STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 36

Sley: San Francisco

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The ride was bad but bearable. Being stuffed into a narrow trunk, knees to chest, arms tied behind his back, head banging on the greasy mat every time the car hit a bump—these were annoyances. He was more worried about what lay at the end of the trip.

Was that really Yi-gang? Sley could scarcely believe it. In the darkness and the haste of the ambush, he wasn’t sure. He tried to summon an image of his son and could not. It had been too long.

He felt like he should care. Yi-gang, last of the Kong clan, damned to eternal boyhood. The idea that his son had survived this entire time seemed incredible. The notion of a guardian Auntie Nadia was too fabulous to entertain.

Sley wanted fatherly love, pride, and concern to well up from his heart.

It wasn’t coming.

The car thudded to a stop. The trunk opened and he saw a pair of silhouettes against a shadowy gloom. The maw of a pistol; a crackle of electricity from the other man’s Taser.

Two white men hauled him out, one big, the other short and fat with an unruly beard that spilled from beneath his balaclava. Sley was still gagged with one of their straps, a world of hard rubber filling his mouth, so all he could do was grunt as they tried to get him to stand.

They were in the Phanes parking lot, the complex’s sleek windows blank in the pre-dawn darkness, but then they brightened with an opaque shine from a sprint of headlights. It was chilly, but he could still discern the lingering scent of ashes. A Land Rover came to a halt beside them, Nadia’s cigarette glow in the driver’s seat.

He heard the click and the slam of the passenger front door. The boy walked around to the Rover’s front. For a moment the headlights caught his porcelain face and tangle of hair. He could have been any East Asian kid pulled from a San Francisco gutter. But his eyes. Sley didn’t recognize the boy’s face, but he knew the depths in those eyes. It was the look of a beast who had long since learned not to feel.

He couldn’t prevent tears from blurring his vision. Yi-gang! What evil god did this to you? In what kind of a world are children made into ghosts?

Nadia killed the headlights and got out of the Rover. She checked her watch. To the white men she said, “Round up the others. I’ll handle Sley.”

Sley saw them open the rear seats, guns trained on the occupants who got out. Becker and the security chief, Carlos. Then Sofia.

He felt his body connect to his emotions in a surge of pure feeling. For the first time, maybe the first time in over five hundred years, he knew the power of another person over his being. Not a domineering power, or a physical coercion, or the fleeting promise of sexual pleasure. It was the power of surrender.

He turned his head as the white men marched their prisoners toward the complex, and for a second Sofia met his gaze. She was frightened—who wouldn’t be? But she was also angry. Angry for herself, maybe, or because of her love for him.

Nadia grabbed Sley’s hoodie and led him towards the building, Yi-gang trailing somewhere in the shadows. “You should have accepted my offer,” she said.

It was okay being gagged. He had nothing to add.

Instead of heading inside she guided him around the expanse of the complex. “We could have stopped him,” she continued. “He’s gone to incredible lengths to keep you caged up. I never thought anyone could scare Mang, but he’s scared of you. Together we could have a fighting chance, and I think he knows it. That’s why he’s coming here to get you. Personally.”

Sley couldn’t imagine why Mang wanted him alive, unless it was some primitive desire to snuff Sley with his own hands… Or…

He grunted. Nadia considered him for a moment, then unbuckled the rubber strap. He gagged as she pulled the rubber bite from his mouth.

“You got something to say?”

He nodded as he calmed his coughing. Yi-gang gazed out from behind her hips.

“There’s only one reason why Mang would come here.”

She shrugged. “I stopped second-guessing him centuries ago.”

“He knows why I went to Becker. Why I came here.”

“What is this place, anyway?”

“Becker’s company. Phanes is a biotech project that’s extending human lifespans by decades, if not longer. They’re working on technologies to freeze or even reverse the aging process.”

“Let them try to become immortals. They’ll never be like us.”

“That’s not what Mang worries about. It’s what else they learn how to do.”

“Like what?”

“Reverse the process.”

She let slip a giggle. “Find ways to age us?” When he didn’t reply, she turned a mean sober. “This is what you’ve been up to, Sley, trying to kill us all?” She grabbed the boy’s scruff. “Your own flesh and blood? You’d kill him too?”

“We’re long past due. All of us.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Nadia,” he sighed, “look around. Mang’s about to commit mass murder, an atrocity that even we can’t imagine. That’s what we’ve become, that’s what this deathlessness led us to. But we’re not gods. We don’t have the right.”

“We’re not humans either,” she snarled, “not anymore. We’re the new masters.”

He shook his head. “No. You haven’t given birth to any children, have you?”

“You planted that abominable seed in my belly. It’s cursed me.”

“We aren’t a new breed of superhumans. We’re ghosts. And inside this building are the people and the machines that can end the nightmare. You told me you don’t want to live in a world ruled by Mang. Well, neither do I. Nobody does. And there’s only one way to kill him.”

She opened her cigarette pack, but it was empty. She swore and hurled it away. “Suicide wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“You just want to take his place. Nadia, Queen of the World, all bow down.”

“Yes!” she screamed in his face. “Yes! Yes! Queen Nadia! After hundreds of years of roaming this horrible planet! From that filthy Mongol khan to the emperor himself, all those bandits and stupid oafs in my way, I’ve always had to sell myself to survive. Sell myself and worse. You have no idea what it’s been like, being a woman in this life. So don’t lecture me, Duke Kong, on nobly sacrificing myself for worthless scum. I’m done sacrificing.”