Jade Dragon

15. Enter the Dragon

Blue Snake came into the hospital first, with her sister White Snake and Qin Hui following close behind. Blue and White had not been born as siblings, but in their service to the Cabal they had been made so, in manners far beyond the level of crude genetics. Their masks were negative images of each other. Where her visage was dominated by azure colours, honeyed filigree and pale trim, her sister’s facade was white with blue and gold detail. Their masks were the faces of two mythic characters, serpent-spirits who guarded a mountain in legend. By contrast, Qin Hui’s face was dominated by death-white, with facets of black and pink; his name was taken from a perfidious politician of the Song Dynasty, whose hands bore the blood of the renowned hero Yue Fei-if the stories of the playwrights were to be believed.

They advanced through people who wailed and rocked. Blue Snake felt a pang of envy for them that was quickly excised; these wretches did not yet understand the gift they had been given.

A nurse approached, her expression frayed. She had the hardened aspect of someone who had seen much trauma but still kept a kernel of humanity within, refusing to become cold to it. She wore the kevlar uniform typical of an Accident and Emergency staffer. “What do you want here?”

White Snake showed the nurse a datascreen. “Have you seen these two men? The black man’s name is unknown to us, but the youth is Chen Wah Ko.”

The nurse shrugged. Blue Snake saw the lie instantly, the slight dilation in her eyes and the change in her blood capillary flow. The mask fed the data to her, direcdy into her thoughts; it went to her sister and to Qin Hui as well.

White Snake took the nurse by the arm and spun her about, dislocating her wrist in the process. With her other hand, the Mask produced a sprayhypo loaded with Z3N doses. White Snake fired twenty ccs of the blue into the woman’s neck and let her drop, stuttering, to the floor.

Mr Tze suggested that they be careful not to terminate anyone already in the early stages of the rapture, that they take every opportunity to induce more to the glory should the opportunity present itself. To this end, Qin Hui tossed a slow-release canister of aerosol Z3N into the air ducts while Blue Snake examined the hospitals computer system. Her mask extruded a wire into the reception terminal’s interface socket and she sat motionless, the monitor in front of her flashing through pop-up permissions screens.

White Snake ensured that the channels on all the hospitals d-screens were tuned to the live feed from Wyldsky. They had learnt only recently that one of the clinic’s doctors had been causing problems, attempting to interfere with the pattern. It was of course no accident that this same doctor had made contact with the Chen boy. This was the way of things, the play of designs laid down by the King and his brethren.

The canister began to hiss; thousands of others, some spraying mists, some dripping thick blue liquid into reservoirs, were doing the same across the city. The Masks had been planting them for months in places where they would lie undiscovered. Metro stations and schools. Shopplexes and parks. Trams and taxis. Everywhere.

But this was only the secondary objective; the primary was to locate the targets. This directive was also broken into two elements. The first was to Isolate and Apprehend. The second, the simpler of the two that would come into play if the first could not be achieved, was to Kill.

“I have them,” said Blue Snake. “Eastern quadrant of the building, emergency exit stairwell number four. They are together, descending from the roof.” Before her, grainy video feeds from monitor pods showed a pair of blurry figures.

“Hey!” shouted a voice, attracting White Snake’s attention. A security guard with a large taser hove into view, his expression confused at the trio of incongruous porcelain masks. “Step away from the computer!”

White Snake adjusted something on the hypo, and aimed it at the guard. Reconfigured for dartgun mode, the device coughed, and one of the cartridges embedded itself in his right eye. The man screamed and clawed at his face, foam forming at the edges of his lips.

“Moving,” said Qin Hui, producing a flechette pistol and pointing. He didn’t need to speak; none of them did. But the public relations department felt that, at least around humans, they should converse in a normal fashion. Alienation of the client base was never good for business.

The Masks moved into the hospital corridors, laying people down as they came across them.

Ko grabbed the op’s shoulder and pulled. “Come on, man!” he cried. “What are you waiting for? We’ve got to run, get distance… Get Nikita out of here!”

But Fixx hesitated, thinking. “They don’t want her. She’s already dead in Tze’s eyes. They’re here for us.”

“What?”

