The Race for the Red Dragon Read online

  He woke hours later, groggy and thirsty. The rickety hatchback was travelling along a broad multi-lane roadway that crossed a deep body of water, brilliant in the noonday sun which beat down out of the sky.

  Ah Po turned her softly wrinkled, apple-cheeked face towards Harley for a moment, yelling over the sound of the clanking, labouring engine, ‘This is Shenzhen Bay! Welcome to China!’

  Behind Harley, Qing leant forward to study the border control area they were approaching, a frown etched into her delicate features. Through the dusty windows of the little beige car, the three of them could see over a dozen long parking lanes in which tourist buses, cars and mini-vans were queued up, nose to tail, with more lines of disconsolate people standing nearby. Harley watched as other people continued to enter and leave a large complex of grey buildings bristling with warning signs. The pit of his stomach went cold as he realised how much trouble he was in.

  ‘I don’t have a passport!’ Harley whispered, turning in horror to Ah Po beside him at the wheel. ‘Dad took care of all that stuff before and now Dad’s not here.’

  He felt that familiar ache that gripped his guts every time he thought about what might have happened to his twinkly-eyed dad and his dad’s huge, goofy friend – who looked and sounded exactly like a movie bad guy, but was actually a gooey, walking marshmallow.

  Ah Po brought the car to a stop in one of the parking bays and patted Harley’s hand. ‘It is all taken care of,’ she said kindly, rifling through the glove box of the little car, which was hanging open because the lock was permanently busted. She pulled out a Hong Kong passport with gold lettering on the front and opened it to the photograph inside. Harley gaped as he saw a headshot of himself – taken against one of the white-tiled walls of the restaurant during his marathon eating session – with the name Chung Cheung Fai next to it. Harley might have been imagining things, but the passport felt vaguely warm. He took it from Ah Po and flicked through it in bemusement. It was filled with dozens of country stamps in different colours, showing different dates. ‘I’ve even been to Venice, Italy,’ Harley breathed. He’d always wanted to go to Venice, Italy. But until Qing had literally exploded into his life, he’d never even left Australia.

  Ah Po shooed Harley out the passenger side door, saying as she crawled out after him, ‘I’m your grandmother, okay? Escorting you back to meet up with your extended family across the border.’

  ‘Um,’ Harley replied uncertainly, looking down at himself. ‘Is that going to work?’

  As the old lady nodded, joining Harley outside the small, sagging hatchback, Harley demanded, still clutching the fake passport, ‘Well, what about her? She doesn’t have a passport at all.’

  He gestured behind him at Qing inside the car, and Ah Po answered serenely, ‘What about who?’ as she steered Harley away from the parking area and towards the grey concrete and steel complex that was their gateway into China.

  Harley looked back at the car, and his mouth fell open again as he saw that it was completely empty inside.

  When Harley reached the customs window, Ah Po spoke smoothly to the customs officer in Cantonese. The officer looked at the passport, looked at Harley, then addressed him rapidly in a staccato stream of Cantonese as well. Harley just stared at him, bewildered. The man tried another Chinese dialect, then another, then, when Harley appeared to be familiar with none of them, the man said flatly, ‘I don’t believe your name is—’ his face fell into a sneer, ‘Chung Cheung Fai or that you’ve been to …’ the man flicked rapidly through the passport, ‘Svalbard in Norway in November of last year.’

  Harley scraped the bottom of his memory for any stored fact nuggets about Svalbard in Norway, dredging up the two random things his dad had ever told him about the place. ‘It’s really cold?’ Harley said hesitantly. ‘And, little-known fun fact – the Governor of Svalbard is also the chief of police?’

  Ah Po raised her eyes to the ceiling as if to say, Way to go, Harley. That’s a completely not suspicious, or slightly criminal-sounding, thing to say.

  Though it didn’t seem physically possible, the customs officer’s mouth turned down even lower at the corners. He passed the passport under some kind of light scanner and his shoulders slumped in defeat.

  ‘I can’t fault this,’ the man said, his gaze fixed on Harley’s light, almost golden, brown eyes. ‘But you just don’t look like a Chung Cheung Fai to me.’

