Red Moon

CHAPTER SIX liangzichanjie Entanglement

As he was marched away, Fred glanced over his shoulder at Ta Shu. Ta Shu looked shocked. Fred felt hands gripping his upper arms, tight as the grip of Earth itself, which was driving him toward the floor and causing him to stumble. A jolt of fearful adrenaline kept him on his feet, but barely, as his knees were buckling with every step. Back in custody! No! Although in fact he had never really felt out of custody. Helplessly he watched Ta Shu recede.

Their captors kept him with the young Chinese woman Qi, whom they had also taken into custody. As they were hurried along an empty hallway she moved to his left side, then slipped her arm under his. This startled him, as she had not given him a second glance during their transit to Earth.

Now she said under her breath to him, in English, “Don’t tell them anything. I’m going to tell them you’re the father.”

“Who?”

She elbowed him. “The father of my baby.”

“Why?”

“I want to distract them. Just be quiet.”

This Fred could do. They were led down long gray corridors that were much like the tunnels on the moon, except for their gravity. Eventually they were put in a small room, and just in time: the short walk had been enough to exhaust Fred. He sat heavily on a bench. The young woman sat next to him.

“Why are you here?” she asked him in a low voice.

“I don’t know. Why are you?”

“Because I’m pregnant.”

“That’s not allowed?”

“Right. It’s illegal to get pregnant there. Not to mention stupid.”

“Because why?”

She stared at him. “Think about it,” she suggested. Her English was very practiced, and had a slight British accent to it, or something like a British accent.

Fred thought about it. Possibly it was bad for a fetus to develop on the moon; possibly there was population control up there. He didn’t know enough to say. “So why did you do it?”

She shrugged. “A mistake.”

“Sorry to hear.” He gestured at the closed door. “What now?”

“I’m going to get us out of here.”

“Really?”

“We’ll see. I’ll be trying. Just stick with me.”

The door opened and they watched two men and a woman come into the room.

Qi began to speak in Chinese, quietly but insistently. The three visitors listened to her without reaction at first, but then the two men pursed their lips and looked annoyed, and the woman’s face reddened. Fred wondered what Qi was saying to cause this. Then their three visitors began to look concerned. They weren’t looking at each other. It occurred to Fred that he should try to look dangerous, but in truth he had nothing. It was easier to mirror their worried look.

Eventually one of the men raised a hand and said something, clearly trying to stop Qi from talking. She didn’t stop. Then after a couple more minutes she did, ending with something emphatic and definitive. The whole time her voice had stayed low, but she had spoken quickly and intently, and had sounded as if she were lecturing them about something they should already have known.

Their captors led them out of the room and along another hallway, then down a jetway and into a small jet. They all strapped in and after ten minutes took off. It felt like slow motion to Fred after his landing on the moon, he even worried for a moment that they were going too slowly to achieve lift-off. But the plane rose in the usual manner, and then they were looking down on scrubby steep hills.

“Did it work?” Fred asked Qi.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it might have. We’ll find out.”

After about an hour the plane descended over a vast city of lights, into an airport that as they descended seemed to spread all the way to the horizon.

Their jet landed and trundled over to another jetway. They were led through an airport that reminded Fred of the spaceport they had come from: giant steel-girded rooms, glass walls—everything vast, utilitarian, grim.

They were led around customs by way of a side door, and after that were waved along by guards who resolutely ignored them. Through the baggage claim area, then again through closed doors to one side. Then onto a small bus. They got in the backseat and strapped in next to each other. The three people who had been with them from the spaceport looked into the little bus, then stood back. Off the bus went. It seemed to be driving itself; the man sitting in the front appeared to be some kind of conductor or guard. It was dusk. The world reduced to lines of headlights and taillights.

Qi leaned forward to talk to this man. She seemed to be asking questions. The monitor said nothing.

“Where are we going?” Fred asked her.

She didn’t bother to reply.

They got into traffic, slowed down. Fred looked out the window. He had traveled on business to Beijing three times, but that was no help now in determining whether they were there or not.

“What did you say to them?”

“I told them how much trouble they were headed for.”

“And so?”

“I think they might be getting rid of us.”

“Getting rid of us? That sounds bad.”

“We’ll see.”

“Should we jump out?” They were stopped in traffic at the moment.

“We’re locked in.”

“So you think this guy will let us go?”

“The van will do it, but yes. I think he’s just along to make sure everything goes okay.”

Fred shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“Yes.”

An hour of stop-and-go traffic. Then one sign had English words on it under the big Chinese characters: SECOND RING ROAD. They crossed this broad boulevard. Qi began talking to their conductor.

Finally they stopped. The conductor said something, the door locks thunked.

“Come on,” Qi said.

“What’s happening?” Fred said.

“Just come on.”

They got out of the van and walked across the road, then over a small old stone bridge that spanned a narrow canal, which ran in a stone-sided cleft deep below street level. On the sidewalk paralleling the canal, a crowd strolled in the chill starry night. Qi looked into each of the glass walls fronting the clubs set back from the road. Small bands inside these clubs played music to tightly packed crowds. These venues alternated with restaurants that were stuffed with patrons focused on hot pots and talk. Qi kept Fred on the restaurant side of her, ducking her head down. There were security cameras over most of the doorways. Fred saw there were more such little black boxes hanging like fruit from the branches of the gnarled old trees overhanging the sidewalk.

“Where can we go?” he said uneasily.

“There’s a waffle shop I know,” she said.

“Won’t the cameras there recognize you?”

“They run a fake feed into their camera.”

“How do they get away with that?”

“Gifts. There are people who go there who don’t want to be seen, and people who will take gifts to keep them not seen.”

“How near is it?”

“Just around the corner here.”

“Good. So look, what happened back there? Why did they let us go?”

“They were scared.” She laughed grimly. “There’s no one who wants to be caught in possession of me. They would pay too high a price. That’s what I told those people. I reminded them what would happen to them if they were the ones who had me when my father’s people located me.” Her look turned dark, Fred shuddered to see it. He understood suddenly that this was a person from a different world. Then she glanced at him and laughed again. “No one likes to think some old Ming torturer might grab their family and take them away.”

“Could that happen?”

“What, do you think torture doesn’t happen? Aren’t you an American?”

“What do you mean?”

She stared at him. “I guess I mean that you’re good at ignoring it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously not.”

“But I saw that you scared them.”

“Easy to do. No one wants to cross my father.”

“He’s powerful?”

