“No, no thank God! He killed Bertha!” Lily was clearly out for blood.
Louis-Cesare still looked confused, probably because Bahram was turned away from him, and he hadn’t seen the universal gesture.
“He shot the tits,” I told Louis-Cesare.
“No! He no shoot,” Lily said. “He push, right over the edge!”
“Seriously?” I asked Rashid, whose cheeks were burning.
“It assaulted me. I have the right to defend myself!”
Zheng was still standing there, with an I-don’t-believe-this-is-my-life face. “You’re gonna have to pay for that,” he told Rashid.
“I was attacked!”
“Yeah, by a pair of tits.” Zheng looked him over. “You are a vamp, right?”
“He’s a master,” Bahram said, munching on something. It wasn’t chicken feet, so I guessed they’d made a stop.
Rashid’s cheeks went puce, a fact that did not stop his mouth from opening. But Lily wasn’t finished yet. “What about poor Bertha?”
“He’ll pay for another one,” Zheng assured her.
“I not want another one! I have Bertha long time. I want her.” Her eyes suddenly went huge. “What if she not dead? What if she down there, all alone? Hurt and—” Her hand went to her mouth. “What if monsters get her?”
“What monsters?” I said.
Zheng put a hand to his forehead. He stood like that for a few seconds, while Rashid continued to be assaulted. He didn’t push anybody else over any ledges, however, so I supposed he’d learned something.
“Alright,” Zheng said. “You,” he pointed at Rashid. “Pay for the damned tits. You,” he pointed to a couple of his guys, who were just standing in the back, watching the show. “Take a car and have a look down below—carefully. You,” he pointed at me. “Come this way. I’d like to talk where I can hear myself think.”
* * *
We ended up in a dark red corridor with dim lighting, probably to cover the signs of a hasty construction job. Red flocked wall paper hid the plywood walls, and plush red carpet covered the floors. There were a lot of doors all along one side.
The client rooms, I guessed. They must have been soundproofed, because I didn’t hear anything as we walked along. But not that well soundproofed, judging by the expressions that crossed Louis-Cesare’s face, which ranged from slight amusement, to wincing sympathy, to—
“What? What was that?” I asked, because it had looked a lot like envy.
“Tell you later.”
“Well, at least you’ll tell me something later.”
That did not get a response before we entered a large office at the end of the hall. It was a semicircle with almost a full wall of windows behind the desk. It looked like it had been scavenged from some high-end spa or executive’s corner office, which it probably had. The authorities had better things to do these days than police the wreckage, and supernatural Hong Kong had a history of repurposing everything from pirate ships to the ubiquitous rickshaws.
“Can I see the tat?” Zheng asked, before he even sat down.
He looked over the item that Hassani had given us while we took chairs in front of the desk. It was a huge, old-world, dark wood item that Zheng had come up with somewhere, and that looked like it might have been part of one of the aforementioned pirate ships at one time. It had small, carved figureheads for posts—tits out, of course, which actually fit in with the overall ambience around here—and wooden curlicues that almost matched the wallpaper outside.
It was elaborate enough to give the office a feeling of luxury, despite the fact that the plywood walls were still bare.
Well, almost.
There was a set of kinetic armor that I’d seen Zheng wear in battle once, hung on one wall, with occasional arcs of what looked like electricity jumping from one little trefoil decoration to another. There were some weapon’s cabinets in the same dark wood as the desk that were hedging the door, where I supposed their contents would be handy. And there was an old, expensive Persian rug on the floor, in blues and yellows and whites, covering most of the unstained boards.
But it was the view that stole the show, with all kinds of strange vehicles filling the skies and several other floating gardens looking like green clouds in the distance. This wasn’t an area with a lot of skyscrapers, and the ones that did exist weren’t in direct line of sight. Giving me the surreal sight of an entirely floating city, with nothing underneath but air.
It could have kept me occupied for hours, but Zheng didn’t need them.