1.

Hell, Liam thought, is a customs and immigration line: no escape, no recourse, no logic. But why complain? Prayers and groans yield only a side-eye from the poor damn listless souls suffering alongside you. Your own choices left you here, thrown upon the tender mercy of petty bureaucrats, abandoned to the death of a thousand grinding ticks of a slowing clock. The judge waits. She’s had a long day, there are men with guns behind her, and she doesn’t give a shit about you.

Even Liam had to admit he was being unusually grim, but after an eleven-hour flight with a three-hour connection through Dubai, no one had the right to expect him to feel chipper. Bureaucrats and their lines and maps, getting in the job’s way, keeping people from living the lives they— No, calm down. Behave. Act how you had to act in lines. Or else. Think positive thoughts, Sal would have told him, if she were here.

Typical American.

Fine. Positive: The Shanghai Pudong Airport customs line was far from the worst he’d seen. They’d swept the place recently. He could appreciate quality in this sort of thing. There were better and worse ways of having one’s fingernails pulled out.

Grace, beside him, hadn’t stopped fidgeting since they had joined the line. She rolled her ankles, her shoulders. Hands in pockets, then out. Arms crossed, uncrossed. Stretching. Casing the corners of the room, as if a demon would jump them in the middle of a goddamn airport. Liam frowned. “Could you stay still, please?” Meaning: You’re attracting attention. “I'm just as eager to get this over with as you.”

“I doubt that.” But she stilled. Too much, in fact. He stood beside an iceberg.

And now he’d pissed her off, of course, sent her into that icy withdrawal where she spent… well, a lot of her time when he was around. He was just tired. Christ Jesus. “Look. I’m sorry. I know you hate travel. Me too.” She turned to him, at least, and raised one eyebrow. “Not the waiting—good chance to catch up on airport news. It’s this guy that bothers me.” He thumbed open his passport and showed her the picture.

“Looks like you with a better haircut.”

“And I don’t have any idea what he was up to for two years.”

Grace blinked. “Oh. The demon thing.”

Which was an abrupt, if accurate, way to sum up the two years of possession and stolen memories from which the Bookburners had rescued him. “The ‘demon thing.’ Sansone’s diplomats claim I’m not on any watch lists, that they’ve scrubbed the few crimes I committed that made it onto records, but you never know. Especially in a place like this.” He pointed to the stars-and-blood flag with his chin. “Sansone doesn’t have official ties here. No Bookburners in China since the Matteo Ricci business. If it turns out dear old demon-possessed Liam has history with the local constabulary, well, you know what they say about interesting times.” He glared at the face in the passport. Beautiful old mug. Shame it kept getting him into trouble.

“Nobody actually says that,” Grace said. “It’s an urban legend. Sort of racist, too. If you think about it. Inscrutable wisdom.”

The line shuffled forward in silence.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it could be worse.”

“Oh?”

“You could have fought wizards and demons for the Nationalist government in 1928, until your friends betrayed you and smuggled you out of the country in a curse that stuck you beyond time. You could have slept away most of the century, not knowing what happened to the people you fought beside, while the country and the world changed. You could worry that whatever name your passport says, whatever flag’s on the front, your face will trip some trigger in a ninety-year-old file that says wait for her. For example.”

“Oh,” Liam repeated, in a different tone.

“Exactly.”

Grace didn’t go in for gallows humor, or graveyard whistling, but Liam tried anyway. “Remind me why they sent the two of us, in particular, on this job.”

“Bringing the whole team would attract attention. The information Asanti got from the Maitresse said that we need an artifact Team Four sent east a few centuries back, with a Jesuit named Matteo Ricci. And the Ricci Circlet should be on sale at the Bizarre.”

“You keep calling it that. Don’t tell me the homophone works the same in Chinese.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “The Chinese name for the place we’re going,” she said, “is two characters, one of which means death, and the other one of which is half of the word for market, sort of, and it’s a horrible pun, because if you pronounce market with a thick southern accent, the first half sounds kind of like the word for death, or dead.”

“And you thought it was important to translate the bad pun.”

Grace didn’t answer that. “Your ex-whatever said she and her gang of techno-cultists were headed to Shanghai, so you’re here in case she is, and you don’t speak Chinese, which is why I’m here. Entering a country where we have very limited resources, looking for magic that might kill us, under the eye of an unfriendly government. That might recognize me.”

“It’s been a long time, Grace.”

“I used to work with people who served under the emperors. Bureaucracies conserve people and knowledge—that’s what they’re for.”

Liam sought through shreds of history he remembered from school: wars and revolutions and caves and there had been a march or something, probably. Red armbands? Books on fire? Or was that Indiana Jones? “A lot of things changed while you were sleeping in that crate.”

“I know,” she said. Four people left between them and the front of the line.

“We’ll be fine.” He was reassuring himself as much as her, but it helped to say the words. “Team Two have been wankers in the past, but their tradecraft is good. Our umbrellas here will hold, we’ll slide into the Bizarre, find the dingus, and be on our way before you can adjust to the time change.”

“Maybe.” She flicked her passport cover.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Maybe I don’t want to. This was my country, once. My friends and I fought to save it. They might still be around. Or their children.”

Liam heard the note of hope in her voice, and did not know how to answer. He handed his documents to the woman behind the desk, who frowned at the visa, frowned at the picture, frowned at Liam, then stamped his entry and waved him through. Grace approached the desk, submitted her passport with both hands, and received the same three frowns and a stamp.

