Mouse told us he’d found a monster in the tunnels under the city. “A nice monster,” he clarified, when Rabbit began to cry, her snotty, globby tears full as moons. So we were headed there to save the monster, before the bulldozers came to destroy our walled city and the monster with it.
Rabbit couldn’t help being a crybaby. At nine, she was the youngest of us five. We wouldn’t even have started bringing her along on our nightly adventures if Ox hadn’t been designated her babysitter when their mother got sick a couple of years ago. Their father said her health would improve after they moved into the government housing at the other end of Hong Kong, where the air was fresher, but we knew better than to trust anything the government said. They didn’t do anything when Puppy’s aunt got killed in the triads’ crossfire. And it wasn’t as if any of us had ever spent much time outside this city and could verify the air quality where they planned to stick us.
“Monkey,” Puppy said from behind me, her hand lightly tugging the hem of my shirt. “Maybe we should take a break. We’ve been walking for a long time, and Rabbit isn’t used to being out this late.”
“I’m OK,” Rabbit said so quietly we could hardly hear her.
“It’s huge!” Mouse chimed in, picking at the scabs up and down his shins that he’d gotten crawling around the tunnels by himself. You could always tell he was near from the antiseptic ointment he gooped on them, an earthy, stingy smell like rusty barbed wire. “But really, really calm, like a giant tree.” He raised his arms high in the air and made a whooshing sound like a wind through the leaves. “You guys’ll like him.”
“The police are coming tomorrow to start kicking us out of the city. This might be our last chance,” I said. They usually let me make the decisions because I was the oldest. “Rabbit, tell your brother if you’re really not feeling well, OK?”
It was true we’d been out for a while, but even for adults, getting from point A to B in our city was sometimes an adventure. The tiny alleys that veined certain areas often got clogged by crates and sudden dice games. Levels jointed at odd angles like badly set elbows and knees. We needed to avoid the people who stood between us and the monster, like the police, who would make us go home if they saw us, or the missionaries who searched the hollows of this place, trying to find souls to save the way my mother searched between couch cushions for loose socks that needed washing.
We pried deeper into the soggy darkness as if into a succulent oyster, marking our path with chalk as we went, our shoes slipping on decades’ worth of discarded plastic bags and orange peels, fallen flyers advertising showgirls and mah-jongg dens, babies’ bibs lost from clotheslines way up above. “This way, this way!” Mouse exclaimed after another few minutes or so. He painted circles with his flashlight on a tunnel barely wider than our shoulders, and we all went in.
None of us believed Mouse at first, of course. He often made things up, and what he didn’t make up, he misunderstood, like that time he saw a fortune-telling slip on top of a pile of rags and became convinced it was a de-reanimated corpse. He dragged us all the way there and poked at the supposed jiangshi with a stick, only to reveal a nest of rats under the rags. “So that’s why it was moving,” he muttered to himself, nodding like an old-timey sage. If he’d had a long beard he would have stroked it. Puppy, who read a lot, even books too difficult for fourteen-year-olds, said that Mouse had something called hyperkinesis, which meant that he was too impatient to think things through. Mouse hated this label and called her “book idiot” behind her back, but I kind of liked that side of Puppy, how she often paused before she answered questions, as if triple-checking her words. Once I accidentally said this out loud and Mouse started laughing. “You looooove Puppy,” he said. “You wanna maaaaarry her.”
Puppy and her family—minus her brother—were moving to Macao. They had some relatives there who could find her father a job as a dockhand. As for my family, well, my mother hadn’t decided yet where we were going to go. There was always the government housing, but she balked at the idea. She liked to say, swearing and spitting all the while, that the Hong Kong government was about as useful as a life preserver in a desert. At the peak of the triads’ power, the politicians had pretended they couldn’t see us, this blind spot the size of a square city block. And now that things were finally better through community efforts, they wanted to improve our “living conditions” by tearing us down and putting up a park.
“We should go home,” Ox said to Rabbit after another twenty minutes or so. “You just got over a cold.”
“Rabbit will tell us if she’s not OK,” I said. “You OK, Rabbit?”
