“Your persistence worries me,” she rasps.
“I was less aware of your district than I expected, but I assure you, my client is very serious about arranging a match. She asks that you accept Sun Hyun-sook as amends for my lack of etiquette. He will be your escort for the next twenty-four hours.”
Sam glances at Sun, who smiles back. He's not quite the man she's dreamt of bringing home on holiday, but there's a thuggish charm in the way he moves, and in the indigo tattoos covering his square-tipped fingers.
“And I will personally give you five hundred right now if you return to Jake’s and meet Yao Su. She's the one who wants to play.”
Sam doesn't recognize the name, which means Yao is a player from out of town. It also explains why she's been peculiar about setting up a match. District 3 is Sam's stomping ground, and while she doesn't exactly have friends in high places, she's met enough gamblers over the years to know they don't tolerate foreigners making trouble.
“Alright, make the payment.” Whatever Yao is planning, she seems to want a genuine match. For five hundred Sam is willing to sit in the same room and listen.
The deposit blinks onto Sam's display and she swings off her bike next to Sun, who has an umbrella open and waiting. The other two Koreans wedge into the stream of sidewalk traffic, water running cleanly down their hydrophobic suits as Sam and Sun follow close behind.
Sam tries not to think about Sun's lips, or the heat she can feel radiating from his body when they press close. A ten thousand-credit game has no room for distractions. She chews absently on her bottom lip, wishing she hadn't put out her cigar.
#
Back in the bar, someone—Yao Su, Sam presumes—is sitting on a stool at the counter, talking to Jake. Yao turns to the door and Sam sees the gear work attached to her head, an expensive halo of dreadful wires and black, plant-like tubes that make Sam's skin ripple with goose bumps. She rolls her shoulders back to shrug off the chill and walks after Sun, who's already at Yao's side, pressing his lips to her hand.
Yao smiles at his touch and gently smoothes the hair pinned above the nape of her neck; a strangely feminine gesture that reminds Sam of a geisha, or an elder woman being doted on.
“Nice to meet you, Sam.”
Yao's voice is slow and unconcerned, thin like a fine piece of pottery. The organic half of her face is smooth and unwrinkled. Sam wonders which drugs she's taking, and if they might be legal in District 3.
“I don't have ten thousand,” Sam says, sticking her hands in her jacket pockets.
Yao nods. “You would owe me.”
Sam hides her surprise with a frown. Yao's face is unreadable, yet squarely serious. It seems that she trusts Sam's word, meaning she's as ignorant as Felix. Almost certainly unaware of how hard it would be to track down Sam and force her to pay.
“Ok,” she says, pulling her goggles down. “Let's go.”
#
The alcove is a concave of smooth, seamless plastic, curving like an open baseball glove around a high-back chair. On Sam's command it alights with a flawless 3D display of open space: the view from the cockpit of her digital starship. She grabs the handling sticks as they emerge from the floor and blasts to hyper speed, feeling the music from her goggles vibrate against her chest. The familiar thrill stirs her blood and pushes her steadily to greater speeds, past stars and ancient gas clouds, until she catches sight of a lone planet, smaller and further separated from the rest.
Time slows with the speed of the starship and describable shapes begin to form: the outlines of coasts and mountains, and there, ahead of Sam, a patch of freezing white. To her side a great, brown river burrows through a landmass of velvet green, and on the other a storm churns, hiding the ground below.
When Sam reaches the tree line of the tallest mountain, she levels off and passes over the landscape in a silver blur. Her red-rimmed eyes twitch and dart in their sockets, straining to keep her as tight as possible to the mountainside without crashing into it. When her control of the ship feels sharp and right she pulls off the planet in a single, upward blast and slingshots to a star cluster four thousand light-years away. Yao appears beside her en route in a porcupine ship of narrow edges and sharp angles, matte as a blot of ink and moving silently, as Sam imagines a fish deep in a sunless ocean might. The ship’s compact shell is fully opaque, hiding the bloodless metal eyes that Sam knows return her gaze unobserved.
They stop near a solar system mothered by a small green star. A track of transparent blue light shines into existence beneath them, arcing far and down through an indiscernible layer of clouds to a planet's surface. A sliver of the track turns red and the two ships swoop after the changing color, down through the membrane of atmosphere, and into the planet's womb of air and rain.
Under the curtain of cloud, night is thick and smothering. The lights on Sam's ship flash on and bring fire to the darkness, illuminating a frozen landscape of ice and snow and naked rock, blazing with the light of the two ships.
Sam follows the track into a narrow canyon and turns her ship vertical, hugging the inside wall and edging into the lead. By the moonlight she lilts and sways a hair above the frozen rock, gripping her handling sticks with the lightness of spiders' webs. Her finest touch.
From a glimpse of shining snow she sees the canyon's exit and pulls up to block Yao's path, flashing first out into the open sky. The track leads her down to an ocean shore caught in the fury of a storm and Sam has to divert her thrusters to stay balanced in the sudden gusts of wind. Giant forks of lightning crack in the distance, giving Sam strobe vision of the track, which turns out over the water. She steers a low, curvy path in the lee of mountainous waves, cockpit shaking from the thunder like a wounded bull.
