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Itensed up, afraid that comment was likely to piss Zheng off again, not because it had been belligerent, but because it was true. No way was a city founded by pirates and gangsters going to miss a chance like that. But he merely shrugged.

“Of course. The gals back at Lily’s, for instance, that’s how we fuel them. That’s also why they get a little aggressive, from time to time. Smaller bits of power get flung off that thing,” he gestured with his glass at the wall of ominous whiteness, “that are too thin to see, but when they impact one of the girls . . .”

“But why do they get hostile?” I asked. “You designed them, right?”

“Lily designed the bodies,” he corrected. “But the personalities were those of her friends, and some of those ladies have a temper. But mostly, they just get a little willful or catty or whatever. They’re not a problem.

“Those are the problem.”

I realized that we’d started moving again, and were now approaching some kind of stadium. I couldn’t see it too well, as it was on the opposite side of the car, but it looked pretty big. Although not compared to what was floating in cages beside it.

“What is that?” I asked, staring at the nearest one.

“What we came to see.”

The car swung around, getting into a queue for admission, I guessed. A bunch of guys on bright red rickshaws were patrolling the airspace around the main event, probably to discourage freeloaders. The new position gave me a better view and answered a few questions, although not all of them.

The “stadium” wasn’t actually floating, as I’d first thought. Even for a city with magic to burn, that would have been excessive. The base was five skyscrapers built around a small park, and the still functioning bridges connecting them. The roofs of the skyscrapers and the entire length of the bridges were crowded with spectators, but far more people had brought their own seats. Thousands upon thousands were crammed into vehicles of all descriptions, which filled the spaces between the buildings as well as the skies all around.

Some of the flying stadium seats were small, including a ton of two or four-seater rickshaws. At the opposite end of the spectrum were levitating platforms holding hundreds of spectators in nicely slanting rows so that everybody got a view. And in between was every kind of vehicle imaginable.

There were buses with twenty or more people on top, yelling and cheering. There were stretch limos serving as stadium boxes for the rich and well connected. There were people on things that weren’t technically vehicles at all, with the sofa I’d almost collided with earlier suddenly making more sense as I spotted dozens more just like it. Some people had even had their makeshift sky houses towed over to the event, so that they could watch in comfort from their balconies.

And then there were the cages, given plenty of space by the crowd, maybe because they were rocking from side to side while the contents screeched and cawed and howled. Even with the limo’s obvious soundproofing, the ruckus could be clearly heard. As could the low-level roar of the crowd, the whir of hundreds of fan blades, and some Cantonese being broadcast either through a spell or a hell of a lot of loud speakers.

It must be deafening outside, I thought, wondering how anybody stood it. And then I noticed a guy in a rickshaw with some Chinese writing on it, and a picture of earplugs underneath. Ray would like this place, I thought with a pang. They really knew how to merchandise.

“When the Circle started to pull their people out of here for the war, it left us with a problem,” Zheng said. “Local mages and some reinforcements from the mainland had to take over patrolling the dead zones, but most didn’t know how. They were wardsmiths and spellbinders, not war mages, and this was not their skill set.

“But there wasn’t anybody else, so the Circle started bringing some of the nastier things they captured over here, where the new guys got a chance to learn the techniques they needed to take ‘em down. Word got around and people began coming to watch, then somebody figured, hey, why not charge admission to help with the rebuilding . . .”

“And, thus, a new sport was born,” Louis-Cesare murmured.

Zheng nodded. “All the usual ground games—football, horse racing and the like—have been cancelled due to the possibility of the participants being attacked. The matches quickly became the only game in town. Now, it’s not just new mages learning the ropes. They still have some of that, usually as a warm up. But there’s also teams of crazy people who volunteer to take on the worst of the worst.”

“And the city allows that?” I asked. “What if they get killed?”

Zeng shrugged. “It’s volunteer only, so they know what they’re getting into. And mage squads are in place—the trainers and their students—if things get out of hand. But the purses for the victors are pretty substantial, as the better the show the more spectators it draws in.” He shrugged.

“The Wild, Wild East,” I said, repeating something I’d thought earlier.

Zheng laughed. “That it is. At least until we can figure out what the hell went wrong with the system.”

“What did go wrong?” Louis-Cesare asked, while I eyed up the creature in the nearest cage.

It looked like an Escher drawing of some type of squid. I couldn’t be sure as it kept morphing and twisting in totally impossible ways that hurt the brain and crossed the eyes, while flashing in changing, neon colors that didn’t help. Graffiti, I thought, looking away before I was mesmerized. Guess not all of it exploded. And now some kid’s idea of cool had turned into something that could possibly eat your brain after it finished frying it.

