Are you injured?” Sun says, squatting on his haunches beside me and holding out a bottle of water.
“No,” I croak.
He turns his head to survey the carnage, then looks at me with his eyebrows raised in some blend of wonder and concern.
“You were fast,” he says. “Your actions were effective. It could’ve been a lot worse.”
I rinse my mouth with water and spit it out onto the floor. Sun nods grimly, then kneels over the sobbing boy and speaks to him in gentle tones.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Would you please roll over?” He fishes around in his little black backpack and pulls out some first aid supplies and more zip ties—am I the only one not carrying zip ties around? I sit there, watching as if from a great distance, as he does a neat little bandage job on the girl punk’s stab wound. Then he hauls Overalls out of the fetal position, unceremoniously yanks the throwing knife out of his face, and rolls him onto his belly, eliciting a series of aggrieved gagging sounds.
“There’s blood in your sinuses,” Sun says without emotion as he pulls a zip tie tight across Overall’s wrists. “Try not to choke on it.”
When he’s done with them, he goes back into the backpack, pulls out two small digital cameras, and turns his attention back to me.
“We have to move quickly. I’m guessing that Ouyang was working on Ice in this factory. You take video, I’ll take stills,” he says, tossing me one of the cameras.
“Wait.” I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment, seeking words. “I need to ask you something.”
“I’ll explain as soon as we get out of here, I promise. A car is waiting for us outside,” he calls over his shoulder as he walks into the dark mess of machines outside the ring of tables. He comes back in a moment, shoving something into the backpack.
“What was that?”
“This?” He pulls his hand back out of the bag, revealing a small black cube with two buttons on one side and a little grill on the other. “It’s a Bluetooth speaker. You see.”
He pulls out his phone and punches around on the touchscreen, and then his voice comes out of the cube: “You’re making a mistake.”
He presses another button.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the black cube says.
I shake my head. “So simple.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
I follow him out into the hallway and watch vaguely as he tries a few doors. My body’s not much up to the task of resisting gravity, and first I’m leaning against the wall, then sliding down to the cold floor. I sit on my ass and sip water out of the bottle Sun gave me. My neck is sore from whatever Overalls injected me with, and my whole head feels like a bruise, thanks to Ouyang’s big mitts.
Ouyang. Half an hour ago I expected him to kill me. Instead, he’s the one lying dead on the cold factory floor, warm blood still leaking out of his face, and I am alive in a blurry new universe, my mind slowing to the trickle of the moment, my thoughts failing to discern familiar patterns or comforting landmarks. I close my eyes, squeezing teardrops out onto my cheeks, and in my mind I see the knife hit Ouyang again and again. I see his face go from vexed to blank as the blade reaches his brain, and it feels like it’s me who’s been hit by the knife, and I take some quick shallow breaths and cry some more.
I’d never met a fucker who I thought deserved it more. I just never expected to watch it happen. I shouldn’t be here. I should never have come here. The words keep repeating in my head.
“Xiaozhou! Over here.”
I look up to see Sun wave at me from a doorway down the hall, then slip out of sight. I rally myself upright, careen over to the doorway, and find Sun taking photos in a room that used to be some kind of office. There’s a dead guy lying naked on top of a big desk that has been pushed to the middle of the floor.
I stare at him, blinking, until Sun snaps his fingers at me and gestures impatiently at the camera in my hand.
I flick on the camera and start a video. Sitting on a stool next to the desk, there’s a tray of scalpels and forceps and such. And a little baggie of white powder next to a beaker and a syringe. I dip a finger into the powder and stir it around. More ketamine.
“He was prisoner—probably labor reform,” says Sun, pointing to a ring-shaped mark, presumably from a manacle, on the man’s ankle. I start there and drag the camera’s eye up his body: wiry leg hair, hairy crotch, waxy belly with a long incision down the side, farmer’s tan on the arms, blank eyes, shaved head. The smell is bad but not so bad—maybe he hasn’t been dead for long.
Waxy belly with a long incision down the side. It’s also used in hospitals for anesthesia. I lower the camera and close my eyes. Aron Ancona, hepatologist at Cedar Sinai. Importing a volatile commodity.
“No, no, no fucking way.” The haze lifts from my mind. The fatigue vanishes from my body. Ice.
I run out of the room and back down the hallway to the kitchen where I woke up half an hour ago. It might as well have been a lifetime ago. I throw open the door to the industrial freezer and there they are—half a dozen grapefruit-size hunks of pink meat suspended in steel-lidded jars of bluish fluid. Little wisps of crimson emanating from them like solar flares.
Sun is beside me, scratching his chin. He raises his camera. “Take a video of this, too.”