"I sent a couple of cars," Dimmock reported, re-entering the station. All four of the circus goers stood up from the waiting room. Emili kept swallowing hard. An officer had directed her to an eye-flushing station, but she still felt the effects of pepper spray in her throat. "The old hall is totally deserted."

"That's not possible," Sarah objected fervently, her eyebrows furrowing. "They had an entire circus!" She tugged on John's sleeve to get his agreement. "The place was packed full!"

"I saw the mark at the circus," Sherlock told Dimmock, striding in the lead after the detective. He was drawn up indignantly, frustrated and at a loss with the Yard again. "That tattoo we saw on the two bodies. The mark of the Tong!"

"And on Soo Lin," Emili reminded.

Dimmock sighed and stopped in his tracks, turning around to look at them. Emili had appreciated his promptness when they told him what was happening. He had dispatched Scotland Yard officers to the recital hall immediately. Now that they had come up empty, though, he seemed to feel like he'd been played for a fool again, and it disappointed Emili that the beginnings of the rapport they had developed were being disintegrated.

John held his hand up to stall Dimmock. He moved his other hand to Sarah's back. "Lukis and Van Coon were part of a – a smuggling operation." He re-summarized just in case Dimmock forgot. Sarah, who was hearing this for the first time, looked back at her date in bewilderment. "Now, one of them stole something when they were in China. Something valuable."

Sherlock nodded his confirmation. "These circus performers were gang members sent here to get it back," he asserted with conviction.

"Get what back?" Dimmock demanded pointedly, crossing his arms.

Emili felt her jaw go slack in disbelief. "If we knew how to read the cipher, do you think we'd have spent twelve hours on their book collections?!" He had been right there with them, how had he forgotten?!

"In other words," Dimmock translated, looking at her with chagrin, "You don't know." Emili could've screamed. Of course they didn't know! That was what he had been trying to help find out! "Mr. Holmes…" Dimmock stopped himself, shook his head, and then decided to power on. He bravely met the detective's eyes. "I've done everything you asked." Yeah, while hemming and hawing about it the whole way, Emili scoffed. "Lestrade, he seems to think your advice is worth something."

"So did you, the other day!" Emili reminded him, infuriated by the hypocrisy and selective memory.

"I gave the order for a raid!" The DI raised his voice in retaliation, staring her down with authority he was still desperately trying to harness. "Please tell me I'll have something to show for it, other than a massive bill for overtime!"

The student angrily puffed. It was ridiculous! "If those are your priorities," she retorted, also raising her voice. If he wanted to treat her like a child, then she was going to return the favor. She hoped the other officers still working would hear. "Then maybe you should take a trip to the morgue!" People were dead because of this case, and he was worried about paying a little extra to his staff?! "Smugglers or not, two people with lives and families are dead! Soo Lin had a life here and she had to entirely uproot because her own brother tried to kill her! For Christ's sake, get over yourself! There are more important things at stake than a raiding party working overtime!"


After being dismissed by Dimmock, all they could do was to follow up on the smugglers on their own turf. Sherlock and Emili were all for returning to 221B. John wanted to stay out for longer, but after it had been proven that even the circus was perilous, he grudgingly admitted that the case needed to be prioritized and wrapped up. Sarah, intrigued and tailing along after her date, took a separate taxi with John to rendezvous at their apartment building.

John took off his nice date night coat when they arrived. Sherlock went in first, then Emili and John did an awkward thing where they each tried to wait for each other to enter. John had decided he would stay with Sarah to be polite, though, and so Emili went up second and the two doctors came last.

"They'll be back in China by tomorrow," John groused, laying his coat over the back of his favorite armchair. There were still books littered around, but now that they'd all been looked through, the mess was manageable, as they were all able to be packed back into their boxes.

"No," Sherlock contradicted sharply, rubbing the back of his head after whipping off his scarf. Emili wondered if maybe he should've been taken to urgent care, too, since he was down for a minute after being assaulted. "They won't leave without what they came for. We need to find their hide-out, the rendezvous point… somewhere in this message, it must tell us."

He unpinned one of the photographs stuck around the wall over the hearth. After printing off Emili's photos of the train station, he had created a digital rendering, blown it up, and printed off images of the same message but in larger ciphers. Because the characters in the ciphers weren't super intricate, the were still readable, if they only knew how to translate them.

