He signed off.
I snuck back out into the room and stood there for a minute watching the two guys sleep. I thought about waking them up and letting them know where I was going, but Vamp would insist on going for sure and I didn’t want him getting involved with Kang. Kang might cut me some slack, but he wouldn’t cut Vamp any.
Neither of them stirred as I slipped out into the hall and heard the door latch behind me. Down the hall, Wei’s cubby behind the glass was empty. No one else was around.
I padded down to the front door and headed back out into the night.
Chapter Twelve
10:36:44 BC
My gas tank was getting close to empty, but the dream and the incident with Vamp had left me wired. My legs were restless and the walk felt good as the post-chem surge carried me deep back into the heart of Tùzi-wō. It felt good to get out in the open too, away from the sweat-heavy air of the hotel room. It had been getting hard to breathe in there, and getting back in that bed might have stirred things up again with Vamp.
Gonzo, I almost jumped him. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Kang’s credit had bought me two jumps there and two back, but I decided to take one there and hoof it the rest of the way just in case he tried to do the math and track my distance from him. When I stepped through to the other side across town, the light flashed green with no yellow warning shade.
The main drag was hopping, and through the gaps in the crowd I saw floodlights shining up ahead. A crew was doing night work, and the shop fronts across the street from them danced with the shadows of men moving along scaffolding. When I got closer, past the end of the block, I saw a crowd of people clustered at a chain-link fence that had been set up around an empty lot where a giant festival air float was being put together.
The float’s base was a platform about the size of two tractor trailers side by side, and the metal framework mounted on it was a story tall. Wire mesh had been wrapped around the frame in the shape of a giant face, and shirtless workers moved along the scaffolding applying the plastic skin around two giant, googly eyes that stared down over a grinning, toothy mouth. Huge plastic streamers along the edge of the face were tied down, but a few had come loose to wave lazily over the street in the hot summer breeze. I watched them for a moment and sighed.
I just want to go to the festival with Dragan, I thought. That’s all I want.
I didn’t want to care about secret haan gates, pre-Impact conspiracy theories, or bomb-toting nut jobs. I didn’t want to care about refugees or gonzos or SIPS. I just wanted to live with Dragan, earn enough to pay my way, get enough to eat, and have enough left over to stay in smokes, shine, and double cross. Was that too much to ask?
The streamers waved, like long ghostly tentacles that reached out over the crowd. Apparently, this year anyway, it was.
“Jiangshi,” a voice said. I turned and saw kid with a wooden pole slung over one bony shoulder. Festival masks hung from the pole by their string ties.
“No, thanks,” I said, but before he even got his mouth open to haggle me down, I changed my mind. “Actually you know what, that’s perfect.”
He beamed as I picked the closest one, and then he held out the credit reader. I wiped my card over it, letting Kang pick up the tab.
“Thanks,” I said. He made a cute little bow and scampered off into the crowd until all I could see was the pole, jutting up over their heads and tracing his path like a wobbly paper periscope.
I slipped the mask on, hiding my face, and tied it snugly in place. The GPS pointed left, down a narrow side street, and I squeezed through the flow of foot traffic to pass in front of a set of headlights. The guy in the two-seater honked its anemic horn and muttered something at me through the glass as I made my way down the uneven sidewalk where grit and flakes of scrap plastic from the float construction had accumulated. Up ahead was the sign for the Rukou Bar, blazing red neon against the drab concrete.
Something crept along a power line overhead as I wove through a crowd that lingered outside along the street, drinking and smoking. No one was manning the door, so I pushed it open and went inside.
The bar was packed way over capacity, four to each table along the wall to my right and a row of sweaty backs all the way down the bar to my left. I made my way between them, squinting through the thin haze of smoke. Over the drunken babble around me, I heard someone call out from the direction of the bar and saw a tall man back there with a do-rag plastered over his brown, bald head. He pointed at me, scowling, but stopped when someone whistled. Kang was sitting a few tables down, the only one by himself. He signaled to the bartender, who nodded and went back to what he was doing.
Kang had a fogged glass in front of him where whiskey formed a moat around a big ball of nitrogen-chilled crystal, and the ashtray was filled with ash. In front of the empty chair across from him was a shot of something clear sitting on a wrinkled cocktail napkin. I hopped up on the empty stool and he gave me a faint smile.
“Nice mask.”
“It’s my cover,” I said, pulling it back so that it sat on top of my head. The hanging streamers still covered most of my face like thick white hair. Kang nodded at the shot.
“Take it,” he said. “You’ll need it.”
I drank it. Whatever it was, it went down like drain cleaner. “Gonzo, Kang. You trying to kill me?”
“Quit kidding around,” he said. “This is serious.”
“Yeah, I got thrown out a window, Kang. Believe me, I get it,” I said. Kang sighed and shook a black cigarette out of a squashed pack. He offered me one, and I took it. “So, what do you need to talk to me about?”
“Dragan’s not in any of the detention centers,” he said, lighting his smoke, then holding out the lighter to me. He watched my face as I puffed mine alight. “You don’t look surprised.”
“I thought you might lie,” I said, sucking in smoke.
“I wish I was lying.”
“So where is he?” I asked, watching his face.
He looked nervous. “Not anywhere easy to get to.”
“Shiliuyuán Station?” I asked, and I saw his eyes widen, just for a second.
“There is no more Shiliuyuán Station.”
“The haan have him, don’t they?” I asked.
He wiped sweat from his forehead and drained his glass. His hand shook a little as he put it back down and took another drag off his cigarette. “All I know is after she took him at the apartment, she—”
“How did you know it was a she?” I asked, but even before the look in his eye changed, I’d already put it together.
“I’m sorry,” his wife had told me when I called. “Jake is out on assignment.”
“Is he on the security sweep?”
“No, I don’t think he is….”
“You were there,” I said.
He looked down into his empty glass for a minute, and I noticed then how tired and red his eyes were. He watched fog drift around the stone, and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was there.”
“You were the third soldier.”
He nodded again, and I slapped him across the face so hard it knocked the cigarette out of his mouth in a cloud of embers. The people around us turned to look. Some of them laughed.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” he said evenly.
“How was it supposed to happen, Kang? Huh? How was it supposed to happen?”
“It was just supposed to be an arrest,” he said, and his eyes looked haunted right then. He ran one hand over the stubble on his face. “He wasn’t supposed to get hurt, and I never thought she’d…”