True Dark

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Yes,’ Cygnus said. ‘We’d like to get started as soon as possible. If Twilight is in Hong Kong, we’d very much like to find her.’

  ~~~

  ‘We have very limited information on the woman,’ Jiang said. ‘She called herself Midnight, we know that.’ Cygnus and Jacob exchanged a look and then turned back to the policeman. They were in a small conference room. There was fresh coffee and some reasonably good biscuits, but neither of the Americans were that interested in the latter. It had been nine in the morning when they had left New Millennium City and after ten p.m. when they had stepped out of the warp conduit in Hong Kong. The coffee was welcome.

  ‘As best we can tell, she arrived in the city around the time the alien ship exploded over China,’ Jiang went on. ‘We are not sure of the exact date. The first indication of her presence here was in June, on the twelfth, when she killed a four two six of the Eight-G in a club.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Cygnus interrupted. ‘A four two six?’

  ‘The triads designate the ranks of their members with numbers,’ Lán Yǎnjīng explained. ‘A four two six, or Red Pole, is an enforcer. Not someone of senior rank, but higher than the general members who are known as forty-niners. The Eight-G are a– Pardon me, they were a quite powerful triad, known for taking Ultras as members. Jīnlóng saw to it that there are few members of that group left.’

  ‘So,’ Jacob said, ‘he’s killed off the majority of people who might know something about Twi– Midnight?’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Jiang said. ‘However, we believe that she set up a man named Billy Hong as their new leader between the twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth of June. She appears to have acted as Hong’s personal enforcer, but we now believe she was simply employing Hong as a figurehead. She was the real power behind the throne. We discounted her role initially. She was working…’ Jiang paused to hand out some photographs. ‘She was working as a dancer in the nightclub they took over, the Midnight Dancer.’

  ‘She’s grown her hair,’ Jacob commented as he looked over one of the pictures.

  ‘It is definitely her?’ Lán Yǎnjīng asked.

  ‘It’s her,’ Cygnus replied.

  ‘But this woman, Midnight, is psychotic. We have records of a number of deaths at her hands. The Union would not accept such a person–’

  ‘One of the reasons the Union took her on as an associate member is that she has, or had, a rather complex form of split personality. Her powers appear to come from one of her personalities, though her other ones could direct them. Her dark side has only really got out once before, but she slaughtered dozens of people that time. She’s actually being pretty restrained, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘Something changed around Halloween.’ Lán Yǎnjīng nodded to Jiang, who took up the story again.

  ‘Several Eight-G businesses and establishments were hit by an unknown agent during the first two weeks in October. Then, in the early hours of the twenty-fifth, Leung Gāng was murdered. He was… the principal accountant for the triad. It appeared that the Eight-G were searching for someone with powers similar to Midnight’s. Several rumours were heard to that effect.’ Jacob frowned within his helmet, though no one else could see the expression. ‘Tensions grew among the other triads in the city. They believed that the Eight-G were showing weakness. We presume that one group, the New Peace Society, decided to make use of the perceived weakness because the Eight-G engaged in the near extermination of the New Peace Society over the course of Halloween night.’

  ‘But that didn’t stop the attacks on the Eight-G, right?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘Apparently not. A few bodies of Eight-G members turned up on the third of November, and on the fifth, the Eight-G began attacking all the other triads.’

  Jacob turned his head to look at Cygnus. ‘I think Twilight’s taking control at times.’

  Cygnus raised an eyebrow. ‘You think she was the mysterious Ultra with powers like Midnight’s?’

  ‘Who else has powers like hers? I’m not even sure anyone could have powers like hers.’

  ‘She hasn’t tried to contact us.’

  ‘I’m not sure she would if she can’t be sure of keeping control. You know better what this Midnight personality is like. I wasn’t there when she got out at the castle.’

  ‘Yeah…’ Cygnus looked back at Jiang. ‘So, the fifth is when this war started and Golden Dragon became involved?’

  Jiang nodded. ‘Things got worse rapidly. The triads were well-armed and… and we were having trouble maintaining order. Then Jīnlóng arrived in the city, bringing soldiers with him.’

  ‘This is not normal,’ Lán Yǎnjīng said. ‘Under the “one country, two systems” principle, the mainland does not interfere with our operations. However, since Beijing… It has become difficult to say that China is still one country. Jīnlóng seems to have decided that he must act with authority to return the country to an ordered state and previous policies are of little concern to him. When he began “cleaning up the mess,” it rapidly became a massacre.’

  ‘There is little organised crime left in Hong Kong,’ Jiang said. His face screwed up a little as if he did not want to admit the next bit. ‘However, it will take months to re-establish order in the city and ensure that our system of government is retained.’

  ‘And what happened to Midnight?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘Jīnlóng attacked her apartment early on the seventh,’ Jiang said. ‘We believe he was injured in the attack. He generally does not allow any injuries he sustains to become public knowledge. We know that Midnight somehow escaped with Billy Hong because Jīnlóng left to track her down that night.’

  ‘We missed her.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Lán Yǎnjīng said. ‘If I had made the connection sooner… But Midnight was very secretive. We did not really understand what she was capable of until recently and I did not connect her to Twilight until after she was gone.’

  Jacob nodded. ‘Not your fault. I’d like to see the apartment, maybe the club too. And if we could talk to some of the people there? If she was dancing in the place, she must’ve talked to other dancers.’

  ‘We will make arrangements,’ Jiang said. ‘The club has been closed, but we have the names of those who worked there.’

  ‘Great,’ Cygnus said. ‘This is the first definite sighting of her we’ve had. Hopefully we can get somewhere this time.’

