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bleeding, mutilated monkey he’d seen being dragged over the wall yesterday, barely a stone’s throw from here. Did the carving have anything to do with that corpse?
    A shudder ran down Mico’s spine. He knew he was straying into forbidden territory, but his restless mind was urging him to investigate this dark mystery.
    Carefully, he wrapped the carving up in the bamboo fiber and placed it back in the wall, just as he’d found it. Then he clambered out of the shrubs, steeled himself and made his way down the gloomy path that ran along the perimeter wall.
    It wasn’t long before he found himself standing at the front of the wall gazing at the handprint stamped in blood. Already it was starting to fade; one big rainstorm and it would vanish altogether. Slowly he reached out to the bloody print, as if hoping somehow to unravel its mystery through touch—
    “Oi! You!”
    Mico spun round to see two burly elites striding toward him.
    “What you doing here?”
    “I–I…,” Mico stuttered.
    “You–you…,” the elites mocked.
    “I think someone’s been hurt. Look!” And he pointed at the handprint.
    The lead elite bent down to sniff the handprint, and then Mico saw him exchange a fleeting, shifty look with his subordinate. They knew something.
    The lead elite stood up and waved Mico aside dismissively. “There’s nothing for you here. Run along.”
    But Mico wasn’t running anywhere. Pandering to their vanity, he looked up at the elites with awestruck eyes and asked, “Was it one of our enemies?”
    A dark smirk flashed between the elites.
    “Did you deal with them?” persisted Mico.
    “As it happens, we did,” said the lead elite.
    Mico gasped. “What happened?”
    And the one thing no elite could resist was telling a good battle yarn.
    “We were so pumped, they never stood a chance,” the lead elite began. “A few lucky ones escaped. The rest…” He snapped his fangs, hinting at the brutality of their demise. “So we’d just finished cleaning up, when this rhesus bolts out of the shadows. Don’t know whether we missed him first time, or if he’d come back—”
    “Not that it mattered much,” added the junior elite.
    Even though he felt cold dread rising in his guts, Mico needed to know the truth. “So what did you do?”
    “We took him down.” The lead elite pointed to the bloody stone. “Right there.”
    Said with such malevolence, it jarred Mico’s imagination, which started painting the horror in vivid colors—in his mind he saw the rhesus scrambling through the undergrowth, desperately trying to escape.
    “He was fast, but we were faster….”
    Mico imagined the rhesus hurtling down the path, glancing back as the menacing langurs surged toward him.
    “He was going for the wall. No way could we let him escape.”
    “No way,” the other elite chuckled.
    “We circled round and slammed him.”
    “BOOM!” The junior elite leaped across the path to demonstrate.
    “Heard his bones crunch, we did.”
    The impression was so vivid, Mico felt himself reeling from the impact.
    “Oh, then he started begging for his life.”
    “Begging!”
    Mico shuddered as he pictured the helpless rhesus surrounded by langurs, violence burning in their eyes.
    “Please! I have a family,”
the elites mocked as they recalled their victim’s pleas for mercy.
    “That’s what you think!”
    The lead elite slammed his club down in the dirt next to Mico.
    “Right across his legs.”
    Mico could almost feel the spasm of pain shooting through his body.
    “Mind you, he was stubborn.”
    “Very stubborn. Tried to crawl away.” The junior elite pointed to the wall. “As you can see.”
    Mico looked at the bloody handprint, heart pounding as he shared the fear of the dying rhesus.
    “That’s when I dropped him,” the lead elite boasted. “With a rock.”
    Mico closed his eyes, feeling the horror as the rock came smashing down.
    “Epic kill!” said the lead elite.
    “Epic!” echoed his