part0013

The next morning, when Ming drove her maglev chair into the Qinlao boardroom with Marcus at her side, she heard the collective gasp of the room. She didn’t need Echo to read their expressions: pity, disgust, sorrow, anger … not a shred of decency in the room.

Ming approached her aunt. The older woman did everything but sneer at her. “Back so soon, Ming? You were not missed, Niece.”

She started to turn away when Marcus spoke. “Ms. Qinlao would like to add an item to the agenda for the board meeting.”

Her aunt’s green eyes might as well have been carved jade. “The agenda is closed, Marcus. You can put forth a request when we get to new business.”

“As CEO of Qinlao Manufacturing,” Ming said in a clear voice, “I will adjust the agenda as I see fit, Aunt.”

The buzz of the room stopped to watch the dance of the lionesses. Ming could feel their eyes on her—Sying, her mother, JC Han, Danny Xiao—and they all had reasons to vote against her. For a fleeting moment, a twinge of unease filtered through her defenses. She was taking a step that was not easily undone.

Ming displaced Xi at the head of the table, enjoying the scarlet flush that crept up her aunt’s neck as she forced the rest of the board to slide down so she could still be close to the chairman’s seat. Ming engaged Echo as they shifted their seats and Marcus called the roll.

“Xi Qinlao.” Her aunt was flustered and angry. Perhaps she had expected Ming to make a subtler attack, not this direct assault on her base of power. But she was also confident. Her aunt had long prepared for this day.

“Jong Chul Han.” JC’s square face was ruddy with anger beneath his oiled gray pompadour. In the elevator, Marcus had reported the old man was furious about the divorce and her betrayal of his trust.

“The Xiao family.” Danny Xiao, her former boyfriend whom Ming had dumped in a spectacularly public way, acknowledged his presence. He slouched in his designer suit, cuffs rolled up to his elbows, eyes surveying Ming. Danny might be a pretty boy, but he knew how to play the game. He was watching and waiting to see which side he should support.

“Sying Qinlao.” It pained Ming to look at her former lover. Sying’s beauty had only ripened in Ming’s absence and looking deep into her eyes did nothing to lessen the impact of her presence on Ming’s emotions. She had dreamed of this moment for so many nights, but it was not to be. She hardened her gaze and looked away as Marcus called out the rest of the board.

“We have a quorum, Madam Chairwoman,” Marcus said quietly. The room was still, tense, watching every move she made, trying to divine meaning from nuance.

“My aunt has failed to follow the course set for this company by my father and by me,” Ming said. “As Chairman and CEO, I call for an immediate vote to remove her from the board.” The whooshing of the air conditioning was the only sound.

There was none. Marcus waited as Ming challenged each board member with her gaze. Echo reported anger, resentment, and frustration, but no fear and no trace of pity now. Certainly no agreement with her motion.

“The motion to remove Xi Qinlao does not pass,” Marcus said, making a note in his tablet. “Moving to the next item—”

Ming feigned surprise as she turned to her aunt. “You have something to say, Xi?” Using her aunt’s given name infuriated the older woman, Ming knew.

Careful, Echo cautioned, her anger is barely under control . Which was exactly where Ming wanted her aunt’s anger level.

Xi rose from her seat and posted her fists on the tabletop. “In the last year, we have created more wealth for our shareholders than in any one-year period in the last three decades, despite the global economic slump caused in part by the rash actions of my niece.”

“That’s all a result of council money, Xi,” Ming said. “Have you delivered anything yet? Do you even know how to deliver what you promised?”

“That is enough!” Xi crashed her fist onto the table. A strand of hair slipped from the clasp on her nape and draped across her face, giving her a wild look. “I demand a vote of no confidence in our newly returned CEO. She is clearly unwell and needs rest.”

The vote was unanimous. Ming let tears she didn’t feel run down her face as she pushed back from the table and headed to the door.

Ming sat at the window of her father’s apartment, watching the sun set. Burnt orange on a muddy brown horizon. The rain from the night before had washed Shanghai clean and deep reds gleamed on the buildings and the aircars flashing by.

Lander let Marcus into the office. He stood by her at the window. “I can still smell those vile pipes your old man used to smoke in here.”

Ming rested her head against his narrow hip. “It’s almost gone,” she said. “The smell, I mean.”

