[center][h2]Somewhere in Hebei Province, China[/h2]
[h3]Dawn[/h3][/center]

Nicole sprawled along the top of the eastern temple wall, bare legs dangling, fingers intertwined over her stomach, and stared into the depths of the lightening sky. Birdsong rang clear through the air, the sound almost alien to her ears. She had always been in the city, trapped behind barriers of concrete and society both. Her parents had never quite been well off enough to take them camping, or hiking, or anything else that took more than a few hours. The closest she'd ever been to nature was Central Park when she was five, and that was two lifetimes ago now, it seemed. And while the growing sunlight didn't warm her bones like it should have, and she didn't even feel the prickles of energy that she remembered from dawn practises with the soccer team, dawn was still one of her favourite times of the day.

The mutters of some of the monks coming outside for early morning practise roused her from her perch. She sat up and watched them for a few moments, talking about who knew what. She knew by skin colour alone she'd always be at least slightly an outsider here, no matter how Alex framed it to her. Sure, they were open and inviting, but there was always a distance between her and them. White. Girl. Powered. All three put her on a completely different social strata, and whether they knew it or not, they would always treat her differently. Not that that changed if she went anywhere else, but here it was more pronounced. 

She shifted her gaze and stared out over the forested mountainsides surrounding the temple's weathered stone walls. Birds took off from one tree a few hundred meters away, startled by something still hidden in the foliage, their colours flashing vivid blues and reds against the green backdrop. She could see why there were so many poets from ancient times that felt inspired by this area. If she was an artist, maybe she could put that feeling into a form others could perceive, but she had no talents with pen and paper. Something her teachers had constantly chided her for not trying to develop, but she had been focused on sports. Less because she enjoyed them, though she did, but more to try and earn a scholarship and get out of the rut her parents had fallen into.

Ruts. She was young, but she knew already that they were dangerous. Too much stagnation and things went sour, rotting on the vine. And her curse definitely made her more susceptible to falling into pattern and not getting out of them. She glanced back over her shoulder at the monks, and suddenly her jaw set. With one quick motion she flung herself off the wall and out of the temple, flopping and rolling as she crashed into the ground a hundred feet below and then further down the steep hillside. Several instances bounced her off trees, but except for useless air getting knocked out of her lungs, as usual nothing hurt her. The worst of it was the disorientation as her view changed randomly when she ricocheted off of three boulders and a tree, spinning madly.

After her head stopped spinning, she stood up slowly. Her choice of clothing for normal days proved good, as neither her gym shorts nor tanktop were more than slightly tattered. She looked up the ravine she found herself in, seeing nothing but greenery and grey stone. [i][color=azure]Well, shit. Guess I'm not finding my way back any time soon. Not that that was the idea, anyway.[/color][/i] She found, to her surprise, it didn't seem to bug her too much any more that the fall she had just took would've guaranteed death to any normal person. Instead, she just had to pick sticks out of her tangled hair as she resolutely turned on her heel and marched off into the forests, aiming generally downhill.

[hr]

She knew it hadn't been days, but only because her memory didn't match night to forest. It could've been several hours, several seconds, or several [i]weeks[/i] for all she really knew since she had flung herself off the wall. She trudged on, tireless, dispassionately watching the foliage as it smacked into her face. If she had pockets in her shorts, she would've stuck her hands in them. As it was, she had snapped off some sort of thorny branch and was periodically taking vicious swipes at imagined foes. There were no tracks in this areas, no paths, so she was left to forge through undergrowth that may not have seen humans pass in a hundred years. She thought that it might've been nice to know what she was walking through, but she hadn't taken a biology course before and her family had never really been the outdoors-y type. Still, she filed the thought away for when she maybe went to school again.

The sudden appearance of the road came as somewhat of a shock. One minute she was wrestling with some especially thick vine plants, and then she had torn through them, only to be sent careening down another hill. Only when she came to a stop this time, it was on a dirt road, in a jumble of broken branches and small boulders. She sat up after coming to a stop on her back, arms splayed, looking to her right into the astonished eyes of a farmer who had been leading his mule, laden with bags, along the path. He stood perhaps thirty feet away, mouth working like a fish out of air. The mule looked completely unconcerned with the sudden appearance of a white girl out of the woods.

She was just about to ask him to stop staring, when he screamed out, [i]”Shénshèng de gǒu shǐ, yīgè jiàndié! Měiguó zhèngzài rùqīn!"[/i] He then took off at a dead run past her, leaving the mule to stare uncaring after him for a few moments before following at a sedate pace. Nicole stared after him, then shook her head, stood up, and looked around.

Down the road where the man had run, dense forest and rocky hills gave way to distantly visible open fields, she guessed probably all farmland. In the other direction, the road bent around the hill she had come down. Figuring whatever the man had shouted, it wasn't polite, she turned towards the bend and took off at a sprint. Not really out of alarm, just the feeling of speed after however long she had been thrashing through vegetation.

The sun went down soon after, but she kept running. After all, it was the fastest mode of transportation she had at the moment, and, except for the occasional tumbles over unseen stones, she was in zero danger of getting tired or lost. The road just kept going, weaving through the hills. When she finally burst around a corner and saw the first signs of civilisation, a bus station sitting on the intersection of her little dirt road and a paved one, dawn was beginning to colour the sky again. Feeling a bit weird for having run so long when she should've gotten tired, she sat down at the little bench and looked around. This new road ran along a river, and judging from where the sun was, north to south.

