Something strange happened on the island side of the road bridge.
Harley just kept on running up the road, his breath caught somewhere high in his throat, until he was almost across the entire width of the island – but Schumacher didn’t follow him.
The shouts across the water were fainter now. Harley danced around in the middle of the road for a while, waiting for Schumacher to appear so that they could head together into the tree-lined interior of the island to start searching for the vase. But Schumacher never came.
Harley worked his way backwards to where the road met the island, taking care to follow the tree line on the eastern side. ‘Schumacher!’ he hissed. ‘Where are you?’
He found Schumacher sitting at the base of a split tree near where the road bridge met the island. The big man was almost completely camouflaged in the shadows of a deep cleft in the tree’s trunk. The tree was somehow still alive, with a flourishing canopy, but the inside of the trunk was hollowed out, half-exposed and blackened by an old lightning strike or a fire.
Harley crouched down beside his friend. ‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered, his blood going cold as he glimpsed a hint of pink through the trees on the other side of the road bridge. The man called Vinegar had found them.
‘Please, Schumacher!’ Harley pleaded. ‘They’re almost here!’ He shook Schumacher by the shoulders urgently. ‘We have to move!’
‘I can’t!’ Schumacher moaned, his head bowed over his bent knees, long blond hair lank around his face. ‘There is something very wrong with my legs. A … how do you say it? A bad feeling. I set foot on the island and this bad feeling … it has come over me.’
‘You’ve got to move!’ Harley insisted, placing one of Schumacher’s big arms around his shoulders and trying to lever him up, without success. The man had to be more than one hundred kilograms of muscle. ‘At least get further inside the trees,’ Harley pleaded, ‘away from the road, Schumacher, please. They’re going to find you.’
Schumacher shook his head, still groaning. ‘I don’t think I can stand, Harls. This bad feeling – it’s like a weight. Pushing me down. Maybe it is the heart attack. Too many servings of Rostbratwurst in my life, now coming home to roost, like the pigeons. You go, Junge. You go find the vase.’
Schumacher’s voice trailed off into a whisper. If it were possible, he seemed to curl up even smaller where he was sitting inside the tree trunk, his knees drawn up tightly under his chin, his head down, as if he were in great pain. His breathing was rapid and shallow and Harley’s eyes filled with sudden tears.
‘It’s like the island—’ Schumacher mumbled.
‘What?’ Harley begged, barely able to make out what Schumacher was saying.
‘—is speaking directly to me. Telling me – Go. No. Further.’
Then Schumacher seemed to fall into a deep and abrupt sleep. No amount of shaking would make him raise his head. It was hopeless.
Harley glanced across the bridge and saw splashes of colour moving closer through the dark green.
Dashing the back of one hand across his eyes, without thinking and hardly breathing, Harley turned and ran into the dense forest to the east of the fourth road.
Moving through the trees, Harley found it eerily quiet. The insects that had plagued him the entire time on the mainland were gone. Sunlight fell through the leaves and branches, clean and golden. If Harley weren’t in fear for his life, it would actually be quite a nice walk.
His path zigzagged between bent and twisted boughs. He was uncertain of what to look for. A vase-shaped impression in the ground? A strange vase-shaped knot in a tree trunk? What?
The smell of water grew stronger, and Harley stopped, realising, as he looked through the tree line before him, that he’d hit the eastern edge of the small island. Before him lay a wide channel of dark water, the forest recommencing on the mainland on the other side. Harley followed the eastern shore to the north of the island and found the edge of another man-made road. Stumped, he worked his way back down the eastern shore to the south and held his breath as he again glimpsed the narrow fourth road bridge in the distance through the trees. There was a mass of people standing at the mainland side of the road bridge now. Harley could make out Vinegar – in his bright pink polo shirt and loud golfing knickerbockers – shouting orders to people beyond. It looked like he was telling them to bring something forward.
Maybe it was guns!
