Jade Dragon (25 page)

Hi snorted. “He still doesn’t comprehend. He’s no better than the
other.”

Tze silenced her with a snap of his fingers. “There’s never been a time
when we haven’t watched you, Francis. Even before your birth, the King’s
Men observed, measured, tracked. And waited.”

“The files,” Frankie blurted. “I saw them.”

The other man nodded. “You and your kindred have something I could only
dream of possessing, son. You are touched by Him. Your bloodline bares
the mark. You are living avatars, the keepers of the Key to the Great
Pattern, scattered across the world like seeds. Waiting to bloom.” He
touched a hidden control on a wooden lectern. “Let me show you.”

A d-screen dropped from the ceiling behind Hi and flicked into sharp
reds. Frankie recognised electron microscope images of blood platelets,
of twisting ropes of DNA. The view crawled closer.

“Do you not see?” grinned Tze, pointing.

At a size visible only on the highest magnifications, Frankie saw shapes
that seemed embossed on the very matter of his flesh and blood,
imprinted there like a makers mark: the repeated icons of a star with
eight points and the same shape that was burned into the chest of Mr
Tze. His stomach twisted.

“Spilled blood marks the way,” intoned the other man, “and it must be of
a vintage that the King prefers.” He snapped his fingers and Monkey King
was there, strong, iron-hard arms snaking around Frankie s torso. “Don’t
fear Him,” murmured Tze, “embrace Him. When your veins are opened and
the Jade Dragon drinks of you, you will become a part of His Glory. You
will seal the pact for us.” Tze’s eyes glittered with rapture and he
pointed up at the ceiling. There were carvings of serpents and cruel
angels up there, shadows writhing in the dim lamplight. “Alan perished
too soon, he forced my hand. That error will not be repeated.”

“You, every damn one of you, are absolutely out of your fucking minds,”
said Frankie.

Ropé stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of Blue Snake, standing
there in the middle of the atrium, her slender and dangerous hands
moving in front of her chest like leaves in a gentle breeze. The
bodyguard was watchful, patient.

“Where is Miss Quan?” He demanded, striding toward the guardian.

“She became unwell.” Blue Snake nodded blankly at the restroom. “She
required privacy.”

“How long ago was this?”

She cocked her head. “Elapsed time: four minutes, thirty-six seconds.”

Ropé sneered and went into the toilet. Blue Snake walked warily behind
him. The guardians were useful tools in the correct circumstances, but
they were flawed. Drained of their humanity by the Masking process, they
sometimes became slow, confused by emotions and reactions that they had
lost the means to process. Tze’s ridiculous attachment to them had been
shown for the idiotic affectation it was in the club tonight, his
personal bodyguard downed by a mystery assailant; and now this, the
female one failing to understand the mindset of the girl Juno.

He slammed the stall door with his hand, kicking at the discarded coat
with the tip of his boot. The smell of cooling puke tickled his
nostrils; Blue Snake examined the remains, analysing them in a vague
attempt to grasp the error she had made.

Ropé prodded her in the chest. “Seal the building. Locate her. But be
discreet
.”

Blue Snake padded out into the hall and halted. “Tracking reports…
target is ascending. Destination is Research and Development level.”

He swore and pushed the woman out of the way, dragging a smartcard from
his pocket. Ropé entered a lift and gave chase.

The chamber began to unfold. Where they stood in the centre of the room,
the circular section of the stone floor remained static; but the rings
of smaller flagstones around the edges of the hall folded back upon
themselves and allowed twisting wooden pillars to emerge. Some of them
were wet and they smelt coppery in the thick air. From the ceiling,
extending from the carved bodies of snakes and worm-headed abominations,
metal arms ending in the glass eyes of holojector lenses fell into place
and emitted coherent light. Frankie saw the shapes of people forming in
some of the glowing haloes beneath them, others showing black monoliths
that reminded him of obsidian tombstones.

Hi completed cleaning the bowl and allowed Tze to cut himself into it.
The CEO removed the same silver box from beneath the oak table and
Frankie suppressed a shudder. Out came the knife of manifold blades,
into Tze’s hand with casual, dangerous motions.

