Revolving Door: Volume 3
Liaoning Libraries - II
“Okay, let’s go over it again,” Hong Yi says as the yacht skims over the waves, eyes glimmering with the last port lights through the window. “We want as little time on the island as possible. Every hour we’re there, the risk of getting caught compounds. Plus, we need to mind our supplies.”
“Do I look like an office worker?” Adelaide murmurs, tugging on the blouse she is wearing.
Reclining in the seat beside her, Hong Yi beams. “I assure you, you look quite professional.” He is himself wearing business casual, complete with a stripy tie.
“Are you sure it wouldn’t make more sense to leave me on the boat…or downstairs…”
Hong Yi shakes his head. “We shouldn’t split up for too long. We might need all hands on deck.”
Inhaling deeply, Adelaide peers out the window. Through the windshield, she sees that the eternal twilight of the port illuminates the waves only so far. Once they fly out of the orange fog of industrial sodium floodlights, the expanse ahead clears to pitch black, pierced now and then by the strobing of a lighthouse on what must be Dashan Island. Container ships are strung along the horizon, like fraying trails of the city’s glow.
“Keep that lighthouse on your left, I mean, port side,” Hong Yi says. “Turn about forty-five degrees to starboard.”
Artur uncomplainingly spins the helm. Now they are plowing bow-first into the abyssal part of the night. Adelaide watches over Hong Yi’s shoulder as the pointed dot on the map surges across satellite seas towards the pixelated island. “Alright, straight on,” Hong Yi says as they ease out of the turn.
Whenever Adelaide read about boats, she always pictured lazy meanders down waterways, perhaps prodding at her own distant memory of going with her parents on their little vacations. What she sees now can barely be described as leisurely, as Artur stamps on the pedal and sends them hurtling across the frothing waves.
She clings queasily to the armrests while Hong Yi’s eyes lift from his phone. “Everything okay?” he says. “Do you get seasick?”
“I don't know.”
“Is this your first time on a boat?”
“My first time on one that went this fast.”
“Come over to the centre, it's not as bad here. Actually, let me try something.” As she slips across the armrests, dragging their bag after her, Hong Yi loops an arm around her back. At once the g-force is dampened and her stomach settles. “That help?”
She nods profusely. “That’s amazing.”
“I’ll have to pay attention, though.”
“Should have brought ginger,” Artur mutters from the cockpit. “Helps with boat sickness, you know. My father taught me…”
Adelaide does not know much about Artur other than that he is a menace with boats. Even with their lights off and only Hong Yi’s verbal instructions in lieu of GPS, he maneuvers the pleasure yacht precisely around the incoming rocks, watching the silhouettes sail past their windows.
“I have broken every marine rule,” he groans.
“And saved us breaking our skulls!” Hong Yi replies.
They dodge around the back of the island and chug into the arc of a rocky beach, where branches overhang the sands. Killing the motor, Artur sits catching his breath for several seconds, before popping open his outer door. Barreling out onto the deck, he athers up rope in his hand to tie a large noose.
He tosses it at the nearest branch, misses, the cord splashing in the waves. Yanking it back aboard, he tosses again, and this time it catches. He tightens the noose and loops the slack around the cleats till there are only two metres of give. It's as if he has done this a hundred times before.
“Quickly,” Artur calls, waving them towards himself, and they shove the passenger door open and scramble out to the deck, where the hull is closest to shore.
“I can give us a boost,” Hong Yi whispers. “Any chance you could make a gale?”
Adelaide nervously glances across the inky gap between them and the shore. “I don't know that I can make the jump…”
“Yes you can!” Hong Yi declares under his breath, taking her wrist. Artur glances back and snatches her other wrist, somehow gentle despite the fear in his eyes. Then, Hong Yi’s weighs the boat down, as the hull begins to push deeper beneath the waterline, water sloshing aside, Artur counts them off from three—
Adelaide feels her body lighten. The boat beneath them rockets upward like a rebounding trampoline. They leap, much higher and farther than humanly possible. A gale catches them midair, propelling them towards the shore.
They land lightly, as if on the moon—and the three allow themselves mutual grins before resuming their sprint—straight into a perimeter fence.
A wire fence girds the entire island boundary, taller than any of them. Hong Yi and Artur meet eyes, and with a nod, begin to count off another leap.
With the lightness of the upward gale, Adelaide finds no trouble scrambling up the fence after the other two. They await her expectantly as she lands gently on the other side, and once her feet meet land, they break into a crouching sprint.
