He can’t stop me.
I pump my fist in the air, the peculiar silence following his death causing chills to course down my spine despite my excitement.
No more humanoids are on the roof.
I walk over to the edge where the ladder is.
I expect to see an army of his short, steroid-ridden bodies getting ready to slice me to pieces. Instead I see nothing but a few old air conditioning units lying on the cement roof.
Every humanoid of Li is gone.
I stare up at the sky. The heavy black smoke from the fires and residue from the explosives that went off midair seem to envelop the building I am on. I can’t see the surrounding roofs to know if by some chance Jake or Ai survived, and I certainly can’t tell if the Chinese military is coming for me or how far away they are.
For a brief moment I am alone with nothing but my own thoughts. For some reason it is moments like these that scare me most. A twisted feeling boils from the pit of my stomach. I feel like my intestines are wrapping into one ginormous knot that won’t ever leave.
Then the knot explodes.
More accurately, the tension and anticipation inside me turn into straight-up terror as a smoke grenade lands from the sky and onto the roof. The smoke doesn’t just make it impossible to see two feet in front of me. It seeps through the holes in the fabric and invades the air in my lungs. My throat closes upon first contact with the heavy, metallic gas, and my lungs feel like they are swathed in a pool of cold liquid the moment I take a deep breath in.
I violently hack, the pain shooting through my neck and chest. I grasp the backpack, switching it around to my front side so that I can open it up and command the medical nanobots it has the ability to create to stop whatever pungent gas it is from killing me.
But by the time I finally open the bag, it is too late.
Two arms wrap around my waist and pull me in their direction. The odd stillness in the surrounding sky erupts into the chaos of what must be at least a dozen people landing onto the roof.
This was all just one big trap.
They knew we left the Gyurtog monastery.
They knew exactly where we would be.
And they pretended not to know about the attack all so that they could make it that much easier for them when the time came to kill us.
That time is now.
Chapter 2
Dozens of people are laughing at me.
Actually, I take that back. Hundreds of people are standing on the cold, granite floor of the capitol building, their sinister laughs and accusatory fingers pointing right at me.
Each curse word yelled by one of the hundreds of people beneath me bounces off the interior of the circular dome and wildly echoes in my ears. They all know I speak English, so they make it a point of screaming loudly that I am a bastard, pussy, cracker, and a ton of other awful words that would have made my seven-year-old self cry.
Words don’t bring me to tears anymore.
But the sensation of a thick rope digging into my armpits as I am dangled from two large loops of rope from the ceiling is tear-inducing. Top that off with the metal shackles cutting into my ankles, pulling my legs apart into an almost full split and not only do I have tears involuntary streaming down my face from the pain but my ball sack feels like it is going to split into two as the right side of my body is ripped apart from my left side.
This should be against some universal law. I grunt, the crowd getting some visible excitement from the gruesome expression on my face. I can barely hear my own thoughts above the yelling of the crowd—the only thing I feel is pain.
Some say pain and pleasure are interconnected.
And that may be true.
But I am way past the threshold where even someone high on morphine could trick themselves into thinking that this level of pain is slightly pleasurable.
The pain blocks out all other emotions from hitting me. The fear is gone. Any anger I feel is nothing more than a little ripple underneath the powerful rip tide of the agony. It tears apart the muscle fibers in my groin and slowly severs any will I have to live.
This pain isn’t worth it.
I cough as my legs are stretched even more. I haven’t strained my eyes to look at the machine that is torturing me, but it is stretching my muscles beyond their biological limit, causing my tendons to snap and legs to feel like they are going to fall off my body.
The hundreds of highest-ranking officials in the Party that have gathered on the floor of the capitol building to marvel at this spectacle feel worlds away as the pain swathes all my senses. Even the Chimera Cube that I clawed to mercilessly doesn’t feel as if it hangs off my shoulders inside the backpack my father gave me. As I was dragged into an aircraft and then taken to the floor of this very room, I couldn’t let go of the cube, but now my body has barely enough strength to hold its own limbs up.
The air around me feels miles away as my lungs struggle to take in my next breath, my diaphragm in the middle of spasming from the pain instead of calmly expanding and contracting.
President Li is about to win.
He designed a way to kill me that I can’t get out of. And Ai, Jake, and the other three Syndicate operatives who hang from this ceiling have no shot at getting out of it either. The second the military flooded my position on top of the roof, they restrained me to ensure I didn’t reach out and grab the Chimera Cube inside my backpack.
The dozens of clones of Li on that roof were nothing more than a distraction to give the military time to set up in the smoke surrounding the building and pounce on me right when I was least prepared.
Now I’m hanging from the roof of the capitol building. Its beautiful golden dome surrounds me with a large skylight at the top that gives one a perfect view of the smoke-infested night sky. If I weren’t currently being chained to two machines at the base of the dome and dangled from a metal bar at the top of the dome, I may marvel at the beauty of the capitol building.