“You’re not going to die tonight,” Tze said in an offhand manner,
whispering so that the other players in his sick little theatre did not
hear. “Your bloodline is the most potent, the most vital. We have to be
economical with it.” He smirked. “I am not a man for wastage.”

Frankie struggled in Monkey King’s grip. “This is nuts! You’re telling
me, my whole family is some line of sacrificial lambs for some psycho
cult?”

“Not just you. There are others.” Tze nodded at the holos. In one,
Frankie saw a general in the uniform of the APRC carefully stabbing an
elderly man; in another, a woman in a blue shipsuit was coring the eyes
from a screaming child. He turned away, reeling. “It is just that your
blood is the superior strain.” Tze took the knife and made shallow,
stinging cuts on Frankie’s wrists, catching the ejecta in the bowl.

Hi made symbols in the air and bowed. Tze waited for her to have her
face over the basin, and in a single sweep, he tore the blade across the
bare white flesh of her throat. Dark arterial spray fanned into the air
and the music executive perished with a wailing, streaming gurgle. There
was something like rapture in her dying eyes.

Tze gave a pious nod to the other members of the Cabal. “The altar is
anointed. As the pattern speaks, we will allow the stone and wood to
drink their fill, preparing themselves. We Open The Way.”

“We Open The Way,” came a chorus of voices from hidden speakers.

“In the wastes of America, a fool tries and fails. So-called Elders with
their petty, limited ideals bark like dogs believing they have the
attention of men. They have nothing but the contempt of the Dark Ones.
It is only we who will succeed. We, who light the path. We, who will
thrive where Seth fails.” He showed a mouth full of white, razor teeth.
“The Jade Dragon rises. It is ordained.”

Juno had never been here.

She had been here many times.

She had no idea what number to key into the security keypad.

The code was 7–9–5–7–3.

Juno remembered the glass and steel rooms with floors of hollow plate.

She was terrified at her first sight of the facility.

She was scared the security drones would see her.

She knew where to stand to avoid them.

The tarot card in her hand. It seemed to merge with her flesh, become
insubstantial. The image of the High Priestess was a brand, a tattoo
done in acid inks. She let it lead her in, muscle memory taking Juno
deep into a place of quiet, patient machines and liquid glows.

Inside, the laboratory was lit in a watery yellow, a series of light
bars set in the floor casting shadows around a collection of large
spherical modules. The orbs were transparent, and in each of them was a
naked human body, coiled and floating in a green ocean. Juno recoiled,
almost falling over a low console. The sphere closest to her held a
child, a girl, and as she watched, Juno could see the slow movement of
her chest and the occasional twitch of fingers and toes. A flat mask
covered the girl’s eyes, and a pair of thick, semi-organic cables
extended into the liquid medium. One was attached to her navel, and the
other disappeared into a fluffy matt of hair at the back of her head.
Juno felt her stomach turn over again and put out a hand to steady
herself, inadvertently touching the wall of the sphere.

The sensation was instantly familiar, and her mind swam with the
faintest recollection of a thick, warm sea. She retched, tasting plastic
in her mouth, the horrible memory of pipes snaking down her gullet and
into her stomach.

Behind her the door hissed open again, and a gust of warm air wandered
into the chamber with Heywood Ropé at its centre.

“Oh dear,” he said, lilting and mocking, unconcerned and hateful. “Don’t
you know it’s wrong to peek behind the curtain?”

Juno began to cry. Her world was coming adrift, huge icebergs of her
personal reality breaking off and sinking.

Ropé came close, snatched the tarot card from her stiff grip and shoved
her down. “What have we here?” He raised it to his nostrils and took a
long, deep sniff. “Where did you get this?”

Juno shook her head, backing away.

His face twisted. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you know.
There’s no time for the pattern to be altered. You’re going to do what
you were made for, you little bitch.”

Tears streaking her face, she glanced at the glassy spheres, the
sleeping girl and the other, unfinished things. Ropé answered the
unspoken question.

“Them? Oh, they’re just leftovers, darling. Remnants and remainders.
Understudies, you might say.”

She found her voice again. “I’m not… going to help you. You kill
people.”

He laughed and the sound made her whimper. “I’ve murdered you in a dozen
different ways, each sweeter than the last. So know that. Know that you
will do what I tell you. You don’t have a choice.” He rolled a Z3N
capsule between his thumb and forefinger, and she wanted it more than
anything in her life.