“Just goes to show,” Liam said. “You can’t go home again.”

• • •

Several hours later, Grace still hadn’t choked Liam out, though not for lack of prompting.

“Looks like a Shaw Brothers set,” Liam said, wondering at the scalloped tile roofs of the market north of the City God Temple. “I mean, except for the skyscrapers. I didn’t expect buildings this… old-fashioned.”

“That’s because we’re in a tourist trap.” Grace grabbed Liam’s wrist and pulled him away from a young man touting overpriced steamed buns. “They want it to look like you think it should. Now come on. Our tail’s catching up.”

Liam stumbled into step. “I was going to eat those.”

“Stuff your face later.” She frowned at the stone courtyard and the gaggle of tourists and the slate-colored sky. Liam was right, though she’d never admit it: the place did look old-fashioned, not quite like she remembered, but close enough. Traditional. The people, though, those had changed. Fewer suits, no hats, sneakers everywhere. She liked modern fashion, in general: more supportive and less constraining than the older styles. A night’s makeup no longer took an afternoon to apply. But she’d grown used to those changes in the West, in her decades of Vatican service after Menchú woke her in Guatemala. Here, on streets she almost knew, the modern look seemed harsher, more artificial. She knew how people dressed in her Shanghai, and they didn’t dress like this. But once in a while she saw a look in some businessman’s eye, a smile shared between two young women walking hand in hand, that dragged her ninety years back home. She remembered the smell of sea and fish and sweat and smoke and perfume; she remembered the sharp sibilants of the city.

Add the not-so-subtle tail, and she felt right at home.

“They picked us up at the hotel, do you think?”

“Don’t know.”

“Or followed us from the airport?”

She didn’t repeat herself.

“Could be thugs—I look like a tourist.”

He didn’t, quite. Liam, as usual, looked a little too dangerous, and a little too sure of himself, to play the clueless outsider. No sense telling him—he’d take the former as a compliment, try to overcorrect for the latter, and only make himself more noticeable as a result. Sometimes—often—Grace really wished more of the team had formal espionage experience. “Our tail is a professional.” On the subway, their tail had passed as a bored commuter; Grace had noticed the slender woman with the round unremarkable face and the chin-length bob when she followed them into the City God Temple. Certainly, locals went to the Temple, or at least they had back in the old days, but the woman with the bob had paid for a ticket, then left as soon as Grace and Liam did, and she’d followed them ever since.

Grace shouldered into her coat and led Liam past a scummy green reflecting pool that reflected only the bridge above it. “The Bizarre must be around here somewhere.” But Liam wasn’t at her shoulder anymore—he’d slowed to ogle a, God, a straight-sword on display in a tourist shop. She hooked his elbow with hers and tugged him along. He flailed, exaggerating, and almost toppled into an old woman in a fake fur coat. The woman responded with a vicious glare that after all this time abroad Grace could still read with perfect clarity: Screw this idiot if you must, but manage him. As if she’d ever. That sort of mistake was more Sal’s purview. “Keep close. And keep moving. Once we find the Bizarre, we can try to lose them.”

“It’s magic,” Liam said. “Maybe it won’t open while we’re being followed. Hell, maybe our tail is from the Bizarre. Maybe the place can read our thoughts. Maybe it’s listening to us right now.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“In our line of work, that makes me a realist.”

They skirted the edge of a street performer crowd; Grace led Liam into a shop that sold overpriced middling-quality porcelain, and out another door, circling back on their path. “When I was last here, the magical community congregated around the City God Temple at Spring Festival once a decade. They rented market stalls and plied their wares in disguise—but this was a real market, then.” She spotted the woman with the bob out of the corner of her eye, searching the crowd; the woman would catch on to Grace’s trick soon, but the confusion would give Grace time to spot any other tails. She needed a vantage point—the footbridge over the reflecting pool would do. “Can you imagine someone like the Maitresse doing business here?”

“If she liked bubble tea, maybe.”

Grace didn’t dignify that with a response. The sky flashed blue in the reflecting pool; she looked away.

“The Maitresse wouldn’t have sent us on a false lead,” Liam said.

“Are we talking about the same Maitresse? Ancient, mysterious, utterly self-interested?” Grace stopped. “What did she say about the Bizarre, again?”

“She said it was ‘right where you left it, on the flip side.’”

“‘On the flip side.’ Those words.”

Liam leaned against the bridge railing. “Like you said: she’s ancient, mysterious, and utterly self-interested. I don’t think it’s fair to judge her for not being hip to current slang.”

“Hush.” He shut up. Good boy. Grace didn’t burn. She didn’t need to move faster, just to think in four directions at once. First: A few figures in the crowd moved out of step with the rest, too slow or too fast, scanning for a quarry, settling on her. More surveillance. Second: What would she, Grace, do if she were enormously skilled in magic, and of a mind to hold a clandestine market in a high-profile tourist stop? Third: On this gray afternoon, how had the scummy reflecting pool produced that sharp blue flash? Fourth: She hoped the auntie in the fake fur coat would be watching this next bit. “You know what we’re looking for.”

“The circlet.” He tapped his jacket pocket. “I have the description, the Vatican dispensation, and everything.”

“Good. Start shopping. I’ll lose our tails. Meet me back at the hotel.”

His brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, Grace? I don’t—”

She pushed Liam off the bridge, and through the reflecting pool.