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  The depth of his answer surprised me, but I added, [I saw no disrespect at all. Only great admiration and even affection.]

  She searched my face quickly to see if my expression matched the words coming out of the phone, and I nodded my sincerity.

  “You’re both kind. But I am nervous and frightened and perhaps talking too much out of a sense of relief. You got here very fast and I’m so grateful.”

  [I need you to talk much more, Ya-ping. We have a ride ahead. Tell me more about your education thus far and your situation.]

  Ya-ping’s shoulders fell at my words, and the train was pulling up to the platform, so I didn’t pursue it. But she said, “I knew we’d have to do that. Might as well be on the train. It is a liminal space, and within we shall move from being unacquainted to acquainted.”

  “Wot, now?” Buck said. “MacBharrais, wot was that she just said? Subliminal? Did I just get hypnotized? Ye’d tell me if I was, right?”

  I shook my head at him to dismiss it, but he didn’t take it in the manner I intended.

  “Ye mean ye wouldnae tell me? That’s no very bloody nice. I’d tell ye if you were hypnotized. I’d say, Oi! MacBharrais! Ye’re hypnotized! Now get me a scone! Or sumhin like that. A scone sounds good right now. But no with raisins in.”

  A small quacking noise emanated from Ya-ping’s pocket and she checked her phone, the noise evidently being an alert of some kind. Whatever she saw there, she dismissed with a shake of her head. We boarded, taking three seats out of four that faced one another in pairs. The empty chair next to Ya-ping struck me as symbolic; it was why we were there, and she followed my gaze and sighed as we got under way, a breathy hiss over the rumbling white noise of the train.

  “I graduated from Glen Waverley Secondary College a couple of weeks ago, just before Christmas. In a few months I’m supposed to complete my training to be a sigil agent, the youngest one in quite some time, I’m told, because I’ll still be eighteen.”

  That was interesting. Shu-hua had begun her training while she was still a minor. It wasn’t impermissible, but it meant that there were potential conflicts with the parents and the necessity to let them in on the secret that gods and monsters were real, just drowned out by the noise of modern living and the grind to pay the mortgage or talk about the new thing on the telly. Popular culture’s embrace of science, too, tended to make people dismiss the mystical or magical almost by reflex. Ya-ping lifted a hand and cocked it at me like a pistol.

  “And now’s the part where you ask about my parents.”

  “Wot about yer parents?” Buck asked, saving me the trouble.

  “They’re dead. No need to get their permission. Sifu Lin has been my legal guardian for the last two years and a better parent in every way than my real ones were.”

  My surprise must have been plain.

  “Yeah, she didn’t share that information with the group. I know how it goes. She just said, ‘This is my new apprentice,’ and none of you asked any questions, because it’s not your business, right? But I guess it’s your business now. You want to know what happened.”

  [In case it proves relevant later.]

  “It won’t. But I’ll tell you so you won’t worry. My father was an alcoholic. Not physically abusive but certainly not shy about hurling verbal abuse in my direction. A couple of years ago, as I was finishing up grade ten, they went out for a Christmas party and got lit up. And then Dad tried to drive them home. Instead, he drove right off the road into a tree, maybe three hundred meters from where he’d parked. Mom was killed instantly. Dad lived long enough to realize what he’d done, decided he couldn’t live with the shame and guilt, broke a whisky bottle, because of course he had one in the car, and sliced open his throat with the glass. So that was a pretty terrible holiday season.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said aloud, not bothering with the app.

  “Me too,” Buck added. “Gods below.”

  Ya-ping closed her eyes for a moment, acknowledging our words, and continued. “My mom was good friends with Sifu Lin. Like, childhood friends. She was already a huge part of my life. I called her Auntie Lin while I was growing up, even though there’s no blood relationship. She was at all of my birthdays and all of my mother’s birthdays, and I’d see her two or three times a month. And, as it turned out, she was the person to whom my mother had legally entrusted my life should something catastrophic happen. I was with child services for like, a day, when Auntie Lin came in with the documents. And once I moved in with her, she couldn’t pretend that she did anything normal anymore. When I was young, she told me she did paralegal work. Ha! Paralegal. I didn’t realize at the time it was a pun.”

