by Rebecca Lim
‘My bullet will be faster,’ the man retorted stepping forward again.
Qing changed her guard so that her crossed wrists and inward-facing hands covered her face from the right. ‘Yìng,’ she roared.
‘Hardness?’ the man laughed, stopping mere metres away from Qing now, the right shoulder of the jade goddess the only thing disturbing the air between them. ‘Flesh can never match the hardness of steel, the hardness of jade. You have no hope of defeating me.’
Qing turned her crossed guard so that this time it protected her left side at waist level. ‘Ruǎn,’ she murmured.
‘This is not the time to relax and be fluid,’ the man said, raising the muzzle of his gun so that it was pointing directly at Qing’s face.
Harley’s skin went icy with fear. ‘Qing!’ he pleaded hoarsely from behind her.
The girl calmly finished the form she’d been sketching in the air so that her crossed wrists and inward-facing palms covered her face again, this time from the left. ‘Qiǎo.’
‘Skilful?’ the man snorted. ‘All you’ve shown me is a simple form of centre line defence, fit only for small children. Is that the best you can do to protect your upper gate, your middle gate, your lower gate? Which one should I shoot at first, little girl?’
‘Jìn!’ Qing roared suddenly and her wrists uncrossed so quickly Harley barely caught the change. She pushed her bladed hands outwards towards the man’s face then pushed at the air sideways then forward again in the direction of the bandit, and the jade goddess … began to move.
As the statue came off its wooden stand and began to glide then topple towards the gunman, he yelled out and fired. But it was true – no flesh was harder than jade, and jade was an element more inflexible than steel. As the gunman, cursing and spitting in Chinese, grappled with the heavy statue before it could crush him into the ground, Qing turned, grabbed Harley by the wrist and ran towards the small steel door in the wall that the fallen goddess had once concealed.
As the two of them strained to pull open the rusted vertical floor and ceiling bolts that held the door closed, the gunman – still struggling to push the leaning statue off him – fired wildly in their direction. As the air went icy in the way Harley had come to associate with unseen power, the door opened, revealing a dark, musty concrete stairwell and a short flight of stairs that led up to the roof.
Qing ran up the claustrophobic set of stairs in near total darkness as Harley stumbled along behind her, missing the edges of stairs and tripping and falling over his own feet.
When she reached the top, she screamed, ‘Kāi!’ and it seemed that the simple power of her voice made a door fly outwards to reveal a dirty concrete rooftop with nothing on it but a rickety TV antenna, the outline of the big glass skylight, and no way down.
‘There’s no fire escape!’ Harley yelled, galloping all over the roof like a mad thing. ‘We’re trapped!’
He and Qing heard the statue of the Goddess of Mercy crash to the wooden floor below. Harley’s heart was in his throat, then his mouth, as the gunman emerged onto the roof at a run, still wielding his gun. He stopped in his tracks as somewhere nearby sirens shrilled, growing louder as they drew closer.
Qing and Harley backed as far away as they could from the gunman and looked down the back edge of the building. This was not a movie. There was no conveniently placed garbage skip down below filled with large pieces of soft foam to land on. It was an empty alley lined with cobblestones, broken glass and old spew. That was it.
‘The piece!’ the gunman roared.
Qing took it out of her tunic and held it up high above her head, the mark facing outwards, as if she were going to smash it to pieces.
‘No!’ the gunman exclaimed. ‘What are you doing? Do you know how much that is worth?’
Still holding the mark to the sky, Qing shouted, ‘Dài lái fēngbào!’
As her words died away, the sky lit up from end to end, ablaze with sheet lightning, illuminating every rooftop and building for miles around.
The energy in the air raised the hair on all their heads so that strands floated about them weirdly. In that one frozen moment, it seemed they could see and know each other perfectly; that, in fact, they could see what things were made of – every mote of dust, every speck of paint and rust and dirt and energy that made up everything – they could somehow see it and be it. It was in them, it ran through them. Power coursed like a river between them all. The masked bandit dropped his gun, looking about him in awe, clutching at motes and streamers of light in the air.
