Curious Notions

Eight

Whenever Lucy went out these days, she kept looking around to see if she could spot Paul. He'd turned up a lot when she wasn't looking for him. Now that she was, she never got a glimpse of him. Things often seemed to work out like that.

She wondered if he had any clothes besides the ones he was wearing. Once she saw somebody who looked a lot like him in an orange-and-black Seals shirt. She was glad when that turned out to be a stranger. She thought of Paul as a Missions rooter, the way she was. She didn't know whether she was right. They'd never talked about it. But she would have been disappointed to find out he backed the team the rich and famous cheered for.

Work just went on from day to day. She'd learned the things she needed to know to be a good clerk. Now the job was just routine, the way her time at the sewing machine had been. Her supervisor couldn't complain. She did everything that needed doing, and did it well.

Even though she did it well, she wondered what she had to look forward to. Another fifty years of this? That was probably what she would have had if she'd stayed at the sewing machine. She hadn't thought about it so much then. She wondered why not. The work had been a lot harder.

Maybe that was part of the answer. She'd been so busy at the sewing machine, she hadn't had a chance to think about anything. This job made her think, at least some. And it had slow times when she couldn't help thinking. She almost wished it didn't. She would have had more peace of mind.

Sometimes she felt ashamed of herself for worrying. Paul was the one with things to worry about now. The Germans held his father. They seemed to have stopped caring about hers. They weren't after her. They sure were after him. She had a job. He was, she supposed, looking for one. If he wasn't, she didn't know what he'd do for money.

She also had somewhere to go home to. The Feldgendarmerie were keeping an eye on his home. For all she knew, the Kaiser's secret police were standing between him and whatever brighter Sunset District he came from.

Lucy snapped her fingers in annoyance. She'd meant to ask him about that the last time she saw him. The visit to Stanley Hsu's must have distracted her. She laughed, not that it was very funny. Here she'd gone all her life without having anything to do with the Triads. She'd hardly even believed in them, any more than she believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They turned out to be real, all right. And how had she found out? Because of somebody who wasn't even Chinese. That was funny, in a strange sort of way.

Stanley Hsu didn't think so, though. He took this whole business as seriously as life and death. What did he think Paul could tell him? How much difference would it make to whoever in China was trying to stand up against the Germans? And what difference would that make to the United States?

Lucy had no idea what living in a free country was like. How could she, when she'd never done it? (For that matter, her great-grandparents hadn't, either.) She didn't think about living in a free country now, not really. She did hope that, if China somehow came out on top, it would be an easier master than Germany was. That was as far as her ambition went. She couldn't get excited about politics. She'd never had any politics to get excited about.

When she walked into the apartment, her brother bounced up and down. "You've got mail!" Michael squeaked. "You've got mail! Open it!"

"Hush," she told him. She couldn't help being a little excited herself, though. She didn't get mail all that often. The advertising mail that came to the family mostly had her parents' names on it. That kind of junk went straight into the trash, anyhow.

She didn't recognize the handwriting on the envelope or the name in the return address. But the return address itself was on Thirty-third Avenue. Lucy found herself smiling. She knew who'd sent it. Paul had to have figured she would.

The letter inside was chatty. It might have come from a tourist, not somebody who'd grown up in San Francisco. He talked about the sights he'd seen: the twistiest street in the world, the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, the big bronze statue of Wilhelm IV in front of City Hall, and the museum and Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park.

Japanese garden came at the front of one line. Saturday came at the front of the next one. At three o'clock came at the front of the one below that. Paul hadn't used a secret code, not really. He'd just hoped Lucy would be awake and alert and figure out what was gong on. She was pretty sure she had. She was also pretty sure no Feld-gendarmerie man could.

Paul had signed the letter with the same name he'd used on the envelope. The Germans wouldn't know who that was, either, if they'd read the letter. Paul had to believe they would. They might think he was a school friend or someone she worked with.

"Who is this guy it's from?" Michael wanted to know.

"None of your business, brat," Lucy said sweetly.

