Kern wakes as the first light touches the jungle. The ground is steaming, his sleeping bag damp. The motion of the leaves makes patterns on the sky, shadows of birds darting through the bright empty spaces. Lots of birds, here, and though he rarely sees them clearly he’s come to know their songs. Good to think of them living their lives up there, indifferent to the surface of the world.
Kuan Lon already feels like just the next thing, not much different from any other place. It’s almost disappointing. He wants there to be another city, or sequence of cities, cursed cities buried ever deeper in the jungle, dead and shattered, stained skulls entangled in suffocating vines, culminating in some unfathomable absolute zero.
Six fights in two days, all won by knockout, and he’s as sore as he’s ever been. His hands are an agony, stiffened almost into claws. He has money, now—Singdam, who also goes by Simon, the Thai promoter with the Australian voice, keeps doubling his purses, just like Final Sword. When he fights all the farang cheer for him, throwing yellow flowers and candy into the ring, afterwards stuffing bills into his hands.
He lies there, craving more sleep, knowing it’s unattainable, hoping it will help a little just being still. His fights haven’t gone long but even a few minutes in the ring are exhausting, and he feels like he’s approaching an edge, that something will be revealed if he can just maintain focus and keep pushing through his fatigue. Dead hours before him until the lights in the trees wink on at sunset and then his seventh fight.
Crash of someone coming through the wood, water drops flying from lashing branches. Probably another bar girl. There was one who’d come to his clearing in the middle of the day and, catching his eye, matter-of-factly dropped her shorts, lest he miss the point, and turned her head and smiled, and this and the sun on her thighs and her wisps of pubic hair were the stuff of fantasy but the fights had hollowed him out and he was unmoved by the sight of her, and he’d thought this must be how naked people look to animals, and in a voice more distant and cordial than he’d known he possessed he’d told her to go home.
Sulfur on the air as a match is struck and then burning tobacco, and a man says, “Boy, do you have any idea how much heaven and earth have been moved to find you?” Hiro steps into the clearing wearing a suit and swiping beaded water from the jacket, holding his little silver gun.
“Oh,” Kern says. He’s wrapped up like a package in his sleeping bag—no point in even trying to get away. Screeching overhead as a mass of birds rises from the branches and in the rushing of their wings he thinks yes, it might as well be here, and it might as well be now, but Hiro just watches the birds scatter into the air and the moment passes. It hits Kern that there will be no seventh fight. He closes his eyes.
* * *
They’re walking on a game trail as light slowly fills the jungle, and though his hands are cuffed behind his back and Hiro is five paces behind with the ghost’s phone in his pocket he feels at peace and is achingly aware of every rustle and creak in the shifting leaves and branches. He knows there are animals in the jungle, quiet and watchful, though he’s never seen one, and if they’re ever to be revealed it will be now, and even if they’re not then at least they’ll be the ones to find his body, approaching over the fallen leaves with a diffidence learned over ten thousand generations, and long after his corpse has corrupted and his bones have turned to dust they’ll still be here, living the same lives, and he feels lucky that here at the end he’s depleted enough to be both neutral and accepting.
“Zero point eight percent,” says Hiro. “That’s how much of the world’s total computational power we leased to try to find you. Server farms everywhere from Barrow to Klamath Falls have been doing nothing these last weeks but sifting images for you. What images, you ask? All of the images. All the images that were going up on the web plus footage from our spy drones flying over the major cities plus all the footage from certain makes of security cameras with whose manufacturers we’ve made arrangements. You wouldn’t believe the cost, but if I ever had that much money I wouldn’t be consorting with the likes of you and me. And all this to find a two-bit street fighter on the lam. I certainly hope you’re sensible of the honor.”
