Connaught flyover unfolded like a wet blade, and Iris took it the way knives like to be taken—edge-on. Behind her, six engines spooled into a chorus meant to intimidate, all brand and bravado and money that thought it could buy weather.
She fed the throttle. Pillars flicked past, vermilion drips still wet from monks repainting overnight. The air tasted of wet copper and old incense, Hong Kong's favorite cocktail whenever gods argued with maintenance.
Lotus-Black fell in like they'd rehearsed it: two tight on her back wheel, two wide to pen her in, one hovering a lane off to film the humiliation. Their fairings glowed with imported brag-code, slogans spilling across rims. Iris snorted—Hong Kong wards ate this kind of tourist magic for breakfast. Iris glanced once and filed the glyphs as useless.
"Keep up," she said into her helmet. No one heard it but the machine, which purred like it agreed.
They swung off the flyover into a feeder that knifed toward Sheung Wan. The city down here still carried storm bruise: tarps bandaging scaffolds, black sacks of ruined prayer paper stacked like wet loaves. Stalls yawned awake under plastic, aunties cursing the rain as if it had done this just to them. A tram dinged twice like a reluctant apology. Iris cut under its nose and felt the riders behind her hesitate—foreign wrists checking their entitlement against a two-hundred-ton argument.
The backpack shifted, a small weight reminding her that she wasn't alone. The kitten slept through gunfights and thunder, but engines and wards made it dreamy, a heavy warmth riding her spine. She kept it there because she didn't trust the flat to be empty, and because some part of her had already started to measure danger in how close it stayed.
A wet market opened ahead—alley slit, tarps sagging, the floor a patchwork of puddles reflecting red lanterns and dead neon. On a good day, you didn't take a bike through here. Today was a quieter kind of stupid. She dropped a gear, tipped in, and let the alley narrow until it felt like the city was swallowing her whole.
Vendors shouted, half raucous, half delighted to have something to shout at. Cleavers paused mid-chop. A kid holding a kite frame of copper wire gaped as she ghosted past and then, because children worship speed, ran whooping after her until his grandmother snagged him by the collar and blessed him with a slap.
Lotus-Black followed—pride had its own engine. Their HUDs saw a clean corridor, but tires told the truth: slick tile, fish scales, a smear of oil waiting to drop them. One rider tried to be clever and hopped a curb to pass her on the left; his fork clipped a string of hanging squid. Tentacles slapped his visor. The market roared approval.
A box truck blocked the far mouth of the alley, old bones and new paint, its bed stacked with styrofoam coolers stenciled with kanji and optimism. It was half into a three-point turn that was really a twelve-point prayer. The driver had a cigarette clenched in his teeth and the patient eyes of a man who had already lived through five couriers and three typhoons.
There was a gap. Not a good one. The undercarriage hung just high enough that a sane person would brake and negotiate. Iris wasn't in the mood. She let the machine settle, weight low, and then she breathed in and the world went thin.
The backpack tapped her helmet—pam—soft as a knuckle on a door.
"Yeah," she said to the weight, grin automatic. "I see it."
She dropped her left boot, let the leather kiss tile for balance, then flattened herself against the bike and knifed under the truck bed. Sparks zipped her backplate, fizzing against the jacket's storm-scars. For a heartbeat she scraped sparks under the truck, ribs pressed to steel, then shot out into open air. The driver, cigarette still clenched, saw the Lotus-Black nosing under his rig after Iris and casually dropped the clutch. The truck lurched an inch, just enough to force the rider to brake hard. Tires squealed, balance wobbled, and the market roared at the foreigner who'd been punked by a man in flip-flops.
One down. Five left.
Behind: an oath in a language she didn't care for. A Lotus-Black rider tried to follow. His bars kissed a dangling lattice of red-thread talismans tied off a vendor's awning—someone's flood prayer turned into hanging teeth. Paper snapped. The charm bit. For a flash, Iris swore she saw the sigils stand up in the air and sink ethereal fangs into his front wheel. Rubber screamed. The bike jackknifed sideways. Styrofoam exploded into a snowstorm of fish guts and ice as he scythed a stack, then pinwheeled into a pillar and stuttered to a horrible stillness.
The market made a sound like temple bells and football stands having a baby. The aunties whooped. Someone shouted hou2 aa3! Good! Good! Monks repainting a ward on a tram pole gave Iris a look that wasn't quite a blessing. She didn't take offense. Gods and cops shared a tight smile whenever she passed.
She popped out into sunlight that had no business calling itself that, a washed steel sheen off the harbor. Connaught Road West ran fat and slick, lanes smeared with diesel and apology. She took the inside line and let a bus be her shield. Its belly smelled of wet iron and incense, the city's two religions mixed to a broth. Lotus-Black reorganized behind her—five now, angry math—and crowded her lane at the next merge.
Her visor danced with little electronic lies: lane guidance flicker, hazard glyphs mispronouncing themselves. A corp billboard overhead glitched from storm relief loans to a live feed of two of the Lotus-Black riders; a cameradrone had found its story and, like all foreign media, decided it already knew the ending.
"Who's filming who?" Iris muttered.
One rider came in close enough she could count the bad luck beads on his brake line. He wanted to lean her into the rail. She let him think it for three beats, then checked her mirror—tram rail ahead, broken paint, an old bronze coin someone had epoxied to the asphalt because their grandmother told them it would hold the road together. The little lies of a city that didn't trust concrete alone.
Pam.
