The Apothecary Page 0,49

our clothes to Jin Lo as the elevator opened. She still wielded the smoke-spewing vial in one hand.

I heard a shriek from the female guard down the hall. “The prisoner’s gone!” she cried.

But the elevator doors closed, and we were on our way out.

CHAPTER 21

The Oil of Mnemosyne

The elevator took us up to daylight, and Jin Lo left the vial of orange smoke by the front door of the bunker so that it poured out into the street. She looked boyish in the khaki overalls, with her long braid up under a hard hat, and she walked purposefully away, carrying her bundle of clothes, as if she were a workman going for help in controlling this strange chemical fire.

A few people came out of houses, staring at the orange smoke rising into the air, but no one stopped Jin Lo, and we were around the corner before we heard shouts coming from the building, and a man’s loud voice asking if anyone had seen a Chinese girl in black. No one had, and Pip and Benjamin and I were still invisible.

A bus came by and stopped, and we climbed aboard. Jin Lo nodded to the driver and walked past him with her armful of clothes.

“You’ve got to pay!” the driver said, but Jin Lo ignored him. The rest of us filed invisibly after her.

There were seven or eight other people on the bus, including a white-haired woman with a curly white dog in her lap. The dog started to bark hysterically as we passed, and she murmured and hugged him close.

“It’s just a Chinaman, my angel, selling clothes,” I heard her say.

The dog kept barking—smelling, I was sure, all four of us.

We found a place near the back of the bus where no one was going to bump into us, and the driver gave up and drove on, flummoxed by the inscrutable Chinaman and late for his route. The old lady got the curly dog to be quiet, but it gazed back over her shoulder, panting.

Jin Lo dumped the pile of clothes beside her and sat down.

“So who are you, exactly?” Benjamin whispered, under the rumbling noise of the bus’s engine. “How do you know my father?”

“Only letters,” Jin Lo said. “I come from China to meet him.”

“Are there lots of girl chemists in China?” I asked. This was 1952, after all.

Jin Lo frowned as if the question had never occurred to her. “I am apprentice, very young, to chemist in Shanghai. I have no other school. When he die, I finish his work, write to colleagues.”

“What was his work?” I asked. “He wasn’t a normal chemist, right? Was he an alchemist?”

Jin Lo shrugged, as if the idea of normality was unimportant. “Everyone work different. Where you last see apothecary?”

“In his shop,” Benjamin said. “He was given a message saying you had been taken, and he would be next, so he hid us in the cellar. Some Germans burst in, and when we came upstairs, my father was gone.”

“Germans—they say what?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “It was in German.”

Jin Lo frowned. “Why you not speak German?”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin whispered. “I guess because of the war. No one wants to. Do you speak Japanese?”

Something I couldn’t identify passed over her face, and I remembered that parts of China had been occupied by Japan. “Yes,” she said. “When soldiers come, better to know what they say.”

“Oh,” Benjamin said, abashed. “Well, I don’t speak German.”

“You take me to shop,” she said.

The dog up front gave a petulant bark, and the old lady sneaked a look back at the Chinese rag seller. Then her gaze seemed to shift to me, and I looked down at my two visible fingers, which were holding on to a pole. It wasn’t just my fingers anymore, but a whole stretch of my hand and forearm that was visible—actually visible, not just dusted with orange. My other arm was visible in patches, too, and so was part of my left knee.

“Jin Lo!” I whispered. “Stare at that lady with the dog, quick.”

Jin Lo did, glaring so fiercely that the old lady whirled to the front, embarrassed and confused, pulling her dog down into her lap. I grabbed the blue raincoat from the top of the pile and wrapped myself in it, tying it at the waist. It covered me to the knees, and I crouched down on the seat, trying to blend into the pile of clothes.

“You’ll draw attention without a head,” Benjamin whispered.

“Not as much as you’ll