Eret put his arm around her shoulders and hurried her down the path.

“Don’t stop, we need to get away.”

Linua let herself be hustled down the path.

“Who’s Hoblin?” Eret asked, as they went through the gate onto the street.

“The thief.”

Eret shook his head.

“That’s not our problem.”

It wasn’t their problem. Hoblin had chosen to work for the businessman, and investigate Eret’s family, and infiltrate the Observatory. But still. Towards the end he had tried to help Linua. He’d promised to do what he could for Eret. If he hadn’t spoken up the businessman might not have agreed to their plan at all.

“Do you know how to get to the back of the house?” Linua asked.

Eret hesitated.

“We need to move.” He started walking up the street. “They kept me in a bedroom at the back. I tried to look through the curtains. I couldn’t see much, but there’s a garden and then an overgrown bank with lots of trees and a path that goes down to the river.”

“Okay. Let’s go round the back.”

“How do you know they’re going to kill the thief?”

Linua explained about the code.

“It’s not your problem. They’re horrible people,” Eret’s voice shook slightly as he said this. “All of them. There’s nothing you can do.”

They walked to the end of the street.

“That looks like a path to the riverbank.” Linua pointed.

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I won’t do anything stupid. But I need to go and find out.”

“They’ve got guns!”

Linua hesitated.

“I’ll be careful. I’ll hide. But I have to check it out.” She dug in the backpack and passed Eret the radio. “Walk to the end of this street, then radio Pickle and tell him to give the password. Tell him where you are. Anith is on her scooter, she tried to follow but the thief—Hoblin—shook her off. I’m just going to see if Hoblin’s alright.” She held up the backpack. “Look, I even have a mitani cloak.”

“Linua, you are not a mitani!”

In answer, she turned and jogged towards the river. Eret cursed, spoke into the radio to tell Pickle to give the thug the password, then followed her. They walked along the path back towards the house.

“Which one is it?” Linua muttered, as they passed several gardens. Some were immaculately kept with patios and potted plants. Some had been allowed to grow wild. Some were scraggly lawns covered in plastic children’s toys.

“That one.” Eret pointed. “It’s the eighth one along.”

The eighth garden had a neatly clipped lawn and high hedges to either side, which meant it would be hard for neighbours to see into it.

Linua crouched down behind a bush that gave her a view of the back gate to the businessman’s house. She unfolded the backpack into the mitani outfit and slipped it on, along with the mask.

“Linua…” Eret hissed warningly. “You can’t get involved.”

“Can we call the police?”

“One, I don’t know how to call the police on a radio, because unlike Pickle I am not a member of the Radio Club, and two, if something was going to happen the police wouldn’t get here soon enough anyway.”

Eret ducked down as the backdoor opened. They both peered through the slats in the fence. Hoblin came out, but he was stumbling, and his hands were tied in front of him. The big man was holding Hoblin’s arm tightly. In the big man’s other hand, hidden down by his leg, he had a pistol. It was black, and sinister looking, with a long barrel.

Linua felt a tickle as Eret put his lips close to her ear.

“I think that gun has a silencer,” he whispered.

Linua knew nothing of guns—the only thing wushu training covered was how to disarm someone with a gun, and that was considered a technique of absolute last resort, to be deployed only if you were facing certain death. Sheyboh hadn’t specified if it was okay to use it when someone else was facing certain death.

The big man kicked open the back garden gate, then directed Hoblin across the muddy path where Linua and Eret crouched, safely hidden behind their bush. Hoblin and the big man went into the stand of trees that led down to the river.

Linua rose, but kept her weight low, and filled her mind with Stalking Cat pose. She stretched her arms out for balance and glided forward, placing her feet carefully with the ball landing first, followed by the heel, keeping her weight on the outside edges of her feet. She heard a slight rustle behind her and frantically made a slowing down motion with her hand, hoping Eret would get the message and stay back. He must have understood, because she didn’t hear anything else from him after that.

She imagined the Chi flowing through her, like water sheeting over a rock, fast, quick and silent. She moved forward with quiet, cat-like steps, avoiding leaves or twigs.

The path down to the river was damp and muddy. Ahead of her, Hoblin had just fallen down. There was a trickle of blood from his temple and he looked dazed. The big man kicked him. He hadn’t noticed Linua yet.

“Get up,” the big man said. He sounded bored and irritated, as if Hoblin was deliberately trying to make his day more difficult. From the little Linua had seen of Hoblin, this was probably correct.

Hoblin struggled to his feet.

