Jade Dragon (29 page)

Fixx was not happy about the place he found himself in. Looking for
somewhere to make a stand in a hospital was never going to be a good
idea. Too much chance of collateral damage, too many civvies. For a
second he smelt the toasting flesh from the ferryboat massacre, saw
Cajun Pork Cathy’s dead, dead eyes. Fixx blinked the thought away, and
rested his hands on the edge of the nearest cot. There were ranks of
bassinets in tight rows filling the ward. Each crib was cooing quietly
to the sleeping babies within, monitoring them, turning them with
piezoplastic paddles to keep the children content and prevent cot death.
Fixx felt uncomfortable here with the SunKings in his hands, and when
the door opened to admit the woman in the blue mask, it was almost a
relief.

She carried a flecher, a Krupp by the looks of it, with a fat snail drum
magazine. Two seconds of pressure on the trigger would murder every
newborn in the room, should she wish it. The Mask nodded slightly. Fixx
guessed she was listening to a comm-link.

“Mr Tze would like to extend an invitation to you, to visit the Yuk Lung
tower.” Her voice was a whisper, but it carried. “The choice of the
state in which you arrive there is up to you.” The gun muzzle never
wavered.

“A moment,” he said, carefully holstering the pistols. “If you please.”
Fixx drew the bones from his pocket and weighed them in his hand, then
gently rolled them out across the top of an enclosed cot. The child
inside stirred, blinking at him. Small fingers stretched at the
yellow-white pieces, then sank away.

Fixx studied the lay of the bones, and as he did, he noticed the
feedlines dripping clean air into all the cribs. Blue vapour twinkled in
there.

The woman in the mask flicked off the safety to make her point.

He smiled thinly and gathered up the bones once more. “Never been a man
to argue with fate,” said Fixx, holding up his hands. “I can read the
signs. I surrender.”

“I’m here,” she said to the world, and the world screamed back love for
her. Juno stood inside a bowl of darkness, surrounded by a shifting sea
of souls, crying, imploring her, begging her to complete them. The girl
saw them through a hazy lens, reading the colour of their hearts. They
burned with wild fires, but the shades were dull, tainted. They never
even knew it, the dear poor people, but she could see it. Juno saw it
very clearly now, the acrid blue that stained everything, the battery
acid taste in her mind. She looked up and they did the same, joyful at
the touch of the warm drizzle falling. The crowd were unaware of the
invisible balloons floating up there, molecule-thin sheathes breathing
out the drug into the clouds, seeding the blue rain.

They moved like a shoal of fish or the mindless uniform motion of a
flock of birds in flight. The crowds were unified, drunk on the Z3N
laced in the food, the water and the air. They were sharing,
transforming as one. A totality that waited for one shining light to
guide it. Her
voice
.

Juno’s hand strayed to her throat, feeling tightness there. Her flesh
and mind warred with one another; she knew she only had to release the
first note to set her nightmares in motion.

Tze spoke from the wings, and despite the roaring adulation, she heard
him. “Sing,” he commanded, repeating the words of compulsion Ropé had
used in the laboratory. “Sing for them,
infans simulare.
”

“Harmony,” she wept. “Come with me.”

The two vehicles exploded out of the tunnel and howled through the side
streets of Causeway Bay, the sirens of the ambulance parting traffic
before them like a knife. Burning jags of yellow light from the Vector
lit up the flanks of the paramedic van, shattering lights and tearing at
the tyres.

The Merc kept on him as he turned on to the back roads, screeching
around the narrow bends up toward the Peak. The ambulance ricocheted off
safety barriers and knocked chunks of old stone from the walls. Beams
scorched the asphalt. The vehicle was getting sluggish. Ko knew he was
on a loser.

Another shot flashed through the back of the ambulance and struck a
pressurised gas cylinder. The shriek of escaping fumes brought the stink
of liquid nitrogen to Ko’s nostrils. The smell made him panic and he
jerked the wheel hard, vaulting out of the vehicle and into a gully.

The ambulance spun out as the Vector came closer. Ko had time to bury
his face in the dirt as the CryoSaviour re-sus module inside exploded.
Designed to flash-freeze trauma victims, the uncontrolled detonation
created a plume of super-chilled vapour that engulfed both vehicles.

Clutching at the re-opened wound on his chest, Ko staggered from his
place of safety to find the masked woman frozen to the inside of her
car. She appeared quite dead.