"I'm gonna tell," Michael said, and then, much louder, "Mommy!" But Mother backed Lucy. Her mail was her business. Mother didn't say anything about the brat. She didn't always seem to realize Michael was one—she was, after all, his mother, too. But he had been snooping, and so she didn't get mad at Lucy.

Saturday afternoon came around much too slowly. When Lucy first got the extra half day off, she'd thought it was the biggest luxury in the world. Now she took it for granted. Things often seemed to work out like that, too. It was a little disappointing—but having to work the whole day would have been a lot worse.

She took the Fulton Street bus to Golden Gate Park and walked to the Japanese garden. She was way early, but she didn't care. Whether she was seeing somebody or not, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon. Everything was in its place, all the plants perfectly pruned. It was beautiful. And it smelled green and growing, too. She didn't notice missing that when she was away from it, but it was very nice when she found it.

She'd just stooped to take a closer look at some ferns growing by the base of a pine tree when someone behind her said, "Hello, there."

Lucy jumped up and turned. "Hello, yourself," she managed.

Paul was smiling, but he stood too straight and moved in quick jerks. He might have been a wire stretched too tight for too long. "You're early," he said.

"I like it here," Lucy said. "Besides, so are you."

"I like it here, too." Even his smile seemed brittle, as if it might break if she tapped it too hard. "I'm glad you worked out what I was saying in the letter. I'm glad you knew it was me."

"Who else?" she answered. "I don't get a whole lot of letters, especially from people I've never heard of. I know you couldn't put your own name on it, but you didn't really need to."

"Okay," he said. "Shall we walk around and look at things?"

"Sure." They strolled the narrow, twisting paths. Most of the people who came to the garden seemed to be from out of town. Some of them were from out of the country. Several spoke German. Any American recognized the rulers' language—and recognized it as a signal to get out of the way, to make sure you weren't noticed.

Whatever Sunset District Paul came from, he reacted the way Lucy would have. He went down a path that took both of them away from those guttural consonants and flat vowels. After a while, his voice as casual as he could make it, he asked, "So—have you heard anything from Stanley?"

Lucy needed a moment to think of the jeweler by his first name. Paul was smart to talk about him that way, though. Plenty of people were called Stanley. Even so, she had to shake her head. "No," he said. "Nothing. You?"

"Also nada," he answered.

She cocked her head to one side. She could see what that had to mean, but it wasn't English—not to her, anyway. All her doubts and curiosity came flooding forward. "Where are you from?" she asked.

"I told you before," Paul said. "From here. From San Francisco. From the Sunset District. From Thirty-third Avenue."

"I know what you told me," Lucy said. "I believe all of those except that you're from here. You can't be from here—you just cant." She started talking about all the strange things Curious Notions had, and about Paul's own strangeness (especially if he was supposed to come out of the Sunset District), and about her own thoughts about how maybe there were other worlds. The longer she went on, the more foolish she felt. It all seemed so silly, to say nothing of unlikely.

That was what she thought till she turned and looked at Paul's face. He'd gone white as skimmed milk. His voice shook when he asked, "Who told you about this? Who else has heard about it?"

She'd thought of a lot of questions he might ask, but not those. "Nobody," she said. "Not from me, anyhow."

"What does that mean?" He didn't sound shaky any more. He sounded hard and dangerous. "Is anybody else saying that kind of thing?"

If she'd said no, what would he have done? Knocked her over the head with a rock and dragged her into the bushes? She wouldn't have been surprised. He looked so intense, he frightened her. But she answered, "The people from the Triads wonder about you, too. They don't see how you can be from here, either."

Paul went even paler. Watching him, Lucy began to realize her crazy idea might not be so crazy after all. "Oh, great. Just. . . great," he said, and she could make a pretty good guess about what he hadn't quite said. He wouldn't have got so upset if she were crazy. He needed a little while to gather himself. Once he did, he went on, "Listen, you've got to promise me something. You've got to, Lucy, you hear me?"

"I hear you," she said. "I'm not going to promise anything till I know what it is."

He nodded jerkily. "Okay," he said, though it seemed anything but okay to him. "You've got to promise me not to talk about this business with anybody. Anybody at all. Ever. You don't know how much trouble it could cause."