  Ah Po gently interrupted, ‘As I explained earlier, dear, he is my cherished grandson, and he is meeting his extended family on the China side. He may not look exactly like us—’ she gestured at the customs guy, then at herself, ‘but he carries his people in his blood. They are always there – and always will be. You know this to be true.’

  The customs man’s expression softened slightly at her words. Levelling one more stern look at Harley and Ah Po across the counter, he finally stamped the passport with unnecessary violence and waved brusquely at Harley to go through.

  Ah Po took Harley aside, startling him by enfolding him in a quick, hard, grandma-style hug. ‘There is a minibus when you go through those gates,’ she whispered urgently as impatient people brushed past them to get to the counter. ‘It’s painted white and green with the words JollyBus on the side. Walk straight onto the bus without stopping – the driver knows where you are going. It is all arranged.’

  The old woman’s eyes darted around the building for a moment as if she were looking for something or someone, then she refocused her gaze on Harley. ‘Just remember that you are always welcome at “Mr Hong Kong’s” house. Your father saved my son’s life during that job in Brussels.’ Ah Po took a quick, shaky breath, her eyes very bright and shiny.

  ‘Leave no man behind,’ Harley murmured in sudden understanding. It was his dad’s operational motto. Harley knew that whatever kind of dastardly international crim his dad was, he was not a fully evil guy. He really cared about the people he worked with.

  The old lady nodded quickly, sniffing. ‘As far as I am concerned, the favour stands forever. There will always be a favour when you Sparks need one, in this part of the world.’

  Ah Po dashed a wrinkly hand across her eyes, then gave Harley a small shove. ‘Go!’

  Harley hesitated before stepping back into the flow of impatient people moving through the gates towards China. He turned and waved once before he stepped through, but Ah Po’s small upright figure was already lost to the crowd.

  As Harley exited the doors on the China side of the complex, he felt something wriggle across the shoulders of his bomber jacket and gave a yell that raised nearby eyebrows. He jiggled and slapped at his clothes to get rid of the disgusting bug that was crawling all over him. Leaping and yelling again, he felt something tickle the back of his neck.

  If you really want to kill me, a small voice said sternly, directly into the space between his eyes, just keep doing what you’re doing, buster.

  Harley froze mid-jiggle, his right hand still raised in the air, mid-slap, over his shoulderblade.

  Didn’t she say to keep walking? the small voice continued in exasperation.

  ‘You were there the whole time?!’ Harley yelled, causing the couple walking past him to jump sideways and give him reproachful looks.

  I have not been to Svalbard either. The tiny voice sounded amused. Though I will go. One day, it added wistfully.

  Harley felt the sting of tiny claws.

  The JollyBus is over there, the voice hissed.

  Harley scanned the packed car park and stumbled into motion. A small green and white minibus with that exact name painted on the side was parked across the tarmac very close to the exit gates, with its door – midway down the bus – folded open. He faltered as he drew closer, noting the scruffy passengers already seated inside. Ah Po hadn’t said anything about other people being on the bus!

  The driver of the minibus looked up from the Chinese newspaper he was reading, and the roast pork bun he was eating, as Harley put his foot on the first stair.

  ‘Chung Cheung Fai?’ the man barked.

  ‘Uh, yup,’ Harley replied, his voice high and squeaky with tension. He felt the tiny claws shift impatiently on the back of his neck. The driver jerked his head, indicating Harley should continue towards the back of the vehicle.

  Harley held his breath as he passed a dirty-looking man in an ill-fitting red tracksuit with white stripes running up the arms and shoulders who was fast asleep in the front row. His mud-stained face was hidden by the brim of a frayed blue baseball cap and turned towards the window. He was also snoring loudly, with his mouth hanging slightly open. Harley was still holding his breath as he passed a tall woman in plaits wearing a floppy sunhat and long shapeless tea dress in a hideous green and orange floral print, sitting midway down the bus on the other side. She was also asleep against the window, one edge of her hat squashed against her head.

  Without warning, the door at the front slammed shut and Harley was on his way. But to where?

  Chapter 11

  Harley took a seat right at the back of the bus – as far away as possible from the large sleeping woman in the hideous dress and the grubby-looking man in the red trackies and cap.

