by Sam Abraham
Sun punched the drywall behind her so hard he put a hole in the plaster. “Last chance.”
“There is an account,” Anmei said, “with large sums transacted in and out for the last three years. One recipient of this money is another account that belongs to the professor.”
Sun nodded, considering her words. Then he whirled on Yang and punched him in the gut. The professor doubled over in pain. “Why did you and Shen come to me for help? What is your plan?”
Yang spat a wad of blood onto the floor. “I will never say.”
Sun was about to slap him, but thought better of it and instead whirled on Anmei. “And you! Your snakelike river ways don’t fool me. How do I know you aren’t in on it too?”
Anmei said a silent prayer and gambled. “Don’t be stupid,” she snapped, and for a moment Sun forgot he was the alpha dog. “If I was in on the take, I wouldn’t be spilling it to you. My ancestors have lived in Wuhu for five hundred years, and I am not about to let a mad scientist run an army over my home without discovering that his accounts recently grew by two hundred and thirty billion Yuan.”
Sun was so incensed at the sheer magnitude of the sum that he could hardly breathe. “What now, then?”
Anmei looked at Yang. “Who knows who else is guilty?” she said, sharing only snippets of what she had pieced together. “I don’t know whether any of the others are complicit, or if Yang has been playing everyone like fools. But we can’t let him go until we find out.”
Sun spat on the floor. “Find a dark hole,” he told the guards. “Throw him in it and tell no one where he is except for me.” He looked at Anmei with his nose in the air. “Not even her.”
When the guards marched the professor from his office, the bandit picked up the toppled office chair and took a seat, putting his dirty boots up on the desk. Anmei started to speak but Sun shushed her. “You’ve said too much already, Minister. Get out of my sight.”
Chapter 29 - Kan (坎)
Between Thorny Prison Walls
The day after the battle for the City of Heaven on Earth, Li and Shen surveyed the damage in Ma'anshan. Hotels had been toppled by drone fire. Piles of rubble and bodies lay in the streets. “We must retreat into the hills,” Shen told her as they watched warriors in white interrogate remaining River Syndicate infantry. “The Centrists will learn of conflict this close to Nanjing. If they find us too soon, all of our work to save the west from famine will be undone.”
Li laughed, watching as ranks of hostage infantrymen declared allegiance to the Jade. “I am surprised at you, Laoshi,” she said. “Despite the fact that my father has reneged on his promise to meet me, despite an ambush by the River Syndicate, we are stronger than ever. Have you forgotten the miracle of the Holy Lake, how I pulled the waters over the land? Thousands flock to our cause, are given longshui, and are healed of hunger. God must be protecting me, for if He were not, surely we would have failed by now. Why would we stop?”
“Xiao Li,” Shen said, shaking his head, “we have been lucky so far, but we must stick to the plan.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Li snorted at her teacher’s apparent cowardice. Vivid images played in her mind of all the lost girls in Nanjing, and she felt the pull of the weak and poor. “I am the agent of heaven,” she intoned, yearning for the summit of worthiness that could only be tasted from the worship of those she had saved. “I will take my divine mandate into the Centrist belly, and show people that they do not ever need to be afraid.” And she walked away from her teacher before he could say another word.
For two nights after the battle, the Centrist metropolis of Nanjing swirled as usual. Malls swarmed with fashion alleys, hydrocycles wove through traffic jams and countless tiny stories were told, lives rushing, small-talking over tea, as the city’s neon lips sang songs of thirty million souls.
On the third day, the Jade appeared like a ghost at dawn.
As the sun rose, five hundred men in white stood in a square outside Nanjing Media Tower, in the center of town. The smog was thick, blowing in from eastern industrial zones. It was not hard for a few smoke pellets to make the whiteout complete. The Jade came from the alleys and subway tunnels in small bands. No one paid them mind, these tiny bands of migrants, as invisible as the blue sky to the city dwellers, their faces as forgetful as the hot September breeze.
