The elevator dropped her back through the tower's throat, lights strobing over stainless steel like a countdown. The doors slid open to an air that smelled of chillers, jasmine cleaner, and expensive nothing. Ozone's hush snapped behind her; the rest of the hotel hummed with post-typhoon nerves—staff speaking in the soft, efficient tones of people paid to pretend storms were someone else's problem.
She cut through the lobby, past a concierge whose AR smile flickered when he glanced at her. The lobby sagged back toward corporate normal, but the concierge's AR grin cracked when he glanced at her. In the garage below, the air stank of jasmine cleaner and old incense. Her bike waited between two black sedans, matte and impatient. She thumbed the key; the engine rose like a cat hackling up. The barrier arm twitched, rose, and the guard looked anywhere but at her.
She rolled toward the exit gate. The barrier arm twitched, then rose before she even braked. A guard in a neat cap looked anywhere but at her. The camera's red light blinked twice and died. Wei's wake still washed through here. Good. She'd take any slipstream she could get.
Then she was in the open—West Kowloon breathing damp heat, sky a pale lid. The highways wore the typhoon in scabs: tarps flapped from half-collapsed stacks of bamboo, work crews in orange pounded new bolts into signs that had tried to fly away. Emergency trucks drowsed on the shoulder, lights rotating lazy. The smell was hot brake dust, and the sweet ash of wet incense.
She slid into Route 8, the bike bucking once as if glad to be allowed to do the thing it was built for. The AR HUD in her visor jittered as it synced with the city grid—lane markers soft as watercolor, hazard glyphs popping in and out where wards chewed at the code. She set the overlay to minimal: speed, time, compass, a thin sliver of horizon with the sun's predicted rise like a knife-edge crawling toward her.
"Alright," she told the road, because talking to herself made the math behave. "Airport in under sixty. Stonecutters. Tsing Yi. Tsing Ma. Lantau Link. No miracles. No portals. Just asphalt and bad decisions."
She threaded the first clot of buses without touching the brake. The buses lumbered like old gods who refused to die, temple bells in their guts. A taxi drifted across three lanes with the weary entitlement of a man who'd destroyed better cars than this. Iris breathed, cut under his mirror, and let her engine snarl just loud enough to teach him about consequences.
The Western Harbour skyline fell behind her. Ahead, Stonecutters Bridge threw itself across the water like a blade. The towers wore fresh ward paint—thick vermilion brushstrokes that dripped down concrete ribs, still wet where monks had leaned out over harnesses at dawn. The air around the pylons buzzed the way a snake vibrates its tail. As she arrowed onto the ascent the HUD fuzzed, the grid's tidy green lines smearing to white noise. Charm-fields leaked across the lanes in pale ripples. Her bike shivered once under her, then steadied. Tech hated magic; she cut between them like an abscess lance. They burned charms. She burned rubber.
A maintenance truck loomed ahead, hazard lights spitting. Two workers in plastic ponchos stood on the shoulder, repainting a glyph that warded wind. The bridge remembered the storm; it clanked in its bones. Iris leaned into the wind-shove and let the weird calm come—the thin space where she and the machine were one thing that happened to wear two shadows. Her music clicked in her ear, the track auto-loading from muscle memory: throat singing coiling under a low, synthetic thump. Bass like a steady pulse. Voices like a mountain humming. It made sense of speed. It always had.
Coming off Stonecutters, the city broadened, low roofs thick with water tanks and satellite dishes like bent coins. The highway curved toward Tsing Yi with a line of trucks dragging storm-lashed cranes behind them, orange flags whipping. She slipped through their blind spots like smoke. One flatbed started to drift, then his radio stuttered static and the driver yanked the wheel back without knowing why. They usually didn't know why.
Her timer ticked. Forty-two minutes to touchdown.
"Don't you dare be early," she muttered to the plane the way sailors swore at weather. "You wait for me like a good little bird."
She reached a toll checkpoint still smeared where floodwater had kissed it. The booths were open—screens glitching, attendants slouched—but a police van boxed the left lane, and an officer in damp body armor flicked a gloved hand at bikes to slow. A sensor arch had been bolted up overnight, cables snaking into a generator. New corporate initiative: collect plates, measure faces, call it public safety. Iris's overlay pinged a polite request to identify. She killed it with a thought.
