by Sam Abraham
And Sun led them in the rite, saying, “Behold the Lamb of the Heavenly Family, behold She who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb.”
Among the host of thousands, the man called Han stood, stretching on his toes to see his friend Xie speak. He was with the other warriors on the edge, watching the hungry masses at the long tables. He was amazed at how large the following had grown. Truly, he thought, I found what I was looking for, genuine revelation. And though he was battle weary, and his face and hands were dirty, and the white tunic he wore was coarse against his skin, gratitude warmed his belly. All the comforts he had left behind were empty compared to the Communion of the Lady in the Moon.
And his voice rang out with thousands of followers as he replied, “Oh Jade Prophet and Her Heavenly Family, I am not worthy that you should enter my roof, but only say the word and take my soul to Heaven.” Han took the wafer on his tongue and watched his brothers and sisters do the same, and felt a familiar numbing blanket surround him.
Soon he noticed the difference. There was no piercing light, no blending of Heaven and earth. But he did not care. His illumination was no longer dependent on the euphoria of Communion, it was in the shared experience. He had not been hungry for weeks, and felt at peace. The restlessness he had always known was vanquished, leaving space for a new sensation. Numb to his ego, he had a revelation.
For his entire life, he had been afraid.
Afraid of being a soul unworthy. Afraid of not living up to his father’s expectations. But the Lady in the Moon had shown him the way past fear. In surrendering to the Lady’s spirit, Han found that she had planted the seed of understanding in him. It was compassion for his past, for the frailty of humanity, for the vast mystery of life. Somehow, over his journey, it had grown into a sun in his chest, shining through his whole being. At one with grace, he knelt and prayed, as did thousands of other pilgrims in a rippling wave.
Captain Xie knelt too, and placed a wafer on his tongue. But his wafer contained nothing but glutinous substrate, a complete placebo. As he closed his eyes, he resolved that neither his knowledge of the fake Communion, or the secret of Li Aizhu, would weaken his conviction in the Lady’s Grace. And he prayed ever more solemnly so that the all-hearing ears of Chang’e might listen to his spirit.
Chapter 40 – Xie (解)
Kills Three Foxes
Trapped in the lab’s nursery with her mother, Li Aizhu lost track of time. The metal walls around her were a cage, pressing on her, echoing the weight of lies that she had been using to define herself, pulling her down into deep depression.
At first, she could not believe that she had been so conned, that she had killed countless people for the empty ambition of a man who had deceived her about her family, her origin, everything that had ever mattered to her. But after marinating in self-flagellation for days, haunted by the bloated blue corpses of drowned Anqing, Li began feeling foolish that she had ever considered herself a lodestar of truth. Of course she was a puppet, she mentally whipped herself. There should never have been any doubt that she was a soulless ventriloquist’s doll. Such was the will of her creator.
Finally, after concluding that the smooth walls and bare furnishing of her cage made suicide difficult, hateful words slipped from her. “Mama,” she said, “you’re such a disappointment.”
Hua opened her eyes. She had been sleeping, lost in a sea of narcotics to help her with the pain. With her cancer supercharged by longshui, tumors were eating her alive. She was cachectic, scrawnier than she had been just days before, when she had met her daughter for the first time in seventeen years. She lay in the same nursery in which her granddaughter had been born. It had become a hospice room. Hua gave a wan smile and said, “Why is that, dear?”
Li sat slumped on the metal floor. “First, I thought it was because you let Lao take my daughter,” Li said, “but you can’t help that. You and she are his slaves.”
Hua scoffed. “That is quite righteous from someone who terrorized innocents as the unwitting dupe of Lao Jinglai,” she said weakly.
“Then I thought it was because you’re a poor excuse for the family I’ve dreamt of my whole life,” Li continued, ignoring her mother's retort. “But how many people are ashamed of their parents? Daiwu always said he hated his mother. God,” she said, remembering her old life, “that feels like so long ago. You seemed perfect in the holo Uncle - I mean Colonel Qi gave me, but real people can’t compete with pictures.”
