Chapter 6: Research

Chapter 6: Research

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

Amateurs chase. Professionals wait where the target is going to be.

Yun Zhou had learned that from a very old, very dead assassin, back when he was young enough to think skill was the same thing as power. The assassin had spent three weeks sitting in a teahouse across from his victim’s front door, drinking the same cup of cheap tea every morning. On the twenty-second day, the victim walked out, and the assassin did not have to move at all.

Patience is a weapon, he thought, settling onto a plastic stool at a bus stop across from the Harapan Baru Cooperative. It’s the only one I can afford.

It was 8:40 a.m. The cooperative sat on the ground floor of a tired four-story building, wedged between a mobile phone shop and a laundromat. Its glass door was papered with promotional flyers: FAST CASH! NO CREDIT CHECK! HUNTERS WELCOME! Behind the flyers, he could see the dim outline of a desk and a wall calendar.

He pulled the hood of his jacket up, slouched, and let his shoulders sag. A sick kid waiting for a bus. Nobody looked twice at a sick kid.

At 9:15, Marlo Chen came out.

***

He didn’t come out alone. The man with the steel baton walked half a step behind him, scanning the street out of habit. The thin man from yesterday was nowhere to be seen.

Marlo stretched, lit a cigarette, and checked his fake watch with exaggerated satisfaction.

Confident. Fed. Slept well. Yun Zhou studied his gait, his posture, the slight swing of his shoulders. A man who thinks he’s safe.

Good. That makes the fall longer.

They turned left. Yun Zhou waited ten seconds, then stood and followed.

He used Creep.

It wasn’t really a technique, not in the glamorous sense. There was no glow, no flash, no name shouted into the air. It was a way of moving: knees slightly bent, weight low, each step placed on the outer edge of the foot to cut the sound. You kept to the shadow side of walls. You let the crowd cover your gaps. You never looked at the person you were following, because people feel eyes the way they feel a draft.

In the Demon Sect it was called the Gutter Step, and it was taught to the lowest-ranking disciples, the ones assigned to follow, steal, and eavesdrop. Elders scorned it as a beggar’s skill.

The Heavenly Demon had always paid special attention to beggars’ skills. Beggars lived longer than kings.

The body protested. By the end of the first block, his calves burned. By the second, a cramp had begun to bloom in his left thigh. He ignored it. Pain was information, not instruction.

One hundred meters back. Keep the baton man between me and Marlo. Never cross his line of sight. If he turns, become a pillar.

***

The first stop was a fruit stall.

The vendor, a heavyset woman in a floral blouse, saw Marlo coming and her smile went stiff as plaster. She dug under the counter and pulled out a thick white envelope.

“It’s all there,” she said quickly. “Same as last month.”

Marlo took the envelope. He didn’t count it in front of her. He didn’t have to. He tucked it into his jacket, gave her a lazy wink, and moved on.

Yun Zhou drifted past on the opposite sidewalk, eyes on a shop window, and let a thread of Oculus loose.

It was the hardest kind of reading. The woman was ten meters away, well outside his range, and the street was noisy. He got nothing. But as Marlo and the baton man walked away and she slumped back onto her stool, her face collapsed from forced cheer into pure, exhausted hatred.

He felt no thoughts. He didn’t need any. Some feelings are loud enough to read from across a street.

Weekly collections, he thought. Forty, fifty small businesses on this route. All paying a “protection fee” to a cooperative that calls it interest.

Marlo handles the cash. And every envelope passes through his hands before it reaches the boss.

If a man wanted to skim, this is the perfect place.

***

The second stop confirmed it.

It was a tiny hardware shop with a barred window and a hand-painted sign. The owner, a thin, balding man with a perpetual wince, handed over an envelope without a word.

This time, Marlo opened it.

Yun Zhou was close enough to see, standing in front of a vending machine two stalls down, pretending to hunt for coins. He kept his head bowed and let the faintest breath of Oculus brush across Marlo’s mind.

It was like touching a hot pan. The signal flared, bright and ugly, and a headache stabbed behind his eyes.

...four hundred short. Again. Bastard thinks I don’t notice...

...but I’ll take it out of the next one. And the ones after. The boss won’t check each envelope. He checks the total.

...if I shave a little off every stall, twenty here, thirty there, nobody’s ever going to see...

Marlo stuffed three bills into his own left pocket. A smaller pocket, not the one with the envelopes.

