The Windup Girl

2

“Lift!” Hock Seng shouts. Pom and Nu and Kukrit and Kanda all lean against the shattered winding spindle, drawing it from its cradle like a splinter pulled from the flesh of a giant, dragging it up until they can send the girl Mai down underneath.

“I can’t see!” she shouts.

Pom and Nu’s muscles flex as they try to keep the spindle from reseating itself. Hock Seng kneels and slides a shakelight down to the girl. Her fingers brush his and then the LED tool is gone, down into the darkness. The light is worth more than she is. He hopes they won’t drop the spindle back into its seat while she’s down there.

“Well?” he calls down a minute later. “Is it cracked?”

No answer comes from below. Hock Seng hopes she isn’t caught, trapped somehow. He settles into a squat as he waits for her to finish her inspection. All around, the factory is a hive of activity as workers try to put the place back in order. Men swarm over the megodont’s corpse, union workers with bright machetes and four-foot bone saws, their hands red with their work as they render down a mountain of flesh. Blood runs off the beast as its hide is stripped away revealing marbled muscle.

Hock Seng shudders at the sight, remembering his own people similarly disassembled, other bloodlettings, other factory wreckage. Good warehouses destroyed. Good people lost. It’s all so reminiscent of when the Green Headbands came with their machetes and his warehouses burned. Jute and tamarind and kink-springs all going up in fire and smoke. Slick machetes gleaming in the blaze. He turns his eyes away, forcing down memories. Forces himself to breathe.

As soon as the Megodont Union heard one of their own was lost, they sent their professional butchers. Hock Seng tried to get them to drag the carcass outside and finish their work in the streets, to make room for the power train repairs, but the union people refused and so now in addition to the buzz of activity and cleanup, the factory is full of flies and the increasing reek of death.

Bones protrude from the corpse like coral rising from an ocean of deep red meat. Blood runs from the animal, rivers of it, rushing toward the storm drains and Bangkok’s coal-driven flood-control pumps. Hock Seng watches sourly as blood flows past. The beast held gallons of it. Untold calories rushing away. The butchers are fast, but it will take them most of the night to dismember the animal completely.

“Is she done yet?” Pom gasps. Hock Seng’s attention returns to the problem at hand. Pom and Nu and their compatriots are all straining against the spindle’s weight.

Hock Seng again calls down into the hole. “What do you see, Mai?”

Her words are muffled.

“Come up, then!” He settles back on his haunches. Wipes sweat off his face. The factory is hotter than a rice pot. With all the megodonts led back to their stables, there is nothing to drive the factory’s lines or charge the fans that circulate air through the building. Wet heat and death stench swaddle them like a blanket. They might as well be in the slaughter grounds of Khlong Toey. Hock Seng fights the urge to gag.

A shout rises from the union butchers. They’ve cut open the megodont’s belly. Intestines gush out. Offal gatherers-the Dung Lord’s people, all-wade into the mass and begin shoveling it into handcarts, a lucky source of calories. With such a clean source, the offal will likely go to feed the pigs of the Dung Lord’s perimeter farms, or stock the yellow card food lines feeding the Malayan Chinese refugees who live in the sweltering old Expansion towers under the Dung Lord’s protection. Whatever pigs and yellow cards won’t eat will be dumped into the methane composters of the city along with the daily fruit rind and dung collections, to bake steadily into compost and gas and eventually light the city streets with the green glow of approved-burn methane.

Hock Seng tugs at a lucky mole, thoughtful. A good monopoly, that. The Dung Lord’s influence touches so many parts of the city, it’s a wonder that he hasn’t been made Prime Minister. Certainly, if he wanted it, the godfather of godfathers, the greatest jao por to ever influence the Kingdom could have anything he wanted.

But will he want what I have to offer? Hock Seng wonders. Will he appreciate a good business opportunity?

Mai’s voice finally filters up from underneath, interrupting his ruminations. “It’s cracked!” she shouts. A moment later she claws her way out of the hole, dripping sweat and covered with dust. Nu and Pom and the rest release their hemp ropes. The spindle crashes back into its cradle and the floor shakes.

