Chapter 20

Chapter 20: Water

The ruin’s entrance was also its exit. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo stepped back into the same East-Asian room where they’d started.

While fleeing inside the ruin, they’d talked it through. If the government had gone to such lengths to trap them in ruin S86, the point was to limit their freedom. Once they got out, two outcomes seemed likely: one, imprisonment; two, elimination.

Given Qian Duoduo’s skill and Zhao Meiyou’s bug status, finding replacers wouldn’t be easy. So the government probably wouldn’t wipe them out completely. One thing, though, was certain—the exit would be a bloodbath.

They had agreed on at least this much: neither of them was going quietly.

As expected, someone was waiting. For a beat the man’s eyes flashed in surprise, as if he hadn’t believed they could claw their way out. He swallowed it down. “Citizens Qian Duoduo, Zhao Meiyou, you are hereby summoned by the government.”

He wore a Megalopolis Government commissioner’s uniform. Qian Duoduo closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again. “What does the government want us for?”

“As you must have experienced firsthand, ruin S86 has some issues the government needs to understand.” The commissioner smiled a bureaucrat’s smile. “This is standard procedure. Please rest assured.”

Beyond the room, water ran through a courtyard. A bamboo spout knocked against rock with a hollow tock.

Qian Duoduo fixed him with a look. “What standard procedure requires an army lying in wait outside?”

The man flinched. His eyes changed. The instant his hand dipped inside his jacket, Zhao Meiyou’s boot caught him squarely and drove him into a wall niche. The paper shoji burst. Alarm bells screamed.

“Taking him hostage won’t help. The government won’t care.” Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers. “Wind!”

A gale slammed through, hard enough to lift the ceiling. “I can’t hold this long. Eight o’clock is weak—move!”

Long ago, in one of Diao Chan’s stories, he’d mentioned that Liu Qijue had once dragged a dragon out of a ruin into the real world.

Zhao Meiyou had laid out his guess. Qian Duoduo considered, then said, “Should be doable.”

That was the whole plan—brute force, because what else was there? No one knew what you could bring out of a ruin, but while the doorway stood open, the quantum afterglow left a brief trace in reality. All they had to do was hit that window and let Qian Duoduo blow a path through.

When Qian Duoduo had closed his eyes just now, he’d used scan. Trust the government: the Eastern tavern was a kill box.

Goldfish lanterns lined the corridor. Bright ukiyo-e sprawled over the paper doors—beauties opening their throats in a riot of color, spray and splatter at the moment of the cut. A hostess in a kimono lunged. Her face split; from the place where her mouth should have been slid a gun barrel. Not a human at all, but one of the Megalopolis government’s killing machines, a top-tier model. Zhao Meiyou had seen one only once, down in the Lower District, when they used it to crush a riot on Level 330.

By luck that was exactly when he’d learned how to deal with the tin-plated harlot. “Qian Duoduo!” he shouted, and Qian Duoduo’s snap landed: “Bronze!”

A weapon blossomed in Zhao Meiyou’s hand: a sword, an ancient Eastern blade, retired the instant firearms were born, then lost in the dust of history. In the Level 330 riot, a middle-aged woman had wielded just such a thing—not even a sword by pedigree, only a length of metal, sharpened and double-edged near the tip, yet preternaturally supple and keen. She’d driven it into the seams of the humanoid machines like a snake and cinched till the core chewed itself to shreds.

Top-tier Megalopolis kill-bots were nearly impregnable to heat weapons—bullets couldn’t crack or pierce them; their skins might as well nap through explosions. Only the old cold steel could do it: a soft sword thin as a cicada’s wing and as supple as drawn silver—like water, sliding into the metal’s joints, then swelling into a flood, parting iron as if it were clay.

They had gamed the escape a hundred times. Killing machines were a given. The price tag would cap the numbers. “Ten,” Qian Duoduo finally said after running it again and again. “At most ten.”

That would be the hardest knot to cut. To tangle with machines body to body—Zhao Meiyou, even at his strongest, could manage it three times before the bill came due. Inside the ruin, Qian Duoduo’s condition had kept him from learning the sword in time. It wasn’t easy, not even after a millennium in the grave. Like the cold-weapon age itself, it demanded blood and bone.

Zhao Meiyou bet anyway. After ten months of grafted time, his and Qian Duoduo’s bodies had fused, in a sense. For a few ticks, while the quantum afterglow still held, that fusion might hold as well—

He took apart the fourth machine and hit his limit. Oxygen debt fuzzed his mind; for an instant his brain went white. He grabbed that sliver of mindless time and let his body decide.

Shapeshift.

What did it feel like? Like a dream breaking into daylight, quantum fingers plucking the strings of time, visions of fire surfacing from primeval murk. He’d done it: for the first time, the archaeologist’s power answered him in the real world. No smooth slide, no elegant melt like inside a ruin. This was teeth-rattling, tendon-jerking torment. Venom soaked his brain. His skin ballooned as if someone blew him up from the inside. He spat something out—some piece of himself, maybe—then came the numbness of poison. He felt nothing. He felt only lightness. And power.