Then he pulled out a different, thinner envelope, counted a few bills into it, sealed it, and tucked it away.

There’s the double-book. Yun Zhou’s heartbeat stayed even, but behind the lowered hood, his eyes sharpened. One for the boss. One for himself. And he’s careless enough to think nobody’s watching.

He let the reading drop. A thread of blood tickled his lip. He thumbed it away, shoulders hunched, and acted out a brief coughing fit for the benefit of a passing grandmother, who gave him a pitying look and a pack of tissues.

“Thank you,” he rasped.

“Get some rest, young man.”

I intend to, he thought dryly, once I’m done ruining a man’s life.

***

The afternoon crawled by.

Marlo’s circuit took him through six neighborhoods, nineteen stalls, three alleys, and one lunch of fried chicken and cheap beer in a corner restaurant, during which Yun Zhou ate a single flatbread on the opposite curb and counted the minutes.

Four times, his body nearly gave out. Once, on a staircase, his legs buckled, and he caught the railing with both hands, breathing like a dying man. A passing delivery rider glanced down and asked if he needed help. Yun Zhou summoned a thin, apologetic smile.

“Low blood sugar. Sorry.”

The rider handed him a candy bar and left. Yun Zhou ate it, because refusing a gift draws attention, and because he was starving.

Mask: sick, harmless kid. Result: free candy. Efficiency: acceptable.

By five o’clock, his notebook was three pages thicker.

Route: 19 stops, 6 districts. Cash handoffs: avg. 2.3M each. Skim rate: ~15%. Marlo’s habit: left pocket = personal.

Baton man: bored, ignorant. Doesn’t know about the skimming.

Thin man: not present today. Check later.

And at the very bottom, one line, underlined twice:

Where does he put the money?

***

At 6:20, Marlo said goodbye to the baton man outside a convenience store, took a bag of snacks, and walked away alone.

Yun Zhou nearly smiled.

Alone.

Marlo’s pace changed. He stopped glancing at his watch. His shoulders dropped slightly, the posture of a man off duty. He turned south, away from the cooperative, away from the busy districts, and headed for the old rail line.

Yun Zhou followed.

It was almost dusk. The sky had faded to a bruised orange, and the streetlights were flickering on, one by one. The neighborhood grew shabbier with every block: peeling stucco, shuttered storefronts, a stray cat watching from a window ledge.

He’s nervous.

Yun Zhou read it in the stiffness of Marlo’s neck, the way his right hand kept drifting to the pocket with the cash. A man carrying stolen money feels every glance like a hand on his collar.

Good. Nervous men repeat habits.

They crossed an overpass. Beyond it, the old Eastgate Station sat like a tired animal at the end of the line, its roof sagging, its windows grimy. The platform was mostly empty. A sleeping drunk. A pair of teenagers arguing over a phone. A cleaning cart abandoned near the stairs.

Marlo didn’t go to the platform.

He turned left, into a narrow concourse lined with metal lockers.

Yun Zhou stopped at the corner, flattened himself against a pillar, and held his breath.

Lockers.

Of course.

***

The row was long. Two hundred, maybe three hundred units, most with their doors dented or hanging open. Paint peeled in strips. Someone had scrawled graffiti over half of them. The whole corridor smelled of rust, urine, and old cigarettes.

It was the perfect hiding place. Impersonal. Anonymous. A thousand strangers had passed through here, and no one had ever bothered to look inside a single locker.

Marlo walked to the far end, stopped at one of the larger units near the wall, and glanced around.

Yun Zhou was already behind the pillar, one eye at the edge, his hood down so the pale oval of his face wouldn’t show. He dropped his breathing to near silence. For a heartbeat he considered Feign, then dismissed it. A held breath was enough.

Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him feel you. You’re a shadow on a wall.

Marlo reached into his jacket. He drew out the thin envelope, the one with the skim. He checked the corridor again, left, right, left.

His eyes slid over the pillar. Over Yun Zhou.

For one stretched, silent moment, he looked directly at the shadow where Yun Zhou was hiding.

Don’t breathe.

Don’t blink.

You are not here.

Marlo’s gaze moved on.

Yun Zhou let out a breath so slowly it barely stirred the air.

Now.

He let a thread of Oculus slip out, thin as a hair. It was a gamble. Marlo was twenty meters away, impossibly far, and the corridor was a dead zone of metal and concrete.