“That’s why I’m here,” Zheng said, answering Louis-Cesare. “Our consul isn’t too happy about a boat load of free-floating magic in the middle of a war. She wants me to find out why the system that worked for hundreds of years is suddenly bubbling over with extra power, and what can be done to stop it.”

“And have you?”

He snorted. “Do I look like a mage to you? I lived here most of my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m an expert on how everything works. Fortunately, I do know a few. They’ve been working with the Circle’s men to fix things, and their theory is simple: get the damned pillars back up.”

“The pagodas that were destroyed when the city fell,” I explained to Louis-Cesare, who hadn’t been here. “They served as waystations for channeling the power of the lines into the phase.”

“And they channeled a lot,” Zheng added. “They absorbed a ton of power, even though most of them were redundant. As we found out the hard way, one pillar can support the phase alone if required, but the designers put in multiple redundancies because if the damned thing fails, the city falls back into real space, taking out human Hong Kong along with it.”

Louis-Cesare nodded. We’d been briefed about this in the senate, although judging from his expression, being here made it much more real. Try being in the battle, I thought, remembering.

“But now that most of these pillars are down,” Louis-Cesare said. “That power is going where?”

Zheng gestured at the white fog again, boiling maybe ten or so blocks away. “In there. It’s just floating around, like overflow from a faucet that nobody remembers how to turn off, because everybody who designed this city is dead. People know how to run the system, but not how to restrict it to a trickle until we get the rest of the pillars back up.”

“Then what are you doing about it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Living with it. The theory is that the excess magic will become less and less of a problem as each pillar comes back online. They’ll be sucking up most of the overflow like sponges, just like before, and what little is left over will be grabbed by the government or hijacked by people like me.” He grinned. “Until then, we’re stuck dealing with the consequences—and so are you.”

“Us?” Louis-Cesare said sharply. “Why us?”

Zheng took out the little golden charm again, and weaved it in and out of his fingers. “This is the Chinese symbol for eternity. It’s also the calling card of a new triad that started up recently. Nobody knows much about them, except that they operate in there,” he nodded at the cloud again, “and that they deal in stolen power. The consul worries that they’re maybe selling it to the wrong people.”

“Are they?” I asked.

“Hard to say. If so, they’re keeping it quiet. None of my contacts have seen massive new amounts coming onto the market—”

“But if they’re selling it to the other side in the war, you wouldn’t,” Louis-Cesare pointed out.

Zheng nodded, looking vaguely surprised that there was a mind inside that pretty head. “Yeah, that’s the worry. But they could also just be stockpiling it, waiting for the price to go up as the war progresses. Like I said, it’s hard to say. Everybody skims some; it’s almost expected. But if they’re trying to turn it into a big-time operation . . .”

“Is there any evidence of that?” I asked.

“Not . . . directly, no, or we’d have already moved against them. Well, if they ever come out of there, anyway.” He grimaced, looking at the fog. “But one of the new pillars was sabotaged the other day, and some think that the new guys may have been behind it. Like they weren’t happy about the pillars going back up and ruining their business—”

He broke off as a two-seater rickshaw drew up alongside us. A window went down, but the expected blast of sound did not follow. The silence spell wasn’t linked to the windows, it seemed.

A bored looking official poked his head in. And then he saw Zheng and his eyes blew wide. He started bowing excessively, almost hitting the window frame in the process, and talking a mile a minute. I didn’t know what he said, but a moment later, we were being ushered to one of the inner circles of hovering vehicles, with an excellent view of the ring.

“I know one of the show runners,” Zheng explained. “He owed me a favor.”

“Meaning we get a good view?” I asked, as Louis-Cesare and I rearranged things, so that we could both see.

“No, we get the order changed.”

“The order of what?”

“Who fights the ‘monsters’. I want you to see the squad I’ve been using to poke around inside the dead zones. They’re one of only three groups crazy enough to go in there, and they’ve managed to narrow down the location of the Eternity gang’s headquarters to within a couple of blocks. They’d probably have found it outright by now, but they waste part of their time on this shit.”

He shook his head in apparent disgust.

“Can’t you use one of the other groups instead?” I asked. “To finish the job?”

Zheng made a moue. “Could if they weren’t all dead or in traction. Anyway, if you want to check out Eternity, these are your guides.”

The crowd gave a sudden roar that was so loud it rattled the limo, sending us rocking a bit in the air. I held on and watched as, down below, a small group of people emerged from under a covered walkway. It connected to one of the skyscrapers, where I guessed the green room was located for waiting fighters.

There were four of them, none of whom I could see very well from up here. But then, I didn’t have to, as a couple of large billboards suddenly flashed with their faces. Electronic confetti and fireworks went off behind them, as if they were sports figures being introduced, which was fair, I guessed.

