Ch’eng, the tenghuang gangster before you, is perforated with snub-nose rounds, fired at point-blank through his sickly camelid chest, gunpowder pecks exploding like unfurled sunflowers. In the few moments of shocked clarity, his hooded, drug fueled visage does not change, accepting the pain as if it were just another bad trip. Gracelessly, he folds to the floor, oblong head smacking against the metal sidewalk, splitting in gruesome succession and coating the ground with sticky crimson that stains his already unlaundered suit jacket.
Whitesuit turns to you, hands shaking, pulling the trigger further, spraying your general direction with poorly aimed shots. Behind you, a purple panel of glass shatters, Bloom!’s amplified sitar beats freed, belting into the arcology’s crowded streets. You and your mare duck, hitting the ground in a vain attempt at evasion, flattening against the bar’s grimy steps.
Ø, for her part, jumps back up immediately, quickly enough to see that the assailant has turned tail, fleeing into the convulsing crowd of interested onlookers.
“Come on, let’s get after him,” she orders through your orgones. “He fired what, six? He should be out by now. Couldn’t hit a damn thing, anyway.”
The two of you jump down Bloom!’s staircase and into the pit that has formed, where local shopkeepers and tourists ooh and aah at the twitching Yaomo corpse. With Ø’s height and weight, she clears a path, tossing aside the rusted bicycles and pushcarts that clog the streets, throwing elbows into unsuspecting faces and snouts. You follow behind, 415 in hand, noting your pathway through the sprawl.
You realize, disappointingly, that Whitesuit is getting away.
He’s headed Below.
Ahead, towards the elevators, coolie-hatted peasants wait in line for the next available transport platform, cradling their yokes of goods for above-board sale. Among them are the others, the less fortunate; the residents headed home Below, leaving their menial day-jobs as busboys and shoe-shiners and housemaids. They avoid bumping with the criminals and gangsters, headed towards their own seedy destinations that exist in the Above platform’s shadows, packs of them chuffing cigarettes and snarling, arguing about gambling debts and girlies.
Whitesuit haphazardly shoves his way onto the arriving platform, braving the swirling crowds beholden to public transport. Mechanisms like this, the repurposed kilometer-and-a-half tall, stripped down graphine space elevators dotting the Settlement, at least in their original form, can hold roughly five standard nuclear artillery pieces, or twenty-five antique combustion-powered automobiles. For today’s Tiangong, that weight limit equates to four-hundred sweaty free-riders, carts in tow, chicken coops rattling, kting voar and other pack beasts braying.
You arrive too late, the platform already squeezed to capacity, those at the entrance shoving the first arrivals in further, until there is no space to stand, sit, or raise a hand to scratch your ear. The give-or-take six hundred passengers spit tobacco from their chapped lips and involuntarily huff the shared stench of the elevator’s slow descent. Ø’s kick against the elevator’s see-through chickenwire exterior is backed by a petulant, shrill whinny.
“Come on, follow me,” you grip Ø’s arm and drag her from the front of the line, the new crowd forming in anticipation of the elevator’s next arrival.
Your eyes trace the meter-thick glass road at your feet, where through the dirty view you spy another platform, only a trot away, amongst the hundreds of criss-crossed elevators and bamboo support beams that keep the arcology stable and standing. You recognize this other elevator from your brochure—it leads from a landing platform Above to the Soong Regency Hotel, the lavish compound fortified, “reclaimed” from the riff-raff normally found Below.
At a full sprint, you approach the hotel’s Above entrance, cybernetic valets herding rickshaws out of the way of disembarking quadrotors and landing craft. Through the automatic revolving door, the Hall & Hotz, the Sun Sun, and other boutiques, with concierge chittering away for the upsell, where the open trough of sparkling waters waft aromas—air conditioned—of mango and saffron from the lobby. A holographic screen cycles through smiling young hostesses in evening gowns, high-cost ‘karaoke companions’ for an evening’s rent, three-dimensional headshots airbrushed and buttressed with daisy-chain flower borders.