“Would you like to see him again?” Hua mumbled. “Your Uncle, I mean.”
“You are disappointing,” Li said, pressing on, “because you are a hypocrite. You escaped! You freed yourself, made a life for yourself, and then you returned to help Lao enslave your family--” she trailed off, tears forming in her eyes for her wasted life and for the skeleton her mother was becoming.
Hua swallowed painfully. “Since you know so much,” she whispered, “I don’t imagine you would want to hear the story of how I got you out of Lao’s prison seventeen years ago?”
“You?” Li said. “Shen said Colonel Qi stole me from here.”
“No, Zhu Zhu. I broke in here and rescued you. Qi was my getaway pilot, but I did the dirty work. When I was a prisoner here, my only friend was a nurse. Nurse Song. She took care of me every day, made me laugh. She was the only person who cared for me. And I killed her,” Hua said softly. “After Qi helped me escape, we tracked her down and I murdered her in cold blood for her access card. And when I came back to rescue you, I broke in through the roof and posed as the friend I had murdered. I found you, in a nursery just like this one, guarded by a Xinren. Hunter class.”
Li’s eyes widened. She knew the Xinren phenotype. Nasty breed, like a tiger on amphetamines.
Hua looked at her daughter. “As we flew away, I saw the Mountain of Shanghai in the distance, that giant hand reaching into the sky, and felt hope. That we could be safe and happy, together.”
“And then you just left me? After risking your life?”
Hua looked away. “After spending years in the genelab, I couldn’t stand the outside world. I tried to shut it out with neurostims. That’s where they found me, you know, dreaming in a stimden. You were barely a year old, and Qi was watching you, thinking I had gone to the market. I never came back, leaving you with an incapable man. But maybe now I can help you succeed where I failed. I can give you the chance I squandered. It lives in our bellies, and I can teach you...”
“Mama,” Li said sadly, “You’re not making sense.” Li stood and came to her mother’s side, standing in the green glow of the monitors. She put her hand on Hua’s forehead and felt her fever.
Something in her daughter’s touch brought Hua back. She forced the fuzziness from her head and said, “Listen to me. You were never taught how to unleash your true power. I discovered abilities while I was on the run that not even Yang knows about. So many things I was never able to teach you! But if you’ll let me, I can teach you now.”
Li wanted to trust the dying woman before her. But her heart was hard, and she asked, “Why should I believe someone who gave her infant daughter to a drunk?”
Hua closed her eyes, too tired to fight the shame. “Lao told me that there is no need to release you now that your daughter is fully grown,” she said. “It is a mark of his arrogance that he did not even bother replacing the tracking microdrones in your blood. If you want to get out of here, using what I can teach you is your only way. Help your daughter. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
Li knelt at her mother’s side. A visceral instinct rose within her to find Baiyue and change her fate, to track down Professor Yang and force him to heal her and her daughter, so that their bodies would not become cancerous food for power plants. “How?”
“As Shen surely told you,” Hua said, “you can focus the energy your cells draw from longshui just like you might flex a muscle. You were built with cells in your arms and hands that can create and release a vo
ltage gradient. The longer you flex, the greater the current that will fly from your hands, as if you were an electric eel. Lao says it can be powerful enough to break stone.”
“Could we use it to break out of here?” Li asked of the prison holding them.
Hua winced in pain. “The nursery is surrounded by a Faraday cage. It will dissipate a longshui charge so it becomes too weak to do any damage. But if we can get the door open, you can release your power in a rushing river, and nothing will be able to stop you. Beyond simple spears of lightning, I can show you to create electrokinetic waveforms that you can shape at will. Please, Zhu Zhu, whether or not I deserve it, I beg you to have faith in me. For your daughter’s sake.”
Li took her mother’s hand. “Teach me, Mama,” she said in a small voice, and knew, despite her disappointment, that she had been waiting her entire life for the chance to speak those words.
