"By God, so you're a griffin!"

"I beg your pardon?"

Lisa squirmed in her chair. At high noon, the Majestic Café was crammed with people, and the notoriously hot and humid Shanghai summer added to her feeling of being broiled alive. Furthermore her companion's somewhat – she hunted for the word – eccentric manners did not help in the least.

"A griffin," Cecily said with a condescending, almost supercilious air, "is what we Shanghailanders call a newcomer to this Chinese Babylon." She said we Shanghailanders with the sort of laconic drawl usually reserved for pronouncing titles of high nobility.

"Shanghailanders?" Lisa murmured.

"Oh, veterans, don't you know." Cecily thumped her chest. "Old China hands."

"Ah," Lisa nodded her head meekly. There was an awkward lull.

Cecily was, as far as Lisa could tell, a friendly enough, if rather forthright, girl; a little arrogant to be sure, but she did seem to have the requisite sophistication to back up that arrogance. It was Cecily who arranged the whole meeting: the letter of introduction; the rendezvous at the café; even having the choicest table reserved. And whenever she talked of Shanghai, she did so in a tone of jaded contempt born only of long and thorough experience.

As if she read her thoughts – another habit of Cecily's that Lisa had come to find unnerving – the girl cracked a lopsided grin and asked, "But enough about me. How are you finding Shanghai so far?"

"It's a bit crowded, isn't it?" Lisa replied without thinking, and immediately felt appalled at how inane that sounded. "But it's very interesting," she added quickly. "I mean, being in China and all – five thousand years of history and culture…"

Cecily was glancing out at the thronging street. "Shanghai's not China," she interrupted absently. "It's many things, but it's not China. China is Peking and Chungking and Xi'an and maybe even Canton, but Shanghai? Oh, no." She paused. "Besides, the so-called five thousand years – and it's nowhere that long, believe me – of history and culture, it's all utter rot. Here, watch."

Emerging somewhere out of a gutter, a gnarled and wrinkled Chinese woman hobbled to their table and held out a trembling hand. Lisa recoiled involuntarily when she saw her feet – abnormally small and, where the straw shoes had fallen apart, black with grime and pus. She was about to reach for her purse when Cecily laid a hand on her arm, called loudly for a nearby waiter and jabbed a thumb at the beggar.

The waiter shouted something in Mandarin at the old woman, who cringed back and shrank silently into the gutter. "Terribly sorry about this," the waiter told them with a slight bow. He mixed up his l's and r's, as every Chinese Lisa had met so far did; otherwise his English was passable.

"Beggars are a dime a dozen, you see." Cecily was looking at her with faintly mocking eyes. "Literally!" She laughed. "Give one a dime and a dozen swarm over. Let this be your first lesson of Shanghai! No good deed goes unpunished here."

"I'm afraid you make Shanghai out like it's a rather nasty place," Lisa ventured.

"Oh, it's not all bad." Cecily's face took on a reflective shade. "A city of forty-eight-storey skyscrapers built on twenty-four layers of hell. A Chinese playwright wrote that," she explained. "They have a way of turning phrases prettily, these Chinese, when they're not smoking opium or trying to weasel you out of your last penny."

Another awkward lull. Lisa wondered desperately if she would ever find something to say that did not sound desperately commonplace to her companion. At length the only topic she could think of was talking shop. "You wanted to meet me to discuss how things are done here…" she began.

"Aha. Business it is!" Cecily leaned forward with a sudden lunge. She reached into her handbag and after some rummaging pulled out a large map of the city, which she spread open on the table. "Look here. This is Shanghai. You can see it's partitioned into four zones."

"I only see three," Lisa said hesitantly.

Cecily sighed. "You're supposed to see five. Pay attention. This is where we are: the International Settlement. The Settlement is practically run by us Brits and you Americans, so the only two magical girls allowed here are always a Limey and a Yank."

"What if an Italian or a, a Dane were to…"

"We have an understanding with the local Incubator not to induct any Continental in the Settlement. And if by chance one landed here, well, it's too bad for her, but she's either kicked off to the rural areas or," she drew a line across her throat with her thumb. "Hasn't happened for ages, though. In fact, we haven't had a magical girl arriving by boat for nearly a decade until you turned up."

"Oh." Lisa suddenly felt an irrational urge to apologize.

"Don't worry about it. The game's pretty fair here. Shanghai is almost too good for a magical girl." Cecily smirked as if she had made a joke. "South of us," she traced her finger across the map, "across Avenue Edward VII, is the French Concession. Two magical girls run the show there: Marianne Labelle and Tamara Nochitskaya."

"Nochitskaya?"

