I sighed with feeling. ‘I suppose.’
‘Thanks, Emma!’ she said, and hung up. Thanks, really, Emma, she added silently. I wouldn’t ask if you had a class, and I won’t ask again, okay?
‘Tell her she can ask as much as she likes if it makes her feel good about being normal,’ I said to the stone.
Simone’s voice was giddy in my head. You’re the GREATEST, Emma!
‘You won’t be the greatest when she gets your email,’ the stone said.
I rose and collected my bag.
‘Not sending Leo?’ the stone said.
‘Nah, he’s with Meredith. It’ll do me good to get out of the office, even if it is to go through the tunnel.’
It took half an hour to wend my way through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel traffic and reach the top of Kowloon City and the massive shopping mall of Festival Walk. The mall didn’t look much from the outside, a regular two-storey rectangular monolith, but inside it plunged to six storeys below ground level. I entered the spiralling ramp down to the car park, travelling a long time before I reached the boom gate. I pushed my credit card into the slot and wound my way to the bottom floor, another three levels down. The car park was deserted this far down during the day, and I pulled up next to the lobby at the bottom of the escalators below the supermarket.
Simone wasn’t there so I pulled out my phone to call her. There was no signal so I left the car and went towards the escalator lobby. As I opened the door to enter, my hand was grabbed from behind and I was swung away from the door. I didn’t really register who had attacked me; I just knew they were human not demon: three Chinese men, all of them menacingly close. The one holding my wrist was grinning at me.
I didn’t mess around; I moved as quickly as I could and took them down. I pushed just above the heart of the man holding my wrist and his knees buckled, his eyes went blank and he collapsed. I used a simple throat block to make the second feel unable to breathe for a few seconds, and used that time to hit the third under the ear on a pressure point that put him straight to sleep. I returned to the second and shoved him in the solar plexus, knocking him unconscious as well.
I was bending to check their unmoving bodies for ID when I heard panting and running. I looked up, preparing to defend myself again, and saw the Nemesis, Peter Tong. He was wearing a designer polo shirt and a pair of slacks hitched under his bulging stomach. His face was swollen with exertion and one flailing arm held a small pistol. I moved into a long defensive stance, ready to take him down before he could shoot me.
He stopped, bent over his knees to pant for a while, then stood again. ‘What happened?’
‘Put the gun down,’ I said.
He waved the gun again and I ducked as he pointed it at my head. ‘No! I’m here to defend you!’
I moved close to him, put my foot between his feet, bent my knee into him and pushed him onto his back, taking the gun at the same time. He smelt of cooking oil and expensive aftershave.
‘You idiot, you could have killed me,’ I said. I checked the magazine; it was empty. ‘You run around with an empty gun? What are you doing?’
Simone and her friend Sarah came down the escalators and hurried to us.
‘Oh, Emma, were you attacked?’ Sarah said, waving her arms theatrically. ‘What a stroke of luck that Peter was here to save you!’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, and looked from the Nemesis, still gasping on the ground, to Sarah. ‘How much did he pay you to do this, Sarah?’
‘Oh, you know about it? Three thousand dollars,’ Sarah said. She went to Peter and held out her hand. ‘Come on, pay up.’
‘What happened?’ Simone said. She studied the goons on the ground. ‘These aren’t … These are ordinary …’ She was silent for a moment, thinking. ‘You were mugged by three men, Emma?’
‘Yeah, and Peter came rushing with his dinky cowboy gun to rescue me,’ I said.
‘Wait, he paid Sarah?’ Simone took her friend by the shoulder. ‘He paid you to set Emma up?’
‘Nobody was going to get hurt. It was just a little demonstration to show Emma how much she needs a man in her life to defend her,’ Peter said. He clumsily pulled himself to his feet. ‘What if these men had attacked you and I hadn’t been here to scare them off?’
‘You scared them off?’ Simone said with scorn.
‘Look! They all fainted with fear when they saw me!’ Peter said.
I passed the gun to Simone and she held it as if it were something contaminated. I moved into a serpent-style stance: legs spread, and palms flat and facing down like the head of a snake. I jabbed a few times at the Nemesis’s eyes, making him reel back with shock, then lightly hit him with the tips of my fingers, not enough to hurt him but enough to make him feel it. I struck his chin, throat, shoulders, chest, and then made a flurry of strikes at his stomach, not hard enough to do damage. I changed to monkey style and swept low, taking his feet out from under him, and catching him just as he was about to hit the ground. I lowered him to the floor so that he didn’t hurt himself, and stepped back.
‘I took them down myself,’ I said. ‘I’m a master of seventeen different styles of Kung Fu.’
Sarah stared at me, then turned to Simone. ‘Do you do martial arts too?’
Simone hesitated, then raised her chin. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s fun,’ Simone said.
Sarah turned back to Peter. ‘I did what you asked me to. Where’s my money?’
Peter pulled himself back to his feet, then hunched over, grimacing with pain. ‘I’m horribly injured! You beat me! I need an ambulance — and a lawyer!’
‘You’re a good thirty centimetres taller than me,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s going to believe that I hurt you, particularly when there isn’t a mark on you.’
He raised his shirt, revealing his white, glutinous abdomen. ‘I’m covered in bruises!’
‘No, you’re not. Get over yourself.’ I turned away from him. ‘I think you need to find a lift home, Sarah. Or was this loser going to drive you as well as pay you blood money?’
‘My driver’s on the way to pick me up anyway,’ Sarah said with a toss of her head. ‘I don’t need to call my stepmother for a lift. My real mother can’t drive, she doesn’t need to. We have a driver; we don’t drive ourselves around like domestic helpers.’ She turned to Simone. ‘Next time I think I’ll go shopping with someone interesting, not some freak who does martial arts.’
She swung her bags as she turned to go up the escalators, then turned back to Peter. ‘I know who you are, loser, and you owe me. If you don’t pay up soon, I’ll get my boyfriend and some of his friends to spray-paint your store in Central. The inside.’ She swept away.
‘Well, thank you very much,’ Simone said, grabbing her bags and storming towards the car. She turned back to yell at me. ‘Just go and ruin my life one friend at a time, Emma, why don’t you!’
I pointed at the unconscious goons on the ground. ‘How much did you pay them?’ I asked Peter.
He pulled down his polo shirt to cover his stomach, his face red. ‘I never paid anybody! I protected you from these … these … thugs!’