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Slipped.

Horrified, Jericho saw her fall. A jolt ran through her body. At the last second her fingers had closed on the rod she had just been standing on, but now she was dangling over an abyss a good seventy metres deep.

Zhao stared down at her.

Then he left the cover of the girderwork.

‘Bad mistake,’ Jericho snarled. ‘Very bad mistake!’

By now his glands were firing considerable salvos of adrenalin, whipping his heartbeat and blood pressure up to heroic levels. With each passing second, he was more in control of the machine. Carried on a wave of rage and euphoria, he sent the airbike shooting forward and took aim at Zhao, who was at that moment crouching, about to climb down to Yoyo.

The hitman saw him coming.

Baffled, he came to a halt. The bike shot over the conveyor belt. Anyone else would have been swept into the depths, but Zhao managed to pirouette himself back onto the edge of the inlet. His gun clattered far below. Jericho turned the bike and saw the blond guy staggering out of the control centre and getting onto one of the remaining airbikes. No time to worry about him too. His fingers twitched in all directions. Where on the display – no, wrong, you did it with the handlebars, right? He just had to bring the right handlebar down a touch—

Too much.

The bike plummeted like a stone. Cursing, he caught it, climbed, put his foot down and then immediately decelerated until he hung, jets hissing, right under the wildly flailing Yoyo.

‘Jump!’ he shouted.

She looked down at him, her face distorted, as her fingers slipped millimetre by millimetre. Gusts of wind grabbed the bike and carried it away. The girders trembled as Zhao jumped gracefully from the edge of the inlet and landed on the lower
part of the scaffolding. The hitman plainly didn’t suffer from any kind of vertigo. His right hand came down to clutch her wrist. Jericho corrected his position, and the bike spun back under Yoyo.

‘Jump, for God’s sake! Jump!’

Her right foot struck his temple, and he couldn’t see or hear a thing. Now he was underneath her again, looking up. He saw Zhao’s fingers stretching out, touching her ankle.

Yoyo let go.

It was a bit like having a sack of cement dropped on him. If he had imagined she would land elegantly on the pillion, he could think again. Yoyo clutched his jacket, slipped off the bike and dangled from him like a gorilla from a rubber tyre. With both hands he pulled her back up, as the bike hurtled towards the ground.

She shouted something. It sounded like
maybe
.

Maybe?

The turbine noise rose to a scream. Yoyo’s fingers were everywhere, in his clothes, his hair, his face. The dusty plain rushed up at them, they would be smashed to pieces.

But they weren’t smashed, they didn’t die. He had clearly done something right, because at the same moment as her hands closed around his shoulders and she pressed her torso against his back, the bike shot straight upwards again.

‘Maybe—’

The words were shredded by the squall. The blond guy was approaching on the left, his face a mask of dried blood, from which hate-filled eyes stared across at them.

‘What?’ he shouted.

‘Maybe,’ she yelled back, ‘next time you’ll learn to fly the thing
first
, you fucking idiot!’

* * *

Daxiong floated to the surface.

His first impulse was to ask Maggie for a cappuccino, with plenty of sugar and foam, of course. That was why they were here, after all. To have breakfast together, since Yoyo had appointed Andromeda as her summer residence again, as Daxiong jokingly put it, except that right now it seemed to make more sense to go into hiding in the steelworks for a while.

Maggie only ever brought coffee for him. The others, Tony, Yoyo, Maggie herself, Ziyi and Jia Wei preferred tea, like good Chinese. And like good Chinese they had wontons and baozis for breakfast, they ate pork belly and noodles in broth, swallowed down half-raw shrimps, the whole deal, while for unfathomable reasons his heart still beat for the Grande Nation and was devoted to the buttery, warm smell
of freshly baked croissants. By now he was even toying with the possibility that he might have French genes, which anyone who saw his face would strenuously have denied. Daxiong was as Mongolian as a Mongolian could be, and Yoyo was forever rattling off all the wonders of the fun, authentic China that had no need of imported Western culture. Daxiong let her talk. For him, the day began with a proper milk foam moustache. Maggie had called and croaked ‘Breakfast!’ into the receiver, and Ziyi had yelled and screamed.

