The detonators were in different spots, required different routes to reach. She couldn’t destroy each simultaneously, but rather experienced them in sequence, like they were on old televisions slightly out of sync.
She stumbled over a low tool case at one of the sites. Kim concentrated on shattering the rest of the detonators as she got back to her feet, only to find a man standing triumphantly with the lost one in his hand.
“God is Great!”
Everything vanished in a flash.
Chapter 68: Helen
She took the stairs up to the roof two and three at a time as she ran. Ozzie turning her into a puppet and then using her to attack her friends was awful enough, but he also graphically detailed what he planned for her. He kept calling her daughter. If she survived this, there might not be enough hot water in the world to get her clean again.
He’d ranted about incinerating China’s leadership, but Father wasn’t in Beijing, he was here in New Shanghai. Ozzie didn’t know that, otherwise he would’ve said something. Hacking into the helicopter he’d requisitioned for whoever Chang was should’ve been easy, but Helen had never done it running up stairs in realspace. She nearly stumbled to the ground when it finally answered her orders.
The flight to the government center took only minutes, but it felt like hours. She cursed ever following the Snake Mother’s advice.
“You could afford the delay, dear,” it said as she ran down the empty sidewalk next to the helipad. “You’re ready for anything now.”
The stamp on her pass was good for twenty-four hours so she had no trouble getting all the way to Father’s office. Fortunately, he worked on correspondence alone. If he’d been in a meeting she would never risk the loss of face disrupting him would cause. All of China would’ve burned, millions of people dead just for honor’s sake.
Kim and Mike made more sense all the time.
“Father, please, I must speak to you. China is in very great danger.”
“Close the door, Fang Hua.”
She closed it on the pair of concerned bodyguards.
“Father, please. We must make an announcement. The terrorists, they’re all Pakistani. I have proof.” Ozzie had gleefully detailed that wrinkle during the fight. They’d been masquerading as Chinese special forces as they’d burned one Indian village after another.
“So Qiáng Shān is finally dead then?”
It took her a second to remember Ozzie’s Chinese name. “You knew about Qiáng Shān? That he was still alive?”
“We suspected. The autopsy showed the guardrail had explosive residue on it. Not at all what would be expected from the debris of an accident.” He sighed and steepled his hands in front of him. “Can you tell me how he managed to fake the corpse?”
“It wasn’t a faked corpse, Father. It’s very complicated. I’ll be happy to explain what happened, but we must act quickly.”
He smiled and pressed a button on the desk. A virtual screen flashed into being behind him, much enlarged but essentially identical to the one Ozzie had shown during the fight. This one was live video. The screen had a countdown timer with ninety seconds remaining.
“No, daughter, we do not have to act quickly. We do not have to act at all.”
She grabbed the back of a chair to keep from falling down. He knew about the dams already, about what Ozzie was doing. Finally, she realized the truth. Nothing this big could ever happen without his approval.
She was trying to stop a nuclear war that her father wanted.
“You must stop this. You can’t let it happen again.”
He nodded distractedly, examining the images. “So Three Gorges isn’t a secret to you anymore. Good. Our problem was not planning on a large enough scale. Even with a scrambled economy, China absorbed the blow too well.”
She had defended him, defended this government, in spite of the monstrous things they’d done. Helen had betrayed her friends to preserve this travesty. He turned them over for medical experiments.
“Father, this is wrong. You must stop this.”
“You will remain silent. This is men’s work.”
The seconds thumped away. Obedience rooted her to the spot, but the need to move was overwhelming. Everything she’d ever believed about him was a lie. She'd built her entire life, everything, on lies.
With seven seconds left, walls blasted open silently at all twelve sites. An armored figure marched purposefully through each frame, throwing lightning from her arms. Helen recognized her even through security cameras.
Kim.
When the timer hit zero there was exactly one flash, one detonation that sent a wall of water down a valley somewhere in India. Her real self stumbled in Chinese realmspace as a sensation she’d known all her life vanished. The force on the other side of the Great Firewall, what she now knew was the base of her brother’s true existence, vanished.
Oh, no.
Father shook his head. “We were hoping for a much better result. But no matter.” He opened a new console full of military symbols and entered his access codes. “It will take a few minutes for India to discover what has happened. Hopefully that idiot vice president of mine will be sober enough to confirm my launch authorizations.”
Mike and Kim were dead. “A nuclear exchange. You want a nuclear exchange. You can’t do this.”
“I can and I will. Fang Hua, you do not understand China. There are too many of us, too many men especially. Only a reaping can cure us. China must be culled, Fang Hua, culled and then allowed to rebuild again. India cannot be allowed to continue on while we rebuild, so she too must be culled.”
“No, Father. China is greater than this. We are greater than this. You cannot decide the fate of so many. We are not cogs in a machine.”
“Of course you are. There are too many teeth in the gears, Fang Hua. The machine doesn’t mesh anymore. This will be quick and clean.”