You beat your way past the big hatted ladies and their tuxedo’d compatriots, the gigolos and courtesans fighting for breathing room, cutting them all in line. You cram into the smaller luxury elevator, where only five can fit comfortably, as the doors close behind you.
An older tigress next to you, her bright-pink fascinator drawing as many eyes as her overt décolletage and short-cut cheongsam, snarls as you bump into her from the back. Her wealthy older suitor, aged-down cosmetically, but at your guess a firm hundred-and-twenty, turns his nose at your insolence.
His accent, thick and Teutonic, spits at you through his syllables, past his mistress’s feathery pseudo-galero of a picture hat.
“I don’t suppose you’re also guests at the Soong?”
“Just visiting,” you reply, you and the mare cramming your faces against the glass tube as it jolts to motion, trying to see through the glare of sunset that shoots into your eyes. Seventy meters away, slowly descending alongside you, you spy Whitesuit, pressed against the chain-link fence that encloses the elevator for less-privileged riders.
“Oh yeah, now we got him,” Ø grins.
“Ø, look, he’s doing something.”
“What? Is he… No, come on,” she whines, annoyed as she watches the gangster’s shaky hands disappear into pockets, followed by what looks like Whitesuit loading more slugs. “What a clown. He can’t his us from there. This meat couldn’t hit the side of the barn.”
“Darling,” the tigress sneers at your silence, “what’re those two on about?”
“Heavens if I know,” the suitor jostles the attendant, the tapir anthropomorph just barely old enough to work, synthetic suit jacket a size too large, cap ajar and tied with a thin plastic string. “Ach, Bellboy, can you get this riffraff out of here? I expect some sort of accommodation as a guest. A paying guest, mind you.”
“How about you mind your own business?” the mare spits onto the floor.
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Girlie, tell your John to smarten up,” she gestures with her Star at his neck.
“Ø, look at this,” you sigh.
“I can’t see,” she hisses, “not with the glare.”
“Well, he’s aiming,” you wince, as you see what you think is a barrel snaking through the elevator’s chickenwire, propped up against a trough in the pattern’s knitting.
“I wouldn’t worry,” she sneers. “See, meat like that, when they’re all scared, pissin’ their kimonos—”
At the strike of Whitesuit’s hammer, gunpowder bursting, your elevator’s paneled glass rocks, the ceiling momentarily filling with fire and smoke, soot flooding the capsule. A long, curved crack stretches from a gaping hole near the elevator’s canopy to your feet, the tube’s steel crown molding twisted into a bird’s nest. Your ears ring, mouth tasting the metallic debris of insulation, making you salivate.
Unsurprisingly, your fellow occupants scream in unison.
“Well, it doesn’t matter if he’s got explosive rounds,” you lurch, realizing you still have another kilometer to your destination below. The glass flooring beneath you cracks further, spreading to encompass your half of the cylinder.
“Operator, get us back up there, right now!” Your feline passenger screeches at the bellhop, who stands frozen in abject fear, the tapir’s ears folded back in shock. Ø whips her gun around the four-square-meter space, waving it in the bellboy’s face to prevent any delays, stopping short of whipping him unconscious.
Another round discharges from the opposing elevator. Its contents churn in fear at the gunshot’s announcement. Confused, confined, spooked cattle rear. Whitesuit is slammed against the chickenwire, his shot missing completely. Pinned against the floor-to-ceiling chain-link fencing, his whole body threatens to be minced, cubed, under the stress of hundreds of thousands of writhing, panicking kilograms.
Somewhere in the distance, another explosion rings out as Whitesuit’s bullet hits, assaulting some unaware building Below, within the walls of the Old City.
Ø shoves her barrel through the cracks of your elevator’s glass, which breaks apart in chunks as the Star’s muzzle clinks along its jagged edges. She brings her other hand to stabilize herself, jostled by the movement of the elevator and screeching passengers.
She swears beneath her breath, eyes squinting through the purple-orange beauty of a Tiangong sunset.
“I can’t see a damn thing!”
“Don’t just shoot blindly, there’s civilians on there,” you chastise, holding your 415 pistol to the bellboy’s gut at Ø’s insistence. “Sorry,” you whisper.