Despite the half-moon, it is a dark night on account of all the ocean clouds. The wind is whipping, its cutting gusts softening when they dive behind a line of trees. The only light at this hour is from the building corridors, glowing mutedly down through rows of windows. The air thickens with vapour as they skirt the perimeter, searching for a way inside.
This facility spreads its limbs over every foot of the island, its spidering blocks and wings five stories tall in some places and three in others. It is like a research campus with its many buildings joined to each other at odd angles. Through a crenelation in the wall, they see an open-air bridge on the fourth story, but there is no visible path there.
“Some weird sect,” Hong Yi murmurs as they dash past block after block. “I hope it’s the right place.” As they sprint along, feet buoyant, they see that there are no openings into the depths of the structure but the windows, all of which stand shut.
Except, in an obtuse angled corner formed by two white walls, they glimpse a third-floor window that has been left ajar, just wide enough for a person to clamber through.
Adelaide sees, from the darting of Hong Yi’s eyes, that he is starting to construct a way up. A gutter pipe ascends to the window, ensconced in chunky brackets that form precarious rungs. It passes a parapet running between the second and third floors, and then it is no less than a leap from that ledge to the windowsill.
Adelaide’s knees start quaking.
“Follow me,” he whispers. “We’re going up.”
“What if I fall?” she breathes.
“I will go below you,” Artur replies, and by then, Hong Yi is already scampering up the pipe rungs.
The trio ascend in a chain, Hong Yi charting the path. Adelaide watches the steps diligently, the way he springs from one bracket to another while gripping the next handhold above. This cannot be the first time he has done this, though perhaps that comes with the territory.
When it comes her turn to make those moves, she lifts one foot onto the first bracket, propels herself upward—and feels her pulse accelerate as a creak of metal reverberates through her body.
Where Hong Yi was able to leap fearlessly, she freezes and crawls in stops and starts, even with his gravitational boost.
“You okay?” asks Artur a foot beneath her.
She glances down. She is half a story up. Her arms also trembling. “Y-yes. I think.” Then she resumes watching Hong Yi from beneath his shoes as he swings off the pipe and onto the parapet.
The rest of the pipe climb is easier now that she has performed the motions a few times. Her hands find purchase on the rough steel and haul her up with startling ease. Once or twice, her shoe misses a bracket and scrabbles against the pipe, but eventually—without looking down—she reaches the parapet.
From here, Adelaide can see that the flat span of the parapet is about a foot wide, not quite enough to walk on. But the windowsill is just close enough to swing to straight from the pipe—if she doesn't miss. Ahead, Hong Yi is already readying for the leap to the open window, silhouetted in the predawn sky beyond.
Here, three metres from the ground may as well be twenty. She resolutely keeps her gaze level. Behind her, she sees that Artur is still picking his way up the pipe; there are a few things standing between her and a perilous fall.
With that in mind, she puts her left foot on the thin sliver of wall, which Hong Yi has only just deserted, crouched on the windowsill. Heart thundering, she swings. Pivoting on her feet, Adelaide does as Hong Yi did, leaning to snatch the rough corner of the windowsill with her left hand. She puts her left foot on the parapet, then, with a deep breath, takes her right foot off the bracket, planting it on the painted concrete.
Her torso is pressed to the wall and her arms are spread, one hand hooked on the sill and the other fighting for grip on the rough paint. Her fingers are sweaty, sliding against the dust. Her feet inch sideways along the ledge. There is a fog tiding in.
Inch by inch she sidles towards the overhanging sill—feet, then hands, until both hands can reach the window frame.
And then she has to leap. But now she can see that the windowsill is a little higher than her shoulder. She will have to haul herself almost her entire height upward.
“Addie!” breathes Hong Yi, torso halfway through the window. He extends a hand.
She stares at the hands hanging down into her vision. The ground spins. Her fingers are slick. “I—I can't,” she stammers.
“I think you can,” Hong Yi whispers, reaching out to grip her wrist with a nod. “And I can give you a boost. Don’t worry, okay? You won’t fall as long as I’m here.”
Adelaide swallows and nods back, hinging everything on the bright confidence in his eyes. Both her hands tighten their grip on the windowsill. Shifting her right foot as close to her left as she can without losing balance, she counts under her breath, “Three, two, one—” Then with only the slightest bending of her knees, she leaps as high as she can.
Suddenly she is hanging by her hands, swallowing the scream that would burst from her throat if terror didn’t hold it down. Every muscle from her elbows to her neck clenches painfully. Her arms are not strong enough to lift her. But she feels Hong Yi hauling her upward, both of them huffing and puffing even as her joints cease to strain and she launches her torso onto the sill with one last kick, landing belly down.
