Chapter 2: The Collection
The artist’s smile was a clean, white knife in the sterile light. Li Wei’s body moved before his mind could process the words. He spun on his heel and ran.
He didn’t choose a direction. He just fled the white room, his shoes slapping against the polished floors, the image of Zhang Hao’s gold-veined eye burning behind his own. He took turns at random, propelled by pure adrenal terror, past doors that hissed shut and archways that led to more impossible, opulent rooms. The pulsing music had stopped. The manor was silent now, a tomb awaiting his footfalls.
A servant stepped into his path, arms outstretched. Li Wei didn’t slow. He dropped his shoulder and barreled into the man, a move from the rugby pitch. The breath left the servant with a soft oof, and Li Wei stumbled past, feeling a sick satisfaction at the solid impact.
He found a narrow, plain door half-hidden behind a tapestry. It wasn’t grand. It was meant for staff. He wrenched it open and plunged into a steep, stone stairwell. The air changed instantly. The perfumed warmth vanished, replaced by a damp, frigid chill that smelled of wet rock and that same, persistent copper-metallic tang. The only sound was the frantic echo of his own breathing and the distant, lonely drip… drip… of water.
The stairs descended into a throat of darkness. He had no choice but to follow them. Up was death. Down was unknown. He took the steps two at a time, his hand skidding along the rough, slimy wall.
The stairs ended in a low, arched corridor carved from raw bedrock. Greenish light emanated from faint, bioluminescent fungi smeared in streaks along the ceiling. The walls wept condensation. The air hummed with moisture and a low, electrical thrum that vibrated in his teeth.
Then he saw the tanks.
They were set into recesses in the stone, floor-to-ceiling cylinders of thick, greenish glass. Inside each one, suspended in a viscous, amber-hued fluid, was a figure.
Li Wei’s breath hitched. He took a step closer, his reflection ghosting over the glass, superimposed on the horror within.
The first held a woman in the tattered remains of an evening gown. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, but her eyes were gone, replaced by complex, glittering clusters of faceted crystal that grew from her sockets. Her fingers ended in long, delicate shards of the same material.
In the next, a man floated peacefully, his torso fused with the intricate brass gears and polished wood of a grandfather clock. His heartbeat was a visible, mechanical tick-tock behind a glass porthole in his chest. A tiny, porcelain bird emerged from his parted lips every sixty seconds.
A click echoed down the corridor. Wet. Deliberate.
Li Wei froze, pressing himself against the cold stone. Another click, closer, followed by a soft, dragging sound. Something was moving in the darkness ahead, something large and patient.
He couldn’t go back. He sidestepped, his back scraping along the rough wall, and slipped into a gap between two tanks. His hip bumped a protruding pipe. A gout of steam hissed from a valve, making him flinch.
In the tank before him, a face pressed against the interior of the glass.
Li Wei stifled a cry. It was a young man, maybe a year or two older than him. His hair floated in the amber fluid like kelp. His body was a horrific marriage of flesh and chitin: a sleek, iridescent carapace grew across one shoulder and down his arm, which ended in a segmented, mantis-like claw. His other half was human, pale and untouched. His human eye locked onto Li Wei’s. It was alive. Aware. Desperate.
The man’s human hand came up, pressed flat against the glass. His mouth formed a single, slow word, bubbles trailing from his lips.
Run.
A wet, clicking drag sounded just around the corner. Li Wei’s blood turned to ice. He pushed off from the tank, forcing his legs to move, and sprinted deeper into the catacomb. The greenish fungal light illuminated more tanks, more impossible fusions: a woman with fern fronds growing from her veins; a man whose legs had become polished marble pillars; a thing that was all weeping, unblinking eyes and twitching violin strings.
The corridor opened into a vast, cavernous chamber. Here, the tanks were larger, connected by a network of pulsating, organic-looking tubes. In the center of the room, under a brighter, surgical light, a figure moved.
It was Mrs. Liang. She had exchanged her jade silk for a simple, grey smock. She stood before a partially assembled form on a stone slab—a fusion of pale limbs and gleaming mechanical parts. She wasn’t humming. She was speaking, her voice calm and instructional.
“The joint requires more flexibility,” she said, not looking up. “The scapula is not a hinge. It is a plane of potential.”
A hunched figure in a leather apron nodded, adjusting a tool with a low whir.
Li Wei shrank back into the shadows, but his foot dislodged a small stone. It skittered across the wet floor with an echo that was impossibly loud in the humming chamber.
Mrs. Liang’s head snapped up. Her eyes found him instantly, not with surprise, but with a kind of weary recognition.
“The observer,” she said, her voice carrying across the cavern. “You have a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.”
The figure in the apron turned. It was the artist from the white room. He held a bone saw.
“The living model,” the artist said, a spark of professional interest in his voice. “For the dynamism study.”
Li Wei didn’t wait. He bolted for a narrow, dark passage on the far side of the chamber. He heard Mrs. Liang’s sigh, more annoyed than angry.
“Don’t damage the structure,” she called after him. “The skull is particular.”
