Jade Dragon

13. Time and Tide

“Miss, wait a moment-” Juno ignored the voice and kept walking, her feet clacking across the polished granite of the Yuk Lung tower’s atrium. She was aware of the guardian at her side, the woman Tze called Blue Snake. “Perhaps we should return to your hotel.”

Juno stopped suddenly and stamped her foot. “No. I want Frankie. Where is he? Mr Tze brought him here, I know it.” She rocked as she shouted at the bodyguard, feeling flushed and faint. In one hand she was still clasping the tarot card the dark-skinned man had given her. It was hot against her fingers.

Blue Snake hesitated. Juno knew the woman was trapped by her orders from her master, and like a robot with conflicting commands, the guardian stood watching her rather than initiate a choice that could be the incorrect one. Juno looked at the blank eyes inside the azure and gold mask and thought of the other one, the big man with the green faceplate. She had heard the gunshot, saw him falling with a trail of ruddy matter streaming from the back of his head. Then the fire, the screaming. Calling out for Frankie…

“I want Francis Lam!” she snapped, her voice pitching up. “Now.” Her throat felt dry. “I’m giving you an order.”

“Perhaps I can locate him and bring him to you at the hotel,” Blue Snake tried again, cocking her head like a dog.

“No!” Juno shouted like a petulant child and slapped the guardian, the unexpected impulse of anger shocking her. Her hand connected with the mask and she staggered back a step, her palm stinging. Blue Snake flinched, unsure of how to proceed.

Bile bubbled in Juno’s throat and she swallowed metallic spittle. “I… I have to…” She ran for the washroom concealed behind the banks of elevators and crashed into a stall. Juno was barely over the steel bowl before she vomited, a thin purple fluid of spent cocktails and half-digested food streaming out of her.

The girl slipped to the cool white tile floor and shivered. Her clasp bag was somewhere out in the limousine, but in her hand, there was the card. Burning her, even though she couldn’t dare to let go of it.

Juno looked at the careworn image, the priestess in her courtly robes, hands open and cupping arcane energies. The card shimmered, as if she saw it through tears.

“What did you do to me?” she piped, licking tainted lips.

I’m gonna give the past back to you.

Fixx’s words rumbled in her bones, as loud as if he were there inside her skull. She was afraid, trembling on the toilet floor. She wanted Frankie to be with her, to hold her, to tell her it was all fine.

Instead, there was a rising tide of terror. It welled up from a secret place in her heart, and there came an awful moment when Juno realised that it had always been there, always waiting. The man with ebony skin and dark, deep eyes, he had known that. He unlocked something in Juno, just with a touch and a word. With a picture and a card.

High Priestess. High. Higher…

The ink from the card was staining her fingers, stinging them, passing through her skin. Memory came upon Juno in a tidal wave and she choked.

Sunglasses smashed. Rope’s hands around her throat. Slow, slow cracking pops. Vertebrae snaps. Body falls dead. Beckons her from the door. Gently undresses the dead. Taking her clothes. Becoming her. Becoming the dead. Reborn. Renewed.

I am you now.

“Fuck!” The word came out in a tight animal screech. Juno scrambled from the toilet stall and slammed into the rack of glass sinks, the room swaying around her, her balance hazy and faltering. She could not release the card. He had done something to her, like the street magicians who made people sleep with a snap of their fingers. The dark man had reached into her thoughts and pulled out the stops.

Juno hung on to the sink, the room spinning about her so fast she was afraid that gravity would throw her off if she let go. She raised her head and saw mirrors.

There were silver ovals on every wall, perfect and flawless reflections of her pathetic scarlet face and eyes of smeared kohl. In each her irises glowed amber, staring back at her. The mirrors ranged away into a curved tunnel of infinity. She was here and she was there; she was dead and she was living. Image and real. Reflection and reflected.

She was one and she was many. The girl tasted alien fluids in her gut, for one phantom moment feeling the distant sensation of tubes in her mouth, probes in her nostrils, thick oils dragging on her naked skin.

Her equilibrium returning in slow, painful ticks, Juno discarded the coat about her shoulders and pushed out through the doors. There were jade pillars dotted about in this part of the atrium, and with slow, careful progress, the girl kept herself from the line of Blue Snake’s sight, finding an elevator to the tower’s upper levels. She seemed to be escaping, but to where she had no idea.

