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“I didn’t think he’d come after us,” Mack said. He flopped back on to the bed, which was amazingly soft. There were two beds in this room, and another bed in the adjoining room. “I thought Grimluk might have said something about a trap. It wasn’t clear. I thought I was imagining it. But I guess that was the trap.”
“The possibility of a trap is something you definitely want to mention,” Jarrah said. “Still and all, here we are, right as rain. No worries.”
Jarrah was a cheerful, optimistic sort of girl. Mack wished he could be like that. The cheerful, optimistic part, not the girl part.
Stefan was looking at the room service menu. “I can’t read this.”
Jarrah took the menu from him, flipped from the Chinese-language pages to the English-language pages, and handed it back.
“Huh,” Stefan said.
“That was weird, wasn’t it?” Jarrah said thoughtfully. “I mean, so I say these Vargran words, and stuff happens. I mean, that’s weird, right?”
Mack lifted his head. “Some people might think so. Like, sane people. They would think so.”
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MACK, NOT ABOUT ME. I’M JUST HIS GOLEM. SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS PART. UNLESS YOU WANT TO. DO YOU WANT TO? ARE YOU HOLDING THE BOOK SIDEWAYS SO YOU CAN READ IT? ARE PEOPLE STARING AT YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE READING A BOOK SIDEWAYS? DO YOU FEEL KIND OF SILLY? I FEEL SILLY A LOT. LIKE THE OTHER DAY WHEN IT RAINED AND MY FEET GOT WET AND STARTED DISSOLVING. I WAS RUNNING LATE, SO NO TIME TO STOP AND RE-MUD MYSELF. BY THE TIME I GOT CLASS, I WAS WALKING ON MY KNEES. I FELT SILLY. ALSO SHORT. THEN KIDS STARTED SCREAMING.
Jarrah took a thoughtful bite of her candy bar. “I mean, what’s weird is that I’d spoken Vargran before. While I was with my mom and she was working on the Uluru cave wall. We’d puzzle words out. But nothing ever happened before. Not like that. Not something supernatural.”
Stefan said, “It’s all Chinese food. Except the club sandwich.” He tossed the menu aside and turned on the TV.
“I think there’s some kind of match-up between the person and the things they can do with Vargran,” Mack said. “I don’t know. I tried Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, all the search engines. There isn’t much about Vargran.”
“You think they’ll eventually shrink back? The Lepercons, I mean?”
Mack nodded at the TV, which was showing a news report. It was an exterior shot of the airport. There were police cars and ambulances with lights flashing.
A small army of workers pushed wheelbarrows full of goo that looked a bit like soft blue cheese. Firefighters had hooked up a hose and were spraying down some very disgruntled-looking people and their luggage.
The broadcast was in Mandarin – one of the two main Chinese languages – so no one understood the commentary. But Mack guessed it was something like, “Holy fajita, the airport baggage claim is full of giant creatures oozing stinky cheese. What the heck is going on?”
“This Vargran stuff is cool,” Stefan said. “I could buy a Snickers, right? And Jarrah, you could do your magico mumbo jabumbo and make it, like, huge.”
“And then we’d be smothered in creamy nougat,” Mack pointed out.
“Nah. Just eat your way out,” Stefan said. He made a face like he thought maybe Mack was being an idiot.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Mack said. He got up and went to stand between Stefan and Jarrah at the window. They were on the twenty-first floor, high up. It was dusk; lights were just coming on all over the city.
“We have thirty-five days,” Mack said. “We have to find ten more kids. The exactly right ten more kids. We can’t just go to the nearest middle school. Then we have to, like… Well, I don’t exactly know. Grimluk said we had to find these ancient, unknown forces. And mostly, we had to learn Vargran.”
“Well, my mom is working on deciphering more of that,” Jarrah said. “Why did Grimluk send us here to China?”
