Jade Dragon

12. To Live and Die in Tsim Sha Tsui

The Korvette grumbled along Nathan Road in the stop-start evening traffic, a black shark drifting between the slab-sided hulks of double-decker buses. The street was lit with gaudy neon and blinking holos, dancing over their heads. Ko caught a glimpse of a flickering dragon in brilliant green, but it was gone before he could focus on it.

In the driving seat, Fixx glanced at the dashboard navscreen. “Couple more blocks.” He looked up at the youth. “Still time to change your mind.”

Ko’s eyes flicked to a passing street corner. Feng stood out there, arms folded, shaking his head. “Just drop me off outside,” he insisted, turning back. “I’ll handle it.”

Fixx made an amused noise. “I don’t think I’ll be doin’ that.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Didn’t seem that way at the docks,” said the op. “Or perhaps I was just readin’ the situation wrongly.”

Ko’s lip twisted. “Look, this isn’t one of those things where you save a guy’s life and then it belongs to you. That’s the Apache who do that, not the Chinese.”

“The old guy, the Sifu. He asked me to keep an eye on you for him. Says you’re reckless, impulsive-like. Could get you into trouble.”

Ko looked away and smoothed down the jacket he was wearing. The clothes were nondescript and traditional in cut, and they reminded him of a school uniform; but that was all they had to spare in the dojo, and there was no way he’d get into The Han in his go-ganger colours. “There’s only one ticket on the door, and it’s in my name.”

Fixx smiled. “You let me worry about that.”

The thief blew out a breath. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what you did for me, but the Good Samaritan thing, it’s getting a little old now. Why don’t you just go on about your business and let me deal with mine?”

The sanctioned operative’s eyes flicked to him over the rim of the espex. “Maybe you are my business, kid.”

He slapped his hands on the dash in exasperation. “Why? What the hell do you want with me, Fixx?”

One hand left the steering wheel and dipped into a jacket pocket. It returned with the tarot card, the Knight of Wands. Fixx held it up.

“That’s it?” Ko snorted. ’“Cos of some stupid card trick you suddenly gotta stick to me like glue?” He tried to snatch the card from the op’s fingers, but Fixx did a magician’s flourish and made it disappear. “That’s jagged, man! You think your freaky-ass cards and your pocket full of chicken bones makes you some kinda wizard?”

“Houngan,” corrected Fixx, but Ko wasn’t listening.

“Whatever you think you know about me-”

“Ain’t about you,” the other man said. "Nor me neither. It’s about the way things come together. We got parts to play.

Ko’s face flushed with annoyance. “Who told you that, huh? Some voodoo hoodoo? Some-”

“Ghost?” Feng was there in the back seat. Ko could smell the dry scent of his leather armour.

Fixx saw the fractional glimpse he gave the rear-view mirror and looked as well, eyes narrowing. He sniffed.

Ko was still talking, the words spilling out of him. “Maybe you don’t see nothing, huh, did you ever think that? Maybe people are right when they call you spooky and weird, maybe the phantoms are all in your head and you’re just too looped to know it…” He trailed off, silenced by his own words.

Fixx gave him a quizzical look. “You all right, kid?” The navscreen chimed.“ We’re here.”

Ko’s face darkened, and taking care not to let his eye line cross the back seat again, he popped the latch as the vehicle halted at the kerb. “One thing,” said the youth, “if you’re coming with me.”

“Yeah?”

“Quit calling me ‘kid’.”

Fixx tabbed the autodrive control and set the Korvette to take itself somewhere secluded. “Whatever you say, slick.”

The deal, such as it was, came together in a flurry of text messages, back and forth in the dimness of the meditation cell. The wageslave was waiting for Ko’s call, and he could taste the man’s anxiety even through the strings of letters and numbers. There would need to be money, real yuan cash and not some fairy gold eDollars that would vanish from the account the moment the transaction was done. The corp made promises, and the thief turned the screws on him.

Not just cash, wageslave. More than that.

This chance would never come again, Ko was sure of it. He made the man secure stratojet transfers, nameless and no-questions-asked tickets that would get Ko and Nikita out of Hong Kong and to any major city in the world. The thief thought about the Zarathustra Clinic, the glossy brochure of the clean white buildings in Zurich and Aspen.

