Chapter 11: Gorman

Chapter 11: Gorman

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

There are two kinds of lies. One is told to hide the truth. The other is told by wearing it.

Yun Zhou had spent ninety years mastering the second kind, and he had perhaps four seconds to decide which one this moment demanded.

Gorman said he’d ask only once. That’s a bluff, but a good one. It forces me to answer fast, and fast answers leak.

He knows the message wasn’t from a stallholder. He can’t read my mind, but he’s read plenty of liars. If I deny it, he’ll watch how I deny it. If I confess to everything, he’ll wonder what I’m still holding back.

So I give him a confession, but one built to the shape of what he already suspects. Small. Cowardly. Believable.

A man like him doesn’t punish cowards. He uses them.

Yun Zhou let his chin tremble. He let the tears he’d been holding spill over, hot and real, the kind a body produces when it’s nearly out of fuel and the mind finally lets it break. He drew a wet, shuddering breath.

“Y-yes,” he said.

The word fell into the alley like a stone into a well.

Gorman said nothing. His eyes did not move.

“It was me,” Yun Zhou whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what else to do.”

***

“Go on,” Gorman said.

Yun Zhou pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. His shoulders shook.

“Three days ago, I... I tried to...” He touched his neck. The rope scar was livid in the morning light. “I didn’t want to be here anymore. And then I woke up, and I was still here, and Marlo-ge came and said I had three days, and he said...”

He swallowed.

“He said he knew a doctor. And I understood what he meant.”

“Yes,” Gorman said quietly. “I imagine you did.”

“I didn’t want to die like that. Not like that.” The tremor in his voice was no longer entirely acted. A small, cold part of him noted this with interest. The body’s grief. Useful. Don’t waste it. “So I followed him. I thought, if I could just beg, if I could catch him alone and explain, maybe he’d give me another week. I followed him all day yesterday. Two days ago, I mean. The route. The stalls.”

“And you saw him take the money.”

Yun Zhou nodded. His head bobbed twice, jerky and miserable.

“He had two envelopes. He kept one for himself. I didn’t understand at first. Then he went to the station, to the lockers, and I saw him put it in.” He hiccuped. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought, if I tell him I know, he’ll kill me. But if I tell you...”

“You’d be a snitch.”

“I’d be alive,” Yun Zhou said, and the raw edge in his voice was the most honest thing he’d said all week. “You said, in the notice, that nobody touches a debtor without your approval. I saw it printed at the bottom. I thought, if Gorman-sir knows what Marlo’s doing, he’ll stop him.”

A long silence.

Everything I said was true, Yun Zhou thought, calm as a still pond beneath the shaking mask. The route. The envelopes. The locker. The clause in the notice.

What I left out was how much I already knew, and why.

A man like Gorman can check every fact I’ve given him and find no lie. He’ll just find a very frightened boy who did the only clever thing he could think of.

***

Gorman rose slowly from his crouch and brushed a speck of dust from his trouser leg. He turned away and walked a few paces down the alley, hands clasped behind his back. For nearly half a minute he stood with his back to Yun Zhou, looking at the broken streetlight.

Yun Zhou stayed where he was, trembling, small, and wet-eyed, and took the opportunity to study the man.

Tall. Narrow shoulders. A runner’s build gone slightly soft. Hair silvering at the temples, but his posture is better than a man of fifty-five. He doesn’t walk like someone who started rich. He walks like someone who learned how to look rich.

No ring. But there’s a pale band on the left ring finger. He took it off. Recently? Years ago? A divorce or a widowhood.

Cufflinks.

His gaze settled there.

Plain silver, small, unremarkable. Not what you’d expect from a man of Gorman’s taste. Everything else about him was polished and deliberate, yet these looked almost cheap, worn smooth along one edge.

Earlier, when I tried Oculus on him, I felt a wall. Not silence. A wall.

Cheap-looking cufflinks. A wall.

Hm.

He eased a thread of Oculus out again, even thinner than before. Not at Gorman’s mind. At the object.

For a heartbeat, he felt nothing.

Then, faint as a vibration in the floor of a distant room, a hum. A slow, steady pulse of something that was not Ki, not mana, but kin to both. It brushed the thread like a hand brushing away a fly.

Yun Zhou’s blood ran cold.

I know that feeling.

The Seven Artifacts. The ones the Elders wore when they stood around me in the hall. Small, innocuous things that sat beside the heart and ate every thought I tried to read.

Not the same. This is crude, a cheap imitation. But the principle is identical.

