Jade
Jade slid the shot glass across the bar in the transactional manner of a drug deal, as the twenty-one-year-old sperm of a new money robber baron, evolved from an amoeba, to a tadpole, to a long-tailed amphibian, a reptile, primate, and finally human fetus—raised with a silver spoon by a suspiciously pregnant Filipina nanny, sent to all the finest European schools, horse riding academies, and an orthodontist—splattered down the front of her bar.
Jade was instinctively suspicious of barons, but she didn’t sense any of the profound sense of entitlement, which was the hallmark of his caste.
“I'll have two Cancun Sunrises, please,” the man said with the easy speech of someone who already had one or two.
Jade assembled the Blue Curaçao, then the green Absinthe, the yellow Galliano, and finally the Vodka.
“I like your costume,” he said. “Are you Mitzu Girl?”
Jade leaned forward to be heard over the booming beat of the synsing music and noticed the fragrance of his hair product. “How did you guess? Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, my big sister used to watch it. The costume looks really good on you.” He looked her up and down. Jade had full, painted on Kewpie doll lips, and perfect figure, but her cat-like eye makeup gave her a predatory look. She could tell he was attracted to her and was using the costume to compliment her body without being overtly sexual. She appreciated his tact and didn’t mind since he wasn’t bad looking either.
I wonder if he suspects? Jade thought.
“My name’s Alan McPherson,” the baron said, and held out his hand, flashing a winning smile—the best money could buy.
Jade shook his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jade Yang,” then poured the first blue layer in the glass's bottom.
She poured the green absinthe, so it floated on the blue. Jade told him a bit more about Mitzu Girl and dribbled the yellow Galliano liqueur and topped it with the clear vodka and a few clouds of coconut cream. The different liquors settled, creating bands of color like the Caribbean Ocean meeting the sky.
Jade thought he looked like a college boy, probably in his third year. She offered the payment terminal, and he briefly held it to his face until the small light indicated recognition. He selected the tip amount using his smart contact lenses and tapped the ubiquitous eight centimeter long WON, which was strapped to his wrist. Jade's handset blinked to show he completed the transfer. A nice tip, but not so big to imply obligation for anything else. Well done.
Alan made his way through the crowd and brought the drinks back. His date looked up at him as he approached and smiled when he placed them in front of her.
Something drew Jade’s attention to the doorway as the bouncers let in two mismatched men. She had never seen them before but recognized the way they carried themselves. They were here on a mission. The taller man had short, dirty-blonde hair and a tweed jacket with a long, deep blue overcoat. The other had long black hair and an insulated synthetic denim jacket. They sat at a table behind Alan and ordered drinks from the server. They talked little but leaned forward and spoke in hushed tones and made furtive glances at Alan. The short one nodded slightly, and the taller stood up in a smooth motion while reaching deep into the inside of his overcoat. His arm withdrew, holding an industrial appliance vaguely resembling a metal broom handle with a gun trigger, and moved towards his target—Alan.
In unison, Jade’s arm rose and straightened toward the man with the gun. A pellet, moving too quickly to be seen, made a beeline from a tube under her wrist, directly towards the face of the man with the gun. Centimeters before making contact, the pellet exploded like the crack of a whip, ejecting microscopic flechettes. She vaulted over the bar and launched herself toward the tall man like a cheetah, with her long cape flowing behind, as she dodged the tables and chairs in her path, with her eyes locked on her prey.
After the cracking sound, the wrist of the tall man cocked, the zip gun slipped away and thudded to the antique wooden floor as a guttural roar emerged from his throat and his legs gave out. In full panic mode, he screamed louder than the music and clawed at his face—kicking and rolling like a man doused with gasoline and set ablaze. Jade grabbed his gun and pointed it at him. Alan was cringing, realizing the gun was meant for him. The gunman’s writhing slowed as he passed out. The red threads in his scratched face formed a drop on his nose before it drooped, sagged, elongated, snapped loose, and dropped to the floor.