“Yes. And it’s not just him. Although he is used to getting his way. But his security team, and the whole security apparatus at the top, they’re dangerous people.”

“Is that why you went to the moon?”

“I wanted to get some distance, yes. And I did. While I was there I slipped away from my security too. That was a lot harder than getting away from these people who just had us.”

“You’re good at getting away?”

“Pretty good. Lots of practice, anyway.”

“How come?”

“I was brought up in a Swiss prison.”

“A Swiss prison?” Fred repeated, startled.

“A boarding school,” she explained, looking amused at his literal-mindedness. “Very secure.”

“And yet you got out.”

“Three times.”

“Impressive.”

“Well, I was caught twice.”

“I guess it must be hard to get away these days,” Fred ventured. “Like now. There are cameras everywhere.”

“But their pictures go different places. The system is balkanized.”

“What if these cameras send our pictures to the wrong place?”

“They don’t work as well at night. Only the ones that check your gait, so change your usual stride.”

“How long can that work?”

“Not long. But we have some friends to help us.”

“Us?” Fred asked. “You’re helping me?”

She stopped, so he did too. He watched the sidewalk as she regarded him. “Jiang told me what happened to you,” she said. “You were used to kill someone, from what he said. So if the people who used you for that get hold of you again, they’ll probably kill you.”

“But I don’t remember anything.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Could you—could you get me to the American embassy?”

“That’s where they’ll have people looking for you. And there are people looking for me too. They know I was with you when we were released, so they’ll keep your embassy watched.”

“I could get there on my own?” Fred suggested.

“Could you?”

He looked around uncertainly. She laughed shortly at the look on his face.

“No,” she said. “I would have to take you there. But I need to hide. So if you want to go off on your own, fine. Do it. But if you stick with me, I can hide you. That will keep you away from the people looking for you, and if my friends can get it sorted out, I mean who was using you, that would help you. And it might even help me. It might give me some leverage.”

“But I don’t remember anything!”

She sighed. “They don’t know that. Come on, think it through.”

“Leverage for what?” Fred asked, trying to catch up.

“Just leverage. There are fights going on where some leverage could help. Meanwhile I’m offering to hide you! So come on, if you’re coming.”

Fred felt the Earth’s gravity bearing down on him. He was confused, he didn’t know what to think. His tendency to think of the world as a potentiality state awaiting the wave collapse of a decision now mocked him. Yes, the world was a fog of probabilities, yes, one could only learn partial truths by making decisions about what to do. Now it was time to make a decision.

“Where are we going again?”

“First a waffle shop.”

“Which is where?”

She didn’t even give him a look, being busy glancing around the street. She clutched his hand and pulled him along like a recalcitrant child. Past rows of bars and restaurants, down a dark alley—a hutong, Fred guessed, an old-style Beijing residential alley, which was only wide enough for one small car, if that. Low roofs of gray tile upcurved at the beam ends—everything mossy, dusty, ancient. Big red doorways with giant iron knobs on them, all recessed into the walls fronting the alley. No obvious cameras here, though of course tiny cameras could be tucked anywhere, and probably were.

They emerged from the hutong onto another broad busy highway. A sea of trucks and cars passed before them, all humming quietly on their own, and only en masse creating a buzz like a vast refrigerator, or a beehive. Articulated buses had dedicated lanes of their own, they were like subways on the land. It was amazing to see bike riders out in the middle of this traffic trundling stubbornly along. Qi led Fred between two buildings, then across a street as wide as two American highways, after waiting a long time for a pedestrian light. After that down another narrow street, Fred trying to lengthen his stride as Qi had suggested. It made him clumsy, she tugged on his hand. The heavy gravity, or his recent poisoning, or some combination of the two, was really hammering him.

Finally she pulled him into a two-story glass-fronted restaurant; it had a big open interior, with a small balcony at the back overlooking everything. The tall airy space was crowded with old chandeliers hanging at different levels, most of them ornate crystal antiquated things, but also a few big wooden rings, black glass mobiles, and dusty faceted mirror balls. All of them hanging in the air together made for a weird kind of magnificence.

Qi said something to the young woman at the front, who looked shocked and then hurried to the back. Qi led Fred up broad glass stairs to the balcony, where she sat them at a long table. Everyone in the restaurant could look up and see them, and this exposure caused Fred to look at people even less than usual. Qi ordered from a waitress, and when waffles came for both of them, she poured green syrup over hers and ate. Fred had his with maple syrup and whipped cream, feeling suddenly famished. He tried to think and failed.

“Do you feel the gravity?” he asked her.

She nodded, swallowed. “It’s pretty bad,” she allowed.

The table they were sitting at was long and communal. After about half an hour, a young couple sat down next to them. Qi ignored them and kept eating. Then she began to talk to them in Chinese, as if introducing herself, and they chatted for a while, as if about inconsequential things. Just a matter of being polite to tablemates. Possibly it was a Beijing custom, Fred thought. Despite the crowds everywhere, people seemed friendly. Was this a Beijing thing, or China in general? Strangers just talking to each other out of the blue, it was kind of amazing.

On the other hand, Fred suddenly saw that the people Qi was conversing with, though acting like strangers, were actually quivering a little. Suddenly he saw their nervous exhilaration. They glanced at Qi in sidelong flickers, as if to look at her too long might burn their retinas. What did it mean? Who was she?

The young couple took off their wristpads. One of them held a wristpad up to Fred’s face and took a picture, it looked like, and then plugged it into a small box in her jacket pocket. After that she slid both wristpads across the table to Qi, who scooped them up and put them in the pocket of her jacket. Abruptly she got up and said something, then led Fred down through the cloud of chandeliers and back onto the street. They left without paying, as far as Fred could tell. He asked Qi about that as they hurried down another crowded sidewalk, and impatiently she shook her head. “My friends will pay,” she said.

“So those were friends?”

“Yes. They’re arranging our train trip.”

“Train trip?”

“I told you. We need to get to a good hiding place.”

“Why weren’t they scared to be around you, like the people you talked into letting us go?”

“Maybe they were.”

“So why did they help you?”

“We’re part of a group. We work together.” She looked at him curiously. “Don’t you work with other people?”

“Yes?”

He had to think about that as he followed her down the sidewalk, under broad dusty trees. His employers gave him things to ponder and tasks to attempt, and he did what he could. They took his efforts and gave him more things to try. He brainstormed with colleagues and commented on their work, and occasionally he was sent out to activate a quantum phone, mostly when all the other facilitators were busy, but he could do it and he did. So was that what she meant by working with other people? He wasn’t sure.