She lays there for half a minute, gasping for breath, before crawling the remaining distance across the sill.
When at last she rolls off and lands on the carpet on bent knees, her legs refuse to hold up her weight. She hugs her knees on the floor, panting. Hong Yi pats her shoulder with one hand, the other gripping the window frame.
Only then, when Adelaide has cleared the sill, do Artur’s fingers peek over the edge, a gale swelling up behind him and whistling through the window. He, too, lunges onto the windowsill and lies draped there, panting with terror before sliding onto the carpet. “Never doing that again,” he groans, dusting off his hands on his shirt.
At last, the trio look up in concert, and they see that have entered an office corridor.
The grey carpeted corridor goes on for tens of metres before reaching a junction at what appears to be a courtyard of some kind. They are alone for now, save for the soft, static hum of air conditioning and the camera swivelling just above their heads.
“Alright, act casual,” says Hong Yi. “We probably can't avoid being seen on camera now. But with luck, no one's actually watching right now.”
Adelaide taps Hong Yi’s arm for the backpack, and he slips it off to pass to her. Quietly, she plucks her mask from their half-empty bag and slips it over her head. “We should find a computer terminal,” she whispers. “They either have the document in a physical library or they would have digitised it. We'd need to check the catalogue either way.”
“Alright, let's scout out the place.”
The doors are glass, showing them the state of the tables inside—four cubicles to a room, each one decorated in its occupant’s vision. Each door has a scanning camera and up to four occupants’ names on cards, each rendered in Chinese characters and Latin ones. Huang Yiming, Yao Xing Summer, Natasya Tochilin. None of the lights are on. They try two empty office doors, but those do not budge.
At the other end, the corridor meets one of the five corners of a pentagonal walkway, running along the perimeter of a courtyard. Two floors down, a small garden glows in day-coloured spotlights. The scent of leaves drifts into awareness along with a gentle sway of music—a tinny piano ballad with no lyrics, overlaid on a loop of birdsong.
More office doors stand along all five segments of this walkway. They walk past a digital notice board glowing with holographic digital posters of scientific machines Adelaide has never seen in her life. Opening hours: 6am – 6pm daily.
As the reach the next corridor radiating out of the courtyard, the scale of the facility suddenly becomes visible. On and on through the gaps, they see an endless layered maze of blocks and walkways, painted white and striped with filtered blue windows. Every gap is filled with more windows and walls, not an inch of the cloudy sky visible except through the top of the courtyard’s airwell.
Hong Yi waves them into an alcove beside a metal flap labelled cleaning closet, where their only company is a chrome drinking fountain with blue LED indicators. “Alright, I have an idea,” he whispers. “To gain access to a computer, we're gonna need an employee’s login. So what do you say, one of us pretends to be a new employee and distracts someone away from their office?”
“Alright…but how do we get their credentials by sneaking in?” Adelaide answers.
“We won't have to. Consider…”
*
The trio push open the flap of the cleaning closet and creep inside. Hong Yi crouches as they enter, peering about in the dimness.
It is a small dim chamber whose ceiling is lower than their heads, lit solely by the blue LEDs of six cleaning drones. They are asleep at the charging docks, the gradual dimming and brightening of the edge lights timed like breathing. On each dock flashes a timer that reads 00:31:45, counting down by the second. The drones’ make is similar to the ones they saw on the streets, white with rounded corners, tall as children, their blue pixel eyes closed in slumber.
“Oh, huh, cleaning time soon, I guess.” Yawning, Hong Yi, plucks the phone from his pocket. “Okay, we're almost on six A.M.” It is decidedly strange sitting here in a cleaning closet bathed in blue. The lights gleam off Adelaide’s mouse mask. Artur has already dozed off.
But before the hour is ended, they hear the first clatter of footsteps up the hall—just two employees first, speaking Chinese with great familiarity, then not long later, a pair chattering in Russian.
“That sounds like our ticket, Artur!” Hong Yi shakes his shoulder till he roses with a sputter.
Two minutes before the cleaner drones are due for their rounds, they spring out of hiding and dash in the direction that the voices went, back up the walkway and into the corridor they came from. Down below, office workers are shambling down the garden paths, oblivious to the hubbub above.
