Chang'an was not Luoyang.

The capital was swollen with secrets, her markets full of strange tongues and sharper knives. The air was thicker, the crowds more desperate, and the women—well, the women were harder in their laughter and far more skilled at hiding the price of a smile.

Five years had passed since the night Bao Zhu shattered a jade hairpin in Luoyang.

Her robes, once dyed to draw the gaze, were now muted to the color of bruised peaches. Her hair was twisted low and bound with a single string of knotted hemp, and she wore only a thin trace of rouge along her cheekbones, the kind of mark a workhouse mistress might use to feign class. If the effect was deliberate, it was because tonight, she intended to disappear into the darkness of the city's least forgiving labyrinth.

The workhouse sat on the outer margin of the Southern poor quarter. It was not the worst she had seen, but it was the purest: a paragon of institutional indifference. The roof tiles sagged and the windows were bricked in at random.

Bao Zhu approached with her gaze lowered, but not cowed. Inside, the main corridor was lit by oil lamps suspended at irregular intervals. The first thing she noticed was the silence: no wailing, no fights. She counted two dozen girls in the first room alone, seated at battered looms or bent over warping boards, their eyes blank and fingers a blur.

She presented her token at the desk—an ivory pass stamped with the emblem of the Ward's medical examiner. The clerk did not look up from his ledger, merely pointed to a corridor lined with paper screens and flicked his wrist in the universal sign for "hurry up."

She followed the corridor's bend, counting the doors until she reached the one that matched the note she had been given: Room Seven. She knocked, once, and waited. A young man, perhaps twenty and trying desperately to appear older, opened the door. His face registered neither suspicion nor interest. He let her in, closed the door, and immediately held out his palm.

Bao Zhu removed a coin purse from her sleeve and tipped 50 bronze coins on a string into his hand. "I'm here for the girl, Xiu Ying," she said.

The man pinched the coins, pocketed them, and gestured toward a bench.

"I know, wait here," he said, voice flat. "I'll bring her up."

She nodded, eyes fixed on the thin crack in the plaster opposite her. Three months she had searched. Three months of bribes and favors traded with men who understood neither gratitude nor pity. The trail had gone cold twice, and each time, she had nearly lost hope. But in the end, all human systems obeyed the same logic: children vanished not for love, not for hatred, but because someone calculated the profit of their pain.

She heard the steps before the door opened. The clerk returned, trailed by a girl so small and hunched that for a moment, Bao Zhu thought he had brought her the wrong one. The child's hair was hacked short, matted with what looked like dried starch and grease. Her face was thin to the bone and her eyes were swollen; rimmed with darkness and fatigue.

The clerk pulled the girl forward by the scruff of her tunic, as if presenting a stray animal to a new master. "She's a good worker," he said. "Never talks, never fights. The headman likes her." He made a show of brushing lint from her shoulder. "But money is money."

Bao Zhu's hands trembled as she drew out the second scroll, this one a carefully forged document of guardianship and redemption. The clerk barely scanned it before stamping it with the chop he carried on a cord around his neck.

"Take her," he said, with a dismissive flick. "She's worth less than the cloth she weaves anyway."

Bao Zhu knelt, so she was eye level with the girl. She reached out, slow and measured, and tucked a stray lock of hair behind the girl's ear.

"Do you remember me?" she asked, softly.

The girl stared, her expression blank. Then, with the tiniest jerk of the chin, she looked away.

"Xiu Ying," Bao Zhu said, the name a memory shaped by equal parts guilt and longing. "You're safe now. You're coming with me."

She stood, gestured for the girl to follow. For a moment, the girl did not move, and Bao Zhu's heart seized. Then the girl shuffled forward, her feet almost silent on the splintered boards.

They left the way they came: past the blank-eyed children, past the indifference of the day clerk, through the dusk-lit corridor and into the dank alleyway. At the threshold, Bao Zhu paused and looked back, as if expecting someone to call her bluff, to drag them both back into the warren, but no one noticed. No one cared.

Only when the main door had swung shut behind them did Bao Zhu allow herself to look closely at her daughter. She crouched again, scanning the child from scalp to toes, her mind unconsciously flipping through what she had to do save her daughter. Bao Zhu fought the urge to cry. Instead, she gathered the child into her arms, the fragile weight of her a jolt, and turned toward the alley where her horse drawn carriage waited.

She walked quickly, the first drops of rain stinging her face, and hoisted the child into the carriage before climbing in after. She pulled the curtains shut and wrapped them both in a spare blanket.

For the first mile, Xiu Ying sat rigid, hands fisted in her lap, gaze fixed on nothing. Bao Zhu tried to catch her eye, tried to say something that would not come out as a command or a plea. In the end, she simply held the girl close, one hand pressed to the sharp angle of her back, the other smoothing the filthy hair with a tenderness she had learned through her years as a woman of The Pavilion.

The city rattled by outside, indifferent as ever. Bao Zhu enumerated every step she would need to take: the baths, the herbs, the type of nutrition. The harder part—the part Eric would have failed at—would be the repair of the spirit. She wondered if it could even be done, or if the girl was already too far gone.

As the ride wore on, Xiu Ying's head drooped, then fell against Bao Zhu's shoulder. Her body, which had been stiff as a plank, melted suddenly into sleep. Bao Zhu watched her daughter's chest rise and fall, each breath a tiny victory against the world that had tried to erase her.

She pressed her lips to the girl's forehead, wept as much as she needed to, then whispered, both to Xiu Ying and herself, "I've got you."