Jade Prophet

by Sam Abraham

  “This sale has to happen,” he said softly.

  “What do we do?” Zoe said quietly.

  “I start damage control,” he said. “One way or another, by the New Year, all this will be over.”

  “What will be over?” came a new voice. A fork pierced the churrasco on Eli’s plate. He looked up as a man stuffed the meat into his mouth. Eli recognized him from his meeting with the Yellow River Company. He had been wearing a black mask then, but Eli remembered his shining eyes.

  The man’s posse hung about in black suits as the rest of the restaurant cleared, patrons dashing away from their tables. Eli recognized some of the thugs from Xintiandi, and the mall, and the butler from the Sinan Mansions. They had been following him all day.

  “Oh,” the man with shining eyes said, “You mean that the ORS deal will be over. You know, the deal you are smuggling through us because you don’t want anyone to know that the seller is Lao Jinglai.” The man dropped the fork on Eli’s plate with a clatter. “I mean, if it got out that Lao resurfaced after all these years to sell Chinese technology to Americans, what would people think?”

  “Excuse me,” Zoe said irritably, “can’t you see we’re in the middle of dinner?”

  “You were at the green light meeting,” Eli said, barely keeping his composure.

  “My friends call me Ginger,” the man said, “I just paid your check.” He swung around a chair, leaned the back against the table and straddled it.

  “Much obliged,” Eli said flatly.

  “We know you’re behind the Jade rebellion,” Ginger said. “But did you know that your dogs in the Ghost Lands are out of control? That they plan to execute Yang in a matter of days?”

  “I don’t care if you did pay the bill,” Zoe said testily. “That doesn’t give you the right to make up wild stories.”

  “Wild stories?” Ginger said, raising an eyebrow. “The Tiger of Shanghai does level accusations unless his facts are solid. You tried to pull a fast one, and you fucked up.”

  “What do you want?” Eli said.

  “Always the dealer!” Ginger said, laying his hand menacingly on Zoe’s shoulder. “Well, now I have a deal for you. Tomorrow, Ms. Chou here will go with me to the cesspool that used to be Anqing. When we return with Yang, the professor will give his designs to me, and you can keep your dirty money.”

  “And if I tell you to go fuck yourself?” Eli said.

  Ginger laughed. “I wouldn’t do that if you want to live. The Tiger knows what you’re selling. He will take the longshui, whether you like it or not.” He looked over his shoulder and three of his men revealed handguns in their jackets. “Oh, and we’ll be keeping you here as insurance,” he said, staring at Eli with his cybernetic eyes. “Any rudeness from you and we’ll cut off Ms. Chou’s pretty little head.”

  “No—“ Zoe’s words were cut off as two of the goons grabbed her.

  “I swear,” Eli fumed, “if you harm one hair on her—“

  “Then it will be your fault,” Ginger interrupted.

  Chapter 34 – Da Zhuang (大壯)

  Thunder In Heaven

  Li stood at the edge of the world. A towering pagoda rose before her on a hill, its crimson columns inlaid with gold. She looked behind her, at the silent, war-torn shell of a city. Somehow she recognized the scene, knew it like a lover’s face. To either side of the shrine stretched endless ocean blue. But between the columns, there was no sea, no sky. There was only a door.

  She stepped through into a temple. There was the white altar, surrounded by rows of Jade statues. Each statue was slightly different, she saw, walking among them. This one gripped a broadsword, grimacing his bearded jaw, while the statue next to him was a young man clenching his fists. They were endless, countless thousands of carved nephrite warriors, and she stared at them in wonder.

  A long shadow flashed overhead. Li looked up at the amber dome overhead, open in a canopy of branches, and watched the shadow become a swarm descending from the sky. The temple was soon filled with butterflies, orange flecks flitting about, sparkling like embers. The butterflies fluttered ever faster, tiny wings flurrying like twisting lines of silk, weaving into each other around the rows of statues so that they congealed into droplets of orange liquid.

  A thousand orange pools formed together and slowed into a long body streaked with the colors of fire. Golden amber fur radiated around a heaving ribcage. Four massive paws extended from a scaly belly. As the body coiled inside the temple, patterns in the creature’s hide danced like flame. Li was entranced by its sinuous levitation, and her eyes grew wide as she saw the head of the dragon.

  The dragon stared back, its pearl eyes unblinking. Its massive jaws were wider than she was tall, and blended into a muzzle feathered with horns that ran between its eyes and down its back. Long whiskers, waving on the breeze, stretched from nostrils sniffing the air, smelling her dreams and fears, her past and future. When the dragon curled its purple lips up over scimitar teeth, it took Li a moment to realize that the creature was smiling, and that it knew her destiny.

  “Jade Rabbit said you were looking for me,” Li said. She remembered her mother's words, that its third eye could reveal the path to freedom. But the mystic serpent before her had only two eyes.

  Its deep voice boomed in her mind, though its jaws were unmoving as it floated around her. We met many ages ago, Da Jie, it said, before you became immortal.