“I’m OK,” she said.
“See?” I said.
This part of the city was almost empty, and emptiness was a spectacle in the most crowded city in the world. In the main alleyways, shops, factories, and homes squeezed shoulder to shoulder like clowns in cars or climbed atop one another like acrobats. People ate, napped, played endless games of chess, and spanked their misbehaving children with their front gates rolled up. Here there were only bags of trash nested together like large eggs and fangs of broken metal pipes dripping cold saliva on our necks. In the fuzzy, mothy fluorescent light, the only light that ever shone on the lowest levels, objects appeared as they did in fever dreams, their edges soft and foaming out of themselves as out of a rabid dog. It wasn’t hard to believe there might be a creature near.
Besides, who were we to deny the possibility of impossible things, in impossible things? Rabbit was born blue. No oxygen in the brain, the doctors claimed. Say your goodbyes. But Auntie Lai, our neighbor from down the alley, had a vision. She went running to the hospital with the jade pendant she’d inherited from her mother and from her grandmother before that. Figuring that Rabbit was good as dead anyway, the doctors allowed Auntie Lai to do what she wanted. She placed the piece of jade on Rabbit’s forehead.
Finally the passageway widened a little. Now we could walk two by two, barely. A hot, sour wind blew, leaving grit on our lips and in our eyelashes. We sneezed and sputtered, blinked up indignantly at the guilty kitchen-exhaust vent. Beyond it rippled a strand of sky, black as pomaded hair. A half-moon, or a moon half obscured by building tops, poised itself to glide through the night like a golden comb.
Ox was wiping his face with a handkerchief. He was the only kid I knew who actually carried one around. “My dad says the new government housing will have air-conditioning,” he said.
“Oh, really?” Puppy said, in that quiet voice she used when all the aunties started talking about setting her up with their sons but all she wanted was to be left alone to read.
“He says that there will be a park right in front with a lot of trees. It’ll be really great.”
“There are a lot of mosquitoes out tonight,” I said. I slapped Mouse, hard, on the back of his arm.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Mouse yelled.
“It was giant,” I said. “The size of your monster. It was going to suck all your blood.”
“Well, where is it then?” he said.
“It flew away. You’re welcome.”
“Butthole,” he said, but the corners of his mouth were turned up slightly. In the end, he was just glad that we’d agreed to come along, after weeks of us telling him to shut up already about the monster. What finally swayed us was the bulldozers, which had begun lining up outside the city walls. If a (nice) monster in fact lived under the city, we reasoned, then we didn’t want his death on our conscience. We had to at least try to save him. Who else, except the five of us who knew these tunnels best, was up to the task?
Mouse’s theory was that the monster was a lizard that had grown fat from eating all of the garbage cast down by the people who lived higher up. That was how he’d described the monster: a white lizard with a big belly.
My theory involved a mad scientist and Z-rays, a more advanced form of X-rays. I hadn’t figured out the details yet.
“What do you think?” I asked Puppy, because even though she was only a little younger than I was, she was a lot smarter. This was a few days after we’d decided to join Mouse on his rescue mission. The three of us were hiding from the heat on the lowest level of the city, but still the humidity leaned close and breathed on us like a good friend with a bad idea. Around us, factory engines wheezed and groaned, bearing hard white candies and little plastic people with unfinished, prickly seams. Men in white undershirts with the pits stained brown humped boxes from one place to another or crouched on the ground, which was spattered red from their chewing tobacco. Rusting signs that once exhorted safe work habits now timidly suggested them from behind cabaret ads posted by the triads and Bible study flyers posted by the missionaries.
Puppy gazed up at the sky. Or, rather, she gazed up at the welts of laundry and telephone lines that scarred the sky, that made it ashamed to show those of us living on the lower levels its full face. “Maybe every city has a monster,” she said. “Maybe when so many people live and die in such a small space, a monster starts to grow deep beneath the earth. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, and everyone’s asleep, I like to go and sit on the stoop right outside my door. And sometimes I feel, I don’t know, like a humming, like there’s a wire connecting me to the earth. Maybe that’s the monster, trying to let me know it’s there.”