“Well, what’s your idea?”
Another explosion jolts your platform, landing once more above the cylinder, ripping the ceiling clean off. Wind whips your hair, the lift seeming to fall faster than your natural descent. Sparks fly from the central guide rail, metal crunching against metal and stinking of carcinogens.
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Another shot and it’s over.
Ø fires once, twice, both shots missing the opposing tram completely, their natural arcs destined for the hydroponic farms somewhere in the wastes outside the city’s walls. The suns blare, intensified by the silicon haze belted from far-off factories and churned from the semi-regular radioactive dust storms.
From her eyes, you realize, she really can’t see a damn thing.
With a quick thought, you draw your arm across your body, accidentally smacking your fellow passenger across his mustachioed face. With another whispered apology, you rip at the tigress’s hat. Although too small for her, you bring the headpiece to Ø, who, lost in frustration, lets loose three more impotent shots in the interim. You cram her long ears back and tilt the brim towards the sun to act as an umbrella.
“What’s the matter with you?” she bucks with anger, reactive under stress, “trying to mess up my shot?”
But your sharpshooter gets the message.
“Fine. I hate this,” she groans, tilting her head to the horizon, the lace underbrim blocking one, then two of Tiangong’s afternoon sunsets, only leaving the breathtaking, distracting aureola to contend with.
Wind flaps through her mane, its speed jostling her composition. She stares down her sights, timing herself through the bamboo scaffolding, support beams, and satellite dishes—the mechanical nervous system that keeps the Above afloat. With only a half-kilometer to go, the buildings Below come into sight, the tallest of them threatening to screen any chance of a shot. Whitesuit, realizing this, once more angles his gun, fingers clawing through chickenwire, at your blown-out elevator shaft that could collapse any second.
Ø feels your warning. Time’s running out. She wants another cigarette.
Her equid fingers squeeze the trigger once, a bullet embedding in the plasticwood cart of durians near Whitesuit’s foot. He flinches. She holds her breath, nervously chewing her lip, and you feel a pang of happiness run through her, the Pavlovian response that triggers whenever she tastes a victim’s fear.
Her final shot enters at an upward trajectory, the jacket shredding through the gangster’s calf, embedding itself in the flanks of a monstrous kting voar behind him. Already spooked, braying and snarling, the pack animal goes berserk, pressing its filthy horns forward through the crowd, trampling those less fortunate. Whitesuit’s head, eyes wide in fear, is forced into the platform’s cheap metal exterior, abrasions carving grotesque X’s of blood into his thin skin, making him howl in chorus with the other gored passengers.
The unsightly scene disappears with the arrival of discolored billboards and Soong penthouse suites, their manicured balconies adorned with evergreen hedges and reflecting pools, where clutches of well-dressed onlookers stare past their martinis at your party’s sorry shape, your pelts and hair filled with shards of glass, the elevator’s metal screeching against itself in an irreversible decline that can be heard from kilometers away.
Satisfied and spent, Ø re-holsters her firearm with a smile. She rips the hat from her head, slicking back her mane with a hand. She balls it up, pitching the headgear to the nearly fainted tigress, whose claws have dug through her Teutonic suitor’s sleeve, unsheathed in petrified fear.
Ø’s self-satisfaction is cut short with an ominous snap. All five sets of eyes look to the floor, where glass cracks unfurl into a jumbled mandala of possible defenestration, every jolt of the platform causing more petals to blossom. Beneath your soles is a certain uncaring weightlessness, like shifting sands.
“Nobody,” you suck down air, “please, just nobody move for a minute.”
The five of you pause, bound to the same inescapable fate, crinkling metal and shattering glass threatening to give way and send you all down another couple hundred meters into the streets, sans flooring. You stare, Teuton to tapir, yourself to tigress, watching blood seep from the ribbons of her suitor’s tattered sleeve, her whiskers twitching with despair, mouthy mewls reeking of cinnamon mahua donuts and spezie.
But, Ø looks down, watching as the landing platform rockets into view. Standing as still as possible, all a-silent, the stenches and sounds of Below flood through the cracks. Refried street food, the yells of chastising aunties, a stray yelp of gunpowder bursting from an alleyway. Hardly the luxury the Soong promises its guests.
