by Kylie Chan
He waved one hand dismissively. ‘Can never be executed enough, you know that.’
I faced the hill and hit the lever to go forward. The unit rattled to the bottom of the hill, then stopped, its wheels spinning in the gravel.
One of the scientists ran forward and fiddled with the settings. ‘Ramped it up. Try again.’
‘Say the line!’ the Tiger said.
‘No,’ I said, and pushed forward again.
The wheels bit into the gravel and I lurched forward. The vehicle tipped over and I found myself upside down inside the top.
‘You okay, Emma?’ the Tiger said.
‘Yeah,’ I said as they righted me. ‘What happened?’
‘May be top-heavy with your weight in it,’ one of them said. ‘You’re heavier than expected.’
‘Fatty,’ the Tiger said. ‘Say the line!’
I tried the hill again but the vehicle tipped over again.
‘Let’s try giving you a push up,’ one of the women said, righting me. She pushed me slightly up the hill.
‘How steep will it be?’ I said.
‘Fucking steep,’ the Tiger said. ‘Come on, say it for me. Do it.’
I pushed the lever to move forward and the unit tipped over again.
‘Can we weight the bottom?’ the Tiger said.
‘If we do that it’ll wear out the batteries before she gets there,’ the woman scientist said. ‘How far does it have to go?’
‘About fifty k’s.’
‘We’ll be lucky to get that much life out of the batteries we have now. Only way is if we can make the snake smaller.’
‘This is as small as I can go for any length of time,’ I said.
The Tiger shrugged. ‘Back to the drawing board.’
I turned the unit so it was facing down the hill, pushed the lever and it tipped over again, this time rolling down the hill. The Tiger moved quickly to stop me and pushed me upright again.
‘We’ll have to work something else out, but thanks for your time, everybody,’ I said.
The Tiger’s expression filled with mischief through the view port. ‘Say the line and I’ll let you out.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Come on, Emma, do it for me,’ he said. ‘You know you want to!’
‘Oh my God, these rods on the front are just for show. They don’t do anything, do they?’
‘Couldn’t resist.’
‘Blame Dad. We thought he was being completely lame and tried to stop him,’ one of the scientists said.
‘Let me out!’
‘Just the word! Say the word!’
I took a deep breath and mumbled, ‘Exterminate.’
‘Yes!’ the Tiger yelled, punching the air. He popped the lid so I could climb out. ‘Totally worth any number of executions!’
The ringing woke me up. I waved my hand over the bedside table a few times, then hit the alarm button on my clock. It didn’t work, so I hit it again, then realised it was the phone. I picked it up and blearily saw the time as I pressed the button: 1:24 am. ‘Hello?’
‘Lady Emma, my apologies for waking you,’ said the demon, ‘but Lord Gold said that you would want to know. We’ve found the common thread in the data. We have the name of the central agency that all the missing people went to.’
I snapped awake. ‘Are you still at the office?’
‘Yes.’
I threw my legs over the side of the bed. ‘I’m on my way.’
‘Lord Gold says we’ll pick you up, and bring your Hong Kong ID card,’ he said, and hung up.
I quickly dressed and went out into the hallway. As I closed my bedroom door, I imagined for a moment that John was asleep in his room and I could give in to the temptation to go visit him.
I turned and headed out the front door.
Gold, Calcite and Zara were waiting in the lobby. The night sky glowed with the lights of Hong Kong, reflected in the low thick clouds that swathed the Peak above us.
Gold gestured for me to follow him to the family car. ‘We’ll drive you across the border, ma’am, it’s in Shenzhen.’
‘Who’s on duty?’ I said.
‘Sit and Lee. I notified them and I’ll stay in contact.’
‘Good job,’ I said, climbing into the front passenger seat. ‘Let’s go.’
‘It’s a mid-range employment agency, nothing special,’ Gold said as he drove us through the deserted Western Harbour Tunnel, the tunnel’s blazing lights reflecting on the car’s glass. ‘They have an office in Dongmen, near the main shops, very central.’
