The Windup Girl

42

Hock Seng shelters in an alley as tanks and trucks rumble down Thanon Phosri. He shudders at the thought of the fuel burning. It has to be much of the Kingdom’s diesel stock, all of it going up in a single orgy of violence. Coal smoke fills the air as stoked tanks surge past on clanking treads. Hock Seng crouches in garbage. Everything he planned has fallen apart in this moment of crisis. Instead of waiting and moving north as a careful unit, he left his valuables to burn for the sake of one long-shot risk.

Quit complaining, you old fool. You would have roasted, your purple baht and your yellow card friends all together, if you hadn’t left when you did.

Still, he wishes he’d had the forethought to bring at least some of that carefully squirrelled insurance. He wonders if his karma is so broken that he cannot ever truly hope to succeed.

He peers into the street again. The SpringLife offices are within view. Best of all, there are no guards present. Hock Seng allows himself a smile at that. The white shirts have their own troubles now. He wheels the bicycle across the street, using it as a crutch to keep him upright.

Inside the compound, it looks as though there was brief fighting. A trio of bodies lie against a wall, seemingly executed. Their yellow armbands have been pulled off and tossed in the dust beside them. More foolish children playing at politics-

Movement behind him.

Hock Seng turns and jams his spring gun into his stalker. Mai gasps as his gun barrel buries itself in her guts. Mewls with fear, eyes wide.

“What are you doing here?” Hock Seng whispers.

Mai stumbles back from his gun. “I came to look for you. The white shirts found our village. People are sick there.” She sobs. “And then your house burned.”

For the first time he sees the soot and cuts covering her body. “You were in Yaowarat? In the slums?” he asks, shocked.

She nods. “I was lucky.” She fights back a sob.

Hock Seng shakes his head. “Why come here?”

“I couldn’t think of any other place…”

“And more people are sick?”

She nods, fearful. “The white shirts questioned us, I didn’t know what to do, I told—”

“Don’t worry,” Hock Seng sets a soothing hand on her shoulder. “The white shirts won’t trouble us anymore. They have their own problems.”

“Do you have—” She stops. Finally says, “They burned our village. Everything.”

She is a pathetic creature. So small. So vulnerable. He imagines her fleeing her destroyed home, seeking refuge in the only place left to her. And then finding herself in the heart of warfare. A part of him wants to be rid of her burden, but too many have already died around him, and he is obscurely pleased for her company. He shakes his head. “Foolish child.” He motions her into the factory. “Come with me.”

A furious stink envelopes them as the enter the main hall. They both cover their faces, breathing shallowly.

“The algae baths,” Hock Seng murmurs. “The kink-springs have stopped running the fans. Nothing is being vented.”

He climbs the steps to the office, shoves open the door. The room is close and hot and reeks as badly as the manufacturing floor from the long days without air flow. He pushes open shutters, letting in night breeze and city burn. Across the roofs, flames flicker, sparking in the night like prayers going up to heaven.

Mai comes to stand beside him, her face illuminated in the irregular glow. A gas lamp is burning freely down on the street, broken. They must be burning all over the city. Hock Seng is somewhat surprised that no one has cut off the gas lines. Someone should have done it already, and yet still this one flares, bright and green, reflecting on Mai’s face. She is pretty, he realizes. Slight and beautiful. An innocent trapped amongst warring animals.

He turns from the window and goes to squat before the safe. Studies its dials and heavy locks, its combinations and levers. Expensive to manufacture something with so much steel. When he had his own company, when the Tri-Clipper ruled the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, he had one like it in his offices, an heirloom, salvaged from an old bank when it lost liquidity, straight from the vault and carried into Three Prosperities Trading Company with the help of two megodonts. This one sits before him, taunting him. He must destroy it at its joints. It will take time. “Come with me,” he says.

He leads her back down to the factory floor. Mai hangs back when he wants to go into the fining rooms. He hands her a line-worker’s mask. “It should be enough.”

“You’re sure?”

He shrugs. “Stay, then.”

But she follows him anyway, back to where they store the curing acid. They walk gingerly. He uses a rag to push aside the fining room curtains, careful to let nothing touch him. His breath is loud inside the mask, ragged sawing. The manufacturing rooms are disarrayed. White shirts have been here, inspecting. The stink of the rotting algae tanks is intense, even through the mask. Hock Seng breathes shallowly, forcing himself not to gag. Overhead, the drying screens are all black with withered algae. A few streamers dangle down, black emaciated tentacles. Hock Seng fights the urge to duck from them.

“What are you doing?” Mai pants.

“Looking for a future.” He spares her small smile before he realizes she can’t see his expressions through the mask. He digs gloves out of a supply cabinet and hands her a pair. Gives her an apron as well. “Help me with this.” He indicates a sack of powder. “We’re working for ourselves, now. No more foreign influences, yes?” He stops her as she reaches for the sack. “Don’t get any on your skin,” he says. “And don’t let your sweat touch it.” He guides her back up to the offices.

“What is it?”

“You shall see, child.”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s magic. Now go get some water from the khlong out back.”

When she returns, he takes a knife and carefully slices into the sacking. “Bring me the water.” She pulls the bucket close. He dips into the water with his knife, then runs it through the powder. The powder hisses and begins to boil. When he takes the knife out, it’s half gone, melted into nothing, still hissing.

Mai’s eyes go wide. A viscous liquid pours off the knife. “What is it?”

