The Demon and the City (3 page)

Robin had asked Mhara which level of Hell he came from, of course, but he had merely given her a vague smile. Robin was desperate to find out more, but the experiment was classified and she was unwilling to risk her good job by asking awkward questions. Yet despite their situation, Robin still got the feeling that Mhara trusted her, and at a time when she had little enough satisfaction, this was a source of comfort. He
needs
me, she thought now, vaguely aware of the abyss that was opening beneath her feet. Now, Mhara sat up straighter, and Robin plumped the pillows.

"Could I get up today?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," Robin said again. "Not today. One more day, and then we'll see how you're doing."

Mhara said nothing. Robin hated herself. She looked at the downcast experiment and the blue gaze turned to her as he smiled. They were marvelous eyes, and the contrast with his pale face and crow-blue hair was strikingly attractive. He looked nothing like the demons she had seen in the research files.

"It's not your fault, Robin. I know that."

It didn't make Robin feel any better. Stifling guilt, she went through the various tasks of her day in peace, until late afternoon when there was a sudden hubbub in the lift landing.

"Excuse me," Robin said. "I've got to go. I'll be back in a moment."

The experiment nodded. Robin went out and found her employer striding down the corridor. Jhai Tserai, wreathed in an amethyst silk sari, was surrounded by an adoring crowd, the young turks of Y Lab. Tserai's trademark cascade of dark hair was drawn back from the elegant curves of her face. She appeared delighted to see Robin standing drably in the office doorway.

"Robin!" She kissed Robin's cheek. "What a week, eh?" She gave Robin that eye-to-eye look which meant:
We've really been through it, haven't we? But we're still one hell of a team
.

She really isn't much taller than me, Robin thought, and yet somehow Jhai always seemed to be looking down on her. Robin deeply distrusted Jhai's attempts at friendliness, but when bathed in Jhai's famous charm, she couldn't help but respond. How did Jhai always manage to catch you off your guard? Robin wondered. She supposed it was some kind of charisma, but whatever it was, Jhai had it in spades. The subtle, provocative smell of Jhai's perfume followed her into the lab.

The morning medication had taken effect. Mhara was sleeping, lying curled on his side and breathing peacefully. He always slept neatly, like a cat: no drooling or snoring.

Jhai peered at the winking lights on the monitor. "Seems fine to me. Good work, Robin. It's never easy." She gave Robin a dark, concerned glance.

"He's so—accepting," Robin said guiltily.

Jhai reached down and turned the experiment's shoulder gently. The blue eyes were a dark well, open yet dreaming. The oval face was shadowed beneath a fall of hair.

"Where do we go from here?" Robin asked. Her boss shook her head.

"We just keep going until we figure out whatever neurological configuration it is that gives him his predictive abilities." Catching sight of Robin's unhappy expression, she added, "We need him, Robin. He can glimpse the future and we need to make sure that we're one step ahead of Hell."

Regular scientists were horrified by Jhai, Robin reflected. She was unmethodical, subjective, running on half-expressed intuitions, heretical and unrepentant. But because she was running the show she could work any way she pleased, and in the past the results had been impressive. Her disciple technicians trusted her, even when she outraged them. She rode the dragon and they ran along behind, imploring hands outstretched, pleading for her to slow down. She rewarded people who enjoyed being outraged: Robin was not one of them. Jhai, so forceful and vivid a presence in the dingy little lab, made her uneasy.

The experiment stirred and whimpered. Robin started fiddling with the hookups on the monitor. Another few minutes and then she would go home, and maybe Deveth would have rung. Better yet, perhaps she would find Deveth waiting on the step, her arms full of groceries, smiling up at Robin.
Dream on,
Robin thought. She glanced up to find that Jhai was staring at her, the gaze full of that assumed concern.

"Are you okay, Robin? You look a little tired."

"I'm fine," Robin lied.

"Good. Well, let me know if anything happens."

Robin nodded, willing Jhai to leave, and at last, after a final data inspection, Jhai did so. Robin turned back to the bed. The experiment was awake. The blue eyes burned into her own.

"Mhara? What's wrong?"

"The world," the experiment said, almost conversationally, "is going to end. Very soon."

"What?" Robin faltered. The experiment's gaze blurred; his voice murmured in the vaults of her skull.

