Shadow Hand

by Sacchi Green

  “She’s right, though, about spreading the word,” Cleo admitted. “Maybe we should wear disguises. Costumes. Or at least cover our faces, so we could be seen but not seen.”

  Chiu came up in time to hear that. “What, are we making a movie or rescuing trafficked girls?” But Jian looked thoughtful.

  Ash stepped behind the desk and looked around for something to use to get attention. Val moved in beside her, cleared a swath of desktop, and pounded out a military drum tattoo with her big fists.

  “Whoa!” Cleo muttered when the general uproar subsided. “Wish I hadn’t missed all those parties, Drummer!”

  “That makes two of us,” Ash said, then turned to the now-attentive group and ratcheted up her Army officer voice.

  “We’ll take two days to reconnoiter, be sure we all know what we’re doing, and make our move the following day. Jian and I will work out a plan of action and let you all know in time for discussion and fine-tuning. In general, Jian’s group will take charge of rounding up the girls, bringing them out, and taking them away, while our group will break into the warehouse, disarm guards or whoever, and keep the others from being followed.”

  One of Jian’s friends who could have been a basketball player, too, offered a last bit of advice before the meeting broke up. “Most of those massage dens are run by women as dangerous as any hired thugs, so watch out for them. There may be some men, too, but it will be the older women keeping the girls in line, and none too gently. They may well have guns or knives.”

  “Maybe we’re making a movie after all,” Cleo muttered, and followed Ash out into the chilly autumn air.

  “I just need to smash something!” Ash flexed her shoulders and arms. The leafless branches of a nearby tree thrashed, while everything else remained still. “Something big. Like that warehouse.” Too much talking, planning, staying calm, she knew. Too much damned impulse control.

  “C’mon, Godzilla.” Cleo put her arm across Ash’s twitching back. “Let’s see how much smashing our bed can take.”

  The bed, being flexible, survived, but the springs might never be the same. It was a good thing nobody lived beneath them on the ground floor—or above them, for that matter—because Ash had a vague notion that she’d lifted the roof a time or two while Cleo was making sure that however long she held Ash so close to orgasm that she wanted to scream, the pleasure that finally pounded through her body was worth every second.

  A heavy mist rose from the harbor while their convoy of cars and vans crept through narrow streets toward the warehouse. Low-flying planes landing or just taking off loomed like ghostly whales in a gray overhead sea, then disappeared into its depths. Even the roar of their engines seemed muted.

  Ash was both on edge and invigorated. No more waiting for girls to be loaded for transport to wherever men would pay to use their bodies. This would be an all-out attack on the prison itself, no one left behind. According to some of the girls already rescued, the hour or two just after dawn was the likeliest time for everyone to be inside, and in this rundown area there didn’t seem to be much chance of passersby as witnesses.

  “Is Jian’s crew all in place yet?” Ash knew by the set of Cleo’s head that she was listening for engines, and with her uncanny ability to hear and differentiate them, she’d know to the last car when their allies were in position.

  “All present now. Some were here ahead of us. Just a sec.” Cleo tapped out a text on her muted phone, watched for a response, and nodded. “Ready to move in.”

  Ash edged the van forward. Mags and Val followed in their vehicles, all their engines super-muffled by Cleo so that only the tires on the rough pavement made any appreciable noise, and not much at that. They stopped behind the abandoned building closest to the warehouse, got out without making any noise closing their doors, and looked around the corner at their target.

  “Wait… there’s something moving…” Ash squinted, not quite sure the gray forms she saw weren’t just denser patches of mist.

  “Of course. Jian’s crew are supposed to be moving into place. I wish we could have staged a rehearsal, but we went over the plan so many times there shouldn’t be any surprises.” She peered around Ash, caught her breath, and then released it. “Oh, cool! Ghost ninjas!”

