Harley’s eyes flew open again as the air across his face went cold. Hope flared in his chest as he realised who the gun, and the questions, had really been aimed at.
‘Move back! Or I will shoot our young friend here,’ Mr Hong Kong yelled, now sounding strangely frightened.
Harley spun in his seat, spotting Qing at the far end of the shop near the front door. As her azure-rimmed dark eyes flicked up to meet the wide-eyed gaze of Mr Hong Kong, multiple sacks of dried goods simultaneously tumbled over, spilling their contents across the shop floor in a slithery roar that sounded like an avalanche. A tidal wave of sorghum grain, dried fish flakes and salted meat jerky spilled through the open door of the old man’s office. Startled, Harley moved his sneakers back.
Between him and Qing, a knee-deep sea of dry goods had suddenly sprung into being.
The old man – still clutching the handgun – leapt out of his seat, repeating, ‘Who are you?’
Qing didn’t raise her voice, but her words bounced with a weird, spiky resonance off the heavy wooden beams and rafters so that they seemed to fill the entire building.
‘Wò hŭ cáng lóng.’
The black pistol sagged in Mr Hong Kong’s gun hand as he whispered, ‘Crouching tiger, hidden dragon! Can it be true?’
Harley looked from the old man to Qing in confusion. Wasn’t that the title of a famous kung fu movie? Or maybe it was one of those mysterious Chinese sayings that his great-grandpa used to say that Harley could never work out the meaning of.
The light around Qing intensified for a moment before it seemed to concentrate on something she was holding between her cupped hands. As she advanced towards them down the length of the shop, passing easily through the dried grain and other foodstuffs burying the shop floor from wall to wall, the lights hanging down from the ceiling blew out one at a time in a shower of sparks – pow, pow, pow – with her passage. Behind Qing, Harley could see Ricotta yelling and struggling to unlock the security gates barring the front door, which had somehow become fused shut.
As Qing entered the old man’s office, the last pendant light exploded in a rain of sparks. The shop was dark, except for Qing’s softly glowing figure.
She came to a stop behind Harley’s carved rosewood chair, her mere presence raising live static in the air. Harley could feel it crackling around him and hoped fervently that Qing wouldn’t do something friendly like pat him on the back. It could prove deadly.
‘Where have you been?’ Harley’s whisper was almost accusing, to hide his gladness.
‘Around,’ she replied with a straight face, although her mouth might have quirked up at the corners for a second. ‘Just like you, I needed to eat. And now I have eaten.’
Harley frowned in confusion, then his eyes widened, remembering the small, pale thing he’d thought was some kind of horrible caterpillar burrowing into the sack of dried fish at the front of the shop.
Qing uncupped her hands at last, and Harley watched as she quickly threaded a shining pearl back onto the simple ribbon she wore around her neck. The pearl nestled there in the hollow between Qing’s collarbones – both the source of her luminescence, Harley realised suddenly, and her power. It was the same shining pearl that he had followed all across Taipa Island and off the ferry, only smaller.
In a way Harley couldn’t fathom, she was the pearl, and the pearl was her. He might have lost his dad and Schumacher in Macau hours ago, but Qing had been with him the whole time. It was strangely comforting.
Qing’s gaze swung back towards the old man. In the eerie shadows cast by her glow, Mr Hong Kong appeared to be both smiling and weeping at the same time. His dark eyes shone with the same tears that now ran down his hollow cheeks in thin rivulets and into the collar of his crisp white shirt.
Mr Hong Kong studied the finely embroidered gold and azure rampant dragon twining around the neckline of Qing’s tunic, his gaze narrowing on the C-shaped lapis lazuli dragons weighing down the ends of her belt ties. ‘Indeed,’ he murmured through his tears, ‘the world is full of the extraordinary which remains stubbornly hidden from view; in the way of the tiger, the reclusive dragon. It is I who must apologise, lóng tǐ,’ and the old man rose and set the handgun down on the glass-topped table between them, ‘for doubting this boy’s story.’
The elderly gentleman punched his right fist sharply into his open left hand and bowed once from the waist, respectfully, in Qing’s direction before quickly straightening. ‘What do you need from me?’ Mr Hong Kong enquired, trying hard not to stare at the large, shining pearl nestled at the base of the girl’s neck. In a lifetime of finding and helpfully ‘relocating’ valuable things, the old man knew he would never see anything as priceless as that pearl again, not if he lived for ten thousand more years.
Qing gave the old man a grave look, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking, before saying something that seemed to be a series of staccato serpentine hisses. The sounds entered Harley’s eardrums like short, sharp blasts of frigid air, and raised the fine hairs on his skin. Mr Hong Kong nodded, then gave his head a little shake as if to dislodge something tickling the inside of his skull.
‘I will take you to the Wŭdāng Shān personally, lóng tǐ,’ the old man insisted. ‘It would be my duty and my honour to do so. My private plane is at your disposal.’
