Jade Dragon (14 page)

“Quite something, isn’t she?” Mr Tze crossed his line of sight, four
girls in unfocussed disarray following him in a loose gaggle. “It’s hard
not to fall for a woman like that.”

“She’s a fantastic dancer,” he said lamely, bereft of anything better to
say.

Tze laughed, a brusque bark of sound over the music of the string
quartet. “Of course she is.” The executive gestured at the girls with
him. “Francis, some of us are retiring to the private suites. Perhaps
you’d like to join in?”

“Are you Mr Tze’s protege?” asked one of the women, the hint of a
predatory smile on her doll-like face.

“He may well be, Nikita,” said Tze. “Francis has a shining path set out
before him.”

Frankie gave a shallow bow. “Thank you, sir. I’m, uh, grateful for the
opportunity.”

The girl, Nikita, extended a hand to him. “You’re coming, then?” The
other women giggled.

His stomach knotted with disquiet. Tze’s women looked at him with
calculating eyes. Frankie felt like he was beneath a microscope or
pressed on to an auction block. “Perhaps later,” he mumbled. “I’d, ah,
I’d like to enjoy the party some more.”

There was the very smallest flash of annoyance in Tze’s expression, but
then it was gone so fast Frankie wondered if he had imagined it. “Of
course. Later.”

Nikita tossed a last look at him as the group vanished into the depths
of the atrium, to the chambers and rooms hidden in the shadows.

He watched the party diffuse, the people drifting away or coming
together into small knots of murmured conversation. He spotted Juno’s
manager but each time he crossed the atrium to find him, Ropé was gone
when he got there. The pillars of creamy green jade and the artfully
strewn furniture made the chamber difficult to navigate.

As Frankie crossed and re-crossed the room he became aware of a shift in
the mood around him. The melange of genteel conversation and light
amusement had faded, and in its place was a shady ambience, a sense of
secrets and harsher humour. Startled, he happened on a couple in one of
the booths engaged in slow, mechanical sex while a dozen silent
spectators watched. Both of the performers were blindfolded with silk
ties that bore the YLHI corporate logo, and their hands were fixed to a
seat frame in the same manner. The spectators were breathing in a chorus
of rhythmic, gasping breaths. One of them offered Frankie a tray of blue
capsules and he shook his head, backing away.

He stumbled into Alice and half-stuttered an apology. She eyed him.
Somewhere along the way she’d lost her ornate jacket and the red silk
blouse she wore was open, revealing a glimpse of breasts beneath.

“Hungry?” she asked. Her eyes were glassy but there was a challenge in
her flat tone.

“No.”

“Liar.” She pushed into his personal space, crowding him. “You want
something more plastic, is that it?” Alice walked lazy fingers over his
jacket and pulled his glass from his hand, swigging the contents. “Go on
then,” she snapped, turning her back on him. “Go play with your dolly.”
Alice wandered away, unsteady.

Frankie glanced around. Suddenly it seemed everywhere he looked, there
were bodies pressing bodies and the taint of drug haze in the air. He
felt flushed and uncomfortable. Sure, he’d been at corp raves dozens of
times, seen drink and drugs and sex tossed around like party favours,
but here it seemed…
darker.

Cautiously, he walked out of the atrium proper and into the shadows.

Tze closed the door behind Nikita and nodded at the other girls. They
had been here before and they knew how things were going to play out.
Nikita flashed him a look, a heady mixture of fear and arousal in her
dull eyes. He showed her where the suite’s small bar was and ordered her
to make some drinks. She did so, eyeing the door now and then, thoughts
of bolting warring with her baser, more avaricious instincts.

He wandered about the room as the other trio took items of equipment
from the hidden compartments beneath the wide, burgundy-coloured sofas.
Tze feathered the dimmer control on the discreet lighting control
panel—he liked the gloom to be thick and warm—and started the recorders
concealed in the walls and the ceiling.

There was a bowl of blue capsules on the low table in the corner, and
next to that a flat metal case the size of a hardcover book. It was cold
to the touch, condensation speckling the surface. Tze tapped it lightly
and the lid sighed open, letting a waft of white vapour escape before he
reached in and took out two glassy rods. He glanced up. The girls had
the rig fixed up, straps and spars dangling from the rings fixed to the
ceiling. They played a quick game of rock-scissors-paper and the blonde
was the winner. Nikita returned from the bar with two highball glasses
and she stopped short as she took in the scene. The other two girls were
stripping the blonde, binding her into the cruciform support frame.