Mai glances behind her at the noise. Hock Seng thinks he catches a glimpse of fear, the realization that the spindle could have truly crushed her. The look is gone as quickly as it came. A resilient child.

“Yes?” Hock Seng asks. “Go on? Is it the core that has split?”

“Yes, Khun, I can slide my hand into the crack this far.” She shows him, touching her hand nearly at her wrist. “And another on the far side, just the same.”

“Tamade,” Hock Seng curses. He’s not surprised, but still. “And the chain drive?”

She shakes her head. “The links I could see were bent.”

He nods. “Get Lin and Lek and Chuan—”

“Chuan is dead.” She waves toward the smears where the megodont trampled two workers.

Hock Seng grimaces. “Yes of course.” Along with Noi and Kapiphon and unfortunate Banyat the QA man who will never now hear Mr. Anderson’s irritation that he allowed line contamination in the algae baths. Another expense. A thousand baht to the dead workers’ families and two thousand for Banyat. He grimaces again. “Find someone else then, someone small from the cleaning gang like you. You will be going underground. Pom and Nu and Kukrit, get the spindle out. All the way out. We will need to inspect the main drive system, link by link. We cannot even consider starting again until it has been checked.”

“What’s the rush?” Pom laughs. “It will be a long time before we run again. The farang will have to pay the union bags and bags of opium before they’re willing to come back. Not after he gunned down Hapreet.”

“When they do return, we won’t have Number Four Spindle,” Hock Seng snaps. “It will take time to win an approval from the crown to cut another tree of this diameter, and then to float the log down from the North-assuming the monsoon comes at all this year-and all that time we will be running under constrained power. Think about that. Some of you will not be working at all.” He nods at the spindle. “The ones who work hardest will be the ones who stay.”

Pom smiles apologetically, hiding his anger, and wais. “Khun, I was loose with my words. I meant no offense.”

“Good then.” Hock Seng nods and turns away. He keeps his face sour, but privately, he agrees. It will take opium and bribes and a renegotiation of their power contract before the megodonts once again make their shuffling revolutions around the spindle cranks. Another red item for the balance sheets. And it doesn’t even include the cost of the monks who will need to chant, or the Brahmin priests, or the feng shui experts, or the mediums who must consult with the phii so that workers will be placated and continue working in this bad luck factory-

“Tan Xiansheng!”

Hock Seng looks up from his calculations. Across the floor, the yang guizi Anderson Lake is sitting on a bench beside the workers’ lockers, a doctor tending his wounds. At first, the foreign devil wanted to have her sew him upstairs, but Hock Seng convinced him to do it down on the factory floor, in public, where the workers could see him, with his white tropical suit covered with blood like a phii out of a graveyard, but still alive at least. And unafraid. A lot of face to be gained from that. The foreigner is fearless.

The man drinks from a bottle of Mekong whiskey that he sent Hock Seng out to buy as if Hock Seng was nothing more than a servant. Hock Seng sent Mai, who came back with a bottle of fake Mekong with an adequate label and enough change to spare that he tipped her a few baht extra for her cleverness, while looking into her eyes and saying, “Remember that I did this for you.”

In a different life, he would have believed that he had bought a little loyalty when she nodded solemnly in response. In this life, he only hopes that she will not immediately try to kill him if the Thais suddenly turn on his kind and decide to send the yellow card Chinese all fleeing into the blister rusted jungle. Perhaps he has bought himself a little time. Or not.

As he approaches, Doctor Chan calls out in Mandarin, “Your foreign devil is a stubborn one. Always moving around.”

She’s a yellow card, like him. Another refugee forbidden from feeding herself except by wits and clever machinations. If the white shirts discovered she was taking rice from a Thai doctor’s bowl… He stifles the thought. It’s worth it to help someone from the homeland, even if it is only for a day. An atonement of sorts for all that has gone before.

“Please try to keep him alive.” Hock Seng smiles slightly. “We still need him to sign our pay stubs.”

She laughs. “Ting mafan. I’m rusty with a needle and thread, but for you, I’d bring this ugly creature back from the dead.”

“If you’re that good, I’ll call for you when I catch cibiscosis.”

The yang guizi interjects in English, “What’s she complaining about?”

Hock Seng eyes him. “You move about too much.”