The other man rubbed his chin. Yeah. It was making sense to him now, the pieces of sensation and distant, weird vibes he’d been collecting over the past few months at last starting to cohere into something tangible. The waking dreams that led him to the singer in Newer Orleans, the fragments of deep fear that bled across the night from the Eastern sky. The words of the old Sifu and the steel-sharp determination in the eyes of this streetpunk. All of it reflected in the psychic aftertaste of the man who had violated Nikita’s mind, the man called Tze. In The Han, they had looked at each other for a fraction of a second, and Fixx knew. There were other clouded souls and dark forces at work here, but this monstrous plan had Tze at its heart. He glanced at Ko, and felt a sudden understanding, a sharp and painful realisation. As much as he wanted to, as much as it seemed Maitre Carrefour had brought him here for it, Fixx at last saw the role that he was to play. The final pages of the script for this night became clear. “You have to stop Tze,” he told the teenager. “He has to die by your hand. ”

Ko’s jaw dropped open. “Me?”

“Listen,” Fixx lent close to him. “World turns, she’s gotta a pattern, see? Layers and levels, moves like clockwork. The whole of life works on one principle, slick. Right man, right place, right time. When one of those is off, all hell breaks loose.”

The kid swallowed hard. Fixx knew he was remembering the visions, the carrion city and the horrors of the emerald serpent-demon.

He prodded Ko in the chest. “You and your boy Feng. You gotta do it. No-one else can.”

“I steal cars, for Buddha’s sake. I’m just a… a thief, and not a very good one at that,” he said, dejected.

They were alone in the stairwell, their voices echoing. Fixx looked around. “Ask the ghost what he thinks. ”

Ko fell silent for a moment, looking into the middle distance. After a moment, he nodded. “What do I have to do?”

“Get up to the Peak, find that black-hearted sonuvabitch… and end him. Else, there’ll be no place to run to.”

“Nowhere to hide,” added Ko, his voice low. “What’re you gonna do? What about that Lam guy?”

Fixx smiled. “Don’t you worry none, I’ll give ’em some-thin’ to think about.”

The metallic gridwork of the stairs clanged as Ko took them three at a time, vaulting over the banister to leap off to the next floor. He glimpsed Feng on every landing, nervously watching for any sign of the Tze’s sinister henchmen. The running made it easier for Ko to keep his concentration in the moment, worrying about where he was going to be in the next second instead of letting the conflicted emotions inside him take over.

He was leaving Nikita alone; Fixx was standing his ground to let Ko escape; there was something awful hatching on the Peak; the man who ruined his sister was in league with monsters. Any one of these things would cripple him with fear and doubt if he let them. z/p›

Ko dropped past the ground floor and went down one more, into the basement sublevel. He was moving so fast he lost his balance and bounced off the door, practically tumbling through it into the open grey cavern of the vehicle park. He slipped on a patch of old motor oil and fell against a concrete stanchion. There were cars dotted about in some of the parking spaces. All of them were the same kind of unremarkable compacts, Kondobishi Yasumes or Toyomazda Sunrays. Nothing with any poke, as traditional go-ganger slang called it.

He took a breath, scanning the underground car park for Feng. On the other side of the garage, he spied the swordsman gesturing at a rank of white vans. Ambulances. Over there, the paramedics waited on alert status for calls that would send them racing out into the night; but for some reason nobody was around down here, and Ko could hear the far-off sound of a phone ringing and ringing. The meat wagons were bulkier than the compacts, but they made up with overcharged engines what they didn’t have in grace. Ko jogged across the asphalt and got halfway there when Feng shouted out a wordless warning.

He turned and saw a woman in a white mask sprinting out of the stairwell toward him. She was so fast. Ko vaguely remembered the sight of a similar mask on the face of a driver, crossing the Tsing Ma Bridge; then she was on him, a hammer blow punch spinning him around. He turned into the impact, feeling his teeth rattle and slid away down the flank of a parked vehicle. She came at him with a kick that stove in an ambulance’s fender, popping the headlight out like a glass eye.

Belatedly, Ko wished he’d asked Fixx if he could borrow his crossbow. In his pocket, his fingers traced the shape of something and on reflex he threw it at the guardian, moving and taking cover by the van’s open doors.

The woman caught the missile out of the air and examined it quizzically. “Tarot card,” she said, without a hint of exertion in her voice. “Knight of Wands.”

Ko came at her at full tilt, dragging a heavy fire extinguisher from a snap-clip on the wall. The red cylinder swung into the masked woman’s head and Ko heard something break. She staggered and fell over. He followed up by letting the thing off into her face, great gouts of white chemical foam smothering the guardian. She batted at the acidic stuff like an animal with tar on its fur.

“Mine,” he grated, recovering the card. Ko tossed the extinguisher and vaulted into the ambulance’s cab. He didn’t even need to hotwire it; the motor was already in standby mode. The thief stamped the accelerator pedal into the floor and the hydrogen engine snarled. Automatically, a two-tone siren started wailing and the blue lamps dotted over the vehicle strobed wildly.