But Marlo, in his nervousness, was thinking loudly.

...two-one-four. Seven-one-nine. Two-one-four, seven-one-nine...

He was repeating it, murmuring it like a prayer. The way people recite numbers when they don’t trust their memory.

Locker 214. Code 0719.

A hot, bright blade of pain drove through Yun Zhou’s skull, and something warm ran down his lip. He clapped a hand over his mouth to stop the drip and clamped his jaw shut against the headache.

Worth it.

At the far end of the corridor, Marlo punched four numbers into a keypad. The locker door swung open with a squeal. He slid the envelope inside, behind a stack of other envelopes, thick and white and heavy.

How many months? Yun Zhou thought. How much has he stolen?

He didn’t have a way to count. But the stack was as thick as a brick, and that was enough.

Marlo shut the door, spun the dial, and wiped his palms on his jacket with a nervous, satisfied smile. Then he turned and walked briskly out of the concourse, past Yun Zhou’s pillar, close enough that Yun Zhou could smell cigarette smoke on his coat.

His footsteps faded. The station settled into silence.

***

Yun Zhou waited a full five minutes.

Then he stepped out, walked down the long row, and stopped in front of locker 214.

It was a large, gray unit, indistinguishable from the others. A small LCD keypad was set into the door, its screen glowing a dull green. He could see the tiny crescent of smudges around the buttons where fingers had been pressing the same four numbers for months.

Zero. Seven. One. Nine.

His hand rose, almost on its own.

No.

He pulled it back and tucked it into his sleeve.

Opening it would be the amateur’s move. It would give Marlo a reason to suspect a thief. It would leave fingerprints. It would force a confrontation I’m not ready for.

What matters isn’t the money. It’s the knowledge. A man’s fear is built on the gap between what he’s hiding and what other people know. All I need to do is close that gap.

He took out the cracked phone, held it low, and angled it toward the locker. The camera chirped.

Click.

A second shot: the locker number. A third, wider: the corridor, showing where it sat in the row. A fourth: a close-up of the keypad, the worn buttons, the telltale smudges.

He checked the images. Grainy, dim, but legible.

Evidence.

He pocketed the phone and looked at the locker one last time. The metal was cold. The faint reflection of his face stared back from its dull surface, a thin, pale boy with a rope-burned neck and eyes like wet stones.

“Marlo Chen,” he whispered.

His breath fogged against the metal.

“Thank you for being so predictable.”

***

On the walk home, he noticed the numbers.

Not in his head. In his hands.

They were shaking, faintly, uncontrollably. He clenched his fists, but the tremor ran up his forearms. His legs felt hollow. A cold prickle ran down his spine, and when he touched his forehead, his skin was slick with sweat.

Too much. I’ve pushed the body past its limit.

He stopped under a flickering streetlight and leaned against a wall. His vision swam. For a long moment, the street seemed to tilt on its axis.

Breathe.

He breathed.

Count.

One. Two. Three. Four.

The dizziness retreated by degrees. He wiped his face, stared at the ground, and let the tremor ebb.

I’ve used Oculus nine times today. Creep for ten hours. A day of walking, standing, hiding, and almost no food.

This body is a candle. I can burn it for a while, but not forever.

He lifted his head.

At the end of the street, across a small intersection, a stray dog sat under a lamppost, watching him. It was a mangy, thin thing, ribs showing, one ear torn. It didn’t growl. It didn’t wag its tail. It just stared.

Yun Zhou stared back.

The dog whined, softly, and backed away. Then it turned and bolted into the shadows, tail clamped between its legs, as if it had seen something it had no name for.

A faint, cold tug pulled at the center of his chest.

Hungry, something whispered, from nowhere he could point to.

Yun Zhou closed his eyes.

“Not now,” he murmured. “Tomorrow, I work. Tonight, I sleep.”

When he opened them again, the street was empty.

***

At home, he fell face-first onto the mattress without taking off his shoes. Sleep took him in less than a minute. But before it did, a single thought drifted across the surface of his mind, calm and bright and cold.

I have the locker. I have the code. I have the photos.

All I need is the right person to receive them.

And a message that doesn’t sound like a threat.

In the dark, his lips curled.

Marlo Chen. By the end of this week, you’re going to wish you’d never learned to count.

***

To be continued in Chapter 7: “A Message From the Wrong Person”