‘Do they know we’re on our way?’
Gold shrugged. ‘Hard to say. I hope not.’
‘All the people who disappeared had something in their records that was linked to this agency,’ Zara said. ‘Even something as minor as a phone number in their call records.’
‘Wait, the government had their call records?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Calcite said. ‘So they can monitor who calls who and track down dissidents.’
‘That’s a gross invasion of privacy,’ I said.
‘Uh, this is China,’ Gold said. ‘Privacy is an interesting theoretical concept.’
‘Most people are so accustomed to living crammed in together that they don’t have the same level of respect for privacy that you spoiled Westerners do,’ Zara said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Look at the way people refuse to talk to you on the phone until you identify yourself. And everybody has their phone number withheld on caller display.’
‘With the government keeping call records, can you blame them?’ Calcite said.
The streets of Shenzhen were nearly deserted, the building fronts lit only by the streetlights and minimal internal shop lights. Tired prostitutes in high heels and huge wigs stared blankly at us as we passed, not seeming to care whether we stopped or not.
Two women were digging a large hole through the paving stones on one side of the road; they stopped and watched us as we drove past. They wore grey thick shirts and pants over their colourful floral clothes and worked under a single electric light bulb.
The agency was in the centre of the shopping district, surrounded by shiny new ultra-modern concrete shopping malls and white-tiled office buildings. Gold stopped the car under one of the office buildings. When we climbed out, he made the car invisible — easier than attempting to find a parking space to avoid being booked by the police. We went to the door of the building and Gold held one hand over it; it unlocked with an audible click. We opened the door, Zara checking behind us to ensure that nobody saw us go in.
We went up to the nineteenth floor, where a number of offices were located along a narrow corridor with white tiles on the walls and floor. The company names were all in Chinese. Gold stopped outside one of the glass doors and concentrated. He nodded, opened the door and we went in. The office floor was covered in shredded paper.
Gold groaned. ‘They knew we were coming.’
He went to one of the desks, picked up the monitor from the computer box and dropped it onto the floor. He removed the box’s external case, tossed it to one side, then held his hand over the hard disk.
He grinned and shook his head. ‘What an idiot. He deleted the data the old-fashioned way.’
‘It’s not gone?’ I said.
Gold yanked the cables from the back of the hard disk, then concentrated and made the screws holding it into the chassis spin out. He pulled it free. ‘Take the hard disks, guys, we’ll scan them all.’
Zara and Calcite moved through the office pulling the computers apart and extracting the hard disks.
Gold held up the hard disk he’d just removed: a plain silver rectangle with sockets in the back to connect it to the PC. ‘They deleted the data, but they didn’t know what they were doing. The FAT — the file allocation table — sits at the start of the disk and tells the computer where to look for the data. When you delete a file, it just removes the reference from the FAT; it doesn’t delete the actual data. Jus
t like throwing away the index card in a library — the book is still there.’ He turned the disk in his hand and focused for a moment. ‘All the data is still there. It’s fragmented but it shouldn’t be too hard for us to put it back together and find out where everybody was being sent.’
Zara and Calcite returned and placed a stack of hard disks on the desk. ‘Still a couple to go,’ Zara said.
Gold put his hand over the hard disks and concentrated. ‘Most of them are full.’ He grinned wryly. ‘Of either porn or cute pictures of Winnie the Pooh and Disney characters, depending on whether the person using the PC was a man or a woman.’
‘Sexist asshole. I happen to like porn, thank you very much,’ Zara said, placing a couple more hard disks on the desk.
‘And I think Winnie the Pooh is the cutest ever,’ Calcite said.
‘And how human are you two?’ Gold said. ‘I never said which was which.’
Calcite and Zara shared a look, then scooped up the hard disks. I helped them, taking about ten myself. We exited the office and stopped in the hallway.
Two fake elementals, one stone and one metal, stood in front of us. The stone one appeared as blocks floating together in a human shape, and the metal one was a smooth human-like form, but their faces were featureless. Their heads brushed the ceiling.
