Chapter 1: Lin's Books
My favorite time of the day was 10 p.m., after we'd finished straightening the bookstore and Dad had taken the cash to the bank, and Colette and I had done the dishes and walked Brownie. (PJ used to join us, getting even more excited than the dog over stray clumps of weeds and odd refuse on the sidewalk, but we resolutely did not discuss that.) All the chores completed, the parental elements would retire upstairs to their bedroom in silence, as they had been wont to do this past year. Colette would sometimes stay downstairs in the bookstore to arrange a few last displays just so or to wipe off a patch of dust that I'd missed and give me a disapproving look, which I always ignored. (Disapproving looks were an older sister's prerogative, and I would not permit the usurpation of my birthright.) As likely as not, she'd then run around calling for Cookie until she found the poor cat and extracted her from under the counter or behind a bookcase and bore the squirming mass of fur off to her bedroom. Then I'd finally be alone in Lin's Books, left to brood in peace among the shelves and the tables laden with books.
When Mom and Dad immigrated to California thirty years ago, they sought the most bland, ordinary life possible. Back then, the Technocracy hadn't built up a strong presence in the Bay Area yet, so it seemed a relatively safe home for a young mage couple. Besides, what could have been more inconspicuous than settling down among all the other immigrants? Opening a restaurant or laundry store would have been too clichéd – and possibly attract attention because of the cliché – so they settled on a bookstore. And anyway, you wouldn't expect any Technocrat to look too closely at a bookstore. Paper and ink bound into volumes using centuries-old technology? How quaint. Even so, after my parents' close call in Taipei, they weren't taking any chances. From the start, they carefully warded and even built a sanctum in the little house they bought on a quiet street just off Cal Ave. We lived on the second floor, for the most part; the living room and den on the first floor became the core of Lin's Books. By the time I was ten and Colette five (PJ wouldn't be born for years), the bookstore was doing well enough for us to buy the house next door when our elderly neighbors moved to Arizona to be closer to their daughter. With permission from the City of Palo Alto, we knocked down the fence between the properties and converted both floors of the second house into an extension of Lin's Books. (Discreet Correspondence wards in each room ensured better security than most bookstores could afford.)
Later, my friend Cyndi Willis (now called Cyndi Aquilanti because she was a paranoid hacker type) found mention online of an outdoor bookstore in SoCal and showed me photos – a maze of freestanding shelves between two old houses; indoor spaces, including kitchens and hallways, all converted into rooms for showcasing books; brightly-colored awnings shading the outdoor bookcases and inviting tables and benches. The concept was quite intriguing. By this time, life as a mage had become increasingly dangerous as Technocracy consolidated its hold over the Bay Area, and the mage community of my childhood had fractured, first into tiny cells, then into isolated individuals. We'd always sheltered fugitives in our sanctum, but now their numbers swelled and we began to hear terrifying rumors of HIT marks, wild animals driven mad by horrible experiments and cybernetic implants, that were created for the express purpose of hunting down mages. This seemed like as good a time as any to strengthen the sanctum, and as a cover for the activity, we turned our outdoor space into a used books section.
Tonight I was just curling up with a book in my favorite armchair in the deserted store when Colette wandered back downstairs and threw herself into an armchair across the room. She sat up again immediately and glanced at the nearest shelf, at the gap where I'd removed a collection of Millay's poems.
She looked pointedly at the book in my hands. "Jiejie, you know Mom hates it when you read the new books."
I shrugged. What was the point of owning a bookstore if you couldn't read the books in it? As long as I didn't crease the binding or wrinkle any pages, I couldn't see the harm. I didn't say any of this, though. Mom and I had been through it already. Countless times. Loudly. Colette and Dad (and possibly some of the neighbors) had heard it all. Besides, warning me not to damage the source of our livelihood wasn't why Colette was down here in her purple-and-white polka-dotted pajamas.
Waiting, I turned to a poem at random, idly skimmed the lines of "Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."
A long sigh. Colette probably thought I was being difficult. "Have you seen Sam lately?"
