On the positive side, it was worth noting that he would never have betrayed Yoyo. Not least out of self-interest – after all, the group stood and fell with her and her box of tricks filled by Tu Technologies. In return he was even prepared to make her problems his own, particularly because he felt a little responsible for the tense situation. After all, he had advised her on this surefire, super-refined matter, and in that he had been successful, unfortunately too successful. Now Yoyo was troubled by worries that robbed her of sleep, so Jia Wei had spent the past two days trying to find out what had actually gone wrong on the night in question. And found something, an incredible coincidence of events. Now, enveloped in a cloud of wonton fragrances rising from Wong’s bags, as he looked across the square, he decided to talk to Yoyo about it right after breakfast. Maggie’s jabbering emerged from the control centre that they had been using as their headquarters since Andromeda had ceased to be safe; she was chattering cheerfully away into her phone, rounding up the rest of the group.
‘Breakfast,’ she crowed.
Breakfast, exactly. That was what he needed now.
But all of a sudden his feet felt frozen to the spot. From his elevated observation-point he could see all the way to the far-away coke plant, whose quenching tower loomed sadly into the dawn sky. The factory grounds were enormous, and included the old steel complex. He wondered where the new sound was coming from, the one that he hadn’t heard around here for ages, a distant hiss, as if the air over Wong’s World were burning.
He narrowed his eyes.
To the left of the quenching tower, something was hanging in the sky.
It took Jin Jia Wei a second to work out that it was the source of the hiss. A moment later he recognised what it was. And although he had never heard anyone say that intuition was one of his outstanding qualities, he felt the danger emanating from it as if in waves.
No one in Quyu had an airbike.
He recoiled. Between Wong’s World and Cyber Planet, he saw two more of the beefy machines appearing and gliding along not far from the ground. At the same time a car came careening out from behind the surrounding Portakabins and stopped by the blast furnace. The airbike seemed to inflate, a sensory illusion caused by the high speed of its approach.
‘Yoyo!’ he yelled.
The machine came towards him like a flat flying fish. Reflections of sunlight darted across the flattened windscreen and flashed in the turbine flywheel as the pilot shifted his weight and forced the bike into a curve. Jia Wei staggered back inside, clutching the bags, as the hiss swelled and the mouth of the turbine began to widen as if to suck him into its rotating shredder teeth. A moment later the airbike came down, sweeping Maggie and Yoyo’s voices away in a surge of noise, touched the floor of the platform, and he saw something flashing in the pilot’s hand—
Xin fired.
The bullets ploughed through the boy and the bags he was holding. Jia Wei’s face exploded, bottles burst, hot soup, cola and coffee, blood, brain matter, wontons and splinters of bone splatted wildly in all directions. While the ruptured body was still tipping backwards, Xin had leapt from the saddle and stepped inside the building.
His glance took in the interior in a fraction of a second, probed, categorised, separated into worth keeping, superfluous, interesting and negligible. Panels with their monitors turned off, covered with dust, suggested a former control centre, equipped with measuring and regulatory technology designed to monitor the blast furnace plant. The room’s current purpose was equally obvious. In the middle of the room, tables had been shoved together, with highly modern equipment, transparent displays, computers and keyboards. Plank beds pushed up against the back wall showed that the control centre was inhabited, or sometimes used as a place to sleep.
He brandished his gun. The fat girl, Xiao Meiqi, or was her name Maggie? held her hands up. Whatever. Her mouth was wide open, her eyeballs looked as if they were about to leave their sockets, which made her look rather ugly. Xin shot her down as casually as the powerful shake hands with those less important than themselves, swept aside the bags she had set down on the table with the barrel of his gun and aimed it at Yoyo.
Not a sound came from her lips.
He tilted his head curiously to one side and looked at her.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. People showed fear and shock in different ways. For example, in the last second of his life Jin Jia Wei had looked as if you could actually wring the fear out of him. Meiqi’s fear, on the other hand, had reminded him of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a distorted image of herself. There were people who preserved their dignity and attractiveness even when they were in pain. Meiqi hadn’t been one of them. Hardly anyone was.
Yoyo, on the other hand, just stared at him.
She must have leapt up just as Jia Wei called her name, which explained her crouching, cat-like posture. Her eyes were wide, but her face looked strangely unexpressive, regular – almost perfect, had a shadow around the corner of her mouth not made her look slightly ordinary. Even so, she was more beautiful than most of the women that Xin had seen in his life. He wondered how much attention such beauty could put up with. Almost a shame they had no time to find out.
Then he saw Yoyo’s hands beginning to tremble.
Her resistance was crumbling.
He drew up a chair, sat down on it and lowered his gun.
‘I have three questions for you,’ he said.
Yoyo said nothing. Kenny let a few seconds pass, waited to see her give in, but apart from the fact that she was trembling nothing in her posture changed. She went on staring at him as before.
‘I expect a quick and honest answer to all three questions,’ he went on. ‘So no excuses.’ He smiled the way you smile at women whose favours you are trying to win by being open. They might just as well have been sitting in a smart bar or a cosy restaurant. It struck him that he felt decidedly comfortable in Yoyo’s company. Perhaps they did still have a little time left together after all.
‘And afterwards,’ he said benignly, ‘let’s go on looking.’
Jericho saw nothing but dust, whirled up by his own car, as he screeched to a halt below the tower of scaffolding. He drew his Glock from its shoulder-holster, pushed the door open and dashed to the steps. They were made of steel, like the rest of the construction, and amplified the sound of his footsteps.
Bonggg, bonggg!
He cursed under his breath. Taking two steps at a time, he tried to walk on tiptoe, slipped and banged his knee painfully against the stair railings.
Idiot! His only advantage was that Zhao hadn’t seen him.
That moment shots rang out above him. Jericho hurried on. The closer he got to the platform, the more penetratingly the hiss of the airbike reached his ear. Zhao had not thought it necessary to turn off the engine. Fine. The bike would drown him out. He turned his head and saw movement on the square below him. Motorcyclists. Without paying them any heed, he took the last few steps, paused and peered across the stairhead.
The airbike was parked right in front of him. The door to the control centre was open. He jumped onto the platform, darted over to the building and paused beside the doorway, back to the wall, gun at eye-level. Zhao’s voice could be heard, friendly and encouraging:
‘First of all, how much do you know? Secondly, who have you told about it? And the third question’s very easy to answer.’ Pause for effect. ‘It’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Yoyo. It is: Where – is – your – computer?’
She was alive. Good.