  “Wot?” Buck said.

  “Because she writes legal contracts for paranormals—never mind. My sense of humor is a bit nerdy.”

  “Ohhh. I get it. Yeahhh, ha ha!”

  I was pretty sure Buck did not get it.

  “So I was at a place, mentally, where I did not want to do anything my parents ever imagined for me, and Sifu Lin needed an apprentice she could trust who didn’t have a lot of family entanglements. It sort of worked out best for both of us. Auntie Lin became Sifu Lin.”

  [Are you still in that place? The one where you do not want to do anything your parents imagined for you?]

  “You mean, would I rather be a dental hygienist or a vascular surgeon? No. I want to be a sigil agent.”

  [Good. How far along are you?]

  “I know one hundred percent of the Chinese sigils and maybe half of the Irish ones. I just learned Iron Gall and painted it on my weapons.”

  [I see. And Hsin-ye was…ahead of you in her studies?]

  “Yes, by a month or two. She likes to tease me about what’s coming next, always texting that something she’s learning is really awesome or bloody awful. She’s also older than me. She’s twenty.”

  It took me some time to type my next sentence. [If all three of them are lost…you might be the last true adept of the Chinese system.]

  Ya-ping dropped her face into her hands. “I don’t want to think about that.”

  [We must. The inkmaking in particular would be a tragic body of knowledge to lose. A priceless cache of lore. I learned to make the inks in my training long ago but have since traded Mei-ling and Shu-hua for everything I needed, since their ink sticks were flawless and mine were…not.]

  “The procedures can be time-consuming and exacting for sure. But that’s not our worry for now. We are going to find them.”

  [Yes. Can you walk me through what happened when she disappeared?]

  “Sure. She loaded up with battle sigils—all the Irish ones, you know—plus some extra cards and pens. That by itself told me she was expecting trouble—or at least preparing for it. She said there was a twinge to a ward she wanted to check out in the Dandenong Ranges. That’s about forty minutes northeast, depending. Plenty of settlement in the foothills, suburbs, and what have you, and then, blam, you’re in the bush.”

  [Which ward specifically?]

  “The Ward of Imbalance.”

  That relatively vague title was one of the oldest mystical wards, used to detect the arrival of gods and demons on the plane. If yin and yang were in balance on the earth—an admittedly dubious proposition—the sudden appearance of a powerful being from another plane would be like dropping an anvil on one side of a seesaw. Or, viewed as a membrane, the plummet of a stunt professional into an air mattress. Such wards had, in the old days, let seers and magicians of all stripes warn the Middle Kingdom of threats or give them hope that help was on the way.

  They were passive sensors and lasted for years when painted properly. The wards did have a limited range, however, and didn’t always pick up the arrival of low-level visitors. A pixie could slip in and out of the plane without us ever knowing. A single ogre could sneak in, even—they were brutes, sure, but there were plen
ty of human brutes too, and they didn’t represent a significant deviation from normal.

  A web of such wards could provide a fairly decent early-warning system, but it was a constant game of updating them and hiding them so that the Fae didn’t know where they were; they would regularly destroy them on sight to blind us and keep their movements secret. Whenever a sigil agent showed up too fast to confront them in the middle of some shenanigans, the Fae knew we had learned of their presence through the Ward of Imbalance.

  [Did she say anything about the twinge to give a sense of how powerful the being was?]

  “No. I haven’t felt these twinges yet, because I guess I’m not attuned.”

  [It’s like a sudden chill along your spine and then someone screaming at a very high pitch in one of your ears, though it is thankfully brief. Which ear varies.]

