36 Streets Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Leave us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note on Vietnamese Language Usage

  Part One

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Episode 01

  Episode 02

  Episode 03

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Two

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Part Three

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Also Available from Titan Books

  “36 Streets glows bright and hallucinatory as tropical neon, goes down smooth as warm sake, cuts deep as a nano-steel blade. Napper honours classic cyberpunk with fresh perspectives and hot genre recombinations, a nasty new-future gleam, the proverbial new coat of paint. But there are more austere echoes here too, of Graham Greene and Kazuo Ishiguro, of a whole post-colonial literary heritage banging to be let in. In a genre stuffed with facile hero narratives, 36 Streets consistently chooses something else – messy humanity, grey moral tones and choices, hard-edged geopolitical truth. Raw and raging and passionate, this is cyberpunk literature with a capital fucken L. Get it while it’s hot!” Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

  “Brutal, brooding, brilliant . . . an angry vision of violence wrapped around a complex meditation of memory, trauma and hegemony. This is cyberpunk with soul. Street crime and resistance; nihilism and heroism; sinners and saviours; tiny Vietnam and the all-devouring empires that have hounded it; turn this book this way and that and these opposites meld and merge and flash bloody smiles at you, like the edges of a single perfect blade, with Napper's hand on the hilt.” Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, author of The Salvage Crew

  “Intimately concerned with the little guy in a world of neon gods, Napper paints a prophetic and uncomfortably believable vision of the future. A fascinating interplay between advancing technology and wish fulfillment, 36 Streets is ambitious in scope while remaining deeply human.” Tim Hickson, Hello Future Me

  “A fun, frenetic journey of neon-blasted streets, sinister underworlds and oodles of brutal tech, rendered in cutthroat prose so tangible you can almost smell the grime and cigarette smoke. T.R. Napper’s cyberpunk world is a feral, back-alley brawl of a novel with real blood under its nails.” Jeremy Szal, author of Stormblood

  “High-octane, immersive SF at its best. 36 Streets is sure to become a classic in the field.” Kaaron Warren, Shirley Jackson Award-Winner

  “For his impressive debut novel, rising star of Australian speculative fiction T.R. Napper gives us an engrossing, intriguing action-packed duty tour of a tech-thick, violence-infused, neon-scorched near future gangland Vietnam, where unwinnable games run hot and wild. Highly recommended.” Cat Sparks, author of Lotus Blue

  “Napper has made a remarkable character in the form of his protagonist Lin Thi Vu, subverting to some degree the conventions of the world of male power and violence. Lin is ‘other’ in this environment: female, somewhat Australian, not Vietnamese enough, desiring and desired widely. It’s a great achievement. The set pieces, the interludes, of performed mastery with weapons and skill, are well poised and set the scene with ritualised violence.” Stephen Teo, author of Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition

  “Beautiful, shimmering, ghostly science fiction.” Anna Smith-Spark, author of the Empires of Dust trilogy

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  36 Streets

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789097412

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097429

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: January 2022

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 T. R. Napper. All Rights Reserved.

  T. R. Napper asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For Sarah, Robert, and Willem. You three: the ground

  beneath my feet, my sky, my stars.

  A Note on Vietnamese

  Language Usage

  By English-language convention, character names do not use diacritics, nor does the country name Vietnam. However, all other Vietnamese words use diacritics to indicate tones, except where a non-Vietnamese speaker is using them. This may sound a little complicated, but I swear you won’t even notice.

  It was their thirty-eighth fight. This time she fought with the kanabo, a three-foot iron-studded ma
ce. Fights with such were not expected to last long.

  They stood twelve feet apart on the tatami mats. Lin Thi Vu held her weapon two-handed, the weight of it already stinging her triceps. Her shihan held his with one, raised above his head, angled so the tip was pointed at her. The third person watched from the shadows, past the edge of her peripheral vision.

  Shihan, silent, no war cry, not a breath: whirled, iron flashing, a gyre that tore towards her.

  The fight did not last long.

  Her arm, broken, was folded behind her. She gasped with pain, vision flowing in and out of focus. Her kanabo lay beyond her fingertips on the white mat, now dotted red with her blood. Probably only a three-mat fight.

  Legs astride her, the master held the mace above his head, ready for the last blow.

  Bao Nguyen emerged from the shadows at the side of the room. Stood next to her, looking down. Eyes watching always watching, marking now the pain on her face. Her failure. Time and again, her failure.