“Whaaa?” Mouse said. “Look, I’m telling you, it’s a lizard.”
Puppy didn’t reply. Her cheeks looked red, but I couldn’t tell if she felt embarrassed at having revealed her private thoughts or if it was simply a shard of light from the neon signs nearby. Or both. In this city, the line between true and false, between wrong and right—between me and not me—was sketched in dust. Fine lines served a purpose only in full light. Maybe that was why the aunties told so many strange stories. Auntie Cheung had one about the piebald, oneeyed cat that showed up whenever someone she knew was about to die. Auntie Mao used to recount the time she wandered into an unfamiliar part of the city and came across a coffin shop. All the coffins were of some black stone that seemed to absorb the light. She didn’t see a shopkeeper, but there on the lid of the center coffin, like an offering or a dare, was a single red apple. Needless to say, she never found her way back to the shop.
“But what did you do about the apple?” we’d asked her the first time she told the story.
“What else? I grabbed the apple and ran,” she said. And then, grinning, she leaned in. “But I got punished for it. The apple was cursed, so now every time someone I know is about to die, I have to guide their spirit into the underworld. I’m the cat that Auntie Cheung talks about!” She crooked her fingers into claws and hissed, and we all started scream-laughing. Auntie Cheung rolled her eyes, convinced that Auntie Mao was trying to one-up her.
Yet the night Auntie Mao died, we could have all sworn we heard mewling. We could have sworn we saw the shadow of a cat. It leapt onto the awning over her door, sat there for a moment as if taking one last good look, and then disappeared.
We heard—a sigh? The sound sagged slowly as if under the weight of its own sadness. Rabbit jumped and clung harder to her brother. Puppy and I swiveled our heads, trying to locate the source.
“We’re close! We’re close!” Mouse said. We picked up our pace, horning deeper into the tunnel, reinvigorated by the prospect of meeting the monster. Our footsteps echoed down the long maw, our spirits bounding ahead in excitement. Or perhaps our spirits had always haunted this space, but if so, then what would become of them after this place was gone?
“I still don’t know how we’re going to save the monster once we find it,” Puppy said. “If it’s as big as you described, Mouse, then how can we possibly help?”
“We’ll lift it,” Mouse said. “Together.”
“You told us it was big as a house,” Puppy said.
“What if we slide a sheet under it and drag it?” I asked.
“Did you bring a sheet with you?” Puppy said dryly, her brow crinkled like a little bundle of books. What about her books, I wondered with sudden alarm. Was her family planning to bring all of them to Macao? Or were they going to leave them to the clawed excavators?
We turned a corner and smacked into Mouse, who had stopped abruptly. “What’s going on?” Ox called from the back. Mouse shushed us. Over his head, we could barely make out the dark blur blocking our way.
Or rather, three dark blurs whose boundaries continuously bled into one another as if belonging to a single, primeval entity that at once consumed and birthed itself: one small blur that turned out to be a dog with an unsettling glow in its eyes, one large blur that belonged to a man sprawled across the ground, and a third, medium-sized blur that appeared to be a baby carriage. Inside the carriage—the beam from Mouse’s flashlight arced over it—was a toddler staring blankly at the ceiling. The light provoked no reaction from either human, but the dog began to growl. At the sound of the growling, the man began to stir.
“What do we do?” Mouse whispered.
“That baby isn’t moving,” Puppy said.
“We can ask him nicely to let us pass,” Ox said.
“You ask,” Mouse said to Ox.
“His eyes are open but he’s not moving,” Puppy said, panic stretching like a fine, silver thread in her voice. “Why isn’t he moving?”
I laid my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
“How do you know that? What if the baby’s … What if …”
The man was rising to his feet. His face was a pale, mushy gray.
“Excuse me, sir,” Ox began.
The man opened his mouth, and darkness unfurled from it—a long tongue of glistening darkness that threatened to slurp us up.
“Go! Go!” Mouse shouted, and we all turned and ran back the way we had come, ran until we felt certain he hadn’t followed. Our lungs burned like temple incense braziers on festival days.