He retracted the thread at once, a bead of sweat rolling down his temple.

A mind-blocking artifact. In a loan shark’s cufflinks.

Which means someone gave it to him. Or sold it. Or he stole it.

This world is a lot more interesting than I assumed.

His face did not change by a single muscle.

***

At last Gorman turned.

“Do you know what I find fascinating about your story?” he said pleasantly.

“N-no, sir.”

“Nothing in it is false.”

Yun Zhou blinked slowly, as if he didn’t understand.

“I have been doing this for twenty-three years,” Gorman went on. “I have heard roughly four thousand excuses. Some were elaborate. Most were pathetic. A very few were clever. But the interesting ones, the ones I remember, are the ones where every sentence is true and the whole is still a lie.”

He walked back and stopped a respectful distance away, as though a man too close might frighten a nervous animal.

“The message I received was not written by a frightened boy who followed Marlo for one day,” Gorman said. “It was written by someone who understood the psychology of my business. Someone who knew I would ignore an accusation but investigate a complaint. Someone who knew that a typo makes a witness sound human.”

A beat.

“It was, frankly, exquisite.”

Compliment. A test of vanity.

Yun Zhou looked up. Confusion crossed his face, and then a slow, sheepish flush.

“I... I didn’t think about any of that,” he said, voice small. “I just wrote what I’d say if I was scared. I was scared. I tried to sound like I was one of the stall people, because I thought you’d ignore me otherwise.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Is it working?

He couldn’t tell. The wall on Gorman’s side was absolute. All he could read were the small things: the stillness of the hands, the slight tilt of the head, the way Gorman’s left thumb pressed once, briefly, against the silver cufflink on his right wrist.

A tell? A nervous habit?

Or a man checking that his shield is still warm.

Then Gorman laughed.

It was a soft laugh, dry and brief, almost startled out of him. He shook his head and glanced skyward, as though the clouds had told a good joke.

“Either you’re telling the truth,” he said, “and you are the luckiest, most instinctively gifted boy I’ve ever met. Or you’re lying, and you are the finest liar I’ve ever met.”

He lowered his gaze, and the amusement faded as quickly as it had come.

“Do you know which of those I would prefer?”

“N-no, sir.”

“Neither.”

***

He crouched again, close this time. Close enough that Yun Zhou could smell the sandalwood and see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes.

“Because a lucky boy is a liability,” Gorman said quietly. “He cannot be controlled. And a brilliant liar is a threat. He is only waiting for the right moment to bite.”

Yun Zhou stared at him with wide, terrified eyes.

“But a useful boy,” Gorman said, “is an asset. And I have a policy about assets.”

He reached into his inner jacket pocket and drew out a slim black phone. His thumb moved across the screen. A moment later, he turned it to face Yun Zhou.

It was a spreadsheet. A single line, highlighted in pale yellow:

YUN ZHOU. Outstanding: 48,000,000. Status: ACTIVE.

“Here is what I propose,” Gorman said. “I will erase this.”

His thumb tapped a button. The line vanished, and a small gray box appeared in its place.

RECORD DELETED.

Yun Zhou’s breath caught. It was a real reaction. He hadn’t expected it so quickly.

Forty-eight million. Gone. No payment. No interest. No clinic.

It’s too easy.

Which means the price has been hidden somewhere I haven’t looked yet.

“In exchange,” Gorman said, “you will work for me.”

“W-work?”

“You are a Hunter.” The word was almost fond. “Rank E, with a certificate of damaged mana channels, which means no guild will touch you and no party will take you. You have been in and out of Gates for four years, and you are still alive. That is a remarkable record for a boy with your handicap.”

He slid the phone back into his pocket.

“I have clients who deal in monster cores. Clients who deal in Gate data. Clients who care very much about which hunters are going where and carrying what.” His smile was thin and pleasant. “I cannot send my own people into the Gates. They are too visible. Too expensive. But a pitiful, harmless E-rank, one that no one would look at twice...”

He let it hang.

“You want me to be a spy,” Yun Zhou said slowly.

“I want you to be my eyes. Wherever you go. Whatever you see. Who enters a Gate with whom. Who comes out with more than they went in with. Which guilds are moving, which hunters are drinking, which of them have debts. Everything.” He paused. “Everything, Zhou. Without exception.”

Information. The very thing I was counting on.

And he’s offering it as a salary.

Yun Zhou dropped his eyes, as if the weight of the offer was too much to bear.

“And if I say no?”

Gorman did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, a little disappointed that the question had been asked.

