Jade Dragon (21 page)

The other men opened fire, and Fixx cut low, the SunKings leaping into
his hands. The boy was letting off wild shots, doing the best that he
could. Fixx went for short, controlled bursts from his silver pistols.

Close misses keened off the bulletproof windscreen and the dirty
concrete. Fixx drilled each enforcer in turn, going for disabling hits
when he could, outright kills when he couldn’t. The kid, this Ko,
emptied the revolver and then ducked in cover behind the car.

Fixx shot the last man in the leg and strode back to the Korvette,
reloading as he went. Mercifully, no stray shots had gone into the
vehicle’s electronics. The op took his seat and opened the passenger
door. “So,” he said conversationally. “You need a lift.” It wasn’t a
question.

“I’ll take my chances, thanks.”

“No you won’t. You’re smarter than that.”

The youth gingerly got in. “I’m Ko,” he coughed.

“Joshua Fixx.” his hand. “Pleasure.”

Ko still had the tarot card. “You, uh, want this back?”

“In a while.” The sports car growled into life and raced away.

Fatigue engulfed her in a slow, warm wave, drawing Juno down on to the
bed and into the cool embrace of the silken sheets. She had a brief
moment of sense-memory, there and then gone, just the quickest taste of
Frankie’s musk upon her lips; she wanted to hold on to it, but it
disintegrated beneath her scrutiny, the way that ancient paper became
dust when you crushed it in your fingers.

Was it daylight outside? She couldn’t tell any more. After all the
travelling, every rootless moment of motion inside and outside, she had
gone beyond a point where she could reckon herself against a watch. She
lived on Juno Time now, where every hour was Me O’clock, her needs
fulfilled as long as she never stepped outside of the bubble. And why
would she? Out beyond the safety zone that dear old Heywood and the nice
men at RedWhiteBlue granted her, well, she knew there were people there
who loved her, but there were also the scary ones. The ones that posted
dead animals to the fan club, or sent her emails of themselves wearing
clothes of hers that her maids had stolen to sell on iBuy.

Still. At times she felt the urge bubbling inside her, the need to go
and walk in the real world without legions of cameras and men whose only
jobs were to plot and scheme over the content of her every breath, her
every move. She could get out if she wanted to,
really
wanted to. Juno
knew a way.

She shifted and felt the bed move with it, gently closing around her.
She blinked, trying to shake away the dark shades hovering at the far
edges of her vision, there in the pools of inky shadow behind the hotel
suite’s curtains, or in the places where light didn’t fall beneath the
furniture. Her mouth was suddenly arid. She felt… she felt… She felt
wrong
somehow, uncomfortable no matter how much she moved, as if it
were her skin that fitted her wrongly, not the cloying touch of the
silk.

The woman kicked at the bedclothes with sudden violence. She wanted them
off her, but they refused to budge. Juno rolled over and pulled. The bed
shifted back with tendrils of gossamer material and dragged her down.
Juno opened her mouth to cry out, but her lips, her dry lips were stuck
together.

Outside the window there was the sound of cats yowling, the whispering
of voices that came from placid porcelain faces, hidden eyes under
unmoving masks. Juno flailed for the edges of the bed and couldn’t find
them. Her hands sank into pools of brilliant blue capsules, glittering
candy-coloured shapes that tingled when she touched them. The dusty
interior of her mouth craved them, begged for the refreshing bursts of
fluid inside. Invisible hands. Know zen. Bubble in the stream.

The room had become dark while her mind was elsewhere. The curtains,
thick and heavy brocade flapping in a pre-storm breeze, they came open
now and then to show her glimpses of a distant green mountaintop, and
beyond it a purple sky lit by silent lightning. Where was the thunder?
Why wasn’t there any thunder?

Juno pushed very hard at her lips and forced a word out of her mouth; it
came apart in fragments, blue and black and green and yellow. She spoke
in colours and not sounds, rainbows of light erupting. It made her cry.

Balling the slick sheets in her grip, Juno forced her way up. Her eyes
would not close, no matter how hard she tried to seal them. By chilling
inches, the contents of the room began to haze over and change, turning
from wood and paper and cloth into glass and glass and glass. Everything
had edges like razors, all of them pointing inwards to scrape at her
eyes.