They kind of were.

A woman was shown first, who looked vaguely Asian with slanting hazel eyes and long, straight dark hair. But she also looked partly something else, possibly European, with olive skin and a Roman nose that was a little too large for her face. She was pretty, though, and knew it, with the brilliant smile of someone comfortable in her own skin.

She had on a leather catsuit, which I thought a bad choice for combat, but the crowd seemed to like it. She blew them a kiss and they went wild again, sloshing us around on the sound waves until Zheng knocked on the partition to the front and said something to the driver. We stabilized, right around the time that the second face came up.

This one looked like a male version of the girl—black hair, warm brown eyes, and tall, maybe a few inches over six feet. He was dressed more casually, in jeans and a hoody, but with enough firepower draped over his person to count as a platoon all on his own. I smiled approvingly. This was a guy who brought a knife to a gun fight—and some throwing stars, and a bazooka, and a dozen more guns.

He was also the kind of guy who walked out alive from a gun fight.

The next couple of faces weren’t so nice, not that the crowd seemed to mind. A tall, gaunt man with deep set eyes and a sallow complexion was next, with greasy black hair that matched the color of his worn and potion-stained robes. If he’d had “dark mage” tattooed on his forehead, it couldn’t have been any more obvious. I was surprised that he hadn’t been rounded up with the others, but maybe he’d been smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing and join the right side.

Didn’t make him any less creepy, though.

His buddy was a bit more of a mystery, reading as magical human to me, but as something else, too, something other. If I’d encountered him in a fight, I’d have kept my eyes on him above any of the others, although it wouldn’t have been a fun experience. He had the face of a pugilist who’d been hit one too many times, knocking things out of whack to the point that they couldn’t be set right anymore. There wasn’t a feature on his face that wasn’t skewed, and he also had some pretty impressive scars, as if something had gotten claws into him at some point.

Interestedly, he hadn’t bothered to cover anything up with a glamourie. Maybe he liked looking like a tough guy. The crowd certainly seemed to approve, roaring in support when his face was shown.

But their biggest roar of all, the one that had us rocking again and Zheng cursing, was for the fifth member of the group, who had just emerged from under the walkway. Only, in his case, I wasn’t sure whether the cheering was for his fighting prowess or his good looks. He could have been the lead on a telenovela: cheekbones high and sharp enough to cut you with, only you’d take it smiling because they were paired with golden skin, short, well-styled, dark hair, and movie star good looks. Not to mention a lithe, muscular body that filled out the jeans and casual black button up he was wearing to perfection.

He was the kind of guy who turned heads. He turned mine, but not for the usual reasons. I tensed up, with every dhampir sense I had suddenly blaring away.

In contrast to the other guy, he didn’t have a weapon on him, but that didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that a first-level master vampire was hanging out with a bunch of pit fighters, because that was undoubtedly what he was. The flood of his power was unmistakable even this far away, making my skin crawl with the energy he was sending off.

And I wasn’t the only one to notice. Louis-Cesare had been watching casually from beside me, drinking his whisky and chatting with Zheng. But he was suddenly sitting up, was staring out the window, was opening the car door—

“What are you doing?” Zheng and I asked, simultaneously.

I doubted that Louis-Cesare heard the question, even with vampire hearing. Because cracking the door did what the window going down had not, and cancelled the silence spell. A wash of pure sound blasted over us, so loud that it was like being struck by a fist. I actually felt my head go back for a second, which is how I saw Zheng echoing my own question. And then I grabbed hold of the back of Louis-Cesare’s trousers, because a fall from that height could kill even a master.

He turned around, detaching my hand. “I have to go down there.”

I saw the words, rather than heard them, but either way, they made no sense. “What are you talking about?

He said something, but I still didn’t hear, and my lip-reading capability is limited.

“What?”

“I said, I have to go down there!”

“I got that much! What I didn’t get was why!”

He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. But I decided that that was beside the point at the moment. “Do you remember what happened the last time you went running off?” I demanded.

“You don’t understand! It’s—”

The crowd roared, drowning him out.

“What?”

Louis-Cesare repeated himself once more, but the crowd was still going crazy, and I didn’t hear.

“Did you say Jonathan?” I asked, and grabbed my purse.

He shook his head. “No! I said—”

Another roar, goddamnit!

“He said Tomas,” the attractive pit fighter said, appearing out of nowhere, and clinging to the side of the car like Spider Man.

He grabbed my husband, threw him off the car, and leapt into open air after him, while Zheng and I just stared. “Don’t!” Zheng said, grasping for my arm.

But he missed, because I was already throwing myself into the void.