Strangely, there was no sign of injury from the pellet. Jade stood over him with the gun in her hand, wondering what she had done. This is not what she expected and wondered if she might have killed him. He started moaning, and the bouncers dragged him out the door by his feet and his moans got louder. The short man had already bolted at the first sign of trouble. The music stopped and everyone's eyes were on Jade...
Yeah, may be a good time to take my break, she thought.
Jade announced, “Nothing to see, just a man with epilepsy. Enjoy the rest of your night.”
People applauded, thinking this was a superhero act in keeping with the theme of the bar. Calm was again restored, and people began talking among themselves as the music resumed.
She took the hay-wire gun into the back room and had a closer look at it. It had two springs attached on each side to a round piece on the back that was attached to the barrel with two sliding steel rods. Machine nuts tack welded to the barrel guided the rods. She assumed that the round piece was a primitive firing pin, and when she pulled it back, she saw it was. She pointed it at the floor and lowered the pin slow and easy, trying not to detonate the shell. It was lucky it didn’t go off when the man dropped it.
Jade Yang worked in the Harakiri Bar on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton. This was her first job after returning from living with her gangster brother in Vancouver, and it was her first straight job ever. In keeping with the theme of the bar, she dressed herself like an anime character. Her straight blonde wig was cut in bangs and draped down her shoulders with tresses over her chest. She wore a short dark gray Greco-Roman pleated skirt, black thigh-high patterned stockings and a long black cape fastened with a gold chain. She was toned and taller than the average Chinese woman and she had a veiled strength that a confident man found alluring, while others found threatening.
Today, she started work at 8:00 p.m. like she did every evening since she started two weeks ago. She was new enough that she enjoyed working there and liked the normalcy of going to a regular job, having her own apartment, and starting something like a typical life.
The boss provided her “uniforms” comprising various costumes that spanned the range between childish to fetishistic, but she enjoyed them all because they helped her get outside of herself for a while. Tonight, she was wearing her favorite, her alter-ego, Mitzu Girl. Depending on the costume, she wore more makeup than normal—some foundation, dramatic color on her cheeks, glitter under her eyelids, and heavy shadow and liner in the corners for a feline appearance. She wore three tone glossy lipstick with pink on the top of her upper lip, yellow around the inner part of her lips that faded to red on the bottom of her lower lip.
The customers continued to file in. They were a general cross section of the different subspecies of homo sapiens in Old Strathcona, including students and staff from the nearby university, townies that ranged from young to middle-aged, as well as starving artists and alternative types. The default was cis hetro, but all different sexualities were welcome here and represented with colored armbands hoping to meet like-minded individuals. All came and took shelter from the growing intolerance and division of the outside.
Jade had mixed feelings about the students. She always thought she wanted to graduate university, but she was cheated of the opportunity, or squandered it, depending on her mood. Although the students were her peers, she realized she was different. She remembered when she went for a walk in the fall on the University of Alberta campus among the lemon poplar and scarlet maple trees to enjoy the sun and the color against the deep azure sky.
A young man in a sweater walked up to her and asked if she needed help. It was the help you get offered by the store clerk, who is worried you will steal something. Was it really that obvious I didn’t belong there? I suppose it was, she answered herself. Oh, well, I’m good at other things and I have a Ph.D. in Ass Kicking. That was a skill she could always fall back on.
It shouldn’t have been her responsibility to spot trouble in the bar. It was the bouncers’, but the manager knew enough about her to recognize that she could do more than serve drinks. Besides, she couldn’t turn it off, even if she wanted to—and on nights like tonight, she really, really did.
It was a long day. She took off her wig and placed it on the Styrofoam head in the changing room and washed the garish makeup off her face and put on her regular clothes. She looked in the mirror and brushed her hair away from the shaved side of her head and reapplied her makeup. It was more than usual for the bus home, but she was going to pay a visit to the man who gave her that bizarre pellet gun.
