Jade Dragon (8 page)

“Where is she?”

None of them answered. They all just looked in the direction of the
dressing room, some sighing, others frowning.

For one blinding instant, Ropé wanted to reach out and break someone’s
neck; anyone, he didn’t care whose. A bullet of hot anger smashed into
him, smouldering. His hands clenched into fists. He was so sick and
tired of ministering to these pathetic children, with their paltry and
ridiculous addictions, their idiotic fears and emotional fragility. In
that second, he longed to stride back to the tour bus and remove the
Glock subgun secreted in his luggage and start culling them. Gentiles,
he thought. I loathe you all.

Instead, he slammed an iron shutter over those feelings and produced a
thin smile that never went beyond his lips. “Fine,” he said aloud. Ropé
knocked once on Juno’s door and entered, locking it behind him.

There was little light inside. Most of the bulbs around the makeup table
were inert, shattered and sparking. The mirrors were all gone, reduced
to jagged shards. Juno looked up at him as he came closer, just for a
moment, and then returned to her task at hand. She was using part of a
chair leg to grind the broken bits of mirror into smaller and smaller
pieces. Juno had already worked a lot of the glass into powdery fines
that glittered all over the red carpet floor.

“Don’t worry,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ll be out when
I’m finished. I just have to break all the mirrors in the world first.”

A sigh escaped him. Apart from that incident in the limo on the way to
the studios in Chicago, there had been no sign of anything approaching
this level of instability. Ropé realised reluctantly that she must have
been storing it up, getting away with small, concealable things like
bouts of self-harm.

“Juno,” he said. “You’re on, darling. Everyone is waiting.” As if on
cue, the crowd out in the dome roared as the pre-show video started up.
He offered her his hand.

Her perfect face watched him, clouded with animal fear. She was wearing
the schoolgirl outfit from the “Locker Room Heart” video: the
exaggerated pigtails, the microskirt and bobbysox had scored huge
numbers with the lolita-complex fans. “They love me. They’ll
understand.”

“Understand what, sweetie?”

“I saw it.” She tapped her temple, and Ropé noticed that her fingers
were bleeding. “The sky tearing open. All these things flying out.” She
made fluttery gestures with her hands. “A big mouth full of screaming
teeth. It wants to eat the world. Darkness. All the worms and the people
tearing up—”

“Juno.” Ropé reached into his pocket and removed a leather case.
“Perhaps we could talk about this another time.” The case opened like a
book, with a puff of cold vapour. Inside there was a device that
resembled the grip and trigger of a pistol, but instead of a breech and
barrel there was a glass tube ending in a micropore mesh. The case had a
small nest of ampoules next to the device, and Ropé loaded one into the
tube.

She came to her feet in a rush, the chair leg shivering in her hands. “I
don’t need that.”

“Juno, love.” He concentrated on the words to make them utterly kind,
totally without any accusation or venom. “I don’t want you to be upset.
I care about you too much for that. It makes me sad to see you like
this.”

“Heywood, you do believe me, don’t you?” The chair leg drooped. “I can
see these things, sometimes in the day now, not just in dreams.” Her
eyes unfocussed. She was exploring the thought. “Mirrors. I’m going to
be killed by mirrors.”

“Juno, you’re a star, and stars are immortal. They can’t be killed by
anything.”

She looked at him again, this time clear-eyed. “Okay. Put that away and
I’ll come out.”

He smiled, guiding the device back to his pocket. “Look, I’m putting it
away.”

Juno dropped the chair leg and came to him for a hug. “I’m sorry. I
don’t mean to be any trouble—”

“I know,” he said in a fatherly voice. When she had both hands around
him, Ropé grabbed her pigtails and wrenched her head backward. She
started to scream, but the noise died in her throat as the injector
device chugged where it touched her jugular. A shot of electric blue
fluid vanished into her bloodstream and Juno staggered back a step, her
eyes hazing.

Ropé spat and put the device away. “The show must go on,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said thickly, her doll-like face brightening. “Oh. Yes.”