Again it was crowded on the streets, though by now it was late at night, the moon gleaming between clouds wafting in from the west. It was impossible to believe they had been up there on that white ball just a few days before. Now its light shone on a broad pedestrian mall of some kind, filled with couples and small knots of families, people out on a nice summer evening. They came to a curving canal, where moonlight lay in a squiggling line over black water.

“This used to be part of the Second Ring Road,” Qi said as they hurried by the canal. “Before it was a road it was a river, connecting to the great canal. Now this part is a canal again.”

“It looks good.”

For a moment she paused and looked down at the water. “They’ve brought back some canals, anyway. It’s part of the Green Beijing movement. Liang Sicheng would be pleased. He fought for the canals and lost.”

“It looks nice.”

“It’s more than looks. When I was a child it was like being poisoned to live here. The air was black by day, white by night. You could chew it. You could feel it eating your eyes. Lots of people died from it. So they cleaned it up. It was a case of make a new China or die.”

Fred looked at her face in the moonlight, trying to understand her expression: proud but melancholy? Bitter? Fred was never good at reading faces, but now under the weight of circumstances things were blurring in his head, and it was hopeless. “Why are you on the run again?” he said.

“I want things,” she said.

Okay, hopeless. Fred gave up. They stood by the wall for a long time, so long that eventually the moon shone down on them entirely from the west side of the branch that had been bisecting it.

“We’re waiting for someone,” Fred guessed.

“For the right train.”

“A train to where?”

She didn’t answer. He suppressed all his questions, tried to content himself with the sight of her. Part of the unexpected beauty of old Beijing at night. In his previous visits he had only ever been to the city outside the Sixth Ring Road, where high rises and industrial parks dominated. Now, with lit paper globes strung through the trees and reflecting off the still water, and a paper dragon draped along the stone dragon that topped the canal wall, it seemed as if he had been transported to a China out of legend.

Qi was looking across the canal.

“What’s wrong?” Fred said.

“There’s a chaoyangqunzhong over there,” she said.

“Is that police?”

“No, just an ordinary person being a public security volunteer. They use an app on their wrists to make anonymous tips to the police.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell by the glasses they’re wearing. Here, hug me.”

She moved against him and buried her head against his shoulder. Startled, he put his face in her hair, breathed it in. Faint scent of jasmine or some other flowery shampoo.

“Will they know that you’ve spotted them,” he murmured in her hair, as if romantically. He could feel her breasts pressed into his chest, and her pregnant belly, and she had an arm up and over his shoulder and neck. He could feel her warmth.

“I don’t know,” she said, voice muffled. “I’d like to get out of here, in the direction behind me. Turn so you’re on the canal side, and help me along.”

She turned and Fred followed her instructions, bending over her and murmuring nothings. “Do you have a Western name?” he asked in a low voice. “A Western name you used at school or something?”

“Charlotte,” she said.

“Charlotte,” he said, and breathed it like a chant as they hurried along the canalside. He hunched over her as much as he could, and she watched where they were going, guided him away from people coming in their direction. When they got to the end of the canal they turned right, and when they were in a narrow dark street they picked up their pace, finally running to the next intersection, hand in hand. Again she led him, dragging him first right then left, finally into a winding street. Dim streetlights competed with the moon to make the darkest shadows.

They came to a building so big it covered three or four blocks. “We have to wait,” Qi said, looking at her wristpad. “Fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t think we were followed.”

“You don’t know. I’m chipped, so we need to wait until my friends change that.”

“Change the chip?” he asked, confused.

“Change the train station’s record of the chip.”

Her scowl was enough to stop questions, at least for now. There was a look that flashed over her face from time to time that he found a little terrifying.

The train station was the source of all kinds of noise: huge hisses and whooshes, also hums like those of a power plant. Under those, an oceanic slosh of voices; also bell tones frequently ringing. Finally Qi took his hand and strapped one of the wristpads she had gotten from her friends onto his wrist. “Time to go,” she said. “You’re with me, so I’ll do the talking.”

“What if they ask me questions in English?”

“Tell them you’re with me!” she said, and dragged him off.

The train station was completely surrounded by other buildings, it seemed to Fred; trains were apparently arriving and departing underground. One new wing on the east end of the giant building displayed posters with pictures that suggested it was a hyperloop terminal. Qi confirmed this and added that they were very fast. She looked at his wristpad and told him his name was William Janney, then marched them to broad doors at the other end of the station, where they stood in the line going through a security checkpoint. Fred worried about the chip she had mentioned, embedded in her body somewhere. Was every Chinese person chipped, or was she special? He had heard once that the Chinese all had citizenship scores, like credit ratings but more comprehensive. He had never worried about that kind of thing himself, as he was a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide. No need to pry into a book that had no pages. But now it did. Fred gulped and stood behind her, looking down, feeling conspicuous. He didn’t like anything he couldn’t control, which of course meant there was a great deal he didn’t like, but this was unusually bad.

Finally they came to the security gate and sailed through without a second glance from the guards manning it. On through a huge central hall of the station, a cathedral-like space of empty air ringed by four stacks of busy balcony malls. Qi pulled him past a wall of ticket booths, then past shops and kiosks selling everything travelers might want, then onto a platform at the far end of the building. There was a train waiting by this platform, and again they presented their wristpads. Qi said something to a conductor, a severe elderly woman, and then they were allowed to step up into the narrow hallway of the train.

Everything about it was old and battered. A slow train, a train that had carried millions of people millions of kilometers, still in service despite all. A train for poor people. They passed through a car of open seats, then crossed into the next car, which featured individual sleeper compartments, each so narrow that people turned sideways to slip through their doorways. Qi held her wristpad to one of these, and when the door clicked she pushed it in and turned to squeeze through. Fred followed her. Inside, beyond the empty space needed for the door to open, a thin low bed filled the whole of the compartment, except for a narrow slot leading to the window, where two short seats faced each other. A minimalist space, but compared to what he had seen elsewhere on the train, luxurious.

They sat down on the two seats, looked out the window. In the darkness it was hard to see anything but their reflections in the glass. That other couple looked tired and worried.

“Seems like your friends got us through,” Fred said.

“So far so good,” she said. “We’ll know after we get off.”

“Will that be long?” he asked. Then, when she didn’t reply: “Are you sure you can’t tell me where we’re going?”

