Chapter 12: First Night as a Free Man

Chapter 12: First Night as a Free Man

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

The internet café was nearly empty at 8:47 a.m. The clerk was asleep with his head on the counter, and a screensaver of tropical fish drifted across the monitor behind him.

Yun Zhou paid for thirty minutes, took the corner booth, and logged in with fingers that were only slightly unsteady.

Thirteen minutes to spare.

The throwaway account was where he’d left it. A single scheduled email sat in the outbox, its little clock icon blinking patiently: Send: 9:00 a.m. To: [email protected]. Attachments: 4.

His cursor hovered over the Cancel button.

Think before you click.

The email had been insurance against Marlo. Marlo was in the back of a black sedan with plastic ties around his wrists, which meant the insurance had already paid out. If the email went through now, Gorman would receive photos he’d already acted on, sent from a source he didn’t know.

He’d start wondering who has been taking pictures of his lockers.

And a man like Gorman asks that question until he finds the answer.

Yun Zhou clicked Cancel.

Then he opened the attachments one at a time, looked at each of the four photos, and deleted them. He emptied the trash folder, cleared the history, and closed the account. For good measure, he opened the browser settings and wiped the cache, cookies, and autofill.

Evidence that no longer helps me is evidence that can only hurt me.

He did, however, keep one thing.

A single photo, saved to a tiny memory card he’d bought at the market, no bigger than a fingernail. The photo of locker 214, with the keypad and the worn buttons visible in the frame.

A man might need to remind Gorman, someday, how his empire looked from the outside.

He tucked the card into the lining of his jacket and stood.

On the way out, the sleeping clerk stirred, mumbled something, and went back to sleep. Yun Zhou had not made a single sound.

***

The walk home was long, and he took it slowly.

It was nearly ten by the time he reached his block. The morning rush had thinned, and the street had settled into its midday lull: a few old men playing cards under an awning, a delivery scooter parked on the curb, a woman hanging laundry from a third-floor balcony.

He stopped at the corner store and bought food.

Not ramen. Not this time. He stood in the aisle for a long moment, weighing it, then picked up a small bag of rice, a carton of eggs, a bunch of scallions, a block of tofu, and a cheap bottle of soy sauce. At the register, he added a pack of vitamin tablets and a chicken leg from the heated case.

The cashier, a bored girl with purple hair, rang it up without looking at him.

“Eighteen-four.”

He had sixty-nine thousand in his pocket, a portion of it the ten thousand Lin had pressed into his hand. He counted out the bills carefully.

Lin gave me money out of guilt. I spent it on food. That seems like a fair use of an investment.

He didn’t let himself think about the other half of that thought, the part that noted, quietly, that the man had meant it.

***

The apartment felt different.

It was the same cracked mirror, the same sagging mattress, the same stain on the ceiling shaped like a country that had never existed. But the quality of the silence had changed. For six days, it had been a room he was trapped in. Now it was a room he was standing in.

Yun Zhou set the groceries on the counter and, for a moment, just stood there, one hand resting on the cheap plastic.

Free.

The word was strange in his mouth. In his old life, freedom had never been something he held. It had been something he was, an ambient fact like air. He had never counted its price, because no one had ever dared to charge him for it.

Forty-eight million, he thought. That’s what it cost to buy me out of a cage I never agreed to enter.

And I paid nothing. Which means I owe someone, somewhere, a debt I can’t see.

He started a fire under the little pot.

***

It was the first real meal he had cooked in this body.

He rinsed the rice carefully, three times, until the water ran clear. He set it to boil and diced the scallions with the cracked-handled knife, slicing them thin and even with the quiet precision of a man who had once cooked for fifty thousand soldiers on the eve of a siege. When the rice was nearly done, he cracked two eggs into a bowl, whisked them with a pinch of salt, and let them sizzle in the pan until the edges turned lace-gold.

The smell filled the apartment.

He sat on the floor, balanced the bowl on his knee, and took the first bite.

It was ordinary. Salty, a little bland, the eggs a touch overcooked. But the heat of it, the plain, filling, ordinary warmth, did something to his chest that he had no word for.

He ate every grain. He licked the soy sauce off his thumb. He drank the last of the water, set the bowl down, and sat looking at it for a while.

This body hasn’t had a hot meal in weeks.

Maybe months.

The thought did not hurt, exactly. It was more like discovering a stone in his shoe that had been there for a very long time.

“Don’t,” he said aloud, to no one. “It isn’t yours.”

The room did not answer.

***

By afternoon he had cleaned the floor, mended the door, and moved the folding table to the center of the room.

He tore a fresh sheet from the notebook, and with a ruler he’d found in a drawer, he drew a long vertical line down the middle of the page. At the top he wrote two headings.

TARGETS.

TOOLS.

The first list is easy.

He wrote the names slowly, in the same small, flat handwriting.

1. Gorman Tan.

Director, Harapan Baru. Organ trafficking. Paranoid. Wears a mind-blocking artifact (cufflinks). Hidden safe, camera in office. Source of artifacts? Who supplies him?

Status: master (for now). Eventual target.

2. Bram.

Party leader. Pushed me into the monster. Proud. Terrified of losing status.

3. Cassia.

Handles the money. Boastful. In debt? (Check.)

4. Dorian.

Cruel. Sent the text. Younger cousin of Bram, resents his shadow.

5. Fenrir.

Coward. Follows the strongest voice.

He stopped, tapped the pencil against the page, and added one more line below, in smaller letters, set apart from the others.

6–12. The Seven.

Dead. Gone. Out of reach.

(For now.)

His hand paused above the paper.