  Bao said: “[The will and the act.]”

  Lips swollen, voice blood-slurred, she replied: “The will and the act.”

  Bao said to the shihan: “[More.]”

  With a triumphant cry, the master brought the iron down.

  PART ONE

  Fat Victory

  I’ll give you twenty endless years

  Twenty years seven thousand nights of artillery

  Seven thousand nights of artillery lulling you to sleep

  Are you sleeping yet or are you still awake

  – Tran Da Tu, Love Tokens

  The problem with heroes was they thought the world owed them tribute before being sent to die. Awed respect. Last requests. Nobility in death. All that bullshit. This hero was no different. Handcuffed to a rusted wall pipe, wrists bloody, looking up at Lin Thi Vu through a sheen of sweat and fear and perverse hope. Dark eyes, lean shoulders, lean face. He said, jaw set: “[Get word to my mother. Tell her what happened.]”

  The words came through her on-retina translator, in English. She understood what he was saying, but out of habit read the translation before nodding once.

  Uncle Bao had given her the location of the safe house, told her to be careful, only go for the target, call it off if he had accomplices. Do no more than they’d been paid to do. Her thoughts, precisely.

  He’d come alone; she’d got him. As usual, she’d made it harder than necessary.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes earlier Lin had been waiting on a plastic chair in the darkest corner of the room, wearing a conical bamboo hat, the rim down over her eyes. Chain smoking to help keep the tremors in her hands under control. The target was late, so the shakes had gotten progressively worse. Lin tapped her foot on the ground in a nervous staccato; her free hand gripping and un-gripping the loose material of her faded blue pants. The pulse pistol rested near her crotch. She picked it up, checked the charge, put it down again. Up, and down again. Battered blue metal, faded Baosteel logo stamped into the rear of the stock.

  Lin was down to her last three cigarettes when a key rattled in the lock. She jumped, the pistol clattered to the ground. She bent down to scoop it up, dropped it again as the door opened, a shaft of light splitting the gloom. A shadow outlined in the doorway as Lin, down on one knee, finally grasped the weapon.

  “[Who’s there?]” asked a voice. Lin could see more clearly now. Clear enough, anyway, to confirm it was her mark: young man, twenty-two, message runner and scout for the Việt Minh in Hoàn Kiêm.

  He took one step forward, squinting into the gloom as he reached for something at his belt. She squeezed the trigger, the room lit up, strobe-flash-blue, the boy’s eyes wild-wide.

  But her aim was off, the blue arc of electricity hitting his shoulder then striking the wall behind him, the shock popping a black-and-white picture of Ho Chi Minh from the wall. The boy shouted at the pain, half turned, legs wobbling. The weapon he was holding – a hook-bladed knife – dropped to the floor. He reached for the doorframe behind, trying to drag himself out.

  Lin said: “Fuck,” and pulled the trigger again. The gun answered click. Then repeated itself: click click click. She swore again, too strung out to care what the neighbours heard. The shaking in her hands abated, her vision cleared, the adrenalin of imminent failure pumping into her system.

  She sprung up, took four steps and swivelled her hips, delivering a high kick to the young man’s temple. His head snapped sideways, bounced off the doorframe, and he collapsed at her feet.

  Lin dragged him by the arms across the smooth tile floor. Breathing heavily, she handcuffed him to a pipe and gaffer-taped his mouth, just as the shakes started up again. She stagger-stepped towards the couch, slumped backwards into it, missed, slid off the rounded armrest and cracked her temple on the side table as her butt hit the floor. Undeterred, Lin slid the vial out of her pocket and held it up in the thin light.

  A sigh escaped from her lips. The viscous yellow liquid glowed as though generating its own light. No drink to mix it with, she pulled the dropper, hands respectfully calm as the chemicals in her body began to change in expectation, already starting to behave as they would post-hit.

  Three drops onto her tongue. Bitter, pungent, cat-piss taste and then—

  Euphoria.