Phoebe Hi looked up and started as the doors to Tze’s library opened. She was cleaning the ornate bowl in the centre of the room with a sanctified cloth and a vial of tainted blood plasma supplied by an operative in a Kowloon children’s hospital. “Mr Tze! I, ah-” Her words faded as Frankie crossed the room toward her, his face murky with anger. The vial slipped from her fingers and rolled across the oaken table. “Francis?”

He loomed over her, his fists balling and uncurling, his lips moving but no coherent words emerging. He was so utterly furious that his capacity to speak rationally had vanished. Hi shot a worried look at Tze. Frankie released a powerful backhand blow that knocked the woman off her feet and to the floor. “You fucking bitch, you killed my brother!” he screamed.

Hi’s hand came to her lip and traced blood. She looked at Tze again, confused.

“Francis deduced the train of events himself,” Tze said sadly.

“Doesn’t he understand?” wailed the woman. She glared at Frankie. “It was necessary. He was going to destroy the great work. He was defecting.”

“You didn’t have to kill him!” roared Frankie. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did.” Tze’s words cut through the air.

Frankie turned. “But the 14K said she-”

“Phoebe brokered the hit, yes, but on my authority.” He let out a small smile. “Did you not think that I would have some say in the disposal of so valuable an asset, Francis?” Tze shook his head. “I regret what happened, I really do. Alan was like a son to me. We are so close to the ascendance. Perhaps I could have overlooked things if only he’d kept faith with us.”

“What?” Frankie rocked on his heels, a sick churn in his gut. “Why…?”

Tze frowned. “Your brother was flawed, Francis. A bright man and very good at his job. Ruthless in the right places, careful in others. But there was a certain inner strength he lacked. The capacity to subsume himself to a greater cause. Alan did not have the courage to embrace self-sacrifice.”

Hi was picking herself up, attempting to gather her dignity. “He couldn’t see the reach of the pattern.”

The CEO of Yuk Lung Heavy Industries took off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt. “The time is not right. We are early. But I see that rigid adherence to the letter of the pattern has only brought us grief. We must be flexible and adaptable, like our King.”

And very suddenly, Frankie felt the world shifting around him. The nagging doubts, the faint fears, the splinter in his mind that screamed something is not right. All of it crystallised in this moment. He knew that these people were going to kill him, just as they had his sibling. His eyes flicked to the doors; Judge Bao stood there, the mask glaring back at him.

“Few men have a sense of their own worth, Francis,” Tze said. He had his spidersilk shirt off now and the suntanned skin beneath seemed murky with lines of writing and whorls of colour. “Fewer still of their own destiny. I am blessed because I have both, and by that token, it is my gift to know your worth as well.”

“Wh-what the hell are you talking about?” Frankie stuttered.

“Hell.” Tze smirked. “Yes, indeed. My meaning, lad? It is no less than this. I know the colour of your blood, Francis Lam Cheung Yee. By the grace of the Dark Ones, I’ve tracked the threads of your bloodline across the weave of history.” He made a sweeping gesture. “Your family, your brother too. In both of you it runs thick.” The man came into the light and there on his chest one brand burned brighter than the others, a connection of circles, lines, arcs.

Hi snorted. “He still doesn’t comprehend. He’s no better than the other.”

Tze silenced her with a snap of his fingers. “There’s never been a time when we haven’t watched you, Francis. Even before your birth, the King’s Men observed, measured, tracked. And waited.”

“The files,” Frankie blurted. “I saw them.”

The other man nodded. “You and your kindred have something I could only dream of possessing, son. You are touched by Him. Your bloodline bares the mark. You are living avatars, the keepers of the Key to the Great Pattern, scattered across the world like seeds. Waiting to bloom.” He touched a hidden control on a wooden lectern. “Let me show you.”

A d-screen dropped from the ceiling behind Hi and flicked into sharp reds. Frankie recognised electron microscope images of blood platelets, of twisting ropes of DNA. The view crawled closer.

“Do you not see?” grinned Tze, pointing.

At a size visible only on the highest magnifications, Frankie saw shapes that seemed embossed on the very matter of his flesh and blood, imprinted there like a makers mark: the repeated icons of a star with eight points and the same shape that was burned into the chest of Mr Tze. His stomach twisted.

“Spilled blood marks the way,” intoned the other man, “and it must be of a vintage that the King prefers.” He snapped his fingers and Monkey King was there, strong, iron-hard arms snaking around Frankie s torso. “Don’t fear Him,” murmured Tze, “embrace Him. When your veins are opened and the Jade Dragon drinks of you, you will become a part of His Glory. You will seal the pact for us.” Tze’s eyes glittered with rapture and he pointed up at the ceiling. There were carvings of serpents and cruel angels up there, shadows writhing in the dim lamplight. “Alan perished too soon, he forced my hand. That error will not be repeated.”

