Jade Dragon by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Dark Future, Alternative History, Games Workshop
ISBN: 1844163784
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2006-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Fixx had a sour taste in his mouth, and his lip twisted. It wasn’t the mud-coloured slurry that Burger König called coffee. There was a taint on the air like rancid meat. He pushed the half-finished drink away from him across the cracked plastic table, suppressing a shiver even though the interior of Ocean Terminal was always a summery thirty-five degrees. For a moment, the ghost of the sensation he’d felt at the Hyperdome was about him, there and then gone. He glanced around at the laughing, clapping people. Their faces were the same as the fans in Newer Orleans, they shared the distant look in their eyes, desperate to capture some tiny fragment of Juno Qwan.

On this level, the view of the singer was decent. She was talking into a handheld microphone and waving. The crowds called to her, and even the cocky cluster of go-gangers drifting near the open patio couldn’t help but crack smiles. Fixx shifted to get a better angle and adjusted the gain on his espex. He took a breath, one hand dipping into his pocket to finger the bones, collapsing his view of the world down to the space between him and her. Fixx let Juno’s aura find its way to him, gentle and slow. He forced away the ill scents in the air, concentrating on the woman.

He’d had one of the waking dreams again. It came as he took the tunnel beneath the bay, the car dipping into the red-lit corridor, torrents of colour streaming over him. In there he’d seen webs come from nowhere, the reaching arms of things distant and older than space. They were gossamer, vanishing when he put his full attention to them; in among the ghosts he heard a woman screaming, tasted the bitter scent of things dark and alien.

“Juno,” he rumbled. It kept coming back to her.

She was singing, dancing through a rendition of “Capsule Lover” while overhead screens displayed directionless, watery vistas all blue and inviting. The waves became words: We Are Free, Break The Dark, Unstoppable. Fixx saw the aurora of Juno’s spirit, the faintest Kirlian glow about the woman. It was different.

He worried the bones a little more. Wrong. That is wrong. Fixx looked her in the eye at the Hyperdome, in that second of connection he had known Juno Qwan. That was the gift the loas gave him, the Sight. He could see a man and find the colour of his soul, turn it one way to mark a quarry or another to know a man’s intention. It had never failed him.

But the woman, the starlet down there wore a different aura from the morose girl he had faced in the stadium. Fixx frowned. It wasn’t like she was an impostor or someone disguised—no, he would have seen through that. Even a twin would have been visible to him. The colours of her were the same, but just wrong. Altered. Different. The experience was so new to him he couldn’t frame it in his mind.

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