It was a heavy bet. It was the only way he’d break ten killing machines before the window slammed shut.

In the murk of the lamp-lit corridor, Qian Duoduo and Zhao Meiyou stood back to back in a cloud of killing intent. Qian Duoduo held scan like a wire drawn taut. The wind was still raging. Time enough. In the next breath they flew. Zhao Meiyou’s blade took the charging machine-woman through the face. Qian Duoduo put a bullet through the head of a hidden sniper down the hall.

Five left.

Lamp oil spilled. The paper doors took the flame. Fire slicked the air like phlegm. The goldfish on the lanterns showed their bones. An alloy hand ran through Zhao Meiyou’s waist. His soft sword answered, and the machine’s skull tore apart. They were at the end of the corridor. A smashed porcelain vase lay by a private-room door; metal and blood hissed in the heat, the stink of booze and iron turned feral.

Three.

Overload scrambled his senses. His eyes felt like they would push his skull apart. His brain boiled. In scalding seawater a sun rose, red and enormous. His head would crack; the sun would burst out of it. His body had become a mountain holding down the stars. Deep within, magma burned. An army woke in him, hooves pounding his veins. What were they seeking? What lay buried?

One.

Qian Duoduo blew out a commissioner’s brains, sprinting toward Zhao Meiyou, who was roaring—no telling if it was a roar or a scream. He had the last machine pinned, but couldn’t finish it. His body was coming unbound. He’d shifted too soon, too hard. Qian Duoduo had seen that look in an archaeologist’s face. Dissolution was coming.

Qian Duoduo shoved the sword hilt into the machine’s body and slapped his palm hard on the crown of Zhao Meiyou’s head. The force broke through the pain. Zhao Meiyou came back.

They burst out of the tavern onto a long bridge. On the far side lay the main levels; between them yawned the eight-hundred-and-sixty-level abyss. Qian Duoduo flung the homemade explosives behind them and dragged Zhao Meiyou over the edge.

The last of the quantum afterglow was dying. Heat rolled over them. In the fire, Qian Duoduo lit a cigarette, looked at Zhao Meiyou’s blown mind, and crashed his mouth to his.

Graft.

Zhao Meiyou slammed back into himself. Qian Duoduo was swallowed whole by the chaos of Zhao Meiyou’s senses and spat a mouthful of blood. The afterglow winked out at last, the warped body eased back into shape, but the mind stayed swampy with pain and static. Weightlessness pulled them down. Through it, Zhao Meiyou saw Qian Duoduo’s hand over his mouth, blood seeping through his fingers and falling into Zhao Meiyou’s eyes.

When black meets the light of sun and fire, the result is always red.*

“...Zhao Meiyou... don’t you dare... sleep...!”

Red rose like a tide and swallowed him whole.

Break.

Who knew how long had passed. Zhao Meiyou heard a soft rustle, like a forest in deep mountains.

Am I dead? Or dreaming?

He opened his eyes. He lay on a long stone stair. Above him, blue-green trees stitched a thin seam of sky.

The steps were ruined. Bluestone sunk into loam, hardly passable. He tried to stand and looked down: ancient trees like a sea. Up: steam and cloud.

No end either way.

A mountain?

Confusion tugged at him. He had never seen a mountain, not truly. Megalopolis’s holos kept archives—ranges, forests, coasts, deserts—but they were either prehuman wilderness or gutted, manicured facsimiles. Nothing like this: a place where people had once been and were now gone.

He glanced at himself. Bamboo staff. Straw sandals. A monk from a storybook. But the cloth against his skin said otherwise—a robe like a kasaya, impossibly light and soft, of a texture he couldn’t name.

He tried to think and pain dented him double. The world tilted. From somewhere up the mountain, a bell sounded—thin, elusive.

What is up there?

A temple, if there’s a mountain.

What’s in the temple?

Monks, if there’s a temple.

Then am I the monk?

He touched the cone of the hat on his head. Strange. He had never seen such a hat and yet he knew it: a straw conical hat.

If I’m the monk, who’s ringing the bell?

The pain sharpened. He gave up thinking and climbed. Time came loose. At some point a thread of sandalwood wound into the air. How did he know it was sandalwood? What was sandalwood?

The steps fell away, and he came to water—a deep pool, big enough to call a lake.

A lake set in the heart of mountains and forest.

The bell was here. In the water, half-sunk, an ancient bell waited; water threaded through it, turned it into a throat. Hearing him, the lake answered with other sounds.

Music.

He peered down. Instruments lay submerged in the shallows: a guqin, chime-bells, zithers and flutes and drums, and Western things—piano, brass. Petals he couldn’t name drifted through the water and slid into the deep. The current nudged the instruments; they sounded without being struck, drift-tuned and wrong from too long underwater. He saw a pipe organ down in the gloom. Water and petals spouted from the great ranks of pipes, narrow and vast at once.

Tones of every color swam up through the current, so off-key the song was untraceable. Like ruins after humanity was gone and only sound remained to prove we’d been here at all.

