I rewatched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom recently, and somewhere between the mine cars and the Thuggee cult, I found myself stuck on a question I’d never really considered before: whatever happened to Short Round? He’s one of the more memorable sidekicks in the Indiana Jones films, but he never appears in anything else — no sequels, no spinoffs, no mention. He just sort of exists in 1935 and then vanishes from the canon. So I started wondering what kind of life he might have built for himself once he grew up, separate from Indy, shaped by everything he survived as a kid but very much his own person.

That question turned into this project. Short Round, or Wan Li, deserves to be a hero in his own right rather than a permanent kid sidekick, and these stories are my attempt to imagine that life. Obviously Disney and Lucasfilm own the rights to this character, and I have no illusions about ever publishing this commercially — this is fan fiction, plain and simple, written because I love the character and wanted to spend more time with him. What follows is Act I of the first story in that series, “The Dragon’s Eye,” set in 1941.

Act One: The Scholar and the Street Kid

The lamp had been burning since midnight.

Wan Li knew this because he had lit it himself, settling in at his desk with the particular focus he reserved for Professor Hartley’s seminars — the kind where the reading list assumed you had already read everything and were merely refreshing your memory. The Han Dynasty did not lend itself to casual review. He had filled six pages of notes in a hand that switched languages mid-sentence without ceremony, English giving way to Classical Chinese whenever precision demanded it, then back again.

Outside his window, Oxford was doing what Oxford did in March: producing a wet, grey cold that bore no resemblance to cold anywhere else Li had experienced. Shanghai winters had been bitter and indifferent, the kind that killed people who couldn’t find shelter. Hong Kong’s chill had been brief and almost apologetic. Oxford’s cold was something else — deliberate, institutional, as though the university itself had decided that discomfort built character and had engineered the climate accordingly.

He had learned to dress for it. He had learned to do many things.

The room was narrow, the ceiling low, the furniture supplied by a college that considered utility the highest aesthetic virtue. Li had not decorated. There were books — stacked on the desk, on the floor beside the desk, on the windowsill where they slowly absorbed the damp — and there was a Yankees cap on the shelf above the bed, faded now to a color that was almost not blue. It had been blue once, in Shanghai, when a large American with a fedora and a complicated moral compass had pressed it onto the head of a boy who had just tried to pick his pocket.

The cap was the only thing in the room that had not been chosen deliberately.

Li turned a page, made a note, and heard the knock at his door.

He did not startle. He noted the knock — two sharp raps, a pause, then one more, which was not a pattern anyone had taught him but which he had come to recognize as belonging to a man who thought in complete sentences and expressed even impatience in complete sentences — and he closed his notebook before he stood. He was at the door in three steps, which was all the room allowed.

Professor Edmund Hartley was wearing his coat over his dressing gown, which told Li two things: that the matter was urgent, and that Hartley had not wanted to take time to dress properly but had retained enough of his upbringing to feel that a coat improved the situation. He was sixty-two years old, built like a question mark left out in the rain, and he was holding an envelope as though it might bite him.

“I’ve woken you,” he said.

“No.”

Hartley looked past him at the lit lamp and the open books. “I’ve interrupted you, at least.”

“Come in, Professor.”

The older man stepped inside and stood in the only open square foot the room provided, taking in the organized disorder with an expression Li had seen before — part academic approval, part something more personal, as if the room confirmed a theory he had been quietly developing. Hartley had a habit of forming theories about people and then waiting patiently for them to prove themselves correct. Li had found this both flattering and faintly irritating, which was true of most things about Hartley.

“Sit,” Li said, pulling the desk chair out. He himself leaned against the windowsill, arms crossed. “What is it?”

Hartley sat. He turned the envelope over once, then set it on the desk between them like a man placing the first tile in a game whose rules he was still negotiating.

“Do you know the name Chen Boming?”

Li thought. “Curator. Hunan Provincial Museum, or he was, before the reorganization. He published a monograph on Han-period ritual bronzes in ’37 that your department used to recommend but stopped recommending after it became inconvenient to recommend books by scholars still working under —” He stopped. “He’s in Changsha.”

“He was in Changsha,” Hartley said. “This letter is six weeks old. It came through three separate sets of hands before it reached mine, which explains the delay and also explains why I do not know with any certainty what his situation is at present.” He paused. “He has found something, Li.”

“Tell me.”

