noticed the feedlines dripping clean air into all the cribs. Blue vapour twinkled in there.

The woman in the mask flicked off the safety to make her point.

He smiled thinly and gathered up the bones once more. “Never been a man to argue with fate,” said Fixx, holding up his hands. “I can read the signs. I surrender.”

“I’m here,” she said to the world, and the world screamed back love for her. Juno stood inside a bowl of darkness, surrounded by a shifting sea of souls, crying, imploring her, begging her to complete them. The girl saw them through a hazy lens, reading the colour of their hearts. They burned with wild fires, but the shades were dull, tainted. They never even knew it, the dear poor people, but she could see it. Juno saw it very clearly now, the acrid blue that stained everything, the battery acid taste in her mind. She looked up and they did the same, joyful at the touch of the warm drizzle falling. The crowd were unaware of the invisible balloons floating up there, molecule-thin sheathes breathing out the drug into the clouds, seeding the blue rain.

They moved like a shoal of fish or the mindless uniform motion of a flock of birds in flight. The crowds were unified, drunk on the Z3N laced in the food, the water and the air. They were sharing, transforming as one. A totality that waited for one shining light to guide it. Her voice.

Juno’s hand strayed to her throat, feeling tightness there. Her flesh and mind warred with one another; she knew she only had to release the first note to set her nightmares in motion.

Tze spoke from the wings, and despite the roaring adulation, she heard him. “Sing,” he commanded, repeating the words of compulsion Rope had used in the laboratory. “Sing for them, infans simulare. ”

“Harmony,” she wept. “Come with me.”

The two vehicles exploded out of the tunnel and howled through the side streets of Causeway Bay, the sirens of the ambulance parting traffic before them like a knife. Burning jags of yellow light from the Vector lit up the flanks of the paramedic van, shattering lights and tearing at the tyres.

The Merc kept on him as he turned on to the back roads, screeching around the narrow bends up toward the Peak. The ambulance ricocheted off safety barriers and knocked chunks of old stone from the walls. Beams scorched the asphalt. The vehicle was getting sluggish. Ko knew he was on a loser.

Another shot flashed through the back of the ambulance and struck a pressurised gas cylinder. The shriek of escaping fumes brought the stink of liquid nitrogen to Ko’s nostrils. The smell made him panic and he jerked the wheel hard, vaulting out of the vehicle and into a gully.

The ambulance spun out as the Vector came closer. Ko had time to bury his face in the dirt as the CryoSaviour re-sus module inside exploded. Designed to flash-freeze trauma victims, the uncontrolled detonation created a plume of super-chilled vapour that engulfed both vehicles.

Clutching at the re-opened wound on his chest, Ko staggered from his place of safety to find the masked woman frozen to the inside of her car. She appeared quite dead.

The throaty rumble of a bike engine drew his attention; a kid dressed in Road Ronin armour halted and doffed his samurai helmet. “Dang! Did you see that?”

Ko kneed the biker in the nuts and tossed him from the cycle. As an afterthought, he grabbed the youth’s katana and rode on, toward the glowing summit.

The lines in blood were drawn, and overhead the sickly light of ascension was forming. Rope looked up, weighing the ghost knife in his hand, as Blue Snake arrived with the black man in custody. He searched his memory for a name.

“Joshua Fixx. You’re not unknown to… To me.”

Fixx studied him. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”

“I should say so.” Rope crossed to the wooden frame where Lam was chained.

The operative had a measuring stare. “Does Tze know?” he asked suddenly. “I’m willing to bet they think you’re a team player, right?” Fixx nodded. “But no. I can smell it on you, mister. More to you than just this zen thing, huh?”

“Impressive,” said Rope. “You just clapped eyes on me and you can tell all that?”

“I’m a perceptive fellah. I can smell it. I met your kind before.”

“Yes, you have.” Rope had a blink of someone else’s memory, of Fixx wet with blood and human carrion. “I can taste it.”

“The stink from Spanish Fork carries a long, long way. What is it you all like to say? The Path of Joseph…”

“Is thorny.” Rope spun and threw the blade, burying it in Blue Snake’s chest. She sputtered and perished. He looked up at Fixx and felt the burning touch of Elder Seth behind his own eyes. “Tze makes his play. Then we’ll make ours.”