Free The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway Page B

after a minute or so of silence. No point.
    Lasserly walks out. On his way, he puts his immense finger on my chest. I feel the solidity of him, his body lined up behind the touch. He could channel his whole weight through that finger, probably punch it right through me. I shouldn’t have let him get that close.
    â€œYou’re wasting your time,” Lasserly snarls. “This guy doesn’t know any Secrets.” And he walks out, slamming the door so that the china ducks wobble against the plaster.
    We practise in silence. Master Wu looks very sad.
    On the night of this dark day, when Master Wu has finished wrapping himself around his third slice of apple cake, and is contemplating the advisability of wrapping himself around a fourth, Elisabeth is moved to ask him about Lasserly. The question starts as a curiosity, but by the time she has finished asking it her voice has risen because she cannot hold in her fury any longer, or her shame.
    â€œWhy didn’t you
fight
him?” And then she hears her own question and is abashed.
    Master Wu shrugs. “Mr. Lasserly wanted to know if I knew Secrets,” he says. “He wanted to fight me so that he could find out. And now he thinks he knows the answer. He knows that I was so absolutely sure of which way it would go that I didn’t want to fight him.”
    â€œBut he thinks he would have won!” And this, in the end, is the heart of the matter, because in Lasserly’s certainty our own is eroded.
    â€œOh, goodness me,” says Master Wu, with vast sincerity, “I didn’t mean for him to have that impression at all!” He opens his eyes very wide, as if realising for the first time how it must have looked. “Oh dear! I am so
clumsy
! Do you think I should call him and tell him that I would have beaten him because he has stiff legs, moves like a cow and tenses his shoulders? But,” says Master Wu happily, “he didn’t leave a number. Well, never mind.” And he laughs. “There are no Secrets,” he says, “but there are lots of things I don’t feel like telling someone like Mr. Lasserly. That’s not how you keep Secrets at all—not,” Master Wu says, with great delight, “that there are any.”
    â€œAre there? Secrets?”
    â€œSecrets?” Master Wu says, as if he’s never heard of any such thing. Elisabeth looks at him sternly.
    â€œYes,” she says. “Inside-the-door. Inner Teachings.”
    â€œOh,” says Master Wu, “those Secrets.” And he smiles.
    â€œThose Secrets,” Elisabeth repeats a moment later, when Wu Shenyang’s eyes once again roam in the direction of the apple cake, and she realises that the expression of deep division on his face relates to it, and not to the arcana of the chi.
    â€œYou mean like the Internal Alchemies? The Iron Skin Meditation and the Ghost Palm Strike?”
    The Iron Skin makes a warrior immune to physical weapons; the Ghost Palm passes through solid matter—it cannot be avoided or deflected. I have seen them in movies. I did not know that girls watched those sorts of movies.
    â€œYes,” says Elisabeth.
    â€œWell, no,” says Master Wu, “there aren’t really any of those.”
    This is what he tells everyone who asks, and everyone asks sooner or later. Master Wu has few students, but some of them have students of their own, and one or two of those also have students, spread out across the globe in a great tree of tuition and discovery and experimentation and instruction, but the root is here in Cricklewood Cove, and here it is that every student of whatever level eventually comes to meet Master Wu. Each generation of student is supposed to acknowledge a kind of family relationship with the ones around—we have Voiceless Dragon elder uncles and aunts from Eastbourne to Westhaven, and countless brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. Some are brash and some are