James Swallow - Jade Dragon

“Girls, I like you both…” said the bald guy.

“With me,” snapped the Korean and this time she gave Ko’s sister a shove.

Nikita brought up her hand to slap the ginger girl, but Ko was there. He grabbed her wrist and turned it. Her slow-burning ire instantly turned on him and she bit Ko where his forearm was bare.

The Korean was already melting away. Ko ignored the pain and dragged his sister, screeching and complaining, back to the car. He forced her into the passenger seat and they set off.

Nikita spat and hissed at him on the way back to the apartment. Now and then she would look directly at him and he could see the dull, doll-like cast in her eyes that told him she was stoned. She alternated between ranting and babbling, the coherence of her speech ebbing and flowing. Ko just concentrated on the driving and tried not to think about it too much. Every time he did, every time he thought honestly about his dissolute sister’s self-destructive life, it made his gut tighten and his temper flare. She worked at places like the Lucky Dot ostensibly as a hostess, which in real terms meant she was paid to look pretty, and ply the corp clients who frequented the bar with overpriced drinks while they pawed at her. It was just slighdy less sordid than being a sexworker. Nikita wasn’t like the girls in the Mongkok sinplexes – although Ko often said she was to get a rise out of her-in some ways, she was worse. It made his blood boil to think that the highlight of her day would be some suited creep, like baldy back, there making eyes at her.

“Least I got a job,” she slurred.

Ko realised too late he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.

“Not like you,” Nikita went on. “What do you do, little brother? Play with your stupid cars-” she smacked the dashboard. “Run stuff for the triads ’cross the border, steal? I’m trying to make something of myself.”

“How? By playing corp wannabe, by sucking up to every suit that comes through the door? What, you think one of them is going to fall for you and make you his mistress, shower you with diamonds and credits? One day, one of those scumbags is going to take you for games back at his place and you’ll end up spent and dead!”

“Don’t judge me!” she shot back. “You’re just like Dad-”

Ko stamped on the brakes and the Ranger screeched to a halt in the middle of Kwun Tong Road. In a low voice, without looking at her, he said, “Don’t talk about him. ”

Nikita fell silent and after a moment they drove on.

Eventually, Frankie had to use the Penfield beside the bed just to get some sleep. Half-considered thoughts and strange, ghostly dream fragments hovered at the edges of his weary mind. Exhaustion and jetlag struck hard the moment he laid eyes on the bed, the inviting spread of cream and chocolate-coloured silk sheets open to him in the middle of the suite. Alice talked about the meeting, but he wasn’t really listening. He remembered falling asleep in his suit.

Once or twice he awoke with that peculiar kind of disassociated fear that comes from finding yourself in a strange bedroom. The subtle electromagnetic aura of the Penfield generator eventually sent him into deep REM and finally Frankie relaxed. He thought, just once, that he had seen the Monkey King in the room with him; but that blurred like rainwater on glass and faded.

A service bot woke him by singing a traditional folk aria. It was a silver ball balanced on two convex wheels that emerged from its flanks. A rotating head presented a pair of cute eyes and a sine wave mouth. It giggled like a child as it did its chores, making him coffee and tuning the shower. The device offered him a trio of vitamin and nanobooster tablets as he got dressed, gravely informing him of the dangers of dehydration on the international traveller. Frankie didn’t argue; his face felt like old paper. When he was done, the metal ball rolled away along the corridor and used arrows projected from laser slits to direct him to the hotel’s rooftop heliport. Alice was waiting for him in an idling spidercopter, with Monkey King in the cockpit.

“Where’s Ping?” The question popped out of his mouth as he strapped himself into a seat.

“Occupied,” Alice replied, as the rotodyne drifted off toward the towers of Central.

Frankie watched the world go by, the glass and steel skyscrapers passing beneath him, the near-distant glitter of Kowloon across the bottle green waters of the bay. There was no need to provide a spidercopter to take him to Yuk Lung’s headquarters-a car would have got him there almost as quickly-but the gesture was obviously important. Everything about Francis Lam’s return to Hong Kong was being choreographed with infinite care and precision. For his part, Frankie could not be sure if it were to make him feel special or just inferior.

Monkey King flew them around the dagger-like shape of the China Bank building, giving the sheath of protected airspace around the fluted NeoGen pyramid nearby a wide berth. The rotorplane turned and made an orbit of the YLHI tower. The company headquarters resembled a column of creamy green jade rising like a pillar of heaven; bright ribs of lunar steel studded the sheer walls, and at the level of the ninetieth floor the ultramodern lines of the tower suddenly stopped. Capping the building was a reproduction of a Qin Dynasty castle, deposited there like something from an ancient legend. Only the discreet clusters of satcomm dishes and ku-band antennae seemed out of place. As the flyer approached, a helipad unfolded from a hidden balcony to accept them, a bee settling into an open flower.

Alice read a message from her watch and beckoned Frankie. “Mr Tze will receive you in the library.”

They were met by one of Monkey King’s counterparts. This one had a mask of green with red and white detail, a little trim of gold here and there. Frankie searched his mind and came up with a name: Deer Child, a mountain guardian from an opera that he couldn’t recall the title of. Deer Child was shorter and stockier than Monkey King, but they were cut from the same cloth. The masked man had the same smooth gait and effortless sense of menace about him.

Frankie followed Alice into the castle and Hong Kong vanished behind him. Inside, the building was warm and close, full of the natural noise of feet on stone floors and creaking wooden doors. Tapestries and art hung on the walls, and there were suits of armour at each intersection of corridor. Frankie wondered if they were more than they seemed; if an alarm sounded, would they suddenly leave their plinths and stand to the defence of the castle’s master?

He glimpsed other rooms as people passed them along the way, doors opening and closing with flashes of glass and steel, banks of holographic monitors and server farms. Behind others came the snapping of wooden practice swords and the patterns of voices from sparring fighters. They emerged in the library and Frankie wandered to the centre of the room to get the measure of the place. Books lined every inch of vertical space, rising far out of reach to the ceiling. Trios of full-size terracotta soldiers, some holding weapons, guarded discreet lamps in the corners of the room, looking on across the centuries with blank stone faces. Frankie hesitated by the low table in the middle of the library and something made his eyes fall to the oak platform. A box made of brushed aluminium sat there, shiny and out of place.

From behind him there came the thud of a heavy door and an intake of breath that was deep and sonorous.

“Francis,” said Mr Tze. “Welcome home. I am so sorry we were required to meet under these terrible circumstances.”

The radiator complained as Ko turned the temperature up a notch or two, the elderly pipes rumbling and knocking. He padded through the apartment in his socks, the quiet routine of breakfast so as not to disturb his sister ingrained in him. He microwaved a couple of meatpockets and made strong tea. The atmosphere inside the apartment was patchy; where the kitchen and the closet-sized bathroom lay against the outer wall, it was chilly and damp from the rain; the two bedrooms and the living room-the patch of space Nikita laughingly called “the lounge”-were warmer, closer to the central courtyard in the middle of the block where caged heat from the lower floors wafted upwards. The apartment felt gloomy and confined, as if the resonance from their argument on the way home had followed them in and leached into the walls. The sullen ambience in the room was infectious.