It was all well and good, except after wasting so much time on trying to crack a book code, they still had no results, and no book in common that would translate the messages with any sense of coherency. Translating that message was the key to finding what they wanted, but unless they discovered another lead quickly, they were screwed on that front.

Emili went to the fridge to get a bottle of her iced coffees, but her shoulders sagged when she opened it. She'd drunk them all trying to stay awake sorting the books, and hadn't had the chance to replace them since.

Sarah, the odd one out, coughed into her elbow and held her hands down at her thighs uncomfortably. "Well," she said, forcing some cheer into her voice. It was obvious she wasn't feeling too peppy – they were all tired, and all sore if not shaken. "I think perhaps I should leave you to it."

Sherlock took another of the photos down to compare the two images side-by-side and he agreed with her dully. "Yes, it would be better if you left now," he concurred.

Simultaneously, John had turned to the other doctor and amicably replied, "No, no, you don't have to go." Sarah brightened a little bit, giving John a small smile. Sherlock took a breath and held it, irritated. John ignored Sherlock's audible aggrievement and touched Sarah's elbow warmly, giving her a kind smile. "He's kidding. Please stay, if you'd like."

Sarah nodded that she would like that and John smiled at her. He offered her some tea, which she quickly said she'd appreciate, and the veteran went to the small kitchen to brew some earl grey. While John was in the kitchen, Sarah stood tensely just inside the front door, still wearing her mittens and boots.

She seemed very unsure of herself. She and John liked each other, that was obvious, but Sarah wasn't too sure about the unknown. She kept looking at Sherlock's back and sides when she thought that he wouldn't notice, and John, who was busy being hospitable, didn't see how anxious Sarah was about the crass, rude roommate.

"Is it just me, or is anyone else starving?" She asked, just to break the silence, forcing a fake-sounding laugh.

Sherlock looked up towards the ceiling. "Oh, dear God," he muttered.

Emili scowled. She wasn't a particular fan of the company, either, but at the moment, Sarah was important to John. And even if she weren't, there was still no reason to be an ass. She picked up a pen from the table and chucked it at Sherlock, smacking him in the back.


Sarah became less fidgety once she had something to do with her hands. She nursed the cup of tea until Emili was certain it was too cool to taste very good. In the meantime, John carefully copied each cipher onto drafting paper; then he wrote them in a different order, because Asian writing generally translated from right to left. Sherlock laid all of the blown-up photos on the floor in an apparently random layout and sat down with his legs crossed, staring at them with seemingly dead eyes. The two men were quiet except for John's scratching pencil, leaving Sarah sitting at the other side of the table with Emili.

Emili herself was working on the cipher, too, but while Sherlock looked for patterns, she was translating from Hangzhou to the English numerals. That way it would be faster to interpret the entire code once they found another book to try. She had her tablet turned on, showing a chart of the Chinese system, and wrote them out in a notebook, blocked off in brackets which numbers were paired together.

Sarah briefly got up, refilled her cup with fresh tea, and returned a few minutes later, this time shored up to speak. "So, this is what you do?" She asked Emili. The teen wasn't shocked that she was more approachable than her brother. "You and John, you… solve puzzles."

"Consulting detective." Sherlock stated, slightly irked that Sarah made it sound like they did online games instead of actual investigative work.

Emili looked at Sarah and rolled her eyes, gesturing for her not to take Sherlock too seriously. "What usually happens is we pick up on cases the police dismiss, or we're called when they have something they think we can do faster," she explained accommodatingly. "There's an inspector who usually works there – on vacation now, unfortunately – and he tosses us some reports or crime scenes he thinks might have more to them than they appear. The rest of the time, we get our work from independent clients, who approach us like an investigative firm. Sherlock has a website, John has his blog. They get some traffic." Tactfully, Emili didn't state which one got more. Sherlock was still prissy about that.

"John has a blog?" Sarah repeated in surprise, lowering her voice to a whisper so that she didn't annoy Sherlock again.

Emili nodded. "Yeah, he likes writing. He changes names and some locations to keep privacy, and then he writes about the cases we work on." She smiled. "A Study in Pink was the first one, I can send you the link if you like."