This time harder, heel of a soft paw thumping the back of her head. Reflex before thought; she ducked. The Lotus-Black on her right, committed to the squeeze, went a hair too high. His mirror clipped a low metal sign bolted to the barrier: FLOOD LINE—DO NOT CROSS DURING BLACK SIGNAL. The sign sheared and spun free, showering him with glittering letters. He flinched, twitch reflex enough to kick him into the tram groove. His front tire kissed the slot and swore allegiance to it. He fought it; the rail fought back. He wobbled into a stuttering fishtail, saved it at the last breath with a howl of tire and ego. The sign spun away into traffic, clanging once against the tram barrier before vanishing. The Lotus-Black rider swore loud enough Iris caught it through her visor's static. His wheel jammed in the tram groove, popped free with a fishtail. He recovered—humiliated. The tram stop crowd clapped like they'd bought tickets.
"Mind the locals," Iris sang, and shot between a taxi and regret.
Four left.
They rode into incense. A coffee can on the median smoldered where someone had left joss for a safe commute; the ash swirled up into her visor, scratched the back of her throat with temple memory. A maintenance worker in a hardhat tucked a hammer under his arm and slapped a fresh ward on a signpost without bothering to wipe the old one first. The new talisman crawled wetly over the old and made a third thing that hummed like a wasp. Lotus-Black's HUDs hiccuped in unison. One rider slapped his visor like that would make Cantonese become English.
Drones found them again. City ones were shy, and her bubble of wrongness made them act like gulls in crosswind. Police ones had learned all week to tie themselves to blessings. A pair of matte eggs skimmed the divider, paper slips taped to their bellies like silly moustaches. The characters wobbled with air, but they held. Their lenses watched Iris with the blank religion of bureaucracy.
Get the footage, not the girl, she guessed. Kwan would be somewhere in a van, telling the rookies to keep their seatbelts on and their opinions to themselves.
She couldn't help herself. "Hope you're rolling, Inspector."
Traffic closed like teeth. Roadworks after the typhoon had cut lanes down around a collapsed manhole, orange fencing praying to be believed. A supervisor in a yellow vest was napping behind a barricade with a congee spoon still in his mouth. Iris's line died to one miserable lane and three loud opinions.
Left: scaffolding lashed in bamboo and blue tarp, rainwater dripping down it like a beaded curtain. Right: a tram stop lined in damp posters promising career advancement and debt consolidation. Forward: a corp sedan that didn't want to be scratched.
"Cute," she said, and put her front wheel where a polite person wouldn't.
The sedan twitched aside without meaning to; people did that around her. Space opened, resentful but real. She slid through, cleared the bottleneck, and then the city gave her a present for good behavior: a lane of fresh blacktop, unpainted, slick as ink. She let the engine sing and remembered she had a body she liked to use.
Two Lotus-Black bit her tail again, angrier than hungry. Their exhausts howled credit limits. Her overlay suggested a right turn that would take her into a tunnel that still smelled of drowning. She ignored it and took the left instead, straight onto the tram corridor, where diet monks and transport engineers had been in a quiet war for a century.
The rails shone like wet knives. The monks had been here while she fed the cat: thick vermilion sigils slapped straight onto the asphalt between tracks, still wet enough to smear if a bus forgot to lift its belly. Wind had worried the ink into feathered edges. The characters said things if you knew how to read hunger and fear.
Trams hated to share but they loved to warn. Bells dinged somewhere up-line, a sound like polite doom. Iris settled her wheels into the nothing space between rail and paint and let the bike balance itself on nerve.
Lotus-Black followed because pride still owned their hands. As soon as their front tires crossed the first fresh sigil, the ward woke. Not angry—just awake. Electronic suspension hiccuped on both machines in a synchronized shrug. Their AR overlays tore themselves into nonsense: hexagrams vomiting stock tickers, lane lines turning into the outlines of koi. One rider shook his head like a dog flinging water. The ward's second character—the one that told wind to behave—took offense at his arrogance and gave it back as a slap. His bike hopped sideways six inches as if a giant had flicked it. He saved it—barely—and came on spitting.
Iris grinned behind glass. "Welcome to my church."
The tram itself slid into view ahead, mass and manners. Driver's face unreadable behind rain-streaked glass, hands steady on a wheel older than any of them. Iris drifted to the right, skirting a shrine bolted to a pillar where someone had set oranges and a bottle of Vitasoy for the line's hungry gods. The shrine's lamp flickered to life as she passed—quick flare, then calm. The kitten's weight warmed at her spine. Someone else purred.
Behind: one of the foreign bikes hit a ward someone had painted wrong under pressure. The character meant to repel water had been smudged into something closer to push anything, thanks. The rider took the corner too tidy. The ward disagreed. His rear wheel bounced like it had hit a trampoline—just a handspan, but enough to untie him from his own speed. He went sideways into the notch by the track. A shower of sparks. A scream turned into the sound of money becoming scrap. He slid twenty meters, sparks a comet tail, and came to rest kissing the base of a lion statue whose mouth had been stuffed with joss paper to keep it from eating children in the night. The lion didn't approve. It never did.
The next sigil wasn't for traffic at all—it was a fire ward. Engines are only caged flame, and the charm snuffed his machine flat. Lights guttered, HUD blinked zero, and the pack left him shame-rolling to the curb.
Three left. Enough to keep the chase honest. Not enough to scare her. The tram's bell dinged behind like a benediction as she dropped downhill, weight light, mouth aching with a laugh she didn't have time to make.
The city widened into salt. Wind off the water shoved at her shoulders, testing loyalties. The skyline across Victoria Harbour had remembered its face; towers adjusted their AR skins, bleeding philanthropy ads over last night's disaster footage. APEX promised resilience. Banks promised loans. Someone promised blessings at scale.
"Bless me small," she told the air. "That's enough."
The kitten shifted once, a contented knead. She risked a chuckle—tiny, sharp—and then the road bent, and the world got weirder.