The Refugee Sentinel (9 page)

An Olympic bellboy with a plastic smile tapped on the driver’s window, as Colton killed the Camaro’s engine.

“I’ll leave in a moment,” Colton said, stuffed a dollar bill in the plastic boy’s front pocket and waved him off.

“Ma’am,” he turned to Li-Mei, “I had a good time. And I thank you for it.”

“Who says the good time is over?” she said and stretched in the leather seat. “I scored a cute room here, the Presidential Suite. Business must be slow if girls like me get suites.” Her fingertips hovered along the contours of her seated body as if showcasing a prize. “It would mean a lot if you came up. How about a cup of tea to clear your hangover for the trip back?”

He looked at her with eyes reddened by lack of sleep. “I’m fine. I live just around the corner.”

“Why are you punishing yourself? I’ll never see you after tonight. And after Defiance Day, I won’t see anyone.”

Colton snorted at the joke. “I don’t know why you’re so persistent.”

“So you’re coming up for some tea?”

“Are you one hundred percent sure you want to do this? The last time I went alone with a woman to her place, a horrible tragedy happened. Tonight doesn’t feel right either.”

“Do I have to strip naked here to convince you to come upstairs?” She froze in place with raised eyebrows. “Look. If I didn’t want you in my room, then you wouldn’t be here, so shut up and let’s have some fun.” The two of them got out of the car.

“Welcome back, Ms. Gao.” Another bellboy greeted her by the elevator doors then saluted Colton. “Good evening, sir.”

Running into the second bellboy wasn’t good news, she thought. The more people saw Colton come in, the messier her pending operation. The elevator proclaimed arrival with a muted ring. She stepped in, pulled Colton with a firm tug, and kissed his cheek as the closing doors hid them from sight. At floor twenty-six, he stretched an arm. “After you.”

“We’re going that way.” She pointed to the left, down a row of numbered mahogany doors. “The last suite on the left.” He walked ahead, his shoes leaving imprints on the feathery carpet. Behind him, her pupils dilated.

“I understand you have a daughter,” she said. She had worked hard for this moment and was going to enjoy it.

“Yes, an eight-year-old. How do you know about Yana?”

“I’m sure her mother has called you asking for help even if she still hates your guts.”

“Who are you?”

Like a tigress who couldn’t purr, Li-Mei closed her eyes to show happiness because losing vision lowered defenses and tigers only did so when feeling happy. “I can’t let you save that girl. I can’t let you Sacrifice for her. My mission doesn’t allow it.” She opened her eyes and looked at her target, alone and filled with the ridiculous desire to save her. She gave Colton one final smile, colder than the melted Antarctic.

Afterward, she struck.

With a screech, Colton’s world stopped for a second or two. He wondered if he had acquired some special power to stop time, but a corner inside his mind sounded an alarm that stopping time wasn’t good news. Cold sweat covered his face and the sound of sandpaper scraping over matted glass filled his body. Time stopped; for how long, he couldn’t tell. Then the stillness cracked and Earth resumed its rotation at the slow-motion pace of a Seattle slug. Specks of dust, usually too small for the naked eye to see, danced as large as snowflakes in the lazy glow of the hotel wall-lights. Then the sandpaper feeling gave way to weightlessness. He realized his head was smashed into the wall but he sensed nothing. No pain, as if the dust snowflakes had muted his senses. His brain gave a standing slow-clap ovation – he could get used to this. Or was he sure?

He should have stayed away from her in the pub. He should have fled after their first flirtation. He should have refused to drive her to Seattle. These “should haves” made him sad. How the rest of life could have unfolded, forever impacted by not meeting this woman. The dust snowflakes whirred on, a sign he was still alive but déjà vu hit him. He recalled the same sense of irreversible loss after the Yana accident. That night, he swore, his eyes unseeing with tears, he would never be on the wrong side again. Never on the unfixable side. Yet, a mere seven years later, the exact same bone-crushing desperation had swallowed him whole. He had run out of excuses. His brain registered his hands pushing against the hallway carpet, likely in an attempt to stand up. Too late… Would people, at his funeral, notice his unclipped fingernails in the coffin? He smiled in his head, because his face had lost the physical capacity to do so.

Next, the dust snowflakes bid him adieu and the world sped back up to normal, ending his sensory anesthesia. Blood, gushing out of his broken nose, pooled red in his cupped hands, as the unmuted world re-entered his ears.