  The glow of the drops spread from her tongue, to her eyeballs, to her earlobes, to her fingernails. So she was glowing, glowing just like the vial. At peace, just like the vial, welcomed, belonging, just like the vial, part of an infinite present, connected via vital luminous threads to all the other vital luminous beings in that web, spread out in space, connected, all connected, all needed, all known, all wanted…

  She awoke. Mouth dry. Lips tingling, aftereffect of the drug; she drew her thumb across them, as though to wipe the sensation away. Lin grunted as she pushed herself up. Left arm pins and needles where she’d been lying on it. The timestamp on-retina said: 6:16 pm

  She’d been out twenty minutes. The boy was still there; the tension ebbed in her chest. Wrists bloody, must have woken before she did, one last desperate attempt to flee.

  * * *

  “[Yes, you’ll tell her?]” he asked again.

  Lin nodded. Even that single gesture heavy, weighed down with the lie. There’d be no back-channel communication, no quiet moment over a kitchen table, Lin’s hand on some old woman’s, mumbling condolences. Tokenism of that sort could be linked back to Lin. And Lin, well, wasn’t much in the mood for being kidnapped by the Việt Minh, then tortured, murdered, filmed, and later broadcast out onto the freewave as an example of what happens to traitors.

  “[Promise,]” he said.

  Lin pressed her lips together in displeasure at his demand, but replied in Vietnamese: “Chị hứa.” No point in letting him get all emotional before the authorities arrived.

  “[She lives on Chan Cam. Green apartment, third floor,]” he said. “[You know it?]”

  Lin nodded. In the thirty-six streets. Of course she knew it.

  “[Tell her I died as a patriot, for our country.]”

  Lin lit a cigarette and settled back into the sofa. The body buzz from the drugs relaxed her limbs, sharpened her focus. The boy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. He was speaking for himself, the words forming heroic images in his mind. The coda of his life’s narrative. She blew out a cloud of smoke. Twenty years old, more or less. Pretty short story.

  The smoke pooled across the ceiling. Peeling paint, dirty white, no fan. Narrow window, sunset, room darkening. Outside a view of a courtyard, overgrown, a tight square between apartments stacked on top of each other, four, five, six stories high, depending on how much risk the landlord wanted to swallow. Poorly made top-floor apartments were known to lose roofs, contents, even occupants, if the winds got high enough.

  This one was solid. Just old, its entrance hidden down one of the alleys in the Old Quarter. Labyrinthine passages, unmarked, slick concrete, shocks of green emerging from cracks, from drains.

  She smoked until someone tapped on
the door, light. Lin rose to her feet, fluid, knife in her hand. Black moulded grip, long black blade, matching pair each ankle, nano-edged Chinese special forces knives that had found their way onto the Hà Nội street market.

  “Yes?” she asked, in Vietnamese.

  The door creaked open, hesitant; Lin reached, no hesitation, and pulled the person in. It was her street kid, grubby face, eyes round in their sockets. He was too poor to have a memory pin, the room was dim, and the rim of the conical bamboo hat covered half of her face. Still, she grabbed his hair and gently tilted his head until he was looking at the floor.

  “[They’re here,]” he mumbled.

  She sheathed her blade, pulled a wad of yuan from her pocket. A cashless world, they insisted. Against all contrary evidence. Citizens didn’t like putting prostitutes on their credit link, for one, no matter the guarantees of anonymity. Everything black market required cold hard.

  She handed him a note. He grabbed it, big smile cracking his face. Lin turned him around and pushed him out the door. Increased jamming in the Old Quarter lately had neural links dropping out all the time, so she’d gone analogue, found a street communicator. Better anyway, harder to trace.

  Lin closed the door and walked over to the young hero, checked his cuffs, gleaming in the low light, firm around his red wrists. She’d add the price of them to the bill.

  He looked up at her. The fear was consuming him now, chasing away the last hints of righteousness. He asked: “[What will they do to me?]”

  Torture you. Virtual, physical, until you don’t know the difference. Over weeks. Turn you. Turn you against everyone you ever loved. Everything you ever loved. Everyone you ever fought alongside. Make you confess every offence you, or anyone you ever knew committed. Put a bullet in you. Bury you in the jungle in an unmarked grave.

  “Don’t know,” she said.

  He nodded. Steeling himself.

  She found herself staring at the young man. His thin shirt, sweat-soaked skin, his failing courage. Utterly alone. She wet her lips to say something, but the thump thump thump of heavy boots on stairs changed her mind.

  Lin Thi Vu left the room quickly, passing the men with her eyes down, conical hat covering her face. Not wanting to be seen, and most of all not wanting to see them and the hard purpose in their eyes.