“She’s damn clumsy. Tell her to hurry up.”

“She also says you are very very lucky. Another centimeter difference and the splinter cuts your artery. Then your blood is on the floor with all the rest.”

Surprisingly, Mr. Lake smiles at this news. His eyes go to the mountain of meat being rendered down. “A splinter. And I thought it was the megodont that was going to get me.”

“Yes. You nearly died,” Hock Seng says. And that would have been disastrous. If Mr. Lake’s investors were to lose heart and give up the factory… Hock Seng grimaces. It is so much harder to influence this yang guizi than Mr. Yates, and yet this stubborn foreign devil must be kept alive, if only so that the factory will not close.

It’s an irritating realization, that he was once so close to Mr. Yates, and now so far from Mr. Lake. Bad luck and a stubborn yang guizi, and now he must come up with a new plan to cement his long-term survival and the revival of his clan.

“You should celebrate your survival, I think,” Hock Seng suggests. “Make offerings to Kuan Yin and Budai for your very good luck.”

Mr. Lake grins, his pale blue eyes on Hock Seng. Twin watery devil pools. “You’re damn right I will.” He holds up the bottle of fake Mekong, already half gone. “I’ll be celebrating all night long.”

“Perhaps you would like me to arrange a companion?”

The foreign devil’s face turns to stone. He looks at Hock Seng with something akin to disgust. “That’s not your business.”

Hock Seng curses himself, even as he keeps his face immobile. He has apparently pushed too far, and now the creature is angry again. He makes a quick wai of apology. “Of course. I do not mean to insult you.”

The yang guizi looks out across the factory floor. The pleasure of the moment seems drained from him “How bad is the damage?”

Hock Seng shrugs. “You are right about the spindle core. It is cracked.”

“And the main chain?”

“We will inspect every link. If we are lucky, it will only be the sub-train that is affected.”

“Not likely.” The foreign devil offers him the whiskey bottle. Hock Seng tries to hide his revulsion as he shakes his head. Mr. Lake grins knowingly and takes another pull. Wipes his lips on the back of his arm.

A new shout rises from the union’s butchers as more blood gushes from the megodont. Its head lies at an angle now, half-severed from the rest of the body. More and more, the carcass is taking on the appearance of separated parts. Not an animal at all, more a child’s play set for building a megodont from the ground up.

Hock Seng wonders if there is a way to force the union to cut him in on the profits they get from selling the untainted meat. It seems unlikely, given how quickly they staked out their space, but perhaps when their power contract is renegotiated, or when they demand their reparations.

“Will you take the head?” Hock Seng asks. “You can make a trophy of it.”

“No.” The yang guizi looks offended.

Hock Seng forces himself not to grimace. It’s maddening to work with the creature. The devil’s moods are mercurial, and always aggressive. Like a child. One moment joyful, the next petulant. Hock Seng forces down his irritation; Mr. Lake is what he is. His karma has made him a foreign devil, and Hock Seng’s karma has brought them together. It’s no use complaining about the quality of U-Tex when you are starving.

Mr. Lake seems to catch Hock Seng’s expression and explains himself. “This wasn’t a hunt. It was just an extermination. As soon as I hit it with the darts, it was dead. There’s no sport in that.”

“Ah. Of course. Very honorable.” Hock Seng stifles his disappointment. With the foreign devil demanding the head, he could have replaced the stumpy tusk remainders with coconut oil composites and sold the ivory to the doctors near Wat Boworniwet. Now, even that money will be gone. A waste. Hock Seng considers explaining the situation to Mr. Lake, explaining the value of meat and calories and ivory lying before them, then decides against it. The foreign devil would not understand, and the man is too easy to anger as it is.

“The cheshires are here,” Mr. Lake comments.

Hock Seng looks to where the yang guizi indicates. At the periphery of the bloodletting, shimmering feline shapes have appeared; twists of shadow and light summoned by the carrion scent. The yang guizi makes a face of distaste, but Hock Seng has a measure of respect for the devil cats. They are clever, thriving in places where they are despised. Almost supernatural in their tenacity. Sometimes it seems that they smell blood before it is even spilled. As if they can peer a little way into the future and know precisely where their next meal will appear. The feline shimmers stealth toward the sticky pools of blood. A butcher kicks one away, but there are too many to really fight, and his attack is desultory.