Nikita blinked and backed away a step as Tze crossed to her and took his
drink. “Hard to know what to think, isn’t it?”

The other women giggled, and began to toy with one another, taking
capsules from the bowl.

Tze rolled a blue caplet between his fingers, and despite herself Nikita
licked her lips when she saw the glittering Z3N embossed on the side.
There were hundreds of the pills in the receptacle.

“Don’t be shy,” Tze smiled, offering her the tablet. The smile turned
into a laugh as her free hand shot out and snatched the Z3N capsule. She
washed it down with a sip of her drink.

“Good,” he said. “We’re getting somewhere.” He nodded to the other two
women. They opened a cabinet on the far wall to reveal a dozen
mirror-bright arcs of surgical steel within. Giggling, they each
selected a curved blade, wicked and sharp as a raptor claw. Eyes
glinting, they descended to the blonde’s bare flesh and began to cut on
her.

The private chambers ranged away along the darkened corridor. Each had
lights above them, some dark but most illuminated. When Frankie pressed
his ear to the doors, there was nothing but silence. A chill went
through him. The rooms were soundproofed. Anyone could be doing anything
in there and nobody would know. He turned in place, his hand trembling,
and then at random he tugged at a handle. To Frankie’s surprise, the
door opened without resistance, and brought with it a draught of potent
human scents. He peered in and his throat went dry.

The room was so dimly lit that it was barely possible to be sure of what
he was seeing, but he could make out the forms of men—one of them was
one of the APRC officers he’d seen before, wearing nothing but his
uniform jacket—coiled on the floor and snarling like animals. He saw
flashes of female flesh in there, and violent rutting caught between the
motions of sweating, scratched bodies. Someone was crying, and the sound
of it drew Frankie’s attention to the ceiling. There was a man up there,
ebony screws as fat as a finger holding him in place where they punched
through his ankles and wrists. Skin hung off him in flayed strips, wet
red meat showing in the half-light. The unfortunate’s face was twisted
in agony, tracks of black tears crossing cheeks laced with complex
scars. Frankie recognised the man: Ping, from the airport, the careless
one who had lost the escort car.

He retreated in shock, forcing the door shut, and his heart almost
stopped when he realised there was someone towering over him in the
corridor. A hulking mass of a man, it was another of Tze’s masked
guardians.

“Participants only,” rasped the figure. The Mask was white and black,
hanging there like an apparition. The stylised face belonged to Judge
Bao, a character from the Peking Opera stories of the Song Dynasty.

“In there—” Frankie gasped.

“What are you looking for?” said the guardian.

“Juh-Juno—” he managed.

Judge Bao pressed a hand into the small of his back and guided him away.
“Over here, sir. I’ll take you to her.”

Frankie stumbled on, his mind reeling, the healing scratches on his hand
stinging.

Nikita’s face was waxy with shock underneath her make-up. She was aware
that her lip was trembling, and in the back of her skull she could feel
the first cool tendrils of the Z3N hit unfolding. It seemed unreal, some
horrific vidshow instead of a real performance happening in front of
her. Tze’s women were opening up the skin of the blonde in turned petals
of pale flesh. When the stink of copper touched her nostrils she gagged
and stumbled back a step.

Tze’s broad hand shot out like a striking cobra and enveloped hers where
she held the glass. “No, no. You’re not going to leave.”

She tried to deny him, but he closed his hand tighter, crushing the skin
and bones. The glass made a cracking sound.

“Don’t lie to me.” He squeezed and the glass shattered. She cried out as
the fragments bit into her palm.

Nikita looked to the others with a pleading stare, but they were busy
drawing intricate shapes on each other in spilt blood, a confusion of
lines and symbols.

Tze took a handful of her blouse and ripped it off her. He drew his
finger through her cut hand and used her vitae to draw a design on her
trembling breast, just above her heart. Two discs, one larger than the
other, connected by a line that was in turn bisected with an arc. Tze
unbuttoned his shirt to show her the same shape rendered as a tattoo on
his chest. The lines were made of dragons, eating each other’s tails.