In the hallway, one of the office lights has turned on. Right on cue, a whir of wheels from behind announces the arrival of the six o’clock cleaning squad. The drones zip by, their eyes open now, scrubbing the floor with spinning vacuum brushes. Masked by the sound of machinery, Hong Yi and Adelaide duck off into the shelter of an adjacent unlit doorway, the former digging for a pen in their supplies bag.
Meanwhile, Artur takes in a deep breath and strides up to the lit office.
He knocks on the glass, calling out Ms Tochilin’s name.
The door clicks open, the glass rattling. Out pokes a face. “Hello?” says the respondent in Mandarin.
Artur begins replying, in Russian. “Good morning! I'm a new initiate here,” is what he is meant to say. “I seem to have gotten lost, and I cannot make heads or tails of the signage. Which way to the eatery?”
Hong Yi hasn't the least clue if he is sticking to the script, but whatever it is he says, it seems to have done the trick, for the door swings open and out steps a person he assumes to be Natasya, short and slender with her black hair tied at her nape.
Artur leads her away down the hall with more questions, away from where Adelaide and Hong Yi are hiding. Meanwhile, the door swings shut behind her—but before it can lock, Hong Yi hurls the pen through the door and, as it enters the gap, multiplies its weight tenfold.
It thuds to the ground as if turning to stone. The door crunches against the plastic. That obstruction is enough to wedge the door infinitesimally open. And then they dive inside, Adelaide plucking the pen from the floor.
Natasya's terminal sits unguarded with two glowing screens. One of them is a touchscreen keyboard with shortcut buttons for various system functions. The other is a display monitor, a research paper sitting open in a many-panelled window.
While Adelaide takes sentry position at the door, Hong Yi jumps into the swivel chair and minimises the document. He finds the interface not all too different of that of any Apple device: the finger gestures for navigating the screen are intuitive enough to learn and the library catalogue browser is conveniently housed in an application of its own.
A search for the name Chen Shanying pulls up only one text, which he clicks into. Physical copy unavailable. Loan digital—
“She's coming back!” Adelaide hisses.
“Shit!” He closes the catalogue window and slaps the Sleep button. The screen winks black.
Rather than dash out of the room, Adelaide dives into the next cubicle. Hong Yi takes the cue and flies in after her, both pulling up against the rough felt of the separator.
Five seconds later, the door clicks open, and in steps Natasya.
In the shadow of the unlit cubicle, they peer through the gaps in the divider panels, Adelaide lifting her mask. Natasya looks absent enough that he doesn't think she has realised they are there. She sighs, wakes her machine, and begins to enter her login credentials.
Heart booming, Hong Yi squints. Her username is simple enough: tochilin.n. Her password is 2y*:n— no, N—it is a string of random characters, which the woman types with puzzling effortlessness. By the time he catches on that some of the letters are capitals, he has lost track of the rest of the string.
Instead, his thoughts shift to the more pressing question of how they will escape. Perhaps, if he takes a precise angle, he could throw something at the door and hope she goes out to investigate…
Amid this furious mulling, a knock resounds on the glass.
Natasya straightens, spinning in her chair. “Oh!” She says something to herself that he cannot understand, then rises to open the door.
From outside, they hear Artur's voice pipe up with an inquiring tone. Hong Yi lets out a long sigh. The woman replies, seemingly bemused but not upset, and steps outside again.
The pair nod to each other. Hong Yi stops the door with his foot and sticks his head out to look. Artur and Natasya are conversing as they stroll up the hallway. In the five seconds they are looking the other way, Hong Yi and Adelaide break of in the other direction, towards the window they entered.
They tumble to their knees in a corner and crouch, panting. Hong Yi tug on his tie. Adelaide pulls her mask back over her face, her gasps fluttering against its plastic.
With shaky hands, she plucks her notebook from her pocket. She begins to jot something down with the half-crushed pen and hands it to Hong Yi.
2y*:NaL1+}, says the note. Forgot to check for username.
Below it, in the margin, he writes: tochilin.n, also how did you remember that?
It has an obvious pattern to it, doesn't it?
No?
The sound of footsteps awakens them to their surroundings. The click of Natasya’s shoes on the floor is followed by the creak and clatter of her glass office door, leaving behind a perfect quiet.
“Let’s give it three minutes,” Adelaide whispers, and Hong Yi nods back.
“I sure hope Artur isn't panicking yet.”
Artur is on the edge of panicking. Not that he would ever show it, but he is not cut out for lying. He is capable of saying untrue things, but Dr Tochilin has been nothing but patient each time, even waxing lyrical about the cafe’s blini and sharing the names of baristas who speak their language. His conscience will not withstand much more.
