“Mr Tze would like to extend an invitation to you, to visit the Yuk Lung tower.” Her voice was a whisper, but it carried. “The choice of the state in which you arrive there is up to you.” The gun muzzle never wavered.
“A moment,” he said, carefully holstering the pistols. “If you please.” Fixx drew the bones from his pocket and weighed them in his hand, then gently rolled them out across the top of an enclosed cot. The child inside stirred, blinking at him. Small fingers stretched at the yellow-white pieces, then sank away.
Fixx studied the lay of the bones, and as he did, he noticed the feedlines dripping clean air into all the cribs. Blue vapour twinkled in there.
The woman in the mask flicked off the safety to make her point.
He smiled thinly and gathered up the bones once more. “Never been a man to argue with fate,” said Fixx, holding up his hands. “I can read the signs. I surrender.”
“I’m here,” she said to the world, and the world screamed back love for her. Juno stood inside a bowl of darkness, surrounded by a shifting sea of souls, crying, imploring her, begging her to complete them. The girl saw them through a hazy lens, reading the colour of their hearts. They burned with wild fires, but the shades were dull, tainted. They never even knew it, the dear poor people, but she could see it. Juno saw it very clearly now, the acrid blue that stained everything, the battery acid taste in her mind. She looked up and they did the same, joyful at the touch of the warm drizzle falling. The crowd were unaware of the invisible balloons floating up there, molecule-thin sheathes breathing out the drug into the clouds, seeding the blue rain.
They moved like a shoal of fish or the mindless uniform motion of a flock of birds in flight. The crowds were unified, drunk on the Z3N laced in the food, the water and the air. They were sharing, transforming as one. A totality that waited for one shining light to guide it. Her voice.
Juno’s hand strayed to her throat, feeling tightness there. Her flesh and mind warred with one another; she knew she only had to release the first note to set her nightmares in motion.
Tze spoke from the wings, and despite the roaring adulation, she heard him. “Sing,” he commanded, repeating the words of compulsion Rope had used in the laboratory. “Sing for them, infans simulare. ”
“Harmony,” she wept. “Come with me.”
The two vehicles exploded out of the tunnel and howled through the side streets of Causeway Bay, the sirens of the ambulance parting traffic before them like a knife. Burning jags of yellow light from the Vector lit up the flanks of the paramedic van, shattering lights and tearing at the tyres.
The Merc kept on him as he turned on to the back roads, screeching around the narrow bends up toward the Peak. The ambulance ricocheted off safety barriers and knocked chunks of old stone from the walls. Beams scorched the asphalt. The vehicle was getting sluggish. Ko knew he was on a loser.
Another shot flashed through the back of the ambulance and struck a pressurised gas cylinder. The shriek of escaping fumes brought the stink of liquid nitrogen to Ko’s nostrils. The smell made him panic and he jerked the wheel hard, vaulting out of the vehicle and into a gully.
The ambulance spun out as the Vector came closer. Ko had time to bury his face in the dirt as the CryoSaviour re-sus module inside exploded. Designed to flash-freeze trauma victims, the uncontrolled detonation created a plume of super-chilled vapour that engulfed both vehicles.
Clutching at the re-opened wound on his chest, Ko staggered from his place of safety to find the masked woman frozen to the inside of her car. She appeared quite dead.
The throaty rumble of a bike engine drew his attention; a kid dressed in Road Ronin armour halted and doffed his samurai helmet. “Dang! Did you see that?”
Ko kneed the biker in the nuts and tossed him from the cycle. As an afterthought, he grabbed the youth’s katana and rode on, toward the glowing summit.
The lines in blood were drawn, and overhead the sickly light of ascension was forming. Rope looked up, weighing the ghost knife in his hand, as Blue Snake arrived with the black man in custody. He searched his memory for a name.
“Joshua Fixx. You’re not unknown to… To me.”
Fixx studied him. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”
“I should say so.” Rope crossed to the wooden frame where Lam was chained.
The operative had a measuring stare. “Does Tze know?” he asked suddenly. “I’m willing to bet they think you’re a team player, right?” Fixx nodded. “But no. I can smell it on you, mister. More to you than just this zen thing, huh?”
“Impressive,” said Rope. “You just clapped eyes on me and you can tell all that?”
“I’m a perceptive fellah. I can smell it. I met your kind before.”
“Yes, you have.” Rope had a blink of someone else’s memory, of Fixx wet with blood and human carrion. “I can taste it.”
“The stink from Spanish Fork carries a long, long way. What is it you all like to say? The Path of Joseph…”
“Is thorny.” Rope spun and threw the blade, burying it in Blue Snake’s chest. She sputtered and perished. He looked up at Fixx and felt the burning touch of Elder Seth behind his own eyes. “Tze makes his play. Then we’ll make ours.”
Fixx shook his head. “Can’t let that happen.”
Rope smiled, bearing more teeth than a human mouth should. “Now you’re becoming interesting. ”
The samurai’s bike took him through a roadblock at breakneck speed, but none of the guards were watching; they were crying, singing, pointing into the dark and pregnant skies.
Ko rode around the edges of the crowd, the thunder of their adulation echoing. He tasted the tingling vapour on the wind, glimpsed shapes at the corners of his vision. Sinuous things, serpents and monstrous angels, ghostly and dancing. The rapturous chorus penetrated his mind, begging him to join in.
When the lightning struck, he thought for a moment the Vector was back, but then he turned his head upwards and the sight almost stopped his heart.
In the air over the city there was a rip in the sky, and from it fell huge emerald tears. As he watched, the clouds gave birth to a thing with claws and teeth and eyes of impossible angles. It was drenched in scintillating viridian shades, scaled with jewels so magnificent they took his breath away to see them. Out of the torn maw of cloud it came, borne on vestigial wings, ephemeral but gaining solidity by the second.
Ko joined millions of people across the city of Hong Kong, watching the end of their world begin as the colossus of the Jade Dragon fell screaming to earth.
Zen, zen
I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice
I’m the perfect smile
Touch my thoughts and flow
There’s no world we can’t know
Sea of stones, sand waves
Harmony, come with me
Taste the blue
Star at dawn
Bubble in the stream
“Touch”
Vocals: Juno Qwan
© RedWhiteBlue Inc. 2026.
16. City on Fire
In the corridors of the hospital, a thousand screaming babies tore at the broken minds of the adults. Dr Yeoh collapsed, plunging into hell. In her room, Nikita slept restlessly; she was already there.
Ko stared out over the shining pinnacles of the cityscape. Juno Qwan’s voice smothered everything in a warm fog of noise. He felt her words invading him; she was crying, but he registered this in only the most distant of ways. Down in the metropolis, he could see her face everywhere, on the massive street-screens in Central, on the flickercladding of the Hotel Metropolita; her song played from radios in every apartment, every channel carried her words. The sound was worming its way into him.
He left the bike and staggered up the summit, through people screaming and crying and weeping and laughing. The freakish, sickening high he had shared with Fixx in the hospital was coming back tenfold. He could taste the Z3N in the air, the thick haze washing through his pores. It swelled his heart, made his feet light. The ecstasy of the crowd around him spilled into his mind, getting louder, becoming stronger.