“All Grimluk told me was, go to the nine dragons of Daidu. If I hadn’t Googled it, I wouldn’t even have known Daidu was the ancient name for Beijing. There was only one hotel named the Nine Dragons Hotel. So. Here we are.”
“We’re here to find the next one of our group, right?” Jarrah said. “So, it’s what, like, a billion people in China? No worries, we just start asking around.”
“Let’s go out and get some food,” Stefan said.
“We only have thirty-five days!” Mack cried.
“We still have to eat,” Jarrah said. “And we’re here, right? Let’s go out, see what’s what. Maybe the third member of the Magnificent Twelve is at the local McDonald’s.”
“It’s getting dark,” Mack said, but it was a weak objection because Stefan and Jarrah were already on their way.
The hotel was situated on a broad avenue. Traffic wasn’t heavy but it was dangerous. There were more bikes than buses, more buses than taxis, more taxis than private cars. But none of them seemed overly concerned with traffic lights.
The Magnificent Two plus Stefan had a map, given to them at the hotel. Marked on it was the night market, the Donghuamen.
Seriously. That’s the actual name.
The woman at the hotel had told them it was the place to go for food. They could see the bright glow of it from blocks away.
“It’s right next to the Forbidden City,” Mack said, turning the map in his hands.
“Forbidden,” Stefan said with a smirk. “Yeah, well, it’s not forbidden to me.”
Jarrah laughed. “Got that right, mate.”
(Author’s note: I forgot to mention that Mack had changed out of his bathrobe. So if you were picturing him still in a robe, no: regular clothes.)
Mack read the brief description on the map. “The Forbidden City is open to anyone nowadays. It’s this gigantic palace complex. Bunch of palaces and museums and stuff, with nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine rooms. Back in the old days no man could enter. Instant death. Unless you were a eunuch.”
“What’s a eunuch?” Stefan asked.
Mack told him, and as a result Stefan headed into the Donghuamen Night Market walking a little strangely.
The market was about four dozen blazingly bright stalls topped by cheery red-striped awnings. The attendants all wore red caps and red aprons and screeched insistently at the passing crowd. It was very clean and well-organised, and smelled of fresh fish.
The food choices were rather unusual. First, most of the food was on sticks. Like shish kebab. Or corn dogs. Except that these were no corn dogs.
There were fried silkworm cocoons on a stick.
Fried grasshoppers on a stick.
Fried beetles on a stick.
Seriously, none of these are made up.
Fried sea horse on a stick.
Fried starfish on a stick.
Fried scorpion on a stick.
And fried snake wrapped around a stick.
The philosophy at Donghuamen seemed to be: Is it really gross? OK then, put it on a stick!
The crowd was predominantly Chinese, and mostly they weren’t eating the various stick-based foods. They were eating little buns stuffed with meat and vegetables, or pointing at pieces of fish and having it fried up in blistering-hot woks. Or chewing brightly coloured glazed fruit.
It was the American, British and Australian tourists eating the OMG-on-a-stick food.
“Huh. Those are, like, bugs,” Stefan said. “Bugs on a stick.”
“You’re not scared to try them, are you?” Mack taunted.
Stefan narrowed his eyes, shot a dirty look at Mack, but then noticed Jarrah smiling expectantly at him.
“I will if you will,” Jarrah said. She had a dazzling smile. At least Stefan looked dazzled by it.
“Yeah?”
Mack rolled his eyes. “You guys really don’t have to.”
“Starfish?” Jarrah suggested.
“Why, you scared to eat a fried snake?”
“Oh, I’ll eat a fried snake, mate,” Jarrah shot back. “The question is, are you man enough to eat a fried silkworm cocoon?”
It was a strange sort of courting ritual, Mack decided. Two crazy people sizing each other up.
“Scorpion,” Stefan said.
Jarrah high-fived him. “You’re on.”
They bought two orders of scorpion on a stick. Each stick had three small scorpions.