“We need to report that man to the police,” Ox said.
Mouse waved his hand dismissively. “Calm down. I know a way around him. A shortcut.” He started walking again. Nobody bothered to ask him why we had taken the other path in the first place when we could have taken the shortcut. That kind of record skipping was classic Mouse.
Now that the man was far in the distance, so was the cold, metal fear that had needled at us. Mouse and I began to swap theories regarding what we had seen. Feeling himself vindicated, Mouse reprised his story about the jiangshi. When I asked him what a mindless zombie was doing raising a dog and a baby, he grumbled something. Puppy, Ox, and Rabbit trailed behind, immersed in their own conversation. Ox was hovering over Rabbit. Rabbit kept shaking her head.
Suddenly Ox spoke up. “He was probably just some drug addict, or a triad member. That’s why things will be better at the new place.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“My dad says Kowloon is a bad place to live,” Ox said. “It’s lawless and dirty.”
“Not really, not like before,” I said. “And how do you know things will be better?”
“My dad says people get used to living in bad conditions. They protest the city getting torn down because they can’t imagine anything better. My grandpa only moved here because the communists took over his hometown.”
I picked up a pebble, whizzed it as hard as I could at the wall. “Your dad sure says a lot of things.” My mother had been among the protesters. She’d come home one evening with a swollen eye that looked like lips sewn shut with black thread. On TV the next day the police superintendent lauded his officers for peacefully dispersing the crowd.
“The people on the outside say we’re only doing this to extort more resettlement money from the government,” she said. “They don’t believe anyone would want to stay here. But they see only the photos the outsiders take, the few of them willing to enter the city anyway.”
I felt something brush against my sleeve and saw that Puppy had caught up to me. She still looked troubled.
“That baby’s fine. I saw its leg move,” I lied.
Her expression didn’t change at all. We could usually tell when the other person wasn’t being truthful. “Sometimes I think I think too much,” she said, pausing to sniff at the fingers of a potted Queen of the Night reaching from a windowsill for a kiss. Even from where I stood I could smell the nectar. Somehow it knew when to bloom despite living down here, set to its heartbeat, watered and sunned by its own seasons.
“Thinking is good, right?” I said.
“You’re the only person I know who thinks that.” By six, Puppy had stopped sleeping through the night. By eight, she’d mastered the art of sneaking out of her family’s one-bedroom unit, past her parents, who worked such long hours that they slept quickly and soundly, sometimes in the strangest places (once she found her father asleep on the toilet—the squatting toilet), and past her older brother, who was banished to the couch when he grew too big to share a bed with the rest of them. But by nine, we’d figured out a system. On the nights I couldn’t sleep either, I kept the one window in my family’s unit ajar. I’d climb out of it when she knocked, and we’d take a walk together or just sit and chat until she felt tired again.
Puppy hadn’t mentioned her move to Macao again after announcing it to us. Sometimes it seemed that, of the five of us, she was the least affected by the news. It bothered me that I didn’t know how she felt about it when I knew how she felt about almost everything else.
“We should come up with a new system,” I said. “For after you … you know.”
“We can’t make long-distance calls. They’re too expensive, and the ringing will wake other people up.”
“I meant something else. I’m sure we’ll think of a way.”
“Yeah,” she lied.
All of us lived in the same alleyway, just a few doors down from one another. Puppy, Mouse, Me, and Ox and Rabbit—that was the order. Sometimes I wondered if we would have become friends if we hadn’t breathed and cried and dreamed so close together. Like, if we’d met somewhere in the outside world, at a marketplace or on a playground, would Mouse have been immediately bored away by sedate, methodical Ox and teary Rabbit? Would I have approached Puppy, who went almost everywhere with a book and shied from eye contact?
Our favorite thing to do was climbing up to the roof, though we usually didn’t because that was where all the aunties gathered for their gossiping, and we couldn’t get away with any mischief under their watchful eyes. We liked jumping and waving at the airplanes that flew barely over our heads, imagining the strange places they’d come from and the strange places they were going. We also liked collecting plastic bags—the more colorful, the better—and when the wind rose, tossing them in the air at the same time. Sometimes we placed bets to see which one would fly the farthest, but other times we just watched them float down slowly like angels.