Then the lightning was gone as abruptly as it appeared and the darkness was rent only by thunder louder than anything Harley had ever heard. It seemed to be going off like cannons inside his head. He doubled over, clutching his ears, wanting it to stop before his body turned inside out. The time his mum had taken him to see fireworks exploding over the river, one New Year’s Eve, had nothing on this noise. It’s a sound that could tear you apart, Harley thought. If it didn’t stop soon, he would probably die.
In the heartbeat after the thunder finally rolled away, Qing said again, almost to herself, ‘Dài lái fēngbào.’
I bring the storm.
Harley, almost deaf and blind from the thunder and the lightning, only saw her lips moving.
Then the rain came down like a curtain, and seemed to obliterate the world.
Harley was drowning standing up. That’s what it felt like.
All he could see, hear, feel, breathe, was rain.
When he tried to yell out Qing’s name, water filled his mouth and he began to choke. Then he felt her small hand grasp him by the collar of his awful old jacket like a claw and jerk him off his feet, and he was falling with the rain.
Falling and yelling.
Right off the back of the building.
The pressure on his collar suddenly eased and Harley landed on the ground at a stumbling run, almost sprawling on his face in the rain-slick, spew-slick alley at the back of Antediluvian House. There was the slimy, crunchy, solid feel of glass-littered cobblestones under his feet as Qing ran past him, dragging him with her by his sleeve as she raced out of the alley. As they rounded the back of a dumpling restaurant, they saw through the torrential downpour that Chinatown was filled with the pulsing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles. But instead of turning right and going towards the lights, Qing turned left swiftly before turning left again up a dog-legged alley and they were out of Chinatown and into an area of the city filled with offices and restaurants, cafes and shops.
She stopped running, settling into a fast walk. She didn’t exactly hurry along the footpath, but she covered more ground than Harley could believe in a very short space of time, and he had to trot to keep up with her.
People in rain-splattered clothes were taking shelter from the sudden downpour everywhere, under shop awnings and inside the lobbies of buildings, their faces visible behind the streaming glass. Hurrying along behind Qing, it suddenly occurred to Harley – who was soaked right down into his squelching sneakers – that she was perfectly dry. From the hem of her billowing gold skirt up to the crown of her sleek black hair, Qing was untouched by the rain that poured down between the buildings.
The storm stopped abruptly at the exact moment Harley’s special phone began to ring, quivering violently inside the pocket of his jacket. Qing turned and arched an eyebrow at Harley enquiringly as if to say, Aren’t you going to answer that?
The people inside the office building closest to where Qing and Harley had stopped on the pavement stared through the glass at the kid in the loud bomber jacket with the knees almost worn through his jeans, standing next to a girl in a luminous, Chinese-style ball gown outfit straight out of an old painting. Harley turned his back on all the curious faces and fumbled his phone out of his pocket, pressing his thumb to the small camera icon that had appeared on the screen.
Ray Spark’s features suddenly flooded into view and he was already shouting, ‘Schumacher’s ETA is fifty-eight seconds. G
ot that? Get in the car and stay down, do you hear me? Down on the floor in case Pang’s still got gunmen on the rooftops!’
Harley knew for a fact that Pang still had at least one gunman on a rooftop because somehow, they’d left him up there. But Harley didn’t mention this to his dad, or the whole thing about how he and Qing might just have broken a law of gravity, because Ray looked frantic enough as it was.
Qing peered down into the phone with interest, and Ray blinked as he caught sight of her, immediately taking in the bright ring of blue around the girl’s dark eyes and the hand-embroidered gold and azure dragon twining around the collar of her (undoubtedly highly valuable) silk tunic because he was trained to see little details like that in a few seconds flat. In any museum job, Ray was the guy who could work out where the most valuable pieces in the place were, in one sweeping glance. He possessed both a valuer’s eye and an assassin’s reflexes, both skills that were invaluable in his line of work. A line of work Delia and Harley hardly knew about.
