by Mel Odom
A predator closed in. I smelled the fetid stink of its breath, felt the heat of its body, glimpsed the rush of coiled muscle.
Then there was silence.
When I opened my eyes, I was in the Walled City.
Chapter 90
The Queen With A Thousand Teeth
I stared at the tenement buildings, rotting where they stood, filled with pain and loss, agony and despair, anger and self-loathing. All of those feelings mixed into a lethal concoction that bruised me just standing there.
Then She stood in front of me again, tall and imposing, made even bigger by the flowing gown she wore. I peered at her, but I still couldn’t see her features. Her horns, though, I could see those, and I knew her face—if I could have seen it—would have been a terrible thing.
She stretched out a long-taloned hand toward me, and her nails were so sharp they slashed the darkness apart.
Her hunger, brutal and unforgiving, lashed me, turned my stomach and emptied me out.
The whole world turned black.
When I woke, I was on the subway platform floor. My sickness, sour and gritty, coated my mouth and tongue and pooled on the dusty concrete. My stomach cramped and heaved, trying to spew more from within me, but there was nothing left to give up. My throat felt like it had been set on fire.
For a moment, I couldn’t focus. When I could see well enough, I saw the others lying around me. I looked instantly for Raymond, thinking this had been a ploy by Josephine Tsang to recapture him. But he was still with us.
Gobbet pulled herself up and looked down at her rats lying on the floor, looking just as sick as she was. Is0bel was on her hands and knees, still retching violently. Racter clung to Koschei, and the drone was the only one among us who had not been affected. Even Gaichu, as dead as he was, was hunkered down by the assault.
Beside me, Duncan shoved himself to his feet. “That wasn’t a dream,” he said hoarsely. “That was something else.”
“It was a vision,” Gobbet said as she picked up her furry friends and tended to them.
“I saw…some sort of…machine inside the Walled City,” Is0bel said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “It was churning something. It felt…wrong…impossible. I think it was ripping…something…” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Reality,” Gobbet said. “It was ripping a hole in reality.”
Racter straightened and looked around. “Something is here, my friends. Something has…arrived.”
“I believe we have just fallen in over our heads.” Gaichu stood and tested his blades in their scabbards.
Duncan turned to Raymond. “What the hell was that?”
Sitting in the floor, Raymond shuddered and wept, looking older and more frail than I’d ever seen him. Than I ever wanted to see him. “She’s here,” he whispered in a fearful voice.
I crossed to him and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Breathe, Raymond, just breathe.” It was one of the first things he’d thought me to do.
“The Queen,” he whispered, “with a Thousand Teeth.”
A chill swept over me. Duncan was affected, too. He pulled out a pistol and stepped closer to Raymond, watching the darkness all around us.
“I left Prosperity in there,” Raymond said in a thin sing-song. “I left Prosperity in there. I left Prosperity in there.”
I squeezed his shoulder again and knelt beside him. “Edward, can you hear me?”
He looked up at me, tears still running down his withered cheeks. “I prefer Raymond.”
“Raymond,” I said.
“Are we still in the subway?” He gazed around in astonishment. “Something bad is happening. It began a long time ago. And I’m responsible.” He paused to draw a shaky breath. “The Queen…Prosperity…”
“The Queen With a Thousand Teeth,” I said. “These dreams, visions. They’ve been coming to you for a long time, haven’t they?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Oh yes. I’ve been plagued by the nightmares for a long, long time.” His lips trembled. “They began years ago…sporadically at first. Vague dreams. Wrapped tight with guilt. With shame.” He closed his eyes. “Until this last year, when the frequency began to increase. Then the imagery clarified, started to repeat. Teeth. Thousands and thousands of teeth. And the sound…the sounds of suffering…began to drown out…even my waking thoughts. That’s when I knew I had to come back.”
“To do what?” I asked.
