Murderworld, p.26
Murderworld, page 26
“Sir, my name is Chun Soo-yun, and I am in middle school,” she said. “Please explain.”
The doctor cleared his throat, not used to speaking to children about weighty medical issues. He instead looked again at Jin-sang, and began to speak. “It’s impossible to know yet whether the blood loss created significant oxygen deprivation within her brain.” Jin-sang nodded again, but Soo-yun was sure that he had no idea what the doctor was talking about.
Soo-yun added to the doctor’s explanation. “Because this lack of oxygen might have caused brain damage.”
The doctor looked startled, and again cleared his throat before responding. “Yes. Right. We’re also giving her hyperbaric oxygen to stave off tissue necrosis. You’re quite a smart child, Soo-yun yang,” he said using the honorific for a young girl as well as her first name, both of which indicated his natural superiority in the social relationship.
“Doctor,” said Soo-yun in as formal a manner as possible, “please just call me ‘Soo-yun.’”
The doctor’s face reddened. “Yes, well—I’ll, uh, be here for another few hours if you have any concerns.” He hurried away, wanting to get as far away from this odd, precocious child as possible.
“Father,” she said to Jin-sang. “There’s nothing more we can do here. We should go home and come back tomorrow.” He nodded, and she saw that tears began to stream down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her, his voice strangled by emotion. “I must have done something wrong.” He searched for words, yet found them only with effort. “No doubt…no doubt I drove her to this.”
Soo-yun couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her father wasn’t deep, but he was reliable, and it was obvious that her mother had her own problems independent of either of them. At the moment Soo-yun was furious at her mother for her impetuous act, and her father’s sudden wave of self-pitying guilt only amplified her rage. Her blood boiled: Who was the child here, and who were the adults?
“That’s fucking stupid!” she yelled at him, and punched him in the arm as hard as she could. His eyes widened at her vehemence and coarse words, embarrassed that his daughter would speak this way in public. He glanced over at a nearby nursing station, where two women had poked their heads over the counter to see the source of the commotion.
“She’s responsible for what she did!” She hit him again for good measure, and he shrunk away from her. “Only the weak blame themselves for the actions of others!” Jin-sang couldn’t process the scene in which he was now a participant, and could only make a helpless placating gesture with both hands in an effort to calm her down. Her improper behavior caused him deep embarrassment.
“You’re my father, and whatever happens, you gotta take care of me. Now be the man of the house and bring me home so we can eat some dinner. We’ll come back in the morning.”
She turned and stormed away, not waiting to see if he’d follow. Jin-sang wiped his face with his sleeve, nodded to himself, then shuffled after Soo-yun.
Like his wife, he had learned to fear his daughter.
At home, Soo-yun ate dinner with Jin-sang, a simple meal of leftover stew which she’d reheated. Her strong words to her father still reverberated between them, and he had nothing to say while they ate, remaining instead in a kind of shock. The day’s events had been too much for the poor man. Afterward, they both retreated to their bedrooms.
Soo-yun plopped down into her desk chair. She was a bit surprised at how good she felt. Her display of pent-up anger had been just what she’d needed, a cathartic moment that broke open the dome of gloom that had enveloped her since she’d dealt with Bong-cha. Her words to her father had allowed her to claim responsibility for her dark deed. Bong-cha may have backed her into a corner, but only she, Soo-yun, was accountable for breaking the girl’s leg—and she’d do it again if she had the chance. Self-defense was its own logic. She now understood, in stark and intimate fashion, that both of her parents were victims, and she avowed right then and there never to be one herself.
She slipped on her interface. It was far past time for her to commit some murder.
fifty-five
Spodek,” said Perry as he stood over the confused woman and pointed a finger at her chest, “you tell Ods that he needs to talk to me immediately, or I’ll cost him billions in lost revenue.”
“This entire situation is unethical. And illegal. Plus it’s late, it’s the weekend, and I’m half-drunk at a Halloween party on a boat in the middle of the goddamn Bay. What do you expect me to do right now?”
