Night in the desert and the freight train roaring by. Behind Kern the desert is empty and still, but he knows that out there in all that vacancy someone is looking for him, and they may still be far away but that they’re coming is a certainty and the only escape is across the tracks where he’s been waiting patiently but the cars keep coming and still no end in sight. He looks over his shoulder—the barren sand looks white in the moonlight. It smells of smoke and creosote—he can tell it’s going to be yet another dry year. With each passing car there’s a deafening pulse and he’s wondering if he could time them, fling himself through one of the evanescent gaps, and he’s looking for his moment when behind him someone ostentatiously clears his throat.
He surges out from under the covers, is up and on balance, scanning for threats that aren’t there because he’s in his hotel room in the dark. He sits on the bed, relieved that he’s alone. He gradually registers the bleating of the landline on the nightstand.
He picks up the receiver just to stop the noise and listens to the line’s silence until Akemi says, “Hello? Are you there? Did I get the right room?”
“I thought you were gone,” he says wonderingly, feeling woozy, as though the room were unreal. He focuses on the bullpup in its black case on his desk, the Mr. Li suit hanging in the closet over his duffel bag of clothes. “I was going to go back for you,” he says, “but I didn’t have any weapons, and I probably just would’ve died if…” He trails off, ashamed of his cowardice, his cringing explanations.
“Well then, you can help me now,” she says. “I need you more than ever.”
“I can’t. I have a job. I’m flying out in the morning for work.” Strange to hear himself—these words belong to someone else’s life.
“You’re working for Hiro, right? You don’t want to do that. I’ve spent some time with him. He was always open with me. I know what happens to his people.”
“I am working for Hiro,” he says. “I have to have a job, and this is what I do. He saw me fight and he recognized me. It’s not that different from what I was doing before, except I never worked for anyone this important.”
“Hiro’s soldiers never last long.”
“I’ll be the exception.”
“Even if you survive, it’ll mar you. He’ll think it’s funny. You’re a sweet boy, underneath it all. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
He blinks, forces his eyes open. He can’t believe she’s alive, and that for the first time in his life he has a place and she’s calling him in the middle of the night to try to get him to abandon it, but even worse is that she doesn’t get him. “You don’t understand,” he says, in a voice that’s pure edge, a voice he tries never to use, what he thinks of as his true voice. “Hiro is weak. He drinks. He blunts his despair with television. He needs things. He isn’t pure. I don’t fear him. If he was smart he’d fear me.” As the flare of anger fades he sees that what he said has some truth, but that he’s also doing something stupid to impress her; it saddens him that, despite this knowledge, he won’t be able to stop.
A pause. He notices that his shin is bleeding—he must have barked it on the dresser when he scrambled out of bed. Numbness is part of the training—the nerves there have been dead for years. She says, “Are you sure you’re prepared to take him on?”
“Completely,” he says, though in fact he’s terrified, and the best he can say is he’ll keep trying.
“Then you’re brave, but me? I am afraid to die, and if you don’t help me I’m going to. So what do you say? I’ve got no one else in the world.”
“What do you need?”
“No,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked. I can’t ruin your gig.”
“What do you need,” he says sharply. Hiro will try to kill him, of course, but that’s probably how it was going anyway, and he half-suspects he’s not meant to come back from the hit on that woman. Maybe his lifetime of training has been leading to this. He thinks of Achilles, Cuchulain, Tyson, Galahad, the joy they’d bring to this crisis, and he’s suddenly keen to get going and let his new life burn up like a dead leaf in a furnace.
“I need you to steal the phone back from Hiro, and right now.”
“His room will be locked.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“And then?”
“Then get the hell out of Hong Kong, as fast as you can, because he’ll be coming. Best if you walk out—the city isn’t that big, and once you’re in the jungle there’s no good way to track you. There are villages up the coast where you can buy a boat.”
“And then?”
“Then it gets complicated. I’ll tell you on the way.”
He turns on the bedside lamp. The room is opulent, part of a princely life he’s now abandoning. “Take everything you need,” says Akemi. “You aren’t coming back.”