“Then I will still erase the debt,” he said gently. “Because I am not a monster. But you will have to find your own way to survive, and I suspect, with your health and your record, that would be a short road.”

A pause.

“I’d much rather you said yes.”

***

Yun Zhou sat on the cold concrete, his arms wrapped around his knees, and let the silence stretch.

Inside, the Heavenly Demon was laughing.

Do you hear this? he thought. A snake offering me a collar, and calling it a promotion.

He thinks he’s buying a pet. He’s actually handing a knife to someone who knows exactly how to use it.

Eyes in the Gates. Access to hunter movements. A direct line to the people who buy cores and data. Protection from other collectors, since I’m now “Gorman’s boy.” And a legitimate reason to carry information to and from the black market.

All of that, in exchange for being watched.

And I’ve been watched before.

He thought of the Seven Elders. Of the way they’d smiled while he handed them the keys to his sect. Of the cool, polite voice of Luo Canghai saying “Elder Brother, rest easy.”

Never trust a man who gives you something for free.

But a man who gives you a leash can also be led by it.

He lifted his head.

His eyes were bright with tears, and his lower lip trembled with what looked like gratitude, relief, and a terrible, desperate hope.

“I’ll do it,” he whispered. “Anything. Anything you need.”

“Good boy.”

Gorman said it softly, almost tenderly, the way a man speaks to a dog that has just learned a new trick. He held out a hand. Yun Zhou took it. The palm was dry and cool, with a surprisingly strong grip.

Warm cufflinks. Cool hands. A man with a heart of ice, wearing a coat of warmth.

We’ll see who melts first.

***

They drove to a small, nondescript office in the old business district, a building the color of dishwater with a single plain sign: TAN & ASSOCIATES, FINANCIAL CONSULTING. Mr. Ho opened the car door with the same blank courtesy. Yun Zhou stepped out, small and shivering, and let himself be shepherded through a plain lobby, into a plain elevator, and onto a plain third floor.

Gorman’s private office was almost aggressively ordinary. A desk. Two chairs. A bookshelf of dull financial journals. A window overlooking an air shaft.

There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, small and well hidden. Yun Zhou noted it without looking.

And a safe, behind the bookshelf. A faint line on the carpet where it’s been moved. Probably the real records.

Noted.

For forty minutes, Gorman walked him through the terms: a burner phone for reporting, a coded schedule, a numbered account for payments. The first assignment would be next week, a mid-sized Gate in the southern district, a Class-D, where a group of hunters from a mid-tier guild were rumored to be smuggling cores out of the official count.

“They are called the Iron Fangs,” Gorman said. “You will sign on as a porter. They always need porters. You will keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, and you will tell me what you see.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One more thing.”

Gorman slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. It was a plain document, one paragraph long.

I, Yun Zhou, acknowledge that I have received a full and final release of all debts owed to Harapan Baru Cooperative, in exchange for services rendered. I agree to keep the terms of this arrangement confidential.

A signature line. A date.

A contract. Not a binding one, not in any court. But a record, with my name on it, in his safe.

Leverage.

Of course.

Yun Zhou picked up the pen. His hand trembled slightly. He signed with a cramped, uncertain flourish, the signature of a frightened boy who didn’t understand what he was putting his name to.

Gorman took the paper, glanced at it, and tucked it into a folder.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

***

It was 8:41 when Yun Zhou finally stepped out of the building into the cold morning sunlight.

He stood on the pavement for a moment, breathing in the exhaust and the sharp, clean smell of rain that hadn’t fallen yet. A bus rumbled past. A man in a delivery uniform hurried by with a stack of boxes.

Free.

Forty-eight million, erased. A new master. A new cage.

And in nineteen minutes, an email will go out from a throwaway account with photos of locker 214 that I can no longer afford to have sent.

He started walking.

His pace was brisk, almost cheerful. Anyone watching would have seen a thin, tired boy who had just been given a second chance, relieved and stunned, unable to stop smiling.

And if some part of that smile had edges, if there was something too sharp in the curve of it, something too patient in the eyes, no one was close enough to see.

Gorman Tan, he thought, with calm and perfect clarity. Mind-blocking artifact. Hidden safe. Camera. Twenty-three years of experience. A man who erases forty-eight million as if it were a coffee stain.

Thank you for the debt relief.

I will be repaying it in a very different currency.

He turned the corner and quickened his step toward the nearest internet café.

Eighteen minutes.

Plenty of time.

***

To be continued in Chapter 12: “First Night as a Free Man”