Book 1: Chapter 6

The adults were predictably horrified. The first thing they did was untie the young man, before they even called the police, which even Linua couldn’t help thinking was a mistake. One of the researchers stayed with him while Eret’s dad questioned his children with increasing disbelief.

Linua quietly melted away with her broom and went to clean the museum.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t bring this to me the moment you thought something was wrong!” she heard Eret’s dad say out in the corridor.

“But Dad, we tried, you thought we were making it up!”

And then a little while later: “Eret, this isn’t one of your adventure games! It’s illegal to restrain people with electrical cables, even if you do suspect them of theft! And by your own admission he didn’t even steal anything!”

Eventually, the members of the Astronomy Club sought refuge in the museum. None of them seemed happy with the way the adults where handling the situation, and they spent several minutes moaning about it. Eventually Linua interrupted them to ask them to perch on the central display table because she needed to mop the floor.

Watching Linua push the mop around the room, Eret’s sister—Linua had learned she was called Anith—asked her how she had been able to stop the young man from escaping.

“That was totally supe,” she said admiringly.

Linua felt her face getting hot. She hated mentioning that she was a Yi because then all people ever wanted to talk about was whether Linua could use ascendent powers like Air Walking, or if she knew anyone who could, and had she ever seen it happen?

“I’ve had some wushu training,” she muttered. That would be safe enough. Wushu training wasn’t restricted only to the Shang Houses anymore, like it had been in the old days of the First Guardians.

“Oh, you go to a dojo? What rank are you?” the red-headed boy asked.

Linua still hadn’t worked out what his name was, and it seemed a bit late to inquire now.

“Rank? What do you mean?”

“Every dojo has a system of ranking.” The red-headed boy cleared his throat. “I’m ranked thirtieth at mine.”

“And how many ranks does your dojo actually have?” Eret asked, sardonically. The red-headed boy ignored him.

“We don’t really have ranks,” Linua said. “We only have a handful of kids at my … dojo.” She added, a little sourly, “I suppose if we were going to have ranks, I would be the last.”

She could have kicked herself as soon as she said that. She should have claimed to be the best. The Astronomy Club wouldn’t have known any different.

“How come your dojo is so small?”

“I just go to my family’s dojo.”

“Oh, it’s not really a dojo then,” the red-headed kid said knowledgeably. “That’s just a family practice. My dojo is ranked third best in the city. That probably makes me, like, maybe one hundred and fiftieth out of the city as a whole.”

“Oh?”

Despite Linua’s discouraging tone, the red-headed kid forged on.

“You should tell your family to come to my dojo, they would get some valuable practice. If you don’t practice with enough experienced people, or do enough resistance training, you won’t be any good.”

Linua tried to picture the expression on Sheyboh’s face if she told him she needed to go to an unaffiliated dojo full of Keretu children claiming to be the third best in the city, because her practice was too limited.

The red-headed kid brightened.

“Hey, we should have a match against each other. Maybe I could give you some advice.”

“No thank you,” Linua said politely.

The red-headed boy was taken aback.

“Why not? You don’t learn if you don’t test yourself against others.”

“I’m not permitted to fight anyone else unless my Sheyboh allows it.”

The red-headed boy gaped at her in astonishment.

“You don’t have the same rule in your dojo?” Linua asked, wringing out the mop.

“Well… what happens if someone attacks you?”

“I would be allowed to defend myself. But if two students fought they might end up injuring themselves, if they weren’t experienced.”

“Yes, I suppose you need to be experienced for that,” the red-headed boy said in a lofty tone of voice.

Thankfully, the Astronomy Club members were then distracted by the arrival of the police, in the form of a sergeant and a corporal, dressed in blue uniforms. They opened the classroom where the researcher had been watching the young man, only to find the researcher tied up with electrical cable, the young man having escaped out of the window just moments before, which only went to show that adults really couldn’t be trusted with anything important. Despite a valiant attempt by the two constables a search of the surrounding area found no trace of him.

With all the interruptions it was nearly nine o’clock by the time Linua got into the lecture room so that she could clean it. She considered just doing a quick once over of the areas which saw all the main traffic. But Alnan didn’t approve of doing things by halves.

She was rewarded for her diligence when the broom hit something underneath the lectern, sending it skittering across the floor. It was a small black square of plastic, about the size and shape of two fingers held together, with metal connectors on one end. Linua picked it up.

Was this the storage media that Pickle had been talking about? How had it ended up here?

The thief! He must have managed to get out it out of his pocket and hide it underneath the lectern during the scuffle, before Pickle had finished searching him.

But why hadn’t he taken the storage stick with him when he left? Maybe he hadn’t had time, or hadn’t been able to find it in time, given that he had only got out of the window seconds before the police had walked into the room. He must have planned to come back for it.

This storage stick would contain images of the item or items that were stored in aisle three.

There was no way for Linua to see what was on it, as she had nothing to connect it to. Pickle had handed over the thief’s camera to the police. She wasn’t even sure what device, other than a camera, could be used to extract the images. Could it be connected to a computer?

The only thing to do was to wait until she was back at the Observatory tomorrow and show it to Pickle. She was fairly sure that some of the Astronomy Club would be there, probably trying to get into the vault so they could go through the storage boxes in aisle three. Then she realised that it was Nimrasday tomorrow. The Observatory would be closed.

Normally Linua welcomed Nimrasday as a break from her usual routine, even if it was terribly dull for its own reasons.

When it was Grandmother’s turn to have her on Nimrasday, that meant going to the temple and attending a two-hour long service in the morning in honour of Lord Nimras the Saviour, followed by a cold lunch—since it was Helged’s day off—and then an afternoon with the Sunday tutor—because it was also Mdm Patoni’s day off—while Grandmother had a nap. In the evening, Grandmother and Linua would read a scientific paper on astronomy and discuss it together. Having a day off seemed to be the kind of thing you could only have once you were grown up, and made Linua wish she was grown up instead of having to study all the time.

Occasionally, if Grandmother was particularly tired and not up to discussing scientific papers, Linua might be given a novel to read. The rule seemed to be that a novel was only worth reading if it had been written at least five decades previously. Linua had often wondered how that worked—what had happened fifty years ago that had suddenly rendered newly-published novels unsuitable for reading overnight? She strongly suspected that this was when Grandmother had attained adulthood.

Sometimes Linua liked the books and sometimes she didn’t. They were either about nauseatingly virtuous children at old-fashioned boarding schools triumphing over another set of extremely badly behaved children, or about a collection of very dull people from the previous century who spent their time constantly wringing their hands and moralising over social misadventures.

There would be no scientific papers or tedious novels today.

Today, it was the Yi family’s turn to have Linua for Nimrasday, and Venerable Guardian Uncle Tai Wu would be there. Today she and the other Yi cousins would demonstrate their supposedly imperfect wushu forms. Maybe in return Uncle Tai Wu would demonstrate his ascendant powers, like Leap of the Antelope, or Air Walking, or using his Chi to break a tree trunk in half.

Linua left the storage stick in her bedroom. Much as she would have liked to have taken it with her and poured over it all day, there was little it could tell her unless she found out how to access the files on it. So she hid it behind one of the books in her room and went off in the car to the Castle.