His heart in his throat, Harley backed away and re-entered the trackless forest at a run, slipping and falling, in his haste, over something round and hard in the leaf litter.
‘Owwwww!’ Harley yelled, rolling around on the ground and clutching at his right ankle, before recalling the Grandmaster’s massed forces, maybe only a kilometre away. He bit his tongue, cutting his howl off mid-shriek. He’d read somewhere that sound carried really far over water. They were probably already coming over the bridge and seizing Schumacher, thanks to the noise he’d been making.
Pulling himself up into a seated position, Harley prodded his right ankle gingerly before feeling around in the leaf litter for what he’d slipped on. It had felt … like a cricket ball.
A cricket ball, in the middle of a Chinese forest?
Harley’s eyes widened as he saw what he held in his hand.
He was so shocked that for a second he felt light-headed, like he’d lifted right out of his body again.
It was a peach. A perfectly formed, perfectly blemishless round peach. But it was green and unripe, almost as hard as a stone. Which was why his foot had slipped straight across it, like the time he’d turned his ankle off a hockey ball mid-play and been benched for the rest of the game.
He hefted the hard green peach in his hand and looked up at the canopy of trees overhead, feeling his skin prickle as he registered that he was surrounded by pine trees or fir trees.
Not a single one of them was a peach tree, or indeed a fruit tree of any kind. Where had the peach come from?
Levering himself up awkwardly off the ground, still holding the peach, he limped through the leaf litter in search of others. For several heart-stopping seconds he felt nothing under the toes of his sneakers but fallen leaves and twigs, until—
There, he thought, almost kicking away something small, round and hard. He shoved the peach he was holding into one pocket of his bomber jacket and bent awkwardly, feeling through the gritty leaf litter with his fingers until he found it.
This peach, too, was green and unripe.
Two peaches! That was practically a trail, wasn’t it? The tree can’t be far, Harley thought, his heart pounding.
Harley held the second peach to his nose, as if sniffing it would somehow lead him to the tree it had come from. Weirdly, the moment he smelled the delicately scented fruit, he saw something. Just a ripple of vivid green between the rough bark of two firs – a bright shade of green that hadn’t been there before. So intent was Harley on finding the tree with the leaves of that colour that he dropped the peach he was holding, running forward eagerly between the two fir trees that were bending towards each other, as if they were whispering. Or were a gateway to somewhere.
And then Harley entered what could only be termed a grove.
A perfectly circular little grove planted solely with small, twisted peach trees only slightly taller than Harley. There was no leaf litter underfoot, only a soft, tufty kind of grass, and the occasional fallen green peach. The trees looked incredibly old and weathered, as if they’d withstood centuries of storms, their dark, bent branches reaching this way and that in contorted shapes, like desperate fingers. But only one tree was heavily covered in fruit – dozens of hard green peaches. Not a single one ready to eat.
Harley could have sworn he’d walked this entire part of the island already. Yet he’d missed this peculiar grove the first time. He wondered how that was possible.
Harley hesitated for a second before walking across the springy grass to the single tree that bore fruit, almost leaping out of his skin when he looked up and spotted the small figurine of a striped cat, sitting above his head in a fork in the crown of the tree. The little figurine was the colour of dried mud, its stripes just darker grooves filled with more mud.
Being an expert on fossils, Harley knew at once that the cat wasn’t one. It wasn’t made of stone or minerals or carbon. It had been lovingly carved by hand. It looked to have been exposed to the elements for some time, and something told Harley that the cat had been placed there the very day the peach trees were planted. Where it was positioned in the sole fruiting tree seemed to give it an air of authority over the entire grove.
The cheerful little cat – the figurine seemed almost to be smiling – stared down at him from the fork, its tongue lolling out one side of its toothy, open jaws, its striped tail raised like a jaunty flag.
Harley reached up his hand uncertainly to stroke the belly of the figurine, and withdrew his fingers hastily as if they had been burnt – it felt to him like the cat was made of bone.