“Not clean, Father. The radiation—”
He slammed his fist onto his desk. “The radiation will be a problem solved by the survivors. Those Japanese devils did it with Fukushima, and we Chinese are vastly superior to those shit eaters.”
Under no circumstances could this happen. Billions would vanish in a flash. She walked toward the desk. “You cannot do this. I will not allow it.”
“You? You’re a weak girl. You couldn’t keep those foreign devils of yours in line.”
“Father, you must stop this madness.”
He stood stiffly. “You are fortunate we are alone, daughter. I will not tolerate any more of your disrespect. You are dismissed.”
The Snake Mother was right. She needed to be ready for anything. Helen put her hand in her pocket. “Please, Father, you must not do this.”
He slapped her so hard she briefly thought he'd dislocated her jaw. The console was open, but Helen couldn’t fight her way past him. She was too small.
“You are my daughter and you will obey. You will obey me!”
Do it!
The motions were smooth, part of the muscle memory of her host. Faster than Father could comprehend she had the syringe out, uncapped, and in his neck.
“My loyalty is to China, not to you.”
She squeezed the plunger.
The Snake Mother in her head cackled gleefully, but then stopped when Helen grabbed a trashcan and heaved her guts into it.
“Don’t be such a baby. He had it coming.”
Helen pulled her head up and wiped her lips. “Shut up. I need to concentrate.”
She immediately contacted the Indian Prime Minister. Using Father’s voice and his rough English she said, “Sir, there is very little time. I deeply apologize, but our drones have just seen the Mullaperiyar Dam collapse. You must alert the people downstream to get to higher ground immediately.”
“You have drones operating inside our borders? This is an outrage!”
Politics. It always boiled down to politics. “Again, I must deeply apologize, but you have to alert the people downstream.”
/> Helen split more threads off and interfaced with the military. “This is Premier, actual. All units stand down immediately. Do not fire, even if fired upon. All units confirm these orders.”
Chapter 69: Kim
A machine beeped away, somewhere close. Not only did heaven exist, it used electronics. She was definitely going to tease Mike about what a load of crap reincarnation was.
And sheets. Kim bunched them in her fists. Breathing came next. The afterlife smelled a lot like a hospital. Hang on a second.
She opened her eyes.
Kim wasn’t dead. She was on a hospital bed in a very neat single room. The characters on the medical monitors were in Chinese. Morning sunlight streamed in through a window straight onto the white sheets, throwing everything else into dim shadows. But where was Mike? She couldn’t have made it this far without him. She looked around.
He was asleep on some kind of convertible chair beside her, wearing pajamas and a robe. There were bandages where his restraints had been, and bruises everywhere else.
It took two tries to get her voice to work.
“Hey.”
He snapped awake and rushed to her side. When his fingers brushed her hand, the sear forced her yanked it back.
So much for touching him. “Well that answers one question.” Kim was still as broken as ever.
“How do you feel?”
“Like someone blew a dam up in my face.” She hurt in places she didn’t know she had. “Why aren’t we dead?”
“When the explosion knocked us both out, we got yanked through all the dimensions and wound up in our realspace bodies. You took a harder hit than I did. You’ve been unconscious for nearly two days. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Okay may be pushing it, but I’ll live.” The pain in his expression turned her inside out. “Hey, really, I’m fine.”
“The last time you transformed, it was for a few minutes. Spencer and I compared notes. We were in there for at least an hour.”
His concern made sense now. “You thought I’d wake up crazy?”
He nodded. “If you woke up at all.” A warm smile bloomed. “I love you.”
It was such an enormous relief to hear those words again. “I love you too.”
“Hey!” Tonya shouted as she hobbled through the door on crutches. She had more bandages on than Mike did. “Look who’s up! I told you she’d be ready for breakfast.”
Spencer came in behind her carrying two big bags of food. She was so hungry. “Spencer, you are a life saver.”
He unpacked everything and, while they ate, she made everyone else catch her up on the rest of the story.
Chapter 70: Helen
With her new access it wasn’t difficult to locate the monument to Ozzie’s ancestors. It was trickier to find time to visit, but nowadays making things a priority meant they actually happened.
It was Tonya who’d goaded her into coming here. “You should honor him.”
Helen was deeply ashamed that the hotel they first stayed in, before the panda sanctuary and everything else, had discarded all the baggage her newfound friends, her new family, had brought to China. Most of it was easily replaceable, except for the ashes of Tonya’s mentor.
“It’s okay,” she said when they’d found out. “It actually makes sense.”
Mike was her brother, but Tonya was becoming an anchor. She was practical, but also passionate. So different from anyone Helen had ever known before.
“It does?”
“What I brought back didn’t matter. It’s good we lost it.” She steadied herself in a way that Helen desperately wanted to learn. “You need to go.”
Helen brought Ozzie’s urn and she prayed as the incense burned.
The voice behind her was reedy and cracked with age. “So he was finally able to marry, then?”
She stood and bowed deeply to the ancient woman who’d walked up behind her.
“Oh, stop,” she said. “You don’t know who I am.”
