Seeker

Shinobu peered at the object in his hand through a haze of opium smoke. It was vibrating. He worked hard to focus his eyes and eventually discovered it was his phone. Who would be calling him? It was the middle of the day. The crew he and Brian usually hung out with didn’t even wake up until after dark.

He exhaled another cloud of smoke from the opium pipe cradled in his arm. It was his seventh pipe, and he was reaching that perfect state when he was balanced between his body and the sky: no worries, no troubles, no people.

But the phone kept vibrating. It had been vibrating for hours, though that was in opium time. In real time it might only have been a few seconds.

“Please shut up,” he whispered to it.

It didn’t listen.

Clumsily Shinobu set the pipe on its tray and struggled up onto his elbows, irritated. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the phone.

“It’s my mother.”

He shoved at Brian Kwon, who was curled up next to him on the pallet, his own pipe lying by his face. Brian grunted in response and mumbled, “Barracuda mom.”

The phone had stopped vibrating, and now it beeped, indicating there was a message. His mother never called. Something tickled the back of Shinobu’s mind. Earlier that day, hadn’t she called him another time? Two calls from his mother in one day was remarkable. Being hit by a meteor while salvage diving was more likely. The last time he’d seen his mother, she had found him unconscious in the kitchen, with burning Shiva sticks all around him and his little brother collapsed in the hallway from the smoke. Mariko had thrown a large cooking pot at him and screamed that he was never, ever to come inside her house again. That had been months ago, and he hadn’t heard from her since.

Without realizing he’d done it, he was already lying down again. He brought the pipe back to his lips and took in another long breath.

His eyes drifted around the room. He had never been to this particular establishment before, with its fine draped silks and carved wooden pallets detailed in silver. There were many cheaper drug bars on the Transit Bridge. Usually he visited the cheapest, on the lowest levels, where you would lie on a pile of Styrofoam packing peanuts, crammed in with dozens of other opium fiends. But Brian had been eager to spend their extra pay from the day’s salvage job. Here, attractive attendants in silk pajamas moved about, preparing new pipes and offering drinks. He noticed they were wearing filters over their noses so they wouldn’t become addicted to the smoke.

Smoke, he thought, his peaceful balance ruined. Smoke and fire. I should have killed you, John, but I hated Briac and Alistair more … There was his father, with a web of sparks around his dark red hair. Shinobu could see that red hair now, like it was across the room from him.

He slowly realized that the red hair actually was across the room from him. Though his mind was still floating, his eyes very gradually came into focus, and he found himself looking at a woman reclining on a pallet on the other side of the opium den.

She was less than forty years old, her red hair the exact shade of his father’s. She was beautiful—as beautiful as he had once thought his aunt Fiona. This woman wore a silk dress in the Chinese style. With her was an older European businessman, whose head was in her lap as she held an opium pipe to his lips. There was a yellow scarf about her neck, which marked her, he knew, as an escort. It was a legal profession on the Bridge. The man must be her client, buying her company while he enjoyed himself in the drug dens. She was speaking softly to him, a discreet filter perched above her lip.

“Sea Bass, she looks just like Fiona,” he mumbled.

“Who?” came the sleepy response from Brian.

“That woman.” He tried to point, but it was too difficult to get his hands to move when he was floating so far above them. He blew smoke in her direction, but of course Brian was lying behind him and could not see that.

“Who’s Fiona?” Brian mumbled.

“Right there,” Shinobu said, coughing.© 2024 Nôv/el/Dram/a.Org.

The woman looked up just then, almost as if she’d heard what he said, which was surely impossible at this distance. Her eyes flitted around the room, paused at Shinobu’s face, then continued on.

It was Fiona. Not someone who looked like her, but Fiona herself.

Shinobu’s stomach did an unpleasant flip. The floating sensation ended. He came crashing back into his own head.

“It is her,” he whispered, reaching out a hand to shake Brian’s shoulder. “She’s right there!”

“Please shut up, Barracuda,” Brian muttered, batting his hand away. “Close your mouth. Close it up like … like something that keeps its mouth closed!”

Panic was creeping from Shinobu’s stomach toward his head. He had not seen anyone from his previous life for a year and a half. Now, in one day, he’d seen both John and Fiona.

“Why today?” he asked Brian.

“A tortoise,” mumbled Brian. “They’re quiet. Be like a tortoise, Barracuda.”

Shinobu concentrated, hoping to see his way through any opium tricks. If Fiona was an escort, it meant she must live on the Bridge. It was true he’d left Fiona and Quin here on the Bridge that night, all those months ago, with Master Tan caring for them. But Shinobu had never imagined they would stay. It was hard to become a Bridge resident. You had to have very particular skills. As he watched Fiona across the room, with her exotic, Western face, and her rare hair color and rarer beauty, he realized that perhaps Fiona had those skills.