“Shekou,” she said.

He didn’t know where that was, which of course she knew would be the case.

“I’m going to go to the dining car and get us some food,” she said. “You stay here till I get back, all right?”

“All right.”

While she was gone Fred began to get even more worried, which surprised him, as he had thought he was already maxed out in that regard. Nothing had gone right since Governor Chang had crumpled into his arms. This single shard of memory was preceded and followed by blank periods, then by blurry recollections of coming to and fading out. No question there were major gaps in his memory of his time on the moon. This he found frightening. The gaps—also what he could remember—both were bad. His inability to understand Chinese was bad. The absence of Americans coming to his aid had been bad. Food had been bad; gravity had been bad. Being moved suddenly from place to place, wearing shackles or strapped to a gurney; taken to spaces smaller even than this sleeper compartment: all that had been very bad. He began to shiver a little. It was still happening faster than he could take in, and he had to work hard to suppress an undertow of terror.

Because this was always a little true for him, he was perhaps better at it than he might have been. Focus tightly on the moment; make an observation; make another observation; thus onward through day after day, as best he could manage. Now that habit of mind came in useful. And he saw also that being paired with Qi was not as bad as being a prisoner on the moon. She had appeared there out of nowhere, brought scowling into the room he had been held in, shouting something at her captors, scarcely aware he was there; and then things had changed. He had been led out of that room with her, and reunited with Ta Shu, and then sent home to Earth, and on arrival cast into this strange trip. Now he remembered the feel of her body as she hugged him, the smell of her hair. That glare of hers, worldly and knowing, hard with resolve, blazing with sudden fury. Interesting was not the right word for what was happening now; it was more than interesting, and worse. But not boring; and those rooms on the moon had been boring. Boring and terrifying both; he hadn’t known that combination was possible. Now he knew it was.

He was hungry. Earth’s gravity pushed down hard. His ears were ringing with a slight buzzy ring, and he still felt stunned, and his hand when he extended it before him was quivering.

Qi returned carrying boxes of Sichuan noodles with chunks of chicken in them. Also a few packets of almonds, and plastic bottles of water. They ate in silence, put the empty boxes on the floor.

Qi sucked her chopsticks clean, inspected one, cracked it such that it split lengthwise. After that she worried the cracked end with her teeth until she had it reduced to a sharp point. A bamboo needle of sorts.

“Okay,” she said, holding it out to Fred. “I need you to dig that chip out of me.”

“What!”

“You heard me.”

“But with that?”

“We don’t have anything better. I bought us toothbrushes and toothpaste, but they didn’t have any little knives or clippers for sale. So this will have to do.”

“Where is it again?”

“In my back. Right where I can’t reach it myself.”

She pulled her blouse up and over her head, shocking him, and then lay facedown on the bed, and reached back and undid her bra. An ordinary human back, ribs and spine obvious, spine in a trough of muscle on both sides of it. She looked strong. Fred gulped.

“It’s right here,” she said, and reached around and pointed. “Next to the spine, but in the muscle. To the left side, I think. There should be a little scar.” Lower down, her backbone rose up toward her bottom, still covered by her pants. “Come on, find it. It should be easy to feel. I don’t think it’s too far in there.”

Fred clenched his teeth, steeled his nerve, and put his finger on her back where she had indicated. He rubbed the muscles to each side of her spine, pushing slightly. Her skin was smooth, as was the muscle under the skin.

He felt a hard little bump over the muscle to the right side of her backbone. Down there in the dermis. Just the slightest discoloration over it, and a faint scar. Shorter than a little fingernail and not as wide. Luckily it was well away from her spine. No way did he want to be digging around near her spinal cord with a sharp stick.

“It’ll hurt to get that out of you,” he told her.

“I don’t care. It has to go. There are lots of security systems my friends can’t fix.”

“What about the blood? It’ll probably bleed like crazy.”

She held up a roll of toilet paper. “I took this from the toilet. When you’ve got it out, just keep wiping me till it stops bleeding.”

“All right, if you say so.”

“I do say so.”

It turned out to be hard. The split bamboo of the chopstick was pointy but not that sharp, nor that rigid. What was wanted was a good knife, one with both a point and an edge. As it was he had to jab her a little, while not stabbing her deeper than was necessary, or getting near her spine. In the end he had to grab her skin and pull it to the side until the little bump was hard under the skin. He could feel her tense her back muscles to help him, which he found distracting. Her torso, her body, her lustrous skin, the curve of one breast still in its bra cup, squashed into the bed and sticking out to the side… Finally he just had to push the chopstick’s sharp point into her taut skin as hard as he could, at an angle away from her spine, and then, when it was at maximum pressure, smack the end of it with his free hand, harder and harder, trying to find the minimum poke that would actually break the skin.

“Just do it!” she exclaimed, her face in profile against the pillow looking fierce, her little eyeteeth exposed and ready to bite something.

So with an extra-sharp smack he punctured her skin, and she said “Ow!” and he had to start swabbing a trickle of blood out of her spinal trough, while also digging around in the wound he had made with the end of the chopstick, which caused her to curse violently, or so he assumed, as she was growling in Chinese, grimacing with eyes clamped shut. He suddenly became aware that she had reached back and was squeezing his knee as if to inflict an equivalent hurt on him, a pressure that he found comforting. He felt like he had fallen into one of his dreams of a quite frequent type, in which he had to perform something he didn’t know anything about, like surgery, as here. And yet it was also weirdly stimulating. Or maybe just intimate, yes, that was the right word. Fred had seldom been intimate with anybody, and he found it quite distracting.

Then he saw one end of the chip there swimming in her blood, and was able to get the chopstick tip under it, then lever it up and pluck it out of her. It was somewhat like taking a tick out of a dog’s skin, a memory that came to him from the lost depths of his childhood.

He put the bloody black pill in the palm of her hand, then focused on unrolling toilet paper and wiping the blood from her skin over and over, pressing hard with a little pad of it, pressing right on the tear in her skin until the toilet paper saturated and he replaced it with another pad, doing his best to keep blood from running into the trough of her spine.

Eventually the bleeding slowed. She sat up, her back to him. He could see the side of her left breast, there under her loose bra, but she obviously didn’t care, and he tried not to either. He was a doctor of sorts, or at least a first responder: time to be medical! And he was good at seeing himself from just behind the moment.