Mr. Lake takes another pull of whiskey. “We’ll never get them out.”

“There are children who will hunt them,” Hock Seng says. “A bounty is not expensive.”

The yang guizi makes a face of dismissal. “We have bounties back in the Midwest, too.”

Our children are more motivated than yours.

But Hock Seng doesn’t contest the foreigner’s words. He’ll put out the bounty, regardless. If the cats are allowed to stay, the workers will start rumors that Phii Oun the cheshire trickster spirit has caused the calamity. The devil cats flicker closer. Calico and ginger, black as night-all of them fading in and out of view as their bodies take on the colors of their surroundings. They shade red as they dip into the blood pool.

Hock Seng has heard that cheshires were supposedly created by a calorie executive-some PurCal or AgriGen man, most likely-for a daughter’s birthday. A party favor for when the little princess turned as old as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninety-eight percent of the time. The Green Headbands in Malaya hated Chinese people and cheshires equally, but as far as Hock Seng knows, the devil cats still thrive there.

The yang guizi flinches as Doctor Chan sticks him again and he gives her a dirty look. “Finish up,” he says to her. “Now.”

She wais carefully, hiding her fear. “He moved again,” she whispers to Hock Seng. “The anesthetic is not good. Not as good as what I am used to.”

“Don’t worry.” Hock Seng replies. “That’s why I gave him the whiskey. Finish your work. I will deal with him.” To Lake Xiansheng he says, “She is almost finished.”

The foreigner makes a face but doesn’t threaten her anymore, and at last the doctor completes her sewing. Hock Seng takes her aside and hands her an envelope with her payment. She wais her thanks but Hock Seng shakes his head. “There is a bonus in it. I wish you to deliver a letter as well.” He hands her another envelope. “I would like to speak with the boss of your tower.”

“Dog Fucker?” She makes a face of distaste.

“If he heard you call him that, he’d destroy whatever is left of your family.”

“He’s a hard one.”

“Just deliver the note. That will be enough.”

Doubtfully, she takes the envelope. “You’ve been good to our family. All the neighbors also speak of your kindness. Make offerings to your… loss.”

“What I do is too little.” Hock Seng forces a smile. “Anyway, we Chinese must stick together. Perhaps in Malaya we were still Hokkien, or Hakka or Fifth Wave, but here we are all yellow cards. I am embarrassed I cannot do more.”

“It is more than anyone else.” She wais to him, emulating the manners of their new culture, and departs.

Mr. Lake watches her go. “She’s a yellow card, isn’t she?”

Hock Seng nods. “Yes. A doctor in Malacca. Before the Incident.”

The man is quiet, seeming to digest this information. “Was she cheaper than a Thai doctor?”

Hock Seng glances at the yang guizi, trying to decide what he wants to hear. Finally he says, “Yes. Much cheaper. Just as good. Maybe better. But much cheaper. They do not allow us to take Thai niches here. So she has very little work except for yellow cards-who of course have too little to pay. She is happy for the work.”

Mr. Lake nods thoughtfully and Hock Seng wonders what he is thinking. The man is an enigma. Sometimes, Hock Seng thinks yang guizi are too stupid to have possibly taken over the world once, let alone twice. That they succeeded in the Expansion and then-even after the energy collapse beat them back to their own shores-that they returned again, with their calorie companies and their plagues and their patented grains… They seem protected by the supernatural. By rights, Mr. Lake should be dead, a bit of human offal mingled with the bodies of Banyat and Noi and the nameless stupid Number Four Spindle megodont handler who caused the beast to panic in the first place. And yet here the foreign devil sits, complaining about the tiny prick of a needle, but completely unconcerned that he has destroyed a ten-ton animal in the blink of an eye. The yang guizi are strange creatures indeed. More alien than he suspected, even when he traded with them regularly.

“The mahout will have to be paid off again. Bribed to come back to work,” Hock Seng observes.

“Yes.”

