Harley’s dad, Ray, who should have had his seatbelt securely fastened by now, was pacing up and down, placing a series of increasingly frantic calls in a language Harley couldn’t understand. Seated around Harley at the huge meeting table that took up almost the entire inside of the plane were Schumacher – his dad’s enormously tall friend and ‘helper’ (Harley had never been exactly sure what he ‘helped’ with) – and a mysterious girl called Qing, who was finishing her seventh straight can of sandwich tuna with a cocktail fork.
When she wasn’t busy kung fu-ing adult-sized exponents of the Northern Praying Mantis style of Chinese martial art into submission, Qing was usually found eating fish.
‘She can really put away the tuna!’ Schumacher said admiringly over the sound of the landing gear extending for the final approach.
Qing shrugged and airily opened her eighth can.
Harley studied the chewing girl as the ground rushed up to meet them. She was about his height, with straight black hair severely parted at the centre and hanging down just below her narrow, bony shoulders. She had a serious, triangular face with high, pronounced cheekbones and a wide mouth. There were two things that stopped her looking like any other kid that went to his school. The first was the way she was dressed: in a collarless, tightly belted black tunic crawling with the looping bodies of six coiled dragons embroidered in azure and gold, worn over the top of a floor-length gold skirt and black cloth slippers embroidered with azure and gold dragons. And the second were her eyes: jet black apart from a thin ring of blue, and whites that weren’t actually white, but the faintest bit golden.
Qing could also – although Harley tried not to think about this too much – apparently move things without actually touching them, and jump off tall buildings without much bother. And it was possible she’d been trapped inside a ceramic vase for over two thousand years, but – out of a sense of extreme politeness, maybe – no one was talking about that part.
As the plane’s wheels hit the ground and hurtled to a stop down the runway, not a muscle in the girl’s face moved, although she briefly touched the large, almost translucent pearl that she wore on a simple ribbon around her neck, as if for luck.
After they landed, the private jet taxied around to a hangar that was largely shrouded in darkness and well away from the main complex. They disembarked into a dimly lit, echoing space and were met by … nobody.
‘He’s not here!’ Ray Spark hissed in frustration, the outline of the jet looming above him.
‘You should have called him directly,’ Schumacher muttered, peering out through the open hangar doors. ‘There were too many middlemans for my liking, Boss.’
‘The middlemans are the only way to reach this guy,’ Ray whispered back. ‘He’s deadly with a cleaver and is a fiendishly good getaway driver, but the man refuses to carry a phone.’
Suddenly, Qing inexplicably exclaimed from behind them, ‘Prawns.’
A large man in baggy tracksuit pants and a singlet lumbered – silently – out of the darkness. It was as though he’d materialised out of thin air – all two hundred-plus kilograms of him. He did, indeed, smell of prawns and his arms were as big as Christmas hams.
‘Spark,’ the shadowy man-mountain said, cracking his knuckles ominously.
His silhouette suddenly stood to attention, and Harley wondered why until he noticed that Qing had drifted out from behind Schumacher to study their getaway driver more closely. Harley saw his dad and Schumacher freeze, too, out of the corner of his eye, because it was obvious to everyone present – even the two pilots busily pretending they couldn’t see what was going on outside the plane – that Qing was faintly… glowing. She was the only person in the place who was clearly and eerily visible and, as she moved closer to the man who smelled like prawns, it was apparent that the man’s singlet was incredibly stained with prawn goo and that he was terrified.
‘Guǐ,’ he breathed, backing away, shaking his head and frantically waving his hands in a shoo, shoo gesture.
Ray looked at the man and snapped, ‘Ghost? What ghost?’
At Ray’s words, what glow there was went out, and Harley had to suppress a yell – for Qing had inexplicably vanished. She just wasn’t there anymore. And all he’d felt was a faint draught moving past him.
‘You’re seeing things, Happy,’ Ray added coolly. ‘Been working too hard. There’s no one here except Schumacher, me and my boy. Let’s get going. The longer we delay, the hotter it gets.’
The big man – who looked the opposite of the English name his mum had given him – cast around fruitlessly in the dark for a while, muttering about ghosts, before he led them moodily out to a battered white delivery van with Hai Tong Tai Seafood Co. painted on the side in red letters. The windows in the rear doors of the van were painted over.
‘Get in,’ Happy indicated with a jerk of his head. He rubbed his bare arms for a moment, as if he were cold – or maybe as if he were smoothing down the little hairs on his skin that were standing up in fright – before moving around to the driver’s door and starting the engine. Schumacher, Ray and Harley piled into the pitch-black interior of the van before Happy came back and shut the rear doors with a soft clang behind them. The smell of fish guts in the delivery van was overwhelming.
Ray said, ‘Pull up a crate, gents – it’s going to be a bumpy ride to downtown Macau.’
Harley was glad that the driver’s compartment was closed off from the cargo area because even Schumacher yelled and jumped, hitting his head on the ceiling of the van, when Qing reappeared without warning.
She had a broad grin on her face as she waved a raw fish fillet at them with a faintly glowing hand, then took a delicate bite.
To be continued in The Race for the Red Dragon
With thanks to my husband, Michael, real-life martial arts action hero, and our fearless and funny kids, Oscar, Leni and Yve, who put up with me walking into furniture and burning the chops when I’m thinking about character and plot. And a huge vielen dank to my new brother-in-law, Stefan Kachel, for double-checking Schumacher’s German is spot-on.
Huge thanks also to Eva Mills and Jodie Webster, publishers extraordinaire and beloved industry heavy-weights, to my brilliant friend and editor Hilary Reynolds for tidying up all the dangling modifiers and POV issues and listening to me whinge, and to my extended dumpling-loving family at Allen & Unwin, whom I’ve been privileged to work with, eat with and bounce ideas off for over a decade now.
Having only ever attained an orange belt in Wing Chun Kung Fu, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Lu Shengli’s most excellent Combat Techniques of Taiji, Xingyi, and Bagua: Principles and Practices of Internal Martial Arts (translated and edited by Zhang Yun and Susan Darley, Blue Snake Books, 2006) and years of watching wuxia movies featuring improbable hairstyles and death-defying stunts.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, descriptions and events in this book are entirely fictional. Any errors are entirely mine.
Rebecca Lim is a Melbourne writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer. Rebecca is the author of eighteen books, including The Astrologer’s Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers), Afterlight and the bestselling Mercy series. Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award, Aurealis Award and Davitt Award for YA, Rebecca’s work has also been longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese and Polish. She is a co-founder of the ‘Voices from the Intersection’ initiative.
Rebecca Lim, The Relic of the Blue Dragon
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