“Now I see,” Meng Yu Fei said. “… and that’s why they didn’t need to capture you alive. Merely finding you and your niece together would be enough to implicate someone high up in one of the ministries… probably the Interior Ministry, right?”
“Something like that,” Emily said, trying to conserve her breath.
“I guess this means I’m never going home,” Li Li moaned, though the tears trembling in her eyes were audible in her voice.
“No, sweetheart,” Emily said, struggling for breath again. “It means you’re going home to Virginia, and we try again another time. Now we just have to find a way out of China.”
Shao Yao turned to Meng Yu Fei and nodded, and her eyes lit up. “As it turns out, we’ve been considering several options in that vein,” she said. “Ordinarily, in a situation like this, we’d lay low in the Gobi Desert, or some other isolated place…”
“… but we didn’t think someone as stylish as your niece would find much excitement out there,” Shao Yao added.
“… and the easiest way to cross the border ‘unofficially’ is down south, in Guangxi or Yunnan, and exit through Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar.”
“Why those countries?” Emily asked. None seemed especially attractive as a destination, though Vietnam had an embassy and more or less friendly relations with the United States. It also had much closer relations with Beijing. By contrast, the northern tip of Laos was infested with drug lords and a civil war was raging in the north of Myanmar. Neither one seemed like a good place to bring her niece, especially if she herself was in a weakened condition.
“Because there’s already a bustling trade in kidnapped women being smuggled into China from those places.”
“Oh, I see… another side effect of the one-child policy, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Meng Yu Fei said. “... which means we should be able to find people willing to bring you in the other direction.”
“Won’t that cost money?”
“Yes, lots,” Shao Yao said. “But we’ll figure that out once we get there.”
Emily faded out again, exhausted by the effort to speak for so long, but relieved to know the tiniest bit more about their new friends. When her eyes opened again, she found herself in a dark alley behind what smelled like a restaurant, or perhaps an open air market. Shao Yao had transferred her to a wheel chair, and Li Li fitted a cap over her head, and showed her a mirror. She was shocked to see that her hair seemed to have turned grey, but when she shivered, white powder fluttered down, and she could glimpse the black again. Still, with her face already pale and gaunt from loss of blood, she could almost pass for seventy, if no one inquired too closely.
Li Li smiled sheepishly, and then threw her arms around her neck until Emily groaned. She didn’t know how to offer reassurance to a child, or even if she should try, given the extremity of their circumstances, which were all too easy to read in Li Li’s face. Things didn’t turn any brighter when she held out what remained of the mobile phones, one smashed, the other with what looked like a bullet hole through the front screen, both of which probably happened during the struggle in the forest. She tried to force a smile for Li Li’s sake.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she croaked. “Just save the pieces. Maybe we can salvage one of them.” She cast her eyes around, trying to move her head as little as possible, peering out from under the cap. “No more driving?” she said in Shao Yao’s general direction.
“Two days hard driving to Kunming, or three days to Nanning,” Shao Yao said. “Either way would be too much for you.”
“Where are we now?” Emily took a deep breath, which wasn’t any easier now than it had been in the car. “I’m not used to feeling this helpless.”
“We are in Guangyuan, in Sichuan.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We will take a sleeper train to Kunming, and then a bus to the border, if you are strong enough.”
“I’m hungry,” Li Li said.
“Yu Fei is buying train tickets, because she’s got a way with crowds.”
Emily smiled faintly at this, having become familiar with the way the Chinese behave at ticket counters – the habit of queuing had not caught on here – and the thought of Meng Yu Fei forcing her way through, ignoring even the most basic social boundaries. This was her Daoism.
“There’s money in my bag.”
“We’ve already been using your money… please, forgive us, Sifu.”
“Only if you stop calling me Sifu.”
“Yes, of course. Please forgive me, Si… uh, Tenno shangwei.”
“My friends call me Em.”