  ~~~

  The apartment was a mess. It looked like a herd of bison had been through the place, maybe flamethrower-wielding bison. There were large burn marks on the carpet in the lounge and something had burned through the mattress in one of the bedrooms. Furniture was pushed over or smashed. Bullet holes riddled the walls in the corridor outside and a sort of reception room just inside the front door. There were bloodstains all over the reception room too.

  ‘Magnesium flares,’ Jacob said, waving a hand at one of the burned carpet patches. ‘They were trying to stop her using her powers.’

  ‘She’s not here, so they failed,’ Cygnus replied. Her gaze swept the room and she narrowed in on part of the carpet toward the middle, crouching down. ‘Blood. Not much, but someone was cut here.’ She looked around at the two cops. ‘You said the Golden Dragon was injured?’

  ‘We suspect so,’ Lán Yǎnjīng said. ‘He was not seen for several hours after the raid here.’ She walked over, crouching down beside Cygnus. Her eyes began to glow a brighter blue and she reached down to touch some of the blood spatter. ‘Male. It is also the right blood group. I’ve never sampled Jīnlóng’s DNA, so I cannot say for sure that it is his.’

  Cygnus grinned. ‘That is a cool trick. I can see why the police like you.’

  Lán Yǎnjīng flashed Cygnus a smile and got to her feet. ‘It is quite remarkable that Midnight managed to wound Jīnlóng.’

  ‘He is quite impervious to physical damage,’ Jiang said. ‘Obviously not completely impervious, but…’

  Jacob had wandered into the damaged bedroom and opened the wardrobe. ‘This is not g
enerally the kind of thing Andrea would wear,’ he said when he heard footsteps behind him. ‘Twilight maybe, but Andrea’s a little more conservative.’ He considered that and then added, ‘In public, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cygnus said. She knew that Andrea would wear whatever worked for a particular purpose when she had to, but the clothes here included nothing so prosaic as a pair of slacks. There was nothing to wear when loafing around on a sofa. ‘No men’s clothes. This Billy Hong guy had his own bedroom.’

  ‘Looks like it.’ Jacob scanned the room. It was nice enough, aside from the ruined bed. There was a lot of dark wood, a lot of reddish shades in the paint and the wood. ‘Nothing really personal. We should look over the rest of the place, but we’re not going to find much here.’

  ‘Probably not. I think Midnight is a little like Twilight. Twi was always a little less mature than Andrea.’