She put on a navy-blue turtle-necked sweater and black jeans. For accessories, she wore black wrist cuffs with leather tassels and a small gold chained jade Buddha necklace. Finally, she put on her high-tech winter jacket, leather gloves, and heeled winter boots and she was ready to go into the bitter cold. She pulled back her left sleeve and watched her WON as the blue dot approach her location on the map while she walked to the bus stop.
The bar was 140 years old and had the original brick exterior. It used to be a hotel, but now the upper floors were apartments. She could barely decipher the numbers 1912 in the sandstone peak. It was part of a clutch of well-maintained original buildings, among nests full of broken eggs. She walked further west, two new buildings bravely grew from the ruins like daisies in a junkyard, while others became populated with tents for commerce, living, or dying.
The polar vortex arrived late this year and greenhouse gas current invaded the Arctic, destabilized the cyclonic air like a wonky tire and pushed it south, over the middle of North America where it gripped everyone and everything in its thermometer imploding grasp. The temperature dropped to minus thirty-five. It was the kind of cold that leaves you coughing at the chill air shocking your lungs. She wrapped a scarf around her mouth and forehead, leaving a slit for her eyes.
She stepped on the compacted snow and finished the two blocks to the bus stop. Nodules of frost grew on the scarf over her nose and mouth like tiny grains of popcorn, and even her eyelashes turned white. She stopped and waited for the bus. She could hear the mournful groans of snow plows scraping Calgary Trail way off in the distance. Steam from her breath rose to the streetlight above, swirling like a nebula in space. The skin above her nose stung as the cold dug in with crystal daggers, making her eyes water. The cold burned her thighs, and she wished she had brought snow pants.
The app told the driverless bus a new passenger was waiting, and a few minutes later, it pulled up to the stop and opened the door. Jade was beat, and she slouched against the wall of the bus, absorbing the feeble warmth radiating from the built-in heaters. The cold had frozen the bus’s shock absorbers and hardened the tires, and every ice rut gave her a jolt.
By the looks of it, the other passengers were leaving a bar too, and beer pouches rolled across the floor as the bus accelerated or braked. The smell of beer breath and vomit filled the air and a young couple beside her was necking and their hands were all over each other in exaggerated, drunken gestures. Jade winced at the wet noises and glared at them, but they were oblivious to her disapprobation, so she gazed out the window and tried to ignore them. Her stop was next, so she pressed the yellow strip overhead to alert the navigation system she needed to get off.
“Next stop Whyte Avenue and 111 Street,” announced the synthesized female voice.
She could take the bus to Kevin’s apartment without a transfer, since it was only eight blocks west on Whyte Avenue, in the historic Garneau neighborhood. The bus slowed to a halt. She was glad to get away from the other passengers and walked the last two blocks to Kevin’s building, getting more worked up as she got closer and thinking of the weapon he made for her. Why didn’t he tell me how it works? Was he just using me as a guinea pig?
Hanging from the front of Kevin’s apartment building was a sign with Reeves Manor written in old English font. Two simulated wrought iron lanterns illuminated each side of the door and gave off a sallow light. Jade always deconstructed the layers of history piled up upon this old building. The wooden siding inside the tenuous fire escape was from its original use as a seminary and the cracking brick facade was from its conversion to a nurse’s residence before it was converted to its final use as an apartment building. Further repurposing was not in the cards. Its fading grandeur was like an aged debutant using face creams and home remedies to hide the irreversible decline into senility and death.
A young woman sat on the steps. Her skin was vaguely luminescent blue, as if lit from an internal source. Her expression was vacant, and she did not react as Jade climbed the spalling concrete stairs of the entrance and pressed the retrofitted buzzer for Kevin’s apartment. The camera scanned Jade’s iris and her name appeared on the display. She sensed that the young woman was a protector, and watched her get up and walk away across the street, looking far into the distance. Jade tried to shake off an uncanny feeling and stepped inside, and the ancient wood door closed behind her with a solid click, leaving a swirling cloud of vapor outside.
Jade stormed across the brick entrance and down the stairs to his basement apartment.