Ah, that again. It was an endless source of amusement – to me, if not to Mom and Dad – that good-girl Colette had somehow developed a massive crush on one of our most questionable patrons, Sam, who was not only eleven years older but also a paranoid drug addict who was always ranting about how the Technocracy was out to get him. Admittedly, given that his mentor had vanished about a year ago, he probably had a point, but he might be more convincing if he weren't constantly high, or twitchy because he wasn't high, or reaching for his flask of whiskey. Or if he weren't shadowed by a highly conspicuous golem that grimly disapproved of his drug abuse. After a stern lecture from Mom one time, he'd mostly stopped drinking in the philosophy section of our store, but I'd have been willing to bet that he still snuck sips when he thought no one was watching. (None of us ever warned him about the Correspondence wards, although if he were sober more often he might have detected them himself. He wasn't an incompetent mage, after all.)
"Nope," I replied to Colette. "I haven't seen him since last Wednesday. Remember? He always says that – "
"You can't be too predictable, because that's how they get you," Colette finished, mimicking Sam's shifty stance, trembling hands, and darting glances, as if expecting a squad of Technocrats to burst in at any minute to drag him off for re-conditioning.
Sam was a good guy under all the drugs and alcohol and poor personal hygiene, but I still couldn't understand what Colette saw in him. Maybe she just needed a distraction from PJ's disappearance, I thought. Maybe she found his hatred for the Technocracy reassuring, when the two of us were so convinced it was responsible but could only speculate because Mom and Dad refused to talk about any of the events of a year ago. (Which I thought was selfish and unfair and cruel, but short of finding a Mind mage, we didn't have any way to drag out information.) Since I was in a reasonably good mood at the moment, I added sympathetically, "I'm sure he'll be back soon. He asked us to order that translation of the Confucius Analects, and – "
"Oh yeah! I remember!" Colette brightened up. She was, after all, the one who had recommended that particular translation to him, which she was reading for her philosophy class at Stanford. (I had my suspicions as to why she'd suddenly developed an interest in the field, and I was sure Mom and Dad did too, but none of us were saying anything.) "So he'll have to come back soon!" Her face cheerful again, she trotted back upstairs, leaving me alone with what peace could be found in poetry.
Any tranquility I felt had rapidly vanished by the next afternoon. Mom was in one of her foul moods because a shipment of novels arrived with all the upper right-hand corners crumpled, and a small child left unattended by a young mother had seized books on the bottom shelves and begun gnawing on them. Even after calling the publisher to complain about their packaging (or lack thereof) and expelling the mother and small child, Mom was still furious. Colette being safely in class, I was the nearest scapegoat.
Unfortunately, we had a lot of old arguments to continue. She picked my least favorite.
"You're twenty-seven years old! When are you going to settle down and start a family? Didn't you hear Auntie Chen's story about her cousin's son's wife, who waited until she was thirty-five to try to have a baby because she was 'too busy with work'?" (As far as I remembered, said wife was a highly successful, i.e. well-paid, employee at some Wall Street firm, so her investment of child-bearing years into her career seemed justified.) "They couldn't have a baby for four years! They almost gave up! And then they finally had a son and he has autism! She'll have to quit her job to take care of him," Mom predicted righteously.
Having learned the painful way that it was best to let her rage, I stayed silent, drifted around the store, straightened a display of inspirational journals, and prayed fervently to all my ancestors for a customer to enter and interrupt the storm.
"Did you know that there's a new technology where you can – " Mom paused long enough to snatch a copy of the World Journal off a newsstand and brandish it at me, "'freeze' your eggs? Maybe you should do this. See, it says here – "
This was going too far. What did she think I was, some sort of lab rat for new technologies? "Mom, I'm not refrigerating my eggs."
"Freezing! Freezing! Aiyah, you never listen to anything I say. What did I do wrong? How did I raise such a rebellious daughter? Do I owe you something from a past life?"
"Mom – "
She wasn't even listening anymore. "Thirty years your father and I have worked hard to give you kids everything you wanted. We sent you girls to Stanford, and for what use? All those rich, promising boys there, and you come out without a boyfriend and your meimei only wants that good-for-nothing drug addict!"
"Don't call him that! He's my friend!"
The lament only changed directions. "Ah, see? You've fallen under his bad influence too. I don't approve of your friends. Not a normal one among them – "
"Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you sent me to volunteer at St. Anthony's!" I couldn't resist taunting her. "It serves homeless people. What sort of friends did you think I'd make there?" It was even sort of true – St. Anthony's was where I'd met Sam, who volunteered there on his good days; Zig, who was indeed homeless and hence a Victim of an Uncaring Society, but who also dealt drugs for a living; and Ezri, who came from a Good Family but Went Wild after his mother disappeared (according to Mom) and developed an unwholesome interest in psychedelic mushrooms. She knew because Ezri had begun driving down to our bookstore to research fungi and cultures. He'd also been tending a cluster of intellectual mushrooms that devoured the old books in our dumpster, but I didn't think Mom needed to know that. Magical mushrooms growing right by our mundane little bookstore? She'd panic, change our names, and drag us off to Europe or something.
