A world extinguished.
The hiss of the other airbike came across from beyond the passageway, changed, grew more distinct. It was getting closer.
‘Hey, what’s with these things?’ Yoyo leaned forward and pointed at one of the gaping entrances to the converter. ‘He won’t be able to find us in there.’
Jericho didn’t reply. The bike would fit quite easily in one of the converters, with both of them on it. The maw was big enough, the container was bulbous and several metres deep. And yet he didn’t like the idea that they might be trapped down there. He brought the machine up, towards the ceiling.
‘If only you hadn’t brought us in here,’ Yoyo complained.
‘If only you’d brought your computer with you,’ Jericho snarled back. ‘Then we wouldn’t be making targets of ourselves.’
Between two joists, right below the ceiling, there was a platform from which you had a vantage point over most of the hall. The converters yawned far below them, separated from one another by large armoured bulkheads. Sunbeams stroked their bike, explored its shape, let it go. With extreme concentration Jericho fiddled with the controls, and the jets produced a small amount of reverse thrust, just enough for the machine to move slowly backwards over the edge of the platform.
‘He’s coming,’ hissed Yoyo.
A beam of light crept into the hall from the neighbouring space. The blond guy had turned on the headlight. Jericho silently settled the airbike on the platform and turned off the engine. The hiss faded to a faint hum. He almost felt something like pride at his navigational abilities. The blond guy wouldn’t hear them above the noise of his own machine, and the gloom up here would swallow them up. They clung to the ceiling like a fat, lurking insect.
‘And by the way I did bring my computer,’ Yoyo whispered.
Puzzled, Jericho turned round to look at her.
‘I thought—’
‘That wasn’t my computer. I just wanted him to think it was. I wear mine on my belt.’
He raised his hand and hushed her. Far below their pursuer appeared and hovered slowly along underneath them. His bike hissed quietly, and a powerful finger of cold, white light crept around the building. Jericho leaned forwards. The blond guy was craning his head in all directions, looking at the ceiling without seeing them, peering between the containers. His gun lay heavy in his right hand.
Had he lost them?
Jericho hesitated. Highly unlikely that the man had gone looking for his pistol after the crash. The force of the collision had slung it far out into the darkness of the hall where the rolling mills were. There was only one explanation. His bike was fitted with more weapons, and if that was true of all of them, then—
On either side of the tank, he thought. That was the only place where there was room, right in front of his legs.
His fingers ran over the body of the bike.
Yep, no doubt about it, there were chambers there, cavities under the casings. But how did you get them open?
Below them, the hitman curved through the hall. The luminous eye darted between constructions and containers, slid along walkways and balconies. Only now did Jericho notice that their pursuer was creeping towards a tunnel-shaped hatch that opened up to the rear of the arched ceiling. Rails led from it to the inside of the hall. The blond guy stopped his bike and glanced in. He seemed uncertain whether to go inside before scouring the entire hall, then he turned back and climbed higher.
He was coming right towards them.
Jericho thought frantically. In a few seconds the killer would find them in their hiding-place. Like a man possessed, he searched the casings and the instrument panel for a way of opening the weapon compartments. The hissing got closer. He felt Yoyo’s breath on the back of his neck, craned his head and ventured to look. The blond guy was two-thirds of the way up the hall.
Less than a metre, and he would see them.
But he got no higher.
Instead, his gaze wandered downwards and fixed on the mouths of the converters, that were turned towards him, lips rounded as if to suck him in, and Jericho realised what he was thinking. The bike stood motionless above one of the gaping maws. There was inky blackness within the steel cooking pot, no way of telling if anyone was hiding inside. The blond guy reached into a compartment on his bike, pulled something long from it and threw it down, then accelerated and got out of the danger zone.
A second went by.
Another, and another.
Then came the inferno.
The grenade went off with a deafening boom. A column of fire shot several metres out of the converter as the pressure of the explosion burst from the opening, bathed the hall in glowing red light, whirled smoke in all directions. Jericho grimaced, so painful was the echo in his ears.
The rumble of the explosion spread, escaped through the light-slit in the roof of the converter hall, its panes of glass shattered long since, vibrated the air molecules above and spread through the sky.
Xin heard the explosion two hundred metres higher up.
Something had gone up. Where exactly he couldn’t have said, but he was sure that there had been a bang in one of the halls lined up to the west of the blast furnace.
Daxiong, on the other hand, had no doubt that the explosion originated in the converter hall.
He pulled the motorbike round, spraying up gravel, and at the same moment Xin plunged down from the sky like a hawk.
‘Get a move on, damn you!’
Lau Ye was really furious. He was hopping from one leg to the other in Xiao-Tong’s shed, watching his friends slowly putting on their shirts and trousers, as if the process of getting dressed contained incalculable risks. Ma Mak revealed the stoicism of a zombie, not embarrassed in the slightest that little Ye had found her and Xiao-Tong naked, in a position that left no doubt about the activity they had been engaged in when they fell asleep. Xiao-Tong blinked hard, trying to banish tiny living creatures from the corners of his eyes.
‘Come on, now!’ Ye clenched his fists, headed nowhere. ‘I promised Daxiong that we’d hurry.’
A duet of grunting was heard, but at least the two of them managed to come shuffling after him. Outside, in the early sunlight, they contorted like vampires.
‘I need a cup of tea,’ murmured Mak.
‘I need a fuck,’ grinned Xiao-Tong and grabbed her backside. She shook him off and struggled onto her motorbike.
‘You’ve lost it.’
‘You’ve both lost it,’ said Ye, and gave Xiao-Tong a shove that managed to get the guy to swing one leg over the saddle. They didn’t have far to go. A few blocks up the street was Wong’s World, and behind it, in the early morning mist, stood the silhouette of the blast furnace. Xiao-Tong pointed feebly at the market.
‘First couldn’t we at least go an’—’
‘No,’ said Ye. ‘Pull yourselves together. Party over.’
That sounded good and very grown up, he thought. Could have come from Daxiong, and it seemed at least to make a big impression on Xiao-Tong and Mak. Abandoning all resistance, they left their bikes where they were, and followed him up the street. The closer they drew to the blast furnace, the tighter the feeling in Ye’s guts became, and a terrible fear took hold of him.
Daxiong had said something about corpses.
He avoided mentioning that to Xiao-Tong and Mak. Not now. For the time being he was just glad to have managed to wake them up at all.
Jericho held his breath.
The blond guy had steered the airbike over the second converter, bringing himself a good bit closer to them. Again he drew out a hand grenade, pulled the pin, slung it into the container and got out of range. There was a bang; the converter spat fire and smoke.