Long groaned softly as Xie rested him on the tunnel’s dirt floor. Xie remained silent as he knelt down to make his gigantic self as inconspicuous as possible, then opened the exit door and poked his head outside.
“I don’t see anyone,” Xie whispered. “Tonglong must still be in the process of shutting down the perimeter. We should make a run for it.”
“Let me see,” Long whispered.
Xie leaned back inside, and Long repositioned himself to face the door. Even that little effort made Long swoon. He carefully stuck his head into the cool night air and found that the moon was bright. Xie appeared to be right. The area looked vacant.
Long pulled his head inside. “What if they have snipers on the rooftops?”
“We will have to take our chances. They may not have had time to do that yet. It is my guess that Tonglong is busy with other things. Locating us is secondary to his larger objectives. He will deal with the Emperor first.”
Long heard tension in Xie’s voice, and he thought again about what he had seen earlier. Tonglong had killed two people in cold blood.
Long shivered. “I am sorry about your father.”
Xie gnashed his teeth. “Tonglong is the one who will be sorry.”
Long did not doubt Xie. He leaned through the doorway again and felt his dan tien begin to quiver. There was someone out there. He attempted to scan the rooftops and found that his vision was blurring from fatigue and blood loss. He strained to focus in the moonlight, but it was no use.
“Do you see anything?” Long asked. “My eyesight is fading.”
Xie carefully stood and leaned over Long, looking outside. “Yes!” Xie replied. “I see something on one of the nearby roofs. It appears to be a …” His voice trailed off.
“Appears to be what?” Long asked.
“Call me crazy, but it looks like a monkey jumping up and down, waving its arms.”
Long felt a glimmer of hope. “Is the monkey alone?”
“I believe so. It is partially in shadow, and … wait! There is someone else. A woman, or maybe a tall girl. She is wearing a white dress and a white turban. She glided out of the moon shadows beside the monkey for the briefest of moments, then nodded in our direction and retreated. If I were superstitious, I would have guessed that she was a ghost. I have never seen a human move that gracefully.”
Long smiled, his own world now draped in shadows. “Pick me up and run to them as quickly as you can. It seems there is hope for us yet.”
And then Long blacked out.
“ShaoShu!” Tonglong snapped. “Where have you been? I was about to send a search party after you.”
ShaoShu hurried out of the Shanghai Fight Club tunnel and stopped before twenty-nine-year-old Tonglong, who was standing inside the fight club’s main rear exit. ShaoShu struggled to catch his breath. “I got lost, sir,” he lied. “I am very sorry. Are we going somewhere?”
“We are indeed,” Tonglong said. “All the way to the Forbidden City. Come with me.”
Tonglong flipped his extraordinarily long, thick ponytail braid forward over his shoulder, securing its tip to his sash. He headed toward a group of four soldiers waiting outside the exit door. The men wore the red silk robes and pants of Tonglong’s elite Southern army uniform, and they carried a large object wrapped in a blanket. ShaoShu realized that there was a person inside it, wrapped up like an egg roll.
“Is this how you plan to transport the cargo?” Tong long asked as he stepped through the doorway, into the night.
“Yes, sir,” one of the soldiers replied.
“Well done.”
ShaoShu reached the exit door and saw a donkey attached to a cart. Next to the cart was a filthy rectangular wooden crate. Ventilation holes had been drilled at regular intervals along the upper section of each side, and large hinges were affixed to one of the sides and a heavy hasp to the opposite. Judging from the smell, ShaoShu guessed that the crate had once held pigs.
“I believe it is large enough,” the soldier said to Tonglong, “but not everyone agrees with me.”
“Find out,” Tonglong said. “Open it.”
The men did as ordered, and Tonglong stepped around to the far side of the crate to get a closer look inside. The soldiers stepped around, too, and began to manhandle their squirming parcel to see how it might fit inside the crate. A section of the wrapping came loose, and ShaoShu saw a flash of brilliant yellow silk. This confirmed what he had suspected. Only one person in all of China was allowed to wear the color yellow, and it was the Emperor. Yellow symbolized the Emperor’s divine connection with the sun.
ShaoShu felt no great devotion to the Emperor, but he did feel sorry for anyone who was being mistreated. He turned away from the spectacle and noticed something moving very fast and low to the ground in the distance. On first glance, it appeared to be a large shadow. However, after staring hard, ShaoShu realized that it had to be Xie and Long!