The throaty rumble of a bike engine drew his attention; a kid dressed in
Road Ronin armour halted and doffed his samurai helmet. “Dang! Did you
see that?”

Ko kneed the biker in the nuts and tossed him from the cycle. As an
afterthought, he grabbed the youth’s katana and rode on, toward the
glowing summit.

The lines in blood were drawn, and overhead the sickly light of
ascension was forming. Ropé looked up, weighing the ghost knife in his
hand, as Blue Snake arrived with the black man in custody. He searched
his memory for a name.

“Joshua Fixx. You’re not unknown to… To me.”

Fixx studied him. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”

“I should say so.” Ropé crossed to the wooden frame where Lam was
chained.

The operative had a measuring stare. “Does Tze know?” he asked suddenly.
“I’m willing to bet they think you’re a team player, right?” Fixx
nodded. “But no. I can smell it on you, mister. More to you than just
this zen thing, huh?”

“Impressive,” said Ropé. “You just clapped eyes on me and you can tell
all that?”

“I’m a perceptive fellah. I can smell it. I met your kind before.”

“Yes, you have.” Ropé had a blink of someone else’s memory, of Fixx wet
with blood and human carrion. “I can taste it.”

“The stink from Spanish Fork carries a long, long way. What is it you
all like to say? The Path of Joseph…”

“Is thorny.” Ropé spun and threw the blade, burying it in Blue Snake’s
chest. She sputtered and perished. He looked up at Fixx and felt the
burning touch of Elder Seth behind his own eyes. “Tze makes his play.
Then we’ll make ours.”

Fixx shook his head. “Can’t let that happen.”

Ropé smiled, bearing more teeth than a human mouth should. “Now you’re
becoming interesting. ”

The samurai’s bike took him through a roadblock at breakneck speed, but
none of the guards were watching; they were crying, singing, pointing
into the dark and pregnant skies.

Ko rode around the edges of the crowd, the thunder of their adulation
echoing. He tasted the tingling vapour on the wind, glimpsed shapes at
the corners of his vision. Sinuous things, serpents and monstrous
angels, ghostly and dancing. The rapturous chorus penetrated his mind,
begging him to join in.

When the lightning struck, he thought for a moment the Vector was back,
but then he turned his head upwards and the sight almost stopped his
heart.

In the air over the city there was a rip in the sky, and from it fell
huge emerald tears. As he watched, the clouds gave birth to a thing with
claws and teeth and eyes of impossible angles. It was drenched in
scintillating viridian shades, scaled with jewels so magnificent they
took his breath away to see them. Out of the torn maw of cloud it came,
borne on vestigial wings, ephemeral but gaining solidity by the second.

Ko joined millions of people across the city of Hong Kong, watching the
end of their world begin as the colossus of the Jade Dragon fell
screaming to earth.

Zen, zen

I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice

I’m the perfect smile

Touch my thoughts and flow

There’s no world we can’t know

Sea of stones, sand waves

Harmony, come with me

Taste the blue

Star at dawn

Bubble in the stream

“Touch”

Vocals: Juno Qwan

© RedWhiteBlue Inc. 2026.

In the corridors of the hospital, a thousand screaming babies tore at
the broken minds of the adults. Dr Yeoh collapsed, plunging into hell.
In her room, Nikita slept restlessly; she was already there.

Ko stared out over the shining pinnacles of the cityscape. Juno Qwan’s
voice smothered everything in a warm fog of noise. He felt her words
invading him; she was crying, but he registered this in only the most
distant of ways. Down in the metropolis, he could see her face
everywhere, on the massive street-screens in Central, on the
flickercladding of the Hotel Metropolita; her song played from radios in
every apartment, every channel carried her words. The sound was worming
its way into him.

He left the bike and staggered up the summit, through people screaming
and crying and weeping and laughing. The freakish, sickening high he had
shared with Fixx in the hospital was coming back tenfold. He could taste
the Z3N in the air, the thick haze washing through his pores. It swelled
his heart, made his feet light. The ecstasy of the crowd around him
spilled into his mind, getting louder, becoming stronger.

Ko stumbled, his thoughts heavy and indistinct. “Why am I here?”

“For the King!” shouted a reveller, bloody and naked. “He’s come for our
love and pain!” A chorus of people mumbled the same words.