Kern says nothing. Plans rise unbidden in his mind—he could pretend to trip and if Hiro is incautious enough to get close then heel-kick him in the groin, and as this is one of his strongest street techniques there’s a fair chance that if the kick lands he’ll rupture one of Hiro’s testicles, in which case Hiro, no matter how fearless or strong of mind, will double over, and for at least a few seconds be out of the fight, and then if Kern is prepared to tear his left shoulder from its socket he can use his right hand to try for the gun—and part of him thinks he should go for it, that it’s better by far to die fighting than passively, but he knows that plans like that only really work in movies and to try it would accomplish nothing, or maybe get him killed slightly sooner, and so he’d lose these last minutes of the morning.
“Your fans were your downfall,” says Hiro. “Goes to show you. Yet another celebrity destroyed by fame. Kuan Lon is all Halliburton cowboys, wholesale traffickers and hungry desperadoes, and let’s not forget the occasional child-sex tourist, but they still feel the need to share their travels with their friends. We found you in photos of your third fight on a Romanian social network.
“I got here yesterday. Not strictly protocol, but I got interested. Hell, I’d even say I’m a fan. You know, at first we thought you had tradecraft, and then we thought you were some refugee from the fighting circuits taking piecework as an enforcer, but then we found your room, and your laptop, and it turns out you’re straight-up refugee.”
They come to a clearing where the air shimmers and the sunlight seems somehow to have thickened, and as he gets closer he realizes that there’s something there, a transparent, blocky geometry floating before him in the air, deadening the wind, and there’s a faint reek of ozone, oil, hot metal, rubber.
Hiro says, “Library, deploy ambient atmospheric from four a.m. three nights ago over the South China Sea,” and for an instant light swarms in the empty space before him and then that light becomes thunderheads roiling and flashing, illuminated from within by lightning’s pulse and snarl, as though Hiro’s words opened a magic door onto a distant storm, and he thinks of the books the laptop gave him long ago about children going through wardrobes into perilous lands.
Hiro says, “Decloak,” and the storm vanishes, becoming a black jet, sleek and sharklike, its aspect entirely predatory compared to the cetacean bulk of the passenger liners he took to Bangkok and Taiwan. Its wings are pulled close to its body, giving it the look of a resting pterodactyl. Vertical takeoff and landing, he thinks. VTOL. Close up, the plane’s skin is covered in tiny hexagons, each the size of his thumbnail; now the hexagons are swimming with colors that resolve into leaves and branches in motion, as though the jet can’t stand to be just itself.
“I knew you’d like that,” Hiro says.
* * *
The cabin’s deeply padded seats are upholstered in creamy leather with complicated multistage seat belts that must be precautions against intense aerobatics and the leather has a smell that he can’t quite name. The cabin’s cramped interior is all black webbing, matte aluminum and mil-spec austerity. Hiro cuffs his wrist to the armrest and he feels he should stay alert but as the plane’s ascent pushes him down into the seat his eyes start to close and it’s only then that he realizes that he knows the smell, that it’s the same as the interior of Akemi’s car, that the smell is money.
* * *
Faint vibration, muffled drone of engines. Night outside, moonglow shining through the tiny windows, no other light in the cabin but the faint glow from the jet’s display. The metal cuff rests lightly on his wrist—he almost doesn’t feel it if he doesn’t move his hand. Shameful not to at least try to escape, but the cabin is a dreamscape, and the bulkheads waver and fall away.
It’s still night when he wakes again. Hiro is across from him, sprawled in his seat in the dark. Kern’s certain that he’s sleeping until Hiro says, “One time I tried to leave, you know.” A pause, and then, “You see, I’d stopped drinking.”
Another pause, the plane shivering as it passes through turbulence, leaves it behind.
“How does one kill? It’s easy, with an enemy, in the passion of the moment, but to kill strangers, day after day? It erodes the soul.
“I was rarely sober. None of us were, not since we graduated from the police academy and started working. The bosses were particular about that. Every day it was a new hotel, and in every new hotel room there were bottles of vodka and bags of cocaine and a stack of guns like a welcoming bouquet. The vodka was for numbness, and the cocaine for the focus and false confidence to carry us through the valley of death, day after day, world without end.