He ran. The passage was tight, the ceiling low, forcing him to duck. The clicking, dragging sound was ahead of him now, but he had no other path. The walls closed in, the stone scraping his shoulders. The air grew thicker, warmer, carrying a new smell—a zoo smell, of straw and musk and animal panic.
The tunnel opened abruptly into another space. This wasn’t a gallery of tanks. It was a pen.
Rough-hewn wooden barriers divided the area. In the dim light, shapes moved. A young woman with the sleek, powerful hindquarters of a deer paced on delicate hooves, her human face streaked with tears. A man with thick, feathered wings was chained by one ankle to a post, his head tucked under his arm, asleep or broken.
And in the nearest pen, the source of the clicking: a large, majestic lion, its tawny coat matted. It lifted its head, and Li Wei’s heart stopped. Its face was human. A man’s face, middle-aged and handsome, contorted in a permanent snarl of bestial fury. It let out a sound that was half-roar, half-sob, and dragged its heavy body toward the bars, one clumsy, misaligned paw clicking on the stone.
“They never get the vocal cords right,” a voice said from the shadows.
Li Wei jumped. Crouched against the wall, wrapped in a coarse blanket, was a boy. He looked about Li Wei’s age. His clothes were dirty but recognizable—fashionable jeans, a torn designer shirt. One of his arms ended not in a hand, but in a delicate, five-pointed starfish, its tips curling and uncurling slowly.
“You… you’re like me,” Li Wei gasped, his voice barely a whisper.
“Not for long,” the boy said. His eyes were shockingly clear and lucid. “You’re the new one. The one who got away from the white room.”
“How do you know that?”
“They talk. They’re proud of their work.” The boy lifted his starfish arm. “This is Phase Two. Incubation. The grafting. Phase One is the… preparation. Your friend in the resin? He’s Phase Three. Finished. Perfected.”
The lion-man roared again, rattling the bars of its pen.
“What is this place?” Li Wei asked, sliding down the wall next to the boy, his energy deserting him.
“It’s their gallery,” the boy said, his tone weirdly conversational, like they were discussing a bad lecture. “Their collection. Mrs. Liang and her… clients. They get bored with paintings. They commission living art. Unique pieces. Some are for display. Some are for… other purposes.” He glanced at the lion. “He was a corporate rival. Now he’s a conversation starter at garden parties.”
Li Wei’s mind reeled. “We have to get out. There has to be a way.”
The boy nodded toward the far end of the chamber. “There’s a service tunnel. Where they bring the feed. It leads to the old boiler rooms, maybe to the grounds. It’s always locked from the other side.”
“Where’s the key?”
“On him.” The boy pointed a trembling human finger past Li Wei.
Li Wei turned.
Blocking the tunnel entrance was a large man in a dark suit—one of the ones from the foyer. His face was a blank slab. In his hand, he held not a key, but a long, needle-tipped syringe filled with a shimmering silver liquid.
“Model requires sedation,” the man said, his voice monotone.
The boy with the starfish arm looked at Li Wei, a final, sad clarity in his eyes. “Run,” he said, simply.
Li Wei ran. Not toward the tunnel, but back the way he came, toward the cavern of tanks. The suited man was fast, but his size made him slower in the narrow tunnels. Li Wei heard the heavy footfalls behind him, gaining.
He burst back into the cavern. Mrs. Liang and the artist were gone. The surgical slab was empty.
He had nowhere to go. The footfalls grew closer, steady, inexorable.
His eyes landed on a metal box bolted to the wall, studded with valves and pressure gauges. The pipes from the tanks fed into it. A central regulator.
Without thinking, Li Wei slammed his shoulder into a large, red valve wheel. It gave with a shriek of protest. He spun it. Alarms instantly whooped through the cavern, deafening. Lights flashed.
In the tanks, the preserved figures began to twitch. The fluid churned. The woman with crystal eyes spasmed. The clockwork man’s ticking stuttered into a frantic, arrhythmic clatter.
The suited man emerged from the tunnel, unfazed by the blaring alarm. He raised the syringe.
Li Wei dove behind the central stone slab as the man lunged. The needle jabbed into the stone, scraping sparks. Li Wei scrambled away, slipping on the wet floor.
A deep, groaning crack echoed through the chamber. A fracture spiderwebbed up the glass of the largest tank, the one holding the mantis-claw hybrid. The amber fluid began to piss out in a torrent.
The suited man turned toward the sound, his programmed priority shifting from capture to containment.
Li Wei saw his chance. He sprinted, not for the exit, but for the leaking tank. He grabbed a loose pipe and, with a strength born of sheer terror, drove it into the crack. The glass exploded inward.
A flood of viscous fluid and the hybrid man spilled onto the floor. The suited man slipped, going down on one knee. The hybrid’s mantis claw lashed out, not at Li Wei, but at the closer threat. It sheared through the suit’s jacket with a sickening crunch.
The alarm wailed. From the tunnels, more dragging, clicking sounds approached. The other specimens, disturbed. Agitated.
Li Wei didn’t look back. He ran past the struggling men, through the archway, and into the unknown dark, the screams of the cavern and the roaring of the lion-man fading behind him, replaced by the sound of his own frantic heart and the dripping, eternal water.