  Ya-ping grinned. “That’s very similar to how Sifu Lin described it. But, no, she didn’t say. Only that it was in the Dandenong Ranges, and then she loaded up for a fight.”

  [Did she take a Sigil of Unchained Destruction?]

  “I don’t know. I saw the Sigils of Agile Grace and Muscular Brawn for sure, but there were others.”

  The train emerged from its underground track to the daylight, having completed a gradual hill climb, and we were rocking along the suburbs. Buck was immediately distracted by the prospect of people to mess with and counting which of their possessions he could easily steal.

  [You only recognized two sigils? No more?] What Shu-hua took with her might give me some clue as to what she thought she was facing.

  “Just those two were all I saw for sure, but I know the others she took were also Irish ones because of where she reached in her sigil drawer—you’ll see how it’s organized. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. At the time it seemed routine and nothing to worry about, so I wasn’t paying close attention, until she told me about the note.”

  [What note?]

  “When Sifu Lin is going on a mission or errand that she believes could be potentially dangerous, she establishes a dead drop somewhere just outside the engagement zone and leaves a note for me there. She’s done this several times in the past and always returned, so I never had to go find one. This time, she packed up everything and then told me that there would be a note for me at the Healesville Grand Hotel if she did not check in or return.”

  [Have you been there yet?]

  “No. I called Sifu Wu when I first became worried, and she said she was on her way because she felt the twinge too.”

  [She felt it in Taipei?] That didn’t bode well. Coriander didn’t set the wards off, which was a blessing, since he came and went all the time. Likewise, contracted Fae like Buck and Harrowbean, as well as other beings who had permission to be on earth and to come and go, didn’t set off the wards. So whoever had tripped the wards definitely had no permission to be here, and it was someone rather powerful.

  “Yes, all the way in Taipei. So I waited for her to look into it. But when she disappeared as well, I called you, because I figured that if two sigil agents couldn’t handle what’s out there, I couldn’t either, and the note would most likely tell me to call you and the others anyway.”

  [So that’s a solid clue. We have a starting point.]

  “We do.”

  [Do you know where the Ward of Imbalance is located? That would give us the center of a circle to search.]

  The young woman shook her head. “Dandenong Ranges is all I know, because that’s what she said aloud. I haven’t felt any twinges and don’t know where any wards are painted, other than the ones I did myself in my studies. I think attuning myself to them is supposed to happen in a few months.”

  I nodded. That was true. Introducing the apprentice to the surveillance net was one of the final tasks before starting them on the ink for the Sigil of Unchained Destruction. The Ward of Imbalance was an excellent start, but it worked in conjunction with the Sigils of Gentle Alarm and Ethereal Scriving, which Brighid had designed to provide a picture of extraplanar comings and goings we could consult as needed, without our nerves jangling at every little thing. Jangling nerves were sometimes useful—they provided a certain motivation—but they could affect sleep patterns after a while.

  A portion of my sigil room held a pigment-soaked map of my territory, which was, in many ways, a priceless gift. It would be the chief treasure I’d pass down to my apprentice, if one ever made it to mastery. Shu-hua had one, Mei-ling had one, as did Eli and Diego, each map made by Brighid. As a rule, the pigments in the map appeared as a neutral brown, the way all colors turn to a slurry of brown when mixed together. But disturbances to the web of wards and sigils we made were bound to the Sigil of Ethereal Scriving in the map, which updated every hour: Dots of color appeared where some being entered or exited the plane, according to the wards and sigils we had out there. A bright-red dot meant an infernal of some kind had arrived; a soft pink meant an infernal had exited. Kelly green and hunter green indicated the comings and goings of most Fae, and white paired with grey tracked the arrival and departure of beings many would consider to be gods.

  [Have you checked Shu-hua’s map?] I asked, because everything else had been a prologue to that.

  Ya-ping nodded, her entire body tensing at the question. She’d been expecting this one and had not been looking forward to delivering an answer.