Now they stood in white ranks, in eight blocks of three lines each, broken and unbroken. Green tattoos curled up from their white smocks, marking them as the followers of the Lady in the Moon. A woman stood in their center, in a white gown that hugged her slender body and flowed out in waves. As the city woke, the smoke pellets dissipated to reveal the Jade contingent, and every holoview broadcasted the leader of the cult that was sweeping the Ghost Lands.
“Your voices are being stolen!” the girl yelled, her words echoing from the mediadrones circling over the square. “You from western farms and you from the eastern coast, your names are being erased as our land is poisoned. Your masters fish the sea dry, bleed life until there is nothing but ashes. And woe to any who speaks this truth, for they are branded ‘sinners’ and banished to the dying west.”
A crowd of a thousand people soon surrounded the righteous in white. They too were Jade, in plain clothes to entice ordinary citizens of Nanjing to join them, pulling the underclass from forgotten places. Soon, the crowd clogged the road, forcing cars to crawl. Police arrived, surrounding the square.
“But we need not be victims!” the girl in white continued, sweeping her arms over the crowd. “Why should we slave in factories and fields so that some fat moneylender can make another few kuai? As millions starve, let us remember how Jesus Christ welcomed sinners and victims. Why did they flock to listen to His parables, when He spoke of bringing home the lost lamb, or finding the lost coin? Because,” she said passionately, “He was touched by the spirit of Chang’e. They saw Him summon Her spirit to feed thousands with only a few loaves of bread and two fish! It was the Lady in the Moon who brought the breath of God, not only to Jesus but to all true prophets before and after.
“Now Chang’e has come back to us, so that we will never be hungry again. Seek not the Heaven of foreigners. Look not to the Muslim afterlife, the Buddhist Nirvana, for these are lesser heavens. They were born when the Middle Kingdom was aged and wise. Even Jesus Christ had not been born when Chang’e flew first to the moon.” She paused, looked out at their yearning, and knew what they wanted to hear.
“I will tell you a true story,” Li said, her voice booming over the square. “The night before Christ spoke the parable of the Prodigal Son, He was lost in despair, for all around He saw hypocrisy. And though He was the vessel of divine power, He wept, overwhelmed, feeling impotent to change the injustice of the world. Yet before His tears could touch the ground, Chang’e reached out with invisible hands and caught them. Surprised to see His tears floating like sparkling raindrops, Jesus said, ‘Show yourself, angel or demon!’ Now, Chang’e did not let Christ see Her face, for it was not yet time. But She revealed Her voice to Him like a storm of flutes. ‘I am neither sprite nor imp, but She who came before you.’ And when Jesus asked, ‘Why have you come?’, He heard Her whisper like the autumn rain. ‘You have chosen the path of miracles and have saved many, and yet you blame yourself for the sins of others! Why? All are on the road they have chosen. Simply feel your breath and you will be a mirror to the sinners of the world. They will realize their shame and follow you. And when they do—’ her voice faded away, ‘—they will find me waiting.’
“Thus, touched yet again by the Lady in the Moon,” Li said, looking around the crowd conspiratorially, “Jesus remembered how to feel Heaven in His breath, and wrote the parable of the Prodigal Son, of the return of the sinner to his Father’s house.”
Li saw police surround the edge of the crowd, push in and peel pilgrims off, force them down and arrest them. But the girl in white reached out her hands and asked those around her to pray. As one, the Jade force knelt, clasped their hands and closed th
eir eyes.
“This is a promise,” she said to the drones snapping vids of her face. “The Ghost Lands have been purified of corruption and hunger by my army of invincible warriors. If you feel lost, abandoned by your Centrist masters, come to us. We will show you how the spirit of Chang’e makes the poorest farmer equal to our great Centrist emperors. Let all who are hungry come and evolve. Let all who are needy choose salvation among the Jade.”
Knowing her time was short, she said, “I call upon the Western Wind to lift to Heaven those who save themselves.”
On cue, smoke pellets were dropped again in the crowd, and a cloud of green mist began to obscure the plaza. Green banners were flung into the air all around them, as if giant grass wings spread their feathery blades. The police looked on in surprise, searching for the source of the green paper, but the rolls of paper were longer than subway cars, and had been thrown from deep in the crowds of nameless thousands. The rolls unraveled in arcs, crossing in midair like great hands clasping. All the while, green and white smoke swirled up between office towers, sweeping down streets, drifting on the wind. Soon nothing was visible, not even the giant skyscrapers of downtown.
