She caught him coming out of the maintenance alley at six in the morning
To her credit she didn't immediately reach for the authority in her voice, just stood at the alley entrance with a paper cup of something hot and watched him emerge from behind the eastern market's drainage infrastructure covered in tunnel dust and looking, he was aware, not entirely like a man with a convincing explanation
He stopped. She looked at him. He looked at her
"Herb vendor," she said
"Inspector," he said
A beat
"There's a maintenance shaft back there," he said, gesturing behind him with the ease of a man who had already decided on an explanation and had committed to it fully. "I was looking for river mint. It grows in the drainage runoff sometimes, in the dark, the kind that doesn't make it to market. I sell it to a woman who makes fever medicine. She says the dark-grown variety is more effective.
Mei Sulan looked at him. Then at the tunnel dust on his clothes. Then at him again
"It does grow there," he added. "The river mint. I can show you if you'd like.
"I don't need to see river mint," she said
"Then I'll be getting to my stall.
"You'll stay where you are for a moment.
He stayed where he was. She approached and stopped at a comfortable conversational distance, close enough to talk, far enough to not be crowded. Professional. She had the notebook out again
"You're up very early," she said
"Best time to find dark-grown river mint," he said
"You said that.
"It's true.
She looked at him with the expression of someone doing a calculation that wasn't coming out to a clean number. He met the look with the pleasant mild openness of a man who had nothing to hide and was slightly confused about why this was taking so long
"What's your name again," she said
"Gu Yun.
She wrote it down. He watched her do it, the same quick left-handed strokes as before
"How long have you lived in this district," she said
"Three years.
"Before that.
"I traveled.
"You said that before too.
"It's also true.
She closed the notebook with a small precise click of the clasp and looked at him directly. This was different from her professional inventory look, the one she'd given him at the stall. This was something more pointed. The look of someone who had decided to stop circling and see what happened if they stepped closer
"There have been two more incidents," she said. "Foundation cracks, both in this district, both within four blocks of where we're standing. One building had to be evacuated.
He let concern show on his face. "Is everyone alright?
"Yes. But the incidents are increasing in frequency." She paused. "The old man you found. Shou Pei. He had been documenting these cracks for years. Mapping them.
"You found his records?
"Some of them." A pause that was slightly too even, the pause of someone choosing words. "Enough to know he was thorough.
Yevhan nodded slowly, the nod of a man absorbing information and finding it worrying in a civic sense. "Do you know what's causing them? The cracks?
"I have a theory.
"That must be reassuring," he said. "For the residents.
She looked at him. He looked back. The morning light was coming in low and amber over the rooftops now and it caught the edge of her face and she was, he noted with the part of himself that noted things in a less professional capacity, quite striking in the early morning in a way that had nothing to do with her being conventionally beautiful and everything to do with the quality of her attention. She was fully present in the way of people who never halfway did anything
It was, he thought, a little inconvenient
"You're not what you look like," she said
The sentence landed the way a dropped stone lands, not loudly but with weight, the ripple spreading outward in the silence after
He didn't change his expression. He kept it at pleasant-confused, let it run one second past where a guilty person would have flinched and two seconds past where an innocent person would have laughed it off, landed it in the specific territory of someone who was processing an unexpected sentence from a stranger
"I sell herbs," he said. "I've been selling herbs in this district for three years. I'm not sure what else I look like.
"No," she said. "That's not what I mean." She paused, and something shifted in her face. Not the controlled professional expression. Something more uncertain. Like she'd been thinking something for a while and had accidentally said part of it out loud. "Forget it.
"I'd rather not," he said. "You said something interesting.
She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who has opened a door slightly and is now reconsidering whether to open it further or close it again
She closed it
"If you find anything relevant to the formation disturbances," she said, back to professional, "report it to the district office." She turned to leave
"You haven't touched your tea," he said
She stopped. Looked down at the cup in her hand like she'd forgotten it was there. Then, with the controlled quality of someone choosing to be slightly human in a professional context, she took a sip
"It's cold now," she said
"That's what happens when you spend it interrogating herb vendors.
Something crossed her face. It was so fast he almost missed it and he was specifically watching for it. The almost-smile. There and gone, suppressed by the same professionalism that governed everything else about her, but present, definitely present
"Goodbye, Gu Yun," she said
She walked away in the direction of the older district and he watched her go in the specific not-watching way and thought about what she'd said
You're not what you look like
She didn't know. He was certain of that. If she knew she wouldn't be conducting early morning conversations with him at alley entrances, she'd be calling for backup and he'd be dealing with a very different kind of problem. She had a feeling, the specific intuition of someone very good at reading people who had found an inconsistency they couldn't name
He needed to be more careful
He also, and this was the part that was going to require some honest self-assessment later, needed to stop noticing things about her that were irrelevant to his problems
The part of him that had been turned off and quiet for three years, the part that noticed people in ways that had nothing to do with strategy, was waking back up along with everything else and it was doing so with the terrible indiscriminate enthusiasm of a thing that had been deprived for a long time
This was inconvenient. He was going to manage it
He straightened his robes, brushed the last of the tunnel dust from his sleeve, and headed toward his stall
He ran into her again at noon
He didn't see her coming because he was explaining to an elderly customer why substituting dried lotus for fresh lotus in a fever remedy would reduce the effectiveness by about forty percent, which required enough of his attention that his peripheral vision was occupied with the customer and not the lane behind her
He became aware of Mei Sulan when she stopped at the edge of his stall and waited. Not browsing. Standing with the contained patience of someone who had something to say and was waiting for the right moment to say it
He finished with his customer, who bought both the dried and fresh lotus on the reasoning that having options was better than not having them, which Yevhan thought was a sound philosophy for fever medicine and several other things
"Inspector," he said
"There's a section of pre-Sovereign foundation wall," she said, without preamble, "in the sub-basement of a building four blocks east of here. Shou Pei's notes describe it as a contact point for the larger structure." She paused. "I'm telling you this because you asked about the cracks, and the residents in that building need to know whether the evacuation should be permanent.
He looked at her. She was looking at the dried herbs on his counter, not at him
"Why are you telling me," he said, carefully
"You know this district," she said. "Three years. You know the residents. If the evacuation needs to be permanent there will need to be assistance arranged through unofficial channels because the official ones are too slow and people have lives they can't put on hold for bureaucracy." A pause. "I'm not asking you to do anything about it. I'm giving you information that's useful to the district.
This was not what she was doing. What she was doing was testing him. Giving him a piece of real information and seeing what he did with it. Whether he already knew about the pre-Sovereign wall, how he reacted, what his face did when she said contact point
He was aware of all of this
He was also aware that she had chosen to tell him rather than not tell him, that this was a choice she didn't have to make and had made anyway, and that said something about her that he was filing away carefully
"I'll let people know," he said. "About the evacuation timeline.
She nodded. Looked at the herbs one more time. Then she picked up a bundle of dried river reed from the front of the display, the cheapest thing on the counter, and set down the exact correct coin for it
He looked at the coin. He looked at her
"You know the price," he said
"You have a sign," she said
She walked away
He stood behind his counter and held the coin she'd left and thought about a woman who looked at a problem until she understood it and then chose, carefully, what to do with what she understood
He thought about the almost-smile
He thought: this is going to be very complicated
Then a customer arrived wanting goldthread root and he went back to work
End of Chapter 8