“When it stops completely,” he said, “I can make a pad of tissue and fit it under your bra strap. Then it might stay there like a bandage.”

“Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

She gestured, and after a moment he got what she meant; he put the toilet paper down and grabbed the two ends of her bra strap and pulled them in, hooked them together while she pulled the front of the bra down over her breasts and shrugged into it. After that he caught up on the blood flow, which was coagulating almost completely now. He made a pad of tissue to put in place when the time was right. The bleeding was definitely slowing down.

“What are you going to do with the thing?” he asked her.

“Get rid of it somewhere. Maybe put it in somebody’s stuff, let the watchers think I’m going somewhere else for a while.”

“Maybe put it on some other train when we get off, or even when we stop at a station, if we do. If there’s a chance. Throw it on board some other train and it will look like you’re going somewhere else.”

“Maybe so,” she said.

Fred kept pressing a wad of toilet paper hard against the cut he had made in her. “How long will this trip take?”

“All night. They let you sleep till morning in these compartments, if they arrive at the station in the middle of the night.”

“But you’ll want to leave as soon as we stop?”

“Yes. I think that will be morning anyway.”

“It looks like it’s almost done coagulating. You’ll have to be careful for a while.”

“Yes. Thanks for helping.”

“Sure. Are you comfortable?”

“I’m okay.”

“What about, you know, you being pregnant and all? You were lying on your stomach.”

“I could feel it.”

“Do you feel the baby move in you?”

“Maybe. My appetite’s been strange, but we were on the moon, so who knows what was what.”

“Indeed.”

For a while they sat there, feeling the train click and sway through the night. The slight vibration put them both aquiver, a tiny quiver that was always there under the rhythmic rocking of the train. It seemed to Fred like his thumb on her back might feel to Qi like something foreign and painful, and again the weird intimacy of what they were doing washed through him. What if the chip had been stuck in her butt! But no, it had to be put where she couldn’t reach it herself, of course. No, a very inappropriate thought.

He sighed, and she glanced at him.

“What?” she said.

“Oh, nothing. I wish I knew what was going on.”

She shook her head, stared at the wall. “It’s China,” she said. “Give up on that.”

More trembling through the night. Eventually Fred had to say, “I think you’ve stopped bleeding,” and after that he placed a fresh wad of toilet paper into place under her bra, and she pulled on her shirt and was dressed again. Goodbye, hour of contact. Gone at the speed of an old train clicking through the night.

They moved into the two seats again, facing each other, the black window beside them creating their transparent twins. Through their reflections the moonlit countryside flickered as it flowed. Lights here and there dotted the countryside, which appeared hilly and uncrowded, mysterious and moony.

“Will this child of yours be the first one conceived on the moon?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”

“So it’s dangerous?”

“No one knows. Some people think so. But do you know the gibbons?”

“The gibbons?”

“There’s a group of gibbons being kept at a base up the libration zone. Too bad you didn’t see them, they’re great. I did some work with them, and I love them. Even on Earth they fly around their enclosures like crazy trapeze artists. On the moon, it’s just—” She waved a hand to indicate the inexpressible.

“Out of this world,” Fred suggested.

She smiled a little. “Yes. And the thing is, they’ve had their babies up there. Three or four generations now. And there haven’t been any problems that people have noticed.”

“They might not be able to test them for, you know,” Fred ventured to say.

She frowned at his presumption. “I know. But I’ve spent a lot of time with them, watching them, and…”

“And they seem all right?”

This was a game his brother used to make him play. His brother would start a sentence and stop midway through, then make Fred guess how to finish it. Fred had been terrible at it, but it had amused his brother, and there were worse ways to pass the time. And his mother liked it when they did it. A good exercise, she called it.

“Yes,” Qi had said, and now he started listening to her again: “—hard to tell. No, this is a kind of experiment. I can’t deny that.” She looked up at his face and added sharply, as if contradicting him, “Of course I didn’t want to experiment with something like this! But I made a mistake. And I don’t want to end the pregnancy. I’m going to have the baby. And then we’ll see what we see. I’ll love it no matter what. Lots of moms have to bring up kids with problems.”

Like mine, Fred thought. Not something to say; nor did he add, It didn’t look like it was that easy. After a while he did think to say, “Yes.” Then: “So you have friends where we’re going?”

“Yes. That’s why we’re going there.”

“I thought so.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what happened to you on the moon?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you remember happening?”

“There are gaps. When I was awake, I didn’t know what was going on. I had to deduce it from the questions I was asked. Someone said I almost died, and I believe it. I felt really sick. I’ve never felt that sick before. But instead of being another victim, I was a suspect.”

She shrugged. “Sounds like you’re better off with me. At least for the time being.”

“Yes,” he said.

Meaning maybe. But it was definitely interesting, sitting there in a night train across from her. She was holding in her hand the chip he had cut out of her. She was getting sleepy. Gravity was crushing them. She was stretching like a cat. She got up and lay on their narrow bed, her head toward him. Eventually she shifted up and used his thigh as her pillow, without asking him, her black hair spilling like shot silk over his legs. Asleep then, with one hand in an ex-thumb-sucker’s position, breathing deeply, with a little asthmatic wheeze.

For now he was stuck with her. Or rather she was stuck with him! Traveling with a Westerner had to get her some unwanted extra attention, but she was doing it anyway. That was interesting. And all his life he had struggled to find things that were interesting. Quantum mechanics, yes, very interesting; but that particular source of interest had taken him far away from other people. He had lived at a remove, uncertain how to find other interesting things; and uncertain more generally, in part because of things people said to him that they seemed to think would help him. They hadn’t helped; possibly the reverse.

Now, however, the world had become undeniably interesting. Even though it might be like getting slapped in the face to wake up, well, still—he was awake. Here they were, in a mystery. In a potentiality. A situation that was without question pretty interesting.

In the gray of predawn the landscape out their window slid by, shifting in quick stages from a classic Chinese ink-brush painting, in which washes of mist separated tree-lined lakes from jagged peaks, to an industrial wasteland fallen into ruin while still under construction. Construction cranes poked the gray night sky like giant gallows built to hang any surviving remnants of Nature. This bleak zone slid by for most of an hour, then the train slowed down. Fred nudged Qi and she sat up, rubbing her eyes.

“Shekou?” Fred asked.

“I don’t know.” She peered out the window. “I’ve never been there.”