"Yeah, I think I'll give it a look." Sarah said, nodding and sending a fond smile at John. The man was too distracted to notice, but it was cute that she liked him so much. If anyone deserved a good relationship, it was probably John Watson. "And your accent. You sound… American?"

Em nodded, still multitasking. Her work was going slower because she was entertaining Sarah, but she didn't mind too much. It was less brain-numbing that way, and they weren't in a hurry to check it against anything at the moment. "Yeah, I was adopted by Sherlock's parents and moved into the upstairs apartment over the summer."

"On your own?"

"The parents live in the country," she explained, "But they wanted me to be closer to the resources in the city, so they sent me to live with my brother." She neglected to mention specifically that Mycroft was the one she was supposed to have stayed with. Sherlock didn't like people knowing he had a brother, and Mycroft didn't like people knowing he existed unless they really needed to.

That seemed to answer her questions for a few minutes. Emili figured out the numbers from a few more ciphers and got a couple more pairs down in her notebook before Sarah had thought of another question to quietly ask.

"What are these squiggles here?" The female doctor leaned over a little and picked up the first photograph in the sequence Emili was working with.

"It's part of a cipher," she murmured back. "Each set of two is one reference. See, these in these photos are one and fifteen. Word one of page fifteen." She picked up the hand that was holding her thin-tipped pen and gestured around the apartment as a whole. "That's what all these books are for. Sorry about the clutter," she noted belatedly.

Em put her head down to continue while Sarah studied the Polaroid with interest. She looked over the entirety of the front, flipped it to the back, and then looked at the image with the cipher again. She hummed softly. Sherlock made a slight huffing noise, and when Emili looked up, he was staring homicidally at Sarah. She gave him a long, scolding look that made him put his head back down to go back into his mind castle or whatever.

"Each pair of numbers is a word, yes?" Sarah confirmed. Emili hummed. "So if there was another set of one, fifteen, you'd know what it meant."

"No, actually, we wouldn't," the pink-haired one sighed with some frustration. She shrugged her shoulders. "We still have to figure out which book was used."

Sarah opened her mouth but didn't know what to say. Her frown deepened. "If you don't know, how'd you translate these?"

Sherlock, Emili, and John all looked up very swiftly. Sarah hadn't taken her eyes off of the cipher, turning it at different angles to see if she could make it make more sense to her. While it was held up, Emili caught a slight glimpse of color on the back, which hadn't been there some time before.

Sherlock put his hand down by his knee to brace himself and hopped up like a spring. While he strode towards the table with energized vigor, Emili took the photo from Sarah gently and turned it over. On the white backing, someone had taken a black pen and written "9 Mil". That was all there was, and Emili didn't recognize the handwriting.

"John, come look at this," Sherlock urged, taking the photo away from Emili rudely. She glared at him. "Soo Lin, at the museum – she started to translate the code for us. We didn't see it!"

She certainly hadn't done it before Zhi Zhu had shown up, but maybe she had taken them with her when she ran to the hiding spot Emili told her to find. Or maybe she had even sought out the photos and started interpreting them instead of hiding, since she had already been pretty resigned to her death. Either way, Emili felt stupid for not having checked them sooner.

"She must have started after I lured Zhi Zhu away," she remarked aloud, still surprised.

"Nine mil," Sherlock read it aloud, taking the photo by its edge and smacking the opposite side against his hand impatiently. He rushed his brain to work faster by moving the Polaroid with more speed.

John sat forward on the edge of his chair. "Does that mean millions?" He questioned.

"Nine million quid," Sherlock half-answered, biting on his lip and staring interrogatively at the wall. "For what?" He reached for the next photo and flipped it, but it was blank. He growled. "We need to know the end of this sentence."

Although Emili agreed wholeheartedly, she wasn't sure how they were going to do that. Soo Lin was in custody and Interpol wasn't letting anyone see her. Before long, she'd be in their version of Witness Protection. Sherlock must have known this, but he hopped over a chair to get his long coat anyway.

"Where are you going?" John asked bemusedly.

"To the museum!" Sherlock exclaimed, giving John a don't be stupid stare. "To the restoration room. Oh, we must've been staring right at it!"

"At what?"