"I think maybe I do," she said.

But Paul said, "If you think so, you're wrong. Americans here thought they knew what atomic bombs could do, too. It turned out they didn't. They didn't even come close. This would be like that, too, only worse—maybe thousands of times worse."

Americans here. What other Americans were there? But as soon as Lucy asked herself the question, she saw the answer. There were Americans of whatever sort Paul was. Were there other kinds besides his? Were there . .. thousands of other kinds besides his?

Lucy looked around. The Japanese garden seemed to press in on her. She knew that wasn't real, but it felt real. All of a sudden, this whole world seemed nothing more than a single grain of sand on the beach. And how many other grains, almost but not quite like it, lay there on the beach beside it? Thousands? Millions? What came after millions?

Quietly, Paul asked, "Do you see?" What must her face have been showing?

"I think maybe I do," she said again, and now maybe she did, or began to. "That's . . . the biggest thing I ever tried to imagine in my whole life."

"Yeah, well, now that you've done it, try to imagine forgetting about it, okay?" Paul said. "Please? It's important. You don't know how important it is."

That was true enough. How could she know such a thing? But she said, "Maybe you ought to tell me, then. I'm stuck in the middle of this, aren't I?"

"I wish you weren't. I wish there weren't any middle to be stuck in," Paul told her. She believed that. If there weren't any middle for her to be stuck in, he wouldn't have been in trouble, either.

If. If. If. Was that how all the separate worlds were different? A different if in each one? She almost asked him. Seeing if he could go any paler than he was already might have been fun. She had more urgent things to worry about, though. "Well, there is a middle, and I'm in it, just like you," she said. "The real question is, how do we get out of it?"

"Good question. Real good question. I wish I had a real good answer," he said. "By now, my people will know something's wrong. But they can't do anything about it, not while the Feldgendarmerie is sitting in Curious Notions."

"That's where you go back and forth?" Lucy asked.

Paul nodded, then looked as if he wished he hadn't "Don't ask me stuff like that," he said. "Don't ask me anything. The less you know, the less they can get out of you."

Lucy wondered what sort of they he had in mind. The Kaiser's men? The Triads? Everybody in this whole world? The last seemed the most likely. He really was a stranger here. "You know how to get in touch with me," Lucy said. "How do I get in touch with you if I need to?"

"You shouldn't," he said. "If you find out where I'm staying, other people will, too. You're okay. Other people?" He shook his head. "You know about the kinds of other people who want to talk to me."

She did, too. She didn't care for his answer, but she saw it made sense. He had a way of doing that. She said, "I think I'd better go. There are a lot of things I need to sort out now." She wondered if she'd be able to go to sleep tonight. She didn't see how.

Her face must have given her away again. Paul laughed—not so much because he thought it was funny, she judged, but because he didn't know what else to do. "I wish you wouldn't," he said. Then he let out another laugh. "I may as well wish for the sun not to come up tomorrow, too. I can see that."

"I can't help it," Lucy said. "This is important. You told me so yourself."

"Me and my big mouth," he muttered. But then he waved her away. "Now you know what you always wanted to. I hope you're not sorry later on."

How could I be? Lucy didn't say it out loud. It was another one of those questions where she could already see the answer.

Paul sat at the edge of his lumpy mattress, staring down at the worn carpet. Every once in a while, he would shake his head. He'd just broken every rule drilled into him in Crosstime Traffic training. Somebody in this alternate knew it was an alternate, and he'd admitted as much.

Try as he would, though, he didn't see what else he could have done. Lucy had already figured most of it out on her own. That was bad enough. But she'd also said the guys from the Tongs weren't far behind her. She couldn't do anything about what she knew (except take it to the Germans, but she wouldn't do that). They . . . might be able to. Paul didn't know enough to be sure.

He also didn't know whether he dared visit Stanley Hsu's jewelry store again. If he showed up there, would the jeweler and his pals grab him and start trying to pull what he knew out of him? If he didn't show up there, wouldn't Stanley Hsu forget about getting his father out of jail? He was too likely to be wrong—dreadfully wrong—whether he chose to go or to stay away.

