~~ Interlude ~~
Her eyes are open and there is nothing in them, and my mouth is open and there is only screaming.
I touch her. For the first time in our lives I touch her, really hold her, cradle her limp and cooling form. Time passes in fits and starts and my body moves without reason. I have neither understanding nor consciousness. I am crying, I am holding, I am pacing, I am shrieking, I am pounding her chest with useless fists. I have wrapped my mouth around red, motionless lips and I am breathing air into them. I am gagging, I am vomiting. I am breathing faster than I thought possible, the room is spinning, a suffocating blur, the walls falling in around us. I cannot think it. I do not hear. My flesh is not my own, I renounce it.
No, no, no, please live, live, live-
Somewhere, a small voice mumbles that it is pointless. Somewhere, in the far distant recesses of my mind I understand what is lost can never return. It is a whisper in a hurricane. I am not my thoughts. I am not my soul.
My fingers rake track-marks down my cheeks and my trembling hands have blood beneath the nails. I do not care, I cannot see. I clutch her soft, unmoving body with the utmost care and reverence, and then so tight it feels like every bone should break.
“Emily,” someone with my voice is moaning. Broken, mournful, weak. “Emily, Emily, Emily…”
So beautiful in death. She is not dead she is sleeping. This is a fairy tale, she just needs a handsome prince, not me I- I am a criminal, a murderer, I will kill myself, please shoot me, oh God make me a stone, do not bury her, she cannot go below the ground, she isn’t hurt, she isn’t-
Somewhere knocking, knuckles on a distant door. An American voice asks in English if I am okay. I am not here, so I do not answer. I am dead, I know, with Emily. My body is simply yet to catch up.
Take it back. Take it back. Return her to life God and I will never speak to her again, I will rot in the darkest prison until the sun weeps black, take my hands, my eyes, my soul, just please return her. Return her. Return-
There is another thought, somewhere in the darkness. There is a hand that is connected to my body. It moves on its own, the world it fumbles through blurred by tears, yet… it holds a phone. It is dialling a number. Characters nostalgic to my swirling, aching brain.
I look down and the body I am cradling is my mother’s. I am ten years old. The world is shrinking, I am shrinking, the colours are rippling and the corpse is growing larger, features melting, sinking into the floor.
Digital ringing. A click-
“Liang please, it’s Em-”
But I cannot even say her name. Nausea overwhelms me. My fingers tremble on the red end button and the link to the world beyond this room is severed. I cannot speak. I cannot breathe. There is no life in this emptiness. We are alone, the two of us, and this is not real, this is not-
Time passes. Does it? There is no instant, no eternity. I feel her weight in my arms, against my body, and I cry, broken, animal sounds, for she has left me, and nothing I do will make her return.
Far away, a distant pop. Another knock on the door, more voices, more shouting, beyond my home and comprehension. I cradle her. I cradle her. A sudden bang, the sound of a door slamming, and suddenly footsteps approach, almost at a run, and in the kitchen hallway is-
“Jesus Christ. Qiang.”
My stomach churns and my eyes are lead but I manage to look up. A figure I know stands in the doorway, clutching the wall, reeling in shock. He has my face if I were fat and prideful. A different haircut, an expensive fade, touches of product. Why have you come, corruption? Why have you opened the door and let in the hateful world?
“What have you done?” my brother whispers. He glances frantically over his shoulder, back down the hallway, out the front door to where middle‑aged American strangers peer curiously inside. I do not care; I do not notice. They are the light of far distant stars, not arriving for millennia. Liang’s footsteps hurry over tiles and floorboards and I hear the door slam. I close my eyes and cling to Emily, whispering faithful sobs into her neck. My tears pool damp upon her cold skin.
“What are you doing, you idiot!” Liang hisses, and I realise he is once more standing in the doorway. I look up, and there is a familiar madness in his trembling eyes. The dark bags under them. The grinding of his teeth. “Get away from her! Get up!”
It seems an eternity before my tongue finds Cantonese. “She’s dead,” I whisper, “Liang please… you have to… I didn’t…”
“Get up you filthy idiot, we must burn her, we must hide before the neighbours see, the- where is your phone, have you called the authorities, your government contacts, we need to get ahead of this and-”
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“She’s gone,” I say and the moan escapes my lips, the last petal on a dying flower, “Gone. I don’t… I cannot…”
“You have ruined us,” Liang mutters, standing shaking in the doorway. He jerks forward as if to reach out to me but then stops himself, his eyes wild. “Qiang you inept, useless dog, you’ve ruined everything, you’ve-”
Finally, my eyes break free from Emily and manage to crawl their way to him. I see him, really see him, for the first time since his arrival. I see him and I realise he is there.
“Brother?”
“Yes! It is me, you moon-brained idiot, stop clinging to the dead girl, we have to-” He runs his hands through his short hair. “We have to…”
“Bring her back.” Suddenly Liang’s tirade falls silent. He stares down at me. I stare up at him. Every part of me shakes and the room swims in tears. “Please. Please.”