‘If we kill one of them and it explodes on me, will it convert me?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Gold said. ‘Stay back. I think it would be a good idea to change to snake, just to be on the safe side.’
‘Changing to snake wears me out; I’ll just stay back. If I’m far enough away I’ll be fine.’
‘What do you mean?’ Zara said, glancing back at me. ‘Convert you to what, ma’am? The serpent is well-known now, there’s no need to worry about taking that form.’
‘Demon form,’ Gold said without looking away from the elementals. They remained unmoving and seemed to be sizing us up.
‘But serpents aren’t demons,’ Calcite said, confused. ‘They’re always going on about how they’re misunderstood and they’re really good people — then they wander off and you don’t hear about them for years. You know the saying: “Never fall in love with a snake.”’
‘One Two Two turned me into a Snake Mother,’ I said. ‘I’m full of demon essence. If I absorb any more, I’ll be converted for good.’
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Gold said. ‘It’s confidential information; we don’t want everybody in the Celestial knowing about this.’
Zara hesitated, then said, ‘I think it would be a very good idea for you to get way back and stay there, ma’am. I’d hate to see that happen to you.’
I nodded and moved back, not looking away from the demons. ‘I can’t gauge them. How big are they?’
‘I can’t gauge them either,’ Gold said. ‘Guys?’
‘You’re bigger than us, Lord Gold,’ Zara said. She concentrated and her human form changed to diamond; not faceted like a cut diamond but clear, transparent and smooth, like glass. Calcite changed to pure white, and Gold changed to his stone form: quartz with veins of gold.
‘Just stay out of the way, ma’am,’ Gold said. ‘The Dark Lord would kill me if I was responsible for your death or conversion.’
‘I’m responsible for myself,’ I said.
‘Not while we’re guarding!’ Gold said, and rushed the stone elemental. He changed form so that his body was egg-shaped and his arms became long, sharp-bladed swords. He ducked under the stone elemental’s arms and sliced through its body, then moved back to stand in front of us.
The demon’s body slid in half, re-formed, and both demons took a couple of huge strides towards us.
Zara grew and stretched and became even more transparent. Her human form disappeared completely and she became a shapeless clear ooze. She engulfed the stone elemental, then quickly shrank to half her size, then a quarter. She shrank more slowly, rolling back towards us to avoid the metal elemental, until she was the size of a basketball, the remains of the stone elemental, ground to a powder, visible in her centre. She flew into the air, split open into two halves and the dust that was the remains of the stone elemental cascaded out. She hesitated above it, waiting to see what it would do, then retook human form and stood in front of us.
‘Metal one left,’ Calcite said. ‘We need a dragon.’
‘Or a serpent,’ I said, changing to snake form.
‘Wah!’ Calcite said. ‘I haven’t seen your snake form, ma’am. It’s huge!’
I rushed the metal elemental, grabbed its faceless head in my mouth, wrapped my coils around it and held it. It struggled, but I was stronger — I was solid muscle. I unlocked my jaw and began to swallow its head. At the same time, I coiled around it to hold its legs and it fell to the ground. We lay locked on the floor, me holding the bound elemental with its head halfway down my throat.
I glanced back at the stones. ‘I can’t eat this, guys, it would probably fight its way out of me,’ I said, my voice muffled by the demon’s head.
‘Stalemate,’ Gold said, still in battle form. ‘What do we do now?’
I had a lightning-fast inspiration. ‘If we do this quick enough, it won’t hurt you too much.’ I summoned the Murasame, and it cooperated for a change, appearing on the floor next to me. ‘Use this, but be quick.’
Gold reached for the sword.
‘Wait!’ I said.
He froze.
‘I’m telling the sword to let you use it, but it’ll still hurt,’ I said. ‘It’ll hurt like mad, but it’ll destroy the demon. Cut off its head, Gold.’
‘What about you?’ he said.
‘I’m in snake form. The demon essence won’t go into me.’
‘Works for me,’ Gold said, and grabbed the sword. He howled with pain and dropped it. ‘Damn, you weren’t joking!’