Raymond opened his eyes and put a hand on Duncan’s arm to steady himself as he stood. “To correct a mistake I’d made a long time ago. My fault…Prosperity…all those people…those poor, poor people.” He choked out a cry of anguish.
“The Prosperity Project?” I asked, trying to anchor his mind.
Shame pursed Raymond’s lips. “You know…about Prosperity?”
“Sort of,” Duncan said. “We already covered this, Raymond. We know that it’s in the center of the Walled City. And that Edward Tsang built it.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Raymond?” I asked. “Tell us what this is all about.”
“The beginning…” Raymond’s voice softened for a moment, then he nodded. “Sometime in the ’20s, my mother was awarded the contract to rebuild the housing development. The Walled City. Prosperity was the Fortune Engine I built at the center of the Walled City. My special project.”
“Fortune Engine?” Duncan said. “What are you talking about? You can’t create fortune.”
“You kinda can, Gun Show,” Gobbet said. “Some practitioners of feng shui believe they can do it. Ever heard of the Begua of the Eight Aspirations?”
“No. I must’ve missed school that day.”
“Keep going, Gobbet,” I said. “I want to hear this.”
“It’s neo-feng shui,” Gobbet said. “The Masters of the craft can map the flow of qi and how it corresponds to different aspects in someone’s life. Fame, relationships, creativity, inner knowledge, health…and fortune.”
“That’s six,” Duncan said. “I thought you said there were eight aspects.”
Gobbet shot him a scathing look. “I don’t remember the other two. But one of ’em was definitely fortune.” She looked at Raymond. “So what does your Fortune Engine do?”
Chapter 91
The Fortune Engine
“The Fortune Engine was designed to improve the balance of qi in a negative-qi environment,” Raymond said.
Duncan shook his head. “A negative-qi environment?”
“Somewhere shitty,” Is0bel said. “Like a slum.”
“Like a low income housing project,” Raymond corrected gently. “I believed that with the Fortune Engine, the rebuilt Walled City might never become a slum.” He paused for a minute, and I knew he wasn’t in the subway with us. “But the machine…malfunctioned.”
“How do you know how to create magic machines, Ray?” Duncan asked. “I thought you were an industrial engineer.”
“I am.” He nodded. “I also have several advanced degrees. Doctorates in Physics, Taoist Alchemy.” He shrugged. “My mother pushed me…hard…to reach my potential.”
I thought about everything Josephine Tsang must have put Raymond through, and I marveled at how he had ever become the man I had known. The man I’d hurt when I left.
“How did the machine malfunction?” Is0bel asked.
“The mechanism I created to circulate negative qi in the Walled City got stuck,” Raymond answered.
“Stuck on what?” Racter asked. I realized then that he would be just as fascinated by machines as Is0bel.
“Think of the Fortune Engine as a sort of propeller blade moving through astral space, circulating qi, keeping it fresh,” Raymond said. “When qi flows, when the rhythm is right, the results are positive. Fortuitous.” He paused. “When I brought my Fortune Engine design to my mother, she embraced it. She more than embraced it. She bankrolled it. Put an entire division of Tsang Mechanical under me to develop it.”
I knew then where th
at missing thirty-five percent of the funding had gone.
“It was the biggest thing my mother had ever attempted in her career,” Raymond went on. “She said that if the machine could bring fortune to the less fortunate, it would prove my theory.”
“And if it could help the poor,” Is0bel said disgustedly, “imagine what a Fortune Engine could do for Josephine Tsang.”
“But the people in the Walled City didn’t benefit from your Fortune Engine, did they?” Duncan asked.
Raymond bowed his head in shame. “Something in astral space went wrong. I wasn’t sure what. The machine started pooling negative qi, and the Walled City started to fill with it. Fortunes turned bad. Eventually the enormous pool of negative qi became…toxic. Fortunes turned from bad to worse. Much worse. Mother’s vision for a rebuilt, revitalized Walled City fell to ruin. It only took a few years for the trapped toxic qi to turn a brand new housing development into a hellish slum.”