The smoke took hours to dissipate. And when it cleared, under green paper jumbled on the ground, five hundred white robes had been abandoned, as if all that was left of the Jade snake was its skin. All the customary arrests were made, but no one seemed to know anything about the girl in white.
Chapter 30 – Li (離)
The Image Of Fire
As Jia Anmei waited in a dark tunnel far from her home in Wuhu, afraid and surrounded by bandits, she remembered how the land around her village had decayed since her childhood. How she had found salvation in the Three Self Church, and how she had evangelized the local River Syndicate magistrate so that the people of the Ghost Lands might have something to hold onto as they starved. How the River Syndicate had lauded her for it, giving her the title of Cultural Minister as a reward. How, lacking alternatives, she allied herself with the very people she hated. And how, in order to save what little remained of her home, she chose to work with Guoanbu, the State Security Ministry spying on its own people.
All these sins and more she had committed. To her they were a mark of how far the world had fallen. But if her alternative was letting her home be overrun, she felt she had no choice but to uncover how this upstart church of the Jade had come to possess so much power.
A warrior opened the door and beckoned her inside. Anmei followed him into a room with a metal table covered in bloodstains. A delicate arsenal of scalpels, daggers, electrodes, hammers and picks was scattered among rolls of duct tape.
And there, laying on the table, was Dr. Yang.
Yang was shirtless, his chest and face a theater of wounds. Some leaked blood, others filled with pus. His hair had caked around his bulging eyes, his joints twisted at horrible angles. He was still breathing, Anmei saw, but it would not be for long if this continued.
“I wanted you to see him,” said the bandit Sun, standing over the professor and wiping his bloody hands with a dirty rag. “To see what I do to those who cross me. Imagine what I would do to you.”
“What secrets has all this mess uncovered?” Anmei said, praying that she would not faint.
Sun smiled and said nothing as he walked past her. Under guard, she followed him up an elevator into a hotel that had long been abandoned by everyone but the Jade. The flooded lobby stank of mold, but the top floor of the high rise, which Sun had taken for himself, glittered with satin curtains.
His guards left him at the elevator, where he met two girls in yellow dresses who Anmei guessed were not a day over fifteen. He groped them as they removed his tunic. When he was naked, they wrapped him in a silk robe and led him into a room with a wide bathtub and window. Daring not disobey the bandit as he beckoned her to follow, Anmei stood just inside the door as the girls helped the bandit into the steaming bath and giggled as he slapped water at them. She focused on the vista. It was a cloudy day, with slender rays tracing the towers rising above the surface of the Holy Lake.
“Forgive my forwardness,” Anmei’s voice came, “but I must ask again what you have learned. The Jade are being noticed. Some say that the Centrists cannot possibly be strong when they cannot even quell unrest in a tiny backwater.” She realized that the girls were paying more attention to her than to the bandit in the bathtub.
“Leave us,” Sun said, peevishly.
When the girls had scampered out, Anmei said, “How will Li Aizhu react when she finds out you have been keeping courtesans?”
“You’re just jealous that I don’t bathe with your old bones.” Sun said, sinking down into the frothy water and closing his eyes. “The girls came to worship Lady Li, as did we all. But the Lady is gone and fate has deemed it best that I become lord over this land in her absence.” Sun grew quiet, wondering what supernatural powers Li might have to read his mind from afar and know that he had usurped power over the Lake. “Besides, I was the one to uncover Yang’s treachery,” he said defensively.
“So he did tell you something,” Anmei said, ignoring Sun’s lies. “Did he name the buyer?”
Sun smiled. “Americans, of course. Through some fart named Lao Jinglai who put the deal together. A hot shot from Jiangsu. Good Dr. Yang begged me to let him go to Shanghai, just before he passed out from the pain. He said the deal won’t go through without him.”
