Then she sees her. The girl she’s supposed to meet. There she is.
Crouching behind the table, huddled next to the wall. So still and silent, a bundle of shadows barely breathing, that Zhu didn’t notice her at first. A furtive motion, and a skinny little hand darts toward Zhu’s feedbag purse on the floor.
Zhu is quicker. She seizes the girl by her wrist, grabs the other flailing arm, and pulls her out from under the table. The girl is strong, much bigger and older than Zhu expected.
“Oy ching, ching, syau-jye!” the girl squeals.
“Please, please, yourself, miss,” Zhu says sternly. She deposits her captive on the opposite chair. “Pa liao.” Enough of this, settle down. “Trying to steal my purse, are you?”
“I not steal purse,” the girl says with haughty authority. Her sulky face is so filmed with grime, Zhu can’t tell if she’s pretty. Her thick black hair unravels from its queue. She wears an apple-green embroidered silk tunic held together with gold satin frogs and green silk trousers. When she lowers her arms to her sides, the sleeves droop below her fingertips, so she looks as if she has no hands. Too bad she doesn’t lower her arms for long because her fingernails are shredded, her knuckles sprinkled with sores. Her straw sandals are threaded with more green silk, but her big bare feet have knobby, filthy toes.
Just the girl Zhu is looking for.
“I not steal purse from fahn quai,” she says with a toss of her head.
“Fahn quai?” Zhu says. “You think I’m a white devil?” She flings the veil up. “Look. Not a white devil.”
The girl’s eyes widen. Zhu has the same golden skin, the same wide cheekbones as the girl. But the irises in Zhu’s slanting eyes are a brilliant gene-tweaked green.
“Oy.” Perplexity clouds the girl’s black eyes. “Jade Eyes.”
“I’m Zhu.” She smiles at the girl’s wonder. “But you may call me Jade Eyes.”
“Oy, Jade Eyes,” the girl pleads. “I not thief. This true. You must believe! Look.” From some hidden pocket in her tunic, she takes out a small carved rosewood box, sets it on the table. “I have jewels. My mama give me for dowry.”
“Let me see.” Zhu waits impatiently as the girl fumbles with the latch.
Amazing! So the Archivists were right, after all. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was right. Wow! And after all that random data, after all these centuries. So much the Archivists didn’t know about Chinese women in fin de siècle America. Still, the Archivists had actually traced this girl—or a girl like her. An anonymous Chinese girl in the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fourth of July, 1895.
Well, all right! Excitement rises in Zhu’s throat. The Archivists also said she would have jewelry. They said she would have the aurelia.
The aurelia—what is it? A peculiar Art Nouveau brooch made of gold and diamond chips and colored glass as bright as gemstones. The Archivists said the aurelia holds the key to the Gilded Age Project. If only Zhu can get her hands on the aurelia, then everything—the past and the future—will turn out all right.
The girl lifts the rosewood lid, and Zhu peers in eagerly. There are three bracelets of jade, one of ivory. A pair of fillgreed gold earrings. A gold ring with a nice jade cabochon.
Zhu frowns, stirring the pieces, turning them over. “This is it? This is all you’ve got?”
“All I got? Mama give! This my dowry!” The girl’s eyes flash. “This jade, this gold.”
Damn. For the second time since she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden, Zhu feels a painful jolt of fear.
The girl doesn’t have the aurelia.
* * *
The aurelia, the aurelia. All this fuss over a trifle, a bauble, a piece of decadent jewelry. Why? Did the success of a complex application of arcane high technology really turn on a piece of old gold? Even after the official explanation, Zhu had always been troubled by the aurelia.
Not that she was happy with most of what happened after the lawyer sprang her loose from the women’s prison facility and sent her in restraints with two copbots on a transcontinental EM-Trans to San Francisco.
“I’m just a country gal,” she joked as two copbots hustled her down high-speed escalators to the underground tubes. The copbots didn’t answer. Either someone took out their voice chips or issued a gag order. Zhu had heard of the EM-Trans, but she’d never personally seen or