In the wing mirror, Ko saw the woman in the white mask getting to her feet as he launched the ambulance out on to the street. She had her head cocked, like she was talking to someone.

Ko turned on to Princess Margaret Road and headed south, watching the accelerometer needle drift up the dial. He hoped that would be the last he’d see of the Masks, but somehow, he doubted it.

From the spidercopter’s window, Tze saw the spread of Wyldsky and he was pleased with it. The sprawling mass of the concert crowd moved like wheat in a breeze, rocking as they threw themselves into the music. The noise from the towering speaker stacks was so loud that the ’copter’s approach was hardly noticed. The flyer crossed behind the stage and turned to land in the statue park behind it.

Tze felt a definite spring in his step as he came down the gangway. His hands threaded together. Outwardly, he was maintaining an air of calm, but inwardly he felt almost giddy with anticipation. Tonight, the things he saw only as vivid dreams would be made flesh. Ahead, the band on stage were coming to the climax of their final number. He knew little about the group, cared even less. All that mattered was that the lead singer, the oily man who had been there that night at the tower, that he had greed and desires that the Cabal could easily turn to its advantage. Tze had seen the anti-corporate banners in the crowds, heard the flaming rhetoric in the songs. It was ample window-dressing for the main event. For Juno Qwan.

He turned, playfully tracing the face of a terracotta soldier and found her behind him, walking like she was approaching the gallows. “That won’t do,” he told the singer.

Juno’s face was tear-stained, her eyes frightened. “Am I going… to die?”

“You’re going to sing,” said the executive, tapping the hilt of an ornate ceremonial sword on his belt. “And it will be perfect.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

Tze laughed. “I have a penchant for the theatrical, dear girl.”

She’d been watching him all through the flight from the castle. “I know you. I’ve seen your face. In my head. Sometimes.”

“They call that meta-engram imprinting.” He nodded. “An echo, if you like, from the donor.” Tze leered a little. “There’s some of me in you.”

“Are you my father?”

“In a way. Along with a thousand others.” He sighed. “It’s all terribly complicated.”

Juno looked at the stage. She seemed like a child now, lost and afraid. “I don’t want Heywood to hurt me any more. Please don’t let him. He… There are things in his eyes.”

Tze frowned. The simple honesty of the girl’s statement rang a warning note within him; but he dismissed it. This was no time for distractions. “He has business elsewhere, child. Monkey King will escort you.” The Mask loomed.

Juno hesitated. “I… I can’t remember the words.”

Tze nodded to the guardian. “Help her.”

Monkey King produced the leather case with the injector device and Juno’s eyes flashed with panic. “No, no! Just give me a moment…”

The Mask ignored her and shot a dose of Z3N into her jugular. She staggered and he picked her up, carrying her forward.

Tze let out a laugh and raised his hands to the sky. “Let’s rock!” he told the black clouds.

They caught up with him as the ambulance was crossing the Hung Horn interchange. Up ahead, past the toll booths and the spread of evening traffic, the black mouth of the Cross Harbour Tunnel yawned. Ko saw a blink of silver bonnet in the rear-view and knew it was the Vector.

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.”

Fixx shook his head. “Can’t let that happen.”

Rope smiled, bearing more teeth than a human mouth should. “Now you’re becoming interesting. ”

The samurai’s bike took him through a roadblock at breakneck speed, but none of the guards were watching; they were crying, singing, pointing into the dark and pregnant skies.

Ko rode around the edges of the crowd, the thunder of their adulation echoing. He tasted the tingling vapour on the wind, glimpsed shapes at the corners of his vision. Sinuous things, serpents and monstrous angels, ghostly and dancing. The rapturous chorus penetrated his mind, begging him to join in.

When the lightning struck, he thought for a moment the Vector was back, but then he turned his head upwards and the sight almost stopped his heart.

In the air over the city there was a rip in the sky, and from it fell huge emerald tears. As he watched, the clouds gave birth to a thing with claws and teeth and eyes of impossible angles. It was drenched in scintillating viridian shades, scaled with jewels so magnificent they took his breath away to see them. Out of the torn maw of cloud it came, borne on vestigial wings, ephemeral but gaining solidity by the second.

Ko joined millions of people across the city of Hong Kong, watching the end of their world begin as the colossus of the Jade Dragon fell screaming to earth.

Zen, zen

I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice

I’m the perfect smile

Touch my thoughts and flow

There’s no world we can’t know

Sea of stones, sand waves

Harmony, come with me

Taste the blue

Star at dawn

Bubble in the stream

“Touch”

Vocals: Juno Qwan

© RedWhiteBlue Inc. 2026.