When the government first announced their plans, we scoffed. They had tried to destroy us before, many times, and our continued existence seemed as good evidence as any that we would survive this latest endeavor, some politician’s reelection slogan or misdirect from rumors of corruption. But in the end the police came, followed by the machines. How were they going to manicure all this life, all this wilderness, into park benches and plaques, prune us down to a few lines in the history books? How could they memorialize our presence with our absence?
At least another hour had passed since our encounter with the man and the dog. Mouse had used the word “shortcut,” it seemed, in the spirit of optimism. Now we were near the part of town where pots and pans clanged and glasses clinked late into the night. The air left a film on the skin that smelled of frying oil and perfume from triad-run massage parlors, that distinctive bouquet of citron and rose, a gold arrow piercing a deep-red heart. Somewhere a woman was singing, her powdery voice rising and falling like a makeup puff on a masseuse’s face and chest.
One would never guess from all the revelry that the police were arriving in the morning to force us out one by one. I tried to imagine silence, the air stripped of its veils of fragrance. I tried to imagine the last neon light in this massive city dimming.
It didn’t seem to me that reality could sustain such a loss, such an erasure. Surely the city wasn’t getting destroyed so much as displaced to some other world, like in the movies when a master thief has to swap a priceless jewel with a bag of sand. Here there would be a park, but elsewhere …
We passed by an open window. An older lady who must have been really pretty once was packing up her belongings. On a table near the window was a zither, playing a slow, twanging song by itself, the strings shivering first singly and then in concert as if from a spreading chill. Next to the zither, an orange-red bird in a cage chittered and flapped. The song on the zither came to an end, and, for a second, everything in the room seemed to stop. The woman paused with one arm raised; the bird hushed midchirp. Then the music started up again, and the woman looked up from her boxes. Noticing us, she came to the window and shuttered it.
Puppy’s place was completely packed. Ox and Rabbit’s was pretty much packed as well, the family eager to leave for the new complex. They might have left earlier had their mother not suffered another relapse, which set everything back. Seeing their units was like seeing someone you’d only ever seen healthy in the hospital for the first time. Torn, twisted electrical wires lay limply on the floor. Holes in the wall previously masked by furniture now gaped openly.
“What if I hang on to some of your books for you,” I said to Puppy. “That way, if you ever need any of them, I can mail them to you.”
“Well, maybe,” she said.
“You need someone to take your books, Puppy?” Ox interrupted. “I can help too.”
“I got this, all right?” I said to him. Puppy flashed me a warning look. I shrugged.
What if no one had accepted the government’s resettlement package? What if, when the first envoys appeared, we’d all turned our backs to them? What could they have done to the thirty thousand–odd of us? It took only a few of us walking away for this wall of people to fall.
“Lovely night,” a woman called out from behind us. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”
We froze.
“Let’s make a run for it,” Mouse said. “They can’t talk our ears off if they can’t catch us.”
“If we run, they’ll think we’re up to something and call the police,” Ox said.
Mouse slapped his own forehead. “We are up to something! Which is why we don’t have time for this.”
We’d all had encounters with the missionaries, who’d landed on the shoulder of this district many years ago—one of the missions was actually on top and a little to the side of the biggest gambling den in the city. They’d courted my mother when she moved here, pregnant with me by a guy who never called her back and kicked out by her parents. Puppy’s older brother had run off with the missionaries after several failed attempts to persuade their parents, both of whom made a living in triad-owned businesses, to swap steady pay for God’s blessings. No one in the family had heard from him since then.
There were five of them, all dressed in white. We didn’t recognize any of them, which was odd because, in our wanderings, we’d clocked a lot of the missionaries in this city. Two of the women and one of the men appeared Chinese; the other man and woman were foreigners. Building gaps channeled yellow, purple, and green slashes and dots onto the blank screens of their suits and dresses.
“Lovely night,” the same woman, the foreign one, repeated. “Are you children lost? It is getting late.”
