Rain needled her visor the moment she turned out of Fortress Hill, each drop catching neon and breaking it into shards across her faceplate. King's Road lay near-deserted, a smear of slick asphalt broken only by the glow of shuttered shops and the jitter of half-dead signs. Hong Kong never slept, but tonight it was holding its breath.
She leaned the bike into the curve, the tires whispering over water-slick lines. Her AR overlay crackled where the tram rails crossed; the old wards bled interference, static snow chewing through maps and adverts. For a moment the world smeared, then it snapped clean again inside that strange little bubble that always seemed to hug her. Null, invisible, whatever Cho liked to call it. She just called it *hers*.
At North Point, a single minibus idled under an awning, driver leaning on the hatch with a cigarette cupped against the rain. He gave her a flat, unreadable look as she passed — the kind older men gave to reckless riders, part disapproval, part nostalgia. She grinned under the visor and gave him a lazy two-finger salute. The bus's brake lights blinked back in what might have been a blessing.
The harbor on her left heaved under the sky, water turned pewter. Kowloon's skyline across the chop looked like a paper cutout dissolving in rain. Ferry horns had gone silent; even the waves felt muffled, as if the storm had pressed a heavy hand on the city's throat.
She dropped gears as Quarry Bay's drawbridge loomed. Its red hazard glyphs pulsed through the rain: METAL RAT: AVOID CONTRACTS before glitching away into LIFTING SOON. DELAY EXPECTED. Two repair drones clung beneath the girders like bats, signal lamps twitching. She felt them try to paint her, then falter — her signature sliding through their optics like oil off glass.
"Not tonight," she murmured.
She gunned it. The surface of the bridge was a washboard of puddles and paint lines, each one a risk. She kept her weight low, arms loose, felt the bike slither then catch again. Behind her the clanging bells started — cut short, muffled — someone had looped a strand of copper coins over the clapper. Superstition, or maybe maintenance. The effect was the same: no clear sound, just dull warning.
The barriers clanked down on either side as she punched across. One arm of the bridge began to groan upward, steel teeth prying at the sky. She slipped through the gap with a bark of laughter, the engine's roar swallowed by rain. In her mirrors, red light flared across the asphalt as the city cut the artery behind her. Ahead lay Kowloon.
The approach road felt narrower than she remembered, boxed in by shuttered warehouses and sagging cables. A police cruiser sat with its hood open, a talisman taped to the battery casing. Two officers argued under umbrellas; one stabbed at an AR tablet, cursed when the map collapsed into a horoscope. Iris didn't slow. The tablet wouldn't like her anyway.
She slid under an overpass where twin lion statues crouched in rain. Real stone, not new concrete everyone adored. Their camera halos had been painted vermilion, streaking now into bloody tears. Her bike shuddered once as she passed between them — engine coughing as if it too recognized the threshold — then steadied. The air smelled of incense through the helmet seal.
A barricade squad worked ahead, fitting interlocks into road channels, rain hammering their slickers. Talismans fluttered from their belts like punk tassels. One kid looked up at her, half a grin forming, but his supervisor shoved him back to task. The city was sealing its ribs, and she was the bone slipping through.
Her comm buzzed against her jaw. A single text.
CHO: north gate. yellow raincoat. don't sign. don't open.
She sent back a single dot, the road too slick for thumbs.
The Arcology loomed block by block, growing out of the weather like a glass fortress. First came the skin — housing stacks with window cages and soggy laundry flapping like flags. Then the muscle — skybridges laced across towers, rain sluicing down in silver sheets. Finally the heart — a walled city rebuilt for modern appetite: dense, vertical, bright-eyed. LED strips traced seams in corporate cyan. Hydroponic terraces spilled runoff through hidden gutters, waterfalls disguised as drainage.
The north gate waited ahead, it's steel jaws open. Two stone lions flanked it, offerings drowned at their paws: oranges bobbing in a rusted tin bowl, joss paper plastered into soggy paste. The gate's scanner flashed her plate, stuttered, and spat APOLOGY across its marquee.
Iris sighed. "Sure."
A guard in a clear poncho stepped out of the booth. He bent down, rain streaking his collar, peering through her visor. His handheld beeped, coughed static, then displayed a seafood ad where her details should've been. He frowned, slapped it, got an error glyph that looked suspiciously like a fortune hexagram.
"Look," Iris said through the rain, voice easy. "Cho sent me. Old karaoke addict, pays in cash, always lights incense for Lunar? One minute in, one minute out. If I screw it up, you never saw me."
The guard blinked. "Cho?" His shoulders eased. "He brought dumplings for New Year." A pause, then a sigh. "Alright. Quick."
He muscled the crank, gate grinding up just enough for her to duck the bike under. The lions stared, blind, dripping and absolutely indifferent for human struggles.