Ko laughed off the corps attempts to get him to meet on Hong Kong Island. Nah. That was the corporate heartland over that side of the bay. Ko wanted the meet to go down on his turf, Kowloon side, the domain of the Street. He thought about how Hazzard Wu had dealt with a similar situation in Cat Street Killer, the last reel was the nightclub duel. Yeah…

They’d meet at The Han. The place was high profile and exclusive, catering to top echelon corps, media types and the richest members of Hong Kong’s criminal dominions. You had to have an AmEx Plasma card just to get in, so he’d heard. Wageslave could make that happen, he promised. Ko’s name would be on the guest list. Of course, he hadn’t reckoned on needing a “plus one”.

Feng still did not speak to him, silent since the incident at the docks, and he seemed to be there less and less. Ko had lost the last few Peacefuls in his pockets to the waters in the bay, and couldn’t even give the swordsman the smallest of offerings by way of apology. The warrior retreated to the shadows and faded.

Fixx and the Sifu caught him trying to sneak out. He heard them talking in riddles, something about “black skies over the peak”, the old man’s voice tight with anger as he spoke of “monsters on the streets” and “poisoned blood”.

He told them, after a fashion, how it was going to go down.

“Smells like a trap,” Fixx noted. “More at stake than you know.”

But Ko didn’t care. He wanted out, him and Nikita gone. The city, his life, everything he knew had turned on him, piece by piece.

“I’m done here,” he told them, and he meant it.

Any other nightclub, and the red carpet outside would have been crammed with paparazzi and camera drones; but the management at The Han had a discreet flicker-field screen extending out to the street. It formed a tube of runny air, appearing like smoke hazing through glass, fogging the image of anyone who passed inside. Coupled with an EM frequency jammer, discretion was assured.

Most people didn’t even know exactly where the club was. There were no advertisements for it, no address listed on the matchbooks. It was a stealth venue, sandwiched between two equally nondescript buildings. Rumour had it that there were even fake entrances dotted all around Hong Kong, just to throw off the riff-raff and the uninvited. If you didn’t already know where it was then you had no business being there.

The doorman was aptly named. He was as large as one, dark aged oak. He held up a hand the moment he got a good look at Ko’s clothes. The AV feed in his monocle had a programme embedded that served solely to judge the fashion index of those who wanted to enter the club. “Name?” he rumbled.

Ko thought himself clever when he told the wageslave what identity to place on the guest list, but now it came to say it out loud, he felt a little silly. “Uh. Hazzard Wu. ”

There was the very smallest raise of an eyebrow, and the man nodded, ticking off an item on an embedded d-screen. “Good evening, Mr Wu. Nice to see you again.” He beckoned Ko with one hand and warded off Fixx with another. “And you are?”

“A gatecrasher.” The sanctioned operative stabbed out with a single finger and struck a nerve point near the doorman’s clavicle.

“Ah,” was all the big man could manage, as his muscles seized up and left him twitching there, rooted to the spot.

Fixx uncurled a hundred yuan note and slipped it into the doorman’s jacket pocket as they walked past. “Thanks, bro.”

There were bars that dealt drinks and food, oxygen and pills. Boys and girls in costume drifted through the clientele distributing orders in stone cups or rough-hewn glasses that looked like cubes of ice. Music and drugfog hazed the air, weaving around the flaps of ceiling fans worked by nubile girls. Ko walked in deliberate slow motion, keeping to Fixx’s right, working hard not to be dazzled by what he saw around him. The club was modelled on the interior of a warlord’s grand hall from ancient China’s feudal past, but in a weird neo-tech style that blended lunar steel with resin statues and old tapestries. The “historic fusion” look was very now among the PacRim in-crowd.

Some part of him, the core of his working-class streetkid soul, felt so utterly and completely out of his depth that the tingle of a flight reflex shuddered through his legs. One look at the opulence inside The Han and Ko had never felt so common in his whole life.

“Can almost smell the riches,” Fixx said out of the corner of his mouth.

Ko nodded, watching men at the bar with yakuza electro-tattoos emerging from their collars. No money appeared to be changing hands; the staff at The Han obviously knew whom they were charging.

A girl, maybe a year younger than Ko, drifted up to them. She wore stylised magistrate’s robes cut to reveal legs and cleavage. “Mr Wu? Mr Lam will receive you upstairs in the gallery.” She pointed to a hooded balcony on one of the upper levels.

“Lam, huh?” Ko glanced at Fixx. “He’s not expecting two of us. ”

The operative nodded, a curious, distant expression on his face. “You settle what you gotta.”

“You just going to stand here and sniff the air?”

Fixx walked away like he knew exacdy where he was going. “Don’t worry ’bout me. I’ll be around.”

In the depths of the shadowed booth, Juno sipped her drink and gave Frankie an artificial, purse-lipped smile. He met her eyes and hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, leaning in. “If you don’t like it here, we can go someplace else after-”

“It’s not that,” she said. “I’m just… just tired.”