"I should never have listened to your Auntie Wu and let you go up there to volunteer!" Mom raged. "She said it would get you into a top university for sure, but what good is a fancy education if you have no morals!"
"They're good people, Mom," I tried to say.
"How can you say they're good people? How can you stand there defending them? Who are you? Do I even know you anymore?"
Finally I lost my temper. "I don't know! Maybe you never did! If you did, you'd listen to me about what I think and what I want! Maybe you'd tell me why PJ had to go away and where that man took him! Why aren't we looking for him? Don't you even miss him?"
It was the cruelest thing I could have said, and I knew it even as I spoke but was well past caring.
"Get out! Get out of my house!" she roared.
"I was going anyway!" I yelled back. I grabbed my purse from behind the register and ran out the bookstore's front door, slamming it behind me and hearing the door chimes clang discordantly.
Still fuming, I stomped down the street and turned onto Cal Ave, walking past the shops and restaurants blindly until I came to the Caltrain station at the far end. A sloping ramp led down to a tunnel under the tracks. I clomped down it, planning to wander through the residential neighborhood on the far side until Mom and I both calmed down enough for me to go home. As I surfaced on the far side, though, the northbound train screeched to a halt at the station and began coughing out stray passengers. Suddenly I remembered that I was running low on ginseng, which formed a base for practically all the herbal concoctions that were my focus for Life magic, and goji berries, which I used to fix my vision when my contacts grew unbearable. Since I was on the right side of the tracks to head up to San Francisco anyway, I might as well pay a visit to Old Hsiao and his wife, an elderly Cantonese couple who ran my favorite traditional Chinese medicine shop in Chinatown. And, a niggling thought came at the back of my mind, I might buy something as a peace offering for Mom too. I hadn't meant to say what I did about PJ at the end and she'd know that too and forgive me (eventually), but some wounds never heal….
The train was about to leave. I didn't have time to buy a ticket, so I just hurried up the steps into the nearest car and made my way to the back of the train, hoping the conductor wouldn't pick today to check tickets. As one might expect for 1:30 p.m. on a Friday, I got an entire half-car to myself and claimed a window seat, tossing my purse beside me and pulling out a pair of small, sharp scissors and a square of thin, scarlet paper about the size of my hand. Folding it in half, then in half again, then diagonally, I glanced around the car as if idly taking in the rows of dubiously clean seats, an elderly couple bickering in Cantonese at the far end, the dark thin carpeting, and the windows smudged by children's greasy foreheads. Everything looked normal. While I turned to gaze out the window at the accelerating suburb, my hands busied themselves with paper and scissors – a cut here, little snips there. Fragments of red paper fell into my lap as I Prime-scanned my surroundings for any magical Effects. Finally, I unfolded a lacy eight-petaled flower, the unveiling of the artwork completing my Effect. Nothing unusual that I could detect, no Technocracy traps, no trackers. I was still safe. Good.
To pass the time while we rumbled northward, I refolded my flower and, entirely mundanely, set about embellishing the petals with delicate slashes and cut-out crescent moons. Two stops later, a harried mother boarded and tugged a young child past my seat; the child slowed to stare in awe at the flower blooming between my fingers, and I handed it to her with a smile. Wide eyed, she took it and stumbled after her mother, who hadn't noticed a thing save, perhaps, that she might be able to get an entire car to herself if she kept going. Just before they vanished through the doors leading to the next car, the little girl, who looked about seven or eight years old, turned back to offer me a shy smile.
A sweet, innocent, child's smile – just like PJ's.
In the act of returning the gesture, my face froze, and the child's expression turned fearful as she passed through the doors. Swallowing, leaning back in my seat, I pulled out another square of paper and fiddled with it restlessly.
