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The kid shrugged. Jericho projected the A with the hazy ring around it onto the back wall of the workshop. The boy’s eyes gave him away – he knew the place.

‘That’s where you want to go?’

‘Is it far?’

‘Not really. You just have to—’

‘Button your lip,’ said somebody behind him.

Jericho turned around and stared at a chest that began somewhere in the southeast and ended further along to the north-east. Way up above the chest there had to be something that the brute used to think. He put his head back and made out a shaven skull, with eyes so narrow that it was hard to believe he could see through them. A blue appliqué on the chin looked vaguely like a pharaoh’s beard. The leather jacket was open at the front, and beneath it he could see the City Demons logo.

‘It’s fine.’ The boy looked upwards, uncertain. ‘He was just asking where—’

‘What?’

‘Everything’s okay.’ Jericho smiled. ‘I wanted to know whether—’

‘What? What do you want to know?’

The man-mountain made no attempt to bend down to talk to him, which would have made conversation considerably easier. Jericho took a step back and turned his projector to the wall again.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve come at a bad moment. I’m looking for an address.’

‘An address?’ The other man turned his massive head and looked – as far as Jericho could tell – at the projected image.

‘I mean, is that even an address at all?’ Jericho asked. ‘I’ve only got—’

‘Who gave you that?’

‘Someone who didn’t have much time to give me directions. Someone from Quyu. Someone I want to help.’

‘What with?’

‘Social problems.’

‘Is there anyone in Quyu who doesn’t have those?’

‘True enough.’ Jericho decided not to take this treatment any longer. ‘What now? I don’t want to keep this person waiting.’

‘He’s also interested in the chopper!’ added the boy, in a tone that suggested he had already talked Jericho into buying the machine for an enormous sum.

The man-mountain pursed his lips.

Then he smiled.

The suspicion melted sheer away from his features, making way for warm friendship. An enormous paw swooped through space and landed with a playful smack on Jericho’s shoulder.

‘Why didn’t you say so right away?’

That had broken the ice. His suddenly hearty manner didn’t yield any more information though, but rather a detailed description of all the chopper’s supposed
virtues, and he reached a genial crescendo as he named an exorbitant price. The ogre even managed to price the missing rear wheel separately.

Jericho nodded and nodded. At the end, he shook his head.

‘No?’ said the giant, surprised.

‘Not at that price.’

‘Fine. Name your price.’

‘I’ll give you another idea. An A with a frayed ring around it and four mysterious letters beneath. You remember? I go there, I come back. Then we do business.’

The giant wrinkled his brow laboriously. He was thinking, Jericho had to assume. Then he described a route which seemed to run the whole length and breadth of Quyu.

What had the kid said just now? Not really far?

‘And what do the letters mean?’

‘NDRO?’ The giant laughed. ‘This friend of yours must really have been in a hurry. It’s Andromeda.’

‘Ah!’

‘It’s a live concert venue.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Your knowledge of Quyu seems to rest on the very slightest acquaintance, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

Jericho had to raise his eyebrows. He would never have expected that a man-mountain like this, with such a tough-looking skull, would produce such a refined turn of phrase.

‘It’s true, I hardly know the place.’

‘Then take care of yourself.’

‘Of course. I’ll see you later, umm – May I ask your name?’

A grin spread across the huge face.

‘Daxiong. Just Daxiong.’

Aha. Six Koreans had come away with injuries. Slowly, the story was becoming clearer.

