This is an unofficial work of fan fiction. Indiana Jones, Short Round, and related characters are the property of Lucasfilm Ltd. This story is shared for entertainment purposes only and no commercial claim is made.

Act Two: Into Occupied China

The river vessel was called the Dongting Plum and it smelled powerfully of fish, engine oil, and the particular damp that accumulates in wood that has been wet for thirty years and never fully dried. Hartley had taken one look at the sleeping arrangements — two narrow bunks in a cabin that also served as storage for rope and spare parts — and arranged his expression into something that could generously be called philosophical acceptance.

Li had slept in worse places before he was twelve. He did not say this.

They moved up the Xiang River through two days of low cloud and intermittent rain, the Hunan hills rising green and indifferent on either bank. There was other traffic on the water — fishing boats, supply vessels, a government launch that passed them going south with its flag snapping — and Li watched all of it from the bow with the quiet attention of someone who had learned, long ago, that the things worth watching were rarely the things that announced themselves. The Japanese army had pushed to within a day’s march of this river the previous autumn. They had been beaten back. They were coming again. Everyone on this river knew it, in the way that people who live close to a thing that wants to destroy them develop a particular sensitivity to its approach, the way animals know weather.

Hartley spent the first day reading and the second day talking to the boat’s captain, a weathered woman of sixty-odd years named Madam Zhu who had been running cargo on the Xiang since before Hartley had begun his academic career and who regarded his Mandarin with the polite patience of someone listening to a child attempt a difficult poem. Li translated when necessary, which was often, and did not translate certain things Madam Zhu said under her breath, which was a professional courtesy he had extended to British academics before and expected he would again.

On the evening of the second day, as they neared Yueyang and the light went the color of old bronze on the water, Hartley came to stand beside Li at the bow.

“She said something,” Hartley observed. “Just now. When I asked about the Nationalist checkpoint at Yueyang. You didn’t translate it.”

“She said that British professors asking about military checkpoints on this river is how people get shot.”

Hartley considered this. “I see. And her actual recommendation?”

“Let me do the talking at the checkpoint.” Li glanced at him. “Which I had already intended to do.”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m not unaware, you know, of the particular — of what it costs you to shepherd me through these situations.”

Li looked at the water. “It doesn’t cost me anything.”

“I mean the indignity of it. A young man of your ability and education, required to translate and manage and smooth the path for —”

“Professor.” Li said it quietly, without sharpness. “I do these things because they are necessary and because I am good at them. Not because you require managing.” He let a moment pass. “Also, your Mandarin really is quite poor.”

Hartley made a sound that was almost certainly a laugh, swallowed before it could fully form. He looked out at the hills.

“What was she like?” he asked. “Hong Kong, when you arrived.”

This was not a question Li had expected, and the fact of its unexpectedness was itself interesting — a signal that Hartley had been thinking about something for longer than the conversation suggested. Li did not answer immediately. He watched a fishing boat pass, its lamp already lit against the darkening water.

“Loud,” he said finally. “And layered. Like a conversation happening in several languages at once where everyone understood some of what was being said and no one understood all of it.” A pause. “I understood more of it than most people expected.”

“I imagine you did.” Hartley was quiet for a moment. “Dr. Jones’s letter described you as the most resourceful person he had ever encountered in the field. He said it as though it were a simple statement of fact, which I found more convincing than if he had labored the point.”

Li said nothing. The lamp on the fishing boat moved away downstream.

“He didn’t know your name,” Hartley continued. “He wrote about you for two full pages and referred to you throughout as Short Round. I spent some time wondering what to make of that.”

“It’s what he called me.”

“I know. But it isn’t who you are.”

Li turned and looked at the older man directly. Hartley met his eyes without flinching, which was more than some Oxford dons managed. There was something in his expression that wasn’t pity and wasn’t admiration exactly — something more careful than either, the look of a person who has formed a considered opinion and is presenting it plainly.

“No,” Li said. “It isn’t.”

He went below to check their packs before the checkpoint, because there was always something useful to do before a checkpoint, and because some conversations were complete when they ended and did not need to be extended.

---

Changsha received them with the wary hospitality of a city that had survived more than it had expected to and was not yet sure what it was surviving toward.

It was a city of walls and water, of old lanes running between whitewashed buildings and newer scars where those buildings had not survived 1938. The great fire of that year — set by the Nationalist government itself to deny the Japanese a prize — had consumed a third of the city and claimed thousands of lives, a catastrophe of defensive logic that the residents of Changsha had not forgotten and had not forgiven, and which expressed itself now in a particular quality of wariness toward authority of any kind. People here had learned that the people responsible for protecting them were capable of burning their homes down in the name of strategy.

Li felt this in the streets without needing to be told it. He had grown up alongside a version of this feeling. He knew its weight.