“Time works differently in that life. There’s a fluidity, a sense of events coming on like waves, and they might break and wash harmlessly around your ankles or they might carry you away. Cause and effect blur—if the man was shot then it was his time to die. If the woman was behind the wall that did not stop the bullet then she must somehow have offended the bosses. I never slept in the same bed twice, or used the same woman twice, or drove the same car for more than a week.
“And then there were these signs, billboards, all over the city. They said, ‘Call on Him, for He is Waiting.’ It was just some church looking for converts, and a picture of Jesus they got off the web, but it seemed like they were speaking to me. There was this one, on the outskirts, out toward the army shooting range. I’d chain-smoke in my car and stare at it, like I was trying to pierce its mystery.
“I stopped drinking and using. I even quit coffee. Clean, I felt the fear, radiant and brittle, all around me, all the time. We lived at the boss’s pleasure and could die at any time and there was no way out of that life, but I was sick with the letting of blood. I didn’t know what to do, so I fucked a lot of women and watched a lot of movies and then I cracked and started drinking again. I decided I’d run for it. First I skimmed money. I was clever about it, but they knew.
“I was commanding my own unit then, and it was my own men who collected me. I’d taken a lot of pills that morning, mostly dilaudid, but I knew what was happening as soon as I saw the black armored SUV pull up to the curb, like it was the nightmare I’d been waiting for all my life.
“They brought me to a death house, one we’d used many times. Bodies upon bodies under the sand in the backyard. They tied me to a chair in the living room and there were the knives and a cigarette lighter and a bottle of acid and I started weeping uncontrollably. Save your tears, faggot, they said. Because we’ll really give you something to cry about. But they didn’t understand—I wasn’t crying from fear of pain, but because I was afraid I would hurt them.
“There were four of them. They were drunker than usual, and my bonds were loose, and I prayed that they’d just kill me before giving me an opening, but the devil was near, I could hear his footsteps as he walked through the house, opening drawers and looking in closets, and then he was listening behind the kitchen door, and despite my prayers one of the men went outside to call a girlfriend and another went off to take a piss and another went to get a beer and the last was a friend, a man whose life I had saved many times over, and I thought he might even let me go, and I tried to keep God’s face in my mind’s eye while he stood there telling me how badly he would make me die, and I prayed fiercely for the strength to just let it happen, but then I stopped, because suddenly I knew beyond question that I’d been praying to the void, that no one was listening, or ever had been, and with that I felt nothing but a profound emptiness and a slight sorrow. Before that, I’d thought I didn’t fear death, but it was only then that I realized that fearing death was all I’d ever done, and in that moment my fear was gone, which made me free, though all the light had left the world. Then my friend turned his back on me to find a cigarette.
“For practical reasons I spent no more than a minute on any one of them, though for them I suspect it was a long minute indeed. You have to be careful, or they just go into shock, and then what’s the point? I smoked a cigarette, while I worked, to cover the smell. Ever seen an altar of Mictlantecuhtli? A brutal relic of the Aztec past, now in vogue again. I made one, though it wasn’t easy, human sinew being more resilient than I’d expected, and me not having the right tools to hand.
“Before I left town I went to the billboard and shot His eyes out, so that His face framed little burning holes onto nothing, which seemed about right. I was raised Catholic, but, frankly, its virtues are those of women and of slaves.”
Silence. Kern says, “Why tell me these things?”
“Want to see something funny?” Hiro says. “The day after I killed my unit I went and killed my old boss.” Another silence. “He was the one putting contracts on my head. With him in the ground, I’d get breathing space. It was the savvy career move.”
Hiro hands him his phone which shows birds-of-paradise on a dusty hillside, and then the view rotates sickeningly into cloudless blue sky before panning over dry distant mountains and settling onto a large white house roofed in red tile, and down by the garden is a wall of glass and behind the glass a fat old man and a pretty young girl are naked on a bed. Crosshairs snap into place alongside fluctuating numbers marked “meters” and “windage” and Kern realizes that this footage is not from a phone but from the scope of a gun. As though reading his thoughts, Hiro says, “It’s an M-110XE, the old U.S. Marine Corps sniper rifle. A classic. We trained with them at the academy.”