Frankie’s expression didn’t change, and Juno felt cold inside, as if something was pushing at the cage of her ribs but couldn’t get to her throat. Why can’t I tell him? The question burned in her, the embers of her dreams and the echoes of the conversation in the church still drifting around her mind like windborne ash. Her mouth opened and closed, but each time she tried to frame the thoughts, speech fled her. Juno could not make herself tell him, as hard as she tried.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to come if you weren’t up to it. ”

She forced another smile. “No. No, this is a great club. The Han is one of the few places I can go where I’m not hounded by drones and people who want autographs.” Juno squeezed his hand. “Can we just not talk about it? Just be together for a while?” The moment the words left her mouth and she turned her mind’s eye from the darker thoughts, she felt calmer, tension ebbing.

“Sure,” he said, a frown threatening to form at the edges of his expression.

It was Juno’s turn to be concerned. “What about you? What’s bothering you, Frankie?”

He seemed on the verge of telling her, but then a screen set into the top of their table lifted itself up and chimed. “Your guest has arrived, Mr Lam,” it announced.

“I, uh, have to-”

She waved him away. “That’s fine, go ahead.”

He reached out and gave her hand a squeeze, as if he needed to make sure she was still real. Frankie stepped out of the booth, straightening his tie.

A boy cruised past, bearing a tray with dozens of small jewelled containers. Juno caught his eye and he paused. She threw a glance to make sure Frankie wasn’t looking back at her and beckoned the waiter closer. “I need some blue,” she told him, the sudden need licking at her gut. The words felt new and strange, as if she had never said them before.

The boy gave her a beautiful cloisonne box in green and gold; inside were dozens of dot-sized tabs, glistening like sapphires.

On the upper galleries there were rows of doors leading off to VIP suites and chillout rooms. Frankie kept his attention away from them as he passed, memories of the activities in the tower returning to him in blinks of smell and sight.

There was a figure arched over the balcony, tapping the brass rail with nervous energy. Turning to face him, the executive saw the youth’s drawn, serious face and almost smiled. Hell. He’s a damn kid.

“Mr Lam?” he drawled, the affected sneer on his lips just failing to give the effect of cocksure arrogance he was aiming for.

Frankie shook his head. “Steal any good cars lately?”

The thief’s face soured. “Fuck you, wageslave.”

He nodded. “Right. Guess that proves who you are.”

“You got the, uh, payment?”

He pulled two smartcards from his pocket. “Here. All-access flight vouchers for Raumhansa Transcontinental. These’ll take you anywhere but orbit.”

Suspicion bloomed on the younger man’s face. “Where’s the money? No cash, no deal-”

“Relax,” said Frankie, as much to himself as to the youth. He produced a ticket. “The money is in a case in the cloakroom. This is the check for it.”

The kid began to back away. “That’s not what we agreed.”

Frankie stood his ground. “Hey, I got no reason to trust you either. How do I know that what you’ve got for me isn’t bogus?” He wiped his hand across his brow. The tension in the gallery was draining him. He sat heavily in a chair. “Ah shit, look. Just give me the name and you can take the stuff and go. I’m not interested in anything else.” He put the ticket and the cards down on a table. “I don’t have time to play these games, kid.”

“My name is Ko,” said the thief, with irritation. He stood his ground, tense and ready to fight. Fists balled, shoulders set, ready to go to the mat with anyone.

Frankie studied him, and saw the mirror of himself there, a decade ago, standing in the corridor of a detention centre…

Brother, listen to me! If you don’t do this, you’ll go to prison, and you know what will happen in there: indentured work service on the mainland, maybe even sending you to the rad-zone reconstruction projects! You won’t survive in there! Look, my supervisor at the academy knows the judge and he’s willing to put in a good word for you. I vouched for you, Frankie. I told him you didn’t want to be in a gangcult, you just fell in with the wrong crowd! Come on! If not for me, then for Mum and Dad! I have faith in you, I know you can be more than this.

I don’t wanna be a damn corp, Alan! I’m not like you, the good boy with the great grades.

It’s not about that, Frankie! It’s about surviving! You gotta trust me, brother! Please!

“Why the hell should I trust you?” said Ko, and abruptly the executive realised he’d been thinking aloud.

Frankie eyes him. “Because, I’m guessing here, that both of us have something to lose. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” came the reluctant, distant reply. “I got someone… something to lose.” Ko took the cards and the ticket. “The dead guy, his name was Lam?”

