Jasmine could feel this place in the air. The smell of it, sweat and greasy food and alcohol coming up from underground vents with ventilation that was barely up to code. The taste of it on the thick wind blowing between the buildings, salty from the Tigris that was on the other side of Riverside Drive. The feel of it within her bones, vibrations and shockwaves that stone and pavement can’t contain. Whatever music people are dancing to tonight, its nothing Jasmine is familiar with.
She looks across at Xiuying. She’s on her fourth, maybe fifth, coffee of the day. The racoon circles under her eyes have only deepened. But her back remains straight and her strides as poised and precise as they were early in the day.
The backpack hangs heavy over Jasmine’s shoulders. At least a thousand pages of stuff, most of it about various Janissaries associated with Permanent Solutions Security, Jasmine’s ostensible employer. More about the company itself. Only a handful of translated articles about the Khanpasha Mateev figure lurking at the back of the pair’s minds. About a half-dozen books; it took talking to a very kind university student named Rashid, apparently from Egypt, to tell her that half of those books were fake. There’s no such thing as the Blue Eyebrow Rebellion – there was a Red Eyebrow Rebellion, but that happened during the Xin dynasty that lasted for the approximate period of Jesus’s life, and not the Qin dynasty. She learned more about Chinese history over those few hours wandering lost through the library than she had in her life.
Somewhere in that bag sits mandatory reading material. Apparently Xiuying wants her to write an essay on it when she’s done and present it to Xiuying and the rest? And then do it again but on a book of her own choosing? And apparently everyone has done this? Jasmine hopes that there’s a quiet alcove so she can just get her work over with.
“Ready, kid?”
Jasmine looks at her leader again. Her coffee is long cold. Xiuying Li, or Xiuying Ku, or Xiuying Zhao, whatever her surname was, crushes the paper cup under her grip and tosses it into the nearest garbage can.
“Not really, ma’am,” Jasmine replies.
“Me neither.”
The traffic lights change, and despite the pair having right of way a sleek-black BMW coupe tries to sneak a right turn, and the driver slams on the accelerator as he escapes. Xiuying just shakes her head, mutters something about “fucking American drivers,” and continues on her way. Jasmine had the feeling that if she was up for it she’d chase the driver down to the next red light and give them a piece of her mind.
The line to enter this place snakes from around a right corner into view, then extends halfway down the block. Jasmine slings the pack from her shoulders but Xiuying keeps walking, past the tail of the line, and then digs out her ID and hands it to an enormously tall man, taller than Jasmine by at least half a foot. Dark-skinned, his hair in thick dreadlocks to his shoulders, a messy goatee on his chin and upper lip. He looks suspiciously at Jasmine.
He says something in a language Jasmine doesn’t understand. French, maybe? Xiuying responds.
<
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His accent makes it sound like he’s African, somehow. His voice is deep and seems to synchronize with the pulsating vibrations that the club gives off.
<
The man nods, unveils a black, thick-tipped sharpie from the back of his pockets, and says something to Jasmine. She just stares back at him, wide-eyed. He’s so tall. Nobody’s ever been taller than her.
“Jazz?”
Jasmine snaps from her awestruck gaze.
“Yes? What do I need to do?”
“Hands,” the man’s voice booms. But his brown eyes are kindly, and he smiles a friendly, gap-toothed smile.
Jasmine holds out her hands, palms up. The giant man huffs and turns them palms down, then crosses ‘X’s on the back of each of her hands.
“Free to go,” he says, with a friendly smile. Someone in the back yells something and the man switches languages to yell back. His voice feels like a distant storm, the rumble of thunder from a dozen miles away. There’s weight to it, heft, that garners respect. Or it keeps the people in line, at least.
Jasmine hurries out of the street and into the small hallway of the building as the wind starts to howl behind her. It’s been doing that all day, now that the sun is setting it seems particularly angry. Her pastors told her back at Trinity that fierce winds like this are the first warning God gives to sinful societies. Why not send down an angel instead? Because He works in mysterious ways, and His plans are unknowable to us. Our lives may be an endless cavalcade of suffering but its all according to His plan, or something. Jasmine always found it suspicious that the people who said that it was all His plan seemed to benefit from His plan for them. But she wasn’t ever one to question doctrine. His plan for her brought her here, even if it was in a shipping container.
“Who was that?” she asks.
“That was Abdoulaye,” Xiuying replies.
“What does he do?” Jasmine looks at her hands.
“Head bouncer. Security. Take care of problems,” Xiuying responds. “The Xs on your hands let everyone know that you’re underage.”
“Oh. Is he nice?”
“He’s a sweetie. But he’s not my type.”
Jasmine wasn’t about to ask.
As they navigate a series of corners and hallways, the vibrations grow louder, pulsating into Jasmine’s synapses. She can very faintly make out the shape of music, drums and guitars and vocals, harsh, yelling, screaming, harrowed, louder and louder until Xiuying opens an unmarked door and it all stops.