Inside, the rain echoed different to outside. It came in sheets funneled between blocks, drumming hollow through stairwells, whispering down skybridges. The air smelled like wet concrete and scallion pancakes. A kid in a Spider-Man poncho chased a plastic boat along a gutter stream, his grandmother cursing the storm from somewhere inside. Iris smiled at the sight.
Her HUD flickered, advertising nothing she could use. Directions smeared, arrows collapsed into noise, as if the arcology itself had decided she didn't exist. Fine. She coasted by memory, dodging rebar leaned like a spear, mop buckets overflowing, a dog sleeping through it all.
The north service mouth yawned ahead. A man in a yellow raincoat was waiting there, under the eaves, clutching a box covered in tarp like it was the last dry thing in Kowloon. His hood shadowed a thin face, sleepless eyes, shoes already ruined by puddles.
Iris killed the engine but stayed astride. "You Cho's friend?"
He jerked, then nodded too fast. Up close, she saw the nervous tics: thumb raw where a ring used to be, jaw working like he was chewing something intangible. A lab man. The smell of disinfectant cut through the rain.
"You're late," he muttered, half-accusation instead of greeting.
"It's raining," she said. "Everything's late."
"Don't open," he muttered hastily as he shoved the box toward her, voice taut. "Straight to Lantau Monastery. Don't stop, don't open."
Iris tilted her head. "Relax, doctor. I'm not licking your samples."
He leaned in, rain slicking his hood. "If they knew I gave it to you, I'd be dead before dawn." His hand jerked back from the box like it had burned him. "It isn't supposed to be touched outside the wards. Don't... don't open. And tell Cho this is last time I am doing this."
He didn't smile. His eyes flicked past her, scanning for threats that weren't there. The box was heavier than it looked when she took it — not metal-heavy, more like dense heavy. Its composite shell was stamped with both corp legalese and something that looked suspiciously like a half-baked talisman.
She strapped the box tight against her rig, rain sliding down her collar like cold fingers. The lab man took two steps back, as if the bike itself was going to bite him in the ankle, and hastily retreated into the arcology shadow. The storm pushed harder.
The north gate spat her out into the storm again. Rain hammered asphalt in white bursts, as if the whole sky had sprung a leak. The box sat steady against her spine, heavy and warm. She didn't think about it. Just another delivery.
She cut south, tires slicing water, the city folding in behind her. Tsim Sha Tsui should've been chaos — shoppers, karaoke spillover, tour groups waving umbrellas like weapons. Instead it lay hollow, lights still burning but with no one to wear them. Storefront AR shouted sales to empty streets, mannequins grinning under taped glass.
A giant screen over Nathan Road flickered storm protocol notices between ads for herbal immunity shots and longevity implants. BLACK RAIN. SEEK SHELTER. Then, in the next breath: YOUTH SKIN: STAY BEAUTIFUL AT ANY AGE. The mix was obscene, but that was Hong Kong. Apocalypse always came with a discount.
She throttled harder. Engine below her roared. Puddles broke under her wheels, neon spilling red, gold, jade. The harbor on her right was a sheet of hammered silver, the horizon already swallowed.
Checkpoint lights cut through the rain ahead. A line of barricades straddled the bridge lanes, steel teeth glistening wet. Military police stood black-armored under the downpour, helmets streaming water, batons tucked like lazy rifles. A portable shrine hunched under a tarp at the barricade's feet; its joss sticks sputtered, incense smoke dragged sideways by the storm. The mix of machine and ritual made the air taste like battery acid.
She downshifted, rolled up slow as tires hissed on wet asphalt. The sergeant lifted a hand. "Road's closed."Iris flipped her visor, rain needling her lashes. She didn't plead. She just looked at him.Something in his shoulders went soft, like a thread cut. He glanced at the shrine, then at her bike, then at nothing at all."Let her through," he said, already annoyed at himself.
Iris grinned, visor dropping. "Do1 ze6, officer. Have a good evening."
She rolled forward before he could change his mind. The barricade gaped just wide enough to swallow her and the bike.
The bridge stretched out ahead, long and high, a rib of steel cutting across black water. Patrol beacons pulsed red along its spine, rain smearing their light into a pulsebeat. The wind hit harder, knifing through her jacket, shoving at her shoulders. The box shifted faintly with the gusts. Lightning tore across the clouds, white and jagged. For half a heartbeat, the sky wasn't sky at all — it had shape, ridges, the curl of a horned shadow coiled across the harbor. A trick of the light, gone in the next breath. Iris barked a laugh into her helmet. "Great. Seeing dragons in the clouds now. No more gin."
She leaned low, weight forward, and let the machine carry her. Behind, Kowloon shut its teeth. Ahead, the island of Lantau crouched under stormlight. Somewhere above, the monks would be rewriting their hexagrams, chanting new omens.
Iris only grinned sharper inside the helmet. "Let's see if you're worth five times, girl," she told the storm, and opened the throttle.