The sweet aroma of petunias and camellias would breathe new life into my nostrils and the intricate murals on the walls that depict scenes from the old dynasties that used to rule over this country in ancient times would give me a surge of adrenaline as I focus on creating a dynasty of my own.
But that all feels out of reach now.
I thought I had it all with the Chimera Cube.
Never did I realize that the Chimera Cube has nothing to truly do with me. It gave me hope, it gave me power, it gave me joy, but all of this was just a smokescreen of emotions that I could have felt all on my own.
Li knew I had the Chimera Cube this entire time.
He knew we would be coming here—that’s why he created this makeshift torture chamber dozens of feet in the air and invited all his closest allies in the Party to come and watch me die. That’s why he still lets the Chimera Cube hang on my back, his eyes staring at me from his perch on a platform that is hoisted on top of a crane at the center of the massive dome.
He is smiling.
He wants to show me that he can kill me with the Chimera Cube. He wants to prove to me that he is more powerful than I will ever be. Because I am not the Chimera Cube. But he is this nation. He is the collective force of hundreds of supercomputers, thousands of humanoids, and millions of cameras, all put together to create one data-hungry machine that is more powerful than any mythological god.
He is everything bad about humanity rolled up into one sad, angry human being that is a product of a broken environment in a broken world that he is attempting to reshape forever.
For months I thought I could stop him.
For months I thought that his throne was destined to become mine.
But I was wrong.
I have the Chimera Cube, yet I still feel like I’m about to die. I feel like there is nothing I can do to get out of this.
He finally won.
“Stop this!” I hear Jake scream as Ai continues cursing loudly at President Li in Mandarin. I open my eyes that have been shut closed due to the pai
n and glance at them. We all are dangled on opposite sides of the dome from one another, our three helpless bodies forming something akin to a triangle as the chains rip our bodies in half. The Syndicate operatives hang from the center of the dome, their bodies all being tortured in the same medieval way that the Chinese government has chosen to dispose of us.
The crowd claps as our displeasure reaches a new level. I am convinced that my balls are bleeding, but I refuse to look down and see. All I know is that enough of my muscle tissue has been ripped to make ever walking again an impossible task without the help of the Chimera Cube.
If Li gets his way, though, we won’t be alive any more than five minutes. Our legs will be torn out of their sockets and our arteries ripped in half to let our heart pump out enough blood in a matter of minutes to kill us all.
The floor will be covered in our blood soon. They will let my lifeless body fall to the ground. Nothing but my legs will be dangling from the chains, still dripping with blood.
I wish I had some horrible disease that could infect all these Party leaders when droplets of my blood land on them.
But even if they got sick with something particularly deadly, it wouldn’t be effective in giving me any sense of retribution after my death. They all know what is inside my backpack. And they all know that once they have the Chimera Cube, China will be the most powerful country on Earth.
They all have no idea that Li will use the very same technology to destroy all of them.
“Fuck!” I scream, but it comes out sounding groggy and airy as it leaves my dry mouth. My legs are completely numb, but the pain somehow still rockets throughout my entire body. Every second I can feel the pull of my leg muscles tugging on my core and lower back, my entire body threatening to split in half.
I can’t take this pain anymore.
This is worse than the simulation President Li used to try and get me to cave the first time.
With that, my brain at least knew that my body wasn’t literally melting away into the floor, but this time I know when my legs are ripped in half that I will be dead.
And somehow that prospect seems better than continuing this debilitating process.
“No!” I hear a desperate cry that snaps me out of my stare directed at a far corner of the capitol building that likely leads to some of the offices of the Party leaders.
The hundreds of Party leaders below stop cheering. Some drop the glasses of alcohol they hold in their hands onto the floor, their designer suits and dresses soaked. The temperature inside the room seems to drop as everyone collectively gasps at the parade of caskets that have entered the room.
They are carried by members of the imperial guard, their bright red outfits obnoxiously standing out in a crowd full of people mostly wearing the color black. The caskets are covered in brown, discolored feces, the stench of the dozens of pounds of shit perforating throughout the entire room in an instant.
It smells even more terrible than I anticipated when the full intensity of the wave of shit hits my nostrils. Li does nothing more than smile, his black pupils seeming to absorb his entire eyeballs as he stares at Ai.
When the imperial guards drop the caskets onto the ground, I finally see why he can’t keep his eyes off Ai. The caskets have three dead bodies inside them, their bodies surrounded in more feces instead of fabric or cushions.
The three dead bodies are Ai’s entire family. Her twin sister Loi lies dead in one, her sumo father in another, and her mom in the last one. All their eyes are glued open and bloodshot while their skin is pale and stripped of all clothing.
Their bodies are devoid of any wounds, but it doesn’t make seeing their naked selves on display any less horrifying. These people were killed like they are nothing more than animals.
The same thing is going to happen to us.