“Em.” Shao Yao blushed for a moment, then nodded. “Yu Fei will bring food. She should be back soon.”
“Is she why you dropped out of college?”
“Your girlfriend is really cool,” Li Li said.
“She’s not my….” He paused to consider his words, which Emily took as a sign that Li Li’s surmise might be correct. “Do you know what a peach garden oath is?” he asked, and Li Li shook her head. “In the ‘Warring States’ period of our history, three famous friends stood in a peach garden and swore allegiance to each other, as if they were brothers. They declared that even though they had not been born on the same day, they would die on the same day, and became brothers by oath. That’s what Yu Fei and I are… siblings by oath.”
“I know that story,” Emily said. “It’s from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s one version.”
“Isn’t it why Chinese gangs are also called ‘triads’, because their loyalty to each other is higher than family or country?”
“You are correct, Em,” he said. “But that’s a perversion of what the three friends intended. For them, nothing was higher than duty to their country.”
“Why did the two of you swear such an oath?”
Shao Yao paused again before replying. “We rescued each other. I was a complacent teenager and she showed me the emptiness of my life.”
“How did you rescue her?” Li Li asked.
“She was a poor orphan abandoned on the streets of Shanghai. I fed her, and let her stay in my flat until we both decided it was no longer useful to either of us… and we hit the road.”
“… and you found your way to Wudangshan?”
“We return there every year… to visit the master.”
“You mean Master Liang, who’s been dead for eight decades?” Emily asked.
“Yes, exactly, only this time we found you… and it was a revelation, and then a challenge, and finally an opportunity.”
When Meng Yu Fei found them in the alley, her hands were full with sacks of fruit and hot food. The only question was where to eat it but, as luck would have it, the evening was warm for this time of year, and a local park offered benches and a modicum of quiet. Uniformed officers took no notice of them as they ate, and Emily managed to keep down a noodle broth with seafood. Li Li had a bowl of something Meng Yu Fei called yuxiang rousi, and which turned out to be shredded pork over rice in an aromatic fish sauce, and though it was a bit spicier than she expected, she managed to finish it.
At the train station, they attracted less official attention, the more intrusively needy they appeared. This insight led them to split up, with Li Li left in charge of wheeling “Granny” through a station still crowded at almost midnight. Porters and a conductor were enlisted to help them find the right platform and to lift the infirm into the proper car. Of course, Shao Yao had proposed taking Li Li with him and assigning Meng Yu Fei the task of pushing the wheelchair, but Emily wouldn’t risk letting Li Li out of her sight, now that she was conscious again.
“This is a rather roundabout route, isn’t it?” Emily asked, once they were setup in their sleeper berths. “Twenty-two hours to go twelve hundred kilometers… isn’t there anything faster?”
“Bullet trains attract more attention,” Meng Yu Fei said. “… and they’re usually booked well in advance.”
&nb
sp; “My father would love this route. He always used to say the best escape route is often the slowest one.”
“Did he have to escape often?” Shao Yao asked.
“More often than one might expect… for a good man.”
Once the train lurched into motion, and she was safely ensconced in a bunk under a blanket, Emily was able to sleep, and not merely lose consciousness. The tracks groaned and clacked underneath the carriage – or so she thought – and she could just barely see the lights of the city slip away through a gap at the bottom of the window shade. Li Li was safe, and so was she, at least for the moment, and the ambient noise of passengers moving along the corridor outside the compartment she shared with Li Li did not seem threatening. Shao Yao and Yu Fei would maintain a vigil over her slumbers, she understood that much about them.
Clack and click, rumble and groan, the rhythm soothed her mind and guided her down through layers of memory. A door opened at the end of the carriage, someone passing through, and then closed again, and the noise of the wind rose and fell. Every once in a while, her bed would shimmy to the left or the right in response to an imperfection in the tracks, and then glide on, and eventually the rocking motion would be incorporated into her reverie.