"The book!" Emili yelped. She almost smacked herself in the forehead. "Soo Lin must have had the book or she wouldn't have been able to translate these!" If the museum staff hadn't cleared out the room, then maybe it was still where it had been!

"Whilst we were running around the gallery, she started to translate the code before you retrieved her." Sherlock fastened two of the buttons on his left side and shoved his feet into his shoes. He reached blindly for his scarf and his hand landed on it in the perfect position to slide it off the hook. "It must still be on her desk!"


Emili finished her translation between Hangzhou and English, and John continued his copying work with renewed speed. Sarah fiddled with one of the photographs, setting it on one of its corners and trying to twirl it around on the table. Emili felt bad, but she wanted to be ready for when Sherlock returned. After she finished, she set her pen down to give her hand a break before she started on the backwards version.

"I'm sorry about Sherlock," she told Sarah sheepishly, massaging her thumb firmly into her palm. "He's… not very social," she lamely finished.

"Really?" Sarah quirked her eyebrows and sarcastically said, "But he seemed very talkative to me." Both of the women chuckled and Emili lifted her hand to cover her mouth while she yawned. Sarah bobbed her head along. "You can say that again. You should go off to bed. Don't you have school?"

"Only online. I don't really have a schedule." Emili sat back and ran her hands through her hair, trying to tame her layered, wavy locks and smooth them out. "What about you? Don't you have work?"

"Oh, not until after tea," Sarah replied, sliding her hands down off her thighs in smoothing her jeans. "Which is why a late-night outing worked…" Her eyes moved over to John and she must have felt bad for reminding him that their date didn't go as planned. "Not that this isn't great, too," she said for his benefit, and John's shoulders eased slightly even though he didn't say anything. "A quiet night in's just what the doctor ordered."

Emili shook her head and rolled her eyes, not nearly as severe as she would have been with Sherlock. What with them both being doctors, that joke was old before it had even been new.

Sarah continued, sending more tiny, rapid glances over at her date to check that he was listening. "I mean, I'd love to go out an evening and wrestle a few Chinese gangsters, you know, generally. But a girl can get a bit too much…"

John looked up, put his pen down apologetically, and stood up. He put one leg out and swung it at the knee to stretch. "No, it's okay," he said quickly, hurrying to make it clear that he understood. He regretfully looked at the paper and seemed to internally smack himself for basically ignoring her to work. "Do you want me to call you a cab?"

Sarah smiled, like there was no harm done, and waved him off politely. "It's quite alright. I'm not that far."

"At least let me get the fares," John requested graciously, biting his lip, understanding but still disappointed.

Sarah acquiesced, and the two adults left after the guest said goodbye to Emili. Emili sighed, cracked her knuckles, and stood up. She was stiff, too, and wondered how she hadn't noticed sooner. While they were gone, she went into the kitchen and found the takeaway menus John kept hidden. It's hard to cook in Sherlock's kitchen because you never know what's clean, what's been destroyed, and what might have touched things that you really don't want anywhere near your food. Sarah pointing it out had reminded her that she'd skipped dinner, and she deserved a hot meal.


Emili and John decided on a knockoff Chinese place, ironically. John got one of their specials on the menu while she ordered wontons, soup, and a side of lo mein. She was starving, and it was taking most of her willpower not to go raid her own kitchen and find a snack in the meantime.

Sarah left after a few last-minute words she exchanged with John. When the writer came back up to the apartment, he had seemed in pretty good spirits, so Emili concluded that the turn from a circus to a police investigation hadn't ruined his odds of a second date. Sarah seemed pretty amicable, and anyone with the nerve to knock out someone twice their size with a wooden arrow was okay by Em's standards.

They both finished the translations and copying that they had been working on shortly after the blonde departed. Without making conversation, their focus improved and they were done in ten minutes. Em leaned back, dragging her hands through her long rosy hair and yawning. John checked his watch, raised his eyebrows in mild surprise at the time, and stood up again.

"Fancy a cuppa?" He offered, ambling around the table to make himself a third mug of tea in hopes of staying awake.

Em made a face behind his back that she was sure he wouldn't have been shocked to see. "Do we have any juice?" She asked instead.

"Ah…" John stopped, pulled open the fridge, and bent down to look on the bottom shelf. "Yeah, looks like Sherlock's not found the quart."

