The deeper we went, the more complex the web became. Qiao was connected to a magistrate who had been buying favors in the form of antiquities — scrolls and seals from far lands. Those scrolls had names my brother had loved to recite. The magistrate, in turn, answered to a committee: a small court of men and women who used law to make things disappear. They were respectable, wore decent coats, and ate at tables where decisions whispered like knives.
Our next step required words, not blades. We infiltrated a banquet and I learned how to smile in a room where every mouth was an armory. Mei moved with the quiet of someone taught by kindness to mask grief. She charmed a clerk, slipped a letter into the hand of a visiting scholar, and left with a jade hairpin she said she wanted as a keepsake. I played the part of the mourner forgotten by the world and learned to cry on cue. Theatrics, I found, were excellent for uncovering truth.
It was there I learned a terrible thing: my brother had been close to uncovering a ledger that would have made public an arrangement between the court and a foreign syndicate — an agreement in which inconvenient people could be bought for study: minds sold to the highest bidder under the guise of "anthropological research." Those sold were not always dead and were not always wanted alive. My brother had been cataloging names, a list that threatened to topple reputations and trade agreements alike.
When we confronted the magistrate, pretending ignorance and weeping, we were offered the same thing the world had given me since the funeral: obfuscated grief. A polite man with the ink of his office still wet on his fingers told us that the missing professor must have wandered into danger of his own making. He said, with the calm of a man who has made many such assurances, that sometimes the world demands sacrifices for the stability of trade. "One life for many," he offered without the apology of a real man.
I wanted to throw the dagger on his carpet and watch the system split open like a rotten fruit. Instead I left the banquet promising to hold the magistrate's secret like a coin he could spend later. I had learned from Yù that the most dangerous thing in the world was not a man who could pull a blade but a man who controlled the ledger.