Colton felt a steel blade bite into his neck and his pulse accelerated against the cold metal. Was this how death felt? He wasn’t rebellious or sad. At times, while driving on the WA-520 bridge above Lake Washington, he had imagined swerving into the concrete highway divider. In his mind, his knuckles firmed and his hands turned the wheel, inch by inch. Then in this War of Curiosities, Good Curiosity of what old age felt like would win out over Morbid Curiosity of crashing into the divider at ninety miles-per-hour. Good Curiosity had won by a photo finish, the last few times. Tonight, no photo finish was needed; the ugly stepsister, Ms. Morbid Curiosity, was the clear favorite.

He felt the knife break the skin of his neck. In a moment, the blade would meet his carotid artery and unleash the rivers of blood coursing through it. Any moment... Colton had never been more certain of anything else in life. He felt special like all other creatures faced with their passing. How many others, around the world, were dying together with him in this moment? He lay still under the crushing knee of the woman whom he had wanted to help earlier and looked at her with the dread of a good man hurt beyond repair. Gasping a flickering breath, he spoke without expecting an answer. “How many others will you kill today?”

The question seemed to stunt her. The blade stopped its march and she looked him in the eye.

“Why does this matter to you?” she said.

“They’ll catch you,” Colton said, hoping she wouldn’t delay killing him much. Being alone with this woman scared him more than death. He didn’t imagine dying was fun, but had thought he could do better than being sliced like a turkey in a dim hotel hallway. He missed the slow dance of the dust snowflakes and wanted them back. He also missed Sarah.

His ex-date pulled him up and his head swam with vertigo. The lights went from bright to muted to full dark. He thought he saw the restroom door on the twenty-sixth floor open. At two-am? Fat chance. But a man’s silhouette did appear, clutching a cane and coming straight at them.

Colton opened his mouth to have it crammed shut by a sweaty tee. The man didn’t move. What was wrong? Colton must have made a sound, a whimper – for sure. Even if this person were drunk, it would be hard to miss two bodies playing a life-and-death game of Twister. Then Colton saw it, more in his mind than with his eyes: the restroom man was blind.

Li-Mei lay on top, crushing Colton in perfect stillness and staring at the man coming out of the restroom. She blinked. Was it two-am already?

She had only herself to blame for taking this long. Each time she had deviated from the script: first with Taxi then with the Purple Servant and now with Parker, she had invited chance into her plans. She hated breaking her plans. She was expected to assassinate Parker, not gloat or become his psychiatrist. Later, she would punish herself for the stupidity by gashing her heels as a future reminder with each step she took. Now was not the time though; this was crisis and she had to focus.

She removed her tee and thrust it down Colton’s throat, her knuckles feeling the pressure of the screams she had stifled. Good... amateur hour was over. She squeezed Colton’s ribcage with both knees and sensed a pop – she must have crushed a rib. Not a deal breaker, but life would get harder if she gave him additional detectable damage. Her thighs eased on his ribcage by a hair but she grabbed his testicles and twisted clockwise with strength she didn’t expect to produce at such awkward angle. He jerked once more and passed out.

Li-Mei focused on the intruder next. She had seen him somewhere. Rummaging through the last few days of memories, the answer rushed in, accompanied by a sense of relief. He was the blind pianist from the hotel lobby. She sized his physique: an average torso, with average strength, that moved with agility uncommon to a person without sight.

“Anyone there?” the blind man said. He blinked hard and didn’t wear shades, a sign he wasn’t ashamed of his dead eyes, which Li-Mei could respect. She pressed closer to the carpet, brushing lips against Colton’s left eye as if nuzzling with a lover. No more stupid risks. Parker’s destiny was to commit a suicide by cutting his throat and the piano man was to live. She had to let the blind guy walk.

The pianist lingered and took another step forward, his cane tapping a foot away from Colton’s unmoving knees. So close that Li-Mei smelled hand-sanitizer on the hand holding the cane. Each fiber of her body pushed her to incapacitate the old man with a strike to the abdomen followed by a-hundred-and-eighty-degree snap of the neck. Yet she stayed pinned. Like a dolphin, sending UV waves into the darkness, the blind pianist stared at the location where her knee was crushing Colton’s ribcage.

At last, the man’s head shook; he scratched his chin and muttered, “Serves me right for getting just four hours of sleep,” then turned around for the elevator. The cane’s tapping along the wall came back with increasing distance. Li-Mei exhaled and lowered her head. Parker’s suicide would be complete in fifteen minutes max. In another thirty, she would soak in the Presidential Suite bathtub, down the hall, and submit his status update on her tablet. All was well that ended well… until a swooshing sound ripped her from her thoughts.

She looked up. The blind man loomed above, somehow having flown the distance from where her eyes remembered him last. What’s worse, his swinging cane was heading toward her head. A bang and, for a moment, her world brightened into a canvas of white light. He lifted her body then threw it face-first into the wall. She chuckled through bleeding teeth – she had lived to witness such infamy. He went for her head next and pressed his hands against the sides of her face. She closed her eyes expecting the inevitable snap of her neck. But then for some reason he let go. He wasn’t much of a fighter. And Li-Mei opened her eyes.