“And we will have to hire monks to chant for the factory. To make the workers happy again. Phii must be placated.” Hock Seng pauses. “It will be expensive. People will say that your factory has bad spirits in it. That it is sited wrong, or that the spirit house is not large enough. Or that you cut down a phii’s tree when it was built. We will have to bring a fortune teller, perhaps a feng shui master to get them to believe the place is good. And then the mahout will demand hazard pay—”

Mr. Lake interrupts. “I want to replace the mahout,” he says. “All of them.”

Hock Seng sucks air through his teeth. “It is impossible. The Megodont Union controls all of the city’s power contracts. It is a government mandate. The white shirts award the power monopoly. There is nothing we can do about the unions.”

“They’re incompetent. I don’t want them here. Not anymore.”

Hock Seng tries to tell if the farang is joking. He smiles hesitantly. “It is Royal Mandate. One might as well wish to replace the Environment Ministry.”

“There’s a thought.” Mr. Lake laughs. “I could team up with Carlyle & Sons and start complaining every day about taxes and carbon credit laws. Get Trade Minister Akkarat to take up our cause.” His gaze rests on Hock Seng. “But that’s not the way you like to operate, is it?” His eyes become abruptly cold. “You like the shadows and the bargaining. The quiet deal.”

Hock Seng swallows. The foreign devil’s pale skin and blue eyes are truly horrific. As alien as a devil cat, and just as comfortable in a hostile land. “It would be unwise to enrage the white shirts.” Hock Seng murmurs. “The nail that stands up will be pounded down.”

“That’s yellow card talk.”

“As you say. But I am alive when others are dead, and the Environment Ministry is very powerful. General Pracha and his white shirts have survived every challenge. Even the December 12 attempt. If you wish to poke at a cobra, be ready for its bite.”

Mr. Lake looks as if he will argue, but instead shrugs. “I’m sure you know best.”

“It is why you pay me.”

The yang guizi stares at the dead megodont. “That animal shouldn’t have been able to break out of its harness.” He takes another drink from his bottle. “The safety chains were rusted; I checked. We aren’t going to pay a cent of reparations. That’s final. That’s my bottom line. If they had secured their animal, I wouldn’t have had to kill it.”

Hock Seng inclines his head in tacit agreement, though he will not speak it out loud. “Khun, there is no other option.”

Mr. Lake smiles coldly. “Yes, of course. They’re a monopoly.” He makes a face. “Yates was a fool to locate here.”

Hock Seng experiences a chill of anxiety. The yang guizi suddenly looks like a petulant child. Children are rash. Children do things to anger the white shirts or the unions. And sometimes they pick up their toys and run away home. A disturbing thought indeed. Anderson Lake and his investors must not run away. Not yet.

“What are our losses, to date?” Mr. Lake asks.

Hock Seng hesitates, then steels himself to deliver bad news. “With the loss of the megodont, and now the cost of placating the unions? Ninety million baht, perhaps?”

A shout comes from Mai, waving Hock Seng over. He doesn’t have to look to know it is bad news. He says, “There will be damage below as well, I think. Expensive to repair.” He pauses, touches the delicate subject. “Your investors, the Misters Gregg and Yee, will have to be notified. It is likely that we do not have the cash to do repairs and also to install and calibrate the new algae baths when they arrive.” He pauses. “We will require new funds.”

He waits anxiously, wondering what the yang guizi’s reaction will be. Money flows through the company so quickly sometimes Hock Seng thinks of it as water, and yet he knows this will not be pleasant news. The investors sometimes become balky at expenses. With Mr. Yates, the fights over money were common. With Mr. Lake, less so. The investors do not complain so much now that Mr. Lake has arrived, yet it is still a fantastic amount of money to spend on a dream. If Hock Seng ran the company, he would have shut it down more than a year ago.

But Mr. Lake doesn’t blink at the news. All he says is, “More money.” He turns to Hock Seng. “And when will the algae tanks and nutrient cultures clear Customs?” he asks. “When, really?”

Hock Seng blanches. “It is difficult. Parting the bamboo curtain is not something done in a day. The Environment Ministry likes to interfere.”

“You said you paid to keep the white shirts off our backs.”

“Yes.” Hock Seng inclines his head. “All the appropriate gifts have been given.”

