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true I'll permit her in this house." The woman blinks eyelashes albino-pale. "I'll have a tisane sent up."
    The elevator at least is ordinary, backlit buttons and metal. Julienne clutches at her phone and wonders if it still functions, wonders why Hau Ngai hasn't called back.
    A key is produced. The room is polished mahogany and camphor, a platform bed draped in green, a writing desk with a Jikqing set and a laptop thin as a tabloid, futuristic-sleek. A bedside lamp sheds an aquarium light, sea-shallows with the movements of coral colonies that don't exist but which nevertheless daub the walls red, polyps and petals. There's no fish tank.
    Julienne leans against the desk. A stray business card. On it, between lines of abstract design, nestles the name Olivia Ching twice, bilingual. "Is this you?"
    "Call me that," she says, noncommittal to the idea of ownership. "Did you lead that madman to me on purpose?"
    Her teeth lock tight against one another. "There'd have been no madman if you hadn't gotten me involved in—whatever this is."
    "I just saved you from certain torture. He'd have flayed answers out of you piece by piece, hung you from some roof by the hair, and made taxidermy out of you." Olivia stands over her and though they are of a height there is a sense the snake is more . "You should show some gratitude."
    "I would've been fine if I never met you." Julienne pushes the other woman away. Too close. That tongue running across her lips. "Why should I do anything for you?"
    Olivia throws up her hands. "Why are you so selfish? Do you always think only of yourself and what will profit you?"
    "Selfish," Julienne repeats quietly and realizes, jarred, that she is imitating Hau Ngai's tone. "Because I saved you and you fed off me knowing it could have been my death. Because I've kept quiet from my aunt about the other night so she won't hunt you down."
    The serpent glares. "It wouldn't have killed you and what few years you lost have already been restored by a god. What is it that you want, then? Such fortune that you may move through the world without resistance, such wealth that you may eat shark-fins and bird-nests gilded in gold, such charm that you may enthrall goddesses with a glance, and have them lie down each night to card ivory fingers through your hair?"
    She stares at Olivia and can think only to say, "What makes you think I like women that way?"
    "What? It's obvious. The unpurified mortal body is like a demon's—a collection of appetites. So what'll it take to get me an audience with Lady Seung Ngo? Say what it is that your heart longs for, what your thoughts are bent toward every waking minute."
    To be well, to know confidence, to have someone like Hau Ngai—just a little like, more human and less legend—for her own. "I told you, Auntie Seung Ngo isn't in Hong Kong. She's traveling. Her wife…"
    "No," Olivia snaps. "I refuse to court death. The monk's eager to exterminate all my genus, but at least he is much limited. The archer is armed with both insanity and almost limitless might. Once she's set her sight on a quarry she never relents. A lover of unprovoked butchery."
    Julienne tries to reconcile that. "She's a very composed person."
    "Most natural-born killers are."
    Her nerves are finding their level. She can be reasonable and logical again and this woman's equal, not a trembling senseless thing in Olivia's arms. "Why do you need Auntie Seung Ngo?"
    A frown indents Olivia's forehead. "You know the story of the white snake?"
    There is a small-screen adaptation every few years, cinematic now and again; of course she does, though—"You're the green serpent." The younger one, the one who lives on past the story's end. Julienne glances at the business card. The surname. It should have been obvious. It would have been, if she accepted that all the legends—or at least most—are rooted deeper in fact than history textbooks suggest.
    "Yes." Olivia looks away; the set of her shoulders loosens and the line of