"A White Russian girl. The daughter of a captain in the Tsarist army. Poor thing." When Lisa still looked bewildered, Cecily sighed. "After the Reds took over Russia, everyone there who didn't want to live in, oh, hell on earth, packed up and fled. As a result a sizeable White Russian community congregated in Shanghai, particularly the French Concession – every Russian of decent breeding speaks French, you see. By now the Russians are looking to outnumber the Frogs." She chuckled. "The men usually work as mercenaries, the women prostitutes; those who don't do either, beg."

"And we allow that? I mean…" Lisa stuttered, flustered.

"White prestige. I know. Not good having a white man begging where the yellow little Chinks can see. Even if it's only those semi-Asiatic Ruskies." She shrugged. "Can't be helped, though. There are simply too many of them, and they're simply too poor. No good dwelling on it. Enough with the Frogs! Let's move on.

"Remember how I said the International Settlement is a British-American business? Not entirely true. The Hongkou district," she pointed, "is called 'Little Tokyo' because of all the Japanese living there. As a Great Power with significant interests in China, they have their own magical girls, even though Hongkou is, de jure, part of the Settlement. Tanaka Kyouko and Yamashita Kaede. We don't bother them, they don't bother us."

"Isn't Hongkou a little small for two magical girls?"

"It is. However, after the Shanghai Incident back in '32," the edge of Cecily's mouth tugged downward; a shadow flitted across her face, "the Japanese girls annexed the Chapei district to the north. So now that's part of their demesne as well."

"Chapei?" Even though Lisa had been in Shanghai for less than a week she had already heard of the notorious warzone. "I thought it's a wasteland."

"Used to be. But after the Japs and the Chinks trashed each other silly in Chapei and no one wants to live there anymore, the Chinese Government decided it can host the refugees from the Northeast. At the present moment Chapei is a humanitarian crisis overflowing with displaced peasants from Manchuria, where the Japs pulled their latest land-grab."

"The Mukden Incident." Lisa remembered listening five years ago to news of the Japanese invasion on the radio, and asking her father what the League of Nations was going to do about it. Her father, a former diplomat, had chuckled bitterly and did not reply.

"So you do know something." Cecily smiled to take the sting off her words. "Yes, the Mukden Incident, when the Japs annexed Manchuria, kicked out the warlord and propped up a puppet Emperor." She shook her head wryly. "That idiot Henry probably thinks the Japs will help him recover his throne."

"In any case, large-scale settlement of Japanese farmers in Manchuria meant that many local Chinese were driven out. Some of them – and since this is China 'some' really means 'hordes' – ended up tramping to Shanghai, where they are fenced inside Chapei and left to stew in their own filth. Despair, hatred, madness and grief abounds – a veritable haven for witches, as I think you're coming to realize. The Japanese girls have gotten a piece of real estate overflowing with milk and honey. So to speak. And they're guarding it jealously."

"But the Chinese girls don't complain?"

"Ah, the Chinese." Cecily's grin widened. "We come to them at last. The two Chinese girls have their hunting ground in the Native City." Lisa's eyes widened. The Native City – Shanghai as it was before being opened up to the international community – was barely a fifth the size of the Settlement, and did not look adequate to supporting a single magical girl. "Having, as you can see, the least resources, they are also the weakest; so as much as they complain there is nothing they can do about their lot.

"But they do have a lifeline," Cecily continued. "There is a free-for-all zone in the Badlands, which is everywhere not covered by the Settlement, the Concession, Chapei and the Native City. We have a strictly unspoken and non-binding gentlemen's agreement to hunt in our respective zones first, and only venture into the Badlands if we absolutely, desperately need a grief seed. You can imagine how well the system works."

"Badly?"

"Terribly! And that concludes my exposition." Cecily rolled up the map with a flourish. "Hey, what say we go witch-hunting together? First time's my treat. You're a griffin. I can help you with directions, tips on good locations, that sort of thing."

Lisa let out a breath she did not realize she had been holding. "Thank you. I would be glad to."

"Excellent." Cecily stood up and ambled nonchalantly towards the exit. A nearby waiter frowned, started towards her and opened his mouth. Abruptly his eyes clouded. He staggered a little, shook his head, and shuffled unsteadily towards the counter.

"Excuse me." Lisa had to run a little to catch up. "There's a question I've been meaning to ask."

"Fire away."

"My…predecessor. How did she…I mean, what happened to her?"

Cecily stopped walking. "Here in Shanghai it's generally considered not quite polite to ask that sort of thing," she said lightly, not turning her face.

"I see. I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it." Cecily smiled at her, and for a brief instant Lisa thought there was a trace of sadness in her smile. Then: "Follow me," Cecily said, and stepped out of the café.

Taking one last look at the café, Lisa chased after Cecily, and together, side by side, they walked into the city of Shanghai.