Hong Kong was a city of towers.
Once.
So many of them were gone now, she no longer recognized the skyline.
She thought, Spare just the one.
As Wu Hongxia joined the silent but urgent queue of riders fleeing the MTR at the Tsim Sha Tsui Station, she thought she might not make it back to street level. Not a single passenger remained behind to ride the train across the harbour to Hong Kong Island, yet they would all emerge within blocks of the massive battle tearing the city apart.
She could smell the smoke before she reached Nathan Road.
To the south, she could see most of the length of Nathan Road, once lined with expensive hotels and dozens upon dozens of small family-owned restaurants. Now it was like a charred tunnel with an ashen sky above. All around her, a sea of dark hair pushed and pressed to reach alleys or fire escapes that climbed to the second floors of buildings that had once had five.
But there was no escaping the fires to the south. Incinerus, what the English called an “elemental champion,” was being battered to defeat by two of the horrid creatures the news reports claimed were part of some kind of subterran uprising: “moles,” they called them. She thought the word in English—it was twenty-two strokes to write the Chinese character for them, so no one in Hong Kong bothered now. There was not enough time left, she supposed.
She ran toward the flames.
In those tiny restaurants that tried to survive the end of the world, she could see most televisions tuned to ATV, and there were the images she dreaded over and over: two monsters, one called Hammerklak and the other called something-Kutter, burrowing up out of the streets as if swimming in water. Between them, they brought down all 56-floors of the Queensway Government Offices on the Island—Hammerklak, with appendages like vises, smashed into the building’s core while the other created a trench around the building that undermined its foundation. When it crumbled to destroy the Zurich next to it, sending both into Victoria Harbour, she cried out in her heart.
Forty people were still missing and were presumed dead, including her mother, who had been an administrator for the Civil Aviation Department housed in Queensway.
Wu Hongxia did not grieve. Though she had lapsed in her personal beliefs, her mother had remained true to the rituals of Taoism to the last. If any could return as a deity, her mother would—but of course, times had changed. When Hongxia’s father, the rock of her mother’s heart, had passed, her mother said she would see him again when he returned to the world. It had never happened, of course. This was the first of the reasons why Hongxia had abandoned the rituals herself—in this world, such faith was sadly misplaced now.
There would be time to mourn her mother later. For this moment, she had to see the only tower that mattered.
Just before the gardens, where Nathan Road intersected with Salisbury Road, she stopped to put her hands on her knees and gasp for air. The Space Museum across the street was decimated. Its beautiful dome was shattered and cracked like an egg.
And in the streets, the monsters fought.
She could not catch her breath, the fear of being near them was so overwhelming and the heat sucking the oxygen from her lungs. The oversized monsters that burrowed and exploded from beneath the streets towered alongside the last of the big hotels and the remnants of the ones they had already destroyed. They were loud, roaring more than any jackhammer she could ever remember hearing when the streets were still busy with workers.
Hammerklak moved with shocking speed through the concrete pavement, sending asphalt and chunks of street flying as it closed on a burning figure. The other, the one whose name she could not recall, swung the giant power saw it had in place of a fist, its flesh scorched but unrelenting. She realized with revulsion that it had two heads, each turned to face the common enemy.
They smashed into the one the called Incinerus—a creature of flame, said to be an incarnate form of Zhurong, god of fire and of the south. He seemed grow right before her eyes, towering over his two enemies, wrapping them in the flames from his arms, and yet he fell often from their attacks.
She ran toward them and then past them. The heat from Incinerus chased her, and the bellowing of battle pushed her forward like a wind. Like Incinerus, she fell multiple times. Her cries mingled with his, she thought. Perhaps we will both die.
She passed the administration building that she knew housed the Tsim Sha Tsui Marriage Registry where her parents had gone. It was on fire, and the building’s windows were mostly gone. The battle behind her rolled after her as Incinerus gave ground to his enemies, Hammerklak and—
An explosion rocked the street, the blast—
Blastikutter, she thought suddenly.
—throwing her down. She struck her head, and the blood ran in her eyes, but she found her feet again and raced on. The heat scorched the hair on the back of her head.
And then she saw it: the most important tower in all of Hong Kong.
In days gone by, it had been the Kowloon-Canton Railway Clock Tower, but those days were long past. Now it was just the Clock Tower, six stories tall, squat and made of old brick. It sat right at the water’s edge, the smallest of the structures around it, the palm trees lining a long pool on one side swaying in the unnatural heat.
She did not know if anyone even used it to tell time anymore; it was just a remnant of a station destroyed and replaced many years ago. And though she had never climbed the wooden staircase inside to reach the view of the harbour at the top, she treasured this tower more than any other building in all of Hong Kong.
Here, her father proposed to her mother. Here, her small family was born. She was all that remained now.
Her heart leapt to know that the Clock Tower still stood, but then she felt her heart tremble to realize how close destruction was at hand. She turned in time to see Blastikutter smash Incinerus in her direction, sending the elemental champion reeling and burning brighter. Hammerklak was immediately over Incinerus, driving its drills into him.
Mother, she said, closing her eyes. Please hear me. If you are truly reborn, please hear me.
She knew, of course, there would be no salvation for the Clock Tower—but she did not expect any. She had come here to join her parents. To be with her family. To die.
Mother, hear—
The waters of Victoria Harbour churned, and a wave roared ashore that all but drowned her, tossing her back to the base of the Clock Tower like flotsam. She gasped and clung to a railing of the stairs before its main door. When the water receded as if vacuumed away, she saw the enormous rising shape approaching. The beak, the tentacles. It rose taller than the Clock Tower, and its birdlike eyes seemed to find her as it scanned the harbour banks. Its purplish tentacles flailed as it came ashore, and behind her, she heard the hesitant sputter of the two burrowers, the “moles,” as the gigantic nightmarish monster spotted them. She saw Incinerus rise with renewed hope, but she could look at nothing but the godlike creature that moved to aid the elemental champion and protect the Clock Tower.
Thank you, Mother, Wu Hongxia thought, her faith reborn, and hurrying, she let herself into the Clock Tower for the first time, climbing the wooden stairs to the top where she could watch the battle turn.