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.