Inside the Hyperdome it was blood-warm and moist with the exhalations of
a capacity crowd. Juno Qwan’s star was still climbing and with a string
of international hits and another album on the way, the petite Chinese
singer had all the hallmarks of becoming a cross-genre smash. The music
wasn’t Fixx’s cup of tea, though. It lacked soul by his lights, it
seemed bereft of meaning; but he was clearly in the minority tonight.
The sanctioned operative moved through the outer edges of the crowd as
“Locker Room Heart” belted out across the stadium. The lights went down
and came back again in flashes of colour, spinning strobe wheels and
trailer spots sweeping the crowd like searchlights over a writhing human
sea. From above, concealed in the steel rafters of the ’dome, misting
nozzles cast a fine, cool haze over the throng. The towering holos of
Juno glittered in the vapour, the giant doppelgangers following her
every move.

Fixx saw her up on the stage, strutting and moving with her dancers,
faking sexual positions with the backing vocalists. The band segued into
“Bitch Queen” and “The Future is Now” before she threw off the
schoolgirl outfit and changed tack. The atmosphere became sultry and
intimate with a cover of “When the Night Comes”, calming the crowd. Fixx
moved slowly and carefully through the ranks of Juno’s fans, letting the
Brownian motion of their enrapt swaying push him ever closer to the
rails of the mojo barrier surrounding the stage.

He crossed into the main mass of people and without warning his path was
blocked by a hooded guy with a sleeper wand and a meshweave shirt that
said
Venue Security.
The man rose from the waves of fans, one hand
pressed to an ear bead, the other pointing the wand. The guard spoke but
the music was too loud to hear a word of it. The letters on his top
changed into a tickertape marquee.

Where the
****
are you going?
scrolled across the shirt, an
automatic censor routine kicking in. Many of Juno’s fans were pre-teens.

Fixx pointed toward the stage as she started to sing the love song
“Paper Sunday”.

Let bee sea your ticket, sun.

The audio pickup on the guard’s throat wasn’t doing the job properly.
Fixx produced the pass he’d stolen and handed it over. When the man’s
eyes dropped, he pushed forward.

What the duck?
The guard went to grab him and jab with the arcing tip
of the sleeper wand; Fixx turned his wrist and disarmed the man. With a
knuckle, the operative struck a nerve point near the security guard’s
clavicle and the man dropped to the floor.
Uuuuuuuuuu.

Next came “Halo Kisses” and then Juno did a piece off the unreleased
album called “Apple/Eye”. Fixx reached the edge of the general admission
crowd and pressed into the thick of the hardcore fans, a hundred bodies
deep in the mosh pit. Juno’s spotlight died and everything went dark.

“Zen, zen,” sang the girl. “I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice.”
The crowd erupted into a storm of cheers and Fixx blinked as he felt a
light rain on his face. “Touch” was the song that had made her career,
the hit that had stayed at number one on the Billboard chart like it had
been nailed there. “I’m the perfect smile,” Juno crooned, the Hyperdome
singing with her. “Touch my thoughts and flow, there’s no world we can’t
know.”

As the bassline kicked in, the stage went supernova white. Lasers fanned
across the arena, cutting shapes, numbers and letters into the misty
air. The holograms of Juno morphed and changed, flickering between her
different outfits. Her face came forward off the holotank podium and
wove patterns of fire above them. People cried out in surprise and tried
to touch them. Angels. Fixx could see angels up there, made from glass
and light.

The skin across his face was tingling and Fixx shook his head, hard.
When he ran his fingers through his close-cropped step-cut they came
back wet. The artificial rain was warm, speckling the shoulders of his
coat. He could see some people tipping their heads back and welcoming it
with outspread arms.

“Sea of stones, sand waves,” Juno’s voice echoed in his skull. “Harmony,
come with me.”

“This is wrong,” he said aloud, but his voice vanished into the roar of
the crowds.

“Taste the blue,” sang the girl, each word a shock to his heart.

The glass angels in the rafters fell toward the crowds and as they came
they changed; bright wings became masses of writhing serpents and faces
fell apart into knots of maggoty flesh. Fixx struggled to find his guns
but the press of people about him was so great he could barely move.
Juno was still singing, and in the spaces between the words a woman in
lolicon gingham shouted “Isn’t she great?” into his ear, wild with the
thrill of it all. “My eyes are golden!”