“Please don’t kill me.” She forced out the words.

He smirked and showed her the glass rods. They were long and thin,
rough-hewn. Nikita was reminded of icicles. Inside each of them was a
reservoir of actinic blue liquid, glittering like stars. In spite of
everything, her mouth immediately flooded with saliva.

“Pure,” said Tze, seeing the reaction in her eyes. “A thousand times
more potent than the weak tea you’re used to.” He jerked his head at the
girls, who were scooping handfuls of capsules into their mouths,
crunching them down like candy.

Then he moved, quick as lightning, and buried the first of the needles
through the middle of the pattern he had drawn on her. Nikita crashed to
the floor, a white-hot shock rushing though her. She glanced up,
hovering on the edge of awareness, in time to see Tze stab himself with
the other rod.

Nikita s world broke open, drowning her in floods of chilling blue. Tze
loomed over her, a towering god wreathed in noxious smoke and shimmering
darts of painful colour. From behind him, tendrils of liquid night
emerged and snaked over and around his body. They stabbed out and
penetrated her, rushing through her flesh and savaging her mind. She
could not speak.

Tze displayed a terrible aspect. “Greedy child. You wanted to taste my
air, dared to know the glory of my world, yes? It will be my pleasure to
give it you. Shall we see if your pitiful cattle-mind can grasp such
beauty?”

He dominated her senses, blotting out everything. Tze opened the Stygian
halls of his psyche, and let the horrors within rush to fill her.

Nikita looked at the truth of him in the eye, and she shattered.

Juno blinked and realised that she hadn’t heard a word of the twittering
platitudes of Phoebe Hi. She found herself staring into the depths of
the champagne glass in her hand, locked on the shifting shapes of the
rising bubbles. They shaded black as she watched them ascend, turning
into tiny ebon pearls. “Juno?” said Phoebe. “Did you hear what I said?”

She nodded, tearing herself away. The conversation area, raised up above
the main level of the atrium, was secluded and quiet; but the singer
suddenly felt enclosed in there, the long shadows around the delicate
lightstands growing even as she watched them. Her stomach turned over
and she shivered. Juno’s hand wandered to the back of her neck, where
her skin felt cold and clammy to the touch. There at the corners of her
vision, dark motes swarmed, just as they had when she tried to touch her
memories of the disastrous concert. She shifted uncomfortably, the wide
sofa too big around her. Juno felt lost in it, tiny and small.

“I… I’m sorry.” She forced a smile. “Perhaps it’s just travel fatigue.
”The words seemed like a lie. Colour was bleeding out of her vision in
little increments, and there was a pressure in her ears. There were only
a handful of people in the room, but she felt like there were thousands
crowded around her.

“Can I get you something?” Hi was watching her carefully.

“Juno!” She turned at the sound of Frankie’s voice—and for a moment, the
gloom around her retreated. He saw the look on her face as he
approached, and his kind eyes clouded. “Are… Are you okay?”

“Better now,” she said, with genuine feeling. On an impulse, the singer
put the half-full glass down on a table and stood up. “I think I’m going
to retire for the night. ”

“I’ll arrange transport to your hotel—” said Hi, but Juno shook her
head.

“No. Frankie’s taking me home.” She took his arm and guided him away.

“I am?” he said, nonplussed.

She almost ran as she led him by the hand up towards the helipad levels.
The shroud of unease dogging her retreated, and she gave Frankie a
brittle smile. “I want to go,” she said. “Please?”

“Of course,” he replied, sensing her disquiet. “But I don’t have, uh,
clearance for a spidercopter. ”

“I’m Juno Qwan,”she said. “I get anything I want.”

Hi frowned as Ropé sat in Juno’s vacated seat. He toyed with her glass.
“You’re not going to intervene?”

She sneered. “Why would I? It was my idea in the first place. It’s an
ideal way to expedite two problems at once. ”

He shook his head. “You haven’t lived with the talent as closely as I
have, Phoebe. You don’t see the variables, the off-pattern behaviour.”

“This is a necessity,” she said, an edge in her tone. “The talent will
do what it is told to do.”