Her feet pushed against the wall, buying room and oxygen for her crushed face. He held her skull in his palms, making the two of them look like a pair of Olympic gymnasts: the one cradling the other’s head and spooning her body, in preparation for the Gold-Medal sequence.

She curled her body upwards, by the sheer strength in her abdomen, and flipped like a soccer forward hitting an overhead kick. At the end of the rotation, she sat piggyback on the man’s shoulders and squeezed her thighs around his neck. He staggered back, looking to hold on to the wall. He was late. His unconscious body collapsed to the ground like a bag of bones.

The forests, surrounding Jenli from three sides, and the river, from the fourth, were all Li-Mei remembered, no matter how far back she went. She had just materialized in this village but come to think of it, any regular child became aware of conscious life after the eureka moment of her mind awaking for the first time. From that moment on, children learned how to form recollections and memories. Li-Mei was the same. The difference was she couldn’t remember her parents.

She didn’t know her age either, but had a hunch she couldn’t be that young. She could count to one billion, wrote in Mandarin, English, Spanish and Korean, played the piano and was a jujitsu green belt. She guessed she was at least six – you didn’t learn four languages and the piano in less time.

Sometimes, certain smells or images would tickle associations of a different place, but she couldn’t be sure. She loved Jenli and her routine. Mondays were reserved for language training. A random instructor would show, which meant she had to be prepared in all her languages. In time, the preparations became a non-issue, as her improving multilingual skills would resolve any assignment they threw at her. Then the Servants would add a new language to the mix.

Tuesdays meant complete physical training. Any weekday morning started with a mandatory five-mile run, but Tuesdays were in a league all their own. She ran laps, did crunches and pull ups and competed against the Servants. She lost a lot, almost always, but kept going, because it was expected of her. Swimming and rock-climbing followed in the afternoons, capped by jujitsu training in the evenings. She would crash for the night squeezed like a grape, which made Tuesday nights a near-lock for a surprise drill. On average, she had three night drills per week. The Servants shoved her out of bed in the middle of the night and made her run, climb or swim past obstacle routes that seldom, if ever, stayed the same.

She loved Thursday afternoons the best. The Servants would take her to the second floor of the tall brown building at the village square where she had to watch a new film each week. She liked the alternate worlds she learned about, ranging from barbaric European battles to colorful Chinese tea ceremonies, or the beautiful music in “The Godfather,” her absolute favorite. All Thursday movies were dubbed in one of her four languages and subtitled in another. After the viewing, she had to submit written reports, one in each language, describing the protagonist character’s development and struggles. If she scored less than a “B” on each report, she wouldn’t receive dinner for the week, until the following Thursday. On one occasion, she couldn’t attend two consecutive viewings because she had the flu, followed by cracking her tibia at jujitsu practice. She didn’t mind not eating for fourteen straight days, but no dinner meant no food for Taxi and she took exception to that. Taxi was her only friend, and friends didn’t let friends starve.

Unlike her love for movies, live TV annoyed her. She was tired of watching self-proclaimed messiahs trumpeting the end of the world from their flooded cities. What did she care? Jenli was safe. Granted, she wanted to see new people other than the Servants, but that seemed like worrying about a zit on the chin when others were dying of lung cancer. The only TV she liked watching were the ULE Senate debates when they debated issues like overpopulation and melting polar caps, in a way that left hope alive or, at least, didn’t outright kill it. She sucked these discussions in like a sponge and sometimes, as far as she knew, invented more eloquent ways to debate than the ULE senators’. The surreal comparison of the TV world to her life in Jenli left her puzzled, but also reinforced the urgency to study and train. What if, as an outside chance, the TV was right and the world was drowning? She was going to be prepared.

In a recent broadcast, the Australian ULE senators advocated a resolution that would force each citizen to vote for one other citizen to die, with the catch that a voter could choose to sacrifice himself instead, and take the spot of an earmarked person. Li-Mei understood the argument; she had studied Plato’s theories, contrasting a life of burden versus a sacrifice with purity. However, she opposed the Australians’ proposal and questioned their population-control ethics, much like the rest of the ULE Senate.

Li-Mei spent her days with a purpose, but if someone asked her if she were happy, she wouldn’t know what to say. She wanted to uncover the secrets of her past and share her present with people other than the Servants, but otherwise, she wasn’t unhappy. She had Jenli, her classes, her jet-black hair, which she loved to comb before going to bed, and for a few weeks now, she had Taxi.