Why had she done that?

Oh yes, he’d been dreaming. Something terrible! Why would anyone dream something like that? He, Ziyi and Tony had driven over to the blast furnace, following Maggie’s call, when two of those flying motorbikes, which were too expensive for him ever to have afforded one, had landed on the control centre platform, where a third one already stood. Amazing. As he approached, he had tried to get through to Maggie, to ask her what kind of guys these were, but she hadn’t replied. So they had decided to take the guns out of their saddle-bags, just in case.

A funny dream. They were having a party.

They were all enjoying themselves, but Jia Wei couldn’t really join in, because there wasn’t much left of him, and Maggie had a sore stomach. Tony was missing half of his face, oh dear, that seemed to be why Ziyi had started screaming, now everything fitted into place, and what on earth kind of people were these?

Daxiong opened his eyes.

* * *

Xin exploded with fury.

With simian agility, he leapt back down over the scaffolding, struts and steps. His airbike was still on the platform, engine running. Far below, the detective was wrestling with the hijacked machine, busy driving himself and Yoyo to their deaths.

Jericho, that thorn in his side!

He’s on his way out, Xin thought. I’ve got the computer, Yoyo. Who can you have spoken to apart from your few friends here, and they’re dead. I don’t need you any more.

Then he saw Jericho wresting control of the machine, gaining height, moving away from the blast furnace—

And being forced back down again.

The blond guy!

Kenny started waving both arms.

‘Kill them all!’ he yelled. ‘Finish them off!’

He didn’t know if the blond guy had heard him. He leapt energetically over the edge of the walkway, landed with a thump on the steel of the platform, and ran to his
bike. The turbine was running. Had Jericho been fiddling around with it? Before his eyes, the two bikes set off at great speed, and disappeared into the intricate labyrinth of the steelworks. He pivoted the jets to vertical. The machine hissed and vibrated.

‘Come on!’ he shouted.

The airbike was slowly lifting off, when something whistled past his head so close that he felt the draught. He turned the machine in the air and saw the bald-headed giant from the control centre, a gun in each hand, firing from both muzzles. Nosediving, Xin attacked him. The giant threw himself to the ground. With a snort of contempt he pulled the airbike back up and flew after the others.

* * *

Daxiong sat bolt upright. His heart was thumping, the sun was beating down on him. Across the shimmering fields of slag the vanishing airbikes quickly gained distance, but one of the bikes was unmistakably hounding the other and trying to force it to land.

One of the hitmen was dead in the control room. So who was that on the fleeing bike?

Yoyo?

While he was still thinking about it, he clattered down the zigzag stairs. Apart from him and possibly Yoyo none of the Guardians had survived the massacre. The remaining City Demons knew nothing about the double life of the six of them, even though they might have guessed at various things. Yoyo and he had originally brought the Demons to life as a disguise. A motorbike association aroused no suspicion, it wasn’t considered intellectual or subversive. They could meet easily, particularly in Quyu. Three more members had joined the previous year. Perhaps, Daxiong thought, as he lowered his full three hundredweight onto his motorbike, the time had come to initiate them. Strictly speaking, he no longer had that option. Whoever their opponent might have been, it was clear that the Guardians had been busted.

As he drove off he selected a number.

There was a ringing noise. It went on too long, far too long. Then he heard the boy’s voice.

‘Where were you, damn it?’ snorted Daxiong.

Lau Ye yawned and talked at the same time.

Then he asked a question.

‘Don’t ask, Ye,’ Daxiong snorted into the mobile. ‘Get Xiao-Tong and Mak over here. Right now! Go to the blast furnace and clear the control room, everything you find there, computer, displays, the lot.’

The boy stammered something which Daxiong took to mean that he didn’t know where the others were.

‘Then find them!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll explain it later. What? No, don’t take the stuff to Andromeda, and not to the workshop. Then think of something. Somewhere they won’t connect with us. Oh, and Ye—’ He swallowed. ‘You will find corpses. Brace yourselves, you hear?’

He rang off before Ye could ask any questions.

