Unrestricted Access

by James Rollins

  What place did all these ancient stories full of ghosts and gods have in the modern world of electrocardiograms, needle biopsies, and insurance forms?

  Finally, a nurse whisked into the room on rubber-soled shoes. “Visiting hours are over, Miss Choi.”

  Her mother began to protest, but a quick kiss from Soo-ling calmed her. “I’ll be back tomorrow . . . after school.”

  Glad for the excuse, Soo-ling fled the room, relieved to escape not just the stories but the demon named cancer. Still, her mother had called after her. “You must beware the—” But the closing door cut off those last words, silencing her forever.

  That night, her mother had slipped into a coma and died.

  Soo-ling remembered staring down at the hospital stationery clutched in her hands.

  Blessing and luck, she thought. A lot of good it did her mother.

  “We’ve arrived, Ms. Choi,” Charles said, drawing her out of the past as he pulled the limo to the curb in front of the theater in Santa Monica.

  Soo-ling shook herself out of her reverie and slid across the seat. The driver already had the door open. “Thank you, Charles.”

  As she climbed out, an anxious teenager in a rented tuxedo tripped down the steps toward her. “Soo! About time you got here!”

  A smile filled her at the sight of him, but she did not let it reach her face. It was not proper for a Chinese girl to show strong emotions. Like casting her symbol, it was another way to honor her mother, to adhere to tradition in this small way.

  The young man rushed up to her. He stood a head taller than her, gangly in the overlarge tuxedo. His long hair had been pulled back into a ponytail.

  Bobby Tomlinson was her age. He’d been her friend since kindergarten. One of her few. Both misfits growing up, they had banded together. He was a computer geek and film buff, and she was the shy student who never spoke above a whisper. Over time they had grown to share a secret love of tagging. He had introduced her to it when she was eleven, and she was instantly hooked. It became an outlet for rebellion against the world as her mother became sick, a sliver of freedom and joy that helped Soo-ling cope with her overwhelming grief and anger. Over the next years, they ran the streets together, dodging police, struggling to leave their mark on the city in multicolored splashes of paint.

  The smile trapped inside her grew larger with the memory. Bobby led her up the steps and inside. He babbled on in a rush about his new intern position at Titan Pictures.

  “We start shooting tomorrow on that vampire musical I was telling you about. I’ll be helping with the gaffing crew!”

  She glanced over to him and lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “I know. I don’t know what gaffers do either. But that’s where I’ll be working.”

  They reached her family’s private box as the orchestra was winding through its first movement. Bobby glanced back to her, his blue eyes sparkling with amusement. The private box was empty.

  “Where’s Auntie Loo?” she asked, expecting to find her aunt already here.

  “She called and said she had a merger to oversee at the bank. It’s just us tonight.”

  Soo-ling was shocked to find herself alone with Bobby—not that the two hadn’t spent many long nights running the streets with each other. But this felt somehow different, both of them all dressed up and sharing this dark private space. She was grateful the lights were dimmed. It hid the warmth that bloomed in her cheeks.

  Still, she hesitated outside the box seats, sensing something out of place. This was Auntie Loo’s passion. Neither of them were fans of the ballet. Plus a small part of her wanted to escape, to keep moving, troubled by an inexplicable sense of being trapped.

  She rubbed her wrist and turned to Bobby. “You know, with Auntie Loo missing in action, we don’t have to stay here. Over at the Grauman’s, there’s a movie retrospective of—”

  “George Pal!” he finished. “I know! War of the Worlds. Those Sinbad movies.”

  She knew how much he loved special-effects filmmaking—from the old-fashioned miniature models and stop-motion photography of yesteryear to the newest computer-generated gadgetry. In many ways, he was just as trapped between the past and the present as she was, stuck between the traditional and the modern.

  “Then let’s go!” she said, catching his enthusiasm.

  Laughing, they fled the ballet and escaped in the limo over to Hollywood Boulevard. They were the only patrons of the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that night decked out in a tuxedo and a formal silk gown. As they passed under the massive marquee, Bobby took her arm under his as if they were waltzing down the red carpet of a movie premiere.