“Loi! Loi!” Ai screams. The surrounding officials of the Party finally glance up at Ai with a bit of sympathy. The energy in the air shifts from one of excitement to one of disgust. Even by these people’s standards Li went too far this time.
But he doesn’t care.
He only laughs at the tension, his smile growing wider at the sight of Ai’s distress. This must be the worst feeling in the world for her. It is already one of the worst feelings in the world for me.
I know I will have my own casket soon.
“You thought you would get away with harboring an enemy of the state?” Li narrows his eyes at her. He is dressed in the same suit that he always wears, his stance so confident and tone so arrogant that he seems like the kind of guy that can easily get high off his own farts. He pulls out something from his pocket.
It’s a large diamond. The same diamond that I gave Chef Chen as my gift to him for driving us to Gyurtog safely. The same diamond that was supposed to justify him letting his daughter fight the government with us and risk his family’s life. The diamond didn’t change anything.
They ended up dead anyways.
“Loi told me she left the country months ago!” Ai screams again. She is completely hysterical, her words spitting out of her so fast that I can barely understand her.
“They never left the country.” President Li sneers. “We got to your family the second your father arrived home. Your restaurant has been closed for months. They never fled this country to Cambodia, we only wanted you to believe that. I knew it would make this moment so much sweeter.”
“Agh!” She roars back at him, but her words do no use. She can’t fight him. She can’t make this man pay for all his heinous deeds. The machines continue pulling our legs apart, and each millimeter that the shackles pull my legs farther apart, I hold my breath as I prepare myself for the end.
I keep my eyes open as I will my body to fight the pain as hard as I can. I try to visualize myself swimming in a sea of marshmallows or basking in the midday sun or my body feeling the pleasure of a woman’s breast against me and her lips caressing mine.
I realize my visions are all over the place.
My mind is going insane. All it wants is a distraction from the pain. All it wants is a reminder that I have felt the sensation of pleasure before.
That one reminder is what keeps my eyes glued open on the Party members below. It’s what keeps me from convulsing. It even allows my heart rate to slow down as I enter a state of peace and serenity.
All that matters are those memories. And if I think hard enough, those memories can swathe my brain and become indistinguishable from reality.
But then the visions end.
Chapter 3
At first, I think I’m dead. But my legs are still attached to my body and I don’t think the feeling of nothingness is marked by the piercing sound of shattered glass.
The sound of shattered glass soon turns into the sensation of thousands of shards of glass raining down upon me. The screams of joy that could be heard echoing throughout the dome a few moments ago have morphed into screams of terror.
And the brief feeling of peace that seemed to wash over me after the pain climaxed has turned into a stinging pain that is concentrated on my head. The bullet-proof suit I am still wearing is able to deflect all the glass from piercing my body, but with the soldiers forcing open the zipper on my suit to show my face to the crowd below, the most vulnerable part of my body is now exposed to hundreds of pounds of glass raining down on me.
I close my eyes, but that doesn’t stop the pointy shards of glass from scraping my eyelids, cheeks, and scalp. One larger piece of glass hits the top of my head and then shatters on impact, the noise so loud that my eardrums are now ringing.
I jerk my body away from the direction both the chains are pulling me in, doing my best to somehow escape this deadly rainfall, but it does no use. Multiple streams of blood trickle down my face. Likely half the skin on my face has been torn apart by the glass, and knowing Li, he has much more in store before he lets us go.
This guy has no idea who he is dealing with.
I grit my teeth as I rip one of my arms out of the loop
tied around my shoulder, holding it in place. I can feel the burning sensation on my armpit from the rope, but I keep going. Instead of trying to wrench my other arm out of the loop it is tied in, I sling the backpack off my shoulders, and hold it back in front of me.
Now I can open this damn thing.
I put my finger on the scanner and slide open the zipper. My finger is on the cube. Yet my one arm that is holding the backpack feels like it is going fall off from the loop that is constricting even tighter around it, and the chains keeping me frozen in place in the air only continue to stretch my legs further.
I have to push through it. I have to win.
I sigh, the manifestation of all the pent-up anxiety and anger making their way out of my nostrils. I quickly scan my surroundings, trying to figure out the best way out of this. The floor is covered in millions of shards of glass. It even coats all the dead bodies in the caskets, cutting up their once spotless skin and filling their feces-lined caskets with blood.
The imperial guards are covered in glass too, all of them staring up at the night sky as if unsure if this is part of the show or something terribly gone wrong.
When I look up, I finally realize that something isn’t right. Li is standing at the edge of the crane, his expression emotionless, but I can tell that the hive mind inside of him is working to crank through some data he is receiving. The drones circling around the hole at the top of the dome where the glass used to be aren’t Chinese military drones.
They are much smaller and without the distinctive red coating that everything the state owns adorns.
The drones must be here to save us.
A burst of hope that I had been searching for amidst the pain finally overcomes me. Whether it’s the Syndicate, the U.S. Government, or a group of aliens trying to abduct me, I will gladly welcome them into my life with open arms.
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