Jericho had never been in Quyu before. He had no idea what was lying in wait for him when he drove through beneath the freeway. But in fact nothing happened. Quyu didn’t begin at any clearly marked spot, at least not in this part. It simply just – began. With rows of low-built houses like the ones he had just left. Hardly any shops as such, but instead street vendors cheek by jowl, who had spread out onto their sheets and carpets anything that seemed saleable and couldn’t run away. A woman in a rickety rattan chair, dozing in the shadow of a jury-rigged canopy, a basket of aubergines in front of her. A shopper took two of these, put money in
her apron and went on without waking her. Old people chatting, some in pyjamas, others bare-chested. Jostling crowds on crumbling pavements. Criss-crossing the street, overhead, the flapping banners of washing hung out to dry, smocks and shirts waving their sleeves at one another whenever the wind found its way between the houses. Murmurs, chatting and shouting, melodic, booming, shrill or low, all woven together into a cacophony. Cheap pedal-bikes everywhere, clawing at the nerves, squeaking and rattling, the thud of hammers and the whine of drills, the sounds of running repairs, maintenance of the make-do-and-mend school. Some traders spotted Jericho’s head of blond hair, leapt to their feet and yelled ‘Looka, looka!’ across the street, waving handbags, watches, sculptures; he ignored them, concentrating on not running anyone over. In Shanghai, downtown Shanghai, traffic was a state of war. Lorries hunted buses, buses chased cars which chased bikes, and all of them together had sworn death to all pedestrians. In Quyu it was less aggressive, but that made it no better. Rather than attacking one another, road users simply ignored one another. Folk who had just now been haggling over chickens or kitchen-ware would hop down into the road, or stand there in little knots, debating the weather, the price of groceries, their families’ health.

With every street he went down, Jericho saw fewer traders aiming at the tourist market. The goods offered for sale became poorer. As the number of cars on the street dropped, there were more and more pedestrians and bicycles, and the throng thinned out. More and more often he saw half-demolished houses, their missing walls meagrely patched with cardboard and corrugated iron, all of them inhabited. In between, years and years of rubble. A cluster of grey and dull blue modular blocks appeared at the side of the road as though cast carelessly down like dice, arthritic trees twisted double in front of them, the randomly parked cars dating back to the days when Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed the economic miracle which had never quite taken place in this part of China.

All of a sudden it was dark around him.

The deeper Jericho went into the heart of Quyu, the less clearly structured it became. Every possible style of architecture seemed to have been thrown on the heap here. High-rise blocks abandoned halfway alternated with derelict low-rises and silos several storeys high, their hideousness emphasised by the peeling remains of several colours of paint. Jericho was most moved by the pathetic attempts to make the uninhabitable look like a habitation. There was something almost like an architectural vernacular going on here in the tangle of hand-built shacks, most little more than posts rammed into the ground and covered over with tarpaulin. At least there was life here, while the silos looked like post-atomic tombs.

In the midst of a wasteland of rubbish he stopped and looked at women and children
loading whatever they thought they could use onto barrows. Whole swathes here looked as though once-intact city blocks had been pulverised by bombing raids. He tried to remember what he knew about districts like these. A number that he had noticed somewhere flitted through his mind. In 2025, there were one and a half billion people living in slums worldwide. Twenty years before it had been one billion. Every year, twenty or thirty million came to join them. A new arrival in the slums had to fight his way up bizarre hierarchies, where those on the lowest rung collected trash and made from it whatever they could sell or trade. According to Daxiong’s description, he would need at least another hour to get to the Andromeda. He drove on, thought of the quarter he had wound up living in years ago, shortly before it had been torn down to make room for the development where Yoyo lived. At the time he hadn’t been able to understand why the residents were so attached to their ruins. He understood that they had no choice, except that some of them could have taken up the offer of being relocated in relatively luxurious apartments outside Shanghai, with running water, baths and toilets, lifts and electricity.

‘Here, we exist,’ they had answered, smiling. ‘Outside, we are ghosts.’

It was only later that he realised that the measure of human misery is not in the condition of the housing. Scarce drinking water, overflowing gutters, blocked drains, all these had their place in the annals of hell. But while people were living on the streets, at least they could meet. It was where they sold their wares. It was where they cooked for the labourers who never otherwise had a chance to make a meal. Food preparation alone provided a living for millions of families, and fed them in turn, a livelihood that could only be earned down at street level, just as the street provided social cohesion. People stood by their doorways, deep in conversation. Life at ground level, the openness of houses, all this spread warmth and comfort. Nobody dropped in to buy something on the tenth floor of a high-rise, and if you stepped outside the door, all you could see was a wall. The road took him to a hill. From up here, he could see in every direction, as much as he could see anything through the dirty brown blanket of smog. The COD was air-conditioned, but Jericho thought he could feel the sun on his skin. All around him was a sight he had grown used to by now. Shacks, high-rise blocks, all more or less shabby, poles standing drunkenly festooned with dangling power cables, rubble, dirt.