“Move,” the big man said. Hoblin swayed on his knees. The big man grabbed him by the hair, and when Hoblin yelped, the man hit him across the mouth with the barrel of the gun. “Shut up and get moving.”

Linua flitted forward. She could feel her chest rising and falling with deep, even breaths. Her heart thudded in her ears, and everything about her seemed to be picked out in a luminous outline. She could see every wrinkle of the bark on the trees, track every blade of grass, and follow the flutter of every leaf in the trees above.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The big man came to a tangle of tree roots where the path plunged steeply. He put his free hand on one tree trunk, then braced the hand that held the gun on the other as he negotiated a particularly tangled knot of tree roots. Linua wouldn’t get a better chance.

She ran forward, two silent steps, then put her left foot about two feet up a tree trunk, and used that to launch herself up. The right foot went on a tree trunk on the opposite side of the path, about five feet up and then she was in the air.

She came down with both feet on the shoulders of the big man. The timing was perfect—she caught him while he was still negotiating the steep incline. He staggered, then his foot slipped, got tangled in a tree root and he pitched over forwards with a yell. The gun went off. It was muted, but still pretty loud, even with the silencer—more like a pellet gun. Linua rolled to the side, and went for the big man’s wrist, the one that held the gun.

The problem now was that he would be holding onto the gun with all his strength. Sheyboh had told them they should always assume an enemy was gripping his weapon as hard as he could. It was why a lot of disarm manoeuvres touted by so-called ‘experts’ didn’t work. She used her own body weight to wrench the big man’s wrist back and he yelled again, struggling onto his knees.

His knuckles were like sides of ham. The fist she wasn’t holding onto slammed with slow inevitability towards her face, and she dodged. His thick fingers scraped at her ear, scrabbling at it as if he wanted to pull it off. She jerked her head again, pulling at his thumb, and he bellowed. The gun finally dropped and slid forward a few feet in the mud.

Hoblin lunged for it at the same time as the big man. Linua let go of the big man and launched herself back up the path towards the house.

When she looked back, Hoblin had the gun and was coming to his feet, even as the big man struggled upwards. Hoblin’s hands shook, but he hastily emptied the cartridge of bullets and sent it spinning into the undergrowth. Then he bolted, slipping and sliding and crashing through the trees.

The big man yelled a particularly vile curse word as Hoblin had disappeared.

Linua decided not to hang around either. The big man was clearly hesitating, deciding whether to go after her or Hoblin, and she didn’t want to contemplate what would happen if she stuck around.

She went sprinting up the path towards the house. The big man went down towards the river, in the direction Hoblin had gone. Linua heard a splash as Hoblin went into the river, and more cursing and crunching of river gravel as the big man arrived at the river’s edge.

Eret was still crouched in the bush they’d been hiding in.

“Run!” Linua gasped as she flashed past him. She heard his footsteps squelching in the mud behind her. They bolted out of the park and ran full tilt down the road. Eret, with his longer legs, was faster, and he soon drew even with her.

A few streets away, with no sign of pursuit, they came to a stop. Linua bent over, her hand clamped to her side.

“You really are a mitani!” Eret gasped. He gulped down several breaths, then clicked on the radio to speak to Anith, and read out the name of the street they were on, in between sucking great lungfuls of air.

Linua had never realised what a truly beautiful sight a bright pink scooter was.

“You did it! You did it!” Anith ran up to Eret, her eyes red and her face sticky with tears, and threw her arms round his neck. “You clod! Don’t you dare ever get kidnapped ever again.” Then she stepped back and inspected his face. “What did they do to you?”

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Eret kept repeating. “It was just … I fell over. I’m okay.”

“You’re going straight to the doctor,” Anith told him fiercely. Then she whirled on Linua and flung her arms around Linua’s neck. “Oh gods, I thought I’d lost him. Oh gods! Thank you! Thank you! I can’t thank you enough!”

She began to wheel her scooter along the pavement beside them while Eret told them about the kidnapping. Two of the businessman’s thugs had appeared on either side of him, thrown a bag over his head, then lifted him and chucked him in the car. The black eye was from when he had tried to resist having his hands tied—it hadn’t been deliberate on the part of the thugs, but was as a result of flailing him flailing around. He’d known immediately that it was about the storage stick.