“Why didn’t you turn it off?” I asked.
“I couldn’t. Something happened. Part of the malfunction. We couldn’t turn it off.”
“Then why didn’t you wrap it in C6 and turn it into a scrap heap?” Duncan asked. “Just blow it up?”
“Mother refused.” Raymond’s shoulders slumped.
“Why?”
“I never found out. She wouldn’t tell me. She would only say that it wasn’t worth spending the additional resources to figure out how to fix it. Or even how to turn it off.” Raymond took a shaky breath. “She sealed off the maintenance room. Our engineers poured a sarcophagus of thick concrete around it so no one would ever find it. Or ever find out what we had done.”
“Then she wrote the project off as a business loss,” Is0bel said, “and moved on like nothing had ever happened. Right?”
“Yes.” Raymond touched the bandages on his head. “After that, I left Hong Kong. I started a new life in Seattle.” He looked at Duncan and me. “Found you two.”
“You should have stayed,” Duncan growled. “Tried to do something about it.” Disappointment showed on his face. “You were a coward, Raymond.”
“Easy,” I said. I knew that Duncan was mad at both of us. I’d left him, too. “Sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, you don’t know if it’s better to run or stay. Cut him some slack.”
“No, Duncan’s right.” Raymond faced up to Duncan. “I was a coward. And the guilt, the burden of my cowardice, gripped me like a vise that never loosened. It’s eaten me from the inside for twenty years.” He licked his lips and sucked in a breath. “And then the nightmares began. Still, I kept working on the problem, night and day.”
“That’s the work that kept you in your study until all hours of the morning,” I said, but I mentioned it more for Duncan, so he’d remember that Raymond had been trying.
“It took me years even after you left,” Raymond said to me, “to make the connections, find out what to do. But I did. I figured it out.” Hope gleamed in his rheumy eyes. “And still the nightmares intensified, until they became unbearable. I knew I had to come back. Fix what I had done. That’s why I contacted you. To help me see it through.”
“What’s causing the visions we’re all having?” I asked.
“When the machine malfunctioned,” Raymond said, “when the circulator became stuck in astral space, it lodged in another domain.” His lips trembled. “And something lived there. After twenty years of constant force, the circulator finally began tearing astral space and created a rupture in her domain. And now she’s pushing through.”
“Yeah, she’s pushing through,” Duncan snapped. “The Queen With a Thousand fucking Teeth! A thing you brought here, Raymond!”
“Duncan!” I spoke sharply, in that tone I’d used back when we were running the shadows together, barely surviving from one day to the next.
He blinked at me and backed down, almost ashamed of himself. But he was hurt, too. Raymond hadn’t turned out to be as perfect as he’d always believed.
“I understand that,” Raymond said. “That’s why I came back! I believe she is only partially here! She hasn’t pushed all the way through yet!” I placed a hand on his thin shoulder and he calmed himself. “She’s probing her potential new hunting ground.” He sucked in a ragged breath. “I know what to do now. How to extract the circulator and shut the machine down. Before she can fully manifest.”
Considering all the effect she’d already had on the sprawl, and she wasn’t even really here yet, I could only imagine the horror that lay ahead if she ever made it into our world.
“Just get me to the center of the Walled City,” Raymond said. “To the Fortune Engine. I will do the rest.” He took Duncan’s big hands in his. “Please. Help me. Help them.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then I said, “That machine has caused unspeakable misery. It needs to be shut down.”
“Whatever misery the machine’s caused is nothing compared to what’s gonna happen now,” Is0bel said. “It’s not just a thing in there. It’s a Yama King. A demon goddess.” She swallowed. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if—”
Gobbet turned to her friend and put an arm around her shoulders. “We’re trapped, Izz. We can’t run, and believe me, I want to. It’s all I’ve been thinking of. But the APB is still out on us, and those visions…I got a feeling they’re not gonna stop unless we make ’em stop. And that fragile old man’s the only way to do it. We gotta take him in there. We gotta help him fix this.”