Should he go on?

Baffled, he told his phone to take bearings. It projected him right in the middle of no man’s land. Off the maps. It was only when he zoomed out that it deigned to show him a couple of main roads that ran through Quyu, if the data was still up-to-date.

Was Yoyo really hiding in this desolation?

He entered the coordinates from where the blog post had been uploaded to Brilliant Shit. The computer showed him a spot not far from Demon Point, near the freeway.

Back the other way.

Swearing, he turned round, narrowly avoided a barrow which several kids were pushing across the road, garnered a few choice insults and then drove off fast, back where he had come from. He passed by on his left the area he had driven through at first, got lost in a tangle of streets, blundered through a garment district, spotted a through road between street stalls heaped with clothes and found himself on a wide street with walls each side and remarkably neat-looking houses behind them. It was seething with people and with vehicles of all kinds. The scene was dominated by food stalls, fast food chains, shops and booths. He passed several branches of Cyber Planet. The whole thing looked like a down-at-heel version of London’s legendary Camden Town when there had still been a subculture there to speak of, thirty years ago now. Prostitutes leaned in doorways. Groups of men who were definitely not in the peace-and-love business sat around in front of cafés and wok kitchens, or walked about with appraising eyes. Jericho’s COD was given many thoughtful looks.

According to the computer his destination was very close, but it seemed there was a curse on him. He kept taking wrong turns. Every attempt to get back to the main road led him deeper into this off-kilter world that was obviously ruled by the triads; this must be where the slumlords lived, the lords of decay. Twice groups of men stopped him and tried to drag him from the car, for whatever reason. At last he found a shortcut, and the quarter was suddenly behind him. The blocky silhouette of a steelworks showed in the distance. He drove over a bulldozed stretch to a gigantic rust-brown complex with chimneys. A group of bikers overtook him, went past and vanished on the other side of the walls. Jericho followed them. The road led to a large open yard, obviously some kind of gathering place. There were bikes parked everywhere, young people sitting together smoking and drinking. Music boomed across the factory yard. Pubs and clubs, brothels and sex-shops had been set up in empty workshops. The inevitable Cyber Planet took up one whole side of the yard, surrounded by stalls offering handmade appliqués. Another shop was flogging second-hand musical instruments. A two-storey brick building stood across from the Cyber Planet. A van was parked in front of the open doors, and martial-looking figures were carrying gear and electronics inside.

Jericho couldn’t believe his eyes.

A huge letter A, twice as tall as a man, leapt out at him from above the doors. Underneath, in large letters, a single word:

ANDROMEDA

Tyres squealing, he stopped in front of the van, jumped out and walked back a few paces. All at once he realised what the ragged ring that replaced the crossbar on the A was supposed to be. Diane had done her best with the image that she had, but the whole picture only made sense in the original. The ring was a picture of a galaxy, and Andromeda, or rather the Andromeda nebula, was a spiral galaxy in the Andromeda constellation.

Hi all. Back in our galaxy now, have been for a few days.

Yoyo was here!

Or maybe not. Not any more. Daxiong had sent him on a wild goose chase so as to give her time to disappear. He swore, and squinted up at the sun. The smog smeared its light into a flat film that hurt his eyes. In a foul mood he locked the COD and entered the twilit world of Andromeda. There was this at least: Chen Hongbing had been afraid that his daughter might be sitting in a police cell somewhere with no official charges. Jericho could disabuse him of that worry. On the other hand, Chen hadn’t even hired him for this job, at least not in so many words. He could go home. His job was done.

At least, everything
seemed
to say that he had found Yoyo’s trail.

And then lost it again.

Irritating, that.