“What the fuck was that? You said it would just knock someone out!”
“Pass-out, knockout, what’s the difference?” Kevin replied, as he led her deeper into his home.
“You’re a real asshole.” said Jade. She took off her boots and marched in past the boxes and techno-litter scattered on the floor. “I thought I killed him.”
“Maybe you’d rather go back to splattering people’s brains all over the wall?” Kevin responded. Jade had nothing to say to that and collected her thoughts.
“Seriously, what was that thing?”
“If you would’ve just given me time to explain when I gave it to you, it’s an air pellet gun. I put a tiny laser diode in the pellet to determine distance to the target and it can detect if it was going to hit cloth or skin. If skin, a small charge will shoot the nano flechettes towards the target, so they spread out in a shotgun pattern and the casing disintegrates like powder. If it’s going to hit fabric, it’ll stay together until its pointed tip penetrates the cloth. Then, the pellet injects needles into the skin. If you miss the target, the pellet knows this and I programmed it to immediately detonate, so they’ll probably get hit with a few needles anyway.”
“How could the needles hurt so much but hardly leave a mark?”
“The needles are too small to cause bleeding or leave a mark, and I impregnated them with synthetic poneratoxin from the bullet ant. The venom acts directly on the nerves but doesn’t burn, so there isn’t any redness or swelling. It’s the most painful venom known to man. It was tweaked to wear off in an hour instead of the usual twelve, and the needles dissolve under the skin so there won’t be any abscess. I got the venom from another mechanic friend on Gray Market. He cooked it up himself with a DIY krunch printer that pokes the ant’s DNA into yeast cells. For him, it’s almost as easy as making home-brew beer and isn’t even very illegal yet. Not that it really matters anymore.
They sat at Kevin’s table, and he swept the bits of wire and drops of soldier on the floor with his forearm.
“It’s worse when you get shot in the eyes, nose, mouth, or penis. As you saw, you totally lose your shit when you get slapped with one of these. The only antidote is local anesthetic.”
“It’s a good thing you got to his gun, or he might have blown his own head off. If you shoot someone in the dick, take away his knives, unless you’re into watching what will happen next.”
“Shut up. I do what needs to be done—I’m not sick,” Jade said. She paused then explained the entire story about the two who tried to kill or capture Alan.
“Who were those clowns, anyway?” Kevin asked.
“I’m not sure. The college boy was a baron, so one of the other families might be trying to get him.”
“I hope they don’t come after you now.”
Kevin’s expression showed his anxiety and his voice, his concern. He was really worried about her. She hadn’t really thought about him as boyfriend material until now. He seemed so busy tinkering or doing whatever he does and thought about him as a friend or brother. She could look after herself, but she had a soft spot for men who showed they cared for her. It had been a long since she enjoyed the company of a man, and she managed to get the last one killed before they had a chance to go to bed. She told herself she had forgotten about sex, but still there was an undeniable physical ache.
Kevin was a handsome guy, five foot eleven, black hair cut short on the sides and long on top. He brushed it to the right and sometimes hung over his bright green eyes, giving him a rakish look. He was slim and wiry, like an actual mechanic, strong from tightening bolts. She was fascinated with the sinewy ridges on his military tattooed arms and shoulders and desired to trace her fingers along the lines of muscle in his forearm.
“Would you like some wine?” he asked.
“Sure, thanks.”
They sat on the couch and Kevin chatted about his experiences. “Universities are basically country clubs for upper class kids. I could never afford to get a degree and who needs it. Any course you can think of is online for free and I take them all the time. Besides, I’ve never had a client ask me if I have a degree,” he laughed.
“I got into a really awful fight with my dad when I was strung out. I was trying to stop him from beating my little brother like he did me. The RCMP arrested me and the Staff Sergeant of the local RCMP detachment volun-told me to join the army and go to Ukraine for a couple of years... ‘Or go to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200’, whatever that means. They needed people with my skills to join the reserves in Six Intelligence Company for a two-year hitch overseas. It didn’t seem too bad. My dad made me go to cadets in the Signal Corps when I was little, so didn’t think it would be that much different. How hard could it be?” Kevin shrugged, but Jade could see there was pain lurking behind his glib acceptance.”