  Now Ash could see a dozen figures hovering between nearby buildings, all in gray sweatpants and hoodies with scarves wrapped around the lower halves of their faces. Jian could be identified by her height. “Ninjas are Japanese,” Ash muttered. “Maybe they’re supposed to be Wuxia heroes.”

  “Or maybe they’ll burst forth from those gray cocoons and turn out to be butterflies.” Cleo grinned. “Whatever, as long as it works. C’mon, we’re up now!”

  Back into the van, newly equipped with a bullet-proof windshield. Cleo drove while Ash half-stood inside, bracing against the bumpy ride. Cleo gunned the engine, racing toward the side of the warehouse where a loading dock extended from the building. Ash focused with all her mental strength on the great metal doors, which shuddered, began to inch apart, then slid faster and faster behind the walls until the dark entrance was completely open, an ominous, gaping mouth.

  The gray guerillas swarmed up over the loading dock and ducked inside. Cleo followed, her rifle ready to spew terror but not, if possible, actual death. Two gray-clad latecomers sprang up behind her, one so close they nearly collided, and Ash heard Cleo growl, “Damnit, Chiu, you could have warned me about today’s dress code!” Then they all stepped through the open door, Cleo turned with a brief thumbs-up signal, and they disappeared inside. The girls, they’d been told, were kept on the third floor.

  Ash slid into the driver’s seat and steered the van toward what appeared to be the conventional office entrance around the corner. Mags and Val were already there with the jeep and truck. Somebody inside knew it, and had turned on a light.

  The three of them got out, Mags first, and moved cautiously toward the door, backs to the splintery wooden wall, while the shrill, angry shouts of a woman inside alternated with the rumble of a deeper masculine voice.

  “Go out there!” the woman yelled. “Do your job!” Then she rattled off a stream of Chinese that Ash suspected was the same orders augmented with colorful profanity.

  The man gave a sharp cry, opened the door, and stumbled through it, carrying a pistol in one hand and bleeding from a stab wound in the other arm. When Ash sent his gun spinning away and into Val’s grasp, he took one more step, looking dazed, put a hand up to his wound, and slumped down onto the gritty pavement. Through the open door, they saw an older Chinese woman brandishing a dagger and glaring at them with venom. She raised the blade, lunged toward Mags, and just in time Ash twisted the dagger from her grip and sent it spiraling up, up, to imbed itself in the high wooden ceiling. The woman still took two steps toward them, then saw how many they were, and how large, turned back, and dashed down the hall and up a staircase.

  Shouts and thumps were already coming from upstairs. Another female voice yelled, “You would not spend on real guards!” followed by a string of rapid Chinese.

  “Get set,” Ash called to Val, and ran back around to the loading dock while Mags was tying the unconscious guard’s hands and feet.

  “Six coming down,” Cleo called from above, and within two minutes six Asian girls clutching clothes or thin blankets around themselves emerged uncertainly from the darkness.

  Ash texted Val to alert her, and almost at once the atmosphere pulsed with deep, low vibrations. Val’s bass drum was muted in some mysterious way that let the sound spread far without creating enough noise to be noticed if you weren’t waiting for it. In a strange way it could have been whale song, as if those ghostly overhead illusions had been whales instead of planes.

  Jian’s backups had been waiting for it. From between the surrounding buildings, along the rutted road and out of alleys, four cars, two vans, and a vintage minibus approached the loading dock and li
ned up.

  A gray-clad passenger stepped out of the first vehicle, spoke to the shivering girls on the dock, helped them down and into the car, and they sped off. By then, two of the rescuers who’d gone inside had appeared leading six more girls, and helped them into a waiting van. Two more of the crew emerged, each carrying a figure so slight neither could be much more than a child, and passed them down to the van as well before darting back inside for more.

  The next group brought five girls, and a hurried message from Cleo: “Trouble on the fourth floor. Two armed hellcats barricaded in a room with a very young girl. Stay down there and watch the windows.”