  The minibus shot out through the gates as soon as Harley took his seat and began navigating its way through the humid, hazy air, ornamental flowerbeds, sprawling construction sites and towering steel, concrete and glass skyscrapers of Shenzhen. Harley’s eyes widened as he noticed dragon gates in some of the buildings they were passing, revealing the structures behind. He’d never known about dragon gates before Hong Kong, and now he was seeing them everywhere.

  There were bottles of complimentary water in the seat pocket in front of Harley, and he opened one and waved it near his left shoulder enquiringly. The fabric across his shoulders shifted minutely and he heard the tiniest of splashes as Miniature-Dragon-Qing dropped into the open bottle.

  Harley placed the bottle gently down on the seat beside him, catching a glimpse of rippling pale-blue scales slipping past the gap behind the label. As he watched (without trying to be too obvious about staring), the water level in the bottle dropped rapidly.

  ‘Another one?’ Harley addressed the air in general, softly, so as not to wake the strangers on the bus.

  In reply, the plastic bottle tipped over, bone dry, as if it hadn’t just been filled to the brim with spring water seconds before.

  Harley watched, fascinated, as a tiny blue dragon – the blue darker yet brighter than it had been a moment earlier – stepped out of the mouth of the empty bottle and looked up at him enquiringly and – no, Harley wasn’t imagining it – a touch impatiently. He hastily cracked open the lid of another bottle and set it down, upright, on the seat beside him. He watched in amazement as mini-Qing made a graceful leap up the side of the vessel and shimmied down into the bottle, her blue and gold mane and sharp triangular spines cutting easily through the water inside.

  Harley was so engrossed that he didn’t see the big woman with the plaits and sunhat advancing down the aisle towards him with her arms outstretched until it was too late.

  ‘Uuuuurnk,’ Harley exclaimed as the huge woman shoved him face-first into her strangely lumpy bosom that smelled of pickled fish.

  He struggled mightily, feeling as if he were going to pass out from the combination of decaying fish fumes and all-encompassing bosom. It would be a truly terrible way to die, a tiny part of his still-functioning brain told him.

  The woman pushed Harley away suddenly, squeezing his face between her ginormous, calloused hands. Harley took great gasping breaths of air, just before the woman did it again – mashed him into her ample front, rubbing his face in her abundant womanly garments and – urgh! – body parts.

  ‘Qing!’ Harley screamed, his voice muffled, his arms windmilling. ‘Get her off me!’ But no help was forthcoming from the tiny creature he’d left doing a sinuous backstroke in the bottled water. He was being attacked. Why wasn’t Qing already using her mystical qì powers on this lady?

  Finally, the big woman pushed Harley back once more as he choked and coughed.

  ‘Kind!’ she said in a weird, high falsetto. ‘How I have missed your adorable dimple (just like your daddy!) and your squeezably chubby cheeks!’

  ‘Chubby cheeks?’ Harley repeated in outrage, more angry now than frightened. ‘How dare you call them CHUBBY!’

  Someone standing behind the woman burst out in peals of laughter and Harley sat bolt upright. He knew that laugh!

  He knew that laugh because he himself laughed in exactly the same way.

  ‘Dad!’ Harley shoved the bosomy woman to one side and launched himself at the man in the grubby red tracksuit, knocking his blue cap off his head and hugging him fiercely (even though his dad, too, smelled terribly of preserved fish with a base note of fermented river mud).

  ‘Und mich?’ boomed the huge woman Harley had just pushed past, beefy fists balanced on hips. ‘Where is the cuddles for your favourite Onkel?’

  Onkel?

  Harley froze and looked up and up – into the kindly, ice-blue eyes of … Schumacher.

  In. A. Dress.

  And –

  Sun. Hat.

  Sporting – luscious long golden … plaits.

  ‘Very surprising for you, ja?’ Schumacher boomed, clapping his massive hands together. ‘Very funny trick I am playing, ja, Harls?’

  Schumacher extended his floral tea dress-clad arms, the frilly sleeve cuffs halfway up his muscular forearms, and made a bring it home gesture with his hands.

  Harley shook his head, the backs of his legs hitting the seat as he tried to avoid more suffocating, fishy cuddles before he realised that Schumacher wasn’t talking to him, but to the snake-like azure creature that was already flowing up Schumacher’s arm. Dragon-Qing gave her silky mane a shake, treading delicately with her five-clawed feet across the garish floral fabric of Schumacher’s bodice until she found a comfortable spot.

