Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

“Jail or the truth. It’s your call and I’m waiting.”

Angela picked at the frayed hem of her shorts.

“Get up,” Hulan ordered. “Put your hands behind your back.” Angela looked at her in disbelief. “Up! Now!”

Angela stretched out her legs and scooted to the edge of the bed. She held out her wrists for a second, then just as suddenly dropped them. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

It had been a bluff on Hulan’s part, but why had she needed to go so far?

“I told you before that my brother and I wrote e-mails to each other,” Angela began. “About two weeks before he died, he sent an e-mail saying he’d found something that would change my life. When I wrote back and asked him what it was, he said I had to come here and see it with my own eyes. I thought he was just screwing around with me. He’d wanted me to visit for a long time, but I don’t have a lot of money, and hopping on a plane to China, even though I loved him more than anyone in the world, wasn’t something I could do just for fun. He wrote back and told me to look at his website.”

“The one you and Lily talked about the other night.”

“Yes, and it was just as Lily described it. He liked to post photos of places he’d been and things he’d seen, not just for me but for his other friends. Here, let me show you.”

Angela got up and rummaged through a pile on the floor until she found Brian’s laptop. She attached an adapter to the computer, plugged it in, booted it up, and connected to the file he’d used to store the photos for his webpage. He stood in the center of the screen on a muddy bank surrounded by dead shrubs. He wore the typical outfit for foreigners in this place—khaki shorts, heavy boots, a T-shirt, and a cap. His arms were spread out as though he were presenting something to the viewer— ta-da! He was beaming.

Who’d taken the photo? The question seemed unimportant to Angela. “Maybe one of the peasants he met when he was hiking.”

Hulan watched as Angela clicked on the icon and the screen filled with the image of an arid hillside. She clicked again and got a panorama showing a low valley of desolate red earth. The next image Hulan recognized as the ragged beach and entrance to the cave where the All-Patriotic Society held its meetings.

“These photos weren’t like others he’d posted,” Angela explained. “Usually he’d put up a pretty landscape or a portrait of a family on whose property he’d camped. But these are just infertile land.”

“Are there any of the dig?”

“In a way.” Angela clicked several times in succession so that images of Site 518 flitted past. “I would have expected photos of people he worked with, artifacts he’d found, or the configuration of the pits, but most of these are of the surrounding area—just dirt.”

“How was this going to change your life?”

“I didn’t know. I wrote him and said that he had to spell it out for me and that I couldn’t come out here for nothing. I wasn’t very nice when it comes down to it.”

“But he still wouldn’t say—”

“He wrote back that he didn’t know who else was looking at the website. After all, it was and still is available for all of his friends back home.”

“And anyone here too.”

“I suppose so, but I don’t know why anyone here would want to look at these pictures. They already know how ugly Site 518 is. The point is he knew the website wasn’t secure, because it was never designed to be secure. But he also didn’t want to write anything too personal to me by

e-mail because he didn’t know how safe that was either.”

“He wrote that?”

“Uh-huh,” Angela confirmed.

“Do you have any idea what he thought was so important?”

“No, only that if I came here my career would be made.” Angela hesitated, then added, “You have to understand. He was my brother. I trusted him. So I came, thinking he would explain everything once I got here.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a mycologist. I study mushrooms and fungus. I thought that maybe he’d found a lingzhi fungus. Do you know it?”

“That’s the one for long life, right?”

Angela nodded. “The lingzhi is found in this area. Well, not here exactly. Have you heard of the Lesser Three Gorges? They’re not far from here—up the Daning River from the town of Wuxia just below Wushan. The first gorge you hit is called the Dragon Gate Gorge. On the east side is Dragon Gate Spring, and above that is Lingzhi Peak, which is crowned by the Nine-Dragon Pillar. It’s up there that the fungus grows and, because of its value, it’s protected by nine dragons.”

“You’ve been there?”