  Ash backed away from the building and looked up toward the top floor. She could see sporadic movement behind a middle window. “Keep loading,” she called to the workers on the dock and in the cars.

  The window opened. A woman leaned out. “All come back!” she screamed. “Bring all back!” She turned away, then back with a slight figure struggling in her arms. “Bring back or else!” She thrust the girl so far out the window that only her grip kept her victim from falling.

  A tall figure hurtled through the gaping door and leapt from the loading dock. “Jian!” Ash called, but Jian, racing toward a spot beneath the window, didn’t seem to hear. Staring up, face twisted in a snarl of rage both more and less than human, she shouted a stream of words that Ash couldn’t understand, but the grim harridan above, screaming back, clearly could. She shook the girl, leaned farther out, shook her again, grabbed one side of the window to keep from falling out herself, and lost her grip on the girl.

  Jian leapt, wild black hair flying, arms reaching up, trying to catch the girl in time to cushion the impact of the ground even if it meant crushing injury to herself. Ash, who had already slowed the falling body, switched impulsively to lifting Jian higher than any basketball hoop, impossibly higher, until her upraised arms closed around the girl. Then, in full view of the rescuers and rescued around the loading dock, both figures descended gradually to a safe landing. No one but Ash saw the startled look that Jian shot her on the way down, or the huge smile that flashed for just a second across her face.

  The woman in the window still screamed, with fear now instead of anger, a fear that turned to shrill panic when Ash plucked her out, raised her, and set her down on the flat roof of the warehouse. Another older woman leaned out the window to see what had happened, so Ash set her on the roof as well.

  It was Cleo’s turn to come dashing out the gaping door and leaping from the loading dock, with Chiu close behind. “What…” She looked around, saw Jian still holding the girl, and ran to Ash, who pointed up at the roof where the two women slumped near the edge. “I missed all the fun! And there won’t even be photos this time!”

  “There had better be,” Chiu said, close behind her. “I gave Twelve a camera on my way. That’s why I was almost late. Once we decided to go in disguise, Jian thought we might as well let her film us.” She strode over to Jian, who looked almost as much in shock as the girl she was still holding. “The poor child’s shivering! Here, Jian, wrap her in this.” She wriggled out of her hoodie and offered it. “The sooner we get her to Jana, the better.”

  “Where?” Ash looked around at the closest buildings to see where Twelve was filming from.

  “Hey! Get me down from here!” Twelve, in a gray hoodie, waved at them from the roof. “The trap door doesn’t work from this side, and I don’t care for the company.”

  An hour later and several miles away Ash alternated between slumping in the car seat and sitting up so rigidly her body quivered. “I should have been upstairs with you!”

  “We all knew that you should be guarding the loading end,” Cleo pointed out, “and positioned where you could see the wider picture. I should have been able to keep that witch from dragging the child upstairs, but everything was so confused and chaotic that I couldn’t see well, or risk firing for fear of hitting somebody else. You were where you could disable the guard and get that bitch’s dagger away from her. Mags told me about that. If she’d still had it…”

  Ash couldn’t stand to think about what might have happened. She slid back into the slumped position and covered her face with her hands.

  “The woman on guard up there just had a kind of short nasty whip for keeping order,” Cleo went on, “so I got that away with no trouble. I think their whole idea was to keep the girls in, without giving any thought to keeping rescuers out.”

  Ash straightened enough to lean her head back against the headrest. “Once more of Twelve’s videos get around, the traffickers will know enough to up their defenses.”

  “I thought you approved of what she’s been doing.”

  Ash shrugged. “The upside is that trafficked girls will know that escape is possible, and thousands of people will have a notion of what’s going on.”

  “Including certain people who’ve been searching for us?”

  Ash didn’t answer, just stared out the window. Finally Cleo said, in a lighter tone, “You’re grumpy now because you still haven’t had a chance to smash whole buildings.” She sighed dramatically. “I guess we’ll just have to resort to sex again until something better comes along.”