Stefan said, “OK, at the same—”
Jarrah didn’t wait. She chewed one of the scorpions, and Stefan had to rush to keep up.
“The two of you are mental,” Mack said as Jarrah and Stefan laughed and crunched away with scorpion tails sticking out of their mouths.
“Oh, come on, don’t be a wimp, Mack,” Jarrah teased. “At least try a fried grasshopper. They don’t look so bad.”
Mack made a face and looked dubiously at the plastic tray loaded with fried grasshoppers. “Yeah, I don’t think so. They look a little bit too much like those…”
The words died in his mouth. What the grasshoppers looked like were Skirrit.
One of which, wearing a tan trench coat and a narrow-brimmed fedora that didn’t exactly hide his giant bug head, had just stepped up beside Mack.
kirrrrrriiiiiittt!” Mack yelled.
He jerked away from the food, away from the Skirrit in the trench coat. But another was right behind him and wrapped its insect stick arms around him. The first pulled a bladed weapon like a short, curved sword from beneath its coat and pointed it at Mack’s chest.
A ripple went through the crowd of tourists as more and more realised that a couple of very big grasshoppers – grasshoppers not unlike the ones some of them were eating – were kidnapping a kid.
People ran. The vendors and cooks working the food stands ran. It took about four seconds for everyone to go from normal to complete panic, and then it was screaming and running and knocking over hot woks, and awning poles broken and ice bins spilled all over the sidewalk, and everywhere food: food flying and food dropping and food slithering because it was still alive.
A giant glass aquarium full of octopi shattered, and hundreds of confused octopi attached their suckers to legs and sandalled feet and bicycle tyres.
That last part was actually kind of funny. If you ever get the chance, attach an octopus to a bicycle tyre and ride around. You’ll see.
Then the first flames appeared as hot wok met spilled oil.
“Back off, bugs!” Stefan roared.
He threw himself, fists pummelling, at the Skirrit that held Mack tight.
“He’s got a…” Mack had wanted to yell, He’s got a knife; but it wasn’t exactly a knife and Mack didn’t know quite what it was, so he ended up just yelling, “He’s got a” followed by an ellipsis.
But Stefan had seen the blade. With sheer, brute force he lifted the Skirrit and Mack together in one armload, spun around, and slammed the first Skirrit straight into the outthrust blade of the second.
“Ayahgaaah!” the stabbed Skirrit cried.
His grip on Mack loosened. And loosened still more when Jarrah snatched up one of the confused octopi and hurled it into the Skirrit’s face.
“Thanks,” Mack gasped.
But thanks were premature. There was still one Skirrit left.
He advanced on Mack with his nameless blade out and ready. “You die,” the Skirrit said. With blinding speed he switched the blade from one hand to the other and lunged. The blade hit – shunk! – a plastic tray held up as a shield by Stefan.
The blade went right through the plastic tray but stuck. Stefan twisted the tray, trying to yank the blade from the bug’s hand.
And… yeah, that didn’t work.
Instead the Skirrit pulled the blade free, took a step back to steady himself, stepped on the ice that had been spilled, did a comic little cartoon wobble, and landed on his face, hard.
Stefan was on him fast. He stomped on the bug’s blade and with his other foot crushed the exoskeletal arm.
“Ayahgaaaaaahh!” the Skirrit cried.
Apparently that is the Skirrit cry of pain.
Stefan picked up the blade, smiled, and began to admire the weapon. Jarrah looked on, admiring both Stefan and the blade.
There came the sound of sirens approaching. At least one of the food stands was burning. Its red-and-white-striped awning sent flames shooting high into the night sky.
The crowd had backed away to a distance and were each and every one fumbling with cell phones to take pictures and video.
“I don’t want to be a YouTube sensation twice in one day,” Mack said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They turned their backs on the chaotic, burning, but still somehow cheerful market, and plunged through the crowds that were now rushing to see what all the yelling was about.
They practically stumbled into a mass of people on bicycles.