Chapter 41 – Sun (損)
Come And Rejoice
“This is an unusual request,” Lao said, the holo floating through the monitors around Hua’s bed.
“I’m dying,” Hua croaked, her voice barely a whisper. A web of wires surrounded her. “Let me see my friend once more before I go.”
“Your friend is in prison for stealing military secrets. Qi was your accomplice when you kidnapped your daughter. I had to use my influence to prevent your execution, if you remember.”
“And now the stay of execution has ended. Soon I will be dust and you will no longer need to bear the shame of my life. What better time to show your final victory? Qi will see me not as he remembers from when we were lovers, young and strong, but as this frail shadow, living on tubes. He will see the futility of his life, and his despair will be an example to any who might cross you.”
The hologram of Lao flickered back and forth, looking between mother and daughter. “I am sure Qi’s time in the exercise yard tomorrow can be cut short,” he said. “Just remember, I will be listening. Do not say I never did anything for you.” With that, the hologram distended into a vertical line and blinked out.
When he was gone, Li smiled at her mother. Hua nodded curtly and said, “Get some sleep.”
Twenty listless hours later, the holo in Hua’s room woke again. This time, the image was of a man with long white hair and a scruffy beard. He wore an orange jumpsuit, and Li and Hua knew he was caged as much as they were, rotting in Qincheng Prison far to the north. His eyes were as cold as Li remembered, and the scar above his eye was deep red. He took long drags of his cigarette.
“Hello Uncle,” Li said. “It has been a long time.”
The man in the holo exhaled a column of smoke, melancholy as he saw the woman in the bed. “Hua,” he said, “you look lovely as ever.”
Hua laughed and coughed, racking her wasted body. “You always were a terrible liar, Qi,” she said. “Lying is unnatural for a heart as kind as yours.”
“You should not say such things,” said the man who had pretended to be Li’s uncle for seventeen years. “You know this line is tapped.”
“Tell me,” Hua said, ignoring his concern, “when you look at me, what do you see?”
Qi’s cigarette ash snaked out as he forgot to discard it. “A woman who never had a chance,” he said. “I was a fool to love you, Hua. Helping you was the worst mistake I ever made, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
Li could barely believe this was the same man who had always been gruff with her. As she watched her pretend uncle try to hide his tears, she thought of Xie, always trying so hard to be her shield, effortlessly teaching her the meaning of love.
Hua smiled crookedly. “You charmer,” she said. “Even you can see that I am dying. I have only one thing to say to you, before I go.”
She paused, knowing that her creator was listening, waiting for her to bury his enemy’s heart. Facing oblivion, Hua let out a little giggle, a fragment of the girl she had once been.
“Thank you, Qi,” Hua said, “For giving me a chance. For raising my daughter in freedom. It has cost you everything, like the son who pulled his drowning father from the river to save his life, even though the father’s weakness brought them both shame.”
“Enough!” came Lao’s voice over the speakers. The holo of Qi went static, replaced by the image of the father. Lao’s combed hair and spectacles and silk suit looked as impeccable as ever, but his words burned. “I should have known that you would disappoint me. Apologize at once!”
But the woman Hua’s eyes were blank. Li saw that the monitors around her mother had flatlined, and she rushed to the bedside. She put her hand on Hua’s head, feeling its unnatural cold.
Lao’s hologram frowned as a channel was opened. “Get people in there,” the shade commanded, though Li was not sure to whom. “We need to freeze whatever cells are still alive. The longshui in her is more valuable than gold.” Lao’s holo turned on Li. “And you, daughter, will stay out of the way, or we will harvest you ahead of schedule.”
Li passed her hand over her mother’s face, closing her eyes for the last time. The vault opened behind her, and men in plastic suits flooded the room, forcing Li’s wrists behind her back and clamping metal cuffs on her fists. Others detached the hospital bed from the wall and rolled it out of the cell. Li watched her mother’s corpse disappear into the hallway, and knew what she had to do.