Before long, he had the problem solved for him. He was walking up O'Farrell Street when a Chinese man a couple of years older than he was fell into step beside him. "You're Mr. Gomes, aren't you?" the fellow asked in a friendly voice.

Paul hesitated. If he admitted it... If he denied it...

Whether he admitted it or denied it turned out not to matter. Three more Chinese men fell in around him. "Why don't you come along with us, Mr. Gomes?" said the one who'd spoken before. Why don't you come along with us so we don't stomp the stuffing out of you? hung in the air. The fellow still sounded friendly. Why wouldn't he? He held all the good cards.

Or did he? "What if I yell for a cop?" Paul said.

All four Chinese men smiled. They were four of the chilliest smiles he'd ever seen. "Go right ahead," said the one who did the talking. "Be our guest."

He needed a second and a half, tops, to decide that wasn't a good idea. If he yelled for a cop, the Chinese guys might maim him before the policeman could do a thing. Even if they didn't, the cop was liable to hang on to him and find out who he was. As soon as the cop did find out, he was very likely to turn Paul over to the Feldgen-darmerie for the reward. Falling into the Tongs' hands might be bad. Falling into the Germans' hands would be bad. The difference was small, but it was real.

When he didn't yell, his—escorts?—smiled again. "I thought you had some brains," the talking one said.

"Do I?" Paul asked bitterly. The men surrounding him didn't answer. They just kept smiling. In a movie, he could have broken away or knocked all of them flat.

Here on the dirty, sadly shabby streets of San Francisco, one against four looked like bad odds. He asked, "Where are you taking me?"

"You'll see," said the man who'd asked his name. Paul wanted to kick him just for that. He would have bet it was what he'd get for an answer. Then the fellow added, "It isn't far."

"Thanks a lot," Paul said. The Chinese man grinned at him. He knows what I'm thinking, Paul realized. He knows, and he's enjoying it.

For whatever it was worth, he told the truth. The Chinese men herded Paul to a noodle shop a few blocks away. They were good at what they did. They didn't look as if they were herding him. By the way they acted, they might have been his buddies. They'd plainly had plenty of practice at their game. He wondered where they'd got it. That might have been one more thing he was better off not knowing.

In the shop sat Stanley Hsu and another, older, man in what passed for a sharp suit in this alternate. Stanley Hsu stood up in greeting. The older man, who had what seemed like a permanent sour look on his face, didn't. The jeweler said, "I hope you'll let us buy you lunch while we talk."

"Do I have a choice?" Paul asked.

"There are always choices," Stanley Hsu answered. Paul didn't like the sound of that. Stanley Hsu went on, "Why don't you sit down? We'll eat lunch, we'll talk, and we'll see what some of the choices are."

Paul glanced at the rugged young men who'd brought him to the noodle shop. "Is one of the choices making them disappear?"

Stanley Hsu looked to the older man. That told Paul something about who bossed whom. The older man jerked a thumb at the door. The four escorts trooped out without a backward glance. The older man pointed to a chair. Paul sat down.

Stanley Hsu's eyes went to the older man again. The fellow's frown got deeper as he thought for a moment. Then he nodded. The jeweler said, "This is Mr. Lee—Bob Lee."

"Hello," Paul said. That let him stay polite without saying he was glad to meet Bob Lee. Was the Chinese man named for the Confederate general? That would have been funny. Paul wanted to see what he could get out of the men from the Tongs. He asked, "How is my father? Do you know?"

Once more, Stanley Hsu looked toward Bob Lee. The sour look didn't leave Lee's face as he answered, "The Germans are treating him pretty well. They're treating him very well, in fact. We don't know what that means."

One thing it might mean was that Paul's father was telling the Feldgendarmerie men what they wanted to hear—or maybe what they needed to hear. But would he do that? Paul hoped not, anyway.

After enough .. . persuasion, anybody might say anything. You couldn't blame someone for that. Before, though? Before was a different story.

The man behind the counter brought everyone at the table big bowls of noodles piled high with shrimp and scallops and crab meat and three or four kinds of mushrooms and even more kinds of vegetables. Nobody had asked Paul if that was what he wanted, but it looked good. The man gave Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee chopsticks. He started to hand Paul a fork. "I can use chopsticks, too," Paul said.

