Daxiong sat bolt upright. His heart was thumping, the sun was beating down on him. Across the shimmering fields of slag the vanishing airbikes quickly gained distance, but one of the bikes was unmistakably hounding the other and trying to force it to land.
One of the hitmen was dead in the control room. So who was that on the fleeing bike?
Yoyo?
While he was still thinking about it, he clattered down the zigzag stairs. Apart from him and possibly Yoyo none of the Guardians had survived the massacre. The remaining City Demons knew nothing about the double life of the six of them, even though they might have guessed at various things. Yoyo and he had originally brought the Demons to life as a disguise. A motorbike association aroused no suspicion, it wasn’t considered intellectual or subversive. They could meet easily, particularly in Quyu. Three more members had joined the previous year. Perhaps, Daxiong thought, as he lowered his full three hundredweight onto his motorbike, the time had come to initiate them. Strictly speaking, he no longer had that option. Whoever their opponent might have been, it was clear that the Guardians had been busted.
As he drove off he selected a number.
There was a ringing noise. It went on too long, far too long. Then he heard the boy’s voice.
‘Where were you, damn it?’ snorted Daxiong.
Lau Ye yawned and talked at the same time.
Then he asked a question.
‘Don’t ask, Ye,’ Daxiong snorted into the mobile. ‘Get Xiao-Tong and Mak over here. Right now! Go to the blast furnace and clear the control room, everything you find there, computer, displays, the lot.’
The boy stammered something which Daxiong took to mean that he didn’t know where the others were.
‘Then find them!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll explain it later. What? No, don’t take the stuff to Andromeda, and not to the workshop. Then think of something. Somewhere they won’t connect with us. Oh, and Ye—’ He swallowed. ‘You will find corpses. Brace yourselves, you hear?’
He rang off before Ye could ask any questions.
Jericho’s machine took a blow when the blond guy’s airbike collided with its chassis. Time and again he had tried to steer towards the airspace above the steelworkers’ housing estate. Every time the blond guy forced him back, stared wildly over at them and tried to take aim. The lunar landscape of the slag-fields sped along beneath them. Once again Jericho tried to turn off to the left. The blond guy speeded up and forced him in the other direction.
‘Where are you actually trying to get to?’ Yoyo’s voice rang in his ears.
‘We’re outdistancing him!’
‘You haven’t a hope out in the open! Tempt him into the plant.’
The blond guy’s airbike shot upwards and immediately plummeted back down again. Jericho saw the machine’s fish belly right above him and then dived. They wobbled along just above ground level.
‘Be careful!’ Yoyo snapped.
‘I know what I’m doing!’ Rage welled up in him, but he was actually by no means sure about what he should do. Right in front of him a huge chimney rose out of the ground.
‘To the right!’ screeched Yoyo. ‘The right!’
The blond guy drove them further down. The bike scratched along dried-up slag, started skipping, went into a violent roll, then they were around the chimney, only to find themselves in front of a hangar-sized warehouse. They were too close, far too close. No chance of avoiding it, of turning away, of avoiding a collision.
No! The warehouse door was open a crack.
Just before the threatened impact Jericho pulled the machine to the side and shot through it.
Lau Ye dashed through the gloomy concert hall of the Andromeda. He ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him.
Don’t ask any questions. Just don’t ask.
He was used to this from Daxiong, and he had never complained. Lau Ye was a novice in the order of the City Demons: he had been the last to join and he was by far the youngest. He respected Daxiong and Yoyo, Ziyi and Maggie, Tony and Jia Wei. He also respected Ma Mak and Hui Xiao-Tong, even though they had only been admitted to the club subsequently. Subsequently in that the others had set up the association together, with Daxiong as founder and Yoyo in the role of Vice President.
But Ye wasn’t blind.
Born on the estate just after the steelworks was closed down, with no school education, but more intimately familiar with Xaxu’s peculiar qualities and those of its inhabitants, from the very start he had refused to believe that the Demons were just a bike club. Daxiong was from Quyu, too, but he was seen as operating somewhere between the worlds of the connected and the outsiders. No one doubted that he would wake up on the other side one morning, rub his eyes, drive a smart car to an air-conditioned high-rise skyscraper and pursue some well-paid job there. Yoyo, on the other hand, Maggie, Ziyi, Tony and Jia Wei belonged to Quyu about as much as a string quartet belonged in Andromeda. In the control room they’d set up a kind of Cyber Planet for the privileged, and Yoyo had packed all the super-expensive computers full of brilliant games, but she was from a different world. She went to uni. They all went to uni to study something that parents considered sensible.
Yeah. Not his.
Lau Ye’s parents didn’t pay him much attention. At the age of sixteen he might as well have been living on the Moon. His job in Daxiong’s workshop and the City Demons were all he had, and he loved being part of it. And so he didn’t ask questions, either. He didn’t ask whether the only purpose his humble self, Xiao-Tong and Mak served was to disguise a conspiratorial little student club as something fit for the slums. He didn’t ask what the other six organised at their many meetings in the control centre when he, Xiao-Tong and Mak weren’t around. Until a few days before, when Yoyo had turned up at the workshop in a complete state. That time he had asked Daxiong.
The answer had been a familiar one.
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I just want to know if there’s anything I can do.’
‘Yoyo’s got problems. Best you stay in the workshop for the time being and avoid the control centre.’
‘What kind of problems?’
‘Don’t ask.’
Don’t ask. Except that three days later that guy with the fair hair and the blue eyes had turned up, the one Daxiong had later said looked like a – what was it? Scanavian? Scandinavian! Ye had talked to the man and learned that he wanted to get into Andromeda.
‘Cool,’ he had said to Daxiong later. ‘You may have sent him on a wild goose chase. Why would you do that?’
‘Don’t—’
‘No. I’m asking.’
Daxiong had rubbed his bald head and his chin, had poked around in his ears, tugged on his fake beard and finally snarled:
‘It could be that we’re about to get an unwanted visit. Nasty people.’
‘Like the other guys that time?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And what do they want from us? I mean, what do they want from us? What have you done, you – six?’
Daxiong had looked at him for a long time.
‘If I confide something in you, little Ye, you’ll keep your trap shut and not tell anyone?’
‘Okay.’
‘Not even Mak or Xiao-Tong?’
‘O-okay.’
‘Do I have your word?’
‘Of course. Erm – what’s going on?’
‘Don’t ask.’
But even on that odd day the standard rebuff hadn’t sounded as desperate and furious as it had just now. It seemed as if the suspicions that Ye had held for a long time were being borne out. The six of them had conspiratorial rituals. His limbs quivered as he crossed the inner room, which was still in a state of complete chaos from the previous night, and barely negotiable for leftover food, bottles, cigarette ends and drug paraphernalia. Alcohol, stale smoke and piss launched a general attack on his chemoreceptors. Mak and Xiao-Tong had been together for four weeks, and had been at the same concert as him. After that they’d had one hell of a party. It was only towards morning that Ye had crept, royally zonked, to Yoyo’s ‘summer residence’. Even now his head felt like an aquarium that the water sloshed around in every time he moved, but Daxiong trusted him.