This is the ninth part of an ongoing serial, written in honor of the Swords of St. Valentine initiative. Here are Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight. Updates every day.
Money solved the problem, in the end. Of course it did. Money solved everything here. For all the adults crowed about the post-scarcity world, of their comfortable walled city and their comfortable walled life, the fact was that they were all still slaves to the tyranny of the market.
There were still dragons and tigers in this age of cryptocurrency. They’d just come out of hiding, now that there was no longer any need to hide their faces. The system did it for them.
Her father was one of those dragons. Stalking a whole meter behind the White Hawk, staring at his limp, Xu Hai couldn’t help but wonder if he was one, too. Someone who would take advantage of anyone, if it brought him something.
“Do you make a habit of buying out the police?”
The White Hawk didn’t turn back. He was all bandaged up; the doctors had seen to that. His voice was as weary as his walk.
“Not if I do something wrong. In this case, it was self-defense.”
“Right,” said Xu Hai. “You grabbed me first.”
“And you kneed me in the balls,” said the White Hawk. Li Wei, his name was. It was hard to think of him by his ring name anymore, now that she had seen him in the flesh.
Oh, and kneed him in the balls.
“Alright,” glowered Xu Hai, wondering why she was still talking to him. The heat was in her cheeks. “I’ll give you that. But did you have to tell him that we were lovers?”
“People tend to understand more if the pugilists turn out to be entangled in passion,” said Li Wei dully. “It’s…”
He made a vague wave of his bandaged hand.
“An wuxia thing. On the screen and page, you know.”
“I don’t,” said Xu Hai. “I never touched that stuff. It’s all so… fake. People who write that drivel don’t have a clue about how it really works.”
“I see,” said Li Wei. “So, how does it work, then?”
She faltered for a moment. For all her conviction, no-one had ever asked her that question before.
“I…”
“For the record,” said Li Wei, “I don’t know either. I can barely read, anyway. But as a matter of fact, I agree with you. It’s all a crock of bull. Blood brothers, evil sects, world-ending techniques, secret histories…”
He sat down on the stone bench, keeping his legs gingerly apart. After a while, she did the same, keeping very far away from him.
“Still, it’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“What?” she asked.
He wasn’t smiling. He was staring at the holotech storefront, as if looking for something he’d never quite been able to make out.
“To punch your problems and make them go away.”
“That’s not how it works,” she said. To Li Wei, she sounded surprisingly subdued. Still rough, of course, but more sand than gravel.
Why had he come here, anyway? On the holovid, she had seemed completely sincere. Desperate, almost. His hero’s daughter, waiting for him to come rescue her from whatever plight she was in. And now, here she was, talking with him on a hunk of carved stone, after she had just beat him to a complete pulp.
“I know,” he said, still staring straight ahead at the shop-display. “I tried.”
She laughed, and he remembered, involuntarily, the sniggers of the other street-kids, back when he had still been a gutter rat. A nobody. Living on the scraps from the ration bins, on the holotech displays in the malls, dreaming of a better life…
“That’s funny,” she said. “What problems do you have? You’re rich, famous… I bet your parents ask you for money.”
“I don’t have any parents,” he said flatly.
“I… Oh.”
He looked across at her. She flushed, then dropped her gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“Don’t be,” he said. “They threw me out, not you. Besides, it’s not like I can remember them.”
She lapsed into silence, genuinely ashamed. He could see it in her eyes. It was strange. Usually, by the time he got to this point with a girl, she was biting his ear and whispering comforting nothings down the back of his neck. None of them really cared.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to teach me,” he said, to change the subject. “Not like that. It was rude, and I apologize.”
“Don’t,” she said, fumbling with her fingers. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“It’s alright,” he said thickly, not used to this at all. “I guess I’m used to it.”
They turned to look at each other, looked at each other, then jerked their gazes away. Still, the air seemed clearer between them. Like the apologies, however awkward, had put them on more of an equal footing.
“You said you were never trained,” she said. “How is that possible? You move like a genius.”
“I’m not sure myself,” said Li Wei. “It was one of my friends… Fatty Shu, we called him. He was fat, you see.”
Xu Hai nodded carefully.
“Well, one day, the other kids - well, mostly one kid, but he doesn’t matter - were beating up on old Fatty. And I didn’t like it, and I told them to stop. And when one of them hit me, well, I pushed him, and he went flying. Straight into the trash bags.”
“You used your chi,” said Xu Hai.
Li Wei nodded, just as carefully.
“That was when I saw your father in the store window. Before long, I had a kind of reputation on the streets as some sort of fighting prodigy. My sponsors found me and made an offer three years ago, one thing led to another, and now, well, here I am.”
“I see,” she said, hands on her knees.
There was a wistful light in her eyes, but he couldn’t tell why for the life of him. What could she possibly want?
“But enough about me,” he said. “You’re better than most of the men I’ve fought. How did you learn?”
She bit her lip and looked away.
“From my grandfather, mostly,” she said. “I started when I was three. He was better than my father, and anyway, my father quit…”
Li Wei almost jumped.
“What?” he gasped. “That’s… I thought the Sable Swan gave up martial arts due to crippling injury! Internal stagnation!”
“Is that what you heard?” retorted Xu Hai, indignant. “The man could probably keep pace with a brothel, he’s so healthy.”
“But…”
“Oh,” said the girl, “so all you wanted to do was meet my father. Well, it’s a good thing you haven’t. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but the man’s a dick. First-class.”
Li Wei fell silent and looked down at his hands. For some reason, he felt like the worst thing about all of this was that he had in fact expected it, somewhere in the back of his mind.
“So, that’s it,” he said. “No heroes, huh? Not a single one.”
“Nope,” said Xu Hai, giving a sage nod. “They’re all flaming retards.”
He didn’t want it to be true. He didn’t even feel like it was true. But he felt that if he could get to the bottom of this somehow, he would find what he’d been searching for this whole time.
The secret to solving his emptiness, to filling the hole in his sated heart.
“This was a very stupid day, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Tell me about it,” laughed Xu Hai. “You’re the only one who’s been dumb enough to talk to me for this long. I don’t study, I barely work…”
He stared at her, trying to read the look in her eyes.
“Do you want to meet again?” he asked. “I mean, not to fight or anything. Just…”
She blinked, then stared at him, stunned.
“Or we could just go our separate ways,” he said, raising his hands. “Sorry, that was a tall request. I - ow!”
She had punched him in the arm.
“You’re a real roller-coaster, you know that, Li Wei?” she grinned. “Of course we can meet up.”
“Two novices in the art of personal communication,” said Li Wei, rolling his eyes. “What a treat.”
But despite himself, he was smiling too.