She downshifted, rolled to a crawl. The officer's helmet visors made him unreadable, but the set of his shoulders said tired. He held out a scanner baton shaped like a priest's wooden fish. The baton crackled at its edges, charms inscribed in the lacquer.
"Lane," he said.
"Which one's blessed?" Iris said through the visor, voice sweet. "I don't want the gods to miss me."
He stared a beat too long, then the baton coughed sparks and died. The officer made a small, involuntary gesture with his left hand, the one grandmothers taught for warding off unlucky strangers. "Go," he said. Not because she asked. Because the moment wanted her gone.
She went.
Tsing Yi rose like the back of a metallic beast, vent stacks stamping white against a sky that had begun to think about light. Far below, barges shouldered through water still fat with debris—broken styrofoam shrines, plastic chairs, a tangle of neon tubing that would never light again. Corporate towers in the distance remade their faces, shucking battered ads for new ones in cycles, money shedding skin.
She hit the ramp for the Tsing Ma Bridge and felt the air change. Out here the wind had a sea-mouth, salted, and it grabbed at riders like a hand. The bridge's suspension lines hummed. Someone had burned offerings in the alcove near the first tower; the ash scattered in a pattern that wouldn't be noticed by anyone who didn't know what it meant. Protection. Or warning. Hard to tell the difference on a good day. Today the difference was academic.
She tucked low and let the bike cut a clean seam along the cable's harp. Jingling charms hung from the maintenance rail, damp with spray, clacking irregularly like teeth in a jar. A priest in a hardhat stood by the second tower with a bucket of red, repainting the wind-ward glyphs, his brush moving quick as if speed invited miracles. He didn't look at her. He didn't have to. She could feel the eye of the island on her back.
Thirty-six minutes.
The Lantau Link unspooled in long, precise ribbons, newer asphalt with corporate gloss, lanes broad and smug. AR signage promised relief credits and subsidies for drone replacement if you signed up today. A test convoy of corp delivery octocopters buzzed in formation across the bay like a school of obedient fish, their vector lights clean, their baskets empty. A gust, a flicker of old shrine-smoke from a tunnel mouth—and three of them wobbled, then corrected, algorithms swearing. A fourth hiccuped and veered away as if offended. Tech and magic nodded to each other like rival uncles over a gambling table.
Iris's visor picked up something old stitched into the concrete—thin lines of sand and powdered bone pressed into the shoulder where the highway had cut through ancient graves. Construction crews had paved over them with HKSAR smiles and liability disclaimers, but anyone with eyes could see where the asphalt puckered and where it didn't. She drifted a hair toward the center lane and felt the bike ease, as if it too preferred not to ride on bones.
Her mind flicked back to the bar without asking—Wei's hands, scarred and still; the way his tattoos had glowed in the glass dim; the line he'd spoken about dawn with the certainty that makes superstition a schedule. She'd thrown a grin at it like a coin into a wishing well. On the house. The silence afterward had weighed more than any contract. This wasn't just a job; this was a promise with teeth.
Traffic thinned as she pushed along North Lantau Highway. The airport's spine ran ahead all mirror and line, pylons marching stoic into cloud. A corporate AR banner unfurled above the lanes, chirping about post-storm resilience while a crew below hosed mud off the median with the grace of men who had been awake since last year. A dragonfly drone hovered near the wash's spray to sample air quality. It zipped away when her engine bellowed, like it knew it had better ways to die.
Twenty-two minutes.
She opened the throttle until the engine sang the note she liked, the one that stitched her bones together. The wind took her shoulders hard enough to make thoughts scatter. That was the point. Throat singing folded into bass in her ear, and for a blink the road was a river and she was something built to swim. She laughed once, a bark the wind snatched and ate, and took the next curve as if it had been drawn for her hand.
A checkpoint sprouted where the highway should have flowed. Temporary, teeth bared—folding barriers, police van, Airport Authority signage, and a corporate container truck parked sideways like a bouncer's palm. Sensors craned out over the lanes, their housings ringed with paper talismans and tiny LEDs, half blessing, half firmware revision. A young officer waved windmilling at the handful of vehicles approaching. The world's last functioning minibar.
Iris downshifted without actually deciding to. The officer stepped into her lane with the optimistic courage of someone new to power. He lifted a hand, palm out, the universal symbol for you there, pretty please don't kill me.