* * *

Jericho’s machine took a blow when the blond guy’s airbike collided with its chassis. Time and again he had tried to steer towards the airspace above the steelworkers’ housing estate. Every time the blond guy forced him back, stared wildly over at them and tried to take aim. The lunar landscape of the slag-fields sped along beneath them. Once again Jericho tried to turn off to the left. The blond guy speeded up and forced him in the other direction.

‘Where are you actually trying to get to?’ Yoyo’s voice rang in his ears.

‘We’re outdistancing him!’

‘You haven’t a hope out in the open! Tempt him into the plant.’

The blond guy’s airbike shot upwards and immediately plummeted back down again. Jericho saw the machine’s fish belly right above him and then dived. They wobbled along just above ground level.

‘Be careful!’ Yoyo snapped.

‘I know what I’m doing!’ Rage welled up in him, but he was actually by no means sure about what he should do. Right in front of him a huge chimney rose out of the ground.

‘To the right!’ screeched Yoyo. ‘The right!’

The blond guy drove them further down. The bike scratched along dried-up slag, started skipping, went into a violent roll, then they were around the chimney, only to find themselves in front of a hangar-sized warehouse. They were too close, far too close. No chance of avoiding it, of turning away, of avoiding a collision.

No! The warehouse door was open a crack.

Just before the threatened impact Jericho pulled the machine to the side and shot through it.

* * *

Lau Ye dashed through the gloomy concert hall of the Andromeda. He ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him.

Don’t ask any questions. Just don’t ask.

He was used to this from Daxiong, and he had never complained. Lau Ye was a novice in the order of the City Demons: he had been the last to join and he was by far the youngest. He respected Daxiong and Yoyo, Ziyi and Maggie, Tony and Jia Wei. He also respected Ma Mak and Hui Xiao-Tong, even though they had only been
admitted to the club subsequently. Subsequently in that the others had set up the association together, with Daxiong as founder and Yoyo in the role of Vice President.

But Ye wasn’t blind.

Born on the estate just after the steelworks was closed down, with no school education, but more intimately familiar with Xaxu’s peculiar qualities and those of its inhabitants, from the very start he had refused to believe that the Demons were just a bike club. Daxiong was from Quyu, too, but he was seen as operating somewhere between the worlds of the connected and the outsiders. No one doubted that he would wake up on the other side one morning, rub his eyes, drive a smart car to an air-conditioned high-rise skyscraper and pursue some well-paid job there. Yoyo, on the other hand, Maggie, Ziyi, Tony and Jia Wei belonged to Quyu about as much as a string quartet belonged in Andromeda. In the control room they’d set up a kind of Cyber Planet for the privileged, and Yoyo had packed all the super-expensive computers full of brilliant games, but she was from a different world. She went to uni. They all went to uni to study something that parents considered sensible.

Yeah. Not his.

Lau Ye’s parents didn’t pay him much attention. At the age of sixteen he might as well have been living on the Moon. His job in Daxiong’s workshop and the City Demons were all he had, and he loved being part of it. And so he didn’t ask questions, either. He didn’t ask whether the only purpose his humble self, Xiao-Tong and Mak served was to disguise a conspiratorial little student club as something fit for the slums. He didn’t ask what the other six organised at their many meetings in the control centre when he, Xiao-Tong and Mak weren’t around. Until a few days before, when Yoyo had turned up at the workshop in a complete state. That time he
had
asked Daxiong.

The answer had been a familiar one.

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I just want to know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘Yoyo’s got problems. Best you stay in the workshop for the time being and avoid the control centre.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘Don’t ask.’

Don’t ask. Except that three days later that guy with the fair hair and the blue eyes had turned up, the one Daxiong had later said looked like a – what was it? Scanavian? Scandinavian! Ye had talked to the man and learned that he wanted to get into Andromeda.

‘Cool,’ he had said to Daxiong later. ‘You may have sent him on a wild goose chase. Why would you do that?’

‘Don’t—’

‘No. I’m asking.’

Daxiong had rubbed his bald head and his chin, had poked around in his ears, tugged on his fake beard and finally snarled:

‘It could be that we’re about to get an unwanted visit. Nasty people.’

‘Like the other guys that time?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And what do they want from us? I mean, what do they want from
us
? What have you done, you – six?’