"I can see everything," the experiment whispered. "Everything that will happen: blood and darkness and fire, demons devouring the city, ghosts running hungry through the streets. The end of
everything."
—and suddenly Robin could see it too, a vision of apocalypse conferred without grace. A tower crumbled and fell, crashing down into the street. The ground split and splintered under her feet and above her, the sky, too, cracked like a fractured eggshell. Robin's vision receded into a tunnel of night. She reeled back, her hand painfully striking the metal edge of the couch, and the lab was as before.

"What's going to cause the end of the world?" The question was no more than a thought, but the answer hissed in her head.

Jhai Tserai . . .

Robin blinked, and the vision was suddenly gone. The experiment sank back against the pillows.

"Mhara?" Robin whispered. She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and gripped his shoulders. "Mhara?
What was that?
What did we see?" but he was already back in the tranquilized trance that passed for sleep.

Her mind racing, Robin tidied up the desk in the lab, made a final check of the monitor and settled the experiment down for the night, attaching the linkmote that would alert her if anything went wrong. She smoothed the dark hair over the experiment's brow. He smiled vaguely in his sleep. He looked so innocent, but the memories of what she had glimpsed were still vivid as nightmare.

"Goodnight," Robin whispered. She locked the door and took the lift up to the atrium. She walked through it in a daze, automatically checking her employee card at the door, barely hearing the doorman's farewell. Above her, the tower hummed with life; Paugeng worked round the clock. Robin stared numbly up at it as though she had never seen it before, and finally got herself sufficiently together to head for the tram. There was some hitch in the Shaopeng service, announced on the departure board, and the downtown was late, eventually arriving after seven. Robin's journey passed swiftly, lost in a haze of speculation.

She had been instructed to report anything Mhara said, directly to Jhai, but she did not want to anger her employer, and informing Jhai that she was apparently the cause of wholesale destruction seemed a good way to go about this. Robin herself was not even sure that she believed in Mhara's predictive abilities, but Jhai believed, and that was the important thing. Robin tossed questions to and fro in her head until she was too tired to think.

By the time she got home, the sky had darkened to rose. Deveth was not waiting on the doorstep. Robin tried to stifle the hope as she stepped into the hallway, but found to her own disgust that she was holding her breath. No one was waiting for her.
I told you so,
Robin said to herself. She climbed the interminable flight of stairs and opened the front door.

The apartment was minute: a box, a coffin. Inside the box, the heat was unbearable. Robin threw open the windows and a suffocating smell of garbage entered. The only choice was to stifle or gag. Robin compromised, shutting the little window in the bedroom and turning on the kitchen fan, which after a minute started to limp around its central spoke. A single step took her back into the main room. She took off her overall tunic and bundled it into a ball so that the Paugeng logo was no longer visible, then stuffed it under the pillow of her futon. The last thing she wanted to think about was work, and if she glimpsed it out of the corner of her eye, the logo looked like a bloodstain. If she looked crumpled next morning, then so be it. She turned on the television, hoping for the news, but no sooner had she sat down than there was a bang at the door. Robin bounced up and flung it open.

"Deveth—" she began, but there was only the empty air. Robin looked down. A small, resentful face was turned upward in reproach.

"I got your noodles," it said sourly. "And your pak choi."

"Good!" Robin said. She had forgotten that she had hired next-door's child to bring her a takeout. She forced money, evidently not as much as the child was expecting, into its grimy hand.

"Is that all?" it said.

"That's all you get," Robin told it, and shut the door.

She carried the oily paper packet back to the television, eating absently with one hand. On the viewer, Malaysian screen idol Inditraya Samay held up a rosy pomegranate and moved her winsome head to one side.
Revolting
, Robin thought. What had happened to the news? She reached for the remote and Samay's pretty pout was ruthlessly intercepted. A long shot of bodies on stretchers was more promising: the news on Channel 8. Robin settled down grimly to watch. Tremors in Sengeng had collapsed a road, compressing its four parallel lanes into a grisly sandwich. The cause—either a grumbling fault line or excessive open-cast mining in Sengeng Paray—depended on political affiliation. No mention was made of the Feng Shui Practitioners' Guild who had, it seemed, failed to predict the disaster. One of the senior dowsers was featured, loudly protesting their blamelessness.