From somewhere outside the compartment, lights flickered and danced across her eyelids, warm at first, like a fire in a cozy room, and the logs crackled and snapped as the flames licked their splintered edges. Soon the cabin was engulfed, flames surging through the gaping hole in the floorboards, wind whistling and screaming as she forced the side door open.
“You’ve got to hit the brakes,” she shouted back into the cabin, and just as the waves below came into focus, the nose of the plane tipped sharply up and they all lurched forward, as if a parachute had been opened behind the tail. The wind whipped her face, suddenly free of the smoke and the flames, and she hit the water.
Stunned for an instant, she floated helpless, suspended in a vast amniotic sea, and through the darkness she saw them, one at a time and then in groups of three and four. Their faces blank, despite the hideous wounds that disfigured them, gaping holes in neck or chest, one man’s face had been smashed as if by a tree trunk, splinters still visible from the impact. Each one drifted past, eyes deep and dark, an invitation to savor the gift of eternity, to share it with them. How she longed to join them… but something else tugged at her, another duty, an unfulfilled promise she couldn’t recall making, and then she felt her legs churning as she ran the ridge, smoke and fire all around her.
Finally, she stood in front of him, Diao Ming, infernal rage practically glowing from his inhuman eyes. She curled into a shell and let him vent his wrath on her spiny exoskeleton, each blow resounding in the hollow drum of her thoughts, each merely the expiation of one more sin she could no longer remember committing. But she was content, because other eyes registered her sacrifice – Theo and Perry, Connie and her father’s old friend from the photograph, Racket and, most important of all, Tarot – they each bore witness and finally understood what he was, a predator, scarcely human, almost as evil as herself.
Her death glinted off the shiny edge of his blade as he prepared to finish her off and redeem the sacrifice of his love. But when she arose, brandishing the blade that had finished that infernal woman, blood dripping along the blade and down one arm, in the other she clutched the hated head by the hair like some sort of medusa. She felt herself shivering through the perspiration that had drenched her clothes, and the light flashed again, until the two of them faced him – siblings or lovers, who could tell? – Diao Chan and Diao Ming, now frozen in dread of the oblivion she’d banished them to, and like two piles of ash, the first breeze scattered them, swirling around her, the intensity growing, pelting her face until she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes.
High above, Emily spotted her, a child riding the storm, and with a tiny gesture, her hand, mighty as the wind, scattered the pelting dust, and lifted Emily up through the eye of the hurricane. Now she could see clearly, both the edge of the storm and the havoc it left in its wake, and the renewal it promised. Passing before the immense face of the Buddha, she recognized no further duty in the depths of its eyes, and she continued to rise, beyond the clouds and even the sky, until she gazed into the vast and unending blackness, and one harrowing thought took shape inside her: one need not die to experience eternity.
Shivering again, a familiar voice summoned her back to the only life she’d known, a small boy’s smiling voice called out: “Ama.” What before had seemed impossibly distant seemed painfully close, and she hardly knew whether to sigh in relief or tremble in fear for him.
28
An Incident in Kunming
“She’s practically a ghost.” Yu Fei held a hand against Emily’s temple. “… and she’s burning up.”
“Bleeding again, I expect.” Shao Yao said. “Probably also has a secondary infection.”
“You have to do something,” Li Li said in a trembling voice.
“Don’t worry, little one,” Yu Fei said. “We’ll find help.”
“Isn’t there an herbalist on the way to the bus station?” Shao Yao asked. “Don’t you remember, the old man with the tuft of white hair on top of his head?”
“Ugh, not another herbalist, and I’ve had it up to here with your wushu medicine. I think we need more antibiotics.”
“She finished the last of the pills Ping Xiao gave us in Wuhan, and I’m not sure we should risk a pharmacy.”
Li Li noticed Emily’s eyes flutter and rushed to her side. “Emmy, you’re awake.”
“Where are we?” she croaked. “Who are all these people?”