  Still, as much fun as it was, Soo-ling was all too conscious of the old theater’s ancient Chinese symbolism and architecture. It stirred again the ghost of her mother.

  But once seated, Bobby’s enthusiasm sparked through her and pushed back any painful memories. He went on and on about why the director George Pal was the true father of the modern special effect, how stop-motion photography was a lost art. Then the houselights dimmed and the first movie started. A comfortable silence fell between them as they basked in the flickering glow that separated this world from the land of illusion.

  At some point, her hand ended up in Bobby’s. She could not say who took whose hand. It happened as naturally as the brush of a stroke of paint.

  Still, neither dared look at the other, their gazes fixed toward the screen.

  As the lights finally rose during the retrospective’s intermission, she turned to Bobby, ready to fill the silence with empty words. She wasn’t ready yet to discuss where their relationship would go from here. Her hand slipped from his.

  “Bobby—”

  Pain erupted in her chest, a whirling blast of ice and fire that burned away any words. Gasping, she fell toward the floor. The theater faded to black as she slipped into pure shadow.

  As darkness drowned her, laughter accompanied her on the journey. The black amusement coalesced into a voice, hoary with frost. “Next time, my dear. Next time you are mine.”

  An image briefly flashed in her mind of the proprietor of the 7-Eleven. He lay faceup in a widening spiral of blood, a raw-edged wound gaping in his chest.

  Then nothing, darkness again.

  Reality snapped back into focus. Bobby’s face filled her vision. She watched his lips move, but it took a moment for his words to make sense. “—hurt. Soo-ling, are you all right?”

  She struggled to sit up. “Y-y-yes. I think so.”

  “Should I call a doctor? It looked like you fainted.”

  “No, Bobby. I just need to go home.” The air in the theater seemed thinner, colder.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  She didn’t have the energy to argue. Leaning on his shoulder, she allowed herself to be half carried out of the theater and down to the limousine.

  “We need to get her home,” Bobby told Charles.

  “Please,” she whispered, collapsing into the leathered interior. “Can we pass by that 7-Eleven on the way?”

  She had to know for sure.

  Bobby climbed in next to her and shared a worried glance with Charles.

  Soon they were speeding down the highway, the traffic mercifully thin. She stared out the window, her breathing shallow. She clenched the edge of her seat with white knuckles. As they exited onto Santa Monica Boulevard, the traffic snarled due to a mass of sirens and flashing lights. They were gathered in front of the 7-Eleven store. A traffic cop, illuminated by a flaming red flare, waved them forward. The limousine glided past the store as a paramedic pushed a draped gurney into a waiting ambulance.

  “Do you wish to stop, Miss?”

  “No.”

  She’d seen what she needed to see.

  “You tagged this store, didn’t you?” Bobby asked, touching her hand, sensing her distress.

  She nodded.

  “But you couldn’t finish your tag? Like back in Laguna?”

  She remembered. It wa
s early in her new role as protector of the city. She hadn’t really fully believed it herself. She’d allowed the police to chase them off before she’d completed her mark. Afterward a fire burned down that store.

  Even after that, she hadn’t been truly convinced. Still wasn’t. She had taken up the fu tag in memory of her mother, to honor her, a duty to tradition born out of guilt and loss.

  But now this . . .

  “No,” she answered softly. “I finished it. It’s something else.” She remembered the icy claw and the black laughter. Words came tumbling out. She felt stupid even saying them, but she knew they were true. “I think something knows about me—and is hunting me.”

  Bobby remained silent. She knew he couldn’t fully comprehend and probably didn’t really believe in her powers, even though he had been the one to get her started. Bobby knew how deeply her mother’s death had wounded her. One night, she had shared her mother’s stories with him, her claims of a mystical maternal bloodline. Intrigued, Bobby had suggested using the symbol as her new tag, to add weight and purpose to their nightly runs together. And so it began.