Hartley told him. It took twelve minutes, because Hartley narrated the way he lectured — with full context, proper sourcing, and a structured argument that arrived at its conclusion only after it had earned the right to do so. Li listened without interrupting, which was a skill he had spent considerable effort developing. On the street, you learned to gather information quickly and move. At Oxford, you learned that some information was worth the slower collection. He was still calibrating when each approach applied.

What Hartley described was a jade bi disc — a ritual object, circular, flat, with a central perforation, a form that had existed in Chinese culture for thousands of years and accumulated meaning the way rivers accumulated sediment: slowly, in layers, until the weight of it became the thing itself. This one was Han Dynasty, or so Chen believed, and its provenance was extraordinary — recovered from a collapsed site in the hills outside Changsha by a farmer who had not understood what he had and had, with great good fortune, brought it to someone who did.

The inscription was what had stopped Chen cold.

Bi discs carried inscriptions. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that this inscription, read carefully against the conventions of Han-period encoded verse — a specialized sub-field in which Chen was one of perhaps eight scholars currently alive with the relevant expertise — appeared to be directional. Not ceremonial. Not dedicatory. A record disguised as a prayer, pointing toward something that had been deliberately hidden.

“He believes it is a map,” Hartley said.

“Of what kind?”

“That is precisely what he doesn’t know. The disc alone is incomplete — he is certain of it. But what he does know is that someone else has become aware of the disc’s existence and has expressed interest in acquiring it.” Hartley’s voice remained measured, but his hands, Li noted, had tightened slightly around the edge of the desk. “Japanese intelligence has been active throughout Hunan Province for the better part of a year. They have been particularly attentive to cultural sites, private collections, and the movement of objects of historical significance.”

“Propaganda value,” Li said.

“And more. There are those within the military apparatus who take seriously the idea that material links to Chinese imperial authority could be leveraged — that possession of certain objects would carry political weight beyond their academic significance.” Hartley looked at him steadily. “Chen needs someone to come.”

The lamp flickered. Somewhere in the building, a window rattled against its latch.

Li said: “The university won’t sanction it.”

“No.”

“Your department will not fund it.”

“No.”

“We would be traveling to a country in the middle of a war, in spring, when Japanese troop movements in Hunan are —” He stopped. “You’ve already looked at the military situation.”

“I have.”

“Then you know that Changsha is currently Nationalist-held but that the Japanese have been building for another push since last year. The city has held twice. It may hold again. Or it may not, and the timetable is not something either of us can predict with confidence.” Li looked at the envelope on the desk. “You want to go before that question answers itself.”

“I want to go before Chen and the disc disappear,” Hartley said. “Which are not necessarily the same event but which could become the same event very quickly.”

Li was quiet for a moment. He looked at the Yankees cap on the shelf, not because it had anything to contribute, but because looking at it was a habit he’d developed when he needed a second to think without anyone seeing him think.

Hartley watched him and said nothing. This was one of the things Li genuinely respected about the man — he did not fill silences. He understood that some silences were working.

“I’ll need to arrange certain things before we leave for Hong Kong,” Li said.

Hartley’s breath released slowly. “You’ll come.”

“You can’t go without me. Your Mandarin is grammatically correct and completely unconvincing, and your Cantonese is an act of aggression against the language.” Li uncrossed his arms and began, efficiently, to make a mental inventory. “We can book passage from Southampton within the week if we move quickly. Hong Kong first, then we reassess based on whatever current intelligence I can gather once we’re there. I have contacts.”

“You have —” Hartley paused. “You have contacts in Hong Kong.”

“I grew up there.” This was not precisely true — he had spent six formative years there — but it was true enough for the purposes of the conversation, and Li had long since stopped making unnecessary distinctions between the cities that had shaped him and the city where he had been born. Shanghai was a wound. Hong Kong was the place the wound had begun to close. He did not draw attention to the difference.

“The university will consider this unauthorized leave,” Hartley said, with the tone of a man recording an objection for the official record while fully intending to ignore it.

“I’m aware.”

“There may be consequences.”

“Professor.” Li looked at him directly. “Write your letter to the dean. Date it after we leave.”

Hartley studied him for a long moment. Then something shifted in the older man’s expression — not quite surprise, because Li suspected Hartley had expected something like this, but a species of satisfaction that looked almost like relief. As if the theory had just proven correct.