As the train slowed it vibrated and shuddered more than it had through the night. Qi moved to sit across from Fred and their knees bounced together and apart. The gray cityscape out the window was a jumble of concrete blocks, liberally spangled with what seemed to be semitropical foliage. That suggested their trip had been southward. Many of the buildings, both old and new, had curving facades. These curves and the greenery gave the city a certain ramshackle aplomb. A tall bamboo cluster reminded Fred of the moon, as did all the predawn grays.

When the train stopped, Qi stood and led Fred down the crowded hall and off the train, then through the crowd on the platform. When she passed an open door on the train across the platform, she tossed her chip up into it with a casual offhand flip. Then they joined the flow of people leaving the station, passing through its tall gates without trouble.

“If I have to, I’ll be telling people you were part of my host family when I went to school in America,” she told him as they hurried down a narrow street. “They won’t be surprised you don’t know Chinese. Thank you is xiexie.”

“Shee shay?”

“Close enough.”

The curving streets in this part of the city were very narrow. The buildings flanking them, four or five stories tall, curved with the streets in a way that suggested they all had grown together. None of the buildings looked foursquare, and it didn’t seem like they could have been easy to build, given all the curves. It was as if the whole city had been twisted by immense gravitational waves and then frozen in place.

“Why does everything curve?” Fred asked Qi.

She shrugged and looked around as if trying to see what Fred was talking about. “Goats?” she ventured.

They came to a widening in one street, a square filled by an open-sided market in which a great number of stalls and tables were all roofed by tarps stretched over aluminum poles.

“Wet market,” Qi said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

She pulled him between rows of vegetables piled in mounds. Stacked in huge numbers were gorgeous eggplants, cucumbers, melons, carrots, and many other vegetables or fruits, quite a few of which Fred did not recognize and felt he had never seen before. These intensely colored glossy globes and cylinders exploded in his sight, deprived as it had been by the monochrome moon and their nighttime wander in Beijing. Orange, yellow, green, purple, red, everything vibrating with the intensity of its particular color. Qi stopped at one stand to buy a string bag, then some small oranges, then some green orbs Fred didn’t recognize. After that they continued into the wet part of the wet market, where water-filled plastic tubs held living fish and eels and crabs and shellfish and baby squid and every other variety of sea creature. Hanging over the tubs were wire baskets of live toads and turtles, and sitting on stools between these baskets were shopkeepers chatting among themselves or staring out at the morning. Fred saw clams and oysters in burbling clear plastic tanks, also shrimp or crayfish—scallops—seahorses! No doubt the live presentation guaranteed freshness, and was possibly a response to the food safety issues that he had once read still vexed consumers and government in China.

They passed through row after row of food, all unrefrigerated, all freestanding in the warm humid air. Skinned bodies of chickens, ducks, small pigs, lambs, unidentifiable animals. Was that the carcass of a turtle unshelled? A hedgehog? Rabbits? Whatever they had been while alive, surely most of this meat would have to sell this very day in order to be fresh enough to eat, or so it seemed to Fred. But maybe it would be. An ordinary Chinese city—did that mean two million people? Ten million? And they all had to eat. Suddenly the amount of food went from looking like far too much to nowhere near enough.

By the time they had finished crisscrossing the market, every animal and plant ever consumed by humans seemed to have made an appearance, filling one stall after another. Maybe it was Fred’s time on the moon, or his illness and incarceration there, or Qi’s hand crushing his now, or Earthly gravity, or simply his hunger—whatever the cause, the supersaturated colors all around him were pulsing harder and harder. Everything looked like it was bursting with itself. He felt stunned, crushed. He was hammered raw, and could barely make himself walk. Everything was pulsing.

Qi had stopped at half a dozen stalls and filled her string bag with various small purchases. Now she led him out of the market by a lane on its far side, then crossed a big street jammed with little electric cars and bikes, and took off down another winding street. On both sides of this street iron-railed balconies were frequently draped with drying laundry. Shops on the ground floor opened directly onto the street, which had no sidewalks. Just as bicyclists shared the big roads with buses and trucks, pedestrians here shared the narrow streets with shop inventories on tables and racks, also bikes attached to carts, creeping supply trucks, roving dogs, and old people seated on upturned buckets, talking things over as if seated in a kitchen somewhere.

At the end of that long winding lane they emerged into a green park, and Fred was yet again amazed. In the center of the park was a lake that looked like it could have been taken from a Chinese landscape painting. Ancient willow trees and pines stood on its grassy banks; an arcing bridge extended over a neck of water; some white herons high-stepped through reeds in the shallows, just offshore from people sprawled on picnic blankets.

In a grove of old plane trees across the little bridge, a big circle of people surrounded a group making music. When Qi saw that she pulled Fred toward it. They stopped at the high point of the bridge, where they could see that the lake and its surrounding ring of trees were backed by much taller concrete buildings; these were overtopped by construction cranes, busily lifting parts of even taller buildings into the sky. Higher still, in the distance past the cranes, a steep green mountain stood against a white morning sky, its ridgeline topped by three or four little pagodas. A thousand years of Chinese history coexisted in a single view.

Fred said, “Is this normal? Do all Chinese cities have parks and lakes like this?”

“A lot of them do, sure. Like anywhere, right?”

They crossed the bridge and joined the crowd ringing the musical group. The band consisted of about thirty people, most of them sitting on folding chairs or plastic boxes, and either reading music from spindly stands or playing without sheet music. All of them paid close attention to a conductor who stood before them waving his arms and singing. Many of the musicians played stringed instruments that looked like skinny cellos; most of these had two strings, which their players bowed enthusiastically. The musicians sitting closest to Fred and Qi blew into instruments that looked a bit like panpipes, but the pipes were arranged in rounded shapes like immense garlic bulbs, and had valves on them that looked like saxophone valves. Other instruments were also unfamiliar, and indeed when he finished looking at each player in turn, Fred had to conclude that he had never before seen a single one of the instruments being played. It was like the unidentifiable fruits or vegetables in the market. He had not known there were musical instruments unfamiliar to him. And as he listened to the sounds the players were creating, he realized that these too were new to him—thin reedy sounds, orchestral but not, and either dissonant or harmonic in ways as unfamiliar to him as the instruments. Foreign—even a bit alien. Fred leaned forward and stared, quivering with the intensity of his attention.