“Family,” said Frankie, staring at the floor. He could hear the blood singing in his ears.

Ko nodded gravely. “It was a couple of Wo Shing Wo hitters. It wasn’t mistaken identity, an accident or any of that shit. They were paid to do it. ”

“The name?” Frankie felt sick with anticipation and dread.

Ko told him.

The cool, crystalline hit was coming on strong when the apparition rose into her vision. Juno stiffened with fright as he took solidity there, at the mouth of the alcove. He blocked the light from the rest of the club like an eclipse dulling the sun.

“Miss,” came a voice, rich and smooth. “Might I presume to take a moment of your time?”

Juno nodded woodenly, and the man shifted into the booth with her, taking the place where Frankie had been sitting. She felt very small in his presence-or was that just the Z3N? The capsules were supposed to make her feel better, make the shades and dreams go away. Lately they seemed to do the opposite.

He said something and she caught only a little of it; was he asking if something was broken, asking to share the hit? Looking for a, a fix?

“But you can call me Joshua.” He took off his shades and studied her in a caring way, a brotherly way. “You remember me, Juno? Newer Orleans? Under the ’dome?”

She had that memory somewhere, but it shrank from her whenever she tried to hold on to it. Confusion creased her face. “I… am not sure we’ve met.”

“I know the feelin’,” he admitted. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I won’t hurt you, you understand that?”

She nodded; the mere idea that he would harm her seemed laughable. It seemed to her that she’d always known that about him. “Of course not. That’s not why you’re here.” And if Juno thought very hard, she could just about understand why he had come. What it was he wanted. What it was he was offering her.

“The dreams, they happen in the day,” he said, careful and matter-of-fact. “Angels in the glass and the snakes, sometimes.” He gave a shudder. “Stronger now.”

Juno’s hand reached out and took his. It seemed like the right thing to do. “The days… When I’m in the now it’s all so clear and vivid, but the days before are cloudy and dull. The further back I try to see, the darker-” Her breath caught. “I don’t want to look back.”

Fixx pressed a card into her hand. She ran her fingers over it. “The High Priestess. Is that me?”

“Could be. You have the look of her.” He reached over and took the green and gold box. “Will you do somethin’ for me, Juno? Make me a promise?”

“If I can…”

He rattled the box, the pills whispering inside it. “No more. Don’t take the blue anymore. That’s where the dark is coming from. It’s not helping.”

Juno heard herself speaking, as if someone else were animating her. “I believe you.”

He smiled warmly. “That’s a good start. Now, you gave me trust so I’m goin’ to give you a thing in return, okay?” He gently cupped his mahogany fingers under her chin and met her gaze. Juno felt the material real of the club become gossamer and faint. The depths of his amber eyes held her transfixed. “I’m gonna give the past back to you, girl. It’ll be slow and it won’t come easy-like, but in the end… You’ll know who you really are.”

“I want that,” she breathed. More than anything, she wanted that.

“Then, child, listen to me. Listen to me. Listen. Listen. Just listen.”

Phoebe Hi, there under the glow of the lamps in Tze’s library. Her plastic smile, the too-perfect face on the dumpy little body. I worked closely with your brother. I hope to do the same with you.

“Bitch…” hissed Frankie, half in anger, half in shock. “Why? Why the hell would she do that?”

Ko chewed his lip. “Happens all the time in HK, man. You’re a corp, you know how it is.” He made a fist. “Like in history, when guys in the palace did shit to each other so they’d look preem in front of the Emperor, make the other sucker take the rap.”

Frankie got up in a rush and he wobbled, the revelation making him dizzy.

Ko grabbed his shoulder to steady him. “You all right?”

He shook off the hand. “Don’t…” He tasted bile in his throat. “I… I gotta think…” Frankie could barely hold the thought of it in his head. His suspicions had been raging for days, and while he knew that YLHI were no strangers to dirty tricks, it still hit him like a sucker punch. It was one thing to sanction something on a rival or apply pressure to a client-but to hire criminals to kill a high level executive in the same corporate clan? On some level of denial, Frankie had been hoping that the obfuscation of the truth was some attempt to protect him from a darker threat, something that had cost Alan Lam his life; but now his certainties rocked around him. Hi had ordered Alan’s murder! Had she done it alone? Who else might be involved? Alice? The Masks? Even…

“Tze?”

A round of clapping came from the lower floor, drawing their attention. The clientele were toasting a new arrival, a gaunt figure flanked by a broad man in a dark green suit and a woman in a white strapless dress. The man and the woman wore shimmering Peking Opera masks.

