Laks didn’t understand how Mandarin worked but it seemed like Lan Lu was both a singular and a plural noun depending on how you used it. Here, in its singular usage, it denoted one guy. It meant Blue Heron. Plural, it meant his whole crew of Blue Herons, who were called the Flock. They favored knee-length changshan jackets in dark blue slubbed silk, textured and yet shimmery, with protruding white cuffs, and gray trousers beneath. They were from Hong Kong. They practiced a style of wushu that had originated in Tibet but had been somehow exported to Kowloon late in the twentieth century and re-interpreted by wushu schools there. Much had been made of its Tibetan origins by Chinese propagandists who wanted to get people to believe it was an example of benign cultural integration. But this dude Lan Lu was a Cantonese speaker by upbringing, a Mandarin speaker when it suited him. And as far as Laks could tell there was no trace of Tibetan ancestry in any of the Flock. Their style relied on enveloping arm movements, said to be inspired by herons’ wings, out of which came vicious pinpoint strikes like the ones that herons used to stun and impale small ground-dwelling creatures with their beaks. Whenever possible those strikes were aimed at nerve centers where they would inflict crippling pain out of proportion to their apparent power.