PJ was my little brother, only eight years old, young enough, in fact, to be my or even Colette's son. It would have been so easy to resent him and all the patriarchal biases in Asian society of which he was the culmination. Cut off permanently from our extended family in Taiwan, as much for their safety as ours, knowing that Dad had no brothers and that his parents fervently hoped for a grandson bearing the Lin surname, Mom and Dad tried again and again for a son. Before my parents left Taipei, my grandfather had given Dad an old silver pocket watch that had been passed down in the family for generations – family, in this case, restricted to male Lin descendants. The watch could not pass to Colette or me or our children. Ping-Jen, more often known as PJ or, in sillier moments, PB&J, was a sort of late-life miracle brought about (I always suspected) by complicated Life rituals about which I knew nothing and wished to know nothing.
How could I not resent him, the hideous red-faced, scrunch-looking, screeching infant?
Yet how I could resent him, the sweet, mischievous little boy who got into scraps without ever quite seeming to understand how he did it and without ever meaning to wreak so much havoc? He followed me around the bookstore so religiously that we began to call him my little disciple, and he once informed a date of mine with all solemnity that the guy had to buy me a frappucino. (The date did indeed buy me one, but it still wasn't enough to tempt me on a second outing.)
Then, suddenly, last January, he was gone.
Late one night, Mom and Dad woke all three of us and quietly herded us through the storage closet on the first floor into our sanctum. Mom and Dad were dressed in street clothes, and so was PJ, I noticed blearily.
"What's going on?" Colette yawned. "I have a chem midterm tomorrow at 9." She yawned again, and so did I. Watching us, clutching his stuffed elephant, PJ giggled and deliberately yawned too.
Unusually, neither Mom nor Dad grinned at their children's silliness or joined in. Instead, they gazed at us with such intensity that it was as if they'd use a Life Effect to wake us.
"Mommy," PJ wavered, running to hug her legs, "are you crying?" His own eyes threatened to mirror hers. She didn't reply, only swept him up into a tight, tight hug. "Mommy?" PJ began to cry too.
Confused, fully awake, Colette and I turned to Dad. "What's going on?" Colette repeated, sharply now.
Dad, who never gets emotional, actually had tears in his eyes too as he explained, "Didi has to go away for a while."
"Go away?" we exclaimed. "Go away where? Why? How long?"
"We're not sure," Dad mumbled.
"What do you mean?" I asked frantically. "What's going on?"
PJ began to cry harder.
"That's enough!" Mom suddenly shouted. "It's for his safety. Don't ask any more questions."
Just then, the clock chimed midnight and right on the first ring (did he have Time magic or something?) a tall man swept into the room, long black cloak swirling melodramatically. None of us kids had ever seen him before, and I'd thought I knew all of our mage contacts.
He and my parents nodded gravely to one another but didn't greet one another by name. Curious, I thought, and traded a quick glance with Colette, who was staring fiercely at the stranger as if memorizing every last detail about him.
"It is time," he said gravely, gently. Maybe Colette could remember his face afterwards, but to me all visual impressions from that night were a blur. Weathered flesh, black fabric, the way the cloak caught the light when he reached for PJ.
The way the light reflected off the tears on PJ's cheeks as he clung to Mom.
The sound of both their sobbing.
The compassion in the man's voice as he said, oddly formally, "We will take good care of him. I'll return before the full moon to confirm my mission's success."
My mission's success? The wording caught my attention, but my mind was working too slowly, drowning in honey or molasses or some horrible thick sticky liquid….
Try as I might, I could never remember what my parting words to PJ were, or what he said to me.
That was fourteen months ago, and the man never returned.
The first few weeks were terrible, as we jumped every time the door chimes rang or footsteps thumped up the front steps. Mom cried a lot, and Dad blundered around the house, dazedly bumping into furniture, and both of them categorically refused to discuss it, ever. Even worse, we discovered that beginning a week after PJ left, no one outside the family seemed to remember him. It was as if he'd simply been erased from the world. Colette and I interrogated bookstore regulars, neighbors, teachers at the elementary school all three of us had attended, and his classmates with increasing disbelief and panic. None of them recognized the name; all of them looked at us as if we were mounting an incredibly puerile prank or just going crazy. They brought out old yearbooks to prove that no such person existed, and indeed, every photo ever taken of him had vanished. Gone from the family album were his baby pictures and all the photos through the years showing him chewing on a telephone (my favorite – I'd taken that one instead of rescuing the phone, to Mom's annoyance), blowing out candles on successive birthday cakes, standing proudly beside his first bike, squeezing Brownie or chasing Cookie. The album didn't even have blank spaces where I distinctly remembered the photos – instead, pictures proceeded in the usual chaotic fashion of family albums, but a family of mother, father, and two daughters. Even in group photos his image had disappeared, and in such a way that it didn't even look as if anyone were missing. How could this be?