There’s a bar and large windows, halfway up the wall to just about a half-foot from the ceiling. On the other side of those windows is some rapturous upheaval of mass, neon lights flashing and music pulsing and people dancing to whatever this is, a band performing on stage, a singer and three guitarists and a drummer and even a turntablist who wore a large CRT television atop their head, a large open area filled with throngs of people to the front of the stage and terraces extending away from it, almost a dozen of them in three levels, and this little private room sits right at the top.
There’s a few booths. A few small tables. The small bar that could fit in Jasmine’s apartment, manned by a single person. Doors to the outside world, presumably on the other side of the block from where Jasmine entered.
This was, apparently, the Osiris. The ruler of the Egyptian underworld. Below was the Duat, the underworld itself. Afterlife, or at least a temporary approximation, was just out a door and down a flight of stairs. It was smaller than Jasmine was led to believe. Room for maybe a dozen at a time. A flat-screen television in the corner, a newscaster on television, the words spilling from her mouth muted. CNN, apparently. The one p.m. programming block on the east coast. It was some roundtable or something filled with experts in their fields. Something about economic policy. Yesterday’s events were old news, just more dead people in a land far away from America.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Besides the person manning the bar – tall and powerfully built, about Jasmine’s height at eye level but with a flat-top that gave him a few inches on her – there were a group conversing, about six. One was about as tall as the bartender but with a spindly build, spider-like and with a round face scarred by some sort of cystic acne. One was maybe six feet and sturdy, dark like the bartender and Abdoulaye outside. Broad shoulders, spoke with a thick British accent not unlike Mr. Tecumseh’s. One was tall, auburn hair and freckles and glasses. One was, frankly, startling, alabaster-white skin and hair red like blood. One was gorgeous and shapely, with a longer, oval shaped face and skin like the sands of the Rub’ al Khali and these wide, piercing eyes, brown with flecks of gold floating within. And one was Dawn.
She wore a rumpled, white button up with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, exposing the tattoo sleeves that covered both of her arms. One arm was covered in various nonsensicalities, a three-eyed fox’s head, a dark void where five eyes peered out of, a Japanese kanji reading something – <
Jasmine, simultaneously, wondered both what could compel someone to do that to themselves and how it would look on her own figure.
Her boss’s eyes flickered from her conversation partners over to Jasmine and Xiuying. Despite the dark circles under her eyes, she seemed awake and alert, enough to not need four coffees to drag herself through the day. Jasmine at least got a nap in while Xiuying was getting her massage or needling session or whatever it was. The woman’s mismatched eyes went wide.
“Jazz!”
The outburst directs every other pair of eyes towards the new arrivals. Six pairs, not including Dawn, stared at the two. Stared at her, with puzzlement and befuddlement.
“I’ve got good news!”
Dawn continues. The eyes directed at Jasmine glues her feet to the floor. Her shoes are suddenly made of clay.
“You’re not the new girl anymore!”
Jasmine looks over to the woman with the bizarre eyes. No, not Dawn, the other one. Not to the redhead with gold rings surrounding her pupils, either. The other one. The other, other woman with bizarre eyes, a brilliant amber with those tiny specks of gold.
Xiuying glances at Jasmine, an eyebrow raised. Her eyes tell the whole story. Another one?
Xiuying pulls on that black cotton mask of hers. Jasmine forces her feet to separate from the ground. The others turn their medusa gazes away from her and the nerves in her feet start to function again.
She quickly crosses the threshold between door and seat and almost crashes into an empty bar stool, one about waist high. She suppresses the urge to spin around and around on it. She’s a professional now.
Xiuying is calmer; she peels off the bright red and yellow Shenzen Leopards windbreaker covering her shoulders and arms. Underneath is a Toronto Raptors jersey, black and red, with the number 23 on the front. Jasmine didn’t know who that is. Her exposed arms and neck have these dark welts, perfectly round and so red that they border on purple, like she’s the victim of a giant squid attack.
“Who are all these people?” she asks.
Dawn runs through the group. The dark-skinned bulldog of a man is Desmond, the tall, willowy woman with the auburn hair and glasses is Claire, the spider-like man with the acne scars is Deshawn, an employee of this establishment, the one with the red hair is Celine D’Ambrosia, and the woman who looked like an Egyptian princess was Farrah al-Aziz. The newest member of the team.
“Where are we getting all of these people?”
Dawn shrugs. The answer, Jasmine feels, is very complicated, too complicated for Xiuying’s sleep deprived mind. Much too complicated for Jasmine.
“Fuckin, Janissary factory, I guess,” is Dawn’s reply.
Xiuying looks across at Farrah. The newest new member of the team has a wine glass, a tiny pool of red floating at the bottom. She holds it by the top.
“So, what’s your deal?” Xiuying asks. It’s probably way blunter than she means it to be.
