Busted Flush

Her longtime sidekick and cameraman, Chen, a chunky crew-cut gargoyle kneeling at her side, seemed focused as tightly as his camera. Hei-lian had to agree that what they’d just captured, the boy’s mutilation followed by the ace formerly known as the Radical leading a surprise assault on his tormentors, was electric. A victory for her team as complete as the one the commandos were even now mopping up.

A young native woman, willowy-tall and fresh-faced as a child, emerged from tall grass to Hei-lian’s left. Hei-lian’s instincts started barking like excited guard dogs. “Chen,” she said urgently. “Track left.”

A brief scowl creased his big round face behind his viewfinder. She actually thought that in their years of working together as a team he’d learned to overlook the fact that she was a mere woman—as well as the indignity of having to take orders from her. He swung the camera left.

“What’s with this chick?” he asked. They spoke English in the field, for practice. “She’s moving like a zombie from Dawn of the Dead.”

“Get that sat dish set up now,” Hei-lian shouted. The use of Mandarin instead of English made the young tech wiping puke from his mouth with the back of his hand jump like a jolt from a cattle prod. He and his assistant didn’t fumble as they unfolded the small metal flower of the portable uplink. They didn’t dare. “Get us a signal.”

“Why bother?” Chen said. “The healer ace. Oh, boy. What? She’s going to conjure bandages out of thin air? Bo-ring.”

“Just keep shooting,” Hei-lian said.

“All right, I know. Human interest. Yada-yada-yada.”

But Hei-lian knew something more was happening. She wasn’t really a telejournalist. Or rather, she was that among other things. And she was getting the intuition in stereo.

The African girl’s smooth face showed keen suffering now, as if she felt not just sympathy but the brutalized child’s actual pain. An empath-ace? wondered that specialized part of Hei-lian’s mind. The Ministry of State Security, the Guojia Anquan Bu, Guoanbu for short, had no information on the girl: she was new. Their would-be allies, the PPA, were holding out on them. Again.

“Hong,” she said.

“Got it!” the tender-tummied tech sang out. “You’re live, Sun.”

She straightened and shifted so that Chen could frame her briefly with the young woman in the background. “This is Sun Hei-lian, CCTV, reporting live from an Ijaw village in the disputed oil lands of the Niger River Delta, where Leopard Men commandos from the People’s Paradise of Africa, led by the ace they call Mokèlé-mbèmbé after the legendary hippopotamus-slaying river dragon, have just stopped a Nigerian platoon advised by British SAS troopers from carrying out a massacre. Now PPA ace Dolores Michel is about to heal a youthful atrocity victim.”

Hei-lian moved to clear the frame. Obediently Chen focused on Dolores. She had slowed even further, as if the air had congealed around her. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Tendons stood out on her throat. Hei-lian could see her shaking from here.

Ten feet from the boy she stopped. Her body spasmed violently. She threw back her head and screamed.

In great gushes of blood her arms blew off her body at exactly the same points at which the boy’s had been severed.

Sun Hei-lian and crew emerged first from the Gulfstream that had brought them from a strip in the recently incorporated PPA province of Cameroon, into the hot green twilight of Kongoville’s Patrice Lumumba International Airport. They set up on the apron next to the mobile ramp to shoot.

Medical technicians carried Dolores Michel down on her gurney, moaning in agony unallayed by painkillers. Briefed by a propaganda officer during the return from the Delta, Hei-lian now knew they interfered with her ace.

Tom Weathers stepped into the sunset light slanting across the Congo River. The crowd held back by Simba Brigade soldiers roared adoration.

A striking woman, tall and slim with blond hair flying, ran from the knot of waiting dignitaries through heat that rose from the pavement like shock waves. She caught Weathers in a passionate embrace. For all her self-control Hei-lian couldn’t prevent a mouth-twist of distaste.

The woman detached herself from Weathers. To Hei-lian’s keen discomfort she ran up and hugged her. She was taller than the Chinese woman, who was middling tall even by Western standards.

“Hei-lian,” she said.

She had the voice of an adult woman, the inflection of a child. Sprout was not Weathers’s lover, but his daughter—protected fiercely throughout his mercurial career as the last international revolutionary. She had the mind and emotional development of a seven-year-old.

Disgusting, that he indulges the creature so, Hei-lian thought as Sprout released her. She fought the urge to dab at herself, as if to wipe away some unseen contagion.