21 September 1923, Peking. The morning after the lecture carried the familiar texture of routine. Breakfast trays, soft voices, the faint clink of cutlery. Yet it landed wrong. Too many of the investigators had woken with the taste of their visions still on the tongue, the sense of having been briefly displaced into somewhere real and inhospitable. Peking, in the clear light of day, did what cities always do: it tried to convince them that last night was simply a story they’d told themselves in the dark.
They regrouped at the Hotel des Wagons-Lit, where the Legation Quarter’s careful civility kept everything polished at arm’s length. It was here that Peter Long joined them, summoned by friends in the Midnight Society to lend his expertise to the expedition west. A short Cantonese historian in a tailored suit, cigarette in hand, Peter had the easy confidence of someone who can step between languages without losing his footing. His English was flawless, his manner crisp, and he arrived already thinking in routes, dates, and the long arc of Silk Road history.
Peter’s presence sharpened the shape of the problem. The Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, he explained, sat on the site of an ancient monastery: a place that had once been a living community of monks and artisans, turned, over decades, into a prize. A British expedition had made an unsavoury bargain years ago and shipped treasures back to London. After that, other colonial powers competed to do the same. The caves still held history in the walls and the dust, and history, here, had become a kind of currency.
Another new face arrived under more official auspices. Wei Gao, a constable in the Foreign Legation Police Force and a Peking native, had been “transferred” onto the expedition through Society influence and the right signatures in the right places. His bearing was controlled, his suit well cut, his eyes alert in a way that suggested he spent more time watching crowds than admiring architecture. If the rest of the group carried curiosity like a torch, Wei carried caution like a shield.
The day split into small pieces of logistics and stolen time. Wei called at Lee Xie Liling’s modest student accommodation and, after the inevitable apologies for humble surroundings, turned the conversation toward practicalities: transport, rendezvous points, timing. Rickshaws were arranged to bring everyone together and carry them out toward their next appointment. Before the afternoon meeting with Professor Wang, they had a few hours in the city. Hours that felt both generous and thin, as if something unseen might snap them shut.
Wei offered a destination that felt like a quiet statement of intent: the Observatory, set against the old city wall, a place built for measuring the sky. It huddled there like a forgotten annex to history, stone, brick, age pressed hard together. Up on the platform, bronze instruments sat on their plinths like patient beasts: armillary rings and sighting tubes, engraved scales dulled by weather and touch. Their surfaces looked cold and intimate, built for hands and eyes and the long work of attention. The city spread beyond in hazy layers, and the sky above it felt closer than it should, like a hard dome that had been lowered.
It was here that they met Aiko Tanaka, a Japanese student studying in China, sent by Professor Wang to join the expedition as a capstone to her work. Her field was the transmission of Chinese myths into Japanese culture: how stories travel, change, and take root in new soil. She wore an archaic, formal Chinese hat with a veil, an outfit that made her look both scholarly and distant, as if she’d stepped out of an older photograph. She was polite, precise, and still trying to work out what sort of people Wang had attached her to.
The Observatory, for all its open air, did little to ease the investigators’ sense of pressure. Ravi – Zahra beneath the disguise – and Peter both felt it: the crawling sensation of being watched, not by a person in a doorway, but by something that didn’t need doorways. It didn’t resolve into a face. It didn’t even resolve into a direction. It simply sat at the edge of perception, insisting on itself.
Talk turned, inevitably, to the visions.
Ravi prodded carefully at Aiko’s expertise, describing the strange man and the incomprehensible patterns that had moved across his clothing, asking whether it meant anything in myth or iconography. Aiko had no immediate answer. Miriam admitted, in her measured way, that she had experienced something too. Peter relayed what he’d heard from others, how Fred had described his own vision, how it hadn’t felt like a dream at all but like being there, in the middle of an event already in motion. Lee spoke only briefly of hers, refusing to dress it up as the supernatural. If she had seen snow and leeches and jungle-thick vegetation, she framed it as memory and stress, a jumble dragged up from Berlin rather than an occult intrusion.
Wei, meanwhile, watched them with the mild bemusement of a man who has seen plenty of human weirdness without needing to believe in monsters. He kept half an eye on the street below, as if he expected a pickpocket to prove, at least, that some threats were simple.
When it was time to travel out to Yenching University, Wei used his police connections to secure a dignitary’s Chrysler sedan from the Legation motor pool. It was a small flex of authority, and it did what authority often does: it moved the group smoothly into the next scene. The ride carried them away from the city’s dust and clamor toward a quieter edge ten miles northwest, in the direction of the broken grandeur of the Old Imperial Summer Palace.
Halfway there, the afternoon turned.
The sky bruised to black with startling speed. Thunder rolled like distant cannon fire. Then hail began to fall. Hard white bursts that drove people and animals into frantic shelter. The car pushed on through a world suddenly rattled and rinsed, puddles trembling with each impact. By the time the storm eased, everything smelled of wet stone and shaken leaves.
Yenching University rose out of the damp like a calm thought. Low buildings and clipped paths set among what had once been imperial gardens, still proud with old trees and careful water. Students hurried past in neat Western-style dress, books hugged to their chests, voices subdued by the weather. The American School of Archaeology stood orderly and purpose-built, an island of scholarship that nevertheless felt exposed under that bruised sky.