“How hard was it?” she asked.
Kevin took a deep breath and looked off into space for a second. “It had its moments.”
Jade noticed his expression become more pensive and realized there was more to it. She wanted to know, but didn’t pry.
“Your parents were rich. Why didn’t you get a degree?” Kevin asked.
“They weren’t really rich,” Jade said, shaking her head. “I tried to, but I couldn’t concentrate. When I was supposed to be listening to the lecture, I was only scanning the other students, reading them for threats, but also reading their emotions. In my first class, I didn’t know how many unhappy girls there were. I’m not judging or anything, but it was kinda surprising. They’ve had such perfect lives but have problems too.”
He reached forward and touched the opposite wall, and the aging display blinked on. “Wanna watch a tube?”
“Sure. How about the winner from Dance Dance.”
They finished the wine, and he walked to the kitchen to refill their glasses.
“Can you put it in holo mode?”
“Sure. TV, holo-mode,” he commanded.
The image froze, then the dancer popped away from the wall and seemed to hover. Kevin’s TV was old, so the processor was not strong enough to maintain a holographic image the size of the full screen and it collapsed the image to half its size. The announcer discussed their standings while the TV displayed a still image of the girl standing sideways, but looking toward the camera.
She wore a revealing costume and was petite and fair skinned with long auburn hair tied up in the top. Her partner was bare-chested young man, tall, with coffee and cream complexion. The routine was passionate, explosive, and sensual, with the soundtrack of Latin rhythm. Jade watched with awe at the start, when the girl sat on his hand, raised above his head, then fell down as he scooped her up to bring her to the floor on her feet. She somersaulted through the air in an impossibly tight spin. The man held her legs and spun her like a ball on a rope while she rose and fell with each turn, a fraction of an inch from her head crashing into the floor then swinging back up. She danced like she was his plaything, but he was only there to display her. It was dangerously fast, yet so graceful. Jade did a little seated dance and mimicked the salsa moves where she would thrust her hips to the side while holding her hand flat against her lower tummy.
“Wanna dance?” Kevin asked. Kevin shoved his work junk against the wall, and she took his hand.
Kevin stepped onto the rug. “What music would you like?”
“Do you know salsa?”
“Not really, but I’ll give it a try.” Kevin turned toward the TV. “TV, play salsa dance music.”
“You should really get out more. Let’s start with the basics. You step forward on one foot, and back with the other. Try that a few times.”
Kevin watched Jade moving back and forth and tried to followed her. He took two steps forward and messed up.
“You step forward with your left foot, then step in place with your right. See? Then step back with your left and pause for one beat. Step in place with your left foot. Step back with your right foot and step in place with your left. To finish, bring your right foot back for another count. There are eight counts altogether. Now you step with me.”
“Sorry, this isn’t going very well.” Kevin looked embarrassed but kept trying.
“You’re doing fine.”
They stood side by side, and Kevin watched Jade’s feet and copied her steps. He found the rhythm, and Jade turned to face him.
“See, you’re doing it!” Jade said. “Now hold my left hand and put your other hand on my back.”
They kept moving back and forth. Jade smiled and looked into his eyes like the women in the dance competition. Kevin still looked at his feet, as if he didn’t know where they were. Jade was feeling the buzz from the wine and was enjoying the dance and enjoying it with Kevin. She could feel Kevin’s confidence and ability build, and he led her into a twirl. She spun out and then he spun her back in. Their lips met and paused before she realized what she had done. She pulled away and held her finger to his lips.
Her body was warm, electric, and sparkled from his touch. Her loins tingled like a magnetic field enveloping him and drawing him closer, but she was afraid to give into her desires. More than that, she was afraid of telling him who she really was. She had to leave—fast.
