Her father was still holding her. She couldn’t believe what he had done. He had deliberately told them she was there. He had been waiting for her all along. And she had helped him. There had been one final trap and she had fallen into it.
“I’m sorry, Scarly,” he was saying. “I had to do it. It was the only way. They’ve promised that they won’t hurt you, and my reward, the reward for both of us – we’re going to be rich! You have no idea how much power they have. And we’re going to be part of it… their new world.”
Of course he had been in it all along. He worked for Nightrise. He had invited her here, made her leave school early with no explanation. He had been skulking somewhere nearby, leaving her in their clutches. And finally he had been positioned here, just in case she tried to get onto the ship…
Scarlett thought of all the people who had tried to help her, all the people who had died because of her. Mr and Mrs Soong had spent just a few minutes with her but it had been enough. She had killed them.
She listened to this pathetic man – he was still jabbering at her – and she spat in his face.
Then someone grabbed her from behind. It was Karl. She didn’t know where he had come from, but the chauffeur was unbelievably strong. He lifted her into the air, then dashed her down. Her head hit the concrete so hard that she thought her skull must have cracked. A bolt of sheer pain ripped across her vision.
In the final moments of consciousness, she saw a whole series of images, flickering across her vision like an out-of-control slide show. There was Matt, the boy she had never met in the real world, on his way to Macau. There were the other three – Scott, Jamie and Pedro – gazing at her helplessly. There was the beach where she had found herself night after night. And there, once again, was the neon sign with a symbol that was shaped like a triangle and two words:
SIGNAL EIGHT
The letters flared in the darkness and looking through them she saw the chairman, Audrey Cheng, Father Gregory and, for one last brief moment, her father.
“It’s coming,” she managed to whisper to them.
Then the darkness rushed in, slamming into her like an express train and at that moment she felt something unlock inside her. It was like a window being shattered and she knew that she would never be the same again.
And five hundred miles away, in a place called the Strait of Luzon, between Thailand and the Philippines, the dragon heard her. It was there because she had summoned it. The dragon had been sleeping in the very depths of the ocean but it slowly opened one eye.
SIGNAL NINE
The letters burned in brilliant neon light. There was a symbol beside it, an hour glass and Scarlett almost wanted to laugh because she knew what it was saying. Time’s up. The countdown has begun.
The dragon began to move. Nothing could get in its way.
It was heading for Hong Kong.
MATT’S DIARY (3)
I don’t think I’m going to be able to write much more of this diary. I don’t find it easy, putting all these words together, and anyway, what’s the point? Who will ever read it? Richard thought it was a good idea but really it just fills in time.
I can’t believe we’ve finally made it to Macau. Jamie is asleep, worn out with jet lag after another flight across the world, and Richard is in a room next door. In an hour’s time, we’re going to meet a man called Han Shan-tung who can help us get into Hong Kong. We’ve waited almost a week for him to turn up and I just hope that we haven’t been wasting our time. We have no idea at all what’s been happening to Scarlett, whether she is even alive or dead. Harry Foster, the Australian newspaper man who was at the meeting of the Nexus, sent someone to meet her – an assistant from his office. Maybe he managed to track her down but we never heard. The assistant went missing… presumed dead.
The Old Ones are there, waiting for me to arrive. In a way, it’s extraordinary that they’ve managed to keep themselves hidden, but that has always been their way. When I was in Yorkshire, they worked through Jayne Deverill and the villagers who lived at Lesser Mailing. In Peru, it was Diego Salamanda. Now it’s Nightrise. They like people to do their dirty work for them and when war finally breaks out, as I know it must, my guess is that they won’t reveal themselves until the end. And by then it will be too late. They will have won.
Maybe the five days we had in London were worth it after all. Jamie enjoyed himself, seeing all the sights, and in the end I enjoyed being with him. Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Harrods, the London Dungeon. Richard kept us busy, maybe because he wanted to keep our minds off what lay ahead. We also spoke to Pedro and Scott in Vilcabamba, talking on the satellite phone. Pedro is worried about Scott. He still seems far away, as if he isn’t even on our side. I know he’s angry that I separated him from Jamie, but I still think it was a good idea. He isn’t ready yet.
And then the flight. London to Singapore, followed by Singapore to Macau. I’m too tired to sleep. When I’ve finished this, I’ll have another shower. A cold one, this time. Maybe it will wake me up.
I don’t know what to make of Macau. If anyone had asked me about it six months ago, I wouldn’t even have been able to point to it on a map. I hadn’t heard of it. As it turns out, it’s a chunk of land, just ten miles from one end to the other. And it’s packed with some of the weirdest buildings I’ve ever seen. Take the ferry terminal. If you’re coming in from Hong Kong on the jet-foil, it’s the first building you’ll see and you’d have thought they could have made it a bit welcoming. It’s not. It’s a slab of white concrete, surrounded by flyovers. It’s drab and ugly.
But then you come to the casinos and you think you must have landed on another planet. Macau makes its money out of gambling… horse racing, greyhound racing, blackjack and roulette. The casinos look like nothing I’ve ever seen before. One of them is all gold, like a piece of metal bent in the middle. There’s another one like a sort of crazy birthday cake. The biggest and the most spectacular reminded me of a giant flower. It was five times taller than anything else in the city. I got a crick in my neck trying to see the top.
The old part of Macau was better. Richard told me that it had once belonged to the Portuguese and he pointed out their influence in some of the palaces with their pillars, arcades and balconies jutting out over the street. But it was still a bit of a dog’s dinner. The traffic and the crowds were Chinese. The older buildings seemed to be in better condition than the new ones, which were all dirty and falling down. The Portuguese had built pretty squares and fountains. Then the Chinese had come along and added casinos, shops and blocks of flats, forty or fifty floors high. And now they were all stuck next to each other, like quarrelling neighbours.
Jamie was disappointed too. “I once read a book about China,” he told me. “It was in the house when we were in Salt Lake City. I never read very much, but it had dragons and magicians and I thought it must be a really cool place. I guess the book was wrong…”
We were met at the airport by a young Chinese guy who was carrying a big bunch of white flowers. That was a bit weird, but it was the signal we had been given so we would recognize him. He dumped them straight away. There was a Rolls Royce parked outside, numberplate HST 1. I noticed that it had been parked in a NO WAITING zone but nobody had given it a ticket. So that told me something about Han Shan-tung. He likes to show off.
The journey from the airport took about half an hour. It was pouring with rain, which certainly didn’t make Macau look any better. Fortunately, it eased off a little by the time we arrived here.
And where are we now?