The Race for the Red Dragon Read online

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2019

  Copyright © Rebecca Lim, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76029 737 4

  eISBN 978 1 76087 126 0

  For teaching resources, explore

  www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  Cover and chapter illustrations by Geoff Kelly/Tou-Can Design

  Set by Sandra Nobes

  To Michael, Oscar, Leni and Yve – love. And to my dad and mum, who want me to write books like Crazy Rich Asians, but have had to settle for this instead.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Harley Spark, thirteen years and twenty-two days old, found himself rapidly descending towards a runway on Taipa Island, Macau, in a private jet with solid gold bathroom taps, in the dead of night. This was all thanks to an ancient dragon vase bearing a rare potter’s mark, and a diabolical international crime network of which his dad was an (unconfirmed) member.

  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 irises apart from a thin outer 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 they 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 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 busy 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 clear 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 draft 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 cheerful 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 large battered white delivery van with Hai Tong Tai Seafood Co. painted on the side in big 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 was cold – or maybe as if he was 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.’

  Har
ley 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.

  Chapter 2

  As the van lurched into motion, Schumacher grinned and said, ‘That is the neat trick, Prinzessin!’

  Qing grinned back, her teeth gleaming faintly in the dark just like the rest of her.

  ‘Ten minutes to destination!’ Ray growled, as Happy threw the van into a doughnut and roared away from the hangar in a screech of smoking tyres. Harley dug his fingers into the side of the ice-filled crate he was sitting on, his bum getting colder through his worn-out jeans. He’d been sweating into his flannel shirt and bomber jacket back in Singapore, but now he was freezing inside this refrigerated van. He wondered when he would ever be comfortable again.

  ‘Ferries leave every fifteen minutes from the main terminal on the Macau Peninsula,’ Ray shouted as they hit a pothole and Schumacher punched the air and shouted, ‘Whoo!’

  ‘Schumacher can take the ferry ahead of us and meet us on Hong Kong Island,’ Ray added as Happy took a corner so quickly that they all slid across the van along with the loose crates. ‘He can clear up any nasty surprises before we get to—’

  Qing sat bolt upright, her head tilted to one side as if she were listening intently.

  Then the interior of the van went black.

  Harley jumped as a single gunshot rang out, loud as a cannon.

  Happy’s driving – already verging on manic – went just about supersonic. The van filled with the sounds of Ray, Harley and Schumacher yelling as Happy seemed to go off-road for a while before swerving and dodging up a series of laneways. The van flew across a shifting panorama of stone pavers, cobblestones and unsealed gravel as its passengers bounced and slid across the floor on their makeshift seats.

  Happy suddenly stamped on the van’s brakes, and they all flew into the tightly packed wall of crates at the front of the cargo area where Qing had been sitting but was now nowhere to be found. Harley, his dad and Schumacher came to rest in a tangle of arms and legs beside an overturned polystyrene box filled with live mud crabs. Harley bellowed, recoiling from the awful sensation of dozens of crustaceans trying to scramble to freedom across his legs.

  The doors of the van flew open onto a narrow, miserable laneway lined on both sides with boarded-up, two-storey stone shophouses that seemed to be leaning down on them at crazy angles in the moonlight.

  ‘There they are,’ Happy growled, clearly furious at being intercepted, jerking his thumb at Ray, Harley and Schumacher through the open van doors.

  Harley could just make out a semicircle of black-clad masked men standing behind Happy, who was possibly the worst getaway driver in history as they’d barely managed to get anywhere, let alone away. The masked bandits were all holding huge submachine guns, pointed straight at Ray Spark’s shocked face.

  ‘Dad—’ Harley squeaked.

  ‘Is it curtains, boss?’ Schumacher breathed, wide-eyed.

  Ray winced, doubtless thinking of the eye-watering bounty Grandmaster Chiu Chiu Pang had just put on his head – twenty million dollars! – in revenge for thwarting the Grandmaster’s efforts to get his hands on the azure dragon vase in Australia, then the green dragon vase in Singapore. Not to mention the pre-existing five-million-dollar bounty the Grandmaster had already placed on Harley’s head for his part in the whole affair.

  The entire criminal antiquities world saw the Sparks – father and son – as walking bags of money, ready for the taking. Ray knew their time was up.

  ‘Out!’ roared the masked gunman standing in the middle. ‘Hands on your heads. Single file.’

  Harley watched as his dad picked himself up first and jumped down out of the van with his hands on his head. Schumacher followed miserably, his lank, death-metal blond hair falling around his distraught features. Harley pushed himself up off the van floor last, nudging live mud crabs out of his path as he shuffled forward, eyes on his sneakers.

  He blinked, looking closer. It was strange, but a thin white mist seemed to be obscuring the floor of the van. Harley could barely make out the tops of his shoes through it.

  Gee, it’s foggy, he thought as he reached the lip of the cargo hold, preparing to jump down and join his dad in captivity. Maybe it’s dry ice keeping everything so cold in here?