* * *
He strides down the hotel corridor with the bullpup swaddled in a bathrobe in the crook of his arm. The thick carpet stifles his footsteps—no sound but the metronomic thump of the duffel on his side. (He wadded the suit into the duffel, which can’t be good for it, but at least he’s got it with him.) He’d expected to hear some kind of human noise from behind the doors—whatever sex, snoring, chatter, TV—but there’s no sound at all.
The door to Hiro’s room is the same as all the others. The corridor is empty in both directions; he stands there, listening, awaiting a sign. He slips his hand into the rolled-up bathrobe, finds the grip by touch, and clicks off the safety, absurdly afraid the noise will rouse the hotel.
His hand hovers over the door handle. Akemi had said that she’d make sure it was open, but how, exactly, was she going to do that? He’s known hackers, even a few girl ones, and all as unlike Akemi as could be.
He turns the handle with painstaking care and is suddenly certain, absolutely certain that Hiro is waiting for him inside, lolling in an armchair and dandling a gun; he’ll have forced Akemi to call him, and in fact she’ll be in a room just a few doors away, sloppy drunk, pillows pressed over her ears so she doesn’t have to listen to him die. Game to the end, he’ll fire the bullpup at Hiro’s chest but Hiro will cock an eyebrow as he savors Kern’s dawning realization that he’s shooting blanks.
The door eases open onto darkness, silence.
He shuts the door behind him and stands there in the suite’s living room, heart hammering, wishing he were back in the ring in Kuan Lon. As his eyes adjust he sees faint spectral television light shining under the bedroom door.
The room is a mess. Bottles glint here and there, and there are crumpled clothes on the floor, among them a girl’s lacy underwear. On the coffee table is a bullet standing on end next to a pile of crumbling white powder.
He almost steps on a sticky room service plate, freezes in mid-motion, carefully places his foot on the carpet. He sees the winking green lights of a laptop on the desk, and there, connected to it by a data cable, is the phone. Keeping one hand for the bullpup, he detaches the cable, then puts the phone in his pocket, as easy as that.
A noise behind him and he whirls with the gun at his shoulder, the bathrobe starting to slide, then slumping to the floor. In the doorway to the bedroom is a naked girl, very pretty, staring at him wide-eyed, frozen in the act of reaching down to get her underwear. Her eyes track him as he moves to get a better look behind her, but he just sees a darkness, the glow of TV. She makes a rueful face and shrugs her shoulders infinitesimally to convey that she’s just doing a gig, and has no vested interests here, that as far as she’s concerned he’s quite welcome to kidnap or kill her client, and could she please go home.
He mimes closing the door, which she does with exaggerated care, and then she steps into the living room with her palms raised. Only a little light filters out from under the bedroom door but it’s enough for him to be distracted by her beauty—Hiro must have spared no expense—and she looks like a marble statue, standing there without expression.
There’s no good option. He’s not going to kill her, and he doesn’t want to choke her out, and even if he did he doesn’t think he could do it silently, so he guesses he has to let her go. He decides to give her money, both to buy her continued silence and goodwill and because Kayla, his ex, who seems far in the past now, had been militant about kindness to sex workers. As he reaches into his front pocket for his money the bullpup dips to the side, which she appears to read as an indication that she should leave, and her face doesn’t change as she sidles toward the door, staring at him fixedly, and he wants to say wait, take some money, take your clothes, at least take the bathrobe, but of course he can’t say a thing, and then she’s gone.
He realizes he’s done there, unless he wants to tiptoe into the bedroom and shoot Hiro in the face, an idea of considerable strategic merit, but if just one person hears the gunshot and calls the cops or even the lobby then his life is done, and Hiro could have killed him in Kuan Lon, in fact had meant to but instead let him live, gave him gifts and the place he’s now discarding.
