“Okay, but from what you’ve told me, this guy is totally not going to let it go even after you’re done. At my old job, we got blackmailed like that all the time, which was really kind of irritating. They’d always try to bargain, and after the first job, they’d say stuff like ‘if you don’t do me this favor I’m going to call the cops and tell them everything’ just to weasel out of paying for the next one.”
“Wait. Was this at the bakery or the merch stand?”
“Uh.” Lily looks a bit sheepish. This is quite unusual, considering that Lily has spent the past four days regaling Helena with tales of the most impressive blood blobs from her period, complete with comparisons to their failed prints. “Are you familiar with the Red Triad? The one in Guangzhou?”
“You mean the organ printers?”
“Yeah, them. I kind of might have been working there before the bakery … ?”
“What?”
Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”
“Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”
“Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers … you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”
“That’s not simple.”
“Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow …”
Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”
“Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”
The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.
As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”
“Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”
The brief specifies that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of 8 August, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.
Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”
“Do it,” Helena says.
The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.
“Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”
Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.
The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.
What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colors, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.
It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.
Cherry Cai Si Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing.”
“Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see … oh. Wow.”
“I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex we just made fun of him non-stop.”
Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically-stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.
“But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm …”
“As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is purebred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”
Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks
