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.

  Nine

  Paul thought hard about disguises. He had very few clothes to work with. He’d got away from Curious Notions with only what he had on his back. Buying more ate into his cash, so he’d done as little as he could. Luckily, San Francisco’s mild climate meant he didn’t have to have a lot of different kinds of clothes. Everything could be about the same, and he could mix and match.

  He thought about growing a mustache like his father’s, but decided it would take too long. He thought about buying a false mustache or a blond wig. The one, though, might not change his looks enough. As for the other … He didn’t see how he could look like anything but a brunet wearing a blond wig.

  If he went out as himself, the men from the Tongs were going to follow him. Since he couldn’t do anything about that, he resigned himself to it. He even tried to make it work for him. He stayed in the shabby little room as much as he could stand. When he went out, he went to the most boring places he could find: to the laundry, to a little café around the corner, or to the newsstand to buy a paper. Then he’d head back to his room.

  This San Francisco had buses, but it didn’t have the BART subway lines. He couldn’t disappear into a hole in the ground and lose people like that. All he could hope to do was lull them into thinking he was the dullest person in the world, somebody they could follow if they were half asleep.

  He still had enough money to leave town. If this were his world, he would have done it if he saw the chance. As things were, he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave his father, and he couldn’t get too far from Curious Notions. Down below the shop was the only way he could get back to the home timeline.

  What were they thinking there? When shipments and messages stopped, they’d figure out that something had gone wrong … wouldn’t they? But if they did, would they try to send somebody to this alternate to find out what? They might. If they did, though, they were liable to walk right into the Feldgendarmerie’s hands.

  However much Paul wanted to, he didn’t see what he could do about that. He did try to get free of his followers one foggy morning. He went into that café around the corner—he often ate breakfast there. This time, though, he took off his denim jacket, put on a cloth cap he’d stuffed into his pocket, and left without ordering anything.

  He kept his head down, walked with a limp, and muttered to himself in what he hoped sounded like an old man’s voice. Maybe all that confused the men from the Tongs. Maybe the fog had more to do with it. Whatever it was, it worked. As soon as he rounded the corner, he sped up. He went left and right at random for several blocks. Every so often, he would pause in a doorway to see if he’d shaken off his followers. When he didn’t see anyone, he’d move on.

  There he was, on his own. The fog lifted. The sun came out. It turned clear and crisp and lovely, the kind of weather only San Francisco can have—and that San Francisco can have any month of the year. Everything was perfect. Well, almost everything.

  He realized he had no idea what to do next.

  He couldn’t break Dad out of jail singlehanded. If he owned any brains, he wouldn’t get anywhere near the jail. The Tongs and the Germans would both be watching it. He thought about going to see Stanley Hsu. The jeweler could tell him what was going on. He thought about it … and then shook his head. Here he was, free, and he wanted to go tell the man from the Tongs that he’d shaken his followers? How stupid was that? Stupid enough, for sure.

  Then he thought about going to see Lucy. He laughed at himself. He really was dumb this morning. She’d be working. She liked being a clerk better than running a sewing machine. It paid better, too—not well, but better. Even so, it didn’t seem right that somebody younger than he was should be working a fifty-five-hour week at a dead-end job.

  Nothing about the United States in this alternate seemed right. The country wasn’t free. Nobody except the handful of rich people could hope for a decent education—and they had to suck up to the Germans. There was no chance of anything better. Back in an old book he’d read in school, somebody’d called tyranny a boot in the face of mankind forever. The home timeline was lucky. It hadn’t worked out like that there. The home timeline had its troubles, but most people were free. Here … Here was the boot heel, right in the kisser.

  Something else that didn’t seem right was leaving somebody as smart and as nice as Lucy Woo stuck in a miserable place like this. Because of what she’d figured out, she was a security risk for the home timeline. But if he ever got the chance, he wanted to show her a Sunset District where even the stray dogs didn’t have to look over their shoulders every few minutes.

  He walked along for half a block. Then he stopped, kicking at the bumpy, uneven concrete of the sidewalk. He was thinking about what he wanted, not about what Lucy would want. This was her home. Her family was here. Taking her away would be kidnapping, even if it were possible. And she couldn’t go for just a visit. That would be—what did Shakespeare call it?—the most unkindest cut of all. She’d know things could be better, and she wouldn’t be able to tell anybody. What could be more unfair to her?

  And she’d know the whole crosstime secret, not just most of it. That wouldn’t do, either.

  Could things get better here? Could the United States be free again, after close to a century and a half of getting its nose rubbed in the dirt? Could the Chinese help? Would they help, or would they just want to be top dogs instead of the Germans? Those were all good questions. Paul had answers to none of them.

  He wondered what Lucy thought. Everything kept coming back to her. That was … interesting. He hadn’t realized she’d got so far under his skin. He’d never kissed her, never even held her hand. She wasn’t under his skin like that, exactly. But he liked her. More than that, he admired her. She had problems bigger than any he’d ever imagined—till now, anyhow. She didn’t even know how big some of them were, because they were the problems of this whole alternate. No matter how big and how tough they were, she carried on. She didn’t complain or make a fuss. She just did what she needed to do. He admired that, too.

  What about me? Paul wondered. What do I need to do? How do I need to do it? Lucy seemed to know without even thinking about it. Paul had an idea of what he needed to do: get Dad out of jail and get back to the home timeline. How? That was a different question.

  He also didn’t know what he ought to do now that he could do it without leaving the Tongs any the wiser. He realized he should have thought that out before escaping his followers. Now he was all dressed up with no place to go. And if he had to get free of them again, it wouldn’t be so easy. They’d know he could, so they’d keep a tighter watch on him.

  Maybe I ought to go back. Maybe I ought to pretend I didn’t know they weren’t keeping an eye on me. Paul shook his head. He couldn’t stand that. He had managed to get away. Not doing something with his new-found freedom seemed a criminal waste.

  Casually, his hands in his pockets, he ambled in the direction of Curious Notions. Who could say what might turn up? If he didn’t go and take a look around, he’d never find out.

  “Lucy, where is Frances Klingerman’s personnel folder?” Mrs. Cho asked.

  “Isn’t it in the maternity file?” Lucy asked. The sewing-machine operator had had a baby boy a week earlier.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Cho said. “Let me check there.” She did, and then nodded. “Yes, I have it. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lucy said. She made a face behind her supervisor’s back. Mrs. Cho knew everything there was to know about the shoe factory’s paperwork. She understood company policy and rules and regulations in a way Lucy wouldn’t for years and years. Most of the time, she knew where all the folders were, and which papers lurked in each one.

  But she didn’t know Frances Klingerman had had a baby. She didn’t have the faintest idea who Frances Klingerman was. To her, the woman was jut a name on a label on a manila folder. Lucy had worked a few machines away from the new mother. She knew her husband stayed out at night in saloons, and sometimes came home drunk and mean. She knew how the little girl the Klingermans already had was starting to lose her baby teeth. She knew Frances liked to eat sandwiches with really smelly cheese in them for lunch.

  Frances Klingerman was a person to her. The woman was nothing but her folder to Mrs. Cho. That seemed wrong to Lucy. What seemed even wronger was that Mrs. Cho could fire Frances Klingerman or demote her or cut her pay without ever finding out who she was.

  hen, all of a sudden, Lucy shivered. If she stayed in the personnel office till she was as old as her supervisor, wouldn’t she learn all the ropes? Wouldn’t she find out everything there was to know about policies and rules and regulations? Wouldn’t she stop thinking about the people who actually made the shoes—stop thinking of them as people? Wouldn’t they just turn into … folders for her? Wouldn’t she turn into Mrs. Cho?

  She’d never had a scarier thought.

  What can I do about it? How can I help it? Like a trapped animal, she looked around the office. Where was the way out? How could she help becoming what her supervisor already was?

  Did they have offices like this in the world Paul came from? If they’d figured out how to make the Sunset District a nice place, wouldn’t they also know how to turn work into something people could stand or even enjoy? She sighed. They sure hadn’t done that here.

  Enjoy it or not, she kept going till the end of the day. Every time she took care of something without even thinking about it, she worried. Am I turning into Mrs. Cho? She hoped not. She wouldn’t have had to wonder about anything like that if she’d stayed at her sewing machine. Nothing could have made her turn into somebody like Hank Simmons.

  She felt even more tired than usual when she started for home. Putting one foot in front of the other took work. But she kept going. She wondered how Paul was doing. Next to the worries he had, hers were small potatoes.

  Thinking about Paul also made her think about Curious Notions. She wondered if Feldgendarmerie men still lurked inside. She also wondered if the Triads had come by to grab whatever they could. How much would the Germans have left? Was there stuff inside the Germans didn’t know about? Was it stuff Paul might have told the Triads about?

  It won’t hurt to take a look, Lucy told herself. Nobody will pay any attention to me if I just walk by. I’m only another face. For that matter, I’m only another Chinese face. The Feldgendarmerie will think I look like every other Chinese girl in San Francisco.

  Talking yourself into doing something dangerous and foolish could be amazingly easy. Lucy didn’t worry about that till later—which only went to show how easy it was.

  Almost before she knew it, she was walking up the street toward Curious Notions. Paul would have told her she was dumb. Her father would have told her she was dumb. Even Michael would have told her she was dumb. She didn’t want to think about what her mother would have told her. She walked up the street anyhow.

  And she turned out not to be the only one drawn like a moth to the flame. Paul stood across the street from Curious Notions, leaning against a telephone pole. He seemed casual enough, till she saw his face. He eyed the shop he and his father had run the way a hungry dog eyed at a steak.

  He eyed Curious Notions—and didn’t even notice the two big, beefy cops sneaking up behind him. The cops looked like something out of a bad movie. They were so obvious, people should have been pointing at them or running away from them. And people were.

  Everybody except Paul, whose attention was elsewhere.

  “Look out!” Lucy yelled. “They’re after you!”

  Paul jumped a foot in the air. When he came down, he took off as if he had wings on his shoes.

  “Stop!” one of the policemen yelled.

  “Stop in the name of the law!” the other one added. They both pounded after him. They didn’t draw their guns. Lucy thought that was interesting. They wanted him, all right, but they wanted him alive.

  She put her head down and kept walking. The policemen hadn’t noticed who she was. They’d been watching Paul as hard as he’d been watching Curious Notions. They had no idea who’d shouted the warning.

  One of them blew a whistle—Tweeeeet! The long, shrill blast of sound did nothing to slow Paul down. The cop blew again anyway—Tweeeeet! Paul scooted around a corner. Big black shoes thumping on the pavement, the policemen gave chase. He was speedier than Lucy had thought he would be. The two cops weren’t going to catch him unless he fell down and sprained his ankle—or unless they started shooting.

  Before long, Lucy heard sirens. More policemen were coming. She hoped Paul would get away. She couldn’t do anything more for him right now. It was only luck that she’d been able to do what she had. She walked faster. Some helpful soul was liable to tell the cops what the girl who’d shouted out that warning looked like. Better if she wasn’t there when that happened.

  When she got back to the apartment, she told her mother what she’d done. That turned out to be a mistake. Lucy should have seen it coming, but she hadn’t. “That boy has caused nothing but trouble,” Mother said. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with him, not like that,” Lucy said.

  “A good thing, too.” Mother pointed to a big pile of shrimp on the counter. “You can peel those out of their shells.”

  “Okay.” Lucy didn’t want to quarrel about Paul. And, while peeling shrimp was work, eating shrimp was pure pleasure. She pointed to them, too. “Where did they come from? They’re always so expensive.”

  “Your father did some work for Charlie Antonelli, the shrimper up at Fisherman’s Wharf. Mr. Antonelli paid him back with shrimp instead of money.”

  “Father should work for him more often,” Lucy said, and her mother laughed. Maybe she wasn’t going to nag about Paul. Lucy hoped not, anyway.

  Mother had boiled the shrimp. They were a lovely white and orangeish pink, not the greenish color they had when they were fresh. Most of the shell, along with their little legs, came off easily. Lucy used her fingernail to take out the black vein along each shrimp’s back. She got meat under it, but she didn’t care.

  The tail was separate. Sometimes you could peel that off, too, and leave the meat on the shrimp. Sometimes the tail broke off, with the little bit of meat still inside. Lucy would crack the tails with her fingers and get the extra meat out. When she did, she’d pop it into her mouth. That was the bonus the person who peeled the shrimp got.

  Michael came into the kitchen when the job was almost done. “Can I help?” he asked.

  “Mother told me to do it,” Lucy said, and she ate the meat out of another shrimp tail right in front of his nose.

  “Mommy!” Michael said—the magic word.

  “Let him have a few to do, Lucy,” Mother said. Michael looked so smug, Lucy wanted to drop a shrimp down the back of his shirt. If Mother hadn’t been standing there watching, she might have done it. But then who could guess what her little brother would do to her to get even?

  Michael didn’t just eat the meat out of the tails. He ate a couple of whole shrimp, which was cheating. When Lucy told on him—and she did—Mother only wagged a finger at him. She had an indulgent little smile on her face. Michael could get away with stuff where Lucy couldn’t because he was a boy. It wasn’t fair, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.