‘The Destroyer,’ Calcite said with awe. ‘I never thought I’d see it. I’m profoundly honoured.’
‘If my arm wasn’t ready to drop off, I would be too,’ Gold said. He took a deep breath and picked up the sword again. He screamed with agony as he ripped the scabbard off, swung the blade and took the demon’s head.
The second the head was gone, Gold dropped the sword and stood panting, staring at it. I waited to see if the demon would re-form; it didn’t. I spat out the head and the three of us backed up.
‘How about we grab these disks and make a run for the car?’ Gold said.
‘Teleport,’ Zara said.
‘Lady Emma can’t,’ Gold said. ‘We have to go down the old-fashioned way.’
‘Stairs?’ Calcite said.
We looked behind us to the stairwell. I changed back to human form to pick up the disks I’d been carrying. ‘Stairs it is.’
‘What about the sword?’ Zara said.
‘It’ll find its own way home,’ I said. ‘And good luck to anybody who tries to steal it.’
‘I can vouch for that,’ Gold said.
We headed down the stairs back to the car. There were no more demons. Gold stopped when we reached the car. ‘Wait,’ he said, and changed form, becoming elongated and elastic, his face turning into a twisted caricature of himself. He sent his head under the car. ‘Thought I smelled something strange, but there’s nothing there. Let’s go.’
The trip back to the Peak apartment was uneventful. It was just before dawn as we went up the drive, the rising sun painting the cloudy eastern sky below us a brownish pink. Gold got out of the car to escort me to the front door.
‘Leave the disks with us,’ he said. ‘We’ll spend some more time sorting out the data and find out where all the people were sent.’
‘How long do you think it’ll take?’
He shrugged. ‘No idea. Depends how fragmented it is; without the file allocation table it can be a bit of a pain putting it all back together. We should know later today.’
I pressed the button for the lift. ‘I was about to say tell Yi Hao that I’ll be late in, but she’s gone. Just pass the word around, okay?’
&nb
sp; ‘Will do, ma’am,’ Gold said, saluted me and walked back to the car.
Just as the lift doors closed, I saw the car dissolve into multiple metallic floating blobs. Zara and Calcite, who had been sitting inside, fell to the ground surrounded by the assorted junk that had been in the car.
I tapped the stone in my ring. ‘They replaced the car with metal elementals. Stop the lift and take me back down!’
‘Not a good idea,’ the stone said. ‘Those elementals would kill you.’
‘Stop the lift, I have to get back down there,’ I said, pressing all the buttons.
‘You can’t go back down, you’ll get killed,’ the stone said. ‘Stay here where you’re safe. Zara is already dead. Gold and Calcite are fighting valiantly but they’ll lose. Stay here.’
‘I know they’re dead, but we need those disks! We have to stop the elementals getting them.’
All the button lights blinked out and the lift stopped.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Hold,’ the stone said. ‘You’re right, we need the disks. Give me a moment.’
I summoned the Murasame and stood fidgeting in the lift.
‘Fixed,’ the stone said, and the lift hurtled towards the ground. ‘I suggest you use your energy centres.’
I concentrated and floated slightly above the floor as the lift plummeted. It slowed slightly, then stopped, and the doors opened. I touched down and raced out to see Simone in her pyjamas standing over the pile of junk from the car, Dark Heavens in her hand.
She turned when she heard me. ‘Poor stones, they died again! This isn’t fair on them.’
I crouched and put my left hand on one of the hard disks in the pile on the ground. ‘Are they still good?’
‘Yes,’ the stone said. ‘The Princess destroyed the elementals. Now all we need are the stones back to process the data.’
‘Send a request through to Court Ten to expedite the process,’ I said.
‘Court Ten is closed for the night; they’ll reply in the morning,’ the stone said.
I rose. ‘We need to take these disks upstairs.’
‘We need to take all our junk upstairs,’ Simone said, staring at the objects on the ground. ‘Why did we have twelve boxes of tissues in the boot?’