Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020complete | Page 245

Future Adventures of the Greater Bay Area
Singapore International School, Chou, Vanisa - 10
Bang! A blinding light and a deafening explosive sound. Li Ying fell at first in a crumpled heap on the
ground before she slowly began to float into the air.
She blinked hard. “Where am I?” she wondered. Her thoughts flew rapidly and memories flooded her
mind.
Blood splattered everywhere, pain sliced through her body like a knife cutting through her, the sounds of
sirens pierced through her head like a machine gun.
The image of a bus toppled over and fire spreading rapidly. Then darkness! She was lying in a coffin and
next to hers, two other coffins with her parents in them. The only person, the only person that she loved
the most, had survived - her younger brother, Li Fu. She did not know where he was or where he had
gone but she knew that she needed to find him and see for herself that he was well.
It was the Ghost Month and Li Ying had exactly 30 days to find him. She had found her way back to their
home in Duanzhou but the 10 storey flat that she had lived in had disappeared. She had wandered around
day after day - nothing was what it should be and Li Ying wondered if she was in Zhaoqing at all. All
around her, glass towers soared into the sky. People scurried around seemingly talking into the air but on
closer inspection, they had glass portals like computer screens in front of them. These flickered on and off, in
the air, endlessly.
“Yikes, watch it!” A high-pitched voice yelled and in the same moment, a strange looking contraption
appeared before her eyes. It was shaped like a capsule and had the words Lai Chi Feng 34455433 on it. The
capsule was so close that it had almost knocked Li Ying over. It hovered, a door slid opened, and out
stepped a pretty pink cheeked girl around her own age.
“Don’t you know that you should not be standing here? It’s a landing spot for heli-capsules!” she said as she
hopped onto the ground.
Li Ying stared helplessly, speechlessly. She had watched a magic show once before, was this girl a magician?
“Wait a minute”, the girl continued. “Where are you from? Your clothes are so strange. How can you
hover in the air? Is it a new teleport app that I don’t know about?” She swished her first finger in the air, her
fingers swiped up and down, left and right. Screens dashed around vigorously but Li Ying had caught the
words “18 August 2080”. What? 2080? Li Ying had died in 2020, sixty years ago! She had not traveled to
another place, she had traveled through time!