James Swallow: Jade Dragon

“Ko brought a car…” began Rikio, in an attempt to justify himself.

Hung turned his puppy-like brown eyes on the Vector and sniffed like he smelt something bad. “Corp wheels? Is this boy a fool?” he asked Rikio, “He won’t earn our graces by doing a stupid tiling like this.” He gave the car a dismissive wave. “Burn it.”

“What?” Ko blurted. “But-”

Hung eyed Rikio, ignoring Ko so completely that it silenced him. “Torch it,” he repeated. “And then make the idiot go away.”

For old time’s sake, Rikio let Ko take the bag from the back seat and leave with just a few bruises and a split lip. By the time he was at the highway, the night had closed in and unleashed the rain. Feng was waiting there for him.

“You lie with pigs, you become dirty,” said the swordsman.

Ko made a spitting noise and kept walking.

We are not so blind that we cannot see. Do you understand what will happen when the sky cuts like SILK and the BEAST pours in?

Do not accept the way of no mind and the CALMNESS of the false Zen-this is a lie made to entrap you, a coil cast down from the dragons in the toivers! Turn your face from false IDOLS. Find truth in your HEART.

The poison of dead emperors taints the Fragrant Harbour! Touch life and live! Go on and LIVE!

Excerpt from a tract distributed in Temple Street Market. Origin and author unknown.

He tried the Banana Dog and the Rama-Rama, Club 19NineTee7 and the House o’ Boots before he found his Toyomazda Ranger wedged poorly between two light buses in a side street off Waterloo Road. A few doors down, a shiny chrome elevator led to the Lucky Dot Bar. So, then. His sister was back there, making a fool of herself, braying that mock nasal laugh she put on when she faked amusement at the off-colour jokes of rich guys.

Ko approached the car and his face fell. She’d left it unlockedagain. The old familiar bite of that special anger and frustration he kept for his sibling rose and fell in his chest. He slid into the front seat and made quick and angry work of gathering up MacDee wrappers and dozens of tiny vodka bottles, the kind that crowded hotel minibars. He threw them into a public flash-burner and stomped back to the Ranger, the rain drumming off the awning of the store next to the parked car, clattering off the sunroof. He sat and watched the silver doorway. Every so often, two light strips either side of the elevator would illuminate and people would blunder out, cursing the acrid rain and unfolding their umbrellas. Mostly they were identikit corps, men and women with little or no difference to them. Some were fatter than others, some had better suits, but they all stumbled around the street like they owned it, pushing people out of their way or kicking at the slow-moving bots that wandered past them, projecting holo-adverts.

The evening moved on in slow, unpleasant surges, and Ko took the time to tape the cuts on his face with a spool of DermFix from the glove compartment. From behind the steering wheel, in the morose damp, he glared at the corporates and the gaudy hangers-on who trailed them in and out of the Lucky Dot. Ko’s fingers dug into the plastic of the wheel with such powerful, impotent fierceness, it made his eyes tight in his head. A knot of them slipped and giggled as they moved toward the main road, at their head a raucous woman in the scarlet kimono of a senior Paradise executive, dragging a boywhore behind her. Under a thermoplastic parasol, she led her gaggle of suits right in front of the Ranger and for a moment Ko imagined the look on her face if he were to stamp on the gas and ram the lot of them against the flank of the minibus. He saw it unfold in his head as a colourless manga strip: cut frames and jagged edges spattered with pools of black ink blood, wheels spinning on corpses. Screaming. Terrible laughter.

“That hatred will burn you alive one day.” Feng shifted in the back seat.

Ko didn’t bother to look at him. “You have a bloody proverb for every day of the week, don’t you?”

“I’m just making an observation.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was alone again.

The night drew in and the transit company programmer came to load the routes for the light buses. He gave Ko a sideways look from under the hood of his acid-resistant rain slicker and did his work. The two buses came to life in blinks of neon running lights and rumbled away to service the shift workers massing at the Metro stations. Tubed in from the outlying shanties across the border wall in Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s population would swell by a third once the day ended as cooks, cleaners and prostitutes came in to fill the low-rent gaps in the city’s service infrastructure. By dawn they would all be gone again, pockets lined with a few more yuan, the messes made by the suits cleaned up so the rich could do it again the next night. The migrant workforce was visible at the edges of every street, edited out of the world that people like the kimono woman moved through.

The digits on the dashboard display moved with glacier-like slowness toward closing time, and the higher they climbed the more suits ejected themselves from the Lucky Dot. In big, splashy steps, a skinny man in a laser-cut Mirany original lurched over to the Ranger and collided with it. Ko jerked awake from a clammy doze and cupped his balisong knife in his hand.

“C’mon! C’mon!” the drunk called to a group of similarly dressed men. “I gotta car! Let’s play go-gangers!” He tugged at the door handle, but Ko locked it. The man frowned, his beer-fogged brain slow on the uptake. “Hey.” He banged on the window. “Geddout. I want this car. I’m driving. ”

“Fuck off,” Ko replied, and showed him the length of the blade.

The guy frowned, unperturbed by the implied threat, and then dug out a roll of yuan. He waved them around. Paper money was a novelty for a lot of corporate types who had been raised inside walled executive enclaves, where wealth only existed as ones and zeros. Hong Kong’s night economy was still traditional at heart, though, and cash remained a quaint throwback in many quarters. The suit peeled off hundred-yuan bills and threw them at the Ranger, one after another. “Gimme the car, street boy. I can buy you. I can buy anything! I wanna play!” He yelled at his friends. “I want to be Hazzard Wu!” He slapped the window with the flat of his hand. “I promise not to kill you…” he chortled, repeating Wu’s signature line from last year’s big hit, the action racer flick, Spider.

From the back of the group came a man who was decidedly not a drunk. He reeked of corp security. With gentle force, he guided the other man away, pausing only to gather up the wet banknotes and throw Ko a slight shake of the head. “This way, sir,” he heard him say. “There’s a limo waiting.”

“A limo!” shouted the drunken man, and his gaggle of friends repeated him with noisy, idiotic gusto.

The lights around the door blinked on again as the lift dropped from the Lucky Dot on the fourteenth floor. Nikita came out and she listed like a galleon in high seas, her face puffy and red with drink, screwing up in irritation at the rain. Another girl came with her-a bottle-ginger Korean dressed in retro kogal style-and trailing behind a bald fellow with a simpering, pleading look on his face.

Ko was out of the car in one swift motion, the balisong still concealed in the curve of his fist. “Niki!” he shouted, and beckoned her toward him.

Nikita threw Ko a look and then smiled back at the Korean and the man. “Are we going to have a party, then?”

The faux-ginger girl gave Nikita a sharp prod that was not the friendly jab she pretended it was. “I’ll take it from here. ”

“He wanted to go with me-”