  Qing, now roughly the size of a young boa constrictor, her azure scales glossy and vibrant from the water, curled herself around the base of Schumacher’s neck once, then stayed there, looped across his shoulders like a vicious-looking, ornamental shawl. Harley gulped as Qing watched him with blue-rimmed, unblinking black eyes, the whites a vibrant warm gold, her two streamer-like whiskers testing the air.

  ‘I have missed you, too, Prinzessin,’ Schumacher rumbled, scratching a spot between Qing’s horns awkwardly with one hand. ‘We worried very much, Ray and I, for you junge Leute.’ Harley smiled. When Schumacher was feeling emotional, his German had a habit of bursting out all over the place.

  Dragon-Qing stretched her head towards the ceiling suddenly, shaking her mane in delight before closing her eyes and dropping straight off to sleep.

  Ray, awed, sank down into an aisle seat on the left, while Schumacher lowered himself down gently into the seat across the aisle, careful not to wake the sleeping creature draped around him. They turned to face Harley as the bus continued to drive in a roughly westerly direction out of Shenzhen. The scenery along the expressway they were travelling on grew more rural by the minute as they left behind factories and businesses and half-finished bridges and buildings covered in dense bamboo scaffolding, driving past clusters of concrete low-rise apartment buildings built around rice paddies, fish farms, small fields of hand-sown crops and one-storey, rusty-roofed brick or wooden shacks with small children playing on the verandas. Huge electricity transmission towers, massive billboards covered in Chinese characters, blue and white steel silos on stilts, abandoned concrete pylons and large bodies of water punctuated the passing view at regular intervals. What foliage and grass Harley could see was a dusty dark green colour so unlike the countryside of home that he could only stare at the unfamiliar trees and bright wildflowers going by. It was a strange mix of urban and rural, the finished and the unfinished, brand-new things and desperately falling-apart things, all jumbled together.

  ‘When did she start feeling comfortable enough with any of us to do this?!’ Ray whispered excitedly. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Qing? I saw her climb out of that bottle, all teeny tiny, and then she was doing that—’ Ray flapped his hands at where Qing lay curled around Schumacher’s neck and shoulders. ‘This is incredible!’

  ‘Wait till you hear about everything that happened after we got separated …’ Harley eagerly filled in his dad and Schumacher on the events following the ambush on Taipa Island.

  Ray’s mouth formed an O of wonder as Harley described the actions of Pearl-Qing in their desperate flight away from Chiu Chiu Pang’s massed forces in the mist. His face went dark at the news of the second ambush in the laneway behind Mr Hong Kong’s shop. And his eyebrows threatened to hit his hairline as Harley told them about the bronze-coloured fúcánglóng that had almost caused an earthquake on Tai Mo Shan, the five golden temple dragons that had somehow come to life at a single word from Qing, and the news that there was another vase with a red dragon on it.

  ‘Does anyone else know?’ Ray said hoarsely. ‘About the vase? It could be our ticket out of this mess. It’s definitely something we can bargain with.’

  ‘Then pull a double cross as we smash it anyway?’ Harley said doubtfully. ‘Releasing the girl inside?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Ray crowed. ‘Now you’re thinking like a Spark.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ muttered Harley, and Ray shot him a hurt look.

  ‘But this is not the new news,’ Schumacher added, troubled. ‘It is over two thousand years since this Magier – this wizard, ja – was last seen. How do we even know we are going to the right place, Freunde? And if this vase is even still there?’

  ‘Qing told Mr Hong Kong – who’s an old lady by the way,’ Harley saw his dad’s eyes widen at that titbit, ‘where the magician was last seen. If I know anything about dragons,’ and Harley’s tone indicated his extreme uncertainty on that subject, ‘there will be some kind of mountain or river involved.’

  Harley felt the distinct sensation that he was being watched, and he looked up the middle of the minibus to catch the dark eyes of their driver staring back at them in the mirror. When the driver realised he’d been caught staring, the man averted his eyes quickly. He began, rather unconvincingly, to whistle tunelessly as he stared ahead at the road, executing a rather dangerous overtake of an overloaded motorbike carrying two adults, a small child and a live chicken, to show that he was, indeed, just driving.