Ko looked away, afraid to look out over the bay where the
phantom-serpent was forming, coalescing wings and fangs and lizard-skin.
The gossamer thing resolved as the people gave it their attention. The
Jade Dragon hooted, the sound flattening buildings, shaking the
landscape. Ko could not look; his head turned. He could not help
himself.

A stinging slap brought him about and falling to the marshy ground. Feng
stood over him, fists balled and his scruffy face alight with fury.
“Wake up!” he bellowed. “You must not gaze upon the beast! It wants your
eyes, it needs your spirit!”

Ko was sluggish as he got up. “She was right… Nikita saw this coming.”

Feng grabbed him, pulled him close. “Sorcery, like the black man said!
It lives only through the minds of others! The Dragon is the demon man
makes for himself!”

The Road Ronin’s sword was heavy in his hands. “I can’t fight that…”

Feng pointed toward the stage, to a place half-hidden in pools of sickly
light. Ko saw Tze up there, lurking in the wings. “Then fight
him!
”

Sifu Bruce called the boys to him, had them bolt the doors to the dojo
tight and close the storm shutters. They gathered sticky rice to scatter
around the perimeter of the building while the old man worked with quick
and deft movements, drawing wards on paper banners in sweeping strokes
of his brush.

The Jade Dragon arched its back and threw off rimes of frozen
interstellar hydrogen. Blood spilt from hundreds of willingly slit
throats came together in a wet cloud for the beast to suck in through
its teeth. Clawed feet found purchase on skyscrapers; they did not yet
fully exist in the plane of flesh, and so they moved ghost-like through
the stone and steel, cutting out the souls of those they touched but
leaving animate flesh undamaged. The mere presence of the Desire God’s
aspect caused spontaneous blood orgies across a ten-kilometre radius
from the demon’s point of intersection. Emerald chemicals of a kind that
had never existed in this dimension dripped from the tear in the clouds
and burned like acid into the streets. The Dragon was slowly unfurling,
shaking off the dust of eons. Newborn and yet impossibly ancient, the
King of Rapture was pleased to be here once again.

The girl performing oral sex on Hung never surfaced from the shimmering
water, and he tried to shift his bulk to see the source of the light
flooding in through the windows of the bathhouse. One by one, the other
girls turned to him, and where their pretty faces had been there were
only nests of worms.

Fixx kept his hands steady, waiting. Ropé crossed his eye-line, without
apparent concern over the fact that Blue Snake had not disarmed him. The
op understood. Ropé clearly didn’t think that detail was of any import.

“I’m curious,” said the thin-faced man conversationally. “Do we know the
same people?” He recovered the ghost knife from the Mask’s corpse with a
sucking pop.

Fixx turned in place, watching him. “Could say that. Crossed paths with
the Josephites once or twice.”

“And you’re not dead. That says something for your strength of
character… Or perhaps that you’re good at fleeing.”

He shrugged. “Little from Column A, little from Column B.” Fixx shifted
his weight. He could get the crossbow from the stance he was in, but he
doubted it would do more than just piss the guy off. “Papa Legba always
said there’d be a price to pay for that. Just didn’t think it would be
today.”

Ropé sniggered. “What sweet delusion. As if pieces of cardboard and
chicken bones could augur the future!” He made a dismissive gesture.
“You think your silly gutter godlings sent you here, is that it? To what
end?”

“To stop Tze. I go where fate sends me. I’m the fly in the ointment.
Monkey in the wrench.”

“Then we want the same thing, Joshua. It has been my honour to serve the
vision of Elder Seth, who sent me on my way so long ago from the
Promised Lands of Deseret to this festering anthill,” he bared teeth in
a sneer, “here, where I lay in silence, waiting for the day that Tze
would recruit me, just as Seth knew that he would. I made myself the
perfect minion. We play a long game, Joshua, a very long game. I am here
to disrupt the plans of Tze and his conclave of idiots.” He balanced the
knife in his grip. “I will stop them from binding the Jade Dragon to
their will.” Ropé pointed at Frankie with the blade. “This poor wretch,
bred from antiquity to be a vessel for the blood that will cage the Lord
of Bliss. He’s the last, and when he’s dead, the ‘pattern’ will fall
apart. Tze will have nothing. He has compounded his error in trusting me
with so vital a facet of his plan. ”