But as the platform lurches, finally, to its destination Below, you all breathe a sigh of relief.
The car’s mechanisms stall a meter from the ground, unsurprisingly, keeping the doors jammed. Shouting and banging on the other side, that of the hotel’s security forces, makes you thankful for the malfunction. A crowbar’s head forces its way through the doors. Robotically, Ø approaches you, bringing her familiar hands to your shoulders.
Two meters of mare pin you to the aluminum doors for leverage. Her digits lovingly dig into your clavicles, snout invading your personal space, lips grazing your neck. The man-eater’s mouth is agape, salivating from the taste of burnt metal. Her puffing breaths reek of Hankow and poorly cooked, over-spiced meats while sweat drips, mane sopping and grimy against your ear.
It’s a familiar sensation.
Holding you as a counterbalance, she whips a thigh to her chest and shuts her eyes, building momentum within every fibrous centimeter of muscle. With a whinny, she slams her hoof backwards, kicking against the latticed mandala cracks in an act of purposeful destruction, shattering the cylinder’s wall in its entirety. The floor gives way, too, a familiar Teuton and mistress sent tumbling a meter below.
Ø turns and bolts through her makeshift exit, you following behind, your cheap flip-flops crunching glass as you flee into the meandering, far-less-well-dressed crowds found Below.
At the entrance of Whitesuit’s pedestrian elevator is a scene only slightly more hectic than usual.
People fight to disembark the platform, some nursing wounds with clay-covered hands, some unconscious and trampled in the cacophony of screaming confusion. At the edge of the crowd, your mare smells a trail of blood in the garbage covered unpaved streets. The outline of a limping leg, leading toward the outer walls of the Old City. Ø, in her feral chase, gives into a dead sprint, tracking the fresh scent before some other detritus can cover it.
Your knees twang with pain. The firm, dusty streets are lopsided and uneven and jolt your muscles. Congealed garbage, of food wrappers and industrial packing, pockmark your steps. Living roadblocks of squawking children and lingering grandparents, hunched forward, arms crossed behind backs, or sacks on shoulders, filled with collected metal waste, are cleared by Ø’s wingspan.
Blocks away, through a thin alley, your prey hobbles, his pristine white pseudo-wool slacks splattered with tea leaves of blood, his face stained with the red X’s of chickenwire fencing. His shaky hands juggle the lock in front of him, the three-story shack unimportant next to its dilapidated siblings, where clotheslines hang and old men sit on the windowsills, chuffing back their low-quality heaters as the suns finally set against the distant mountain range, dotted with the irradiated Imperial shipwrecks of old.
Panicking, nearly crying, Whitsuit spots you both in the empty street, silhouettes glowing in the dusk. With an overwhelming fear, he fires at you both, one shot blasting a hole in the apartment block to your left, the other collapsing a fire escape behind you, sending a collection of potted plants, moldy laundry, and empty cases of beer into the alleyway.
With impotent clicks, your prey realizes he’s out, and weasels his way through the shack’s entrance, the sound of five separate locks following.
Ø runs, gaining speed, pumping her arms as she approaches the shack’s door, bringing a hoof to its rusted hinges. In a clash of corrugated metal, the entire doorway folds, peeling back the ‘frame’ with it, screeching open like a can of Hankow pilsner. Off-balance, her momentum carries her forward, sending her falling through the now-gaping residential hole and flat onto her snout. You follow behind to help her up, and as you notice the silver wire frames of her d’Valay sunglasses have broken, the gracious gift from Boss Shishito. You feel a murderous energy flow from her.
Turns out they’re knock-offs.
You scan the entryroom, one hand helping your mare to her hooves, the other clutching your sidearm. A familiar sensation of sickness wells in your stomach, adrenaline escaping from your grasp. Your grip evaporates, the mare falling back onto the piecemeal metal-on-cardboard floor.
You lurch forward.