It felt like an instant before the rickety little bus pulled up, but the sun was high in the sky. It was a beaten thing, looking like it had probably been in service since before her [i]dad[/i] had been born, and probably repaired so many times there were no original parts left. The door was made of [i]wood[/i], she noticed as it swung open with a creak. A kindly fat old woman smiled at her wide and chattered at her. 

[i]"Nǐ yào qù nánfāng ma? Wǒmen réngrán yǒu hěnduō xíwèi."[/i]

Nicky shook her head and said, [color=azure]"Sorry, I only speak English right now."[/color]

There was a thump and a rustle, and what sounded suspiciously like a chicken in distress. The driver looked back and said something so fast Nicky didn't even know what she heard, and another, younger voice responded. A head poked around the corner in a sweeping curtain of deep black hair, and a girl maybe two years older than her, with wide eyes and deeply tanned skin, grinned at her.

"I speak English! My name is Wang Shu. This is my Aunt Jiayang, it is her bus."

[color=azure]"I'm Nicole."[/color] She instantly regretted how impatient she sounded. [color=azure]"Sorry, it's been a long week."[/color]

"Week? You've..." There was another rapid-fire conversation, during which both women looked Nicky up and down several times. She was suddenly conscious of the dirt covering her, the mud spattered over her bare feet, and the tangled mess that was her hair.

"Quick, come come! We get you out of here." Wang Shu beckoned her onto the bus. She hesitated, then stepped up the creaking stair and into the dim interior of the bus. There was a couple sitting next to a stack of cages with chickens and ducks in them, and an old man at the bus that must've been over a hundred sitting next to a tiny young boy. Everyone was in country clothes, completely unwesternised. Wang Shu ushered her to a seat just behind the driver's, sitting next to her and slapping her aunt's shoulder twice. The bus took off with a shuddering jerk and a cough in the engine, then rumbled off down the road at what felt to Nicky as extremely unsafe speed in a vehicle that should've broken down a decade ago.

"We see several girls before, strangers, come out of the woods," her new guide explained. "There is  a bad place further up in the mountains, somewhere, where kids get taken. Some say drugs, some say worse. Grandmother always say it witches."

[color=azure]"Huh? No, nothing like that with me. I just got lost. Kind of on purpose."[/color]

Wang looked at her a little oddly, giving her another up-and-down appraisal, eyes lingering on her bare feet and legs. "You don't even have scratches. You are good in woods?"

[color=azure]"Uhhhh...[i]something[/i] like that."[/color] Nicky felt like she was probably blushing at this point.

"Oh. Well, this is not good place to get lost. Xié'è de nǚwū, criminal, animals, all up in these mountains. Monks too, but that is a hundred mile north."

Nicky forced herself to not let her jaw drop. [i][color=azure]A hundred fucking miles? How long was I running for?[/color][/i] Outwardly, she asked, [color=azure]"So where are we headed?"[/color]

"Oh, this is monthly trip. We take people up and down road. First stop is Zhengzhou, then south to Hefei and Wuhan, Cross the Yangtze to Changsha, to Guangzhou, then west to Nanning, and final stop in Hong Kong. Then we come back a different way, further west. Next trip is along coast and then reverse this trip."

[color=azure]That is a lot of driving. Do you get a lot of business?"[/color]

"Enough so we get another bus next month! We can double our trips! We get advantage on big government lines. We care more, people see friendly face and want to ride. No faceless man driving, only Auntie."

[color=azure]"Well, I have [i]some[/i] money. I dunno the exchange rate, though."[/color] She dub into her waistband, coming up with several folded bills. Flipping through them in front of Wang Shu without knowing how much she was flashing, she counted out several hundreds, a bunch of twenties, and a handful of all the smaller bills. [color=azure]"How much to get to Hong Kong?"[/color]

"In US money?" There was another rapid exchange. "Auntie says five dollars and we take you anywhere you want to go. It easy since we go there anyway. You save the rest of your money, get yourself clothes. How long you in China for?"

[color=azure]"That is a good question. As long as I want, I guess."[/color]

"You need papers, too. We get you those in Zhengzhou, my uncle's friend has a place to do it. Make you nice and official. In the mean time, we have long drive, I teach you some words."

Since the girl wasn't seeming willing to give her a chance to say no, she settled in for a lesson.

Several dozen miles behind her, on an isolated farm road, a farmer was excitedly pointing at a barefoot print the size of a small girl's pressed into the road a good six centimeters. The two policemen stared at the hole, trying to figure out what they were supposed to tell their superiors.

And in Beijing, and older man received an email from an old associate in America that made him grin like a child with a new puppy. His office was all steel and dark stone and glass. Behind his nearly empty glass desk, and flanked by two very serious men in shades and business suits, the corporate logo for his company, Gōngyè Zhěnghé was emblazoned in huge golden symbols. Cleverly hidden in the logo by subtle stroke differences was the arguably more important symbols for the Golden Dogs Triad.