Helen bowed more deeply. “You are Xian Méigui Yi, Xian Qiáng Shān’s grandmother, and you are one hundred and seventeen years old.”
The woman didn’t have a face so much as a collection of deep cracks and wrinkles, but the smile twinkled just the same. “Very good. So the rumors are true, Madam Premier?”
Nobody should know that, least of all Ozzie’s grandmother.
It all had happened, the dams, the terrorists, all of it, because the corrupt old men of the politburo thought they could ride the dragon and not pay a price. They needed to be tamed, so she and Mike went on what he called a fishing expedition. The dirt they found would’ve outraged her in a previous life. Now it was just spirit money, something she had to burn to buy more guanxi.
When the politburo realized how effortlessly she’d gotten the data, how willing her father had been to incinerate them all, and how well she could imitate him, they offered her the premier’s seat on the spot. Disguised, of course, at least at first. There was a lot of drama in that meeting, but when they realized she had all the cash in their numbered Taiwanese bank accounts in her pocket, it brought them around fast enough. Mike’s version of the carrot and the stick had been basic but effective.
Weibo went berserk with conspiracy theories for the predictable fifteen minutes and then it danced away to obsess over Chinese Idol again. She would’ve found out quickly if anyone took the rumors seriously. China hadn’t been ruled by a woman for more than thirteen centuries, let alone by one so young and unknown.
“How did you…”
Méigui Yi laughed and waved her hand. “Calm down. The politburo, they gossip like old women. I heard a few things. The rest was just a guess. My grandson’s recruiter was…” She paused with a glint in her eye, long enough for a bead of sweat to fall down the center of Helen’s back. This was a secret that could bring it all crashing down, and now she had no choice but to trust the old woman.
“My grandson’s recruiter is the premier. You wouldn’t know about me unless you had access to his personal files.”
Méigui Yi sat down heavily on a bench in front of the monument. “This is China. We won’t admit we know you are who you are, unless you want us to admit we know who you are. But you shouldn’t, because if you do, we won’t like it. We’ll be fine believing you’re him, as long as you keep pretending to be him. Just don’t shove it in our faces.”
It wouldn’t have been possible twenty years ago, before the realms. The modern world had gotten used to seeing their leaders inside realms, being able to touch them without touching anything real. It was a division she’d never once considered important before she’d come outside. Now her life, and the life of her country, depended on it.
Helen had directed the extremely delicate negotiations with India, nuclear weapons on both sides armed and seconds from launch. The ancestors had smiled on China once more. Mullaperiyar dam was a century and a half old; the locals had complained about how unsafe it was for generations. They had been better prepared for a collapse than perhaps any other place in India.
The death toll was still deeply shameful, but the politburo decided to let them believe it was an accident. China’s herculean efforts at disaster recovery were doing much to rehabilitate her image on the world’s stage.
What to do about Pakistan was more delicate. The sick man of South Asia was more dangerous than anyone had believed possible, so she’d allowed their treachery to become public knowledge. The meddlesome American government insisted on multiparty talks to try to resolve everything. Helen agreed, knowing nothing would come of them. At least it would keep the pushy Yankees busy. In the meantime Indian and Chinese Special Forces had begun coordinating with each other for very specific missions.
A sibilant voice whispered in her ear, “It helped that Father’s body was never found, didn’t it?”
“You said you’d go away after the ghost festival.”
The Snake Mother laughed. “Oh I have, dear. I have.” The presence vanished, leaving Helen’s stomac
h lurching with remem-bered poisons.
Méigui Yi broke her out of her reverie. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“No, we weren’t together, not that way.” Ozzie was a monster, but there was something about him. In the midst of that horrible fight she'd felt the connection, had known on some level that he wasn’t beyond saving. Now that he was gone, there would never again be someone quite like that in her life. The regret over his loss was yet another contradiction she was simply getting used to.
“Tell me, Grandmother. What was he like as a child?”
Méigui Yi chuckled. “A total bastard. They all are nowadays. Spoiled little emperors.” She grew wistful. “He was still my grandson, though. Did you know I was the only one who took him outside after he was recruited? He had no proper respect for the ancestors.” She leaned in close. “You should tell the Premier to work on that, you know? I hear your opinion carries a lot of weight with him.”
This time it was Helen’s turn to laugh. “China will change now, Grandmother. Slowly, but it will change.”
Mike and Kim were right. China was more than just a government, much more, and Helen now knew trusting the people was long overdue. She had no idea what her country would look like in the future. Whatever happened, they would all do it together, and in peace. It would take decades, if not longer. Still, this was the 21st century. Helen had the time.
“Politics is boring. Please, tell me more about your grandson.”
Chapter 71: Mike
He walked out of the hotel lobby into the driveway and sighed. At one point in this adventure, the only luggage they had were the clothes on their backs. When they’d fled from the lab, Kim didn’t even have that much.
She was now making up for it in spades. The amount of luggage was nothing compared to what she wanted him to do with it.
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