Excerpt from The Hong Kong Highlight Guide [2026 edition].
13. Time and Tide
“Miss, wait a moment-” Juno ignored the voice and kept walking, her feet clacking across the polished granite of the Yuk Lung tower’s atrium. She was aware of the guardian at her side, the woman Tze called Blue Snake. “Perhaps we should return to your hotel.”
Juno stopped suddenly and stamped her foot. “No. I want Frankie. Where is he? Mr Tze brought him here, I know it.” She rocked as she shouted at the bodyguard, feeling flushed and faint. In one hand she was still clasping the tarot card the dark-skinned man had given her. It was hot against her fingers.
Blue Snake hesitated. Juno knew the woman was trapped by her orders from her master, and like a robot with conflicting commands, the guardian stood watching her rather than initiate a choice that could be the incorrect one. Juno looked at the blank eyes inside the azure and gold mask and thought of the other one, the big man with the green faceplate. She had heard the gunshot, saw him falling with a trail of ruddy matter streaming from the back of his head. Then the fire, the screaming. Calling out for Frankie…
“I want Francis Lam!” she snapped, her voice pitching up. “Now.” Her throat felt dry. “I’m giving you an order.”
“Perhaps I can locate him and bring him to you at the hotel,” Blue Snake tried again, cocking her head like a dog.
“No!” Juno shouted like a petulant child and slapped the guardian, the unexpected impulse of anger shocking her. Her hand connected with the mask and she staggered back a step, her palm stinging. Blue Snake flinched, unsure of how to proceed.
Bile bubbled in Juno’s throat and she swallowed metallic spittle. “I… I have to…” She ran for the washroom concealed behind the banks of elevators and crashed into a stall. Juno was barely over the steel bowl before she vomited, a thin purple fluid of spent cocktails and half-digested food streaming out of her.
The girl slipped to the cool white tile floor and shivered. Her clasp bag was somewhere out in the limousine, but in her hand, there was the card. Burning her, even though she couldn’t dare to let go of it.
Juno looked at the careworn image, the priestess in her courtly robes, hands open and cupping arcane energies. The card shimmered, as if she saw it through tears.
“What did you do to me?” she piped, licking tainted lips.
I’m gonna give the past back to you.
Fixx’s words rumbled in her bones, as loud as if he were there inside her skull. She was afraid, trembling on the toilet floor. She wanted Frankie to be with her, to hold her, to tell her it was all fine.
Instead, there was a rising tide of terror. It welled up from a secret place in her heart, and there came an awful moment when Juno realised that it had always been there, always waiting. The man with ebony skin and dark, deep eyes, he had known that. He unlocked something in Juno, just with a touch and a word. With a picture and a card.
High Priestess. High. Higher…
The ink from the card was staining her fingers, stinging them, passing through her skin. Memory came upon Juno in a tidal wave and she choked.
Sunglasses smashed. Rope’s hands around her throat. Slow, slow cracking pops. Vertebrae snaps. Body falls dead. Beckons her from the door. Gently undresses the dead. Taking her clothes. Becoming her. Becoming the dead. Reborn. Renewed.
I am you now.
“Fuck!” The word came out in a tight animal screech. Juno scrambled from the toilet stall and slammed into the rack of glass sinks, the room swaying around her, her balance hazy and faltering. She could not release the card. He had done something to her, like the street magicians who made people sleep with a snap of their fingers. The dark man had reached into her thoughts and pulled out the stops.
Juno hung on to the sink, the room spinning about her so fast she was afraid that gravity would throw her off if she let go. She raised her head and saw mirrors.
There were silver ovals on every wall, perfect and flawless reflections of her pathetic scarlet face and eyes of smeared kohl. In each her irises glowed amber, staring back at her. The mirrors ranged away into a curved tunnel of infinity. She was here and she was there; she was dead and she was living. Image and real. Reflection and reflected.
She was one and she was many. The girl tasted alien fluids in her gut, for one phantom moment feeling the distant sensation of tubes in her mouth, probes in her nostrils, thick oils dragging on her naked skin.
Her equilibrium returning in slow, painful ticks, Juno discarded the coat about her shoulders and pushed out through the doors. There were jade pillars dotted about in this part of the atrium, and with slow, careful progress, the girl kept herself from the line of Blue Snake’s sight, finding an elevator to the tower’s upper levels. She seemed to be escaping, but to where she had no idea.
Phoebe Hi looked up and started as the doors to Tze’s library opened. She was cleaning the ornate bowl in the centre of the room with a sanctified cloth and a vial of tainted blood plasma supplied by an operative in a Kowloon children’s hospital. “Mr Tze! I, ah-” Her words faded as Frankie crossed the room toward her, his face murky with anger. The vial slipped from her fingers and rolled across the oaken table. “Francis?”
He loomed over her, his fists balling and uncurling, his lips moving but no coherent words emerging. He was so utterly furious that his capacity to speak rationally had vanished. Hi shot a worried look at Tze. Frankie released a powerful backhand blow that knocked the woman off her feet and to the floor. “You fucking bitch, you killed my brother!” he screamed.
Hi’s hand came to her lip and traced blood. She looked at Tze again, confused.
“Francis deduced the train of events himself,” Tze said sadly.
“Doesn’t he understand?” wailed the woman. She glared at Frankie. “It was necessary. He was going to destroy the great work. He was defecting.”
“You didn’t have to kill him!” roared Frankie. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.” Tze’s words cut through the air.
Frankie turned. “But the 14K said she-”
“Phoebe brokered the hit, yes, but on my authority.” He let out a small smile. “Did you not think that I would have some say in the disposal of so valuable an asset, Francis?” Tze shook his head. “I regret what happened, I really do. Alan was like a son to me. We are so close to the ascendance. Perhaps I could have overlooked things if only he’d kept faith with us.”
“What?” Frankie rocked on his heels, a sick churn in his gut. “Why…?”
Tze frowned. “Your brother was flawed, Francis. A bright man and very good at his job. Ruthless in the right places, careful in others. But there was a certain inner strength he lacked. The capacity to subsume himself to a greater cause. Alan did not have the courage to embrace self-sacrifice.”
Hi was picking herself up, attempting to gather her dignity. “He couldn’t see the reach of the pattern.”
The CEO of Yuk Lung Heavy Industries took off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt. “The time is not right. We are early. But I see that rigid adherence to the letter of the pattern has only brought us grief. We must be flexible and adaptable, like our King.”
And very suddenly, Frankie felt the world shifting around him. The nagging doubts, the faint fears, the splinter in his mind that screamed something is not right. All of it crystallised in this moment. He knew that these people were going to kill him, just as they had his sibling. His eyes flicked to the doors; Judge Bao stood there, the mask glaring back at him.
“Few men have a sense of their own worth, Francis,” Tze said. He had his spidersilk shirt off now and the suntanned skin beneath seemed murky with lines of writing and whorls of colour. “Fewer still of their own destiny. I am blessed because I have both, and by that token, it is my gift to know your worth as well.”