Surrounding you, shrink-wrapped, categorized by pictographic and color-coded tag, the nude, desiccated corpses of the less-fortunate. Some with eyes, some without, aghast, missing their lower jaws, tongues ajar; some skin intricately carved, resewn, reset, with geometric shapes and deific doodles, others pulverized and scrapped seemingly for parts. Others are works of art, some simple sketches, all arrived at the same conclusion, organized and prepared, accents on the walls of a butcher’s estate.
A sterile, medical smell wafts through the shantyhouse. It makes your eyes water, and even Ø, her physiology unable to vomit at all, feels the need arise from within. So she salivates, spitting on a pile of plastic garbage bags, imaginings of meat ruined, flooded with inedible medical fluid, an unappetizing embalming umami.
You hear footsteps upstairs. Metal flooring scratches against wingtip shoes. An otherworldly fight-or-flight takes hold. It’s a murderous desire from another consciousness, an anger over busted sunglasses and late lunches cut short.
Taking no precaution, you run ahead, mare forgotten. Your heart pounds, the grimaces of mummified corpses beckoning your ascent. Sutured bones are ripped from tattooed ribcages. Whores pockmarked with junkies’ ballpoints still have mouthfuls of black lacquered teeth. Four-fingered gangsters, naked skin, shaved pelts, bearing tattooed waves and familial identifiers grimace like frozen jikininki demons, even in death craving another hit of opium.
They stereoscope past you, rotating like a wheel of suffering.
The stairs, tiled, click as your psyche cracks under the strain, vomit building in your throat. At the top, across the railing, you find your prey. Both of you, your eyes water. Yours with disgust, his with preylike fear. With a last act of cornered defiance, Whitesuit shouts, and with his swan-song, a newly loaded firearm appears.
You both fire.
The heat that brushes past your cheek intensifies, turning into a fireball at the aluminum wall behind you, the metal shingles of the second floor sneezing onto the street, scattering plastic insulation, asbestos, and giblets of forgotten murder victims in the trash-filled alleys below.
Where the meat missed, you strike. You fire wildly in his direction, momentarily insane. After your first feeling of recoil, your eyes instinctively slam shut, and you lose track of your own actions against the rising tide of nausea, spittle dripping down your chin. Ø, who had hidden beneath the bannister at the sound of the explosion, reappears with a momentary look of concern.
It quickly evaporates as she stares at Whitesuit’s twitching corpse, crumpled and pin-pricked, lying on a patchwork of dirty medical instruments and plastic shower curtains.
There’s nowhere to lean on the walls. The bodies are too dense. You clasp your knees, spitting, vomiting, and swearing under your breath, re-tasting peppercorns that lodge in your sinuses, burning with stomach acid.
Ø approaches the gangster’s corpse. One of hundreds. Her furred digits rifle through Whitesuit’s stained pants, soiled with blood and urine, producing baggies of spezie, business cards of various mechanics and other medical professionals, and finally an ID, which she pockets along with a metal-clipped inch of credits in cash. The wallet she discards, a Heidenheim Leather forgery, has its embroidery misspelled to Hidenhime.
Her almond eyes trace the dead man’s face. High cheekbones, a mouth of false teeth purchased on lease. His left hand misses three fingers, his right a single digit. She slides gold rings from those three fingers, far too small for her to wear, on the longshot they’re worth something, her pirate’s instincts never subsiding.
Stripped of valuables, still in death, he’s just another gangster to be forgotten in the minutes it’ll take to flee the scene.
She’ll never say it, but Ø’s impressed. Almost proud.
You feel the unfamiliar sensation through regurgitated chunks of peppercorn that burn your gums numb. Her heart jumps, skipping on the edge of its grooves and gives a warm vinyl ‘pop’ as she notices Whitesuit’s eye has been shot straight through, serrated medical implements visible on the floor past a mixture of brain matter and crudely installed neurological wiring.
A clean kill.
As you flee, tripping over corpses, ID and loot in hand, you hear sirens. They send the onlookers scurrying, their filthy faces disappearing into tenements and bunkhouses reeking of sweat and opium, as if they’re worried.
You’re dumbstruck—there’s actually law enforcement here in the gangster’s Xanadu.