‘Schumacher’s pulling up right beside you now,’ Ray snapped, Harley wondering in bewilderment how on earth his dad could know that from his vantage point in a place called Buda. ‘I’ll call you again when you’re at a more secure location.’
Then the small silver phone went dead in Harley’s hand and a sleek black sports car with dark-tinted windows drew up at the kerb beside them and Ray’s helper Schumacher (Harley had never been exactly sure what he ‘helped’ with) threw the front passenger door open from the inside, shouting, ‘Kleine freunde! Schnell! Schnell!’
Although Schumacher looked like the bass player for a death metal band with his lank, shoulder-length blond hair, broken nose and rangy build, Qing scooped her voluminous skirts up with one hand and slid gracefully into the front seat without hesitation. Harley scrambled into the back, only just managing not to shut the door on his foot before Schumacher floored the accelerator and bore them away.
They were pulling into an enormous aircraft hangar at a private airfield on the outskirts of the international airport when Harley’s phone rang again. As he pressed his thumb onto the camera icon in answer, Harley stared up through Schumacher’s wraparound windscreen at a huge, gleaming jet parked smack bang in the middle of the hangar. It had twin engines and eleven windows along each side and the front door near the pilot’s cockpit was open, with gold-carpeted stairs leading down to them invitingly. All the lights were on inside the plane. It was the most beautiful aircraft Harley had ever seen.
‘Harls?’ his dad said sharply out of the device in Harley’s palm. ‘Over here, mate.’ Harley ripped his gaze away from the gleaming jet and looked down at his dad’s face.
Schumacher turned the engine off, flicking on the car’s interior lights, and he and Qing turned to look at Harley expectantly.
Harley blinked at the sand dunes now framing Ray Spark’s features. ‘Are you standing in a desert, Dad? What on earth is going on?’
‘I need you to get on that plane, son,’ Ray replied hurriedly. ‘I can answer all your questions later when you touch down. Chiu Chiu Pang has put a price on your heads and effectively declared war on me and my business, ah, interests.’ Ray’s eyes darted about as if he were trying to see around the insides of Schumacher’s car. ‘He’s also put out word that the person who can bring him the dragon vase currently in the possession of the ridiculously wealthy Quek family of Balestier Road, Singapore, within the next forty-eight hours will earn a bounty of ten million dollars payable in cash, diamonds, camels or anything “the finder” likes.’
Schumacher’s mouth fell open. ‘It will be the bloodbath, boss,’ he said from the driver’s seat in his thick Bavarian accent. ‘Such a handsome bounty.’
Ray nodded grimly. ‘The Quek vase – the only other known vase in existence in the series you showed me, Harls – is worth upwards of sixty-six million pounds, boys, so ten million dollars’ worth of camels, or whatever, would be cheap at twice the price. And he’s put the same bounty on the two of you,’ Ray added grimly, ‘for insulting his honour. Five apiece, or ten mill for the pair of you dead or alive, but preferably dead because it’s just neater and will hurt me more. That’s a total prize pool of twenty million dollars floating in the breeze, waiting for someone to grab hold of it. Sources are telling me that even if I deliver the vase to Grandmaster Pang myself, you two still might not be safe because he’s not a forgiving man! What have you got yourself mixed up in, son?’
Harley quickly caught his dad up on all the things that had happened since he’d liberated the old vase off the footpath outside Hammonds the Auctioneers on a whim. He knew what he was saying sounded utterly fantastical, but Ray’s expression did not change one iota as he listened; Harley knew Ray’s mind was processing the hard facts, the way he’d trained himself to do, and discounting the rest.
After Harley finished his breathless recount of the scene on the roof of Antediluvian House (‘Our hair was doing something like out of The Matrix, Dad!’) all Ray observed was, ‘If what you’re saying is true – that’s no ordinary girl, Harls.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Harley said, staring at Qing through the gap between the two front seats; her return gaze was fierce and unblinking. Harley had come to think of the piercing look she was giving him as her thinking face. ‘The rain can’t touch her and she might have read the entire contents of the State Library in one night,’ Harley added. ‘Like, last night she couldn’t speak English, and, and now … she kind of can.’