For a long moment, he did not move.

Luo Canghai.

He did not write the name. He had never written it, even in his old life. A name written is a name that can be found.

He closed his eyes, drew a slow breath, and went on.

***

The second column was harder.

TOOLS.

Oculus: range 2m, surface thoughts only, costs blood and focus. A wall, not a window. Blocked by artifacts.

Feign: 5 min 10 sec. Floor 45 bpm. Faints below that.

Eye: the first stage only. Vital points of humans. Monsters unknown.

Sever: nerve-strike. Works. Needs surprise.

Creep: low-profile movement. Costs stamina.

Body: 94.6°F. Pulse weak. Collapses after six hours of exertion. Hands tremble. Nosebleeds.

Ki: zero.

He frowned at that last line and wrote beneath it, in a smaller hand: Zero. But something else.

He put down the pencil and sat back, rubbing his thumbs against his palms.

Something else.

There was no other way to put it. The hunger wasn’t constant, but it was there. A low, patient pressure in the dark behind his ribs, like a hand pressed against a door from the other side. It had no voice. It made no demands. But every time he stood near something dead, the dead rat, the corpse of a pigeon on the sidewalk, even the chicken leg he’d bought at the store, it noticed.

He had not eaten the chicken leg. He’d left it in the bag, untouched, and later thrown it away.

I don’t like how much I wanted to.

Not to eat it. To...

He did not finish the thought.

***

The afternoon turned to evening, and the evening to night.

At 7:12 p.m., his phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

It’s Lin. Marlo is in a cell at the cooperative’s storage warehouse. They’re questioning him. I thought you should know.

Yun Zhou read it twice, thumbed out a reply, deleted it, and typed another.

Thank you. Be careful.

Three dots flickered, disappeared, and returned.

You too, kid.

He set the phone down and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

Questioning. Not a clinic. Not yet.

Gorman wants to know how many envelopes, how many months, and, most importantly, how much of what Marlo stole went somewhere else.

In other words, whether Marlo was working alone.

And whether anyone else, inside or outside the organization, benefited from the skimming.

He allowed himself a thin smile.

Someone will have to explain how the boss’s money ended up in a locker. Marlo will say it was his. Gorman won’t believe him. He’ll keep digging.

Which means that by the time he finishes digging, he’ll have forgotten about a nervous kid with a clever message.

All I have to do is be boring.

***

At 10:30, he did what he’d been putting off.

He stood in the bathroom, stripped to the waist, and looked at himself under the bare bulb.

The body in the mirror was a ruin. Ribs like a washboard. Collarbones like handles. A purple-black bruise on his shoulder where he’d hit the pavement in the alley, a fainter one on his side. The rope scar was an ugly ring around his throat.

But there was something new.

He leaned closer.

On the inside of his left forearm, just below the elbow, a pattern of faint gray lines had appeared. They weren’t scars. They weren’t veins. They were thin, branching, and almost invisible, like the roots of a plant seen through frosted glass.

He pressed a thumb against them. They didn’t hurt.

He turned his arm, studied it, and then looked at the right one. The same faint tracery.

Ki channels?

He closed his eyes and concentrated, turning his attention inward, toward the dry well in his abdomen.

It was still dark. Still cold. Still empty.

But the walls of the well, the hundred hairline cracks he’d felt on the first day, no longer seemed like cracks.

They seemed like seams.

Lines drawn on purpose.

Edges of something sealed.

He opened his eyes.

The Association’s machine said “damaged channels.” Maybe it’s not damage. Maybe it’s a lock.

He stood very still, his pulse steady, his breath slow.

Then someone locked it. And someone locked it for a reason.

And the box in the closet...

He didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he turned off the bathroom light, pulled on a clean shirt, and walked back into the main room.

***

It was midnight.

The apartment was quiet. The street outside had gone still. A single streetlamp threw a long yellow rectangle across the floor.

Yun Zhou lay on the narrow mattress with his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

He wasn’t sleeping.

He was listening.

At first, there was nothing. The faucet. The refrigerator’s low hum. A motorbike, far away, whining through the dark.

Then, very faintly, so faint he thought he’d imagined it, something answered.

It wasn’t a sound. It was a vibration. A low, patient tremor, felt more in the bones than in the ears, coming from somewhere beyond the thin wall of the closet.

Thrum.

He didn’t move.

Thrum.

The pulse was slow and even. Like a heart. Like something that had been sleeping for a very long time and had just begun, gently, to stir.

Yun Zhou sat up.

He swung his legs over the side of the mattress, planted his feet on the cold floor, and looked toward the closet door.

It was ajar, an inch of darkness between the frame and the panel.

Thrum.

The cold hunger behind his ribs surged, answering the call. It was a sensation like standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the ground tilt, soft and inviting.

His mouth had gone dry.

Earlier, I told myself: not now. Later.

He rose.

It’s later.

The floorboards were cold beneath his bare feet. He crossed the room in four steps, put his hand on the closet door, and, after one long breath, pulled it open.

The sweaters sat where he’d left them. The canvas bag. The hanger with the gray jacket.

And on the top shelf, half-hidden in shadow, the small, dark wooden box.

Its brass lock gleamed faintly.

And through the tiny keyhole, a thin, pale thread of light pulsed once, twice, three times, slow and soft, like a heartbeat answering his own.

Yun Zhou stood motionless, one hand on the door, one foot on the threshold of something he did not yet understand.

For the first time in six days, in this body, in this world, his heart skipped a beat.

Whatever you are, he thought, you’ve been waiting for me.

Let’s see what you want.

***

To be continued in Chapter 13: “The Examination”