“Bring back the delivery girl?” my brother snaps. He gnaws at his lips, his eyes as wide as saucers, endlessly kneading over and over with his hands. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? No, no‑no‑no‑no‑no, we have to run, we have to go, quickly, I, I, I have brought a teleporter, loyal, she can- where is your Distruptance, turn it off, we can- to the mainland, safety, the Party, they will protect us, they will-”
“Please,” I whisper – and in that moment I look at him and will every shattered shard of my being towards him, trying desperately to make him understand, “I love her.”
Abruptly Liang falls silent. “You love her?” he finally mutters – and then suddenly his voice rises, incredulous and hot, “You love her?! The diǎo delivery girl?! Lǎomǔ kǎn jiā chǎn, who cares if you love her, I’m not going to-”
But as his words wash over my ringing ears a memory suddenly rises, an ice‑bound dagger stabbed into my mind. Suddenly I am returned there, to the kitchen, to my body. Slowly, I gently slip Emily’s head from my lap and I stand, trembling, pulling myself up by numb hands on the kitchen counter until I am at full height, staring equal to Liang. My eyes never leave his, welded onto him now, refusing to let go. Emily’s body lays between us on the floor.
“You did,” I whisper, and the words uncurl as frozen thorns around my throat, “You did, for your love, I remember, you took another- and I promised, I let you betray our promise, I let you get away with it and now… and now…”
Suddenly, I scream. “BRING HER BACK!”
Liang flinches. “No, are you out of your-”
“BRING HER BACK!”
I reach forward and Liang stumbles backwards. “Get away!” he cries. His pupils are black holes of greed and panic and his skin is scabbed and haggard, and I see it now, I understand what he is, I see his degeneration and debauchery – and in that moment something breaks. Shards of pain turn to iron, and bloody violence surges through my soul.
I lunge for him, hands outstretched, every tendon on fire, every fibre of my being screaming to hold him down, to force his hands upon her. He shouts and scrambles, slipping back, feet scrabbling on the rug and suddenly he is running and I chase, screaming through a red haze-
Bam! Liang slams open the front door and goes tumbling down the front steps, sprawling in a heap where the footpath meets the lawn. I stalk through the doorway, shoulders hunched, shaking, sucking air between my teeth. The sunlight burns, there is a ringing in my ears, the smell of cold and death intertwined with grass and passionfruit. Emily’s hair. Somewhere there is movement and sirens, somewhere voices, but I do not hear and I do not see. I only have eyes for my traitorous worm of a brother, slithering on his belly towards the freedom he has wasted his whole life.
No more.
Liang is screaming, delirious Cantonese. He scrambles between the strangers arrayed on my front lawn, watching, standing like bowling pins atop the grass, their mouths agape. My so‑called brother has fallen to the left and to the right before me stands a black‑suited African woman, her face plastered in an expression of shock and concern. Between them, astride the thin concrete footpath, two police officers slowly advance between my brother and I, their hands held out and cautious. The fat, soft‑brained Americans spaced out behind them murmur in their shorts and t‑shirts, cattle sensing slaughter with monotone fear and alarm. To my mind it is not real, a moving picture. Nought but enemies to overcome.
I tear my hands from their gloves.
“Hey,” the male policemen says in English. The female turns, reaches down towards my brother, eyes flicking worried between us. “I see you’re angry. Let’s all-”
I do not hear let him speak. I roar, some noise between a shout and a gurgle, and I lunge for Liang, who shrieks and backpedals across the grass. He scrambles to his feet, staggering towards the black‑suited woman, screaming, “Get me out of here, get me-!”
I launch forward. Everything is a ringing blur. Diamond flows over the policeman’s body and he steps towards me, between us, extending a hand. My fingers wrap around his wrist. Instantly he falls.
“Mike! Holy-”
He drops, cast aside, and my eyes burn only for Liang as the policewoman’s hands fumble at the weapon on her belt. Barely a distraction. I sweep forward and my fingers brush her neck and suddenly all light vanishes from her eyes. Her strings are cut and she falls, crumpled, silent. Somewhere, fat Americans scream. I do not care. Liang is scrambling, pushing himself back towards the dark woman in the darker suit, clambering desperately to his feet as I scream-
“MURDERER!”
His hands flail, clutching wildly to her jacket, almost dragging her down trying to pull himself up.
“BETRAYER!”
He has found her, he is clutching her hands and shouting and she has closed her eyes, fervently mouthing something, where moments ago she could do nought but stare at me in terror.
“I WILL TELL EVERYONE!”
Liang leans back and I lunge forward. In an instant, that final instant, my hands close around his collar, and suddenly there is a lurch as something pulls me by the hips, and I am hurtling, hurtling, darkness pressing in on every side-
Bam! The darkness ends and we are no longer in suburbia. A wide, open arrow of lightboards and buildings, skyscrapers, glass and concrete, an intersection of two roads heaving with gridlocked honking buses and cars. The smell of waste and traffic, people walking and chattering, everywhere, in their hundreds, their thousands. For a second Liang staggers, thrown by the teleportation, his face pale, trying to get his bearings. I know where we are; I know it from pictures. New York City, Times Square. The information is there, crystal clear atop my predator brain, present and irrelevant. I care for only one thing.
My worthless brother turns and stumbles backwards, sees me there, opens his mouth to cry something, his fingers still gripped white to the teleporter’s coat. The words never leave him. I grab both of them.
And suddenly the world around us is not life and colour but screams and burning grey.
~~ End Interlude ~~