Finishing her noodles, Robin took the greasy packet out to the kitchen. It was a mess. Normally, an old lady named Mrs Pa came in to do the cleaning, but poor Mrs Pa had been sick over the last few days, and the general chaos natural to Robin's apartment had mounted. A tower of takeout packets spilled over the sink and a stack of dirty plates sat precariously on the little work surface. Robin could barely see the floor of the main room for the clothes that were scattered over it. She piled them in a heap on the floor of the cupboard, then furiously attacked the kitchen, piling the rubbish into a bag and sealing it shut with a snap. She stacked the plates in the sink and hauled the garbage bag out through the small rectangle of the kitchen hatch onto the fire escape, which rose up from the side alley like an ironwork plant from its composting bed.

It was still hot, a humid, reeking heat. The neighboring buildings were squat shadows against the taller buildings of Shaopeng, and the sky was a deep, clear crimson, unusual for the polluted port. As Robin stepped out onto the fire escape, the evening heat wrapped around her like polythene: a moist embrace of carbon dioxide, drains and the oily reek of the river. Another, more organic, odor insinuated itself into the air. Looking down from the top of the fire escape, Robin saw that the black garbage bags had accumulated at the bottom until they burst, spilling a mélange of rotten vegetables around the iron feet of the staircase. Through this bath of odors wound a thread of incense from the apartment below, a spicy breath out of the squalor.

A rattling, scuffling sound arrested Robin's attention halfway down the fire escape. She stopped and peered into the dim alleyway. The sound was purposeful, determined, and came from the bottom of the fire escape. She leaned over the railing, and saw that the black back of the uppermost garbage bag was heaving. From her position at the fourth floor, and directly above, it resembled a seal; it rolled and wallowed in the filth that littered the alleyway. The bag spat tins, and a sheaf of old papers. Two floors down, a door was flung open and the voice of the occupant roared, "What's all that fucking racket? Get out of there! Bloody dogs!"

The animal backed out of its larder and bolted down the alley. Robin caught a glimpse of an ungainly gait and a fat, spotted spine; it did indeed look like a dog of some sort, but much larger. She descended the fire escape and picked her way warily through the litter. The animal was nowhere to be seen. Robin dumped her bag and pushed the rest of the mess around with her foot, until it lay in a heap. Let the collectors sort it out. By morning, half of it would be gone, sneaked away to sell to the recyclers. There was a pungent, animal smell around the alley, unfamiliar, but redolent of earth and meat. Uneasily, Robin climbed back up the rickety escape and shut the kitchen hatch. She spent the evening in front of the television, pondering her problem of Mhara's horrible prophecy until her head pounded.

Deveth did not call.

Until this week, Zhu Irzh had been residing in a somewhat seedy boardinghouse in Lower Murray Street, but Chen's trip to Hawaii had brought an unexpected offer.

"You can look after the houseboat for me, if you like," Chen had said, glancing amiably upward at the demon standing by his desk. "We'll be gone for three weeks; I'd like someone to water the plants and look after the badger."

"You're not taking the badger with you?"

"No, it might cause problems taking him on the plane even in his inanimate form and, anyway, he says he's happy to stay at home. I don't suppose he'll be much trouble. He'll probably be in teakettle mode most of the time. So. What shall I do, drop off the keys on our way to the airport?"

Thus, in the space of a morning, Zhu Irzh had acquired a new home and a familiar. He was becoming almost domesticated, he thought. He had always wanted to live on a boat, that traditional last resort of the poor. It was a long way from that pagoda fortress of his home in Hell, the balconies and verandahs of the Irzh clan, but Zhu Irzh didn't miss the luxury all that much. At least he didn't have to put up with his mother, and that was worth a bit of poverty.

The boat was moored some distance from the waterfront which, a short distance later, led round to Ghenret harbor. Chen had moved the boat closer to shore before a recent typhoon, and it was now reached via a few short hops over a series of pontoons. It looked out over the polluted waters of the Shendei, which, despite their filth, was why Zhu Irzh liked it. He supposed that Chen felt the same way. He could sit on the windowsill in the evening and watch the freighters plough across the harbor, until the swift night fell out of the sky and they became only moving lights.