The man blinked, but handed him a pair. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other. Lee rattled off a few words in Chinese. If they didn't mean, This I gotta see, Paul would have been amazed.

/'// show 'em, he thought. He'd been using chopsticks in Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants since he was a little kid. He dug in. He might not have been quite so neat as the two Chinese men with him, but he had no trouble. The food disappeared. It tasted as good as it looked.

He'd got halfway down the bowl before he noticed the jeweler and the older man staring at him. That was when he realized showing he could use chopsticks might have been a mistake. "You weren't kidding," Stanley Hsu said.

Paul swallowed a mouthful. "Should I have been?"

"I don't know," the jeweler said. "I can't remember the last time I saw . . . someone who wasn't Chinese—or Japanese, I suppose— who could handle chopsticks like that."

"I never have," Bob Lee said flatly. "Never."

This was an alternate. They did things differently here. Not all the things they did differently were obvious. People who weren't Asian went to Chinese restaurants here. Paul had seen that. But evidently they ate with knife and fork when they did. Who would notice something like that. . . till it tripped him up?

"They aren't that hard to learn," Paul said.

Stanley Hsu looked down at the chopsticks in his own hand. "Maybe not," he said, but he didn't sound as if he believed it.

Bob Lee rattled off several sentences in Chinese. Stanley Hsu answered in the same language. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, though they didn't forget their food. Finally, Bob Lee went back to English: "I think they are easy to learn, too. But I am old enough to be your father—almost old enough to be your grandfather—and I have never seen Americans or Germans take to them the way you do. You have your tools, we have ours— and not everyone in Chinatown uses chopsticks, either."

"You're Americans, too, aren't you?" Paul said.

Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other yet again. "Yes and no," the jeweler said after a moment. "We are American, yes, but we are also something different."

"Something more," Lee added. He might have said, Something better. He didn't quite, but he might have.

Thoughtfully, Stanley Hsu said, "Young Mr. Gomes also seems to be something more, if not in the same way we are. The way he eats argues for that, don't you think?"

Paul wished he'd never heard of chopsticks. He would have thrown them down and gone back to the fork had he thought it would do any good. Since he thought it would only make things worse, he went on eating the way he'd started. He'd lost his appetite for the seafood, which was a shame.

"Where are you from, anyhow?" Stanley Hsu asked him. His tone was just like Lucy's when she'd asked him the same question.

He gave the jeweler the same answer he'd given Lucy, too: "Me? Thirty-third Avenue, in the Sunset District."

Stanley Hsu's head and Bob Lee's went back and forth in exactly the same rhythm: left, right, left, right, left. It would have got a laugh on a TV sitcom. Sitting here where they could do whatever they wanted to him, Paul didn't think they were funny at all. Lee said, "You could be from a lot of different places, Mr. Gomes. Wherever you are from, though, that isn't it."

"But it is," Paul said. And it was ... in a way. "I fool around in Pine Lake Park. I just graduated from Bay High."

"Excuse me," Stanley Hsu said, and disappeared into the noodle shop's back room. Paul heard him talking on the telephone, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. He came out again and sat back down. "We can check on that. If you are lying to us, you will be sorry."

"So much for enjoying my lunch," Paul said. Both Chinese men laughed. Paul didn't think that was funny, either.

He'd finished eating by the time the phone rang. The owner called Stanley Hsu into the back room once more. Again, Paul listened to him talking. The jeweler slammed the phone down. He was scowling when he returned to the table. He pointed a finger at Paul. "Your records at the high school are where they ought to be. You got very good grades."

"See?" Paul said triumphantly. "Uh, and thank you."

"Do not thank me," Stanley Hsu said. "Your picture is not in last year's annual, or the one from the year before, or from the year before that, or the year before that. Your name is not in any of those annuals. Records are easy to fix. We know about that." Bob Lee nodded, as if to say he knew it very well indeed. Stanley Hsu went on, "Fixing records does not make things turn true. We want the truth now, please."