  “Where is your third eye?” Li said desperately. “Show it to me! I need it to save my mother!”

  In time, Da Jie. Everything in time. I met your ancestors millennia ago, when the first sages bottled the essence of Heaven and earth in characters. The stroke of the pen brought them divine awareness, and in their new knowledge they turned flint into knife, drawing chalk on walls and dividing the unbroken line. One became two, and three, and eight, and sixty-four. In the numbers they saw the spiral of Heaven, the golden ratio, and they followed its light. The Dao flowed within them, and the people became aware of land and sea in wide circles of fate. That was when I was born.

  Fog rose up around Li forming the ghosts of the rabbit and boar, giant pandas roaming forests of grass. Under a thick bamboo canopy, there was orange in the mist. A flash as the tiger pounced at her, passing through her body, a sage riding on the cat’s back. Then the image tore apart, revealing again the unblinking, fiery head of the dragon.

  Sages crafted me in hexagrams. And in the new knowledge I unveiled to them, they grew savage. Years became centuries. Hunters became farmers, yoking the land, raping its secrets. Farmers became soldiers, conquering their neighbors with the illusion of statehood. You know this, of course. You were there. You saw men tap into the force of Heaven. Not just for knowledge, but for life itself. Your Archer’s student went insane, lusting after immortality. Had you not taken from him the elixir and fled to the moon, he would have ruled the world with an iron fist. Your sacrifice saved us all.

  Images assaulted her of a mountain palace, a bold man on a golden throne, a crystal glass holding the light of stars. A late night of wine and women. A floral fan across a pale face under the darkness of the new moon. As the king slept, a slender shadow took the goblet from its place, drank the tonic of Heaven, and fled. Too late, the king’s man saw his immortality stolen. Furious, he tore apart the land. But the king’s muse had fled too far, imprisoning herself in isolation, frozen alone in the night sky.

  Even when other empires conquered the land, people remembered the meaning behind the symbols. Bodhis came from beyond the Himalayas, and merchants built roads from silk, and imperial navies choked the seas, but their ideas were infants compared to the spirit that already infused the land, the magic of the broken line. The people took the prophets in and transformed them, molded foreign gods to serve the Middle Kingdom. Like the chalice in which your Archer bottled the essence of stars, the words became the vessel of the Dao. So it was for countless centuries, and so it can be again. Learn the magic of the broken line, for in its secret you will fin
d my third eye and have everything you need to free your mother and her ancestors.

  The dragon’s face snarled and the jade statues turned to bleeding rust. A seam of white opened, peeling off the page, and the dragon split into ten thousand butterflies that faded into mist.

  Find the broken line… its voice reverberated in her mind. She opened her eyes.

  Her head felt pierced with needles. Groaning, she found she was unable to move, her arms and legs locked in metal clamps. A mask around her nose and mouth made it difficult to swallow. Her scalp and face were coated with a second skin, her body submerged in blue translucent gel. Surrounding her was a glass cell, a fishbowl for the harness that trapped her. Beyond the glass, several people in white coats took readings from holos and spoke in hushed tones.

  One of them, she saw, was herself.

  At first, she thought it was her reflection. But the woman stood hunched over, her white coat drooping over her frail body as she rested on a cane. Her hair was graying, her face lined with worry and age. When the woman realized Li was staring at her, she smiled weakly, as if the girl’s face was the first warm gift she had seen in years. And for a moment before drugs dragged Li back to sleep, their eyes connected, and Li knew in her bones that she had found her mother.

  Chapter 35 – Jin (晉)

  Honored With Horses

  Li woke on a bed softer than any she had ever known. Around her was a lush garden, blooming with azaleas and hyacinth. The last thing she remembered was Xie’s kiss. They must have drugged me when I got in the mantiscraft, she thought. Now a hand stroked her hair. Beneath the gnarled knuckles, the hand was her own, and she said, “Mama?”

  “The last time I saw you, you were in a bassinet,” the woman smiled wanly, fighting off tears. “Where was Qi keeping you? Ah yes, Hong Kong! I wondered whether I would ever see you again.”

  Li sat up and put a hand on her mother’s cheek for reassurance that she was real, staring into the mirror of her eyes. Her face was identical to Li’s, save for the gravity of time. She had to be at least sixty. “But you have seen me again, Mama. I’ve found you, and we can be together now.”

  Her mother smiled. “May that be your father’s will,” she said. “There’s so much I’ve wanted to tell you. So much you need to know about who you are.”

  A door of light opened among the peonies, revealing a metal corridor behind it. There he was, lao Lao, the young man with straight hair and a shiny pressed suit. Bile rose in Li’s throat as she realized that even here, her father chose to appear as a hologram instead of meeting them in person.

  “Did you sleep well, daughter?” the holo of her father said. “Are you recovered? I know the treatments take a lot out of your mother.”

  “Where are we?” Li said flatly.

  “My lab,” the holo said. He folded his hands. “Well, if you are ready, I will instruct the team to initiate stage two.”