  The sex came along within hours. The building smashing took a day longer.

  Twelve’s newest video showed the building, the neighborhood, the grey guerillas inside on the stairs coming and going with groups of confused rescued girls, and then aerial views from the rooftop that included the cars and trucks being loaded and rushing away (carefully angled so no license plate numbers were visible). The climactic shots were of the girl being held half out the window, Jian’s miraculous leap to catch and save her, and the screaming Chinese women being lifted by an invisible force onto the roof. She had even captured from above the fierce, unearthly look on Jian’s face as she leapt for the girl.

  The banner Twelve added showed the Shadow Hand logo with a calligraphy-style dragon’s head beside it, and the line, “Teaming Up to Terrorize Traffickers.”

  “It’s all going viral now,” Twelve said complacently. ”Just think how much I could do if I had a rich backer and the right gear!” She looked hopefully at Ash, with no response, so she shrugged and went on. “Each of the videos is linked to the others, and millions of people all over the world are sharing them. And the comments! Plenty of trolls being nasty, of course, but far more positives. But look at this one!” She brought up a couple of lines from an anonymous poster with just a street name and number and the word, “Help!”

  “That street’s in South Boston,” Twelve said. “I looked up the address. It’s an old motel that’s supposedly closed now, but a Google Earth scan shows cars there at night inside the fenced parking lot. The cops are sure to see this, and maybe even do something about it.”

  “We’re going to get there first.” Ash’s tone allowed no dissent. “Can you contact whoever posted that comment?”

  “Nobody can hide from me behind ‘Anonymous.’ When shall I say we’ll be there?”

  “Tonight. 7 pm. It’ll be dark by then, but not likely to be many customers yet. Tell Anonymous to get ready.”

  It was too short notice to organize with Jian’s entire crew, but Jian and Chiu wouldn’t be left out, and brought three cars with allies.

  They pulled up outside the gated fence, shining their headlights on the building. Ash tore open the gate, then peeled back sections of fence and rolled them into one huge coil. Several men ran out of the office, one holding a cell phone to his ear, but when Ash lifted the phone from his hand, smashed it against a post, and made the sharp fragments attack whatever heads came close like giant hornets, they all ran back inside.

  Anonymous was ready for them. Ash could see a figure moving along the third-floor outside walkway, pounding on each door. Wherever she passed, a door opened and a girl came out, ran to the stairs, and dashed down to the parking lot. Chiu was there by then, motionin
g them toward the waiting cars. A few times a man stumbled out behind a girl, fumbling to get his trousers back on. Ash, with grim enjoyment, would pluck him off the walkway and fling him through the air to land in the dumpsters out back.

  “Anybody left inside?” Cleo snapped after the last girls came stumbling down the stairwell.

  “Not unless some John is hiding under a bed.” Their Anonymous friend looked them over. “You’re from the Shadow Hand?” She looked about sixteen, but close up her eyes were much older than that.

  Cleo nodded, while Ash scanned the area, focused on the two-story-tall metal lamppost outside the office, and uprooted it. Dozens of eyes watched as the post shot through the air to embed itself in the middle unit on the third level so hard the whole wall caved in, windows spewing shards of glass. The pole backed off, rose high, and, like a cudgel, smashed down on the roof, caving that in as well. Over and over, up and down the length of the building, the battering continued, with special attention to the area over the office, where the guards still cowered until the assault had them running in panic. The walls on the second level began to crack, and the whole building seemed to slump.

  Anonymous watched with as much satisfaction as awe, until a distant sound of sirens sent them all—including Ash, who finally allowed herself to be dragged away by Cleo—scurrying into the cars and trucks and racing off.

  “So,” Cleo said, after they had escorted their passengers to the agreed safe house set up by Jian’s gang. “Was it good for you?”

  Ash was still energized, but mellowing by the minute. “Oh yeah. Just fine.” She grinned over at Cleo. “Not the very best, but fine just the same. You?”