Urk, Paul thought. The men from the Tongs were right. Slipping a false record into a file wasn't very hard. That probably would have been enough to keep the Germans happy. It wasn't enough for these men. They knew San Francisco better than the occupiers ever could.

"Well?" Stanley Hsu said.

"Well, what?" Paul answered. "I thought we had a bargain. Get my father out, and then we talk. You don't have any business pressing me till you take care of your half."

"You have gall. I've already seen that," the jeweler said. "How much good it will do you may be another question."

Bob Lee was blunter: "Times have changed since we made that silly bargain. We need the truth from you—no more nonsense."

"The Feldgendarmerie would tell me the same thing," Paul said.

Stanley Hsu looked pained. Bob Lee only shrugged. "And what would you tell the Feldgendarmerie if they got their hands on you?" he asked. He answered his own question: "You'd tell them whatever they wanted you to tell them, that's what."

"And how is that any different from what you want me to do?" Paul asked.

Lee didn't seem to care. He just wanted answers. How he got them, what he did to get them, didn't matter to him. Stanley Hsu saw the point Paul was making. Whether he agreed with it was probably a different story. But he did see it. He spoke in Chinese. Bob Lee answered with several crackling sentences in the same language. The jeweler said something else. Lee threw his hands in the air as he replied. You must be out of your mind, he was saying, or something much like that.

"You've made yourself . . . hard to find," Stanley Hsu said, in English and to Paul. "How do we know you'll keep your half of the deal? Tell us where you are staying—"

"Show us where you are staying," Bob Lee broke in. "We have already seen you can come up with lies that seem like the truth."

"Yes—show us where you are staying," Stanley Hsu agreed. "That would be better. Then the bargain will be safe."

Letting them know where he lived was the last thing Paul wanted to do. They would have a hold on him then. And he was sure they would keep an eye on him 24/7 after that. But he didn't see what choice he had. This was what he got for being alone in a world not his own.

With a sigh, he gave them the address of the cheap hotel where he was staying. They both made faces. Bob Lee said, "I wouldn't go into that part of town on a bet."

"I haven't had any trouble—except from your people," Paul said.

That didn't impress the Chinese men. Stanley Hsu spoke in Chinese to the man who ran the noodle shop. That fellow dipped his head and hurried out of the place. When he came back, he had with him the four young men who'd brought Paul there. Stanley Hsu smiled and said, "They will make sure nothing happens to you on your way back to your room."

"Right," Paul said tightly. They'd make sure he was staying where he said he was. But he was stuck. He could see that. He got to his feet and nodded to the jeweler and Bob Lee. "Thanks so much for lunch." He almost hoped they would get angry. They didn't. They just laughed.

"Let's go," said the young man who'd done all the talking. Paul went. The four of them stayed around him all the way back to that lousy hotel. He was less sorry to have them along in the Tenderloin than he would have been a lot of other places in San Francisco. People here went on and on about how bad the Sunset District was. And it was bad, especially compared to the same part of town in the home timeline. But a sea gull flying over the Tenderloin was liable to get its pocket picked.

If Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee were telling the truth, nothing much had happened to Dad yet. Maybe the Feldgendarmerie men knew what a valuable prisoner they had. Maybe they didn't want to do anything to spoil their chances of getting the answers they wanted. Paul hoped that was what was going on.

Maybe Dad was talking just enough to keep the Germans happy, and no more. Paul tried to do that with the men from the Tongs. Paul hadn't fallen off the tightrope yet, but he'd sure wobbled in the noodle shop. If they pushed him a little more .. .

He chuckled, which made his escorts give him a funny look. They didn't ask him to explain. That was a relief. He'd wobbled in the noodle shop, yes. But Lucy Woo had pushed him right off the rope and into space. She'd figured out where he had to be from. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee had all the evidence in front of their noses— more evidence than Lucy'd had. They knew he hadn't gone to Bay High here. If they saw all of what that meant, though, they hadn't shown it to Paul.

He stopped in front of his hotel. "Thanks for bringing me back," he said. He wouldn't thank them for taking him away.