  ‘Sometimes a lot less mature.’

  ‘Huh, yeah. Midnight has had even less of a chance to grow up. She doesn’t value personal possessions, random memories. There’s nothing here to say much about her because she’s still trying to work out who and what she is.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jacob agreed. ‘I’d rather she didn’t get much more of an opportunity to figure that out.’

  11th November.

  Chan Méilǐ was an attractive woman, lithe and fit with very long black hair and eyes which were almost the same colour. Sitting in a small apartment in the Lai Chi Kok neighbourhood, dressed in a thin silky wrap, and with a cigarette pinched between her fingers, she looked less good. But she was more informative than most of the other people who had met Midnight, even if Jacob did not really like what he was hearing.

  ‘She’s a sadist,’ Chan said. ‘I mean, a real one. She likes inflicting pain. Weird thing is, she wouldn’t let anyone touch any of us. The girls, I mean. She killed a guy just for pawing at one of the girls. But she just killed him. Someone like that, you’d expect her to play with the guy, but no. When she killed, she was all business.’

  ‘So the sadism was–’ Cygnus began.

  ‘Mostly confined to the bedroom. Though the way she treated Billy was sadistic in its own way. First time she took me home, she made him watch. I don’t think it stopped there.’

  ‘She was definitely the one running things then?’

  ‘Oh, Hell yes! She didn’t mind us girls knowing. Billy was there so that the older guys in the Eight-G didn’t blow a fuse at being run by a woman. So, she would torment him and he just took it. She was like that. You just knew. Whatever she was doing to you, she could do a whole lot worse. Those shadows of hers. No one wanted to find out what was in those shadows. I heard she froze a guy to death for disrespecting Billy. All she did to him, but she wouldn’t let anyone else do it. Froze the guy so much that his head snapped off in her hands.’

  ‘That’s new,’ Cygnus commented.

  ‘She seems to be able to take people with her when she shadow-steps,’ Jacob said. ‘Her powers have obviously changed in some ways.’

  ‘Mm. Thank you, Miss Chan. I don’t suppose she ever mentioned where she might go if she had to leave Hong Kong?’

  Chan shook her head. ‘If I was her, I’d leave the country. Jīnlóng is after her and he wouldn’t be able to follow her out of China.’

  ‘Right.’ Cygnus waited until they were outside the apartment before she put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder. ‘You okay?’ she asked in a low voice.

  ‘Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Because you just found out your girlfriend has been banging strippers?’

  ‘It’s not Andrea. Or even Twilight. I got used to her having two personalities. There were differences and I got to enjoy them. Now… Have to take the rough with the smooth. We’ll get her back.’

  Cygnus nodded. ‘Yes. We will.’

  New Millennium City, MD.

  It was dark when they stepped out of the warp conduit and onto the drive outside Cygnus’s house. It had been light when they had left Hong Kong, and now it was dark because they were arriving at three a.m. Well, it was one way to relive a day.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what we got out of that,’ Jacob said once he had lifted his helmet off. The temperature was down in the mid-forties and winter had never felt so good.

  ‘Well, we–’ Cygnus began.

  Jacob held up a hand. ‘I’ll go through my notes and talk it over with Heather. We spent about eighteen hours there, there has to be some useful information.’ He looked north, in the general direction of his house.

  ‘Stay the night here,’ Cygnus said. ‘I’m not quite ready to go to bed yet, and I’m sure June will be up by the time we get inside. You can sleep here and head home in the morning. Which is in about three hours if you go by the sun.’

  ‘Huh. Yeah, okay. I am kind of bushed, but also wired.’

  ‘Time zones suck.’

  The door of the house opened before they got to it. June was in a silk wrap and looking a little bleary-eyed, but she was, as Cygnus had predicted, up. ‘Hey, how was Hong Kong?’

  ‘Hot,’ Jacob replied.

  ‘Chinese,’ Cygnus added.

  June let out a yawn. ‘Did you go there to investigate rumours, or to eat your weight in noodles?’