‘Mmmm,’ was all Ray said, as if he heard things like this every day of his life.
At that moment, a small flashing camera icon appeared at the top right of the screen of Harley’s phone. It had the word Mum written under it in bright, danger-warning red.
‘It’s Mum!’ Harley’s voice rose to an anxious squeak. ‘What do I do? Whatever do I say?’
‘Put her on,’ Ray said a touch squeakily himself. ‘This concerns her too.’
Delia had told Harley very, very firmly (in no uncertain terms) after Ray had moved out with his one meagre bag of belongings that she never wanted to speak to Harley’s dad ever again. And she’d pretty much stuck to those guns for the last eight years.
‘You know this is breaching Mum’s rule,’ Harley said nervously, ‘about the whole speaking and contact thing. She’s going to scream at us.’
‘Put her on,’ Ray sighed.
As soon as Harley pressed the flashing icon, the screen broke up into two halves and Delia screeched loud enough to distort the audio, making both Ray and Harley wince and cower at the same time. ‘Where have you taken our boy, Ray Patrick Spark? He’s already missed one whole day of school. One whole day. Every grown adult who emerged out of that building you told him to go to – and I clearly watched Harley walk into it – denies he was ever there. This has something to do with you, Ray, I know it does. It’s all your fault.’
Delia appeared to be sitting in the back of an ambulance with a bandage bound tightly around her forehead at a rakish angle. Her shiny black hair puffed out over the top of it muffin-style. She was also sporting a huge black eye and a cut lip. ‘You bring him back home this instant!’ Her face loomed large in the screen as she leant forward and searched her son’s face. ‘I was so worried, Harley. If something ever happened to you …’ Her big brown eyes filled with sudden tears.
Ray gazed at Delia with a mix of hopeless adoration and resignation on his face, which made his usually hard-edged features look younger and softer. ‘That’s the whole problem, Delia. Harley can’t go home yet, and neither can you. There are over four hundred styles of Chinese martial art and Chiu Chiu Pang is a grandmaster of at least fifty-six of them. He knows where you live. He’ll be watching your place and my place, Harley’s school. You need to stay with friends, not family – at least until I tell you it’s safe to go home. Harley will be with me. I won’t let anything happen to him. You have my word on that. It’s just that we need to fix things so that you can go home again, and everything goes back to norma
l. Just tell his school, I dunno, that I’ve taken him for an extended, um, educational camping trip.’
Inside the car, Schumacher and Harley exchanged glances; the camping trip was likely to be very extended, and involve a large private jet.
‘This is the second and very last time I let you ruin our lives, Ray Spark!’ Delia’s features were pale with fear and anger, but she knew Ray well enough to understand from his tone of voice that this was one of those life and death moments he’d warned Harley about only weeks earlier. Delia sensed this was worse than the time the police had stormed their home and turned their lives upside down. She searched Harley’s face again. ‘You stick like glue to your dad and come home as soon as you can, love, all right? Learn as much as you can on your “camping trip”, and if you pick up some useful skills along the way, it won’t be a complete waste.’
Delia’s eyes darted around the interior of Schumacher’s car, too, just as Ray’s had earlier. ‘Can you put her on?’ Delia said abruptly.
Surprised, Harley handed the phone across to Qing in the front seat, who held it cupped in both her hands like a rare and fragile flower. She bent her face over the screen and said quietly, ‘Yes, Mā ma Delia?’
She looked, with interest, from Ray’s face to Delia’s on the screen, both so very different.
‘Qing, love, Harley needs your help now,’ Delia said as Harley groaned, ‘Mum!’ from the back seat.
Delia ignored her son, continuing to address Qing. ‘I know you can do things, special things. The kinds of things my grandfather – Harley’s great-grandpa – used to talk about. Please do what you can to keep him safe—’
‘Mum!’
‘Quiet, Harley dear, Qing and I are having a word,’ Delia continued pleasantly. ‘Girls are more mature, it’s been scientifically proven. Make sure he eats, pet, and that he calls home regularly—’
‘Mum, I’m right here—’