“I, for one, wish to see this Fortune Engine,” Racter said. “I am intrigued. I will go willingly.”
Gaichu looked at us, his face as somber as always. “I have the opportunity to kill a god. I cannot allow it to pass unanswered.”
Duncan was silent for a moment. “I hate this country. I hate this life.” He looked at Raymond. “But I owe you, and I’m not walking away from that. I’ll help you fix your mess, or die trying.”
The tension broke, and I looked around at the group. “We’ll need reinforcements if we’re going in there. And there’s only one place I know to get them.”
“Man,” Is0bel said, “I really want to hear you sell this one to Auntie.”
Chapter 92
“This Whole Place Is In Harm’s Way!”
My call to Kindly Cheng didn’t go through at first. Bao said she was busy with something and would get back to me. I thought it was just her annoyance at us not reporting in on her schedule. So we stood outside the Walled City, waiting in the heavy rain. The wrongness trapped on the other side of the gate was even stronger now, a magnet for the dark storm gathering overhead. Wind gusted through the streets with feral howls. Most of the store owners had closed down, battening their hatches to ride out the night.
Raymond looked a little stronger as he stood next to me. Duncan had gotten him some sticky buns from a street vendor crazy enough to brave the weather, and the old man stood under the small respite offered by a fluttering canopy in front of a closed store while eating them.
“You look like you have something on your mind,” he said to me.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
He waited a bit before answering. “I don’t think so. No. I am the product of an aborted brain surgery. That, combined with all that has happened, I doubt I will ever be okay again. I have no idea when I will…break.”
I was sorry I’d asked. It was a kid’s question, brought up when a seemingly indestructible parent got sick.
“Although I’m relieved that you rescued me before my memory was wiped,” Raymond went on, “part of me grieves at the thought I could have been free from all of this.”
“None of us are free of this until we destroy that engine,” I said.
When Kindly Cheng called back, the conversation with her went surprisingly quick. She told me she was sending a support team.
Less than twenty minutes later, a group of gangers showed up. Street people and vendors immediately cleared the area.
The
leader was young, an elf with a professional demeanor and an arsenal to back it up. He called my name and I responded, stepping out to meet him.
“Mrs. Cheng sends her regards,” he said. “I hear you’re going into the Walled City tonight.”
“I am.”
“You know you’re just asking to get slotted in there.”
“I’m not planning on letting things go that way.”
He spat a curse. “Mrs. Cheng told us to go with you, so I hope you have some really good plans.”
“We’ll need all the guns we can get.”
He nodded. “This is our shot at distinguishing ourselves. Show Auntie that we have what it takes to rise in the organization. It may be our best chance to provide for our families.”
I knew some of them wouldn’t be going back to those families after tonight. I pushed away my guilt over that. If we didn’t do this, a lot more families were going to be lost.
As we approached the gates to the Walled City, a fetid blast of foul air hit us. If I hadn’t already gotten sick back at the subway, I would have been emptying my stomach now. The stench tonight was worse than the last time I’d been inside.
“Do you feel that?” Gobbet comforted her pets as they squeaked in protest. “It’s like the Walled City’s bad breath or something. It’s disgusting.”
Is0bel looked up at the gate. “I feel, I don’t know, unclean just looking at the place. Like life has no value or something. Like there’s just no point to anything.”
“That’s the toxic qi,” Raymond told her. “And it is exactly the point. We need to get rid of it. Fix it at the source. If I can.”
“I’ll drop a marker in the center of the Walled City on everyone’s PDA,” Is0bel said. “We should be able to weave our way through it to the machine.”
“Raymond’s the key to the whole thing,” I said. “I want him protected.”
“I’ll put some body armor under his clothing,” Duncan said. “It’ll stop a .45 at close range.”