Farrah smiles. Her lips are a soft, dark red, and her eyes are outlined thick with what looks like kohl. Her eyelids are shadowed by turquoise, her ears wearing a pair of thin gold rings.
“My deal is that I graduated from the King Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman,” she pauses to take another breath, “Al Saud Soldiering Academy.”
“Do you have to say the entire name every single time?” Jasmine asks, and Farrah smiles again, laughs a quick laugh, and shakes her head.
“Most people just call it the Abdulaziz Academy,” she replies. “It’s certainly a mouthful.”
“You’re not new to this, are you?”
Farrah shakes her head again. “No. I’ve been doing this for, um, about nine years now.”
“Class of ’95?” Xiuying wonders. “Me too.”
“Oh, where’d you go?”
“Popular Shanghai.”
“Ah, I’ve heard of it. Best in China, from what I’ve been told.”
“Enh, second-best. The National in Beijing is better, allegedly. But I’m the best.”
“How do you know?” It sounds like a very low-stakes threat.
“My score is better than everyone else’s, that’s how.”
“You actually know your score?”
“1878.” No hesitation.
Farrah doesn’t verbally respond. She looks over at Jasmine, her eyes practically directed at the top of her head, and raises her eyebrows. Get a load of this loser, it says.
The other group of people have been engaged in conversation separate from Jasmine and Xiuying and Farrah. Two of them, Dawn and this Celine woman, split off from the other three.
Jasmine pulls the heavy sack of books and pages up to her seat and rests it between her legs, then starts pulling out just about everything that Xiuying had printed out, over a thousand pages of news reports and Janissary identifications and business documents. When she drops them all onto the bar they make a mighty thwump that drew everyone’s attention.
The large, tall bartender gives her a dirty look as he mixed someone’s drink and Jasmine wants to hide behind the stack of papers.
Dawn takes a seat next to her and steals the top group of pages off the stack.
“Jazz, have you ever heard of La Montagne before?” Her eyes scan over the first page, then she flips to the second. It’s one of about a dozen articles on this Khanpasha Mateev figure, this one translated from Russian. Maybe a decade old.
Jasmine shakes her head. She looks at the woman with the red hair. She’s striking to look at. A little bit scary. Something about her eyes remind Jasmine of Commander Davison.
“I am Celine D’Ambrosia,” the woman states on her own terms. She holds her hand out and Jasmine gently shakes it. She smiles a cold, deeply unfriendly smile. “I am the leader of La Montagne.”
“That is French, right?”
“Oui, that was French, but we’re not French,” Celine replies. She looks over at Dawn, who’s too engrossed in the articles to look back. “The name comes from a group during the French Revolution.” She’s very careful to not state anything else about the group. Does the name Maximillian Robespierre ring a bell?
“Wait, what happened to Beauregard?” Xiuying asks. She clearly knows more about this situation.
“Monsieur Beauregard has been, let’s say forced to take a different role in the organization,” D’Ambrosia says. “He’s a beautiful wordsmith, but he was too squeamish about the mandatory steps to allow for any actual progress towards our objectives. Hence, my ascension.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Of course not!” She seems appalled at the very suggestion. “He’s returned to Cannes. He’s working on his newest book at the moment, if you’re curious.”
“Well, if you see him, tell him I’m a fan,” Xiuying replies. “Les Échoes des Temps Encore à Venir is the best book I think I’ve ever read.”
“Funnily enough, he keeps saying that it’s his worst. Too commercial, not ideological enough.”
“Sounds like something he’d say. So what brings you to this place? Shouldn’t you be in France?” Xiuying asks. Small talk is over.
“Miss Howard says that you have been looking into a man named Khanpasha Mateev.”
Xiuying pulls a stack of documents off the pile and rifles through them. She hands one of them to D’Ambrosia. The Montagnard doesn’t even spare a look at it.
“Capture or kill. Highest priority. The other killers are too busy collecting easy paycheques, so they give the tough ones to us,” Xiuying replies.
“It may be easier than it appears.” Celine D’Ambrosia pulls out her phone, and very quickly pulls up an article from a Russian news website, TASS. Probably bookmarked it for this occasion. She hands it to Xiuying, and Xiuying quickly reads through the machine-translation of the original article. Her eyebrows furrow halfway through, her mouth creases into a frown.
“Dead, huh?”
“Four years ago. Pre-emptive strike by a joint FSB-Spetsnaz team to prevent a third Chechen War. Keep it under federal control while everything else falls apart.”
Xiuying is quiet. She’s clearly thinking about something. She opens her mouth to speak then decides better. The tall bartender approaches, and Dawn whispers something to him. Jasmine isn’t quite sure of it. But he quickly returns with large pint-glasses of ice water. Xiuying quickly downs hers, reading the article the entire time. There’s a wry smile on her face when she lowers the glass, like she’s figured something out.
Or she knows something that Celine D’Ambrosia doesn’t.