“I expect you to act in the best interests of your company. Now sober the fuck up and get Ods on the line.”
“You’re really an unpleasant person.” Spodek rubbed a hand through her hair, and looked out Perry’s window at the Barcelona plaza. “Fine. You wait, and I’ll tell him. But you’re waking a sleeping beast. Ods has more power and resources than most countries. This isn’t like the Game. I’ve heard stories about how he’s dealt with people who—”
“Save me the fairy tales. It’s not your problem.”
“Then why are you making it my problem?” Spodek was irritated in the extreme. Her portable spex were higher quality than most, thus better at generating a construct that conveyed her actual emotional state.
“Convenience, mostly. Time is not on my side. If it helps, I apologize.”
“It doesn’t,” Spodek sniffed. “Give me at least an hour, maybe longer. He’s got layers of gatekeepers.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Fuck you, Dunne. Seriously.”
Perry found Mari in a Shogunate-era Japanese dojang, at a small crossroads atop intersecting levees that ran between paddies brimming with green rice shoots in muddy water. A few small thatched-roof farmhouses dotted the distance. Mari fought a handful of others, all wielding traditional Japanese weapons and wearing costumes that looked quite at home in the rustic setting. Perry supposed that the dojang was built by ultra-geeky fans of historical recreation, the kind who’d argue for hours about minutiae of martial technique and period weapon construction.
Mari had already lured her opponents into one of the swampy pools by backing into the middle of a paddy, knee-deep in water while holding them at bay. A burly ronin wearing a beige-over-blue hakama jacket gripped a three-section staff, a sansetsukon, and circled around Mari’s left flank while three others fanned out around her. Mari’s eyes were still as she took in the entire group with her peripheral vision, and she held out her kodachi so that they bookended a ninety-degree angle. A priest bearing a chigiriki began to whirl the spiked mace head on its short chain, while his neighbor, a woman wearing reed armor, spun a gleaming pair of kama war-scythes. Behind her was a man with a broad reed hat held on by a chin strap, and he held a long kuwa, a hoe with a sharpened blade.
Perry held back as he watched Mari go to work. Strange that she fought so many at once, he thought—winning was of little advantage to multiple opponents during a Tourney. He guessed that she had challenged them as a group, here on their own turf.
The ronin struck first and tried to hit Mari’s left wrist with a section of his staff, perhaps hoping to get her to drop a sword. With ease she moved her arm out of its path, but the priest swiped the chain of his chigiriki around her right blade, trapping it, and yanked it hard toward himself. Mari let herself be pulled, using the force to leap at the man with both feet out to land in a deep crouch on his chest, whereupon she thrust her free blade into his throat so hard that it emerged from the back of his neck. The priest gargled blood, which became an arterial jet when Mari unsheathed the blade from his flesh as he fell backward.
The farmer holding the sharpened hoe swung it in a broad downward arc to hit her from behind, but she leapt from the priest’s falling body, reverse-somersaulted, and alit on the man’s shoulder blades where she used both blades to scissor off his head. A split-second later, the priest’s body hit the muck, followed by the farmer’s. Mari rode the man’s shoulders as he fell, and landed standing on his back.
The armored woman rushed Mari, screaming a guttural kiai. Her scythes sliced the air and forced Mari to block repeated strikes, and the rhythmic tang-tang-tang of the women’s blades were hypnotic battle music. Mari stood her ground, crouched atop the dead farmer’s body just beneath the water, while her opponent, unsteady in the slippery muck of the paddy, was forced to reposition her footing.
The ronin again lashed out with the flexible staff, wrapping two sections around Mari’s blade to trap it at one of its chained joints. A split second later, the warrior woman interlocked both scythes like scissors onto Mari’s right-hand blade. All three fighters stood immobile for the space of a breath.