He had assumed she and Quin would leave Hong Kong as soon as Quin was healed, find some out-of-the-way corner of the world in which to live. But here Fiona was.

“Go away,” he whispered.

Again, Fiona looked up from across the room, and her eyes scanned the other pallets. Shinobu buried his head behind his arm.

“You go away,” Brian grunted. “And when you get there, please shut up.”

Shinobu waited behind his arm until Fiona’s attention went back to the man lying with his head in her lap. Then he grabbed the side of the pallet and hauled himself to his feet, nearly flattening an attendant who was walking past at that moment. The small man signaled to other waitstaff, and together they steadied Shinobu into an upright position. He was, at age sixteen, more than six feet tall, and it took three men to keep him from falling onto the floor.

“Sir, perhaps you would like to lie down again?”

“No,” he said, swinging an arm to brush them aside, and nearly toppling onto Brian as he did so. He caught himself against a wall. He kneed Brian in the leg. “Bri, come on. We’re leaving.”

“Shh, Barracuda,” he said. “Tortoise. Mouth shut.”

“I’m getting out of here!” He shook Brian’s shoulder.

“… make you into tortoise soup,” growled Brian. One meaty arm came up to slap at him, but Shinobu dodged it, grabbing the wall again to steady himself.

“Then I’m leaving without you.”

He staggered out of the bar, tossing a pile of bills at the attendant who followed him to the door.

“Sir, the Transit Bridge has strict rules about public intoxication. You risk having your visitor’s pass revoked.”

That was true. Shinobu paused and grabbed one of the oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling by the exit. He breathed through it for a few minutes while he leaned against the wall. Whatever was coming through the mask cleared his head immediately. He could still feel a tiny bit of the opium float, but his ability to control his arms and legs came back.

“Thank you,” he said, and he made a respectable show of walking normally out into the wealthy crowds in the corridor beyond.

This level of the Bridge was lined with nightclubs and drug bars of the most expensive sort. His dirty clothes and leopard-spotted hair were already attracting unwanted attention. He pushed his way toward the airlifts, then remembered his phone.

Digging it from a pocket, he found his vision was now clear enough to read his mother’s message. The last vestiges of his opium high disappeared when he saw what she’d written. Akio had been very sick. He’d gotten into something in Shinobu’s room, and he had almost died. Shinobu tried to remember what he might have left there, but it could have been anything. Drugs had been his constant companions for the past year and a half, and he could have left any number of them in his mother’s house. A combination of guilt and terror bloomed in his stomach.

He felt a rough shove and looked up to see Brian, who had staggered out of the bar after him.

“What next?” his friend asked. “Another bar? Or some food?”

“Wait.” He read his mother’s following message, and relief flooded into him. Akio was all right. It took Shinobu a few moments to catch his breath. “I have to pick something up.”

“Food?”

“No, Sea Bass.”

“Beer? We can drink like fish, Barracuda.”

“I have to go home first.”

The words seemed to confuse Brian.

“What home?”

They had been sleeping in that room above the theater for a month, curling up with the rats and cockroaches, which assured Shinobu that he was not, after all, in the Scottish countryside anymore.

“My mother’s house,” Shinobu answered.

Before Brian had a chance to question him further, Shinobu stepped into an airlift. He was whisked to the surface level of the Bridge. It was gloomy there as always, kept dim by the canopy above, which let in only a small amount of sunlight. Late-afternoon crowds of visitors were wandering down the thoroughfare, past restaurants serving every sort of Asian food.

Brian lurched out of the airlift a moment later, and together they joined the foot traffic walking the Bridge. Above the restaurants were apartments, most with lights on inside, where he could see figures moving about. Between the restaurants were healing offices of acupuncturists, herbalists, and practitioners with more exotic skills that Shinobu couldn’t begin to describe.

“It’s over there,” Shinobu said at last, looking at the address his mother had sent and crossing to the other side of the road.

“That’s not your mother’s house.”

“Shut up, Sea Bass. If you’re very helpful, I’ll buy you a beer when I’m done.”

It didn’t happen quite that way. Shinobu was about to have his third strange encounter that day.

He found the office he was looking for, a small clean storefront with an apartment above. He felt inside the metal drop box by the front door and pulled out a large plastic bag of herbs with Akio’s name written across it.

As he walked away, tucking the bag beneath his jacket, the door to the healing office was thrown open. Before he could turn around to look, he was knocked to the street by a figure flying out that door, running like someone desperate to stay alive.