What if it were human?
Screaming on the inside, Harley almost ran, then and there, out of the strange grove of crooked fruit trees. He found himself breathing shallowly, in panic.
Who leaves a bone cat in a tree for someone to find? Did it mean something bad?
Harley’s internal scream stopped abruptly as a thought occurred to him. He prided himself on knowing about old stuff, old stuff that mattered – like fossilised dinosaur poo and the tools and totems of early people. Which were often made of bone. Bone which denatured over time, becoming rough and brittle and broken.
Unlike this bone cat.
If the cat figurine was as old as the trees in this grove, Harley reasoned, something had to have kept it intact, all this time.
The little voice inside Harley’s head, the voice which had originally urged him to take the vase in which Qing had been imprisoned, whispered: Power.
Intrigued, Harley straightened, gingerly reaching up on tiptoe to pluck the little cat made of bone out of the fork of the twisted peach tree. He brushed some of the thick layer of accumulated dirt off it, studying it carefully.
It was roughly the size of his palm. Dirty, but still smooth and not porous when Harley scratched a nail through the caked soil. It was as if the maker had only left off polishing it yesterday and it had somehow got caught in a muddy rain shower.
Harley had no idea what to do with it, but he knew the little cat had to have something to do with the magician and the vase. He just didn’t know what.
He pocketed the cat figurine then spun around the grove, running his hands over the rough bark of all the peach trees, kneeling and digging first at the base of the tree loaded with peaches with his fingers, then under all the rest. After long moments of desperate work, Harley had only succeeded in getting dirt under his nails and tearing the ends of some of them off. He knew he would need help to really make any progress here. So far, the grove had yielded nothing but a small statuette. He needed Schumacher’s help. He needed Schumacher to see this place and tell him what to do next.
Harley retraced his steps across the strange clearing and through the two bent fir trees, looking back once over his shoulder to try to stick the place where the grove was in his memory. But the instant he did that, looked behind him, the grove was no longer there.
On the other side of the natural gateway of fir trees he’d walked under, there were just … more fir trees.
Harley stepped through the gap between the two bent-over fir trees again to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks. And they weren’t. It was firs now, as far as the eye could see.
His internal scream rising again in his throat, Harley sprinted back the way he’d come in a cold sweat, running smack bang into Schumacher coming the other way to find him.
Schumacher put his hands out to steady Harley when it looked like Harley would fall over from a combination of sheer fright, and the impact of Schumacher’s ridiculous sixpack – more like plate armour than muscle – on Harley’s forehead.
‘One minute I was away with the fairies, ja?’ Schumacher exclaimed. ‘Und the next? I was wide awake and wondering where it is on earth you are going to! The bad feelings have gone now, Kind,’ Schumacher said brightly. ‘I feel great energy after my little power nap. But we must hurry und find the vase, ja?’
Still shaking in shock, Harley slowly took the striped cat made of bone out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Schumacher, who frowned down at it in confusion. ‘You are mistaken, Harley Spark! This is not a vase. It is a cat!’
Harley opened his mouth, about to recount to Schumacher how he’d slipped over on an unripe peach that had turned up in the middle of nowhere, when a bloodcurdling scream split the air. It came from the direction of the fourth road bridge, and it sounded uncannily like Qing.
Who never screamed.
Immediately, Harley and Schumacher broke into a run.
While Harley and Schumacher had been on the island, Chiu Chiu Pang’s men had set up the steel cage in the middle of the road bridge, with Qing locked inside. There wasn’t enough room to stand up inside it, so she knelt, her head bowed, her unbound hair falling around her face. She was still wearing her simple black pantsuit, and her hands were wrapped tightly around the bars, the knuckles white with anger. Harley and Schumacher could see this when the road bridge came into sight.