When he turns the corner after Natasya answers his second inquiry—this time about the route to the dormitories—he does not think to pretend to keep walking. Instead he halts in his tracks, and then realises he should have kept going, because she may have noticed.
Even then, she does not reappear around the corner, and only after half a minute does he finally breathe again.
But then comes the next problem. After three minutes of waiting, Hong Yi and Adelaide have yet to reappear. Have they made another attempt at sneaking into her office?
Artur’s thoughts grow unrulier by the second. He is all out of convincing lies with which to convince Natasya to leave her room, and even if he had any, his guilt is starting to gnaw. If he must attempt another rescue, then he isn't sure where he will unearth the wherewithal to bail them out again—
He gasps when a hand claps down on his shoulder. “Saved our lives back there, thank you.” It is Hong Yi’s voice.
Artur sighs. “Did you find the book?”
“We found it,” he replies. “But the contents, well, let's say, that is why we stole her login credentials.”
His heart aches with shame. What a way to repay a lady who has done nothing but help. “I saw a computer lab one floor down,” he replies, pointing in the direction of the stairs.
*
The stairs are around the corner, undressed and grey and steep. The bare concrete shows the scuffing of thousands of heels, and they have already seen other sounds of life stirring in the criss-crossing halls. They see labs, offices, doors, room numbers declared by placards. The floor beneath follows the pentagonal layout of the one above, and it is along the perimeter that they reach the computer lab with its indigo tinted windows, its walls lined with terminals.
Hong Yi tries his luck with the door handle—it swings open with a shove. He pumps his fist as Adelaide and Artur pile in after him.
The carpeted floor is dim, dusky purple, the fluorescent white tubes reflecting off the corners of screens and processing units. The screens themselves are unlit, and their keyboards are mechanical unlike Natasya’s, although the shortcut keys are alike and there is a trackpad for finger gestures.
By virtue of the screens facing the windows, Hong Yi has realised there will be no hiding their doings from anyone who passes. “It’ll be fine,” he breathes as he drops into the closest chair. “Just doing some lab work.” He turns on the closest terminal. “Alright, Addie, you'll have to show me how data storage works.”
She nods. “Pass your phone?” While she opens her notebook on the table, he plucks the device from his pocket to trade it over. He takes the book and enters the details—“tochilin.n,” ”2y*:NaL1+}.” The login form accepts them. “Damn, you’re good,” he breathes. He picks out the library application again and reruns the search.
There is only the one book in the system authored by Chen Shanying. This is a treatise, it notes, on xenisma, the force that flows through all things and brings matter to order. With the trackpad, he swipes down to the button for loaning a digitised copy, which takes him to an embedded eReader called Janus.
There is no visible download button on that reader. He fights with the subwindow system for a minute before opening a corner browser to look up how to download files from Janus, but the prospects are grim: the app streams pages one at a time to the viewer.
“Addie, any chance you know how to programme for the browser?” he asks, and she shakes her head.
“Screen snip them, maybe?”
“There’s fifty pages…but worth a try. Okay.”
“Let's pair the phone, stream them over as you grab them.”
The snipping utility has a shortcut key. It takes a bit of easing in, but once Hong Yi has the sequence of keypresses down, he finds snipping, exporting, and streaming the pages only takes a few presses each.
Still, he begins to fear the spectre of carpal tunnel long before he has finished. About forty-two pages in, Artur clears his throat.
“There’s people looking here,” he whispers. “Hurry.”
At once Hong Yi’s hand motions accelerate. 43, 44, and then 45 fly from the computer to the phone.
“They’re pointing—they’re coming, quick!”
Hong Yi starts to panic in earnest around then, and as soon as his eyes hit the first page of the reference list, he smashes the power button—and that is just as well, because Artur grabs both their arms right then and yanks them away from the terminals and out the door.
A pair of guards is sprinting towards the room even as they burst out the farther door, radio devices to their mouths. He does not like the surly crackle of the voices on the other end. They tear off the other way around the courtyard even while the guards round the other side, soles skidding around the corner. “We need to find that window!” Hong Yi cries. Heels thunder after them. He wheezes and pants, and he can sense Adelaide flagging.
Though they are one floor down, the corridors are a carbon copy, bending at the same jagged angles, enclosing the same courtyard. Retracing their twists and turns, they sprint for their lives while the guards nip at their heels. Past a storeroom then another they fly, by office doors with screens glowing through. “Stop right there!” He shrugs off the yelling, but they are gaining.