They found Chen Boming in a narrow building near the river, up a staircase that smelled of mildew and old paper, in a room that served as both his office and his living quarters and which contained, by Li’s count, more books than could possibly be structurally advisable given the evident state of the floor. He was a compact man with close-cropped grey hair and the kind of face that had been through several weathers and come out the other side without losing the capacity for expression. He was drinking tea when they arrived and he poured two more cups before anyone spoke, which Li took as a good sign — people who poured tea before introductions were people who understood that the social architecture of a conversation mattered.

He looked at Hartley with a kind of measured cordiality and then at Li with something sharper and more immediate, the look of a man rapidly reordering his assumptions.

He said, in Mandarin: “You’re young.”

Li replied, in Hunanese dialect: “You’re in a building that is losing an argument with gravity.”

Something shifted in Chen’s face — not quite a smile but the precursor to one, a recalibration. He set down his tea.

“Good Hunanese,” he said, switching to match Li’s dialect. “Where from?”

“My mother’s family came from here.” This was what Li knew, or what he had pieced together from things heard and half-remembered and not spoken of for a long time. He said it without inflection, and Chen received it the same way, understanding without comment that there was a history here that belonged to Li and not to the conversation.

Hartley, who had followed none of this exchange, looked between them with the patience of a man accustomed to being temporarily excluded from proceedings he had theoretically organized. Li switched to English.

“He wants to show us the disc.”

---

The bi was kept inside a wooden box inside a canvas bag inside a larger box of unremarkable-looking agricultural supplies — a nesting concealment that Chen had designed with the practical ingenuity of someone who had been hiding things from armies for four years. He lifted it out with the care that people reserve for objects they have stopped thinking of as objects and started thinking of as responsibilities.

It was extraordinary.

Li had read about bi discs. He had seen photographs in Hartley’s books, handled small examples at the Ashmolean under supervision, absorbed the academic literature with the efficient thoroughness that Oxford rewarded. None of that had prepared him for the particular quality of attention the disc commanded when it was simply there, in a room, catching the lamplight.

It was deep green nephrite, almost thirty centimeters across, the surface worn to a luminosity that only centuries produced. The decoration was restrained by Han standards — grain patterns around the outer edge, a band of interlocking cloud motifs inside those — but the inscription was what stopped him. It ran in a spiral from the outer rim toward the central perforation, dense and precise, the characters cut with a control that suggested either extraordinary skill or extraordinary patience, possibly both.

Hartley leaned over it immediately, his scholar’s hunger overcoming everything else. He was murmuring to himself in the way he did when something arrested him fully, a half-voiced monologue of observation and cross-reference that Li had learned to find privately reassuring — it meant the professor’s mind was fully engaged and he was unlikely to say anything inadvertent to anyone for at least twenty minutes.

Li crouched beside the disc and looked at the inscription without touching it.

He read. Then he read again, more slowly, working through the particular conventions of Han encoded verse that he had spent the last term studying under Hartley’s direction, the way a phrase could mean one thing when read forward and something structurally different when read against its own meter, the way direction could be embedded in language that appeared to be saying something else entirely.

He looked up at Chen. “You said incomplete.”

“It stops here.” Chen’s finger moved near but not over the disc, indicating a section of the inscription where the text shifted, subtly, in register. “The verse changes — different register. Like it’s waiting for something to answer it.”

“A second text.”

“A second disc.” Chen reached into his coat and produced a folded paper — a rubbing, Li recognized, made from some other surface. He unfolded it carefully. ” Three months ago a monk brought this to me. East of here. Said he found it in old papers — his teacher’s papers, or his teacher’s teacher’s. Han rubbing. I think it’s the other half.” He looked at Li steadily. ” Together you can read it. Alone, neither one says anything useful.”

Li sat back on his heels and thought about what it meant to divide a map between two objects, to make the knowledge inert through separation. It was a very particular kind of thinking — not the thinking of someone who wanted to preserve a secret but of someone who wanted to ensure that the secret could never be read by a single hostile party. You needed both halves. You needed, presumably, someone who understood what they were looking at when they had them.

He was about to say something when he heard it.

Not a sound exactly — a quality of quiet. The absence of the street noise that had been present since they arrived, the low continuous texture of the city going about its business, suddenly attenuated. Like a conversation pausing.

He stood in a single movement and was at the window before either of the other men had registered the change.

Below, in the lane, two Nationalist soldiers were speaking to a man in civilian clothes. The man was listening with the particular quality of attention of someone receiving rather than exchanging information. He was well-dressed for Changsha — city clothes, not field clothes, the kind of quality that did not come from local tailors. He had the bearing of someone accustomed to rooms where decisions were made.

He glanced up, briefly, at no window in particular, in the manner of someone confirming an address.

Li stepped back.

“We have a problem,” he said. “And I need to know something before I tell you how serious it is.” He looked at Chen. “How many people know you contacted Professor Hartley?”

Chen’s expression underwent a rapid, controlled journey from stillness to understanding to something that was not quite fear but was adjacent to it. “Three. Possibly four, if one of the three was not as careful as he believed himself to be.”

“Then it’s serious.” Li moved to their packs and began checking them with quick, practiced efficiency. “The man below is not a soldier. He’s an intelligence broker. He works for the occupiers, or for people who work for the occupiers, and the distinction matters less than the fact that he appears to know where this building is.”