Schumacher’s fists bunched together as he and Harley exchanged glances. They had never seen someone treated so shockingly in their lives, ever. Harley wasn’t to know this, and it probably wouldn’t have made him feel any better, but no one had ever been imprisoned or died during any of the jobs Schumacher and Ray had pulled off together across the world. Schumacher was so angry he began to punch his massive right fist into his left palm.
Grandmaster Pang waved his long ebony-handled pipe in the air as Harley and Schumacher stood at the island-end of the road bridge, the frames of his gold spectacles and the small golden bowl of his pipe gleaming under the high sun. ‘Where is the vase?’ the Grandmaster called out pleasantly from where he was standing on the other side of the bridge, his massed henchmen arrayed behind him dressed as cooks, butchers, policemen, firemen and the like. ‘Give me the vase and I will give you the girl.’
It was a lie. Harley and Schumacher could tell from the Grandmaster’s easy tone that he expected to take the lot – Qing, Harley and the vase, but not Schumacher. ‘Because I am still like the chopped liver to this guy!’ Schumacher muttered darkly.
‘All I found was this!’ Harley yelled back, fumbling the dirt-encrusted bone cat out of his pocket and waving it high in the air so that the men on the other side of the bridge could all see it. ‘There is no vase! I looked everywhere.’
Qing had raised her head at the sound of Harley’s voice and he saw her expression shift as she caught sight of the cat figurine in his hand. It looked as if she … recognised it. Without thinking about what he was doing, Harley set foot onto the road bridge, intending to bring the cat to Qing. After a moment’s hesitation, Schumacher followed him.
‘Stop right there!’ the man called Vinegar roared. He stepped out of the crowd of henchmen and stood beside his grandmaster, revealing to Harley and Schumacher the pearl he was holding in his hand. ‘Stay away from the girl, or I get a hammer and smash this priceless pearl. I’m sending two men across to get that toy cat from you now. You’d better hand it over.’
Harley and Schumacher heard a loud commotion behind Vinegar as several men rejected the mission immediately.
‘Bù shì ní nī gǒu!’ Harley heard someone shout fearfully before Vinegar cuffed him across the head. Vinegar dragged the man who had shouted forward – a man dressed in a chef’s uniform – and then another vigorously protesting individual, who was dressed as a delivery van driver. Vinegar jabbed his finger in Harley’s direction and the fake chef howled, ‘I tell you, it is not a toy made of mud! I won’t touch it, I say!’
Harley and Schumacher could see the two men pleading with Vinegar. Both of them continued to shake their heads, pointing at the caged girl, then at the thing in Harley’s hand. Without any warning, the Grandmaster, a look of deep displeasure on his weathered features, stepped towards both men and simply threw them into the deep waters of the reservoir. He hadn’t even really made any effort. Just a simple hip-strike and a downward bit of pressure on one man’s arm, then a raised knee and a double-handed throw on the other, and they were both screaming and thrashing in the water beside the fourth road bridge.
The Grandmaster turned to his remaining men and raised his voice only a notch. ‘Get the toy from the child, or you all will pay.’
Two men – dressed as paramedics – presented themselves in front of the Grandmaster hastily, punching their right fists into their left open palms and bowing sharply, once from the waist, before straightening.
Harley started to run towards Qing then, holding out the bone cat to her, as the two men picked up speed, shouting and waving as they ran towards the cage from the other side. Harley could hear Schumacher’s laboured breathing right behind him as he knelt and quickly shoved the carved cat through the bars of the cage.
Qing took it as Harley rattled frantically at the cage door. It was locked tight and the key was nowhere in sight. Schumacher – who could almost lift the cage on his own with Qing still inside it – could not bend back a single bar to get her out, and he roared in frustration. Inside the cage, Qing turned the little figurine over and over in her hands, as if she were working through a knotty problem.
The two nervous henchmen dressed like paramedics slowed, facing Harley and Schumacher across the top of the locked cage.