Anmei perked up, forgetting her fatigue. “Lao Jinglai. From Jiangsu. Are you certain?”
Sun splashed more water on his face. “Are you questioning my word,” he growled.
Anmei swallowed her pride, bowing her head. “Lao Jinglai was Secretary of Jiangsu, many years ago. But the Centrists removed him from power after it became public that he was running medical experiments. Horrible holos of the victims were circulated on state television, and he was disgraced. I must go back to Wuhu and inform my superiors about Lao’s involvement. Would you agree that it would be wise to evacuate this place?”
“Why would I do that? What would Lady Li say if we abandoned the birthplace of her miracle?”
“She has already abandoned it. The River Syndicate’s stupid pride is the only reason the Jade have not been compromised faster. When Beijing recaptures the Purified Territories, we will be written down in history as traitors, our ancestors defiled forever. If you truly want respect, help me destroy this farce of a religion from the inside before it does any more damage.”
Sun thought for a moment. Then he clapped twice, and two warriors in white appeared at the entrance. “Take this woman and lock her in a room near the professor.”
The warriors forced Anmei’s arms behind her back. “Have you gone mad?” she said. “What about Lao? What about the money?”
“You asked me once what happens if Yang leaves,” Sun said with a crooked smile. “Well, now the good professor will stay where he is. But what about you? I think you know quite a bit more than you let on. I will be going downriver, to where the Jade army is camped near Nanjing, to pay tribute to the Lady in the Moon. And I can’t have you running around with your loose mouth while I’m gone. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you’re just as comfortable as Dr. Yang.”
As the guards forced Anmei from the room, Sun laughed and splashed himself and clapped three times for his women to return and care for their lord.
Chapter 31 - Xian (咸)
Lake On The Mountain
Great Peace Number Two was the biggest occuhive in Ma'anshan. It was barely a hike from Nanjing’s jostling downtown, from which Li had escaped that very morning. From the rooftops of the Jade stronghold, one could see the hilltop park in the Centrist city housing the Mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen.
Here, where ivy grew along stone bridges and violet wildflowers bloomed in the autumn heat, eight Jade warriors carried the Lady in the Moon in a cushioned palanquin. She looked upon the chrysanthemums and peonies, searching for serenity in the wild gardens.
The bandit Sun, who had arrived t
hat afternoon from the Holy Lake, followed her sedan dressed in white robes and finery. Behind him, a hundred Jade clergy sang hymnals. The porters carried Li’s palanquin into a wide amphitheater where Xie and Shen stood before tens of thousands, holding candles and wearing white. Li’s breath was taken away by the sheer scale of her following.
Sun intoned a ritual, his words mixing with melodies from liuqin strings. “Only you, oh prophet of Chang’e, can rid the land of sin,” Sun said, “and help all humanity see the light of miracles. After slaughtering demons at your gates with lightning, you lift the Jade from Nanjing with nothing but the western wind. Who among the gods is like you, oh Lady in the Moon?”
Li descended from her seat, unable to count all the faces in the crowd. For every pilgrim arrested in Nanjing, ten had come by ox back and ghost train to see Chang’e returned, and know the breath of God. Feeling their presence, she approached a wall where Shen had commissioned a mural. Rivers were drawn winding through mountains, bamboo forests cradling rice paddies. Painted boars and roosters, monkeys and rats, tigers and dragons seemed to come to life. Li slid her fingers against the concrete illustration, and wondered if she had ever been so pure.
“If our story were told with such color,” Li said, leaning against the stone, “all would know how to transcend their earthly weakness by the grace of the Lady in the Moon. But how should we show the path simply, so that our children understand?”
“We can consult the Oracle, Lady,” Sun said, “It is never wrong.”
“The I Ching shines with ancient purity,” she said, knowing her flock would see her too as a symbol of all that was holy. “Proceed.”
Sun produced his four brass coins and dropped them upon an altar. As he had done many times, he examined each, ticking his fingers and drawing chalk lines upon the stone. People crowded close to see the bandit repeat the process again and again, until two broken lines were sandwiched between four unbroken ones. Then Sun’s contemplation broke into a smile.