Red Phoenix

furious. ‘What?’
    ‘This…’ I hesitated, then, with emphasis on the insult, ‘ Turtle… ’
    John made a soft sound of amusement.
    ‘…wants to divert a super typhoon coming this way, purely because it’ll hit us on his daughter’s first day of school.’ I threw myself back from the desk and stood rigid, glaring at John.
    Leo glanced at me. Then his expression darkened. He folded his arms over his chest and glowered at John. I did the same.
    ‘Over our dead bodies,’ I growled. ‘You do any weather manipulation at all in the next three weeks and your shell will be in serious trouble.’
    ‘What she said,’ Leo rasped.
    John appeared ready to argue with us for a moment. Then he grinned broadly and spread his hands, palm up, over the table.
    Both Leo and I sagged with relief.
    ‘I think I must be the luckiest old Turtle in the whole wide world,’ John said, his hands still out.
    ‘You’re definitely the stupidest,’ Leo growled quietly, then stalked out, shaking his head.
    I pointed at Leo’s enormous receding back. ‘What he said.’
    I warned Ah Yat to buy extra food at the market. If the typhoon was a direct hit, then we could be stuck at home for at least a whole day; but it would quickly dissipate once it hit the land. The storm would be intense on the coast, and then clear as it moved inland.
    School was supposed to start the first Tuesday of September. On the Friday before, the Number One standby signal was hoisted by the Hong Kong Observatory. The symbol appeared in the corner of the television screen when Simone watched her children’s shows.
    On Sunday afternoon, the Number Three signal was raised. This was the strong wind warning. I watched the typhoon coming towards us on the international weather bureau websites. It was huge. It cut a swathe of destruction across the Philippines. Six people in the northern Philippines were killed in the flooding.
    The sky grew very overcast. The clouds came down, thick and grey and low. They swept across the sky like a heavy roiling soup, moving unnaturally fast. The weather made John irritable. He locked his feelings down tight. Hong Kong’s spectacular electric storms made him cheerful to the point of euphoria; his eyes would go very bright and hard. But he didn’t enjoy the weather patterns around typhoons at all.
    I suddenly realised that in the previous three years there had been unusually few typhoons that approached the Territory close enough to warrant the raising of a Number Eight signal. There had even been comments made on television about the low number of typhoon hits. He must have been moving them away because he didn’t like them.
    The Number Eight was raised on Monday afternoon. Ah Yat and I went through the apartment and put a large cross of tape across every window. If something blew into the window and broke it, the tape would stop glass shards from flying in and hurting us. John had put safety glass in all the windows anyway, but they could still break.
    When a Number Eight gale force signal was raised, everybody except vital services stayed at home. Schools, shops and offices closed. As the typhoon approached, bulletins appeared on television informing the people of Hong Kong which buses, trains and ferries were still running.
    The noise woke me at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. It was like a rushing freight train directly outside the window. The building swayed gently in the wind.
    I hopped out of bed and quickly checked my window. It wasn’t leaking, which was unusual. The flat I had shared with Louise in Sha Tin had leaked during typhoons and water damage was a constant part of life. During one particularly bad typhoon we’d stuffed every single towel we owned, and all of our clothes as well, around the edges of the windows to soak up the water gushing in, and had spent the afternoon wringing out the towels into buckets.
    I peered out the window. The rain blew sideways. Central District below me was a horizontal blur of lights. The roar of the wind was furious outside the window. No chance of going back to sleep with that, particularly with the building swaying just enough to make me feel seasick as I lay in bed.
    I pulled on some clothes and slipped through the door into Simone’s room. She could sleep through anything; her little face was angelic in the soft glow of her night light. I quietly checked her window. Not leaking either.
    I went into the unlit living room. John and Leo were there already,