Mirrors. Everywhere there were mirrors. Talking mirrors that screamed
and cried or made sounds that could have been songs.

And here came the shapes again, the moving things in the shadows under
the glassy madness. The Angels of Pain. The serpents and the worms, and
over her head, somewhere in the rafters kilometres above, a dragon made
of dark jade, watching. Waiting for something. Waiting for her to sing
to him. The Lord of Bliss ready for her to serenade…

Juno forced herself up and curled her hands around her naked, shivering
form, fighting to shake off the dream; but it clung to her like a film
of oil, coating every surface, reflecting pieces of her life back at
her.

Ocean Terminal, the screaming crowds. The upturned faces in the
Hyperdome. Outside the Yuk Lung tower. Heywood’s hands around her
throat…

She choked, her back arching with pain; and suddenly she saw that
moment, watching it unfold from a place behind the frosted door in the
upper deck of the limobus, the lights of the Lantau Expressway flicking
past outside. She observed…

Herself? Juno Qwan, behind a pair of Minnuendo sunglasses, the Inverse
Smile chapeau, the Dior dress, the Westlake pumps. Her face taut and
morose. Juno Here watching Juno There, detached, an observer.

The Other Juno is irrational and she’s making high-pitched noises that
could be words, but she sounds like she’s underwater. Other Juno
reaching for a bowl of the gorgeous blue pills, so many of them. Heywood
stops her, there’s a blur of motion and those Minnuendos, a two thousand
yuan limited edition from the Fall Catalogue, they fall from her face as
he strikes her with the base of his hand.

She bleeds. The sunglasses are smashed into broken mirrors under Ropé’s
shoes. Ropé puts his big white hands around Other Juno’s throat and he
begins to twist and turn her head. This Juno, Watching and Observing
Juno, touches her neck in reflection, detached, distant, not
understanding.

How can this be happening? How can I be here and there at once? Why is
she dying? Juno is a star. I can’t die.

And the Other Juno’s face turns florid and then slack as Ropé twists and
twists, he’s laughing a little as he does it, eyes wild and enraptured
as he makes the kill last, teasing it out. The slow, slow cracking pops
as vertebrae snap. The meat-sack thud as the body falls from his clawed
hands. Juno. There dead. Dead.

Mirror is broken.

Heywood brushes back stray hairs made unkempt by the murder, straightens
himself, calms down his arousal. He looks at her with kind, fatherly
eyes and beckons Juno Here from behind the door. So she comes, because
that’s what she must do. And This Juno sloughs off the shapeless plastic
oversuit and gently undresses Other Juno, Dead Juno, Pallid and Forever
Not Juno…

She was in the shower beneath a hot spray of water when she finally
recovered enough to stop weeping. The needles of liquid massaged her
body, pain making the dream fade. The punishing heat reddened her skin,
but it forced the thoughts to retreat back into the dark pools and the
black places. Juno shut it off and crossed to the full-length mirror,
wiping away the patina of condensation, examining herself.

“Just… a dream,” she said aloud, her words taking on a peculiar echo
in the cavernous bathroom.

Juno padded out to the suite proper and studied the display on her comm.
It was still ringing, the call unanswered. Francis Lam—Temporarily
Unavailable.

The girl swallowed the beginning of a sob and dressed, taking the most
shapeless, the most basic clothes she could find. The room was tight
about her, strangling.

Juno donned an eyeband and concealed her hair beneath a baseball cap.
She slid out over the lip of the balcony, and edged over into the
neighbouring room, where a fat billionaire from Minsk was sleeping off a
binge on the sofa. She picked her way past him, and out.

From the outside, it had appeared to be just one more in a line of
nondescript lock-up in a back street full of rusted roller doors and
gates cut from corrugated steel. Somewhere a block or two back was the
main crossroads of Mongkok, the constant rumble of traffic and the
sounds of distant metro trains under everything, ebbing and flowing like
waves. Ko found the gateway with the ease of someone who had done it
hundreds of times, and Fixx ducked low to follow him inside, past
hand-painted signs in unreadable characters and layers of flyposters.