Out in the hall he closes the door carefully, wonders if Akemi is watching from somewhere and will lock it behind him, but he doesn’t hear a click. He looks to his left and there’s the girl speed-walking away, and just at that moment she looks back over her shoulder, sees him, hesitates. On her back is a tattoo of a phoenix, its wings unfurled over her shoulder blades, its long tail reaching her coccyx, and in the corridor’s low light its feathers flash green and blue, as iridescent as the throat of a hummingbird, an effect he’s never seen in a tattoo and of a quite hypnotic loveliness. Her eyes are on the bullpup, which he’s holding at port arms, so he clicks on the safety and lowers it, which is her signal to sprint off down the corridor like a startled deer. He tears his eyes from her lean grace and stuffs the gun into his duffel as he strides off the other way.
* * *
As the elevator falls past the ninetieth floor he realizes he didn’t close the duffel fully and the bullpup’s stock is protruding. He shoves it back into the bag, zips it shut and looks up at the car’s tiny security camera. A capital offense to be in possession, Hiro had said. He wonders if anyone is watching—probably not, in one elevator among many in the middle of the night, but what if they have automatic image recognition for guns? Does that even exist? Lares had said something about image recognition being a hard problem, but was that just for faces and people? It occurs to him that outside of fighting he doesn’t really know how anything works and has to guess his way through the world.
The girl’s tattoo shimmers in his memory. The phoenix must be a potent symbol in her personal iconography, and he wonders what fires she’s passed through, what rebirth. Lares once said that soldiering and hooking were essentially the same job—dangerous, but more money than you could probably get otherwise, and they’d generally take you, if you were young and healthy, and both put you a little beyond the law.
As the elevator falls past the fiftieth floor he takes out the phone, sees that it still has the earpiece attached. If she’s not on the phone he has no way of finding her, and no option but to leave Hong Kong and disappear as best he can, but when he puts the earpiece in she cheerily says, “So I guess it worked out, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says, happy to hear her voice, and that once again they share a perspective. “I’ve got the phone. I’m in an elevator, going down. I don’t think Hiro woke up.”
“Well done.”
“I thought maybe you’d have been watching. I mean, you did find my room.”
“It was dark in there, and then my net access went out,” she says, which seems strange, because aren’t phone access and net access basically the same thing? “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s fine. Now let’s get you the hell out of dodge.”
* * *
She guides him through a succession of freight elevators and service corridors where maids and housekeepers and waiters bustle past, seeming not to see him, as though he bears some mark that tells them he belongs.
Down in the basements she guides him to a room that looks like it used to be a meat locker, but now a Filipino vendor has set up a kind of general store, his goods neatly stacked on blankets on the floor. “Get the highest-bandwidth satellite phone he has,” she says in his ear. “And lots of data cables. Like, thousands of feet. Also water, nuts, candy, whatever has the most calories per pound.”
* * *
Ditching the bullpup in a dumpster full of cardboard and sodden vegetables, he feels spiritually lighter.
“Where are we going?” he asks as they walk through rooms full of boxes labeled in Chinese and middle-aged ladies squatting on the floor playing mahjong.
“There’s a village up the coast,” she says. “Fishermen and smugglers, mostly, and apparently a bar scene. The government turns a blind eye, so it’s a surveillance blank spot. We can buy a boat there and no one will ask questions.”
“I don’t know how to sail.”
“It’ll be easy. You just have to motor out and meet these ships at sea.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Something like that. They’re unmanned drones, so you just have to motor up, climb on and hitch a ride. There’s an island on the equator and they’ll take you all the way there.”
“Is that where you are?”
“It will be by the time you get there.”
“Am I rescuing you or what?”
“There’s something I need you to do on the island. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll show you when we get there.”
The corridor ends in double doors that open onto estuarine mud and salt water leaden under the low fog in the predawn light. He walks out into the black, sucking mud, feeling free, grateful to be out of doors even though his shoes are immediately ruined. A heron rises heavily into the air, croaking loudly. No sound but gulls, the low rush of waves. He looks back at the mass of rust-stained concrete—strange that Hong Kong, which had seemed inescapable, ends so abruptly. He looks up toward the city’s towers but they’re invisible in the fog.