disoriented. Reality is shifting and tilting all around her again.
What on earth is happening?
Selena heaves herself at Zhu, cursing and punching. “You go now! No one here!” One of the cops pulls her off and slams her against the wall.
Andrews swings his ax at the door, and Cooke wedges his crowbar. They pop the bedroom door right open, and Zhu and Cameron rush inside.
“No one here!” Selena shouts and spits. “Fahn quai!”
There is no one here. The bedroom is empty. Cameron throws open the closet, throws back the bedclothes, kicks at the flimsy wire frame of the bed.
“She not here, fahn quai!” Madame Selena shouts. “You go now, white devils!”
“Wait,” Cameron says, cocking her head. She presses her forefinger to her lips.
Zhu strains to listen. And there! A tiny, scratching sound.
“You turn into turtle!” Selena yells. “All your children, they turn into toads!”
Cameron seizes the bed, struggles to push it away from the room’s corner. Andrews and Cooke join in, shoving the bed frame across the room. Andrews breaks the washstand with one stroke of his ax, sending water and basin flying. Cameron hugs the walls, tapping, listening. “Listen for a hollow sound,” she tells Zhu. “There’s a secret compartment in here, I can smell it.”
Zhu starts tapping on the walls, too, but she hears nothing unusual.
Cameron wipes her noble forehead with her hand, flushed and sweating.
Again that tiny scratching.
Cameron drops to her knees with a cry of triumph, scratches at the floor with her fingernails. Zhu pushes her aside, takes out and runs the mollie knife down the crack between the floorboards. Cooke applies his crowbar, a loose nail flies out, and two floorboards pop up.
And there, in a narrow space beneath the floor, lies Wing Sing, wide-eyed and trembling.
“Ai!” screams Madam Selena. “All go to hell!”
A tong enforcer stands watching at the door, but he makes no move to interfere. He smiles a little, staring boldly at Zhu.
“Wing Sing,” Zhu says, taking her hand, and helps her sit up. The girl is glassy-eyed, her makeup smeared. Drugged? Her mouth hangs open, her limbs are limp, her hair disheveled. She wears the same apple-green silk pajamas, now soiled and wrinkled. Foreboding rises in Zhu’s throat as she glances at the girl’s feet. She wears the same straw sandals threaded with green silk. But now her feet are concealed by thick white cotton stockings. Bound or unbound? Zhu can’t tell.
“We’re going to go now, just like I promised you. Okay?”
“Jade Eyes?”
“Yes, it’s me. We’re going to take you home.” But that’s not strictly true. How she hates lying to this girl! “We’re going to take you to the home,” she amends.
“My jade, my gold,” Wing Sing says. “My dowry. I take my dowry!”
“Where’s the jewelry she brought with her?” Zhu says to Selena.
The madam shrugs. Zhu exchanges a look with Cameron, and Cameron tears around the bedroom again, tapping, prying. She finds another secret compartment in the floor of the clothes closet. Officer Andrews breaks the planks open with his ax.
And there, the rosewood box!
“I know that my cousin brought a dowry given to her by her mother in China,” Zhu says carefully. “I want to see if Selena has stolen anything, the way she’s stolen Wing Sing’s innocence.”
“Indeed, yes, take a look,” says Cameron.
Zhu eagerly flings back the lid.
The aurelia. She will have it.
Glitter of gold, bracelets of jade, earrings and rings. Zhu peers breathlessly. Several new pieces she doesn’t recognize—amber beads, a necklace of lapis lazuli, a brooch of freshwater pearls. Please. Zhu doesn’t care how or where or when the girl got the aurelia. If a john gave it to her, if she bought it herself at Colonel Andrews’s Diamond Palace, if it materialized out of thin air. It doesn’t matter. Please make this right. Wing Sing has got to have the aurelia. Wing Sing has got to be the girl Zhu is supposed to rescue so that all of spacetime in the future survives.
But the aurelia isn’t there. It isn’t there.
Cameron beams. “Praise Jesus Christ!”
Officer Andrews hands his ax to Officer Cooke. With a gentleness Zhu didn’t think possible, the policeman lifts Wing Sing in his arms.
* * *
At Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, Zhu and Cameron escort the trembling girl into a tiny dormitory with twelve cots and on into the bathroom. Miss Olney is waiting with a basin of steaming hot water, a bar of soap stinking of lye, a burlap wash cloth, and rough cotton towels.
“Let us get you clean in the name of