Something was approaching from out of the air beyond the halls. It was quick, and coming closer. A high-pitched hiss heralded its arrival. A flying device. Like a motorbike, but without wheels. Someone was sitting in the saddle steering the thing, steering it straight at the control room—
Ye blinked, screened his eyes against the sun with his hand.
Daxiong?
He was gradually able to make out details. Not who was driving the machine, but that the driver or pilot or whatever you called him was holding something long that flashed for a second in the sun—
‘Hey,’ he called out. ‘Come and take a look at th—’
Something detached itself from the flying motorbike and came hurtling at him with the speed of a rocket.
It was a rocket.
‘—is,’ he whispered.
His last thought was that he must be dreaming. That it wasn’t happening, because it couldn’t possibly happen.
Don’t ask any questions.
Xin sped away.
The little house resting on the scaffolding seemed to inflate for a second, as if taking a deep breath. Then the front part blew apart in a fiery cloud, slinging rubble in all directions, crashing against the main structure of the blast furnace, the façades of the adjacent buildings, the forecourt. Xin curved round and fired further rockets at the rear façade. What remained of the side walls exploded, and the roof collapsed. The struts of the girderwork tower supporting the blazing ruin snapped. The control room began to topple, raining down flaming fragments, broke apart in the middle and sent a flurry of sparks through the tower.
Xin felt a sudden twinge of satisfaction as he spotted Jericho’s Toyota in the midst of the avalanche of rubble. A moment later there was nothing more to be seen of the car. The detritus of the old control centre spilled over the ground until all that remained upright was what was left of the scaffolding, a pyre, testimony to the cathartic power of heavy explosives.
Jericho’s heart felt cold and clammy as he left the darkness of the warehouse. He saw people running shouting across the slagheaps, drawn by the roar of the fire,
whose black column of smoke, scattered with flying sparks, rose far above the furnace and reached towards the pale, early sun.
Had Yoyo been in the building? Had she and Daxiong gone back there? Had Zhao caught them there in the end?
No, Zhao, Kenny or whatever his name was must have destroyed the building for some other reason. Because Yoyo had left him thinking that the computer was still there. He had wiped out most of the Guardians and now he’d destroyed their meeting point, too, with all the electronics it contained, decapitated the organisation, killed anyone Yoyo might have confided in.
He devoutly hoped that her head start had been enough to let her get away from Zhao.
He flew closer. The airbike was harder to steer now than it had been before the crash in the converter hall. It was possible one of the jets had been twisted and could no longer be precisely adjusted any more. Trying to tilt the bike out of its crooked angle, he didn’t immediately understand what it was that he actually saw. The memory of his car came sketchily to mind, parked below the tower of scaffolding. It was only when he was so close to the fire that the heat forced him to turn away that he knew for sure that his Toyota was burning at the bottom of the column of flames.
Fear, exhaustion, everything was swept away by a wave of ungovernable fury. He searched feverishly for the mechanism that would open the side compartments, to shoot Zhao from the sky with his own weapons. But nothing opened, and Zhao was nowhere to be seen.
The forecourt filled with people. They came from all directions, on foot, on bicycles and on motorcycles. The whole of Wong’s World was pouring towards the blast furnace. Even Cyber Planet opened its doors, releasing pale and baffled figures, unable to believe what they saw.
Nothing helped. Under such circumstances even the police might have been expected to remember that forgotten world. Jericho climbed. He saw various people pointing at him, thrust his engine and passed over the industrial estate.
Xin saw the airbike getting smaller.
A good way away from the scene, he perched on the top of a chimney like a buzzard. For a moment he had considered finishing Jericho off with a well-aimed bullet as well, but the detective might still prove useful. Xin let him go. Yoyo was more important. She couldn’t have got far, and yet he would have to get used to the idea of having lost the girl for the time being. He decided to stay here and keep watch for her at least until the forces of law and order arrived.
In spite of his defeat, he had a clear image of the universe at that moment. Existences that came into being and then exploded, a surging froth of birth and death, while Xin remained immortal, the centre, the point where all lines crossed. The idea reassured him. He had sown chaos and destruction, but he had done it for a higher good. The remains of the girderwork joined the burning ruins on the ground; in the west the flames rose high from the converter hall. Lesser men than he would have called it destruction, but Xin saw nothing but harmony. The cleansing fire spread, healing the world of the infectious afflictions of poverty, cauterising the pus from the organism of the megalopolis.
At the same time, with conscientious precision, he recapitulated his commission, translated into the language of money. Because Xin had learned to navigate safely on the ocean of his thoughts. Without the slightest doubt, he was insane, as his family had always maintained, except that he understood his insanity. Of all the things he liked about himself, this one filled him with special pride, being a self-analyst, able to establish quite objectively: he was a perfect example of a psychopath. What terrible power that realisation contained! Knowing who he was. At one and the same second, being able to be everything all at the same time – artist, sadist, empath, higher being, ordinary Joe. Right now it was the careerist who had assumed control of his various personalities, the conventional one who liked to attend to business and then relax in a villa by the sea, surrounded by helpful staff, feeling like the centre of the universe. It was that down-to-earth, predictable Xin who restrained his crazed, pyromaniac alter ego in his place and taught him efficiency.
He was so many people. So many things.
High up on his chimney Xin, the planner, started wondering what he had to do to make Yoyo come to him of her own accord.
Jericho
For a while, Owen Jericho rode his bike under the elevated highway that separated Quyu from the real world. Below him, the traffic headed noisily westwards, counterpointed by the boom and roar of the CODs on the freeway above him. He was trapped in a sandwich of noise. When two police skymobiles came chasing over with their sirens wailing he took refuge between the sand-coloured skyscrapers that typified the urban desert around the central district of Shanghai, and followed the course of the main road to Hongkou. As he did so, he tried to stay as low as possible in the canyon of buildings. He assumed that he was flying below the permitted altitude, but he didn’t feel at ease on the battered airbike. And he didn’t want to experience a sudden engine failure high above the rooftops. Trying to compensate for the leftward tilt of the vehicle, he wound his way between façades, pillars, traffic-light poles, electric wires and elevated road signs, looking alternately straight ahead, into the rear-view mirror and towards the sky as he waited for Zhao. It was only when he had crossed Hongkou and flown the bike out towards the river that he started to think he might have shaken him off. If Zhao had even wanted to follow him. He plunged into the busy shopping streets behind the colonial façade of the Bund, landed to the west of Huaihai Park and dragged the airbike to the Xintiandi underground car park. The left rear wheel got stuck and scraped noisily over the asphalt. For a moment he wondered where to park it, until he remembered what had happened to his car.