For the past half hour it has felt to Sam as if someone has been pinching harder and harder on the back of her eyeballs. Pain flares again and she quickly wipes at tears, chasing the track out of the storm and back into space, toward the green star. As it grows in Sam's vision, black spots appear where planets should be, then she sees nothing at all. The stars vanish. Only a black as deep and certain as the sea remains.
Tears stream from Sam's broken eyes and she veers sharply to her left, smashing into Yao. The two ships spiral off course and Sam's vision momentarily returns, showing her a burning emerald light looming in trajectory. Warning sounds that Sam knows accompany blinking red lights fill the cockpit, communicating imminent death. She flips two switches by memory and jerks the handling sticks to the side, in time with her stuttering vision to glimpse Yao's ship return to the looping track.
The game ends the moment before Sam's ship is destroyed and immediately disconnects both players from their alcoves. Star Racer's 8-bit theme song begins playing in the background. Sam pulls on her goggles, setting them mute and fully opaque.
“Jake,” she calls, “lend me your arm.” The old cigar relights with a flick and she sucks in a cloud of numbing relief. The pain in her eyes dims from bonfire to pile of embers in an instant, yet a peek confirms that she still cannot see. Only grey outlines in a colorless world. Sam knows better than to keep trying and closes her eyes again, wishing she had something to wrap them with. She sends urgent messages to Jin and Sara, her closest friends, and slides out of the alcove, groping for the door. Her adrenaline's spent, already left and told her to go home for the night. She should have listened.
Sun catches her as she stumbles out of the machine, guides her to the counter. Once she’s seated, he says something terse in Korean and firmly grips her chin. Sam senses a hand moving toward her goggles and bats it away. “Where’s Jake?”
“He went out.”
Yao's slippery voice is surprisingly close. Sam stiffens, tries to appear calm, but the thought of Yao's smile hovering inches from her face forces a grimace.
“Such a painful expression. Let me see your eyes.”
“Not now,” Sam says, turning away. “Let's talk rematch.”
Yao clicks her tongue.
Sighs regretfully. “There will be no rematch. I really do need to see your eyes.”
Sam hears two sets of approaching feet and flips up her goggles.
“Open them?”
She does, briefly, and the Koreans mutter under their breath.
“It's quite bad, Sam. How are you going to pay me if your eyes don't work? This is the problem.”
“I have enough for a new pair,” she says, flipping the goggles back down.
“Show me.”
Sam clenches her teeth. “I can't exactly use my goggles, can I?” she explains. “I’ve been saving. Eyes don’t stop working without some warning.”
“I leave for Seoul in one hour. That does not give you enough time, I'm afraid. I am sorry.”
Two of the Koreans grab Sam on cue, easily handle her thrashing, lay her flat on the countertop. They take her jacket and goggles then thump something square and heavy next to her head.
“Lung or kidney. Your choice.”
Dread fills Sam's stomach. Felix and Yao's odd naivety had pulled her in like a fish. Their purpose in a tier three district is obvious now. But had Yao known about Sam's eyes? How did Felix get her number? Only close friends and well-known gamblers have it, and they know to stay away from gear heads. The cold realization kills Sam’s last hope.
“Jake.”
Yao doesn't reply, but Sam knows. She swears fiercely in Cantonese, the most hateful, ancestor-cursing line she knows, then hisses through her teeth in resignation.
“Kidney."
Yao's fingers slide under Sam's shirt, prod below her rib cage.
“Only one, right?”
“Only one. I don't want to kill you, Sam.”
The machine clicks twice and Yao slips a crumbling pill into Sam’s hand.
“Take this, quickly.”
Sam swallows it and the chemicals gallop across her mind, pulling down the curtain of sleep.
#
Sam wakes to the sound of morning traffic and the medicine smell of balm. She moves the hand resting limp on her shoulder onto the counter and slides, with a groan, until her feet touch the rubber floor. Her side hurts, but not nearly as much as she'd expected. And she isn't dead, which is something. She probes the air with her hands until they touch the fabric of a suit, then moves them down a sleeve to Sun's callused knuckles.
“Sun.”
Her voice can’t go above a whisper. She steps closer, one hand gripping the counter, and cups the side of his face. How is he so warm? She leans forward and kisses him on the lips, on his closed eyelids, on his nose. He wakes slowly at first, and when he smiles she feels it with her fingers.
“Do you remember where I parked my bike?”
#
Sam cuddles with Sun in the last minutes before sleep, floating in barbiturate comfort. Her new eyes will have to be cheap, yet last through a few months in Laishan. Long enough for Sam to make the money she needs to visit a clinic in Saigon, or Bhopal. But returning to Laishan…. Her thoughts drift back to the summer shrine, to the smell of incense, the snake, and her brother’s scream. The rest melts into a haze and Sam falls deeply, and numbly, asleep.
###
Spencer Wightman enjoys ancient history, podcasts, foreign films, and all manner of speculative fiction. "Shenzhen Blues" is his first published story.
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Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014 Page 9