Adelaide shrieks and checks her phone, and as they round the last corner and come into view of a familiarly shaped corridor, they can hear the panting of the guards, almost at their necks…
“Past the cleaning door, quick!” she shouts. In a final burst, they lurch past the closet.
A whir of machinery, a click of a flap, and a cascade of six robots rolls out in a train behind them. They intercept the chasing guards, who trip and curse at the “stupid robots.” With only one glance behind, Hong Yi makes the final push for the window, reaching it before either of his companions. He wrenches the rusted handle horizontal and pops it open with his forearm. “Artur, gonna need your help here,” he says as he leaps onto the sill.
*
By now, the daylight is trickling back through the clouds. The wind is whistling from through the window—a buoyant current that gives Adelaide a chill. She turns and says, “Artur, could you—” Artur needs no more telling—he grasps her waist and lifts her onto the sill with shocking ease.
Outside, Hong Yi has already crept aside to make room. His eyes fly to the foggy horizon and back. “It’s just maybe ten feet to the ground,” he calls as she slides both feet onto the parapet, hands slick around the window’s edge.
Ten feet could still land them in hospital. “I—I’ll do my best—”
“Ready.” Artur's voice is steady behind her. The ground spins beneath her, but Artur is now crouching on the sill.
“One—two—” she braces herself as the wind picks up— “three!”
The wind howls in a whirlwind, picking up a tumult of leaves and twigs. Snatching her hand, Hong Yi leaps. She feels Artur knock her from the parapet, and she almost begins to scream—
—but they do not plummet. The wind is blasting them away from the wall, and they are light as leaves, gliding over the gap between the building and the fence.
What should have been a split-second fall takes them ten seconds, as they arc over the wire netting and loft down on the other side, one hop from cliff’s edge.
Their stolen boat is yanking on its mooring. Artur, barely blinking at the descent, snatches the rope and reels it in against the waves.
“Oh my god, did you see that?” Hong Yi gasps. “I've literally never done that with my powers before! We were gliding!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Artur murmurs, waving them down into the deck. “Quick, inside.”
One by one, they jump the gap, the ocean gale buoying them across. Artur goes last, unlooping the rope as he goes, and even as the boat is pummelled away from shore by the waves, he makes that superhuman leap, a gust thrusting him over and away.
He tumbles into the cockpit and kicks the boat into gear. The ocean splits apart at their bow and, hitting planing speed, the craft punches into the ocean fog.
For a while, Artur does not speak, and Adelaide begins to notice that the boat is not rocking the way it did on the journey here.
“We need to read these books,” Adelaide mutters, already reaching for the phone. “If it runs out of battery, we won’t be able to charge…”
“Vesper charges my phone sometimes,” he replied simply.
Adelaide blinks. “I didn’t know she was so…casual with her powers.”
“Oh yeah, and she makes a show of it when she wants to. Like when she rescued Marcia from those rabid wolves, and zapped them all dead in the colosseum…”
“I did not hear about this,” Artur calls out from the front. “Marcia is a gladiator?”
“Yes, but I don’t reckon that’s all she is,” he replies. “Mm, I wonder how they’re doing with their half of the mission.” He chuckles. “Maybe they’re all done already, and are taking time off to do whatever it is you do in 1894 New York. Eating pizza?” Then he folds his arms. “Anyway, you’re right—we should at least take a look at the book, in case something happens to the device or the files. And with a memory like yours, that’s about the same as making a carbon copy of it. Right?”
“I’m not that good,” Adelaide murmurs, but she cannot help a smile.
*
It is only after twenty minutes of jetting off through the murk, towards the open ocean, that Artur slows back down and turns on the lights for the other two. They do not need it, on account of the light emitted by the phone from which they read, but he figures they could use a view of their surroundings. Hong Yi has pulled his hooded jacket back on.
“Where are we headed?” he asks.
“Not back to Dalian,” Artur replies. “They will find us. We go northeast. I threw the tracker in the marina. I go by memory.”
“Northeast?” he answers. “Not into North Korea, I hope?”
Artur shakes his head with a snort. “Not enough fuel. Maybe halfway.”
Dalian is fading from view in the fog behind them. When Artur next turns his head, it is to the sound of snoring in the backseat. Hong Yi has pulled his jacket tighter and lies curled up on the cushions. Adelaide too is dozing with her feet up on the table.
With a small smile, he focuses on the dim night and the gaps between the lights of vessels queueing to enter port, and they thread themselves gently through, into the darkness beyond.