  ‘Okay, you got me,’ Cygnus said, holding up her hands. ‘I just went for the noodles.’

  Cháohú City, China, 13th November.

  They had been running for days. Billy had lost count, but Midnight said it was Friday now, so… Almost a week? Or was it two weeks? Did it matter?

  Jīnlóng had been chasing them for the entire time and Midnight was not sure how he was doing it. When they arrived in a new place, she would immediately search ahead to find the next location to jump to. From Shenzhen, they had moved to Guangzhou, and then to Qingyuan, Shaoguan, Hengyang… And it was about there that Billy had lost track of where they were as well as the day it was. Wherever they went, Jīnlóng and his soldiers turned up. Sometimes it took a while, but never more than about twelve hours. Rest was hard to come by, sleep was harder, and Midnight’s temper had been fraying.

  Now, according to Midnight, they were in Cháohú, beside the lake, in a currently disused warehouse. ‘I took us to Xi’an last,’ Midnight said as she prepared for what she had planned. ‘That’s almost nine hundred kilometres away so it’ll take a while for Goldy to get here. That should be plenty of time to get this done.’

  ‘You’re going to do it now?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Here and now.’ She lay down on a blanket she had folded and placed on the concrete floor. The only light came from a battery-powered camping lamp set on a desk which had seen far better days. They had set up in an office, or what had once been an office. Now, it looked like the only occupants were likely to have more than two legs, probably several more. ‘I’m going to be out of it for as long as it takes.’ She nodded toward a shotgun. ‘Keep that handy and be ready to use it.’

  ‘If Jīnlóng turns up–’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘If he does, I won’t be able to stop him.’

  ‘Then you’d better hope I’m awake before then.’

  ~~~

  ‘She’s coming,’ Twilight said.

  Andrea glanced down and then lifted her eyes back up to the beam of light which still shone through the clouds. ‘I know.’

  ‘What do you plan to do? You have to have some sort of strategy.’

  ‘Yes, I think I do. The first stage is hiding. She’ll be expecting it anyway. She thinks she’s so much stronger than I am. She thinks she’s already won.’

  ‘If you don’t get moving, she might have.’

  Andrea flashed a smile at her shadow before turning and running off into the darkness. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ~~~

  Midnight opened her eyes and looked out upon the arid, blackened landscape that was the inside of her mind. She frowned. The light she could not extinguish seemed brighter. Did it cover more area? She was near the edge of it and she looked down to
see what looked like grass. Grass! There was life in this place which she had spent so much time keeping lifeless. She was about to do something about that when she heard the voice.

  ‘Well. Are you coming to get me or what?’

  It was her own voice, shouting out of the blackness, but it was not her doing the shouting. Of course, it was her. Somehow she had survived to cause problems. She had been the one who attacked the 8G and set this whole mess underway, and now she was going to pay for it.

  Midnight ran, setting off in the direction the voice had come from, and things got weirder. There was a forest. There was a forest where there should have been barren land. There had not been so much as a grass blade here when she had put the mountain in place to begin the destruction of all that was Andrea Morgan. Now there was a forest.

  The trees were a little strange, aside from the fact that they should not have been there at all. The bark was smooth, almost like glass. The leaves glittered in the light like multifaceted gem stones. They were catching the light from the column and refracting it down to the ground, scattering a plethora of narrow, ephemeral light beams down onto the obsidian ground. Shadows shifted randomly under the trees as Midnight ran after the woman she thought she had destroyed. Andrea had to be responsible for all this.

  ‘When I’ve finished you,’ Midnight called out, ‘I’ll lay all this to waste.’

  There was laughter. ‘You’ll need to catch me first.’

  Midnight’s head snapped to the right. She turned and sprinted toward where she thought Andrea was. She could see perfectly well in the darkness, but the trees were a problem. Was that why Andrea had made them? Had she been getting ready for this conflict for that long?

  ‘You’re not the best at hide-and-seek, are you?’

  Midnight turned left toward the voice, twisting through the trees, ready to attack at any sign of her quarry. There was no sign, just more trees.