“You, every damn one of you, are absolutely out of your fucking minds,” said Frankie.

Rope stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of Blue Snake, standing there in the middle of the atrium, her slender and dangerous hands moving in front of her chest like leaves in a gentle breeze. The bodyguard was watchful, patient.

“Where is Miss Quan?” He demanded, striding toward the guardian.

“She became unwell.” Blue Snake nodded blankly at the restroom. “She required privacy.”

“How long ago was this?”

She cocked her head. “Elapsed time: four minutes, thirty-six seconds.”

Rope sneered and went into the toilet. Blue Snake walked warily behind him. The guardians were useful tools in the correct circumstances, but they were flawed. Drained of their humanity by the Masking process, they sometimes became slow, confused by emotions and reactions that they had lost the means to process. Tze’s ridiculous attachment to them had been shown for the idiotic affectation it was in the club tonight, his personal bodyguard downed by a mystery assailant; and now this, the female one failing to understand the mindset of the girl Juno.

He slammed the stall door with his hand, kicking at the discarded coat with the tip of his boot. The smell of cooling puke tickled his nostrils; Blue Snake examined the remains, analysing them in a vague attempt to grasp the error she had made.

Rope prodded her in the chest. “Seal the building. Locate her. But be discreet.”

Blue Snake padded out into the hall and halted. “Tracking reports… target is ascending. Destination is Research and Development level.”

He swore and pushed the woman out of the way, dragging a smartcard from his pocket. Rope entered a lift and gave chase.

The chamber began to unfold. Where they stood in the centre of the room, the circular section of the stone floor remained static; but the rings of smaller flagstones around the edges of the hall folded back upon themselves and allowed twisting wooden pillars to emerge. Some of them were wet and they smelt coppery in the thick air. From the ceiling, extending from the carved bodies of snakes and worm-headed abominations, metal arms ending in the glass eyes of holojector lenses fell into place and emitted coherent light. Frankie saw the shapes of people forming in some of the glowing haloes beneath them, others showing black monoliths that reminded him of obsidian tombstones.

Hi completed cleaning the bowl and allowed Tze to cut himself into it. The CEO removed the same silver box from beneath the oak table and Frankie suppressed a shudder. Out came the knife of manifold blades, into Tze’s hand with casual, dangerous motions.

“You’re not going to die tonight,” Tze said in an offhand manner, whispering so that the other players in his sick little theatre did not hear. “Your bloodline is the most potent, the most vital. We have to be economical with it.” He smirked. “I am not a man for wastage.”

Frankie struggled in Monkey King’s grip. “This is nuts! You’re telling me, my whole family is some line of sacrificial lambs for some psycho cult?”

“Not just you. There are others.” Tze nodded at the holos. In one, Frankie saw a general in the uniform of the APRC carefully stabbing an elderly man; in another, a woman in a blue shipsuit was coring the eyes from a screaming child. He turned away, reeling. “It is just that your blood is the superior strain.” Tze took the knife and made shallow, stinging cuts on Frankie’s wrists, catching the ejecta in the bowl.

Hi made symbols in the air and bowed. Tze waited for her to have her face over the basin, and in a single sweep, he tore the blade across the bare white flesh of her throat. Dark arterial spray fanned into the air and the music executive perished with a wailing, streaming gurgle. There was something like rapture in her dying eyes.

Tze gave a pious nod to the other members of the Cabal. “The altar is anointed. As the pattern speaks, we will allow the stone and wood to drink their fill, preparing themselves. We Open The Way.”

“We Open The Way,” came a chorus of voices from hidden speakers.

“In the wastes of America, a fool tries and fails. So-called Elders with their petty, limited ideals bark like dogs believing they have the attention of men. They have nothing but the contempt of the Dark Ones. It is only we who will succeed. We, who light the path. We, who will thrive where Seth fails.” He showed a mouth full of white, razor teeth. “The Jade Dragon rises. It is ordained.”

Juno had never been here.

She had been here many times.

She had no idea what number to key into the security keypad.

The code was 7-9-5-7-3.

Juno remembered the glass and steel rooms with floors of hollow plate.

She was terrified at her first sight of the facility.

She was scared the security drones would see her.

She knew where to stand to avoid them.

