David

The good news was that there were robes in the next room which reached David's ankles, as well as a pretty hefty tome of what Alice believed must have been poetry from the way the words were arranged.

The bad news was that while the robes were soft and light, they were all that shade of light grey, which implied they identified the wearer as a member of the temple. Neither of them believed that would be a good thing.

It was in the fifth bedroom where Alice found something which was a good clue as to where they were.

There was a writing desk in the fifth bedroom and on it was a hairpin which had been made of a soft, tarnished metal of some sort. The hairpin shone in the darkness after Alice wiped away the tarnish furiously with her shirt. On the end of it was a symbol that they both recognized.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Set within an octagon, roughly the size of David's thumb, was the bagua.

"Yin and yang," Alice said. "These were Daoists. Or someone got this from Chinatown. Or from China! I guess most hairpins you could get in Chinatown were probably made in China," she said, after some reflection.

"New theory," David said. "This is the set for a movie or a drama and they were too lazy to clean it out after they were done filming."

Alice gave him a look.

"Yeah, there's just no way we're that lucky, is there?"

"And no way that a set would be this intricately detailed," Alice said. "That pillar outside was once a really, really big rock. Rocks are heavy."

David nodded.

"And people lived here," Alice said quietly. "I'm almost certain that they left in a hurry or weren't given a chance to leave."

She looked at the pile of neatly folded clothing which he was now carrying for both of them, all the while still polishing the hairpin.

The hairpin had left a streak on her shirt.

"It's silver, I think," David said. "Soft and prone to oxidizing in open air. Strange that whoever looted this place would leave it behind."

"I don't think this place was ever looted," said Alice. "Whoever did this the first time probably took the statues but didn't think there would be anything valuable or worth grabbing in any of these rooms. They're pretty much untouched."

She undid her hair while staring at the hairpin, then thought of what she wanted to do and, by the power of some dark art, arranged her hair into a bun with the hairpin through it, displaying the symbol at a lazy angle.

David cocked his head from side to side, examining her handiwork. David noted that the blonde dye had been washed out of her hair during the lightning strikes - her hair had returned to a glossy, inky black.

He suddenly had an idea. "Say, if you were a Daoist, what type of money would you use and where would you keep it?"

Alice laughed, then considered the question more seriously. "Well, if it's an olde timey Chinese society, there's those ingots shaped like a cat's head, which I've completely forgotten the name of, and there's coins of various shapes depending on the dynasty called a tael, which is what they weigh - roughly fifty grams. What’s fifty grams in freedom units? I have no idea, the textbook said fifty grams." She eyed the bed.

"I'm not saying we should cut a mattress open but we can definitely look underneath them," David said. "I'm also not saying we definitely shouldn't cut a mattress open," but that got a glare from Alice, who clearly thought that was a bridge too far when it came to the possessions of people who were likely killed horribly.

Unfortunately, they didn't find anything that could be considered money under any of the mattresses. They did find the flute to match the book of flute scores in the first room, however. It was a rough, but gentle thing carved of stone that was nearly three feet long with more holes than they had fingers put together. The last handful of rooms yielded more clothing which didn't look like it would fit them quite as well but nothing else of note.

From the entrance, Alice and David had reached the corner in the back and left of the temple and had come across the wall with windows, each carrying an armful of clothing that would hopefully allow them to blend in rather than stand out.

Alice noticed it first. There were carvings between each of the windows on the wall near where David had woken up.

"What could these possibly be depicting?" David stared at the precisely cut stone. Each of the carvings had a pair of circles and lines extended artfully from them.

"They're people, obviously," Alice snapped a little more aggressively than usual, still looking at the very first carving in deep thought. She marched over to him and dumped her clothing into his arms, muttering something in Mandarin to herself which almost rhymed the whole time. She then marched back to the carving.

Moments later, she was back, taking off her guqin case, which she put down beside him. Her steps were less hurried now and more deliberate, as she made her way back towards the carvings.

She nodded at the carving and then began to move her arms, raising her right fist over her head and bringing a palm forward. Her body shifted as she lifted her left leg off the floor.

She looked at the second carving. The fist dropped to her chest, her raised leg crossed past her other one and touched the floor with a toe. She closed her palm into another fist and pointed it towards the floor, parallel with her right leg. Alice continued to nod and mutter, a little dramatically.

"A lost martial art of a ruined Daoist temple," David said, unsure if he was being sarcastic or if he was genuinely impressed.

"Shush."