“So why was Banyat complaining about contaminated baths? If we’ve got live organisms breeding—”

Hock Seng hurries to interrupt. “Everything is at the anchor pads. Delivered by Carlyle & Sons last week…” He makes a decision. The yang guizi needs to hear good news. “Tomorrow the shipment will clear Customs. The bamboo curtain will part, and your shipment will arrive on the backs of megodonts.” He makes himself smile. “Unless you wish to fire the Union right now?”

The devil shakes his head, even smiles a little at the joke, and Hock Seng feels a flush of relief.

“Tomorrow then. For certain?” Mr. Lake asks.

Hock Seng steels himself and inclines his head in agreement, willing it to be the truth. Still the foreigner holds him with his blue eyes. “We spend a lot of money here. But the one thing the investors can’t tolerate is incompetence. I won’t tolerate it, either.”

“I understand.”

Mr. Lake nods, satisfied. “Good then. We’ll wait to talk with the home office. After we’ve got the new line equipment out of Customs, we’ll call. Give them some good news with the bad. I don’t want to ask for money with nothing to show at all.” He looks at Hock Seng again. “We wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Hock Seng makes himself nod. “As you say.”

Mr. Lake takes another drink from his bottle. “Good. Find out how bad the damage is. I’ll want a report in the morning.”

With this dismissal, Hock Seng heads across the factory floor to the waiting spindle crew. He hopes that he is right about the shipment. That it will be truly released. That he will be proven right by events. It is a gamble, but not a bad one. And the devil would not have wanted to hear too much bad news at once, in any case.

When Hock Seng arrives at the winding spindle, Mai is dusting herself off from another foray into the hole. “How does it look?” Hock Seng asks. The winding spindle is fully disengaged from the line. Now drawn forth, it lies on the ground, a massive spike of teak. The cracks are large and obvious. He calls down the hole. “A lot of damage?”

A minute later, Pom crawls out covered in grease. “Those tunnels are tight.” he gasps. “I can’t fit down some of them.” He wipes the sweat and grime with an arm. “It’s the sub-train for certain, and we won’t know about the rest until we send children down along the links. If the main chain is damaged, we’ll have to pull up the floor.”

Hock Seng peers into the revealed spindle hole with a grimace, flashing back to tunnels and rats and cowering survival in the jungles of the south. “We’ll have Mai find some of her friends.”

He surveys the damage again. He owned buildings like this, once. Whole warehouses filled with goods. And now look what he is, a factotum for yang guizi. An old man with a body that’s falling apart and a clan that has been filed down to his single head. He sighs and forces down frustration. “I want to know everything about how bad the damage is, before I talk to the farang again. No surprises.”

Pom wais. “Yes, Khun.”

Hock Seng turns for the offices, limping slightly for the first few steps before forcing himself not to favor the leg. With all the activity, his knee aches, a reminder of an encounter of his own with the monsters that drive the factory. He can’t help stopping at the top of the steps to study the megodont carcass, the places where the workers died. Memories scratch and peck at him, swirling like black crows, hungry to take over his head. So many friends dead. So much family gone. Four years ago, he was a big name. Now? Nothing.

He pushes through the door. The offices are silent. Empty desks, expensive treadle computers, the treadmill and its tiny communications screen, the company’s massive safes. As he scans the room, religious fanatics in green headbands leap from the shadows, machetes whirling, but they are only memories.

He closes the door behind him, shutting out the sounds of butchery and repair. Forces himself not to go to the window and look down again on the blood and carcass. Not to dwell on memories of blood running down the gutters of Malacca, of Chinese heads stacked like durians for sale.

This is not Malaya, he reminds himself. You are safe.

Still, the images are there. As bright as photographs and spring festival fireworks. Even with the Incident four years in the past, he must perform calming rituals. When the feeling is bad, almost any object reminds him of menace. He closes his eyes, forces himself to breathe deeply, to remember the blue ocean and his clipper fleets white upon the waves… He takes another deep breath and opens his eyes. The room is safe again. Nothing but empty desks set in careful rows and dusty treadle computers. Shutters blocking out the blaze of tropic sunlight. Dust motes and incense.