“A specialized bacteria. Something the farang have created.”

“Not acid, though”

“No. It’s alive. In a way.”

He takes the knife and begins to scrape it along the face of the safe. The knife disintegrates completely. Hock Seng grimaces. “I need something else, something long, to spread it with.”

“Put water on the safe,” Mai suggests. “Then pour on the powder.”

He laughs. “Clever child.”

Soon the safe is soaking. He prepares a paper funnel and lets the powder stream through in a tiny fountain. Wherever it touches the metal face it begins to boil. Hock Seng steps back, horrified at the speed of the stuff. Fights the urge to wipe his hands. “Don’t get any on your skin,” he mutters. Stares at his gloves. If there is a trace of powder on them and they are wetted… His skin crawls. Mai is already backed away to the far side of the office, watching with terrified eyes.

Metal pours off the face, eaten and discarded iron, peeling away in sheaves, layers of it flaking away as if blown by autumn winds. The bright leaves of melting iron land on teak flooring. They hiss and spread. The flakes burn on, creating a lattice of broken seared wood.

“It doesn’t stop,” Mai says, awed. Hock Seng watches with increasing unease, wondering if the yeastlike stuff will eat away the floor below and send the safe crashing down into the manufacturing lines. He finds his voice. “It is alive. It should lose its ability to digest, soon.”

“This is what the farang make.” Mai’s voice is frightened and awed.

“Our people have made such things as well.” Hock Seng shakes his head. “Don’t think the farang are so much as all that.”

The safe continues to disintegrate. If only he had been brave before. He could have done this when there wasn’t a war boiling outside the window. He wishes he could go back in time to his former frightened paranoid self, so worried about deportation, about angering foreign devils, about preserving his good name, and simply whisper in that old man’s ear that there was no hope. That he should steal and run, and it could not turn out worse.

A voice interrupts his thoughts. “Well, well. Tan Hock Seng. How nice to see you here.”

Hock Seng turns. Dog Fucker and Old Bones, along with six others, are standing in the doorway. All of them carrying spring guns. They’re scratched and sooted from the warfare of the streets, but smiling and confident.

“We all seem to have been thinking along the same lines,” Dog Fucker observes.

An explosion lights the sky, casting orange across the office. The rumble of destruction trembles through Hock Seng’s soles. It’s hard to tell how far away it was. The shells seem to fall randomly. If there is intelligence guiding them, it’s not for them to understand. Another rumble, this one closer. The white shirts, defending the levees, most likely. Hock Seng fights an urge to flee. The cracking of the iron-digesting bacteria continues. Leaves of metal waft to the floor.

Hock Seng tests the waters. “I’m glad you’re here. Help me, then. Come on.”

Old Bones smiles. “I think not.”

The men shoulder past Hock Seng. All of them larger than he. All of them armed. All of them uncaring of his and Mai’s presence. Hock Seng staggers as they bump him aside.

“But it’s mine,” he protests. “You can’t take it! I told you where it was!”

The men ignore him.

“You can’t take it!” Hock Seng fumbles for his gun. Suddenly a pistol presses against his skull. Old Bones, smiling.

Dog Fucker watches with interest. “Another killing will make little difference on my rebirth. Don’t test me.”

Hock Seng can barely control his rage. A part of him wants to fire anyway, to steal away the man’s smug expression. The safe’s metal continues to bubble and hiss, falling away, slowly revealing his last object of hope. The nak leng all watch Hock Seng and Old Bones. They’re loose, smiling. Unafraid. They haven’t even lifted their pistols. They simply watch, interested, as Hock Seng points his pistol at them.

Dog Fucker grins. “Go away, yellow card. Before I change my mind.”

Mai tugs at Hock Seng’s hand. “Whatever it is, it isn’t worth your life.”

“She’s right, yellow card,” Old Bones says. “This is not a fight you can win.”

Hock Seng lowers his pistol and allows Mai to pull him away. They back out of the office. The Dung Lord’s men watch with small smiles, and then Hock Seng and Mai are going down the stairs and out into the factory, and from there into the rubbled streets.

In the distance, a megodont screams in pain. The wind gusts, carrying ash and political pamphlets and the scent of burning WeatherAll. Hock Seng feels old. Too old to still be striving against a fate that clearly wishes him destroyed. Another whisper sheet tumbles past. The headline screams of windup girls and murder. Amazing that Mr. Lake’s windup could cause so much trouble. And now everyone in the city is hunting for her. He almost smiles. Even if he’s a yellow card, he’s not as disadvantaged as that sorry creature. He probably owes her thanks. If it hadn’t been for her and the news of Mr. Lake’s arrest, he supposes he would be dead by now, burned in the slums with all his jade and cash and diamonds.

I should be grateful.

Instead, he feels the weight of his ancestors pressing down upon him, crushing him with their judgments. He took what his father and grandfather before him had built in Malaya and turned it to ash.

The failure is overwhelming.

Another whisper sheet flutters up against the factory wall. The windup girl again, along with accusations against General Pracha. Mr. Lake was obsessed with that windup girl. Couldn’t stop fucking her. Couldn’t resist bringing her to his bed at every opportunity. Hock Seng picks up the whisper sheet, suddenly thoughtful.

“What is it?” Mai asks.

I am too old for this.

But still, Hock Seng feels his heart beating faster. “I have an idea,” he says. “A possibility.”

A new absurd flicker of hope. He cannot help it. Even when he has nothing, he must strive.