Alice went from wall to wall, replicating the stance of the first figure and then the second figure. After she was done, she made her way back to David. In a startling display of just how good her memory was, she performed the first sequence in full and then the second. Both sequences looked way less ridiculous compared to when she performed them a stance at a time. She hadn't even broken a sweat.

"You're actually really, really great at this," David said, unsure of what else to say. There had been a total of thirty six stances, none of which to his barely trained eye had been repeated. Barely, because he'd been at the same after school martial arts class with her for six months, when they were eight or so. He'd been there first, which was why he'd called her shimei as a joke.

Alice rolled her eyes. "Of course I am. I've won many medals." He could tell she was pleased though, from the way she was grinning from ear to ear.

"Have you come to any profound understandings of this new style that you've added to your repertoire?" David asked, definitely being sarcastic this time.

"No." Alice exhaled gently, giving him a real answer. "I don't expect that anybody would ever put anything crazy on the walls. Also, it's not entirely new. It resembles some of the beginner forms of the Wutang. I say Wutang, of course, because there's a mix of all three substyles in the forms."

Stolen novel; please report.

David tuned her out.

"Had it been two styles, I would have assumed that I was reading the carvings incorrectly and that the continuation from one frame to the next was unclear, which would make for a great teaching moment to young disciples trying to get ahead of the curriculum." She rolled her eyes again.

"Wutang, of course," David said, parroting her words, then raised his eyebrows. "As in your favorite rap group from Staten Island, the Wutang Clan."

"David, I swear-" Alice folded her arms, then dropped them to her side. "Yes, these martial arts forms were in fact invented by the Wutang Clan, between the recording of their albums." She rolled her eyes at him but the corners of her lips betrayed her smile.

David scratched the back of his neck. "I've definitely heard of the Wutang. But only the rap group." He also knew the name of the Wutang Clan had come from some kung fu related theme.

"The Wutang Sect, the most famous school of martial arts, founded by your favorite Daoist martial artist and folk legend, Zhang Sanfeng?"

David looked at her blankly.

"One of the main characters of the acclaimed conclusion to the most successful Wuxia trilogy of all time, Yitian Tulong Ji, your favorite allegorical explanation of the Mandate of Heaven set in the dying embers of the Yuan Dynasty, featuring many names from history?"

David shrugged.

"Uncultured," Alice said in Mandarin with an exaggerated sniff - clearly in parody of something or someone, but David didn't get that either. Alice clearly found it really funny. Her giggles echoed through the quiet halls of the temple.

She suddenly sobered and she looked incredibly tired. "For many years, we'd eat dinner at eight. During dinner my parents would let me watch tv and, usually on one of the few Chinese channels, there would be an adaptation of some Jin Yong novel playing. Dinner would always last the full hour. I read the books he wrote after I'd learned enough to understand them. Dad was really into them. He thought Shen Diao was one of the greatest love stories of all time. I thought Xiao Ao had characters comparable to anything I've ever read."

She was weeping now, though her voice remained clear and strong. "This place really isn't just somewhere in China, is it?"

No, no it wasn't.

"Mom told me not to eat outside after I went to the library for my performance because she was making chicken wings. I wasn't going to, but there's a new bubble tea place by the train station and I was going to drag you along with me. We were going to become friends and everyone was going to have a lot of fun, starting this year. We were going to get into whatever school we wanted to go to and then graduate and meet people from all over the world."

David nodded and they stood in silence for a while, then he put the pile of clothing he was holding onto the floor, walked over to her and gave her a hug. "Maybe this is a temporary thing," he whispered into her hair.

"I hate mulberries."

He supposed he wasn't too big a fan of eating nothing but fruit either.

"I hate mulberries," she repeated into his chest. "I want to shower. I need to go to the salon. And I need a new phone, one that's lightning proof. Or at least has insurance for lightning strikes."

David laughed along with her because he figured that was better than crying.

They drew apart. David picked up the pile of clothing and looked at the robe on the bottom in disgust. "I'm not wearing this one," he said, after it seemed to get even more dirty when he slapped at it to dislodge the dust it had picked up from the floor. Alice, ever resourceful, took it from him and started to wipe down an area of the floor.

"Well, we are definitely not sleeping in any of those beds," she explained, as she pushed away alarmingly large piles of dust which she had swept up with the robe. "So it's going to be the floor."

"I'm not going to be able to fall asleep," said David. "I just woke up."

Alice finished pushing away the dust and then covered the pile with the robe. "We're not done exploring yet anyway," pointing at the other wall. "There was something interesting over there, an altar of some sort. Didn't give it too much of a look though." She pointed at the carvings in explanation.