The old man took a small phone out of the inside breast pocket of his immaculate suit jacket and Harley watched as Ricotta stopped yanking at the gates outside the front entrance to answer his own phone with a perturbed look on his face. Mr Hong Kong and his driver exchanged hurried words, then Ricotta vanished out of view.
‘Follow me,’ the old man said, turning to face the packed bookcase on the back wall.
‘Uh,’ Harley replied uncertainly. ‘Where to?’
The bookcase looked pretty solid. As far as he could tell, the only way in and out of the shop was the barred front door.
The old man placed his right hand on a maroon clothbound volume with the title Moral Humanism in the Four Great Masterworks and tilted it sharply towards him. Harley gaped as a section of the back bookcase opened outwards, shaped just like a swinging door. The concealed exit revealed a narrow passage – again illuminated by a single green pendant lamp – which had an additional large room running off each side.
Harley spotted an elderly cook in a dark dress and stained white apron, her white hair scraped into a tight low bun, moving around in the room to left, which looked like a full-sized kitchen and dining room containing a table set for twelve. She did a double take as she caught sight of Qing and Harley hurrying after the old man towards the locked back door of the shop, and Harley gave her a small, embarrassed wave.
Harley tried not to stare as he passed the huge, windowless room on the right, which appeared to be stuffed full of the kinds of ancient Chinese statues, scrolls, weaponry and figurines that he’d seen at Antediluvian House and the Quek mansion in Singapore. But there was also stuff that looked maybe Greek or Roman – like half-naked statues missing limbs and noses – together with a bunch of old oil paintings on stretchers, or in nondescript frames. Harley hurried on, his mind buzzing with questions about the shadowy world his dad seemed to inhabit when he wasn’t taking Harley out for pizza, or games of laser tag.
The old man reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew a set of keys hanging from a gold chain, unlocking then throwing open the back door with a flourish.
Then without warning he stuck his hands straight up in the air, and Harley did the same, his heart sinking into his sneakers.
In the grimy, graffiti-covered alleyway that ran along the back of the dry goods shop, it was evident that the old man’s black limo, his driver, Ricotta, and another bodyguard Harley hadn’t seen before, were surrounded by unfriendly forces.
Ricotta and the other man were kneeling on the ground, their fingers interlocked on top of their heads, facing the side of the car. Around them, and positioned at both ends of the alleyway, were men dressed in head-to-toe black, only their eyes visible through the gaps in their balaclavas. Some grasped thick bamboo poles as long as a man’s forearm – a weapon Harley was unfortunately already familiar with from the fracas at Antediluvian House – while others (he guessed the even meaner ones) held the kind of submachine gun they’d already run into in a dark, misty laneway on Taipa Island.
Grandmaster Chiu Chiu Pang’s men had found them again.
‘Children,’ Mr Hong Kong said quietly. ‘Grandmaster Pang and I have an agreement that he is not to enter this area of Hong Kong without a great deal of advance warning. I will clear up this … most unfortunate and potentially fatal … misunderstanding with the grandmaster’s chief goon, Vinegar, here.’
Harley’s eyebrows shot up. The man’s name was Vinegar?
What followed was a rapid-fire argument in Cantonese. The old man – without ever really raising his voice – was clearly indicating, with sharp, bladelike gestures of his wrinkly brown hands, that some kind of territorial boundary had been crossed. In reply, the chief goon jabbed the barrel of his submachine gun first at Harley, then at Qing standing silently behind him, indicating that he would be relieving Mr Hong Kong of both the children and the car.
When Mr Hong Kong shook his head, the man called Vinegar swung his weapon around in a swift arc without warning, knocking the old man out cold. Both Ricotta and the other bodyguard exclaimed in horror as the elderly gentleman crumpled to the slimy red brickwork of the alleyway, then lay still.
Behind him, Harley heard Qing’s clothes rustle as she stiffened in outrage. Masked men swiftly moved to separate Harley from Qing, two of them crying out in pain when a crack of static energy passed from Qing’s body into their fingertips as they tried to grab hold of her upper arms.
In a flash, Harley saw the masked men in the alleyway around them stiffen, their watchful eyes narrowing. They’d all seen the intense, bright blue light which had arced off the girl’s bell-like silk sleeves the moment the men’s fingertips made contact. It had been more than mere static. It had had the appearance of miniaturised lightning.
The battalion of armed men – at least a dozen of them – looked uncertainly to Grandmaster Chiu Chiu Pang’s chief goon. She was just a kid in fancy dress, right?
The man called Vinegar made a sharp chopping gesture and the men holding Harley wrestled him right off his feet, throwing him into the back of Mr Hong Kong’s limo before lacing his hands behind his back with plastic cable ties.
Huddled over in the footwell between the two leather bench seats of the limo, Harley turned his head sharply as the air went arctic and began to fill with the sounds of men losing their minds in fear.