The tarot card in her hand. It seemed to merge with her flesh, become insubstantial. The image of the High Priestess was a brand, a tattoo done in acid inks. She let it lead her in, muscle memory taking Juno deep into a place of quiet, patient machines and liquid glows.

Inside, the laboratory was lit in a watery yellow, a series of light bars set in the floor casting shadows around a collection of large spherical modules. The orbs were transparent, and in each of them was a naked human body, coiled and floating in a green ocean. Juno recoiled, almost falling over a low console. The sphere closest to her held a child, a girl, and as she watched, Juno could see the slow movement of her chest and the occasional twitch of fingers and toes. A flat mask covered the girl’s eyes, and a pair of thick, semi-organic cables extended into the liquid medium. One was attached to her navel, and the other disappeared into a fluffy matt of hair at the back of her head. Juno felt her stomach turn over again and put out a hand to steady herself, inadvertently touching the wall of the sphere.

The sensation was instantly familiar, and her mind swam with the faintest recollection of a thick, warm sea. She retched, tasting plastic in her mouth, the horrible memory of pipes snaking down her gullet and into her stomach.

Behind her the door hissed open again, and a gust of warm air wandered into the chamber with Heywood Rope at its centre.

“Oh dear,” he said, lilting and mocking, unconcerned and hateful. “Don’t you know it’s wrong to peek behind the curtain?”

Juno began to cry. Her world was coming adrift, huge icebergs of her personal reality breaking off and sinking.

Rope came close, snatched the tarot card from her stiff grip and shoved her down. “What have we here?” He raised it to his nostrils and took a long, deep sniff. “Where did you get this?”

Juno shook her head, backing away.

His face twisted. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you know. There’s no time for the pattern to be altered. You’re going to do what you were made for, you little bitch.”

Tears streaking her face, she glanced at the glassy spheres, the sleeping girl and the other, unfinished things. Rope answered the unspoken question.

“Them? Oh, they’re just leftovers, darling. Remnants and remainders. Understudies, you might say.”

She found her voice again. “I’m not… going to help you. You kill people.”

He laughed and the sound made her whimper. “I’ve murdered you in a dozen different ways, each sweeter than the last. So know that. Know that you will do what I tell you. You don’t have a choice.” He rolled a Z3N capsule between his thumb and forefinger, and she wanted it more than anything in her life.

“I hate you,” she wept, collapsing in on herself.

Rope knelt by her, the horrible facade of his outward face coming to the fore again. “Don’t,” he said mildly. “I’ll give you what that witch doctor offered. You want to know yourself, Juno? Here you are.”

He bent close to her ear and whispered a word. The command made a post-hypnotic suture in her RNA tear open and bleed memory. Juno went into quiet shock as she remembered…

The songs fading. The channel into her sealed and dark; disconnected, the world ending.

Around her, the slow thick ocean pulling, dragging as she turns. New sensations of movement and direction, and the ocean falls away.

Muscles spasm. A burning stream of pain from her belly, out in a plug of expelled jelly. Weight pulling her into places and directions she’s never known. Cold hardness pressed into the length of her, light flooding over, coming in some impossible way from outside of her head. Fluids dripping out of holes in her body.

Something digs into the skin of her face and the light blazes inward like the ignition of a supernova.

“Eyes are open.”

Convulsing. Burning coming up again, a million times worse.

“Got your smock?”

Out in a rush, a torrent of agony.

“Aw, shit!”

“I told you, always point the head towards the drain. Stupid. ”

Voices? Moving her mouth, pushing and pulling at her muscles. The slow waters are gone, a cold, invisible ocean around her. Wet hiss from her lips.

“Meat’s awake. Dose it, then.”

“There’s a lot of blood in the ejecta. Shouldn’t we-”

“Just get it done.”

Light breaks apart into shifting pieces, growing large or small.

“Uh, okay.” Something at her neck. Hard. Sharp. “Full dose.” It bites her.

Sound like a pressure leak sings out of her mouth, dropping into a thick gurgle.

“Juno Seven decanted at fourteen-forty. No anomalies, cleared for processing.”

“Let’s go, hurry it up.”

Movement. Light falls away. Touching her belly, there’s a fleshy stub, crusted with drying fluids. The cord is cut! She spits out bone-jarring coughs, ejecting droplets of dark colour from her mouth…

“Do you understand now, little doll?” whispered Rope. “Little plastic girl?” He took a handful of her hair and pulled her to her feet. “You’re nothing but a wind-up toy, the ballerina on the music box. We made you.”