Across the room, deep in shadows, the twinned vaults of SpringLife’s safes gleam dully, iron and steel, squatting there, taunting him. Hock Seng has keys to one, the petty cash safe. But the other, the great safe, only Mr. Lake can open.

So close, he thinks.

The blueprints are there. Just inches away. He has seen them laid out. The DNA samples of the genehacked algae, their genome maps on solid state data cubes. The specifications for growing and processing the resulting skim into lubricants and powder. The necessary tempering requirements for the kink-spring filament to accept the new coatings. A next generation of energy storage sits within his grasp. And with it, a hope of resurrection for himself and his clan.

Yates mumbled and drank and Hock Seng filled his baijiu glass and listened to his rambles and encouraged his trust and dependence for more than a year. And it was all a waste. Now it comes down to this safe that he cannot open because Yates was foolish enough to raise the investors’ ire, and too incompetent to bring his dream to fruition.

There are new empires waiting to be built, if only Hock Seng can reach the documents. All he has are incomplete copies from when they used to sit in the open, splashed across Yates’ desk, before the drunken fool bought the cursed office safe.

Now there is a key and a combination, and a wall of iron between him and the blueprints. A good safe. Hock Seng is familiar with its sort. Benefited from its security when he too was a big name and had files he needed to protect. It is irritating-perhaps more irritating than anything else-that the foreign devils use the same brand of safe as he used for his own trading empire in Malaya: YingTie. A Chinese tool, twisted to foreign purposes. He has spent days staring at that safe. Meditating on the knowledge that it contains-

Hock Seng cocks his head, suddenly thoughtful.

Did you close it, Mr. Lake? In all the excitement, did you forget perhaps to lock it closed once again?

Hock Seng’s heart beats faster.

Did you lapse?

Mr. Yates sometimes did.

Hock Seng tries to control growing excitement. He limps across to the safe. Stands before it. A shrine, an object of worship. A monolith of forged steel, impervious to everything except patience and diamond drills. Every day he sits across from it, feels it mocking him.

Could it be as simple as this? Is it possible that in the rush of disaster that Mr. Lake simply forgot to close it?

Hock Seng reaches out hesitantly and puts his hand on the lever. He holds his breath. Prays to his ancestors, prays to the elephant-headed Phra Kanet, the Thai people’s remover of obstacles, to every god he knows. He leans on the handle.

One thousand jin of steel push back, every molecule resisting his pressure.

Hock Seng lets out his breath and steps back, forcing down his disappointment.

Patience. Every safe has a key. If Mr. Yates had not been so incompetent, if he had not somehow angered the investors, he would have been the perfect key. Now it must be Mr. Lake instead.

When Mr. Yates installed the safe, he joked that he had to keep the family jewels safe, and laughed. Hock Seng had made himself nod and wai and smile, but all he could think about was how valuable the blueprints were, and how stupid he had been not to copy faster, when they had been easily available.

And now Yates is gone, and in his place a new devil. A devil truly. Blue-eyed and gold-haired and hard-edged where Yates was soft. This dangerous creature who double-checks everything Hock Seng does and makes everything so much harder, and who must somehow be convinced to give up the secrets of his company. Hock Seng purses his lips. Patience. You must be patient. Eventually the foreign devil will make a mistake.

“Hock Seng!”

Hock Seng goes to the door and waves down to Mr. Lake, acknowledging the summons, but instead of going downstairs immediately, he goes to his shrine.

He prostrates himself before the image of Kuan Yin and begs that she will have mercy on him and his ancestors. That she will give him a chance to redeem himself and his family. Beneath the golden character for good fortune, suspended upside down so that it will gush down upon him, Hock Seng places U-Tex rice and cuts open a blood orange. The juice runs down his arm; a ripe one, clean of contamination, and expensive. One cannot cut too close to the bone with gods; they like the fat, not the lean. He lights incense.

As smoke streams into the still air, filling the office once again, Hock Seng prays. He prays that the factory will not close, and that his bribes will bring the new line equipment through the bamboo curtain without difficulty. That the foreign devil Mr. Lake will lose his head and trust him too much, and that the cursed safe will open and reveal its secrets to him.

Hock Seng prays for luck. Even an old Chinese yellow card needs luck.