One row of the string players seemed to consist of disabled people, some with Down’s syndrome, it looked like, others deformed or odd in other ways, with open mouths, and gazes rapt to the point of glassiness. All the players appeared to be transported by the joy of creating music. It looked like this was the high point of their week, even their reason to live. Or possibly just a nice thing, a fun hour. He had no way of knowing. But his mother had made him take saxophone lessons and play in the school band, a very unsuccessful and brief experiment, thoroughly unpleasant except for the playing of the instrument itself, which, when in his room alone, he had liked. And now he found he wanted to try one of the panpipe things. He wanted to be able to play it like one of these players, or like John Coltrane would have played it. He studied the disabled players in their musical ecstasy. He could feel in his facial muscles that the expressions on their faces were like those on his own face when he was feeling good about something. He only had to give in to it, to release his resistance to it, and those same expressions would be on his face—when he relaxed, or felt happy, or even right now—that was his look, right there before him to be seen. His cheeks burned with some strange mixture of shame and affinity. He was so often amazed or stunned, so often moved by simple things, obscure things. He was more like these musicians than he had ever been like the people in his own hometown. As he felt the truth of that he clutched Qi’s hand. He was a stranger in a strange land. With his free hand he wiped away tears falling unexpectedly from his eyes.

She glanced at him, wondering. She squeezed his hand. “Here come my friends,” she warned under her breath.

A couple passed behind them and Qi followed them, tugging the stunned Fred behind her. Out of the park on the far side of the lake, into an alley, then into a shop selling all kinds of plastic household goods, bowls and cups and so on, stacked to the ceiling on every shelf and in every possible nook, such that one had to walk sideways to get between them. Then up a narrow staircase and through a doorway, with the door quickly closed behind them and some people from the shop. At that point Qi and the others fell on each other. She hugged each in turn, all of them talking at once.

Qi eventually stopped and said to them in English, “This is Fred, he helped me get here. He was in trouble on the moon too.”

“Nice to meet you,” everyone said, almost in unison. They laughed at that; it was one of their first English-class phrases, they let him know, now finally put to use. For most of them it proved to be all they could say in English. Those who knew more invited him to sit down, asked him if he wanted tea. Their English was not as good as Qi’s, and seemed neither British nor American in accent, something more purely Chinese, angled a bit perhaps by the accent of whoever had taught them. Classroom English, used for a job, maybe, but never lived in. Suddenly Fred could hear better the fact that Qi had lived some of her life in English, and for quite some time too. Presumably in those Swiss boarding schools. An international person, a worldly person.

He answered their questions as best he could, feeling completely exhausted. He didn’t want to say he had been accused of murder on the moon; in this context it would sound absurd, horrible. Qi seemed to see this, and steered the conversation away from him and toward their next move. They were not to stay with these friends long; there were chaoyangqunzhong everywhere, they said, and Qi, they all agreed, was too beautiful to disguise. “Such fat cheeks, very easy for the facial recognition program!”

It struck Fred that although professional security agents could be made too frightened to hold on to Qi, these ordinary young people were willing to shelter her. Surely they too would get in trouble if found with her. Maybe it was the difference between helping her and holding her, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to ask about it, and in fact their frequent nervous laughter might be covering a certain speediness in them that gave away their fear. They would leave in five hours, they said, as they had made an arrangement with a boat that would drop by the city’s ferry terminal soon after that, and they had the terminal itself rigged for that hour. In the meantime, one of them said, with an uncertain look at Qi, their group would like to see her, if she would agree to it. She pursed her lips unhappily, then nodded.

They were led to the back of the room they were in, where a doorway let them out into an airshaft surrounded entirely by ancient brick walls. They descended a metal spiral staircase into dimness. There was scarcely room to fit between the central pole and the spiraling outer rail of these stairs, and the steps were triangles where even the outermost section was barely big enough to hold a shoe. Fred followed Qi down, feeling blinder and blinder as they dropped. It seemed to him as if they were descending many more floors than they had gone up.

At the bottom of the spiral stair a shaft of light pierced him, and he stumbled into a room. When his eyes adjusted he saw that the room was quite large—a basement storage room, perhaps, about twenty feet high and extending back into shadows some indeterminate distance. Very hard to see all the way, because the room was jammed with people. Fred’s stomach vibrated with the characteristic buzz of a Faraday security cage.

Most of the people in there were standing, others sat on boxes or on the concrete floor. Someone gave a wooden box to Qi, and she took it to one wall and stood on it, and the room went quiet. Everyone stared at her. Faces were rapt. Their expressions reminded Fred suddenly of the musicians by the lake. These people too were flushed and transported.

Qi said something in greeting and many of them smiled and nodded or even said something back. Then she snapped something, in that waspish way Fred was coming to recognize, and it took them aback; they swayed back on their heels, and after that were more rapt than ever.

And then Qi began to talk at speed. Her eyes blazed as she looked around the room, staring at them, her cheeks flushed. She raised a finger, pointed it at them. She was challenging them, Fred thought—but then she spoke even faster and said something that made them laugh, and after that she laughed too, and shifted mode; she was explaining something to them now, telling a story to make a point. Her hands held up her points, chopped them apart, wove them together, handed them over to her listeners. They were about equal numbers of men and women. They looked like they had been working hard that day, like they worked hard every day. They had come into this cellar tired, he saw, and perhaps hungry, but more hungry for her than for food. They could eat later. For now she was their food. Their eyes were devouring her. They were lit, and she was the fire. Fred felt it himself; normally he couldn’t read faces at all, and here he was reading her like a book, even as she spoke in a language he didn’t know. It was very much like hearing that strange orchestra, a deep stab of recognition and longing.

He couldn’t have said how much time passed as she spoke. Half an hour or maybe an hour. He was feeling the weight of Earth, he was hungry, thirsty, sandy-eyed, sick; he should have been sleepy; but he was transfixed. He was a little curious to know what she was saying, but then again, while seeing the situation as clearly as he was, her words were irrelevant. They might even have been a distraction. The form of the situation said more than the content. These were poor people, he thought, in a big city. That meant they were probably urban workers. They would certainly already know a lot about whatever Qi was talking about—they owned phones, they lived lives. Suddenly he saw it: everyone knew everything. Of course. How could it be otherwise? This was the world, people knew it. Even he knew it, and he didn’t know anything. So these people weren’t here for knowledge; they already knew. Eyes bright, watching her like hawks, they were hungry for something besides information. They wanted some kind of leverage, some kind of recognition or acknowledgment. Qi was giving them that.

Finally she ended things with a series of jokes. She laughed, they laughed. She promised them things, and made them promise her back. All this was so clear! Even in this singsongy musical language of theirs, so alien to him, with not a single cognate word he could understand, it was perfectly clear, right there on their faces.