Emili started clearing up the table so they would have a place to eat, keeping her and John's finished papers easily accessible, while the doctor turned the stove on for the kettle and poured her a glass of punch. Sherlock would whine and complain about them stopping for dinner when he got back, but she had her hopes that getting to the museum and back would take long enough for them to erase the evidence first.

The doorbell rang while she was putting out paper towels to use as napkins. John had just moved the kettle before it started to whistle. "Blimey, that was quick," he noted appreciatively. "I'll just pop down."

"Where do you keep the paper plates?" Emili questioned, catching him quickly before he could go.

"Oh, they're…" John started to look over and indicate in the kitchen, but when he saw the general mess on half of the table and remembered that he lived with Sherlock, his shoulders fell and he shook his head slightly. "I'll get them," he offered instead.

Emili pursed her lips sympathetically. She'd probably have lost her patience with Sherlock a long time ago if he couldn't even be trusted not to move paper plates. "I'll get the door," she volunteered, trading places and heading out the door.

She took out some notes from her back pocket and counted them out to see how much she had. It came to a bit over, but it was a good amount for a generous tip, and given how quickly they'd gotten here, they deserved it. She put it back in her pocket and hopped down the steps to the front door to the complex. The hallway, thanks to the dark rug and dull wallpaper, was dimly lit even on its brightest days, but she was so familiar with it by now that she knew where to put her feet.

The girl pulled the door open without hesitation, thinking solely about food. On the other side, with his hand up like he was going to knock again, was a man almost a full foot taller than her, wearing all black – even a scarf that covered his mouth – and had no food to speak of. Immediately, she was put off, but tried not to be too alarmed. It was cold out, maybe he was just bundled up to keep warm.

Yeah, right. Emili didn't think they could've been followed home after the circus, but she remembered suddenly the woman who'd been photographing her leaving the building several days ago. If that woman was associated with the Tong…

Her heart picked up speed and her first impulse was to yell out to John and slam the door in the man's face, but if there was any chance of not raising the alarm, she wanted to try it. If Mrs. Hudson heard a raucous and was hurt checking on them, Emili would never forgive herself. She played it cool. If she slammed the door, all it would do was make her look afraid, and give him reason to break in.

"Hello?" She asked after a moment when he didn't do anything but stare down at her with big, dark, angry-looking eyes. It took a second, but she recognized them with a jolt – she'd seen them very briefly through the carved mask before she aimed at them with pepper spray.

Maybe he didn't get a very good look at me, she prayed silently, although her pink hair was pretty hard to miss.

The very angry smuggler glared down at her twice as hard. "Do you have it?" He demanded roughly.

"What, the food?" She asked, raising an eyebrow and still playing dumb. "No, that's… that's generally supposed to be your job." Please think you've got the wrong address!

"Do you have the treasure?!" The man spat back at her, clarifying spitefully.

There was no good way to answer that. If she said yes, then he'd storm in; if she said no, he'd storm in, anyway, in case she were lying. If ever Mycroft were going to spy on her, she sincerely hoped he decided to do so about now. There was a CCTV camera over Speedy's. She thought again of Mrs. Hudson, definitely asleep by now, and of John, upstairs, obliviously setting the table. Did he have his gun? No, Emili didn't think so, but maybe he could get to his room faster than the warrior could get up the stairs.

"Treasure?" She repeated, giving him a funny look. "Look, I'm sorry, but you have the wrong address." She had kept her right hand on the doorknob through the whole exchange, and now she started to push it closed.

The warrior lunged quickly and slammed his weight into the door. The knob was wrenched out of her hand and she went backwards in a flash of panic. The much bigger man forced his way inside and left the door open behind him, but there was no way she could slip out without being seized.

She screamed. "John!"

He made a grab for her, grunting. Emili ducked backwards and her heel hit the first step. Thankfully, she was far enough to her right and completely missed the stairwell going down, and she gained a few seconds by stumbling backwards up the steps and falling out of the warrior's reach. She put her hands on the stairs to shove herself up, but before she could scramble up more than a couple of steps, the warrior grabbed her and dragged her backwards off of them, crushing her to a wide chest with an arm around her throat so she couldn't shout or breathe.