When they got to the house, they’d taken the bag off his head, and carried him up the steps between them. The puffy lip had come from when he’d fallen over after they’d pushed him into one of the bedrooms. He’d stayed in the bedroom for some time, maybe an hour. Then the businessman had ordered him dragged down and started grilled him about the storage stick but Eret had pretended not to know anything about it. He’d been too scared to tell them anything in case they went after Pickle. He’d been saved from having his fortitude tested via a lengthy interrogation, however, when the businessman had got a phone call, and said, “The contractor is on it.”

Eret had been returned to his room until Linua rrived. Anith and Linua took turns to explain what had happened from their perspective.

“Let’s go to the café and meet up with the others,” Anith said firmly. “Hot chocolate is on me.”

Since she couldn’t fit three people on her scooter, Linua and Eret had had to catch a bus. Neither of them had any money, so Anith gave them enough coins to pay for the fare. Linua thought it was typical that Anith had remembered to bring money with her. Anith followed behind in her scooter.

By the time they got to the café where Pickle and Solly were waiting, Linua was beginning to feel shivery and cold. She saw Eret rub his arms, as if he was feeling it too. When she sat at the table, she suddenly realised just how sick and faint she was, as if she was about to keel over. She was barely aware of Anith ordering her a hot chocolate. It arrived a few minutes later, topped with cream, multi-coloured sprinkles, and a scattering of tiny marshmallows the size of her little fingernail.

The story of the rescue had to be repeated for the benefit of Pickle and Solly. Anith told most of it while Eret and Linua inhaled their chocolate. After a while, Linua realised that Anith was snapping her fingers in front of Linua’s eyes. She felt incredibly sleepy. That would be the adrenalin crash, something the cousins had mentioned, but which she had never experienced before.

“What?”

“Do you have somewhere you need to be, Linua?”

Linua blinked at her.

“What time is it?” She remembered she was wearing a watch, and checked it, stunned to realise how early it still was—it was still only 11.30am. “The car! It’s supposed to pick me up at the Castle at twelve!”

Anith indicated a payphone at the back of the café.

“I can call the car company and pretend to be Helged again, and ask them to pick you up in front of the museum.”

“The library,” Linua said. “That’s where the driver dropped me off this morning.”

That had been more than three hours ago. So much had happened in so little time.

“But we lost,” Solly said, obviously repeating something he had already said several times, judging from the annoyed looks on the faces of Pickle and Anith. “The bad guy got the storage stick with all the images on! That’s totally draff!”

Eret raised his head from where he had been sucking at the remains of his drink with a straw.

“No, he didn’t,” he said. The entire table looked at him.

“What do you mean?” Anith asked.

“I changed the images. I cut and pasted them in a photo editor so that the map looked different from the original. I did it after school yesterday, during the Computer Club, before I gave the storage stick to Pickle.” Eret used the straw to chase a few errant smears of cream from the bottom of his cup. “The bad guy won’t be able to find the lost city. Assuming that’s what the map actually leads to.”

“Shit…” Anith breathed. “Seriously?”

Pickle sat back, impressed.

“Holy Nimsy, I missed that.”

“How long will it take the boss guy to realise?” Linua asked, thinking of the threat he had made as they left. I will come after you and make you regret it.

Eret shrugged.

“He might not ever realise. Unless images of the original get published somewhere, and he compares them to the images he has.”

Anith shook her head.

“We are never, ever doing anything like this again,” she said, slamming her hand on the table to emphasise her point.

Everyone nodded.

“Never,” Linua echoed.

“Ever,” the others chorused.

“Again,” Eret ended.

“Good. Linua, I’m going to go and call your car company now.”

When the car came, Linua fell asleep in the back, and only woke when the driver pulled up in front of Grandmother’s house. Everything felt strangely ordinary. Helged greeted her and asked about wushu training, just like she normally did. Linua had to pretend it had been okay. Grandmother was waiting in the dining room, just as she normally did. The clock on the mantlepiece ticked in a stately, ponderous manner, just like it normally did.

That morning, Linua had been standing in a room with a man who killed people, hoping not to be killed herself. She’d been threatened with torture. She couldn’t tell Helged or Grandmother about any of it. She’d attacked a man who had a gun—Sheyboh would have kittens if he ever found out. She couldn’t even tell him that his gun disarm manoeuvre had worked.

There was one thing she could tell Grandmother, however.

“Grandmother,” she began, as Helged wheeled their lunch in on a trolley.

There was a beef pot roast with red wine and new baby potatoes drizzled in butter for Grandmother, and the usual poached chicken breast with mashed potatoes and peas for Linua.

Linua took a deep breath.

“At the Observatory they have an Astronomy Club once a week. Please could I join?”

Grandmother was delighted.