A sequence of tones as a number is dialed and then ringing and an older man who sounds like he’s used to giving orders says, “Hello?”
From the phone Hiro’s voice says, “What would you pay for the death of Don Victor Garcia?”
The older man says, “Who the fuck is this?” and then, after a pause, he names a large sum.
Hiro: “I just emailed you the account information. Transfer the funds in the next two minutes and it’s done.”
Older man: “Who is this?”
Hiro: “I think you know. Yesterday I resigned from Don Victor’s service, so, counting me, he’s down five men.”
Older man: “I did hear about that, and yes, I do know who you are. And as much as I would love to see Don Victor dead, and however dearly I would pay for that privilege, the problem is that I don’t trust you in the slightest, you backstabbing, coat-turning son of a bitch.”
Hiro: “I appreciate your point of view. I just sent you a link to the video feed from my rifle’s scope.”
The man and the girl are having sex now, the man’s face turning red, his eyes squeezed shut, the girl staring at the ceiling like she’s trying to remember something as her feet flop up and down on his shoulders. The crosshairs come to rest over the man’s right ear. On his tricep is a tattoo of Saint Death, a skeleton in a robe holding a scythe. Beyond the bed is a television showing rioters in a public square throwing bottles stuffed with burning rags at cops with plastic shields and it must be someplace really poor because none of the cops have powered armor.
Hiro: “If you want to make sure it’s real just turn on CNN.”
Older man: “If you’re fucking with me, if this is a trick with computer graphics, then by the Virgin’s cunt you’ll find out how I got such a hard reputation. You’ll have a team of doctors, quite talented men, graduates of the very best schools, all to keep you alive until I’m done with you. Be certain you understand the consequences of breaking your word to me.”
Hiro: “I’ve got a clear shot at his medulla oblongata but she just put a finger up his ass so you’ve got about thirty seconds to make up your mind.”
A pause in which Kern can hear the older man breathing.
Older man: “I sent it.”
A pop like a firecracker, and the fat man collapses onto the girl. She starts to embrace him and even pats him on the back before she realizes that part of his skull is missing and that his blood is pouring onto her shoulder.
Hiro: “Of course, I’d have killed him either way.”
Now the scope is tracking the girl, her face streaked with blood, as she throws open the French doors and runs across the lawn wearing nothing but striped panties and clutching her blouse to her chest. In one hand she has a man’s watch, its dull gold gleaming, inset with what can only be rubies. The crosshairs find the ground in front of her and there’s another pop, and then the girl is sitting on the manicured lawn, looking stunned, and just as she’s about to cry Hiro-in-the-video shouts, “Hey! You in the panties! His wallet! You forgot to take his wallet!”
Hiro takes his phone back. “That’s our recruiting video. We’re still a young organization.”
Fully awake now, Kern looks out a window at the moonlight on the sea, wonders where they are, and where Akemi is, how many thousands of miles away. Hiro seems to be feeling confessional so he says, “How did you end up working for Cromwell?”
“Because my world’s time is ending, though it sometimes seems I’m the only one who knows it. The U.S. doesn’t care about other sovereignties or collateral damage anymore. A few days of daisy-cutter bombs and all my old bosses are dead and some U.S. senator gets a political win. So I came to the North, and found a software baron who’s been accumulating wealth these hundred years and more, and is eager to adapt to the emerging realities.
“Which reminds me. There’s something I forgot to do.”
Then Hiro’s gun is in his hand and pressed to Kern’s temple. Kern forces himself to meet Hiro’s eyes in order to keep his dignity while part of him wonders if it’s even safe to discharge a round in a plane like this—would it pierce the hull and depressurize the cabin, or, as this is a bird-of-war, would the round bounce off its armor and carom around until both of them were dead? In any case he’s glad to have something to think about besides the steel against his forehead.
“Boom!” says Hiro, and then puts the gun away. “There was an order for your execution, which I gave, and now it’s done. So your old life is gone, and, improbably enough, you have another, and with that life you can do as you will. How’d you like to work for me?”