They all nodded. They all waited on the sidewalk while Paul trudged up the grimy concrete steps and into the lobby. In the home timeline, most hotels had doors so you could see out. The door to this place could have turned a charging tank to scrap metal. That kind of door was common in this alternate's Tenderloin.

The desk clerk looked up when Paul came in. As soon as the fellow recognized him, he went back to his book. It wasn't quite a comic book, but it had lots of gaudy pictures. The clerk's lips moved as he read. The pages didn't hold many words, but he didn't turn them very often.

OUT OF ORDER, said the sign on the elevator. It had been there a long time. Paul's lips moved when he read it anyway. He wasn't quite silent. The clerk kept his nose in his story even so. Paul went to the stairs and climbed to his room. The stairway smelled of stale tobacco and even staler food. Somebody going down passed him. They looked away from each other, as if neither wanted to admit he had to live here.

Paul carefully locked all the locks on his door after he went inside. You never could tell, not in this part of town. He walked over to the window and looked down at the sidewalk through the dirty glass. The four young Chinese men were still there. One of them looked up. Paul drew back in a hurry. He didn't want them seeing him, though he couldn't have said why. What difference did it make? They already knew where he was.

He felt almost as imprisoned as his father was. That was partly because the men from the Tongs knew he was here, but only partly. Being stuck in this alternate seemed as bad as being in jail. And he feared it might be a life sentence.

Someone from another world! Lucy had never thought that about anyone but her brother before. This was different. Michael was just a nuisance. He didn't really come from anywhere else. Lucy remembered when he was born. She'd been little then, but she remembered. Paul truly was from . . . somewhere else.

That didn't mean he wasn't a nuisance, too. Lucy's life had got very complicated since she met him. Not many of the complications were much fun, either. She had a better job now, but her father had gone to jail and might never have come out again. And she'd had to start dealing with the Triads. She remembered how she hadn't even been sure they were real. Real? They were powerful, more powerful than she'd ever dreamt. They had connections that reached all the way across the Pacific. And they had connections that reached all through San Francisco.

Lucy smiled as she chopped cabbage in the kitchen with her mother. The Triads had far-reaching connections, all right, but so did she. Theirs reached back to China, the land of (most of) her ancestors. But hers . . . hers reached farther still. Hers reached to a world where Thirty-third Avenue in the Sunset District was a nice place to grow up. How could anyone's connections stretch any farther than that?

Her mother said, "Pass the white pepper, please."

So much for distant worlds. "Here," Lucy said. "Not too much, or Michael will squawk about how spicy everything is." She would have squawked herself, up till a couple of years before. These days, she liked things a lot spicier than she had.

With a small smile, Mother said, "I really do know how much to put in, dear." She sprinkled the pepper into a pot where pork bubbled. "Now for that fine cabbage." In it went. So did two kinds of mushrooms. A smaller, covered pot with rice in it bubbled over a low flame on another burner. Lucy's mother nodded to herself. "Supper in about ten minutes."

"Okay." Lucy looked into the pot with the pork and cabbage and mushrooms. Then she noticed her mother was looking at her. Embarrassed, she asked, "What is it?"

"Nothing." Mother laughed—which only flustered Lucy worse—and then went on, "Or maybe everything. I'm watching you growing up right in front of my eyes. You're starting to do things I don't know about and think thoughts I can't follow. What was going through your head while you were cutting up that cabbage? Your eyes looked like they were a million miles away."

Farther than that. A lot farther than that, Lucy thought. Mother knew all kinds of things. But if Lucy tried to explain about different worlds, would she follow? Lucy didn't think so. She wouldn't have believed it herself if she hadn't had her nose rubbed in it.

Besides, Paul had asked her to keep his secret. She bit down on that as if on a piece of bone in some meat. Who was more important, Paul or Mother? It was Paul's secret, but even so ....

"I don't know," Lucy said. "I'm all confused."

Her mother didn't laugh now. She put an arm around Lucy's shoulder. She had to reach up to do it—Lucy was three inches taller. Mother said, "Whether you know it or not, getting confused some of the time is part of growing up, too. Things are more complicated for you than they were when you were a little girl."

Lucy found herself nodding. Mother was absolutely right about that.