“I’ll have passage arranged by Thursday,” Hartley said, picking up the envelope and rising. At the door, he turned. “You should sleep, Li.”

“After the chapter.”

Hartley made a sound that might have been amusement and let himself out.

Li stood alone in his room and looked at the space Hartley had occupied. Then he looked at the envelope-shaped absence on the desk where the letter had been, now gone with the professor. Then he sat down, opened his notebook, and did not return to the Han Dynasty.

Instead he wrote, in Chinese, a short list of names — people in Hong Kong who owed him information, or favors, or both. People who would know about Japanese intelligence activity in Hunan. People who moved quietly through the space between the British colonial apparatus and the Chinese community that lived alongside it, neither fully inside nor outside either world. He had learned to find those people. They had, in many ways, taught him to be one of them.

He wrote the list and then he closed the notebook and then, against his own intentions, he slept.

---

They arrived in Hong Kong twelve days later, stepping off a BOAC flying boat into a harbor that smelled of salt and diesel and something frying in a wok somewhere close by — a smell that hit Li in the sternum like a physical thing and rearranged something in his chest that Oxford had spent nearly two years quietly displacing.

Hartley stood on the dock with his leather bag and his expression of scholarly attention, cataloguing the harbor as if he intended to write a paper on it. Li stood beside him and was briefly, privately, fifteen years old again.

He had come to Hong Kong with very little — a recommendation from a man Indy had known, a handful of English phrases learned from Hollywood pictures, and the survivor’s instinct for reading which strangers in a crowd were safe and which were not. He had enrolled in the Anglican mission school on Hartley’s eventual recommendation, which was to say on the recommendation of a letter from Indy that had reached Hartley through channels Li had never fully traced, and which he suspected had involved more personal vouching than either man had admitted. He had been a difficult student in the ways that mattered least and an exceptional one in the ways that mattered most. He had also, during those years, built something — a web of relationships so unremarkable in their apparent nature that no one looking at them from outside would have called them a network, but which functioned as one.

Within two hours of their arrival, while Hartley was settling into the hotel and writing letters, Li had drunk tea with a woman who ran a printing shop in Sheung Wan and learned that yes, Japanese intelligence interest in Hunan artifacts had been confirmed through at least two separate sources. He had shared a meal with a man who repaired watches and knew more about the movement of people and information through southern China than any newspaper. And he had stood outside a shipping office on a street in Wan Chai and watched a man he did not recognize watch the street in a way that was not the way ordinary men watched streets.

The man was not looking for anything. He was waiting to see if something appeared.

Li did not change his pace or his expression. He bought a newspaper from a stand across the street, considered the headlines — the war in Europe, the war here, the particular exhaustion of a world that had been at war for so long that the word itself had stopped conveying adequate information — and walked back to the hotel.

Hartley was at his desk when Li knocked and entered.

“We have a problem,” Li said. “Or we will have one, if we don’t move soon.”

He described the man on the street. He described, with the economical precision that Hartley had come to appreciate, what the man’s posture and positioning indicated about his purpose. He did not say how he knew these things, and Hartley did not ask, which was one of the many reasons this particular collaboration was functional.

“Fang?” Hartley asked, which surprised Li slightly — the professor had done his own reading on who might be watching Chen’s communications.

“I don’t know yet. Possibly someone working for someone working for someone who is working for Fang. The distance matters less than the fact of the attention.” Li set down his newspaper. “We should book passage on the river vessel to Yueyang tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight.”

Hartley looked at his half-written letter, then at Li, then back at the letter with an expression that suggested a conversation he was having with himself about the relationship between prudence and scholarship. Prudence won, as it usually did when Li made his case without adjectives.

“I’ll finish this later,” Hartley said, and capped his pen.

Li crossed to the window and looked down at the harbor, at the boats and the salt-light on the water and the city going about its loud, layered, tireless business. He was thinking about Chen Boming, alone in Changsha with a jade disc that had survived two thousand years and might not survive this one. He was thinking about a map encoded in stone, pointing toward something someone had buried so carefully that it had taken until now to be found.

He was also thinking, in the way he often did when he was about to move into danger — not with sentiment, but with a specificity that felt like taking inventory — of a dig in Greece a long time ago. Of a man who had looked at a promising but inexperienced kid and somehow decided, against all available evidence, that the kid was worth taking seriously.

He thought of this for exactly as long as it was useful.

Then he picked up his bag and went to find a boat.

---

End of Act One