The Finder

38

He'd left her there. After all the shooting and screaming into the phones. Maybe he'd been talking to Chen; it wasn't clear. Why did he leave, was he expecting someone? Meanwhile, something-an idea, a panicked fantasy-was eating at her, even as she felt despair about her circumstances. She found herself staring at the fuming tub filled with the brown liquid. All the canisters of chemicals. She'd remembered the smell and then she'd remembered something from an applied chemistry course at Harbin Institute of Technology. She needed to increase the density of the jellied liquid. Could she reach? She wriggled into a crouch, grasped her waste bucket, stood awkwardly, shuffled to the tub, and scooped up a bucket load of the scummy mixture. Take your time, she cautioned herself. She knelt and set the bucket on the floor then sat down.

She watched the liquid settle and ever so subtly separate, the water rising to the top. She took off her shoe and stirred the stuff with it. The shoe started to smoke, but the water was brought to the surface. She tipped the bucket and poured off the brownish water, and it trickled across the cement floor toward the drain. By the time the shoe was too floppy and eroded to wear anymore, she had refined the mixture enough that the bucket was one quarter empty. And much more odorous. Her eyes watered. Yes, when the mixture was drained of water, it seemed to evaporate more easily. Evaporation, she recalled, was the achievement of the gaseous state. I know what to do, she told herself. She took the heel of her shoe and dipped it into the mixture. Then she flicked the heel at the lightbulb. A perfect shot. One of the flying globules spattered against the bulb, stuck, heated, and then, just as it dropped away, burst into flame, landing on the floor and producing a horrible black smoke until it burned into nothing but a carbon smudge.

Jin Li coughed a moment, then remembered to slide the bucket around the edge of the mattress, where he would be less likely to see it and discover what she had done.