What is this place?

What waits in the deep?

The bell tolled again.

Zhao Meiyou’s eyes snapped open.

Pain, first and everywhere. He was no stranger to pain, but this was as if he’d been deep-fried and then scoured with lye—bones to organs torn down and reassembled. His eyelids weighed a ton. He worked hard to make a sound.

“Awake?” someone asked at his bedside. “You’ve got a stubborn life, Zhao Meiyou. I figured by now you’d be playing mahjong with the King of Hell.”

A cotton swab touched saline to his lips. Taste returned slowly. Zhao Meiyou rolled his eyes in his skull, worked his mouth, and failed to get words out. The other man read him anyway. “Your lover fled straight to my door. Ground rules first: rent’s still due.”

The headliner, Liu Qijue, sat there, folding fan ticking against his fingers, a leg thrown over a knee, grin wicked as a marquee. “You did good, Zhao Meiyou. Middle of the night, Qian Duoduo shows up like a ghost with you on his back—I thought for sure he’d killed you. Who could’ve guessed? How’d you talk him into it?”

Zhao Meiyou made two terrible aah noises like a dying man. Liu Qijue arched a brow. “At this point, don’t bother playing coy. You claw your way out of ruin S86 and expect me to believe nothing happened?”

If I could stand, I’d fight you, you little bastard.

“Don’t glare. You’ve been out seven days. You won’t be walking for at least a month.” Liu Qijue said, “This is the safe house my husband and I kept. After he was gone there was still plenty of medical gear. Getting you in one piece again won’t be an issue. Lie still.”

Only these two, really—one unable to talk, the other more than able to talk for two. If Diao Chan were here, he’d be sobbing in a cupboard.

Liu Qijue chattered like a talky myna, all harmless fluff—the new play at the theater, what fit Old Mr. De was throwing now, the butcher’s wife missing a mahjong partner and pining, and so on.

The door banged open. Qian Duoduo’s voice came with a strange burnt smell. Liu Qijue stood and clicked his tongue at him. “Still at it? I’m here; Zhao Meiyou won’t die. Stop tormenting the air.”

Qian Duoduo was carrying fish soup. In theory, fish soup. In practice, a metaphysical proposition in a bowl. It shared a concept with fish soup and none of its reality.

The scorched smell alone was a weapon. Zhao Meiyou choked and coughed and managed, raggedly, “...Qian-ge.”

“Oh? So you can talk now?” Liu Qijue blinked at him, then at Qian Duoduo, nodded to himself, and took the hint. “Right. I’ll get lost. You two chat.”

The air was still offensive. Qian Duoduo pushed the window open and picked up Liu Qijue’s fan to move some air—then noticed the ink on the paper.

One side: Pair of male dogs.

The other: Bad weeds live long.

Zhao Meiyou lifted a hand and signed a few clumsy shapes. Qian Duoduo said, “I’m fine. Your body nearly dissolved mid-shift. There may be aftereffects, but don’t panic—they should ease with time.”

They’d planned where to go once they were out. Qian Duoduo had his own safe house, but not enough meds—enough for his kind of injuries, sure. He was used to high-risk runs. Zhao Meiyou had just forced his ability in the real world for the first time; success was one problem, the backlash was guaranteed. The kit Qian Duoduo had wouldn’t cut it.

The Level 33 Psychiatric Hospital was one option—but in the Lower District, and not exactly plugged into the finest supply chain.

Zhao Meiyou had thought of the headliner.

Qian Duoduo knew Liu Qijue. “I’ve worked with Young Master Liu a few times. He and his husband took me to dinner.”

And that was that.

Zhao Meiyou signed again: Qian-ge, I had a dream.

“A dream?” Qian Duoduo sat on the edge of the bed. “Archaeologists dream all the time. It’s one way to get the libido out of the system.”

Zhao Meiyou hesitated. Then: But I’ve never dreamed before.

Mountains and forest. Water and a lake. Music that had fallen out of the world—his first dream.

“What did you dream?” Qian Duoduo asked. “If you want to tell me.”

Zhao Meiyou thought, then flared his hands in a flourish so showy his fingers twirled in the air. Qian Duoduo almost missed it.

You, obviously.

“...Do you want the soup?” Qian Duoduo asked.

Are you trying to murder your husband, Qian Duoduo?

Qian Duoduo sighed. “Zhao Meiyou.”

Mm. Listening.

“The invitation I made before still stands,” he said. “But both sense and feeling say the ground has shifted. Your body may need a long recovery, if you don’t want the aftereffects to stick.”

So what are you saying?

“I can keep being your guide. If you’re willing, we can talk about a long-term partnership.” A pause. “But with your condition as it is, my advice is: wait till I’m out of the ruin, and then we go on.”

By the ruin he meant the high-risk one he’d been preparing to enter—the one so dangerous it had drawn the Megalopolis government’s kill order.

Which ruin, Qian-ge? Zhao Meiyou asked. By now, he’d guessed.

“...Ruin 000,” Qian Duoduo said.

Author’s note:

* Aristotle, On Colors.