The sun slipped below the horizon, changing the city from solid buildings into arrays of pinpoint lights. “That was quite a show you put on today,” he continued. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to get fired.”

Marcus chuckled. “That’s good, because your aunt wants you out of this apartment by tomorrow morning. I’ve arranged for security to take you—”

She waited in the dark for her next visitor, studying the patterns in the city lights, enjoying the anonymity of her position. Lander pulsed her when the visitor showed up.

As the door opened, Sying’s lithe form stood silhouetted in the light of the hallway. Ming caught a glimpse of her face, then darkness again.

Sying stood beside her in the same place Marcus had stood. Her hand trailed across Ming’s shoulder and Ming felt a shiver of anticipation.

“He’s a boy in a man’s body,” she said with a laugh. “Hormones, muscles, and the attention span of a mosquito. Makes me glad I was born a woman.”

Ming tried to reconcile this description with the kid she had protected for months, until he was bartered away by Anthony Taulke. She felt her hands clench and she twisted away from Sying’s touch. She was wasting time.

The woman’s fingers followed her. She stroked the line of grafted skin. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

Sying knelt so she was at Ming’s level. Taking Ming’s face in both hands, she said, “I don’t believe that.” She kissed her, and the touch of her lips was a rush of pure energy in Ming’s head. She pulled back. This was not the plan. She needed to stay on track.

“What’s the matter?” Sying’s hands pushed Ming’s regrown hair behind her ear. It was all Ming could do not to rub her head into Sying’s arm like a cat seeking affection. “Come home with me,” she whispered, her breath hot on Ming’s cheek. “We can be together again. That’s what you want, right?”

Icy calm descended on Ming’s consciousness. She reversed her chair, leaving Sying kneeling on the floor. A flash of annoyance crossed the woman’s face, then she stood.

Ming spun the chair. As she passed the desk, the 3-D picture of young Ming and the butterfly caught her eye. On impulse, she picked it up and tucked it next to her hip on the chair seat.

Lander was waiting for her at the aircar dock. “Ready to leave whenever you are, Ming.” He eyed Sying, trying to puzzle out what was going on between them. His expression told her he wasn’t buying that the only relationship between them was stepmother to stepdaughter.

“You can take my stepmother home, Lander,” Ming said coldly. “I’ll drive myself.” Without waiting for an answer, she moved her maglev into the waiting shuttle that had been modified for her chair.

Lander shrugged and reached for Sying’s elbow. “Ma’am, if you’ll come this way. I’ll get you back to—”

Sying shook him off. “I’m coming to see you tomorrow, Ming.” She strode into the shuttle and threw herself in a chair.

Ming took a deep breath and used the arms of her chair to stand. Her legs shook, but they held her weight. She extracted the small bundle containing the MoSCOW suit from the storage compartment under the seat and tucked it under her arm. As she turned to make her way out of the shuttle, she spied the picture on the seat. Young Ming grasping for the butterfly. She snatched it up and tucked it into the bundle.

In the hallway, she used her retinal display to access the shuttle’s remote-control feature and program a course due east. She made sure the transponder was working and dropped the craft away from the dock.

The air on the street level was stifling and thick with the heavy smells of close-packed humanity as Ming navigated the foot traffic on stiff, aching legs. She found a cab, an electric model illegally siphoning a charge off the Qinlao power meter. Ming pulled her cap lower on her face and hugged the bundle close to her chest as she negotiated with the driver to take her to an address in the old city.

The van had quaint, hand-sewn curtains covering the windows. Ming opened them a few centimeters to watch the Shanghai night scenes. It had been years since she’d spent time on the street level in the city. Through the driver’s open window, the scents rode in on the humid air. Street vendors, baked concrete, barely functioning sewers.

When they crossed the river into the old city, the roads narrowed even further, alleys grew darker, and the odors intensified. She could smell the river clearly, the mud, the rotting vegetation, and who knew whatever else the Han drew in from the countryside.

Her retinal display alerted her that the explosives timer in the shuttle had reached the final countdown. Ming twisted in her seat in a vain attempt to see the explosion. Buildings blocked her on all sides and the shuttle was miles away, but she looked east anyway.

Too late, she realized the cab had stopped. She checked her position and saw they were at least two hundred meters from her destination.

The driver twisted in his seat. “I miscalculated your fare,” he said with an evil leer. He spoke in Shanghainese, the local dialect of the area. Ming cursed to herself; using Mandarin had pegged her as an outsider and now she was paying the price. She didn’t need Echo to tell her she was in trouble.