“I hate you,” she wept, collapsing in on herself.

Ropé knelt by her, the horrible facade of his outward face coming to the
fore again. “Don’t,” he said mildly. “I’ll give you what that witch
doctor offered. You want to know yourself, Juno? Here you are.”

He bent close to her ear and whispered a word. The command made a
post-hypnotic suture in her RNA tear open and bleed memory. Juno went
into quiet shock as she remembered…

The songs fading. The channel into her sealed and dark; disconnected,
the world ending.

Around her, the slow thick ocean pulling, dragging as she turns. New
sensations of movement and direction, and the ocean falls away.

Muscles spasm. A burning stream of pain from her belly, out in a plug
of expelled jelly. Weight pulling her into places and directions she’s
never known. Cold hardness pressed into the length of her, light
flooding over, coming in some impossible way from outside of her head.
Fluids dripping out of holes in her body.

Something digs into the skin of her face and the light blazes inward
like the ignition of a supernova.

“Eyes are open.”

Convulsing. Burning coming up again, a million times worse.

“Got your smock?”

Out in a rush, a torrent of agony.

“Aw, shit!”

“I told you, always point the head towards the drain. Stupid. ”

Voices? Moving her mouth, pushing and pulling at her muscles. The slow
waters are gone, a cold, invisible ocean around her. Wet hiss from her
lips.

“Meat’s awake. Dose it, then.”

“There’s a lot of blood in the ejecta. Shouldn’t we—”

“Just get it done.”

Light breaks apart into shifting pieces, growing large or small.

“Uh, okay.”
Something at her neck. Hard. Sharp.
“Full dose.”
It bites
her.

Sound like a pressure leak sings out of her mouth, dropping into a
thick gurgle.

“Juno Seven decanted at fourteen-forty. No anomalies, cleared for
processing.”

“Let’s go, hurry it up.”

Movement. Light falls away. Touching her belly, there’s a fleshy stub,
crusted with drying fluids. The cord is cut! She spits out bone-jarring
coughs, ejecting droplets of dark colour from her mouth…

“Do you understand now, little doll?” whispered Ropé. “Little plastic
girl?” He took a handful of her hair and pulled her to her feet. “You’re
nothing but a wind-up toy, the ballerina on the music box. We made you.”

“Yes,” she cried, her body shaking with fear. “Oh, yes…”

Frankie shivered, feeling scattered droplets of Phoebe Hi’s blood
cooling where they had spattered on his face. Monkey King’s inviolate
grip held him erect, and all he could do was turn his head away as Tze
came closer. “I want you to comprehend, Francis,” he said. “I want you
to appreciate how special you are. Those others are just the first
morsels of the banquet; you are the delicious feast. The gift you are
given will be sweeter than anything the rest of us can imagine. The King
of Rapture will take you into himself….” Tze shook his head. “Such a
glory.”

He used the fluids in the bowl to write shapes on himself. One of Tze’s
other minions, a man in a spotlessly clean laboratory coat, offered up a
tray bearing a stone bottle and cups. Tze poured out equal measures of
thick syrup. The fluid was sparkling blue.

Frankie saw what was coming and struggled, but the Mask tipped back his
head. Tze threw back the liquid Z3N and tipped the other cup into
Frankie’s mouth.

He tried to cough it out, but the fluid tingled like cold fire in his
gullet and it surged into his body. Monkey King let him go and he fell
to his knees.

Frankie’s vision swam, his senses became woolly one second, ultra-sharp
the next. Tze crouched down to face him, grinning. “Yes. Don’t fight
it.”

He’d done drugs before, but the stories that came with the Z3N caps had
always scared Frankie away, of how it was used at sex parties and
bloodclubs, of the mad psychedelic high and the weird way it made people
speak alike, act alike, think alike. Something about the blue had always
seemed
invasive
to him.

Tze started laughing, and Frankie felt the echo of it in his chest. He
couldn’t stop himself from joining in, the bitter humour overtaking him.
In the haze of his vision he could see dark tendrils unfolding from the
old man, whip-fast and sharp. They penetrated Frankie’s skull and wormed
into his mind. Tze was in there with him, sharing his thoughtspace.