‘Gěi wǒ!’ one of the paramedics said hoarsely, bending to address Qing inside the steel enclosure. His face gave away his unease, the man clearly recalling how the small girl had just given him the worst electric shock of his life in the main street of Taicheng. It was worse than a simple case of static, the man knew – there was something about this girl. He didn’t understand what had happened to some of the men to make them so afraid of the child, but it stemmed from the attempted ambush the other night in the alleyway in Sheung Wan. He’d had the night off from being a henchman, and now no one was talking.
Still, something about her just unnerved him deeply. And the man inhaled sharply as the whites of the girl’s eyes suddenly glowed a luminous gold as she continued to regard him steadily through the bars; her jet-black irises darkened and widened so that the strange, but customary, thin rim of azure blue around each one was almost swallowed by the black.
They were the eyes of a predator, he thought, swallowing. Or of something not quite … human.
His companion also swallowed audibly, beginning to back away.
‘Gěi wǒ!’ the man whispered again doggedly to the girl in the cage. Give it to me.
Qing smiled at his words – a smile without an ounce of humour.
Considering the two men calmly, she poked the bone cat out between two bars, waving it tantalisingly close to the man who had spoken. And then she threw it into the water with a sideways flick of her wrist.
‘Nooooooooo!’ the Grandmaster and Harley yelled at the same time.
‘That was our only clue!’ Harley exclaimed. ‘I found it in a grove of old trees … and then they vanished! I had nothing to show you, Qing, but that bone cat! And now it’s gone!’
Qing turned her head and looked at Harley and Schumacher, not really seeing them. She murmured, ‘Were they peach trees?’
‘Yes!’ Harley nodded, his face crumpling into a frown. ‘But how did you know?’
Qing’s reply was eerily calm. ‘It’s not a cat, it’s a tiger. Made from tiger’s bone, the presence of which, in water, will always draw a response from our kind. You need to get off the bridge.’
The air turned icy around them, so rapidly that it caused Schumacher to inhale sharply beside Harley, who was doing the same. The sun was still blazing, but it felt like the hushed moment before heavy snowfall – before an avalanche came crashing down to bury them all.
It felt like nature turning upside down.
Harley looked at Schumacher uncertainly, the two henchmen doing the same on the other side of the cage. All of them were stiff with cold as the sun beat down from high above, unable to dispel the chill building around them.
‘Get off the bridge, now,’ Qing repeated, in a voice that seemed to reverberate off the face of the gentle mountain overlooking the reservoir. It echoed back to them from the water, from the trees. Men ducked their heads as if the words were swooping birds with sharp beaks, birds that kept circling, then returning.
Something in Qing’s face so terrified Harley and Schumacher and the two henchmen then, that they peeled off in opposite directions at a stumbling run; Harley and Schumacher made for the island, the two men ran for their lives the other way.
Soon after, there were two heavy splashes in the water, followed by choking cries, and Harley knew that the Grandmaster had flung the two ‘paramedics’ off the bridge as well, in a high rage.
‘You will pay!’ the Grandmaster shrieked as pandemonium descended upon his men. Some of them ran in circles, some pushed roughly past Vinegar and their fellow henchmen and didn’t stop running, even as they hit the edge of the forest on the mainland and disappeared out of sight.
Looking across the bridge at the men scattering this way and that like scalded ants, Harley couldn’t understand what had set them off. In the centre of the road, all was still, save for Qing in her horrible cage with no key.
But then Schumacher pointed at the distant surface of the water with a shaking finger. Something titanic, a dark and gargantuan shape, was raising ripples just beneath the surface. It was worse than a tsunami because it was moving so fast. And it was coming from the exact direction where Qing had thrown the bone tiger. It was like she had called it.
Then, with a roar, the entire road bridge burst upwards, flinging the cage metres into the sky like a strange-shaped steel ball tossed into the air by the hands of unseen and uncaring gods.