CHAPTER 71: 71

Aunt Yeung strode into the room and I quickly got up.

"I didn’t ask earlier, but are you alright?" she asked.

"Me? I’m... fine."

"No injuries," Aunt Yeung went on. "That Zhan is quite the fighter."

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Ah, she meant the fight. I shook my head. "No, I’m fine," I said more resolutely.

Then my eyes fell to the phone and the charger in the wall. There were no lights or anything to indicate that it was charging and I felt my heart drop. What were the chances a decade old phone would work anyway?

"Have you found Bran?" I asked, though I was sure that if she had, that would be the first thing she’d say.

Aunt Yeung shook her head. "No. There is some kind of formation being used to obscure his location, but," she looked at me with sharp eyes, "it can confirm that he is alive."

Something lodged in my throat and all I could do was nod.

Aunt Yeung sighed and for once, she seemed old enough for her greying hair. "We’ll get him back," she said, though I got the sense she was saying that more to make herself believe.

"Just who kidnapped him?" I found myself asking. "Was Zhan attacking you in the inner sanctum a distraction for it?"

The woman didn’t reply immediately and instead fixed me with one of her discerning stares. I grit my teeth and held her gaze.

Finally she spoke.

"Walk with me," she said, then turned and headed out the room. I quickly chased after her. "I, we, are still much in the dark about current happenings," she said after some time. "But we can safely assume Malcolm and Zhan are working together."

"Because you really do have the Baize Tu pages, right?" I asked.

We were in the hall just outside and about to cross over into the main atrium. Aunt Yeung’s eyes widened at my question and I felt the temperature in the hall plummet. Had this happened just a few hours earlier I would have been scared stiff but since the moment I knew you’d been taken, a cold calm had descended on me, making me not care at all about my wellbeing.

"Explain," said the woman. She stopped and turned to face me.

"It’s just a guess," I said, attempting to hold my ground. "I’m guessing that Malcolm intentionally told you the pages were missing from the libraries to get you to check that they were safe then his accomplice, Zhan, could follow you and steal them."

Aunt Yeung smirked. "Fine, I admit it," she said, beginning the journey again. "But I will have you know that those pages have been safely kept by me for over a hundred years. Those pages the libraries had are mere replicas."

Something clicked in my head as I followed after her. We were in one of the larger buildings down and heading down a flight of stairs I didn’t know existed. "But if it was Morgan and Zhan that stole the pages from the libraries, they probably realised they were fake! That’s why they came here and... teamed up with Malcolm somehow?" I looked to Aunt Yeung. "Um, Aunt Yeung, who exactly is Malcolm?"

If the change in the hall earlier had been a thunderstorm, then the change this time was more of an overcast afternoon.

Aunt Yeung sighed. "He is, was, one of the early members of Whale Toes. Not a founder, but an early joiner back when we were meeting in backrooms in the dead of night. He came from overseas and showed a keen interest in the culture here and a great few people rather liked him. Bran did. And... so did I."

She stopped at the edge of the platform where the railing looked a little weak. About a metre away were some ropes hanging freely from somewhere up above. She said some word I didn’t know and I felt a brief surge of power. The ropes quivered then began to quickly shift and I leaned out over the railing and saw just as a wooden platform arrived.

It was a wooden lift system.

The fragile looking railing flicked up at the arrival of the lift and I followed Aunt Yeung onto it. The mechanism waited a moment then clicked into action again, the railing dropping down again and the platform beginning its descent.

I watched in wonder as the intricate mechanisms of the manor sped past us. The wooden interiors of the rooms and halls seemed ancient yet I now saw that, no matter when it was built, the place was incredibly advanced - like a smart home before smart homes.

The rope stretched down and down and so we continued to go lower and lower into the cloud sea that embraced the mountain. As we did, the air became thicker and the light dimmer. Finally, by the time the lift came to a smooth stop, it was so dark that even I had to squint as I followed Aunt Yeung off and into the gloom.

I hadn’t set foot on the actual mountain since waking in the manor so I was surprised to discover that the ground was almost volcanic in nature with dark, craggy stone in impossible shapes. Maybe this was where you’d gotten that bit of stone in your room from?

The darkness made the space seem enormous but after only walking a few metres Aunt Yeung came to a stop and I saw, through the fog, the stone face of the mountain.

There was a distant groan and a puff of dust cut a rectangular shape in the rock.

"Where is this place?" I couldn’t help asking as the stone door slid away revealing a set of stairs down into the dark.

"As you surmised," replied Aunt Yeung as she, again, led the way forward. "I had an inkling that I was being deluded into revealing the location of the Baize Tu pages which was why I led Zhan to the temple."

"You mean, the pages are really here?"

"Indeed."

"But... why? Shouldn’t you be-" I stopped myself before I said ’looking for Bran’. I knew she cared deeply for you - I saw it and sensed it - so if she was taking a detour down here, there had to be a good reason.

Aunt Yeung seemed to understand my sudden outburst and equally sudden pause. She chuckled. "The pages might be here, but that is not why I am bringing you here."

As we descended, blue-white flames burst into life atop torches mounted to the walls letting me see further ahead down the tunnel. To my surprise, the air here felt even wetter than outside, almost like the sea caves back in Scotland, rich with sea spray and salt, but that couldn’t be right. True, we’d come down quite a way in the lift, and we’d walked further down still, but I was sure that we were still nowhere near the ocean...

But where ever it was that Aunt Yeung was taking me, it was still further in, so I decided to kill time by asking more questions.

"Is Zhan being kept down here?" I asked. That was the only reason that I could think of, though I wasn’t sure why Aunt Yeung would want me along for an interrogation. Maybe to fact check?

"No," was Aunt Yeung’s crisp reply. "He is being kept in a secure room in the main temple with Cheungyi watching over him."

"Oh..."

There were a few more moments of silence as we came to a flat bit of ground.

"So, why didn’t Malcolm kidnap Bran while he was in Pretan?," I asked. I was curious about this, but I also didn’t like the silence. "Bran said he lived there a few years in his lab."

"You bring up a good point," replied Aunt Yeung. "And I do not have a good answer. Perhaps the time was not right, or perhaps he was not aware of Bran’s true nature."

"His true nature?"

The tunnel turned suddenly and I stopped in my tracks as the ’where’ of where we were going finally came into view.

The mysterious underground laboratory had everything you’d want from a mysterious underground laboratory: metal gangways bolted to slick wet stone, long strips of fluroescent light, and lots of people walking around with purpose and complicated looking equipment.

But all that wasn’t what I was focused on at that moment.

In the centre of the large room was a giant capsule-shaped tank, kind of like those you’d see in an aquarium, except the occupant was decidedly less... fishy. But only somewhat.

"I regret now not explaining to Bran the full extent of the situation," said Aunt Yeung, "but you must understand that I thought that telling him as little as possible would let him live as normal a life as possible." She sighed. "I see now that that was merely my own wishful thinking." She raised a hand to present the occupant of the tank. "This is Lok Saan, Bran’s biological mother."

Maybe for you, seeing your unconscious mother hanging suspended in a capsule of water with a fishtail for legs was normal, but for me, even after all the weird things I’d seen up until now, it was a real shock.

"W-why? I thought..." I mumbled.

"She is human," said Aunt Yeung, coming to stand next to me. "These grafts are to keep her alive in her current state. If she ever wakes, they will be removed."

I stared at the mermaid floating above in the tank. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise but your mother really looks similar to you, or maybe I should say, you look a lot like your mother. Even with your lighter brown eyes and lighter brown (but currently blond) hair, the blood connection was undeniable.

"What happened to her?" I asked in a whisper.