“We’re fine,” I said. “We’re on our way home.”
“That is wonderful. Do you have a moment to hear about our Lord?”
“No,” Puppy said.
“What a shame. Are you certain you do not have even a minute to hear about how Jesus sacrificed himself to save you?”
“No,” Puppy said more loudly, but to no avail. The five of them had, as if through teleportation, somehow closed the distance between us. In their hands they carried colorful leaflets, which they held out and then kept out for so long that it became rude for us not to take them. On mine was a line drawing of an angel with a large key ring, standing in front of a gate. The gate had what looked like thunderbolts coming out of it to show that it was shiny. “The City of God,” the title read.
“The lighting here is quite dim,” the woman said. “Why not join us around the corner for some tea and cookies? You can read the material there. Your young friend looks like she needs the rest.” She gestured toward Rabbit.
It was true, Rabbit had looked better. If we didn’t stop to rest, we might never get to the monster. We glanced at one another and took a silent vote: yes, yes, yes, cookies.
Puppy took a deep breath. “Fine,” she said. “A minute.”
As if connected through the ears by a single, invisible antenna, all five of them tilted their heads to the left at the same time and then stopped at the same angle. “Wonderful,” they said.
We followed them out of the tunnel into a wider alley. A couple of people were milling about in the alley, but they seemed not to notice us. The missionaries waved us into an incandescent white unit that was maybe four strides from end to end. Metal folding chairs, also white, took up most of the space. On one wall, they’d outlined a cross with pink neon tubes, which burned the shape into the retina the way a UFO burned circles into crops.
We sat. They passed out cookies on a porcelain tray and tea in Styrofoam cups. Only Mouse ate the cookies. In this light, the distinctions among them became clearer. The foreign man and woman wore matching glowing pendants whose contents appeared to be almost moving, flecks of silver white swirling against a dark-blue background. The Chinese man was older than the rest by a couple of decades. The two remaining women might have been twins—clones, really, because twins usually sought to distinguish themselves from each other, even if it was just with a bow in the hair or an overtheatrical laugh. These two dressed the same, moved the same, perched at the edge of their seats with their hands folded in their laps the same.
“What have you children heard about heaven?” the foreign woman asked.
“Angels playing harps, bright,” Ox said.
“That is correct,” she said. “What else?”
We shrugged.
“There are many earthly cities,” she began. “Some are poor and crumbling, whereas others are grand and beautiful. But even the grandest of cities cannot rival the grandeur of the City of God.”
She opened a photo album that one of the twins had passed her and flipped it to a colored illustration of heaven. It showed white archways and fountains, unbroken blue sky. Little people with wings raised their arms to something we couldn’t see.
“Heaven is not just a beautiful place,” she continued, “but a state of communion with God and with everyone else there. Can you imagine that? Please, try. Imagine yourself far away from the grime and noise of this city. Imagine being connected to something so much bigger than you.”
“I feel rested,” Puppy said. “Time to go.”
The woman put out a hand to prevent Puppy from standing. “No, no, take a moment. It doesn’t matter what kind of place you live in here on earth. If you place your faith in Jesus, you will be saved and you will be granted a place in—”
“What is it with you people?” Puppy yelled. She shoved the woman’s hand aside and, with a spitefulness I hadn’t known her capable of, dashed her cup of tea against the white linoleum. She marched out, and we followed, more out of confusion than solidarity.
Actually, I pitied the missionaries a little. If tonight was our last chance to save this city’s monster, it was their last chance to save this city’s souls. When they arrived in Kowloon decades ago, they must have seen laid out before them their life’s work. So many people wandering in spiritual and physical darkness. They’d knotted their fates with ours, picking up addicts in alleyways and trying to get them clean, rankling the triads in the process. And tomorrow, they were going to be driven out like the rest of us.
“We should have at least let that woman finish her speech,” I said to Puppy once we were back on the monster’s trail. “Rabbit could have used the extra rest.”
“Now you care about Rabbit’s health?” she muttered.
Ox trotted up to the two of us. “Why are you so mad?” he asked Puppy. “Those people just wanted to help.”