  Harley’s eyes widened as the fog grew noticeably denser. It now streamed down past his calves onto the road outside. He turned to see it rising to fill the van behind him, like a wall of cloud.

  Rough hands wrestled Harley down onto the ground and the opaque fog began to pour out of the vehicle in earnest now, curling around the legs of the gunmen, flowing up the captive figures of Ray and Schumacher until even their faces were obscured.

  Everyone began to bellow and roar, flailing around in circles within the enveloping, unnatural fog which now blanketed the entire laneway from end to end.

  Harley stood stock still, listening intently, trying to work out where, in all the fog, his dad and Schumacher were.

  There were the sounds of men struggling and scuffling, and Happy took the opportunity to stumble away into the night, abandoning his seafood van and his passengers to the ghostly mist, which he tried desperately to brush off his skin and clothes while shouting, ‘Guǐ! Guǐ!’

  Suddenly Ray roared, ‘Run, Harls, run!’ as the air was rent by a spray of gunfire.

  Panicked, Harley promptly turned and ran straight into a concrete wall, banging his nose so hard his eyes began to water.

  ‘Dad!’ he wailed. He’d never been so scared in all his life, as the sounds of desperate wrestling continued. ‘Dad!’

  Sounding half-choked, Ray grunted, ‘Call. Hong. Kong.’

  Harley ducked as bullets whistled overhead, impossibly close and awfully loud.

  Call a whole island? What could his dad possibly mean?

  It was then – as he crouched against the wall in terror – that Harley noticed a small, warmly glowing orb by his right shoe. It looked just big enough to fit comfortably into his palm.

  Instinctively he reached out for it through the thick mist. But when he tried to pick it up, the orb … moved. It made a distinct jump, rolling away and to the left. As Harley stared after it, open-mouthed, it rolled back and tapped once against the toe of his shoe before jerking away again to the left.

  And that was when Harley understood that the pearl – for that was what it was – wanted him to follow it.

  He stumbled through the fog after the zigzagging pearl. Sometimes it paused, which made Harley pause too. For the next hour – although it felt like a lifetime – Harley followed the darting pearl through a dizzying, roundabout collection of fogbound laneways and side streets … right up to the entrance doors of a brutal-looking grey building with Chinese characters and the words Terminal Maritímo de Passageiros da Taipa on the side of it.

  Harley bent low, addressing the pearl directly. ‘I don’t understand what those words mean.’

  The glowing orb gave a small, distinctly frustrated hop on the spot. But it didn’t roll any further. After a moment it just hopped again, as if to say: Duh? We’re here.

  Dazed, Harley picked up the pearl – it was comfortingly warm to the touch in his frozen fingers – and entered the grey building, which had a high, airy ceiling held up by a forest of tall columns.

  And the fog, which had been waiting like a patient puppy just at the fringes of Harley’s sight, entered the building with him.

  It swelled in like floodwater, rising and rising to fill the entire cavernous space inside the terminal; it even flowed across the ceiling in leisurely waves. Ticket counters, luggage belts, vending machines, waiting areas, the queues of people standing there – all were swiftly blanketed and obscured.

  The terminal erupted in the same sounds of panic that
had followed Harley across Taipa Island: the cries of people suddenly separated from other people and calling out in languages Harley had never heard before; the jarring crashes and thuds of things and people falling over into other things and people.

  The only person who could see was Harley, still holding the glowing pearl; it seemed to have the effect of clearing the fog just enough for him to see ten centimetres or so in front of his feet. After a long moment of indecision during which Harley stared at the awe-inspiring sea of fog, the pearl hopped, almost impatiently, out of his hand. It rolled swiftly down corridors, travelators, ramps and walkways – right past the security gates of customs and passport control – while Harley struggled to keep up with it.

  The pearl led him onto a pier and up to the side of a large, bright blue boat that had a flat, streamlined shape. Through the mist, Harley could see several different levels of fixed seating inside and outside the vessel. He could hear the bumps and creaks the tied-up boat made in the waves breaking against the pier.

  It was a ferry, Harley realised. The pearl had actually led him to a ferry. Maybe not the one his dad had intended them to take, but it would have to do.

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered fervently.

  Still shielded by a shifting, clinging sea of white, Harley bent and picked up the waiting orb and walked straight onto the transport, choosing a dark corner seat at the extreme rear of the ferry. He shrank down inside his bomber jacket, hoping no one would see him sitting out here, and clasped the warm pearl between his cold hands. His heart was beating so fast it felt like it might leap out of his chest and into the cold waters of the South China Sea.

  What if someone found him on board without a ticket?

  Where were his dad and Schumacher, and were they even alive?

  Harley was both frozen to his bones and sweating in fear.

  It felt like hours before the fog died down enough to let all the complaining passengers file onto the ferry at last. Harley hadn’t realised he was holding his breath until the ferry cast off and powered out to sea.