  “Sifu Lin did when she felt the twinge. She said there was a white dot in the Dandenong Ranges.”

  “Wot? Is that bad? It looks bad,” Buck said. “Lookit her, MacBharrais. She’s clenched up tighter than a rich man’s bum when ye mention paying taxes. What’s a white dot on a map mean?”

  [It means there’s a god of some kind out there.]

  “A god? Ye told me it was all fire and spiders in this country, and now it’s a god? Ye’re a damn Dark Vaper, I swear.”

  I ignored him and typed to Ya-ping, [We’ll need to drive out there after I check her map for myself. Do you have a car?]

  “Yes. But it’s tiny, a two-seater. I mean, Buck would need to sit on your lap.”

  “He’ll never let that happen. He knows I’ll piss on him, see. And he’ll deserve it,” the hobgoblin said, standing on his chair and pointing at me, “because of fire and spiders and gods and a curse on ma heid because of the curse on his heid and that time he gave me a nasty drink called a negroni and said it was popular!”

  Ya-ping arched an eyebrow at me and flicked her index finger a couple of times in Buck’s direction. “I’m picking up on a low-key current of repressed hostility from your hobgoblin. Are they all like this?”

  “Naw, there’s no any as fine as me. I’m gonnay be a culture hero, if I live that long.”

  [Buck, the solution is clear. We need you to acquire us some alternative transportation.]

  His annoyance melted away from his features and was replaced by a childlike excitement. “Ye mean grand theft auto?”

  [Or the theft of a grand auto, yes.]

  “Can it be a van? A wizard van?”

  [If you wish.]

  His arms shot up in triumph. “Ya beauty! Yessss, ha ha ha!”

  All vans, Buck explained, had the potential to be wizard vans. They were like hunks of marble before the sculptor took a chisel to them. But the best hunks of marble, in this metaphor, would be windowless vans that were kind of tall so one could stand up in them, the sort that plumbers and electricians often used.

  “You mean a tradie van,” Ya-ping said.

  “Wot?”

  “As in tradesmen. We call them tradie vans. They get to park anywhere, and it drives us mad. Anyone else would get a ticket for parking the way they do.”

  “Right. Those. They have the largest surface area tae paint, so we want one of them.”

  When the train arrived and we emerged from the Glen Waverley station, we had to walk a few blocks to Shu-hua’s house, o
n Florence Street. Glen Waverley was an older neighborhood, which continued to thrive because of the school Ya-ping had just graduated from. It was an extraordinarily good one and everyone wanted their kids to go there, so property values were up, and it seemed they were always cramming in some high-rises or remodeling old houses to accommodate demand. As a result, Ya-ping observed, she and Buck would have little trouble finding a tradie van parked somewhere. Stealing, however, was not her specialty.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Buck assured her. “I’ll steal it, you drive it.”

  Ya-ping shot me a glance. “Mr. MacBharrais, you’re okay with this?”

  [We’ll return the van. It will no doubt be in a much different condition from when we took it, but it will be returned with some monetary compensation as a sort of rental fee. They will be inconvenienced a brief while but not suffer any permanent harm.]

  The houses along Florence Street had been built before the idea of tract homes had taken hold, and as a result there were some rather grand aging places along its length, some that were not so grand, and some that had been torn down and rebuilt to be bigger.

  From the outside, Shu-hua’s house looked to be two stories, though it may have also had a basement. It sported a red-brick façade and a black-shingled roof, and there was a balcony above the entrance with a pair of wide French doors. There wasn’t a front yard, exactly, but rather a cement courtyard leading to the garage and entry; lining the edges were little half circles of shrubbery, sprouting out of beds of cedar chips alongside some crepe myrtles and Japanese maples. Along the front was a wrought-iron fence interrupted periodically by four-foot brick columns, each capped with a flat white hat of cast stone. The sides of the property, however, had a more traditional wooden fence for privacy.