Professor Wang received them with tea and the controlled warmth of a man who has been trying not to panic. In his office, tastefully appointed, crowded with books and artifacts in both English and Chinese, he moved quickly to what mattered. He handed Lee a letter in Chinese: a military transit authorization, the kind of document that turns a dangerous road into a slightly less dangerous road. It suggested an official escort could be arranged, and Wang confirmed it. They were to meet the next morning in Tiananmen Square, where the soldiers would be waiting.
Wang’s preparations were thorough in the way of someone who knows how quickly plans die on the road. If necessary, he could provide cars as far as Sian. He had arranged for a local agent, Mi Han, to meet them. He produced a coin purse heavy with Mexican silver dollars, the hard universal language of bribery, supplies, and sudden opportunity. Then he gave them a small wooden chest containing flags from each nation represented in the group. The advice that came with it was grimly practical: display them with the baggage train. Since the Boxer Rebellion two decades earlier, warlords tended to punish those who attacked foreigners, at least when doing so suited their politics. A string of flags might not stop a desperate man with a rifle, but it could change the calculation in his head.
They filled in what they could about Langdon Warner while the tea cooled. Miriam knew of his connection to Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Peter had heard of his funding earlier in the year, and of concerns that White Russian refugees might be a danger to the sites out west. Warner had also been travelling with controversy in his luggage: a new chemical preservative intended for the murals, a technique that, depending on who you asked, either protected fragile art or enabled its removal under the guise of conservation. Even before his telegram, the expedition had carried the stink of competing motives.
The rest of the day became a scatter of preparation. They bought supplies along Peking’s famous Tashihlan street, collecting the sort of practical kit that looks mundane until it saves your life. Miriam, drawn to the old paper and block-printing market, found herself in a riot of colour and texture: silky parchments, vellums, delicate sheets that made modern stationery look blunt by comparison. It should have been simple pleasure: the joy of tools and record-keeping. Instead, it brought another shiver, another moment where the air seemed to tighten as if something unseen leaned closer to watch.
For Ravi, that sensation curdled into something sharper. Zahra’s disguise held, the princeling’s face smooth and composed, but inside it became a private seething. The paranoia had nowhere useful to go. Miriam was deep in her shopping. Aiko had already met the talk of occult visions with polite uncertainty and an academic’s instinct to step back from claims she couldn’t categorise. Ravi carried the feeling alone, and it sat badly.
Wei spent his time doing what he did best: building a safer path out of uncertainty. He sent notices along the route through official channels. At the Legation Police desk he gathered intelligence from people who had no interest in romance or myth. The road to Sian was troubled by bandits, rogue soldiers and deserters, fake toll agents, and refugees pushed west by violence and hunger. Corrupt soldiers could usually be cowed by the military passport. The group, on paper at least, travelled under the protection of General Wu Pei-Fu. It would be wise, the desk sergeant advised, not to advertise that Wei was a detective from Peking.
Peter continued his own research, reminding them that the Thousand Buddha site was ancient and that its walls held portraits of Silk Road merchants, the faces of people who had made their living walking between worlds. In 1900, a sealed “library cave” had been discovered packed with texts, textiles, statuary, and other treasures. The world’s most famous archaeologists had descended on it. The Chinese state had claimed a few items in 1910, but most had already been taken. Most infamously the Diamond Sutra, often cited as the oldest dated printed book. The caves were not just a destination. They were a crime scene with a long memory.
By evening, exhaustion began to show in strange ways. While packing, Lee felt a stupor settle over her like a heavy hand. She fell asleep sitting upright, and when she woke she was sweaty, hot, and fogged as if she’d been dragged through fever-dreams. She found herself gathering a handful of items, seemingly at random, with no clear plan. Later, it would be hard to say whether it was instinct, subconscious preparation, or something else nudging her hands.
The day ended with bags packed, money counted, flags folded, and routes discussed. All the practical scaffolding of an expedition stood ready. Beneath it, the unease remained: the sense of being watched, the residue of visions, the knowledge that someone, somewhere, had sent a telegram that didn’t bother with explanation.
The next morning, Tiananmen Square waited.
It was all scale and cold stone, an open mouth of space that made even a crowd feel small. The Gate of Heavenly Peace loomed ahead, red walls and dark eaves cutting a hard line against the morning sky, its shadow stretching across flagstones still slick with last night’s rain. Somewhere beyond the square, the city was already waking, vendors calling, bicycle bells, the clatter of carts, but here the sounds flattened and echoed, as if the air itself was holding its breath.
The escort stood exactly where Wang’s message had said it would be. Soldiers in drab uniforms, boots planted, rifles slung, waiting with the stiff patience of men ordered not to move until the world ends. Vehicles idled and coughed, canvas covers beaded with water, engines ticking like nervous hearts. An officer checked names against paper with curt efficiency. It was procedure, ink, and authority, until it wasn’t.
Engines revved higher. The convoy began to move.
Peking slid away behind them like a stage set being dismantled, and the road west opened up ahead: long, uncertain, crowded with strangers, and already haunted by the knowledge that whatever had touched their minds in the lecture hall did not feel finished with them yet.
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