Content warnings

Homophobia. Sexism. Hunting and harm to animals.

Here in Blazing Mound, we are not adults until we have brought home a leopard. If we are not adults, then we cannot apply for a household registration record. Without a record, we are permanent dependents on our families. This means we cannot leave our yellow-clayed village to make our fortune in higher-tiered cities as a food delivery driver or a factory worker making phones for the rest of the world.

The leopard’s skull is dipped in a tub, where it is water-marbled in bright colors like lime green and magenta.

I am the oldest daughter. To look after my family, I will have to bring a leopard home. Or be married off to a man with a string of leopard teeth laced around his neck. But I am not interested in men. 

The women make eyes with me. They touch my elbow at the mini-market. But they do not take my gifts of embroidered belts seriously. It starts, it ends, they marry a male friend nearby. I lick my wounds. I cannot marry these women for obvious reasons, one of them being my lack of leopard.

I have stalked four leopards in the scrubland and lost all of them. Not because I was unable to shoot them with a rifle and see them very clearly drop on all fours. But because when I go over to them, in a haze of excitement and ragged breath, I find out that they are ghosts. 

Ghosts that had pantomimed their hurt when my bullet had gone cleanly through their bodies. But ghosts with very real fangs that sink through my chest when I kneel over them. Each leopard has chewed a piece of my heart out before making off with it into some cave or den I could not track.  

I’ve wondered if this is a trial reserved especially for me. The men bring back real leopards around their shoulders. They think I cannot withstand the heat of the hunt.

Night Beauty lives with her father-in-law, who owns a teahouse. She’s married to a young man, a leopard-haver, whom we barely see because he is now in the city working as a butcher in the market. I come by the teahouse often for nuts and mulberry juice. Night Beauty is waifish and pale; she laughs at everything I say. We go to the village cinema together when her father-in-law lets her.

She tells me that her father-in-law asks her when she might give him a grandchild, to which she laughs. She blithely takes my hand in her own, saying we must always be like this in our old age, companions for life.

We see each other often but I am more cautious this time. I tell myself it is because her husband is away that she spends so much time with me. But my old instincts take over and I believe more than what I see. I become too free, I stop checking what I say. I cross that invisible line. 

It scares her away and she reminds me that she is married. I stop going to the teahouse because it has grown too painful.

In an unsurprising twist of fate, the fifth leopard too is a ghost. I had seen from my binoculars that mirage-like bend in the air that tells me this too would not give me what I want:

My heart back. A water-marbled leopard head to show that I am grown. That I can take the train eastward to the factories that make the same houndstooth trinkets our village sells to tourists. 

But as I move my iron sights along with the leopard, tracking the beauty of its fur, the swing of its hindquarters, what crosses my mind is: I have found it. I have found the one that will lead me to that mysterious den where all the pieces of my heart have been kept.

I pull the trigger.

I have seen better days. Prior to this business of leopard hunting, I smiled like the sun. Now all I can think about is that one thing meant to make me happy that I do not have. It is a sad state of things. Only a quarter of my heart is left.

The leopard shudders and drops on the ground. I tear out of my hide of bushes.

I run towards the promise of a different story. I will no longer have to spend my days trying to get closer to the leopard while pretending I am not, in fact, trying to get closer, because if it knew that it would turn tail and sprint away.

I will discover its den nearby and there I will find the other pieces of my heart. I will put them together with flimsy skill and fall asleep, finally made whole.

No. When I am finally close enough to smell its breath and pull its whiskers, I see that it too is a ghost. The leopard lunges at me. In that brief moment, I see a look of sadness and confusion and regret in its eyes as its fangs dip and take the last of my heart.

I totter out of the valley scrub with fistfuls of sand. There is a void in my chest and I fear the worst. And yet I am free. 

The truth is I could always have marched into a household registration office to make a record of residency myself. The leopard business is for the sake of tradition, our attempt to retain our culture before it is replaced by more residential buildings and electronic music. The truth is leopard-hunting is now unfashionable outside our village.

So I go to the office and get my record and my little residency booklet. I take the first bus to the city, discovering all the places I could go from there. The Northern Capital, the City-upon-the-Sea, even all the way down south to the Fragrant Harbor. 

I take the train to Deep Runnels, where the buildings bleed neon.

I am finally a food delivery driver. The packet of noodles I carry is worth more than my life. But who can I blame? No one, except I was born a rural peasant in Blazing Mound.

In my chest where my heart used to sit is a bottomless pit. It is so empty I discover I can stuff all sorts of things into it: a shard of light, an alley and a song, a curse word at four in the morning, the glaze of green tile.

I deliver an order of claypot rice to one of the largest electronics trading hubs in the world. When I leave, I find the hum of a billion transistors toggling on and off in my chest.

The women in this city are interested in me and flagrantly so. The older ones are flush with money. The younger ones, who have dreams of opening a yoga studio, find it fashionable to be interested in someone like me, an exotic young migrant worker who, like them, is a woman who likes women too.

But there are shinier new things in my chestvoid now. 

As I idle outside a cloud brain facility, waiting to hand over an order of pickled fish fillets to a postgraduate student, the city’s synaptic pathways find their way into me. I study them with the same assiduousness I used to study the insides of my heart.

When it rains, there are fewer drivers on the road so the little god that is the algorithm inflates delivery fees. In the sleeting rain, office workers are suddenly ravenous for soup. Tech parks flood with lunch orders. I look at the sky and reference the cloud patterns in my chestvoid. I park my e-bike next to a lab block ten minutes before the rain hits. A second later and I would have been flooded by competition. 