David put the clothing down on the newly swept ground, then followed Alice to the final stretch of wall.

There was indeed an altar, there. It appeared to have been cut out of the stone in the mountain. There was a small cauldron of some sort which had been knocked askew, which had rolled into the corner. David thought it'd probably once contained the remains of incense sticks since it was caked full of ash, which broke away with a light tap.

Behind the altar was what had been a statue but unlike the other ones, this one had been smashed. Pieces of it were on the ground.

"What was it a statue of?"

David looked at the various pieces of statue which littered the ground behind the altar and found a pair of hands clasped together in prayer, as well as most of a face with its eyes closed. "Looks like a buddha statue of some sort, probably not the actual Buddha. A bodhisattva, they're called. It looks like one of the statues in those temples in Chinatown. My mother goes to the big one next to the Manhattan Bridge for Qing Ming day in the spring."

Alice nodded distractedly, thinking about Qing Ming. "We go to, like, three different cemeteries. My folks always forget to buy flowers and my mom always gets mad because we forgot to buy flowers. And then she gets mad when we have to drive from florist to florist because no one ever has plum flowers. Then dad asks her why she won't grow her own apricot tree instead of making him drive around and she gets really mad." She smiled but there was something hollow to it now.

"Just like the poem," David said.

Alice looked confused.

"Rain falls in a drizzle on the day of spring, brokenhearted mourners walk the roads. Where is a tavern to drink away sorrow? A shepherd points to a village amongst apricot flowers."

"Wow," she said. "I can't believe I thought I was the cultured one," she said, raising her eyebrows.

"I want to say I went out of my way to learn them, but that's just not true. My mother knows hundreds of these, maybe more than a thousand," David said. "She likes to recite them while cooking. I've picked up a couple over the years. I was always impressed by her but she says it's like how most people know the lyrics to a ton of songs."

"Not exactly the same," said Alice.

"No, not exactly," David agreed.

They examined the altar for a bit longer but didn't find anything more of note. There were four more altars in close proximity along the wall, all of which were missing their statues entirely.

"Five names on the pillar, one which was destroyed, five statues on the wall, one which was destroyed. I think it's safe to say these were the statues of the founders of this temple," said Alice as they walked along, their eyes on the wall.

There was a crunch as she took another step forward. She looked down and screamed, which echoed through the empty temple.

"I think we might have found the people who used to live here."

There was a skeleton on the ground with a skull which looked to be in pieces.

"I didn't do that," Alice said immediately, hoping it was true.

She hadn't. She'd stepped onto its ribs, pieces of which were broken off.

"Looks like really heavy blunt force trauma. A bat or pole of some kind?" David wondered, kneeling by the skeleton.

"That looks like a pretty awful way to die," Alice said.

David shook his head. "Could have been worse. At least it was quick."

There were more skeletons in their general vicinity, with a total of six that were visible. Three were missing their skulls, two of which were found nearby. Another was missing everything from the middle of the spine downwards.

The final pair were a large skeleton propped up against a wall with a smaller one on top of it. The smaller skeleton's hands lay on the larger skeleton's collarbones. The handle of a sword jutted out of the smaller skeleton's back.

"Do you think they were lovers?" Alice sounded uncharacteristically somber.

In his mind's eye, David could see a man who most definitely didn't look like him with a fatal wound against the wall, a woman who most definitely didn't look like Alice pressed against him, screaming for him to live, and someone without a name or a face casually driving a sword through the woman's back.

"Yeah."

Alice crept closer to examine the sword, which had an unmistakable bagua etched onto the octagonal block that was its pommel. She ran a finger over her hairpin.

"I think it was her sword," she said. "Or at least one that belonged to the temple and not whoever did this."

"How long are swords like this, normally?" David asked, with the sudden hint of a shake in his voice.

"This style of sword, for Tai Chi and the like? Around four to five feet-"

Alice stared at the sword.

"Long?" she finished.

"This wall." David gave it an experimental tap. "This wall is made of stone. Like the altars. Like the pillar."

Alice gave the sword an experimental shake, trying her best not to disturb the dead locked in their final embrace.

It did not budge. The blade had not, in fact, snapped off as she’d instantly assumed. It was at least three feet deep in stone.

"Maybe the secret Daoist martial arts on the wall aren't quite as mediocre as they first appeared?"

"This is too much, I’m going to go to sleep," Alice muttered.