Necropolis

Harbor City, just ten minutes from here. It spends a day in Hong Kong on its way from Tokyo to the Philippines and then Singapore. That is where it will take you. The ship is called The Jade Emperor, and it will be full of wealthy tourists. You will be one of them."
    "How do I get on board?"
    "For their own reasons, the Old Ones do not want the world to know that they have taken over this city.
    That is good. When
    The Jade Emperor ties up, they will have to be careful. There will be security, but it will have to be invisible. They will not want to frighten the tourists. Everything will have to seem normal — and that gives us the advantage. We will smuggle you onto the ship with the other passengers. And once you are there, you will be safe."
    "What happens when I get to Singapore?"
    Jet shrugged. Sing muttered something in Chinese and laughed. "That is the least of your worries," Jet said. "First of all, you have to survive tomorrow. And remember — there are at least a hundred thousand people who are looking for you. This is a trap, and you walked straight into it. Now that you're here, it's not going to be so easy to get you out."
    He wasn't being fair. Scarlett hadn't walked into Hong Kong. She had been deliberately drawn in, and there had been nothing she could have done to avoid it. But she didn't argue. There was no point.
    "We will disguise you," he went on. "We will cut your hair and change its color, and we will dress you as a boy. You must learn to walk in a certain way. We will show you. There is a family joining the boat.
    Their names are Mr.
    and Mrs. Soong, and they are part of our organization. Right now, they are traveling with their twelve-year-old son, Eric. You will change places with him and travel on his passport. By midnight tomorrow, you will be in international water and out of danger. Do you understand?"
    "How will you make the change?" Scarlett asked.
    "We have arranged to meet in a shop in Harbor City. The shop is also owned by us. It pretends to sell tea and Chinese medicine."

    "What does it really sell?"
    Jet thought for a moment. He was reluctant to answer the question, but for some reason he decided to.
    "Do you really want to know?" He smiled. "Normally, it sells opium."

    ***
    Scarlett spent the night on a mattress behind a row of crates that the two men had arranged to form a private "room." She barely slept at all. It was cold in the warehouse — there wasn't any form of heating
    — and she had only been given a couple of thin blankets. Every night is trapped between the day before and the day after, and she had never been so torn between the two.
    She thought about the creatures she had seen coming out of the elevators, the flies approaching the tower block, and the people — were they actually living people? — who had followed her onto the roof. How could things like that be happening in a modern city — monsters and shape-changers and all the rest of it?
    Then she turned her mind to the people she was with. Despite everything that had happened, she still knew almost nothing about them. There were lots of them and they were well organized. Lohan had spoken about them with reverence, almost as if they were a holy order. And yet she had just been told that they sold opium! Opium was a drug that came from the same source as heroin. Could it be that they were some sort of gangsters, after all? They carried machine guns and hand grenades. And although they were helping her, none of them was exactly friendly.
    Finally, she thought about the next day and the dangers it would bring, walking onto a cruise ship disguised as a boy. Would it really work — and what would happen to her if it didn't? As far as she could see, the Old Ones didn't want to kill her. Father Gregory could have done that, and he'd made it clear he had other plans. For some reason, they needed her alive.
    Lying on her back, gazing at the skylight, she watched night crawl toward day. In the end, she did manage to sleep — but only fitfully. When she woke up, her neck was aching and she felt even more tired than she had been before. Her two bodyguards were already awake. Sing had made breakfast, a plate of noodles, but she hardly ate. Today was her last chance. She knew that if she didn't get out today, she never would.
    Nothing happened for the next three hours. Jet and Sing sat silently, waiting, and for some reason Scarlett found herself trying to remember her lines from the school play. She had lost