The ronin acted first, and wrenched the two sections of the staff that had caught Mari’s blade in effort to rip it from her grasp. She released her right-hand sword, still caught between scythe blades, and jumped, managing a handless cartwheel in the same direction as the ronin’s rotation of her left-hand blade. As she landed, she pressed the blade down the length of the staff in the thin gap between its two sandwiched sections, right to where the ronin’s tight fist clamped the two pieces of hardwood together. Her move sliced his hand into neat halves, removing his fingers, and freed her blade, which she then whipped around her body as she spun in place to chop into the right side of the man’s torso. Her steel cut all the way to his spine before it stopped. Dying, he flailed at her with the staff, but she kicked his legs out from under him to let his fall withdraw her sword from his body.
Mari stepped away from her fading opponent, whose last gasps were gurgles of dirty water, and faced off against her final enemy.
“You’re as good as I’d heard,” said the woman.
“Too bad,” said Mari. “I was hoping I was better.”
The woman smiled. She loosened the scythes to release Mari’s captured sword, and the blade splashed into the shallow water. Mari tossed her remaining blade from her left hand to her right.
“It’s been an honor,” said the warrior. Mari nodded, a tight smile on her face.
As the woman rushed she threw one of the scythes to spin at Mari’s center mass. Mari stood her ground, and used her sword to deflect the rotating scythe straight into the air. The warrior rushed forward, kicking, and her foot threw an arc of water between them. The woman’s boot sprouted a bronze-colored blade at its tip, which rocketed at Mari’s face. Mari dodged, leaning back and to one side, then used the flat of her sword to push the woman’s leg past her, so that the woman spun too far to one side. Yet she managed to backhand her remaining scythe at Mari, who blocked it with her sword, locking the blades and freezing them in place.
“Goodbye,” said Mari.
The woman’s quizzical expression remained, even as the second scythe plunged straight down into her skull. She crumpled onto her knees, blood running down over her forehead, then toppled into the water.
Perry applauded.
She looked annoyed, yet not as much as was typical. “Why are you here? Our business is over.”
“Hopefully it’s just beginning.”
“We have nothing to talk about.”
“I think we do. Is it worth five minutes of your time to have the Armilon?”
“You made that promise before.”
“Yes. And I realized that I need to keep it.” He flashed her a grim version of a smile. “I’m not joking or playing some kind of game. You know what it means if you get the Armilon during a Tourney.”
She made a tight face. “They’ll never let me play.”
“Because you’re unregistered? That won’t be a problem.”
“Now you are making promises you can’t keep.”
“What do you mean?”
She opened her mouth as if to answer, but instead an amplified voice rumbled from the sky, thundering across the landscape.
“SHE MEANS, PERRY DUNNE, THAT SHE’S A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL, AND SHE’S NOT LEGALLY ALLOWED TO PLAY THE GAME.”
Mari looked at the sky, then at Perry, eyes wide; it was the first time he’d ever seen anything approaching surprise upon her face.
Right before they were winked away, Perry realized that God had a slight Eastern European accent.
They both appeared in a kind of ostentatious living room, built like a small amphitheater with several cushioned sofa-like tiers that stepped down towards a central pit. The furniture looked to be grown from the wide leaves of enormous jungle plants that sprouted from the room’s floor. Within the central pit sat a squat tree stump of dark, rough wood, which Perry realized was a desk; its knotty roots were buried in a downy grass carpet, and the faces and bodies of gargoyles grew from its whorls. Behind the desk the room looked out onto a view of an ocean from high above, lit by a big yellow-orange harvest moon of impossible size that dominated the sky and cast its fat reflection into the still water of the sea. The room’s walls were also constructed from a dense mat of living plants, and Perry saw that small insects and reptiles crawled and scurried along its interwoven leaves, flowers, and stems. In one corner, reclining upon a smooth, wide branch that jutted from the wall was a large black leopard. It gazed at the guests with cool eyes, its only movement occasional flicks of its tail. Perry and Mari sat next to each other in the front row, facing the desk, behind which sat a familiar man.
“Ods,” breathed Perry.
“In person. Or at least, a convincing duplicate.” Ods rested his feet on the wide desk, and Perry noticed that from the desk the gargoyles winked, or leered, or wagged their tongues at him.
