You are given an attacker and your entire personality reverts to instinct.
You are given a mask so you may be hidden in plain sight.
You fight through a waterlogged gray curtain, as though puppeteering a bloodless simulacrum in one of the violent games children so love to entertain themselves with back home, sitting lazily in front of the television. But there is no laziness to it here, nor even very much sitting. Just violence.
And in a way you accomplish what you came halfway across the planet to do. You kill. You prevail.
That is what you do. It is who you are, now.
The food, the drugs deftly separate you from a world that had little use for you, back there in behind-time.
It is not such a bad life, fulfilling in its primal imperatives. Fight. Survive. Eat. Sleep. Fight again.
You see a man in a cage, less fortunate than you. You are in control of your little universe. The man in the cage has no control. Perhaps you will face this Other in the fighting pit.
But a minuscule ember of memory remains. You recognize this person.
His name is Gabriel. You were introduced to him once.
“Mitch!” said Gabriel, bum-rushing his own bars. “Michelle! You’re alive!”
“I won,” she said, as though that were an answer. She regarded him oddly. Off-center. Head cocked. Sparse recognition in her green eyes. Yet she had remembered his name.
“Who pulled you out of the river?” Of the dozen questions Gabriel could have asked, this one floated to the surface first.
“Some man,” she said.
“Don’t you remember? We were at the casino. You were shot. We all went into the river together.”
“The dream,” she said. “The dream of being someone else.”
“It’s not a dream—look, Mitch, they did something to you. Shot you up with drugs or lobotomized you or…I don’t know.”
“Mitch,” she repeated.
Gabriel watched her worry the name in her head. It was a slim hope, a doomed chance for her real self to flicker alight.
“I am Jin Huáng,” she said. “I have fought five. I have won five.” She showed him the Iron Fist, still strapped to her hand.
“No, you’re not! You’re—”
“When your time comes,” she added curtly, “I’ll win against you.”
Chapter 14
“Jin Huáng, this is your rest period,” said Ivory.
Mitch hung her head and shuffled away.
“Await me,” Ivory said to her back. She stopped walking. Then started up again.
“You’ve drugged her into some kind of…robot,” Gabriel said from the cage.
“A preparation from Mr. Cheung’s resident mystic,” said Ivory. “It subverts the will.”
“I’ll say.”
Ivory unpocketed a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Gabriel.
“No thanks,” said Gabriel. “I never got to finish my drink.”
“We of course had your identity the moment you entered the Zongchang casino,” said Ivory matter-of-factly, not even looking at Gabriel. “I suspected some connection between you and this woman. The cameras confirmed it when you took them both into the river.”
“Well, good for you,” said Gabriel. “I gather this is the part where I’m just supposed to listen to your brilliant strategy and not ask you why the hell you have me locked up in a cage.”
“Unfortunately for you, you have been tricked into consort with the Nameless One,” said Ivory. “Mr. Cheung is very protective of his interests, and disapproves of those who would oppose him for shallow and misguided reasons.”
“You mean like because he murdered your newest fighter’s sister in New York?”
“Ah. That is the link, then.” Ivory rubbed his forefinger against his lips, a nervous gesture. “And you sought to redress this injustice?”
“Mitch did,” Gabriel said. “All I wanted to do was get her out of here. That’s the honest truth.” He hoped he sounded sincere. “This is not our country. Your fight’s not our fight.”
Ivory pondered a moment, then said, “Let me tell you a story.”
“I don’t see how I can stop you.”
“Let us say that this story is about an imaginary person named Valerie Quantrill. Who worked quite expertly in the transfer of digital data. Let us imagine that Mr. Cheung’s company hired her to bring everything in the organization online for access via the latest state-of-the-art equipment. Broadband literacy is essential to a man who aspires to take an entire country to a new horizon.”
“But he didn’t count on his imaginary data transfer czar being broadband-literate herself,” said Gabriel. “And stumbling on things he didn’t want her to know.”
“There was no stumbling, Mr. Hunt. It was deliberate, premeditated and malign. She hacked firewalls, she stole passwords. All deliberate. She deliberately gained access to data that was damaging to us. We foresaw blackmail, threats, sealed envelopes in secret drops. But Mr. Cheung was not enraged—he was pleased. He saw this initiative as a valuable skill. He seeks to encourage people to their best potential—that is why so many in China take him seriously.”
“He’s a madman who participates in slave auctions,” said Gabriel.
“You persist in Western linear thinking,” said Ivory. “But I believe you to be an intelligent and perceptive man. Think of the small crime with yield for the greatest good.”
“Every madman in history has justified his madness that way. Look at Hitler.”
“Yes, yes, Hitler.” Ivory glared at him. “Are you quite through?”
“Not quite,” said Gabriel. “But I’m the one in the cage. I’m through if you say I’m through.”
“Let us say that instead of chastising Valerie Quan-trill, Mr. Cheung offered her a new and expanded role in his grand plan—one that would potentially have made her very wealthy, and free to move about the world as she pleased. And let us say further that she came to the meeting in New York to turn him down. That would have been an entirely honorable decision, you understand—but a bad choice. Mr. Cheung would have perceived her disinclination as a threat to use what she knew.”
“You mean he lost his temper and killed her. Hypothetically speaking.”
Ivory pressed his lips together and looked at the floor for a moment. He released a sigh, as though venting psychic decay.
“If this happened,” he said, “I assure you it was not with my approval.”
“You didn’t prevent it,” said Gabriel.
“Perhaps a Westerner cannot understand. It is not my place to prevent Mr. Cheung from doing what he wishes. I am bound by my fealty to him.”
“Fealty?” Gabriel shot back. “Ivory, he’s not even really Chinese!”
“I know. I have accepted this.”
“Look—you’re better than this guy. You saw Mitch come to kill him and you saved his life, but you saved her life, too. Only now you’re letting your sense of obligation hamstring you.”
“I saved her out of regret for her sister’s fate,” Ivory said. “Were I a disloyal man, I would not have informed Mr. Cheung. Instead I proposed an alternate course, and he approved.”
“And if he hadn’t? If he’d told you to kill her? What would you have done?”
“I would have killed her,” Ivory said, but he said it quietly, in a voice of utter commitment but also some sadness.
There was a deep conflict aboil just under Ivory’s bulletproof surface. Gabriel had sensed it the first time they had met.