In secret discussions after Mom and Dad had retired for the night, Colette and I hypothesized that a powerful Mind Effect was affecting everyone, but perhaps mages could resist it a little better. All the people we'd questioned so far were sleepers. With some trepidation, I texted Cyndi, who, to our great relief, did remember that we had a brother named PJ and had been wondering why I hadn't mentioned him in a while. After hearing the story, she promised to investigate using her Correspondence-augmented super-hacker skills, but months passed and then a year, and she still couldn't find him. The man still didn't return, and Brownie stopped scratching at the door and whining sadly every afternoon when PJ should have come home from school. After an indignant complaint from a customer who thought the prank was going too far and maybe we were acting out from subconscious reasons and needed therapy, Mom and Dad sternly forbade Colette and me from discussing the matter with outsiders. As time passed, sometimes I caught myself wondering if our family harbored genes for schizophrenia or something and I was simply insane. Weren't the twenties the age when these things started to show up?
But it would have to be a collective insanity, because Colette and Cyndi certainly had seen PJ too, and he existed in the voids of Mom's and Dad's silences. So where was he? Who the man in the cloak, and why had he broken his promise? Why wouldn't anyone tell us anything?
I'd asked myself these questions a thousand times since that night – while stomping blindly around the neighborhood after a fight with Mom or Colette, while smacking the tiles in the shower in impotent fury as scalding water blasted over my head, while digging my nails into the steering wheel of the car. I'd asked these questions a thousand times, and I was beginning to believe that I would never ever know what had happened to my brother.
These fruitless thoughts occupied me throughout the train and bus rides and the walk to Old Hsiao's shop. Although the Hsiaos were mages too, they seemed to use their abilities rarely and contented themselves supplying the Chinese population of the Bay Area with the best herbs and life advice. Their store was narrow and dingy, with a cracked linoleum floor and scuffed glass counters. Large cases, as you'd find in a bulk foods store, and oversized jars were full of bizarre-looking dried goods. Most of them were stiff and stringy, and the blend of all the scents smelled quite odd. Fortunately I was used to it and mentally blocked up my nose as I walked in the door.
"Nah-tah-sha!" Old Hsiao straightened up behind the counter and gave me a huge grin. "Long time no see, long time no see! What have you been doing lately? Not working too hard, are you?"
"Gong-Gong hao," I greeted him politely. "Oh, you know, same old, same old. Still helping out in the bookstore. I keep trying to convince my parents to sell some snacks, like cupcakes, or something, but they say that getting licensed is too much of a hassle…."
"Tsk, tsk," he agreed, "they're right, you know." He shook a warning finger at me. "All that sugar is why Americans are so fat!"
I laughed. Chinese people, at least the immigrants, just didn't appreciate the sugar-and-butter-laden glories that were the pinnacle of Western desserts. They were always convinced that a donut would give you diabetes. "Speaking of healthy foods, I'm running low on ginseng and goji again. And would you happen to have shitake mushrooms?"
"Of course, of course," he assured me, moving swiftly around the shop and scooping them into small plastic bags. Back at the counter, he weighed them on a little scale and sealed the tops. "What a good daughter you are, doing your mother's shopping for her."
Something I'd never figured out in all my years frequenting the shop was whether the Hsiaos knew why I needed herbs so often. Did they really believe that I was just a dutiful Chinese daughter? Or was that a façade to protect all of us? Anyway, "a good daughter," sure….
After the obligatory haggling ("Can't you give me a little break? I shop here all the time," "Of course, of course, I always give you the best price. If I go any lower, I'll be taking a loss!" "Well, how about throwing in a few dates then?" "For an old customer, of course, of course"), I walked back out with my ginseng and goji, plus shitake mushrooms and a few complimentary dried dates for Mom. But it was still early and I didn't feel like facing her just yet. Since the weather was nice and sunny, I decided to wander aimlessly around the city for a while. Eventually I wound up in the Tenderloin and was passing a small and utterly unremarkable bar when I glanced inside and saw Cyndi, Ezri, Zig, Sam, and his golem. Now that was an unusual gathering away from St. Anthony's! Curious, I walked in to join them, noting as I entered that a weather-beaten wooden sign overhead said "Twilight."