She popped her visor. Let him see a face that wasn't impressed.
"Closed," he said, voice hitching as the wind shoved it sideways. "Airport perimeter is—"
"Repair operations," Iris said with the flat certainty of a person who'd written the memo. "I know. I'm part of them."
"ID?" His mouth moved around the word like it tasted of rubber.
She patted her jacket as if about to produce something useful. Behind him, the corporate truck's AR panel scrolled fine print: By passing this point you consent to... Iris's gaze slid over the panel and didn't stick. Over the officer's shoulder, a senior cop leaned against the van's grille, drinking from a paper cup, eyes shot with storm. He stared at Iris in a way that said he was trying to place her and failing. The world did that around her—took a step back without knowing why.
The young cop's scanner coughed sparks, then flared sudden bright — for half a heartbeat Iris's plate shimmered on the display, half-formed, numbers ghosting into view. The kid's brows shot up, hand tightening on the baton.
Then the glyphs bled, sigils dripping like wet ink, and the display collapsed back into static. The baton crackled once, pitiful, then died. The young cop swore under his breath, shaking it like a remote that had betrayed him.
Iris lifted two fingers, lazy salute toward the senior leaning on the van grille. "Your system's wet," she said, sweet as vinegar. "You'll be there all day. Let me not be one more problem in your queue."
The senior's gaze sharpened — long enough that she felt him weighing the moment — then it softened into the tired recognition of a man who remembered ghosts. He raised his paper cup like a toast.
"Let her through," he called.
The kid stepped aside, relief and confusion braided so tight he probably wouldn't know which was which later. The barrier retracted with a scissor squeal. Iris rolled past slow enough to look obedient, then fed the bike a whisper of throttle and left their little knot of authority shrinking in the mirrors.
The highway straightened and the sea opened beside it—gray and flat, dotted with the black commas of buoys. The airport grew like a clean promise: terminals glassy and smug, lights strobing on the runways as if nothing in the world had ever gone wrong here. It had. It always would. But the show was the point.
Fourteen minutes.
She rode the fringes of plans she wasn't supposed to know. Service roads veined the perimeter like capillaries, some live, some quiet. A set of gates stood open to let a convoy of maintenance carts chug inward, driven by men in reflective vests still blinking sleep out of their eyes. A priest with a safety badge tucked into his belt stood at the side, thumb-stamping small red seals onto the carts' plastic dashboards as they passed, an industrial sacrament. His head turned a degree as Iris slid by. He didn't raise a hand.
Her visor chirped: Restricted zone. Present authorization. The font was polite. The subtext wasn't. Iris killed the overlay again and took the service loop as if she'd been born to it. The bike's tires hissed over concrete still damp in the seams. A runway unrolled to her left, floodlights tearing white out of the growing gray. The control tower stabbed up like a metronome, steady and tall.
She found a patch of shadow behind a cargo hangar and let the engine settle into a low purr. Not off—never off, not with the clock breathing down her neck—but idle, like a big cat waiting.
Her throat singing track faded to a thrum and stopped. The world rushed in: gulls, engines, the high whine of turbines spooling in a throat that hadn't quite decided to scream yet.
Ahead, in the wash of floodlight, a long body turned to line up with the asphalt—silver skin scabbed by rain scars, logos crisp, corporate prayers etched into the hull's seam lines in paint no one admitted was there. The plane dropped slow and sure, wheels seeking purchase.
Iris rolled her wrists to shake the stiffness out. One hour had felt like a dare. Now the numbers were about to go sideways. Touchdown plus thirty to kill the sun. A city between here and a penthouse threaded with pride and old enemies. A girl she didn't know, carrying a man's gravity in her blood.
"Alright," she told the machine coming for her. "Let's dance."
The wheels kissed tarmac. Smoke plumed soft. The runway thundered like a drum hit under the ocean. Floodlights flared along the path, and the aircraft's spoilers rose like a bird shrugging off rain.
Iris looked east. The horizon bled the faintest hint of silver, a blade being drawn from a scabbard by a careful hand.
She tightened her gloves until leather bit. The bike shivered, eager.
"Welcome to Hong Kong. Population: bad timing."
Outbound done. The real run hadn't even started.