“Star at dawn, bubble in the stream. Zen, zen, I’m the quiet mind
inside, pretty voice.”

The laser fans turned to ropes of blue and green fire. Crossing in the
air, the beams fell into the masses and laid lines of screaming, burning
bodies in their wake. The smell of burnt flesh reached Fixx’s nostrils
and sense memory engulfed him in a flood. For one shuddering instant, he
was—

—
there with Cajun Pork Cathy and her Longpig Boyz out on the rusted
Gulf Coast oilrigs as they did the work of the Dark Ones, turning
ferryboat passengers into chum for Deseret’s blood rites. His guns hot
in his hands. Cathy’s head clean off at the neck. Crimson fountain. The
Queen of Cups, inverted. Screaming. The meat smell.

Fixx snapped back as the crowd picked him up. He was driftwood in the
swell, the panic alive about him. The operative shouldered against the
flow and slid back, standing his ground as the screaming hordes washed
around him. The lasers sputtered and shrieked, darts of murderous
coherent light striking like thunderbolts. The angel-things fluttered
and shredded into storms of snakes, vanishing as they fell or slithering
into shadows.

As “Touch” reached its crescendo and faded, the sound of sirens pealed
over the crash of feet and breaking glass. Fixx shook his head, the wet
fog clutching at his mind, making him feel drunk and slow. Fat droplets
spattered about on the floor, sparkling in the spotlights.

More men in the talking shirts were sweeping Juno and the band off the
stage. Impossibly, there were fans in the circles and the skyboxes on
their feet and applauding, tears of elation streaming down their faces.
Fixx threw himself at the mojo barrier and fell short, rebounding off
the metal with a tingle from the stunner field.

Juno Qwan saw him. She turned and looked at him with those eyes, the
porcelain face that clogged every instant of television airtime, every
billboard and viddy. Fixx tried to find her name but his throat
tightened. The girl looked down on him, beatific and empty.

Then the men in hoods were taking her away, and darkness settled inside
the dome like the end of the world.

Tze discarded the suit like a shed skin and dressed himself once more in
the kingly robes of blue and gold. The only conceit to the present day
world were the handmade Italian shoes beneath the flaring curve of
fabric. There were many vices that Mr Tze granted himself, but sometimes
the simplest were the ones that provided the most pleasure. The shoes
fitted him as perfectly as if he had been born with them, and with a
sigh playing about his lips, the CEO of Yuk Lung Heavy Industries
dismissed Deer Child and gathered himself.

He viewed the painting of the battle at Tsing-hsien on the far wall,
cocking his head so that the clock concealed in the artwork became
visible. Time, then. Time to consult once more with the players in the
game.

Tze spoke a command word and the window glass went opaque, painting the
room with thick pools of shadow where the light of the lanterns failed
to reach. The door opened to admit the Hi woman and he gave her a
cursory nod.

“Sir,” she replied, her mechanical smile snapping on, then off.

Tze glanced at his hand, the one he had used to press Francis Lam’s
fingers into the blades of the ghost knife. “We have a moment before we
begin…”

“The augurs report a perfect match, sir.” She knew what questions he had
before they were voiced. Tze liked that about Phoebe Hi. It was one of
the reasons why she wasn’t dead. “Genotype correlation is very good.
Professor Tang was positively beaming when he gave me the news.”

“I imagine he was,” Tze noted dryly. “Where is Francis now?”

“Alice has taken him to Alan’s apartment. She suggested we allow him to
take the residence for himself. A good solution. Far easier than setting
up another secured environment from scratch.”

Tze nodded. “Commend her. Forward thinking should be rewarded.” In the
middle of the room was a shallow ceremonial bowl. The executive mumbled
a cantrip beneath his breath and bit into his knuckle, letting a couple
of drops of blood fall into the brass basin. “Link,” he said to the air,
and from hidden slots in the ceiling a cluster of projector heads
emerged on silent spider legs.

A series of holograms blinked into life around the room, appearing in a
circle around Tze and the bowl. Most of them were human, but one or two
were simple black monoliths bearing the character for “silence”. Hi
found her place among them and bowed.

Tze gave the phoenix-eye salute. “Kindred, I have good news. Our pattern
continues unaffected by the trials of recent days.”