I accept short, high-surge orders to keep my completion rate high. The app tells me I am now Warrior Class.

My money triples.

The New Year arrives. I could brave the crowds in the train station and go home to Blazing Mound and fling money at those flaunting their leopard teeth. I could fling money at Night Beauty too, but I’m afraid to find out that she might have forgotten me.

So I knuckle down. I spend the New Year alone in the city amid the lion dances. Walking home, I trip over a shattered phone screen. The cracks form a map of the global supply chain. My chestvoid replicates it.

I use a modified barcode scanner to hack a dozen small factories and they report false stock surges on their products. The logistics AI of the biggest e-commerce platform on earth panics, rerouting delivery trucks all on its own. The hubs run out of inventory. The entire platform overloads.

I write a bug report and offer it to the owners of the platform. They pay me a ridiculous amount not to publish it.

I am no longer a food delivery driver. What I am is appetite. In it, I find an obliterating rhythm. I ingest the golden rivers of the city’s power grid. I devour blockchains that automate water allocation and bond tokens. I watch stock exchange transactions following through fiber-optic cable and see the eight-armed trading bots behind them. 

I predict the stock market three seconds before any transaction happens. I profit.

On the street, a butcher stands in her apron and boots next to her stall, smoking. Above her cuts of meat is a red lamp—I know from first look which factory it is from—its glow flattering the meat and eggs.

A lock of hair writhes out of her bun and hangs over her face. She catches me staring and looks at how I’m dressed. Another migrant worker. She smiles and offers me a cigarette.

I could take a drag. I could see the tobacco fields in South of the Clouds, the factory worker loading the tobacco into the roller machine, the robots that packed the cigarettes. I could strike up a conversation with her and wonder about her inner life.

I don’t. The ground beneath our feet rumbles with transformer vaults and pipes of gas and water.

My veins are now the pathways on a circuit-board, my chestvoid thumps with the schedule of the subway trains. These are not ghosts. The city is my flesh.

I am sunning myself on the terrace of one of the fingers of steel and glass in the electronics trading hub. I amuse myself with the faint green grid I’ve projected in the air to reflect the movements of the cars and the pedestrians below. I hear a snuffling nearby that I have not predicted. 

It is the leopard. The fifth one that had taken the last of my heart.

I have not forgotten it. That it had thought of me all this time too stirs a desire in me.

The leopard is some meters from me and won’t come any closer. In my chestvoid, I see the heat signatures of everything around me; the leopard is there in white false-color. 

It’s real. But that doesn’t mean anything. In the sands of Blazing Mound, I had seen its fur catch the sun with the clarity of a burst of rain in the desert and it had meant nothing then.

But I am ready this time.

When the leopard is certain it has my attention, it leaps away. I hurl piles of routers, OLED screen, drones, and circuit boards toward the leopard. It dodges them, its paw climbing upon the scraps away from me. Not a whisker caught.

I try harder. I wake the semiconductor hearts of the cars around me, these electric-powered trinkets of human status and wealth. They throw themselves at the animal, crashing into each other, roiling and twisting like dragon beard candy. A hubcap rolls out and the leopard pads behind it, looking at me at my perch on the terrace. A flood of loathing rises within me.

So I bend glass and steel to my will. I uproot the foundations of the trading hub towers like roots of weeds from the crust of the earth. I bunch them together with an invisible fist until they are an avalanche that smashes into the ground, crushing the leopard, wrapping its body with cabling and rebar.

The city’s alarms go off.

I arrive at Blazing Mound. The military is at my heels.

I find Night Beauty in her father-in-law’s teahouse, closing early. She doesn’t recognize me. I’ve not looked at myself in a mirror for a long time. My head is full of cliffs and wreckage.

Night Beauty is terrified. It’s me, I say. It’s Pomegranate Flower.

A flicker of recognition in her eyes at my name, marred by a look of regret, but quickly swallowed up again in her fear. She steps back. I place the leopard’s head on the table.

In the carnage, debris had fused into the ghostly shape of the leopard’s head and made it real. Its eyes are the cracked glass of camera lens, its fangs drone propellers, its whiskers fiber-optic strands. Its head is made of chunks of server chassis, chromed by the heat and a bath of electrolytes.

I look earnestly for Night Beauty’s approval of my kill. She barely glances at the leopard. Her eyes are riveted at me but only in vigilance, so she could sprint out the door when she can. 

Her eyes flit to the floor above us, where her father-in-law is resting. Then she slowly takes her phone out to call her husband. There is no warmth in her face.

I leave the leopard head in the teahouse and walk away. The yellow clay of the houses blur into silt and sand.

They are coming for me. I can sense them like gnats in the air, searching. There is only one way for me to bargain for my life: to tell them I carry in my chestvoid a simulacrum of the trading hub buildings I had destroyed. If they keep me alive, I can recreate all of it for them.

But something else is filling up my chestvoid now. It is an ache, a tearing in the emptiness that feels simultaneously old and new. A friend I haven’t seen in years whom I’m afraid will see me for who I am. Now it is an acid, burning every chip wafer and thermoplastic inside my chest, now inert and worthless, having lost all their luster. I have no idea why I had collected them in the first place. 

It does not matter if I take this road or that. There is only a nothingness huge enough to eat me whole.

Night Beauty comes out of the teahouse, her phone still glued to her ear. 

A helicopter is coming closer. Gray cabin with a yellow star, a four-blade rotor. A man leans out with a rifle, fixing me in his sights, hunting for leopard.

END

Crystal Koo

Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is currently based in Hong Kong. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of venues including Interzone, Lightspeed, and The Apex Book of World SF 3.