“It’s a big second-hand market, Emmy. You know, like the one we went to in Seoul to swap my clothes.”
Shao Yao helped Emily sip a cup of warm broth and Yu Fei pulled Li Li aside for a whispered conversation. The expression on her face made it clear what was being discussed, and when Shao Yao saw the expression on Li Li’s face he motioned to Yu Fei.
“You are right. She needs a clinic.”
“That’s too dangerous,” Yu Fei said. “The doctor will notify the authorities about wounds like these, and if they operate again she will be immobilized for days in recovery.”
Shao Yao glanced again at Li Li. “There is no choice. If we do nothing, she won’t make it.”
Emily had no idea how they’d managed to find a clinic, or make arrangements, but when she came to again, lying on a thin mattress on something that creaked and flexed like a metal table, an IV sticking out of one arm… at least she wasn’t shivering any longer, or perspiring. An old woman fussed with the blankets, the wrinkles on her face probably etched by the many sufferers she’d seen pass across this table. Was she the surgeon? A younger woman clutching a magazine bustled over as soon as she realized Emily had awakened.
“She’s awake, grandma. It’s really her.” The old woman tried to shoo her away, to no avail. “It’s really you, isn’t it, Tianhuang Daozi?”
Emily turned her head and groaned when the girl held up the magazine so she could see the cover, and her own face next to Wu Dao’s, his arm draped casually over her shoulder in a photo probably taken at one of the Beijing nightclubs they’d frequented in less vexed times. The girl seemed to want something from her, though she couldn’t quite decipher what it might be through her excited chatter. An autograph, perhaps?
The heading on the magazine suggested it was over two weeks old, though Emily wasn’t entirely certain of today’s date. Was she still in the news? And if so, what might the current headlines read? Liang’s Hero Sought By Authorities. Or perhaps, American Prostitute Exposed. What would Yuki or Andie say about that one? Or Li Li and Stone? But those were unlikely, she imagined. Playboy Billionaire Has Narrow Escape seemed altogether more likely. After all, who would care about her when a shiny bauble like Wu Dao could be dangled before their eyes?
“Don’t worry,” the girl said. “Papa is calling the authorities. You’ll be back home in no time.”
She must have meant it to be reassuring, but this news had precisely the opposite effect, and Emily would have leapt off the table, if that were at all possible. As it was, she could barely lift her head. A moment later, the door to the operating room, or recovery room – she couldn’t tell which – burst open and a man stumbled through, and Shao Yao behind him.
“I told you this place was too dangerous,” Yu Fei said. Li Li crept in behind her, and rushed to Emily’s side.
“I hadn’t accounted for the possibility that our friend’s face would be prominently featured on half the magazines in the waiting room,” Shao Yao conceded.
“I think we’re in trouble, Emmy,” Li Li whispered.
Emily said the only thing she could at such a moment: “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Nothing would be gained by alarming the child, and calm confidence was a far better motivator in dark times than panic and fear. “They’ll know what to do.”
Meanwhile, Shao Yao had located a handheld cooler and a few icepacks, and had begun rummaging through a refrigerator for the pouches the doctor said she would need. Yu Fei forced the family to sit on the floor at one end of the room, glowering fiercely and brandishing a telescoping baton over them.
“Stay quiet and you won’t be hurt.”
Shao Yao lifted Emily off the table, placed her into the wheelchair, and handed the IV pouch to Li Li. The doctor cringed, watching this scene, and finally risked getting up, despite Yu Fei’s threat. He taped the pouch into a sling to hold it even with her shoulder, and covered her with a blanket.
“You need to keep this from slipping down,” he said to Li Li, who nodded vigorously. “Take good care of her, little one.”
“Enough,” Yu Fei snarled. “We’ll be out of your hair in a few seconds… and an hour from now, we’ll be halfway to Chengdu, and you’ll never hear from us again.”
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 30