Hartley straightened from the disc. “How do you know what he is?”

“Because a man who lives here and has nothing to hide does not look up at a building the way that one just looked up at this building.” Li glanced at him. “And because the man I described to you in Hong Kong had the same quality of stillness. They’re connected.”

A silence.

“You suspected that in Hong Kong,” Hartley said. “And you didn’t say so.”

“I suspected it was possible. I didn’t know whether it was the same network or a coincidence.” Li set down the disc carefully. “It isn’t a coincidence.”

Hartley absorbed this with the expression of a man recalibrating a relationship in real time. It was not an angry expression. It was something more complicated — the look of a person understanding that the person they thought they were in charge of has been quietly running a parallel assessment of the situation all along.

“What do we do?” he said.

Li looked at the disc, at the rubbing, at the box and the canvas bag and the layered concealment that had not been enough.

“First, the disc goes back into its nesting,” he said. “Second, Chen —” he switched to Mandarin, “— what is the fastest route east from this building that does not use the main roads?”

Chen told him.

Li filed it. Then he said, still in Mandarin: “The rubbing. The monastery. How far?”

“Two days on foot through the hills. There is a path that the soldiers don’t use, old rice trade route.” Chen paused. “I have not told Hartley about the rubbing. About what it means that the disc is incomplete.”

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t sure who Hartley would bring. Needed to see first.” Chen looked at him steadily. “The disc by itself — someone takes it, it’s a loss, but not a disaster. Both pieces together, that’s different. That’s something that cannot fall to the wrong people. So I waited.”

Li understood this completely. He also understood that it placed him, not Hartley, at the center of this decision, and that Chen had known exactly what he was doing when he made that calculation.

“And now?” Li asked.

“Now I think we should leave,” Chen said simply.

Li went to Hartley and switched back to English. “There’s something else. Something Chen needs to explain to both of us, but not here.” He picked up his pack. “The full picture is more complicated than we discussed in Oxford. The disc alone is not what we came for.”

Hartley looked at him for a long moment. Then he picked up his own bag without argument, which was either trust or pragmatism, and Li found he did not particularly need to determine which.

---

They left through the building’s rear, into a lane that smelled of charcoal and cabbage water, Chen leading, Li watching behind. The Nationalist soldiers had moved on. The well-dressed man was no longer visible, which Li found less reassuring than his continued presence would have been — visible problems were problems you could track.

They moved through the old quarter in the low early-evening light, through lanes too narrow for military vehicles, past shuttered shops and doorways where old men sat and watched them pass with the incurious attention of people who had learned that being incurious was a form of protection. Li matched his pace to Chen’s and kept Hartley between them, which placed the most physically capable person at the rear and the most valuable person — the one who knew Han orthography well enough to read what they were carrying — in the middle.

In the hills above the city, where a farmer’s track climbed east between terraced fields, Chen finally told Hartley about the rubbing and the monastery and the companion text. He told it plainly, without drama, and Hartley listened with the focused attention of a scholar encountering a problem that had just become considerably more interesting than he had previously understood it to be.

When Chen finished, Hartley was quiet for a moment.

“So the disc is a question,” he said. “And the rubbing is the form in which the answer can be read.”

“More precisely,” Li said, “the disc asks something that only makes sense if you already have what the rubbing records. Without both, neither speaks.”

“And this man below the window —”

“He knows about the disc. I don’t believe he knows about the rubbing or the monastery. If he did, Chen would not still have the rubbing in his coat.”

Chen confirmed this with a look.

Hartley turned and looked back down the hill at the city below, at the lights coming on in the dusk, at the river catching the last of the sky. He was breathing harder than either of the other two — sixty-two years old, not a field man, and the last hour had required a pace that no Oxford seminar had prepared him for. But his eyes were clear and his voice, when he spoke, was steady.

“How long to the monastery?”

“Two days,” Li said. “If we move at night for the first part, to put distance between us and anyone watching the city exits.”

“At night. Through hills I don’t know.”

“Through hills I don’t know either. But Chen knows them.” Li looked at him evenly. “I told you in Oxford that I couldn’t promise this would be straightforward.”

“You said nothing of the kind. You said we should leave immediately and wrote a list of names in Chinese.”

“That was the same message.”

Hartley made the sound again — the swallowed laugh. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and turned to face the path.

“Lead on, then,” he said. “Before I have time to think carefully about any of this.”

Li moved to the front of the small group and set a pace — measured, sustainable, the pace of someone who intended to cover ground without burning through the people covering it. The hills rose dark ahead of them, the Hunan countryside folding itself into shadow. Behind them, Changsha held its breath in the way it had learned to hold it, waiting for the next thing history intended to do to it.

Li did not look back.

He had learned, a long time ago in a city very far from here, that the most dangerous thing you could do when something was behind you was to let it become the primary object of your attention. You noted it, you tracked it, and then you looked forward.

He looked forward.

The path was there. That was enough.

---

End of Act Two