  But down deep—deeper than she cared to acknowledge—Soo-ling had always known it was more than that. She could not explain it. Tragedies drew her, called to her—and with a can of spray paint she could somehow prevent them.

  Until now.

  “What are you going to do?” Bobby finally asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should I call Auntie Loo?”

  Soo-ling frowned. Her mother’s youngest sister, Auntie Loo, had taken Soo-ling in after her mother had died. Her aunt was a loan officer for Bank of America, practical and serious. She pooh-poohed the ancient traditions her mother held so dear.

  “I’m not sure Auntie Loo can help with this.”

  Or would even want to for that matter.

  But she might know something, anything to make sense of all of this. With no choice, Soo-ling fished out her iPhone. Her fingers trembled, making it hard to call up her aunt’s number from the phone’s contact list.

  Bobby reached and covered her hand with his own. He squeezed once, then slipped the phone from her fingers. “Let me.”

  “Thanks.”

  She folded her hands in her lap to stop them from shaking. She stared out the window as Bobby called her aunt. His voice dissolved into the background hum of traffic.

  She spent the drive home struggling to understand. Someone knew of her work. Or something—

  Her sight suddenly glazed over, narrowing down into darkness. She blindly clawed for Bobby’s hand. She clung to him as if she were drowning. But this time, she knew what was happening.

  A vision opened inside her. She saw it all.

  . . . a sun rising over the ocean . . . a shoreline bucking and tearing . . . cliff-side homes crashing into the sea . . .

  Screams filled her ears.

  Then a blank masonry wall appears . . . under the highway exit sign for Riverside . . . above a hidden fault line.

  She knew what that meant. The blank wall was her next canvas. It called for her work . . . called for her protection against this coming tragedy. As the vision began to fade, she felt both relieved and terrified. Even after three years, these callings spooked her down to the marrow of her bones. She could no longer dismiss them as coincidences or nightmares born out of anxiety and guilt.

  As the screams of the dying faded, mocking laughter followed.

  Soo-ling recognized that trail of dark amusement. It was the hunter revealing himself, letting his presence be known. It was both a challenge and a warning to her.

  Bobby took her in his arms and held her to him. “What’s wrong, Soo?”

  She hid her face in her hands, not wanting Bobby to see her so distraught and scared. In a corner of her mind, she still heard the jeering laughter over the screams.

  “An earthquake. Tomorrow,” she finally mumbled into his tuxedo jacket. “I can block it, but he’ll try to stop me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but we need to hurry. I need answers.”

  “. . . only old stories.” Auntie Loo paced the red Moroccan rug of the living room. Cigarette smoke traced her path. She was a stocky woman who cut her black hair into a fierce bob, nothing like the slender grace of Soo-ling’s mother. “Mumbo jumbo nonsense. All incense and pseudoreligion.”

  “Auntie, I don’t have time for this. You’ve been keeping secrets all my life.” Soo-ling sat straighter on the leather couch next to Bobby. “Mother knew I had the power, and she must have told you.”

  “Soo-ling, you don’t truly believe—”

  “Something is coming for me,” she said, cutting her off. “I know it.”

  A cloud of fear passed over her aunt’s features.

  “It will tear this city apart to get to me,” Soo-ling pressed.

  Auntie Loo turned away to study the intricacies of a dynasty vase. Her voice became a faint whisper. “If you’re right, then he’s found you.”

  Soo-ling’s heart skipped a beat. “Who?”

  Her aunt refused to turn around, as if afraid to face any of this. It didn’t fit into her world of spreadsheets and financial appraisals.

  “Please, Auntie, who? Tell me.”

  “Gui sou,” her aunt finally whispered, seeming to sag under the weight of ancient history. “The demon.”

  A stirring deep within Soo-ling responded to the quiet syllables: gui sou. With the beast named, her body knew it.

  “What do you know, Auntie?”

  “Just stories. Told to scare children to bed. Nothing but myths.”