Within it was a different story: an oasis of old history nestled there,
a small courtyard and a couple of low buildings in an ancient style. The
place was a little shabby around the seams but still impressive in its
own way. Fixx mused on the fact that the space taken up by the temple
could have easily been enough for a housing tower. Whoever owned this
place had influence, money, or both.

There were a few boys and a couple of older teens, spinning out tightly
trained katas with lionhead swords or halberds.

“A dojo,” Fixx said aloud. He glanced at Ko. “You train here?”

The thief gave him an uncomfortable look. “Not for a while.”

Ko made him wait outside while he went into one of the buildings, and
the op watched the other pupils. They were very good, and their kung fu
was something new to him. Fixx picked out elements of a dozen Oriental
fighting styles, but all modified beyond their rigid origins. The kids
with the halberds flowed like water, the pikes meeting with hollow
clacks, never passing close enough for anything but a glancing blow.

He orbited the perimeter of the courtyard and came across a corridor.
Along it there were framed photographs, glass cases that were home now
only to spiders and nameplates where trophies might once have stood. He
found a yellowed newspaper article and there in a dulled image was Ko,
younger and happier, between a whipcord fellow in a yellow tracksuit and
an older man in police uniform. The boy held up a medal. Further down
there were other items that seemed out of place—a stained film script
with the title
Blood and Steel,
and old movie posters, their lurid
colours and vivid blocks of text all faded shades.

The op looked up as a figure appeared in the shadows. “Joshua Fixx,”
said the man. “Who might you be?”

“Just passin’ through,” said Fixx. “Following an inkling, you might
say.” The man walked into a pool of light and he saw the same face from
the paper; the muscular cut of his posture was less than it had been
back then. He had grey hair and that kind of wispy beard the old guys in
this part of the world seemed to like. “The kid?”

“Ko.” The man shook his head. “Such potential. It saddens me to see him
squander it on fast cars and street fights. Ah Sing will see he’s
patched up.”

“He’ll be cool. He’s tougher than he looks.”

The old man cocked his head. “You can tell that from just meeting him?”

Fixx showed his teeth. “I’m what you might call a good judge of
character.”

He held out the tarot card. “Ko asked me to return this to you.” The man
examined it. “You a fortune teller, Mr Fixx?”

“I have my moments.” He paused. “I’m not responsible for Ko’s state, if
that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

The old man shook his head. “I know that. If you were, we wouldn’t be
having this pleasant conversation.” There was an edge of challenge in
the words that gave Fixx pause. “These are dangerous days for the
unwary. The streets of my city are filled with foolish men and easy
roads to jeopardy. Ko, and the others… I try to teach them to seek a
path of enlightenment, not darkness.” He came closer, and Fixx saw the
subtle cues in his posture that showed he was ready to take things to
another level, if that was how it played out. “But I am asking myself,
why would a man like you rescue a streetpunk like him from out of
nowhere?”

“Like you said, the lad’s got potential he don’t even know about yet.”
Fixx took the card and returned it to the pack, careful to remain easy
and unhurried. “Kid’s got a role to play, neh? Like all o’ us.” He
tapped the dusty glass, reading the only English text he could find on
the movie posters. “
The Silent Flute.
I never seen that flick. That’s
you there, right? The leading man?”

“Long time ago,” admitted the old fellow. “Times change.”

“Yeah,” said Fixx, sensing a kindred spirit. “Not always for the better.
”

Ko’s teacher beckoned. “We should talk, Mr Fixx.”

“Call me Joshua. ”

The old man smiled. “I’m Bruce.”

The interior of the church was silent when she slid between the heavy
oaken doors. Her footsteps made gentle tapping sounds on the tiled floor
as she moved deeper into the building, passing the ranks of oaken pews,
empty of worshippers. The chapel seemed strange and out of place in a
city of towering glass and steel, a tiny knot of ancient beliefs crowded
out by the new temples of the corps.

Juno tried to clarify the impulse that had brought her here and found
nothing that could explain it. It was the silence that drew her in, the
sense of tranquillity inside the ancient building. In here, the rest of
the world seemed far distant. She thought of the old ideals of sanctuary
on hallowed ground.