  Li felt fury rise in her. Dreams that seemed so close just days ago were eluding her again. “Why are we in a lab? Why aren’t you here in person? You said that the three of us were going to be together. I’m not going anywhere until I know everything you do!” she yelled, crossing her arms.

  The hologram raised an eyebrow and said, “That would take a hundred years. You must think about what you are asking for.” It turned to Li’s mother. “Hua, tell her what she wants and then bring her to the nursery.” Then it left, the metal corridor fading into the rosebushes.

  “You heard your father,” her mother said, waiting.

  “No more lies,” Li said. “Axe the hologram.”

  The woman beside her nodded, and the garden vanished. Li found herself in a metal cell. At least the bed was real, she thought.

  “Satisfied?” her mother said. Plastic tubes ran into her nostrils from a pouch at her hip. Her arthritic knuckles were so pale that they were almost blue. Bags under her eyes belied sleepless nights.

  Li absorbed her mother’s ancient face. “You are called Hua?”

  “You can call me that.”

  She sifted through a thousand questions. “Why did you leave me?”

  At this, her mother turned away, hiding her regret. “I was young. Stupid. For months I did not know you existed. And when I found out, I could not bear the idea that you would live my life.”

  “Not know I existed?” Li snorted. “Is my mother an amnesiac who forgets giving birth?”

  Mother Hua smiled ruefully. “What do you think you are? A changeling maid rediscovered by her father?” She leaned close, looking her daughter in the eye. “You are a science experiment.”

  “But Lao—“

  The woman sat back, sighing. “Lao is a powerful man. He was once a little girl’s father. But not yours. Not even mine. That little girl died a long time ago. Years later, when Project Longshui came online, the lab was in Shanghai. This was before the rise of their mayor forced Lao to flee that city and rebuild here. Lao indulged his fancy, molding my genome to resemble that of his daughter. And when it became clear that I was aging, he had me copied.” She looked at Li sadly.

  Li could barely speak. The walls seemed to fall away. “What do you mean, copied?”

  “Dr. Yang’s team induced parthenogenesis when they discovered my shelf life. Yang told me once that longshui is so complex that this is the only way our line can reliably reproduce. He produced chromosomal mirroring in one of my eggs and extracted the blastula before I knew I was pregnant. You are a clone, Zhu Zhu. You have no father.”

  Discovering that she’d been made without a father was like not having a continent to stand on. “My conception was immaculate?” was all she could say, lost in all that implied. Then she reached up and touched her mother’s sallow face. “How old are you?”

  Hua frowned, pulling away. “It is not seemly for you to ask me that. The question you should be asking is why.” The old woman took Li’s hands in her own. “Professor Yang has told you by now that you are special, yes?” Li did not have to nod for her mother to see the truth in her eyes. “Imbued with superhuman strength and speed. A high voltage battery in each of your cells, so that you need almost no food, and can command lightning. What better hybrid to conquer the Ghost Lands? But did Yang tell you the true purpose of your engineering? What I have become?”

  Li looked at her slender fingers. They were just like her mother’s. As her mother continued, Li felt as if the cracks that had always warped the mirror of her life now disappeared, leaving her with nowhere to hide from the full horrifying reflection of herself.

  “There are giant fermentation tanks in this lab filled with billions of mammal cells growing longshui. But the tanks are too large to move, and longshui too unstable to survive outside of the homeostasis enabled by the tanks. Now, if only there were a way to bring longshui at scale to the Ghost Lands, the people there would have a source of energy that could make them independent from Centrist hands. Imagine the abandoned masses of the west more powerful than all the economic might of the metropoli. So. How to move longshui across millions of square kilometers of wasteland? How indeed.”

  “Us?” Li rasped, the word whispered, as if using all its force to escape her disbelief.

  Hua smiled sadly. “Daughters of our lineage have three stages of life. First, we are replicated here, grown until our cells are at full strength. Then we are released, hybrids able match any Xinren engineered in Centrist labs. But such power can only be controlled for so long. After two or three decades, our cells grow cancerous. I am told there are at least fourteen tumors growing metastatically in me right now. Of course, this is convenient for Lao and all his pets, like that snake, Professor Yang. An old woman can be moved anywhere, and can make enough immortal cancer cell lines to supply an entire longshui power plant.” Seeing the abject shock in Li’s eyes, Hua laughed bitterly and said, “Where do you think the longshui came from for your factory in Anhui? Yang had me flown in behind your back, my cancer harvested while you were terrorizing innocent people.”

  Li shook he
r head, unable to believe her ears. “Bastards,” she choked out, feeling tears threatening her eyes, the pit of utter betrayal swallowing her whole. “How much time do you have?”

  Hua shook her head. “Not long. But hear me true, Zhu Zhu, the same longshui that flows in me is in you. And in your daughter.”

  Li snapped her hands back. “I would know if I had a child.”

  Hua raised an eyebrow. “Have you not been listening, girl? Who better to remove eggs from than a newborn? Your daughter was conceived before you learned to walk.”

  “Can I see her?”