“They want to tell us what to do,” Puppy said.
“Grow up, Ox,” I said. “The only reason any of this is happening is because people like your parents listen to everything the outsiders say.”
“Leave Ox’s parents out of this,” Puppy snapped at me. “They did what they had to for their family. Besides, what were we supposed to do against the government?”
“I don’t know. Something. Anything.”
“Oh, so it’s my family’s fault too? We didn’t try hard enough?”
“You guys?” Rabbit said.
We turned around just in time to see Rabbit’s knees buckle. She folded softly to the ground. We checked her over: she hadn’t hit her head as far as we could tell, but her knees were scraped up from the landing.
“I’m OK,” she said.
Ox turned to glare at me. “This is your fault.”
“I didn’t know this was going to happen,” I said.
“Forget this stupid city,” Ox said, helping Rabbit up. “We can explore the new place when we get there. It’ll have a better monster.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” I said. “I’m not going to the new place either. There won’t be a ‘we’ anymore.”
Ox’s eyes widened. “Oh.”
I hadn’t told them because I didn’t think I needed to. My mother wasn’t exactly the quiet type. Judging by their faces, Puppy and Mouse had already guessed. Even Rabbit appeared unruffled, though she might have just been woozy. Ox stood there, opening and closing his mouth as if he were chewing cud. This night couldn’t get worse, I thought.
Then we saw the chalk mark.
I hurled my flashlight on the ground. “Damn it, Mouse, we’ve been going in a circle!”
“You lied about the monster, didn’t you?” Ox said to Mouse. “Liar. Liar, liar, liar.”
“Shut up!” Mouse cried. “You guys always make fun of me. I hate you.” He ran off. No one chased after him.
“I guess we should head back,” I said after a couple of minutes or so. My chest hurt. I didn’t want this to be our curtain call, the five of us wandering in the dark, with nothing to remember us by.
Because if we were being honest with ourselves, the idea sounded crazy. How was it possible that, in the densest city on earth, where the sighs and coughs of sleeping neighbors duetted like shakers and rattles at a parade, there would be a giant monster that no one had ever discovered? By all logic, our story should have ended here.
Suddenly we heard Mouse’s voice from a distance. “Wait, wait, I found the path! I know how to get there!”
We ran toward his voice; he met us halfway. Even Rabbit rallied. We squeezed between buildings, the backs of our arms chafing against concrete. We swung from laundry pole to laundry pole across mountains of trash. We prowled over balconies and wriggled under dangerously low-hanging electric lines. Finally Mouse stopped. We followed him out of the tunnel into a cavern bigger than we’d known possible, so wide and deep we couldn’t see the ends.
Maybe no one would ever believe us, maybe some part of us didn’t even believe what was happening, the way no one in the future would ever believe what it was like to live in this city, with all the noise and the music, the darkness and the coruscating neon, the gambling dens and Christian missions and temples that smelled like burnt paper money and joss. But we were there, and there the monster was: coiled, a translucent white, with a mesh-like pattern on its skin that rippled silver when the angle was right. It might have been a lizard or a snake, this creature that had always been with us.
I reached for Puppy’s hand. She took it and held on.
The monster looked pained, tired. From its open mouth came low, regular hisses, less like warnings and more like attempts to breathe. Its eye, the one visible to us, had clouded over, an expanse of unbroken pale blue as if there were sky behind it, as if the monster contained within the walls of its body heaven.
“We’re too late,” Rabbit said. She started crying, then Ox did too, then Puppy. I was doing my best not to follow suit. But Mouse was squinting at something. He crept closer to the monster, which seemed to recognize him because it squiggled closer in return. Then it uncoiled itself to reveal a single silver-white egg about the size of a newborn child.
“We need to keep it warm!” Puppy said. “I read that reptile eggs have to be kept warm!”
Ox immediately shrugged off his overshirt. Mouse stepped forward, and, kneeling next to the monster, gently wrapped the egg in Ox’s shirt before placing it in my arms. Rabbit tiptoed up to me and carefully wound her jade necklace—Auntie Lai’s jade—around the bundle. Together, we carried it into the night.