Perry cleared his throat. “You got my message?”
“Of course. Nothing spices up my day like another feeble attempt at extortion. Normally I let my intermediaries handle this kind of crap. But you make me laugh. As soon as you won an Armilon in the worst match of the year, you interested me. Had you investigated for cheating, of course, as the way you got it made no sense.”
“And?”
“You’re clean, Dunne. Still, there are some unanswered questions.”
“Ah.”
“You know, I even went back and watched a few of your training sessions with Miss Chun, here. Stupidly funny.”
“Miss Chun?” said Perry, looking at Mari.
“Chun Soo-yun, twelve years old. Student at Hwawon Primary School in Seoul, Korea. Two parents, one currently hospitalized after a botched suicide attempt.” He looked over to Mari, real sympathy on his face. “Sorry about your mother, dear.”
“Twelve?” asked Perry, his face betraying confusion.
“I’m almost thirteen!” she said, indignant.
“Almost,” said Ods. “She’s a murder moppet, a killer kiddy, a psychotot, a gunbaby. Whatever you want to call her. It’s our filthy little secret that the Game’s full of ‘em. In Korea, as in many countries, they can’t legally register till they’re sixteen, and we obey local laws regarding children’s exposure to graphic content. But to entice new customers, we allow free play for unregistered Gamers.” He shrugged. “We’re not responsible for lack of parental control if kids play without signing up. Besides—the little ones are future customers. Right?” He winked at Mari.
“I don’t care how old Mari—Miss Chun is. She’s a brilliant player. And she’s done a lot for me.”
Ods took his feet down from the desk. With some admiration, he looked at the petit, brooding fighter sitting at Perry’s side. “Oh, I’ve been aware of the talented Mari Night for a long time now. She’s gonna be big stuff soon. The day she turns sixteen, she’ll get a call from Black Lotus.”
Mari’s mouth dropped open, all pretense at coolness gone. “Really?”
Ods smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Perry Dunne, son of the legendary Maddy Dunne, also known as Slaughterella. I’ve had your mother over here many times, by the way. A charming lady.”
Mari stared at Perry. “Your mother?” Perry responded with a tiny shrug.
Ods continued. “Long-term involvement with a Miss Linda Kresh, marketing director for a clothing manufacturer.” Ods winked at Perry. “Marriage in the works, Dunne?” He continued. “A corporate lawyer for Dray, Horrow, and Schlimm. Currently handling a big case for our subsidiary, PlayMania.”
Perry squirmed as Ods offered up a smile. “Did that insufferable geek Spodek give you a bit more detail than she was supposed to?”
“Maybe,” admitted Perry. “It’s my job to pry.”
“If you publicly revealed anything she said, it would break attorney-client privilege. You’d be disbarred.”
“True. But it won’t come to that.”
“Really? Tell me why you think that is.”
Perry focused, and aligned key bullet points in his head just as if he were presenting a closing argument to a judge in a civil trial. “Spodek told me about your mood enhancement studies in verified testimony that I have safely stored. If I were to release these details to the public, the resulting outcry over fears of mind control would sabotage any future attempt to ever use such technology.”
Ods shook his head. “That Spodek really is an asshole. Maybe I’ll have her killed.”
Perry and Mari stared at Ods.
“I’m kidding,” said Ods. “Jeez, people always think I’m some kind of boogeyman. Okay, she told you. So what? I don’t give you a chunk of change, you tell the world?”
“I don’t want money. In fact, I just want you to do one simple thing, totally within your power.”
“Speak.”
“I want you to make Mari’s account legitimate.”
Ods smiled again. “You really are a schemer, Dunne.” The smile vanished. “I don’t respond to blackmail.”
Perry leaned forward, now in full-on lawyer mode. “It’ll cost you trillions in lost revenue. Plus, harm to your company’s reputation—and the Game—will be irreparable. You can do damage control forever, and you’ll never get that trust back.” Perry held up his hands. “I’m just asking you for something that costs you nothing. Think of it as a favor.”