Like smoke she twisted in the grip of the guards, slamming her forehead into one’s helmet and smashing its plastic visor. As the guard stumbled back, she focused her energy. Her shoulders bulged as she curled forward and shattered the steel arm cuffs. Another guard drew a pulser but she grabbed his wrist and broke his arm as he fired, sending pulseshot ricocheting.
Li ran for the door, but a force like ten sledgehammers clocked her in the jaw. She flew back, the wind knocked out of her. The minotaur stood over her, seven feet tall, wicked horns growing from its head. Its chest and boulder-like shoulders were covered in armor. The monster dove at Li. Springing sideways, she dodged punches that dented the steel walls. She tried to slide under the hybrid’s reach, but it caught her hair and yanked her back, crushing her in its arms. Li felt something in her back snap, and as she gasped in pain, she heard her mother’s words in fragments.
Release your power in a rushing river...
Li focused between ragged breaths. There it was, the power, as her mother had shown her. It had always been there, wide as the ocean, but hidden behind the veils of lies about her origin, her purpose, her self. Now the walls within her dissolved in the light of knowledge.
And a blinding sphere of electricity burst from her arms.
She was on the floor, gasping. The minotaur stumbled backwards, groaning, its charred arms limp. The armor on its chest was blackened and shredded, cauterized burns crossing its massive chest and face. But the damage only seemed to enrage the beast. It found its balance, lowered its horns and charged.
Li forced herself to stay low. She felt the ground tremble under the hybrid’s heavy stride. As it thrust out its horns to impale her, she pivoted and caught one, flipping herself up and over the bull’s head. The beast bucked back and forth, but Li clung tight to the horn with both hands. She planted her feet on the hybrid’s shoulders, and pulled until her lungs burned and her biceps felt like snapping.
Then she heard a sickening pop and the horn she held came off in her hands along with half the hybrid’s skull. Li let out a screech and pulled harder, and the creature’s spine popped out of its back. Lost in bloodlust, Li bent its skull and spine around and drove the horn through the hybrid’s own chest.
The minotaur collapsed in a twisted pretzel, its black blood pooling across the nursery.
Catching her breath, Li saw a holo of Lao Jinglai staring at the broken monster. “Ten thousand hells, daughter,” Lao said, “Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”
“I’m not your daughter,” Li said, looking at the blood on her hands. As groggy as she was, she still found herself surprised. The nursery door was broken. She was in
the hall that cut through the genelab, lined by windows looking onto the neonate enhancement center, with its elaborate glassware and rows of tiny pink infants.
She started to run, but Lao’s guards blocked her escape, accompanied by a canister robot. The canister popped open, letting loose a chain that scurried up both walls, hugged the ceiling, and soon surrounded her. It burst into the bubbling flame of a plasma net. They were designed for containing hybrids, especially those resistant to electric shock, who could not be contained with simple high voltage fences. The grid of flaming gas hovered around Li, causing the air to waver from the heat. Li saw Lao’s cold smile and knew she was trapped.
“You always were a terrible child,” the holo said. “At least once you are harvested your cells will do as they are told. Your disobedience is all in your head.”
Li wanted to scream and call for her mother, but she was gone. All she had left was Hua’s dying wish, and her daughter, adrift in the world. As Li held up a hand to shield her face from the heat of the burning gas, she knew there was only one path forward.
“Fuck me,” she said to herself, “I hope this works.”
Li took a deep breath and focused, calling the power of the longshui from inside herself. As a shield of energy bubbled up from her skin, she gripped the plasma net. She screamed in pain, but the charge off her skin disrupted the electric field of the plasma long enough for her to rip the chain apart. The ends of the broken chain flailed about, waving ion tendrils as she ran through them, shredding her clothes and raking her skin with burning links like searing talons. But her electrokinetic shield bent the plasma so it would not penetrate her organs as she forced her way out to the other side.
Willing herself not to pass out from the pain, her body smoking like cooked ham, Li saw guards pointing at her in amazement. Somewhere she heard Lao say, “Shoot her!”