She stopped with a little wave and their applause started with a short roar, then quickly ended. She got off the box and walked through the room, touching arms, shaking hands, nodding formally, hugging informally. She was moving, Fred saw suddenly, from woman to woman. She was finding the women in the room and giving them some extra moment of female solidarity, while always listening to whatever any of them said to her. The men could watch, that was all they needed to do now. They saw this on her face and stayed clear and watched, eyes gleaming. She got to choose who spoke to her.

This went on for another fifteen or twenty minutes, then her friends were guiding her toward the door, and Fred followed. Back on the narrow metal spiral staircase, climbing through the gloom between the walls. The weight of the world made Fred sweat and gasp as he lifted his feet and found the little triangles of corrugated steel, step after step. By the time they got back up to the room they had been in before, he felt utterly wasted. His head was swimming.

And yet there was no time to rest. They were given turns in a bathroom to shower and relieve themselves, and a young woman went in with Qi, presumably to help her get the cut on her back bandaged properly. Lots of laughter in there as they worked on that. A young man sitting next to Fred gave him an inquiring look, but Fred just shrugged. In the state he was in, Qi was far beyond his ability to explain, in any language except for that shrug.

She came out looking refreshed. They dressed her with a hat, wig, sunglasses, and a nighttime mouth guard. Fred they gave a baseball hat with a Yankees logo on it (his brother would be appalled) and another mouth guard, which he bit down on uneasily. It didn’t fit.

Downstairs on the crowded street, four of them jammed onto an electric cart meant for two and zipped out onto a larger street, into the city proper, into a traffic jam. It seemed to Fred they were headed south again, although in a city as twisted as this one it was impossible to stay oriented; it was just a feeling he had. It seemed to be midafternoon.

They rounded a turn and a giant building came into view, half of it hanging over the water of a hill-circled bay. The ferry terminal, it appeared. It had a big triangular roof slanting up and out over the water. Its sides were covered by irregular metal circles, like bubbles of sea-foam, painted in colors that shifted as they got higher, from yellow to maroon to orange to blue.

The interior of this terminal turned out to be almost entirely a single giant room. Everything was built of either concrete or steel, both corroded by salt, so that like all the rest of the city, it looked both new and old at the same time. There were turnstiles as in a subway station, and also customs gates, as if they were at a border. But the gates were empty, and the turnstiles turned freely. Fred was curious about that, but he didn’t want to say anything aloud.

Then they were showing their wristpads to a pair of terminal employees, after which they descended stairs to a dock right at water level. On the other side of the terminal, a ferry as long as the building was being boarded by people on a higher floor, over a gangplank that was at least two stories off the water. They, however, stepped right onto a small boat with only a dozen seats, set on a single deck with a wooden roof and walled by salty glass, behind a wheelhouse where two women ran the craft. As soon as they were on board, joining what looked like a single group of other passengers, the boat cast off and grumbled away.

Fred turned and looked back. Palm trees bracketed the gigantic ferry terminal. Their boat’s top speed was putteringly slow. Late-afternoon sun glazed the air, and there was so much salt crusting the boat’s windows that they could see little more than impressionist shapes to the sides: other boats, either anchored or moving; a container ship in the distance; a lot of construction cranes on the shore they were leaving; jets taking off and landing at what had to be an airport, somewhere behind the buildings; green hills behind, lush with foliage, too steep to be built on. And then, as they motored beyond a building-filled promontory on the left, a city. A big city: like New York, or Oz, or Cosmopolis.

Fred felt his mouth hanging open, and closed it. More skyscrapers than he’d ever seen in his life were bunched on both sides of a crowded strip of water. Above the far side of this clutch of skyscrapers, green peaks reared toward the sky, towering three or four times higher than the tallest buildings. On the tops of these green peaks stood more buildings.

Their boat passed to the west of this harbor city and continued around a point, headed south. Ahead of them lay an island, considerably lower than the high ridge backing the city, but equally green.

The boat drew up to a small concrete dock protruding into a little bay indenting the island. Behind the dock a village terraced the hill overlooking the bay. The water was still. The buildings were salt-chewed concrete blocks, as in Shekou, but the tallest buildings here were only three stories, each floor stepped back so that a balcony terrace overlooked the street. There were no vehicles except for a couple of small carts there on the corniche behind the dock. People were either on foot or riding bicycles. Palm trees, broad-leafed trees; Fred was unfamiliar with the foliage, but it reminded him of photos of Hawaii or places like that. The buildings looked like beach resorts in tourist brochures, but tackier. Fred saw quite a few Westerners walking the corniche, or sitting in the many open-air cafés. He didn’t know what to make of that. He heard English being spoken in the cafés they passed and kept his mouth shut. It was no trouble to look ignorant and confused.

They walked up a sidewalk that left the little harbor, and followed the sidewalk over a low hill, walking for half an hour to another harbor on the other side of the little island, where an even smaller village was built around a bay deeper than the first one. A variety of boats, including even some classic old-fashioned junks, were anchored next to a stretch of water roped off between buoys, possibly because it was filled with aquaculture pens; he could see little flags and metal rails just sticking out of the water. The concrete buildings around this little bay were shabbier even than those on the side the ferry had docked at.

The sidewalk that had crossed the island led them past a little cave where an old sign in English and Chinese explained that Japanese soldiers had hid in it during a war. Then down to the little harbor, which was faced by a line of open-walled restaurants that shared a single long awning roof. They approached a two-story concrete box near these restaurants, some kind of large cubical bungalow, it seemed. Qi’s friends unlocked a door painted green and they hurried inside and upstairs to the second floor, where the main room’s window overlooked the little bay and its scattering of boats.

“Okay,” Qi said to Fred as she looked around the room. “We’re here.”

“What here?” Fred asked. “What was that big city we passed?”

“Hong Kong!” she said, staring at him. “And this is Hong Kong too, for that matter.”

“Lamma Island,” one of their young companions explained. “One of Hong Kong’s outer islands.”

“It’s a good place to hide,” Qi said to Fred after they sat down heavily on worn-out rattan couches and armchairs placed in the middle of the little room. “This place is owned by friends. It’s usually a rental apartment for tourists, so lots of different people come and go, and sometimes it’s empty. So we can hide here for a while, until I figure out what to do next.”

“Okay,” Fred said, as if he had any choice in the matter.