  Soo-ling crossed the room to her aunt and hugged her from behind. Auntie Loo trembled in her embrace. “Not myths, Auntie. They’re as real as my flesh.”

  Her aunt broke their embrace and crossed to the fireplace. “I did not want to believe.”

  “But why?”

  “The family stories tell of dishonor. Cowardice and shame. Our family is a disgraced line. I was supposed to tell you when you came of age. But it seemed like fiction. I thought I could protect you from needless shame by concealing our family secret.”

  “But I don’t understand. Having this power, this ability to protect, should be an honor.”

  Auntie tapped out her cigarette on a crystal ashtray. “It was. Once. Our clan was one of thirty-five chosen families, one from each province of China. Each family had the responsibility to protect its province. Our family guarded the Shandong Province on the coast of the Yellow Sea. We were a cherished clan in China.”

  “So what happened?” Bobby asked.

  “As the story is told, the gods of order and chaos are always at war. Guardian families grew to be a part of this balance. They were gifted with the ability to interrupt certain strands of chaos and deflect disasters.”

  “Like I can do,” Soo-ling said.

  Auntie nodded and sat on the arm of a leather chair. “Yes. But over the passing centuries, the Chaos Lord became enraged at our interferences and forged a hunter from a part of his spleen, the gui sou, to destroy the guardian families. This hunter was unleashed, and many were destroyed before the families finally banded together. Each family sent one representative to form a union powerful enough to entrap the hunter. It took thirty-five guardians to encircle the beast and trap him, but before the enchantment was complete, one member—the one representing our family—panicked and fled. With the circle broken, the spell unraveled. The hunter destroyed the remaining thirty-four guardians. Our disgraced family was banished from China. After decades of wandering, we finally settled here.”

  “But what of the beast?”

  “The story told is that the gui sou was injured by the failed assault and can only regain its full strength to push back into our world by finishing the destruction of the circle of guardians. He knows the power of the guardian is passed to only one member of each generation.” Auntie Loo stared hard at her. “There is only one member left of that direct descendant line.”

  Soo-l
ing crossed back to the sofa and plopped down. “And of course that would be me.”

  Auntie Loo nodded.

  Bobby took her hand, a silent promise that she was not alone.

  “So how am I supposed to stop such a creature? It took thirty-five experienced guardians to stop him in the past. I am only one. Where am I going to find so many others before the sun rises?”

  “I don’t know. The stories give no other clue.”

  Soo-ling closed her eyes. If she did nothing, then L.A. was doomed. But how could she face this demon alone?

  From the hallway, an ancient grandfather clock, an heirloom of three generations, chimed once. They were running out of night.

  Bobby spoke up. “I have an idea. But it’s a long shot.”

  Soo-ling turned to him doubtfully. “How?”

  “Magic.”

  At two in the morning, the studio lot still bustled. Spotlights and sodium lamps held back the night. Levi-clad wranglers from a new western mingled with black-robed ninjas from an action film, while propmen and camera crews scurried to and fro.

  No one paid attention to Soo-ling and Bobby as they hurried across the lot.

  “What if we’re caught?” she asked, sticking close to his side.

  Bobby pointed to his back. He’d replaced his tuxedo coat with a bomber jacket. The logo for Titan Pictures was stenciled on the back. “Got it with my internship. No one will give us a second glance.”

  She must have looked little convinced.

  “No worries,” he assured her. “This is the land of illusion. It’s not about who you are—but who you appear to be.”

  He flipped up the collar of his jacket.

  Soo-ling glanced around as they left the chaos and headed into a quieter section of the studio. Bobby had never fully explained his plan. “Where are we going?”

  Her friend kept walking.

  “Bobby . . .”

  He stopped and faced her. “If that demon is tracking you, maybe we’d better keep this on a need-to-know basis. For now, the less you know the better.”

  For the first time, she read the fear in his face. He suddenly looked both older and younger at the same time. His eyes shone in the darkness, full of worry—but beneath that something more, something that had always been there, only she’d failed to recognize it. Until now.