Frankie’s heart shrank in his chest. “Speak of the devil…”

Ko spat. “You set me up.”

“No, no,” insisted Frankie, “I didn’t know he was going to come here!”

But the thief was already moving, snatching up his reward from the table and sprinting for the spiral stairs to the lower level. When Frankie looked back from the balcony, Tze was staring up at him. The older man gave him a nod and knowing smile.

Ko had the case in his hand when the cloakroom floor rose up to meet him. He rolled, the black attache skating away from his grip.

“Hello again.” The rasping voice came from behind Deer Child’s mask, newly repaired after the melee in the car park. “Remember me? You have unfinished business with Mr Tze-”

Ko did a scissor-kick that put a boot in Deer Child’s crotch, and spun, coming to his feet in a rush. He ducked to dodge a salvo of fast blows to the chest and head, marvelling at the speed of the bodyguard.

One punch shattered an oil lantern and in a whoosh of sound, a tapestry flooded with hungry flames. Ko moved to avoid more attacks, on the defensive as The Han’s clientele began to panic and flee.

He was a second too slow, and Deer Child snared his throat, one large hand choking the life from him. “Teach you about pain,” said the guardian.

In the confusion of the crowd bolting for the door, Ko saw motion, predator-quick and deadly. The glitter of a nickel-plated handgun. The muffled roar of a heavy gauge bullet.

Then the pressure was gone, the grey mist fogging his brain receding. Fixx was carrying him out into the humid, screeching night.

Ko saw flickers of Deer Child’s face though shattered porcelain. Flayed flesh, dataprobes pressed into optic jelly, lipless mouth over shark teeth.

“Wait, the case…” he coughed. “The cash… ”

There was a moment when Tze made the briefest eye contact with the black man who rescued the presumptuous little thief. His breath caught in his throat; the dark face, the hooded eyes. This face was known to him. He had plucked it from the songbird’s mind while little Juno slept. At the time, Tze had dismissed the moment as a spasm of random memory, bereft of any meaning-but his presence here, in the city, on the eve of the ascendance? Tze knew there were no coincidences, only synchronicity. Did the little doll sense something that I did not?

The palpable aura of threat the dark man radiated made his jaw clench, but he had no time to dwell. The Masks would have to deal with this new variable, and swiftly, before it could expand to alter the pattern. He turned, sniffing archly at the commotion. “How disappointing. The standards here fall lower and lower.” He studied Frankie’s flushed countenance. “Francis, you look perturbed. Is something wrong?”

The anger and frustration overtook any good reason in Frankie’s mind. “Alan’s death wasn’t a mistake,” he snapped, “he was murdered!”

The older man’s face became sad. “Yes, son. I know. I was hoping to keep this awful truth from you, but you seemed so determined to find out for yourself. ”

“You… you knew?”

“Francis, there’s more to this than you understand. What happened to your brother, who was responsible… There’s a pattern to these things that you are only now becoming aware of. ”

He rocked on his heels, giddy with emotion. “But Hi, what she did-”

“She’s at the tower, right now.” Tze leaned in closer. “Blue Snake will take care of Juno. Perhaps you and I should have a word with Phoebe, yes? I’d like you to get a better handle on things.”

Francis felt his hands coiling into fists, a sudden and potent fire kindling inside him. “Yes,” he said. “I want that.”

“Come,” said the CEO, and pressed him toward the door.

The Statue Park at Victoria Peak is one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions. The park is a fantastic fusion of the modem and the ancient. Using design elements from Hong Kong’s stunning skyline combined with actual stonework and statuary dating back more than two thousand years, the Statue Park brings past and present together in one place.

The layout of the park is based on astrological charts from the Qin Dynasty; those of you walking the route follow runes drawn by Chinese magicians, so breathe deep and you might take in a little “qi” of your own! The exhibits at the Statue Park include stone temple guardians from the northern provinces, a troupe of authentic terracotta warriors and the preserved wood beams from a Ming warship. The park is free to all, funded by generous donations from corporate sponsors such as Buell Tool Inc, GenTech East, Yuk Lung Heavy Industry, and Lan Ri Foods.

The Peak Rail Tram operates a half-hourly service. Tickets are available at the terminus in Garden Road. Gangcult activity, while at a minimum across the city, is distinctly possible late at night or during periods of activity such as concerts, festivals or eclipses. Passengers travelling at these times are advised to consider a personal defence device for peace of mind. The terminus gift shop sells a range of semi-lethal deterrents, including tanglers, taser-touch gloves and Nauseator™ gas dispensers.

Excerpt from The Hong Kong Highlight Guide [2026 edition].