Kylie Chan - Hell to Heaven

I curled up my coils and sat in front of his effigy. His black fierce face gazed at me and he seemed ready to leap up and cut off my serpent head with the sword.

I meditated on the lives of those who had died because of the battle between Heaven and Hell. Charlie, Rhonda, Regina: women who had died caring for others rather than fighting, the way so many women in the world’s conflicts died. The Disciples who had died defending the Mountain — the stronghold against the forces of Hell. April, whose naivety had killed both her and her child. The fox spirit who had died trying to hide herself and protect her child, who had died anyway. All the stone Shen destroyed by Six. It was a long list and I wished I could shed a tear for them all, but it wasn’t possible in serpent form. Many of them had chosen their path and died with honour, but for some their deaths were what those in the military blithely called ‘collateral damage’ and dismissed as part of the necessity of war.

Even though John was God of the Arts of War, he had never revelled in war and had always sought negotiation first. He was a study in contradictions, being the greatest fighter in existence and at the same time holding a deep abhorrence for killing. It didn’t stop people from dying, however. Always so many people giving their lives, even more so recently because John was no longer present to protect them.

I raised my serpent head. I wasn’t a fighter of his calibre but I would do my best to protect those who needed protection. I nodded to John, and his statue stared fiercely back at me.

I turned. I was on top of the highest peak in Celestial Wudangshan and the view was breathtaking. The mountains below me spread as far as I could see, their bases covered in mist and their peaks jagged and sharp. Something to do with the altitude and the geography made it seem that all the lower peaks were facing this highest peak and bowing to it. I turned back to glance at John’s statue and bowed to him. My warm, caring, generous, reptilian god.

I went down the stairs to the waiting Tiger.

‘Okay, I’m ready to head back to work,’ I said.

‘Did he appear to you?’

‘No.’

‘I’d expected his statue to take on a life of its own and come charging down to carry you away.’

‘He’s in two pieces at opposite ends of the world. Not very likely to happen.’

‘Has he appeared to anybody recently?’

‘Not since Chinese New Year.’

‘Okay.’ The Tiger touched my snout with his nose and carried me back to the Academy. He bowed on one foreleg and disappeared.

Gold was waiting for me outside my office. He jumped up as soon as I appeared and followed me inside. I sat at the desk and he shut the door and sat across from me, his face alight with excitement.

‘I can see you have something to tell me, so go ahead,’ I said.

‘I have a lead on Shenzhen. It seems that peasants are travelling there to work in the factories, and not leaving. At all. Ever.’

‘Couldn’t they just be falling through the bureaucratic cracks?’ I said. ‘This is all done on paper, I’ve seen it. When you go through immigration at Lo Wu, you fill in a mountain of bureaucratic forms that they don’t even look at. They just stamp them and then put them in a box for filing. There must be some pieces of paper that don’t make it through to data entry, even if they do have a computer system.’

‘They do, and I’ll have to investigate more; all I have at the moment is a hunch. A stone I know was working on the update of the China Bureau of Statistics’ databases and, in a fit of nostalgia, looked for a human ex-lover. He found her — but once she moved to Shenzhen her records disappeared; in fact, she’s disappeared completely. Normally people have to continue to pay taxes in their home province even if they move to the city to work, and she stopped doing it. He checked her residential, health, work permit and family planning records too — and found nothing. She’s gone. No death record either.’

‘More than one person has disappeared like this?’

‘Several hundred.’

I grimaced.

‘I know what you’re thinking, ma’am: there are millions of people travelling into Shenzhen, and many of them want to disappear to avoid being sent back to their villages or to avoid paying taxes back home. But there seems to be some sort of pattern to the disappearances, and we want to do some analysis on the data.’

‘How big’s the database, Gold?’

It was his turn to grimace. ‘Huge. Even the current year’s data is in the terabytes. Older data is kept separately. It’s a nightmare.’

‘You’ll have to go down to crunch that.’

‘Even with three stones linked up, it would take about a day completely offline. Possibly longer.’

‘Do you have a couple of friends who’d be willing to do this? I know how you stones hate being used as computers.’

‘Calcite — my friend who worked in the Bureau of Statistics — will help. We just need to find one more.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ the stone in my ring said. ‘I’m not leaving Emma alone after what happened last year.’

‘Oh, good point,’ Gold said. He went quiet for a moment, thoughtful, then stopped moving completely, not breathing or blinking.

‘Gold, stay alive,’ the stone said.

Gold came back with a start. ‘Oh, sorry.’

‘This has you more upset than usual,’ I said. ‘It’s not often you forget to live.’

‘This sounds like a threesome,’ the stone in my ring said.

Gold wiped one hand over his face. ‘Not a threesome. She’s my great-great-granddaughter.’

‘Five generations?’ my stone said.

Gold nodded.

‘And you worry about her? You’ve been human way too long,’ the stone said.

‘Her great-grandmother was one of my wives at the tea plantation,’ Gold said. ‘When the Celestial found out that I’d helped steal the tea, they only gave me five minutes to put my affairs in order before I was taken to the Celestial Plane. I never really had a chance to say goodbye to them and to make sure they were cared for. The demon servants took off, then the local warlord found out I’d gone. He kept my wives as his own, but when he found that one of them was pregnant he threw her out, leaving her with nothing.’

‘She did well to survive.’

‘She was forced to do things that I’m not proud to be responsible for. Now our descendant, Ah Fua, has disappeared.’

‘This is ridiculous. I bet she doesn’t even keep a tablet for you,’ the stone said. ‘Five generations is way past any accountability.’

‘Her mother does. She has an ancestral tablet for me at home, and one for my whole generation in the temple. Ah Fua doesn’t need to do it because her mother does everything, even sweeps the graves. They’re good, diligent children.’

‘Do they know?’

‘Of course not, Dad. Now, if we’ve finished with the interrogation, I’d like to find another stone who can help locate Ah Fua.’

‘I wonder if Zara would mind helping,’ I said. ‘She’s still in hiding in the armoury, it would keep her busy.’

Gold’s face lit up. ‘She says yes.’ He grinned broadly. ‘I’ll go arrange it.’

Simone, Leo and I had dinner together that evening, just the three of us.

‘The appointment with the Archivist is tomorrow after school,’ I said to Simone. ‘Don’t forget. I’ll need you to take me.’

She gasped, her eyes wide. ‘Oh, no! I’ve arranged to take some of my friends out on the boat after school tomorrow!’

‘You never asked me,’ I said.

She stuck her chin out at me. ‘I don’t need to. It’s my boat.’

‘Point taken; but I’m your guardian and you’re not an adult. Therefore I am legally required to be aware of where you are at all times.’