“Yes,” she cried, her body shaking with fear. “Oh, yes…”

Frankie shivered, feeling scattered droplets of Phoebe Hi’s blood cooling where they had spattered on his face. Monkey King’s inviolate grip held him erect, and all he could do was turn his head away as Tze came closer. “I want you to comprehend, Francis,” he said. “I want you to appreciate how special you are. Those others are just the first morsels of the banquet; you are the delicious feast. The gift you are given will be sweeter than anything the rest of us can imagine. The King of Rapture will take you into himself…” Tze shook his head. “Such a glory.”

He used the fluids in the bowl to write shapes on himself. One of Tze’s other minions, a man in a spotlessly clean laboratory coat, offered up a tray bearing a stone bottle and cups. Tze poured out equal measures of thick syrup. The fluid was sparkling blue.

Frankie saw what was coming and struggled, but the Mask tipped back his head. Tze threw back the liquid Z3N and tipped the other cup into Frankie’s mouth.

He tried to cough it out, but the fluid tingled like cold fire in his gullet and it surged into his body. Monkey King let him go and he fell to his knees.

Frankie’s vision swam, his senses became woolly one second, ultra-sharp the next. Tze crouched down to face him, grinning. “Yes. Don’t fight it.”

He’d done drugs before, but the stories that came with the Z3N caps had always scared Frankie away, of how it was used at sex parties and bloodclubs, of the mad psychedelic high and the weird way it made people speak alike, act alike, think alike. Something about the blue had always seemed invasive to him.

Tze started laughing, and Frankie felt the echo of it in his chest. He couldn’t stop himself from joining in, the bitter humour overtaking him. In the haze of his vision he could see dark tendrils unfolding from the old man, whip-fast and sharp. They penetrated Frankie’s skull and wormed into his mind. Tze was in there with him, sharing his thoughtspace.

You see? boomed the mindspeech. This is His gift to us, the means to unchain the psyche and marshal it to our cause.

He heard Juno singing, somewhere very far away. Touch my thoughts and flow. There’s no world we can’t know.

Tze roared, and Frankie had no choice but to shout with him.

ROLL CREDITS

ANNOUNCER: Live! From Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui! Panda-Vision presents Musical World, with Xing Xing Xing!

FX: APPLAUSE

PANNING SHOT: AUDIENCE

ESTABLISH MEDIUM ANGLE

XING: Hi-hi-hi! It’s my super-happy pleasure to introduce my special guest! Let’s hear it for Juuuuuuuuno Qwaaaaan!

FX: WILD APPLAUSE

JUNO: Hello Xing, how are you?

XING: Better-better-better now that you are here! Phew! She’s ice-hot, huh guys?

FX: MALE LAUGHTER

JUNO: You’re making me blush!

XING: Ha-ha-ha. Juno-Juno-Juno, China is happy-wild to have her famous singer-babe home at last. Did you miss us, bwah?

JUNO: Every day. America was fun, but XING: Whoa-whoa-whoa, those crazee ’merrikins! Too much red meat and too much drinky-winky!

FX: LAUGHTER

XING: Pop-pop-pop, I gotta six-gun! Jack Daniels and Cola! Ah shaw thunk yoo’s a reel purty laydee, missuhjuuuno!

FX: LAUGHTER

JUNO: Some of them are… a little… intense. But I love all my fans.

CUT TO CLOSER ANGLE: TWO-SHOT

XING: But-but-but to be Mr Serious for a moment. Hmmm. It was a trying time.

JUNO: Yes. America is such a fantastic place, but many people there are living day by day. I hope that my music can bring some light to them.

XING: Hmmm. Yes, yes-yes. I bet they wished they could live in China!

JUNO: Well, maybe, but REACTION SHOT: AUDIENCE

BACK TO ANGLE

XING: Big question for you, Juno-peach. Wotta bouta Wyldsky? Are you gonna-gonna-gonna be there?

JUNO: Well, Xing, I’m not sure I should say anything…

FX: AUDIENCE CALLING OUT

XING: Pwease-pwease-pwease? Pwetty pwease wid sugar on it?

JUNO: The answer is yes. I’ve agreed to headline the Wyldsky show, even though some people have advised against it…

FX: RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE

JUNO: I just want to sing to Hong Kong XING: Super-super-super cooool-a-rama! Yay! Wow! Zee! And now we’re gonna hear Juno perform her hit song ‘Capsule Lover’!

GO TO WIDE SHOT: CENTRE ON JUNO: ZOOM IN.