Ming fingered the wad of cash in her pocket. If Ming Qinlao was dead, there was no way she could make a credit transaction.

“We had a deal,” she snapped, switching to the local dialect and surprising the man as she did so. Good, she had him second-guessing himself. Ming pulled out some cash and counted out the bills for the original fare, adding one more to the pile. “You take me where I want to go and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

She held out the cash tentatively and the driver reached for it. Ming dropped the money, gripped his wrist and twisted as hard as she could. With her free hand, she jabbed her fingernails into his eyes, then levered his arm over the seat until she heard something pop. The driver screamed in rage and pain.

Ming pushed her door open, still clutching the bundle with the picture and the suit. She swayed on her feet in the alley. She could barely walk, much less run. If this guy made it out of the vehicle, she was in real trouble.

The driver’s side door started to open and she saw his face, a blotchy mass of wild hair and wilder eyes. Ming seized the door and yanked it open. The driver, suddenly off-balance, began to fall out of the car. Ming slammed the door shut on his body again and again. He slipped lower and his head fell into the path of the doorframe.

She kept going until he stopped screaming, then gave two more wet, mushy slams of the door for good measure. His limp body slid to the ground. He did not get up.

Ming staggered down the empty alley toward her destination. Each step was a jolt of pain through her legs and hips and all the way up her spine, but she kept going, the dot on her retinal display slowly drawing closer to the dropped pin of her destination.

She hadn’t chosen this part of town for its safe neighborhoods. If the driver woke up or someone decided to take advantage of the strange wandering girl, it was all over for Ming Qinlao.

The warehouse was deep in an alley, but there was a dingy light over the doorway. Ming collapsed against the wall and slid the cover off the security panel. Her handprint opened the door and she fell inside.

Automatic lights came on, but she kept her face pressed against the cool concrete. Just a short nap, she told herself.

Ming startled awake. A quick check of her retinal display showed she had been asleep for seven minutes. Between the fight with the cabbie and her nap, she was almost thirty minutes behind schedule.

She drew her knees up under her chest and came to a kneeling position. The pain moved through her like a wave and a surge of nausea threatened to overwhelm her. A few deep breaths later and Ming stood on unsteady legs. Another handprint to another room revealed her destination: a one-seater aircar racer, unmarked, matte black, and equipped with a spoofed transponder.

Ming stowed her now-dirty and blood-spattered bundle under the seat, then lowered her body into the cockpit. The conforming cushions hugged her aching body like a lover and she sighed with blessed relief as she strapped into the harness. Her retinal display connected with the controls and started the preflight check automatically. The destination was preset, she noticed, and she smiled at his thoroughness.

When the craft was ready, Ming ordered the roof retracted. The aircar made a fast vertical ascent and entered the Shanghai air traffic patterns, just one of millions of vehicles buzzing over the massive city.

She ascended swiftly through a series of traffic loops until she entered the transcontinental lanes heading westward and Shanghai was a glow on the horizon. Blots of light showed cities in the dark velvet carpet beneath her car. These thinned as they moved farther west.

A drowsy hour later, Ming felt it in her stomach as the craft dropped rapidly out of the traffic lane. The aircar slowed and settled at a few hundred feet off the ground, engaging the terrain-following feature. In the dimness, Ming could make out shapes of trees and a few buildings as they flashed by. Up ahead, she spied the silver of a lake and knew she was close now. She saw a pattern of cultivated fields and the geometry of a white building looming out of the night as the aircar slowed and dropped to a landing.

She popped the cockpit top and sat for a moment in the night. Sweet air passed over her, carrying the scent of cut grass and turned earth, taking her back years to her childhood. Crickets sounded and the wind soughed through the trees bordering the property.

A light from the building pierced the night, making Ming squint. She clambered out of the cockpit, her legs like formed rubber beneath her, but somehow still holding her weight. A doorway opened on the building and more light spilled out. A silhouette, short, blocky, but still light on his feet despite his years.

They paused a few steps from each other, as if by mutual agreement. Ito’s voice was older, but still strong, still comforting.

His chuckle was like a warm bath to her senses. “It is not the size of the tiger that matters, it is her will to hunt.” He reached for Ming. “Welcome home, Ming.”