Like most stores in Jade City, ours was small and cramped, with a greyish linoleum floor and harsh fluorescent lights. We did make sure there was more walking room than you’d find in, say, a character goods shop, because customers had to be able to turn around without smashing anything. Three sides were lined with glass display cabinets, bolted to the walls because of earthquakes. A table in the center of the room held a seasonal display of delicate, six-inch dolls.

  Since my next-oldest sister Chara was starting freshman year at NJU in two weeks, she’d spent the weekend decorating the store for the Mid-Autumn Festival. She’d picked dolls dressed in yellows and oranges and reds and arranged them alongside silk chrysanthemums and maple leaves, sprays of dried Chinese lanterns, and store-bought rabbit figurines.

  She herself was nowhere in sight – probably out with friends again – but twelve-year-old Meissa, the older of the twins, was perched on a stool behind the counter. Her nose was buried in a book. I glanced at its title and winced. Leo Wolf and the Fall of Magitechnology, which Mei was reading in the original English. She’d been chewing her way through the tome since the start of the vacation. It was her summer project this year, she’d announced.

  One evening when she was in the shower, I’d leafed through it and concluded that it contained nothing new. It recounted the standard tale of how an American mage named Leo Wolf came to regret developing magical weapons during the Mages’ War ninety years ago. Like everyone else, he was so obsessed with victory that he ignored the mounting Toll from flesh-melting bullets and such, right up until a Toll-induced earthquake ripped apart his hometown. It killed his favorite daughter. He went nuts for a while. And then he founded the MEC and spent the rest of his life stamping out magic worldwide. (My maternal grandma, Po-Po, would say that he stayed nuts.)

  Mei had been really offended when she came out of the shower and discovered how much faster I could read English. I was four years older, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying to catch up. Now a little notebook lay open next to her, where she was writing down new vocab and their definitions.

  “Hey, Mei. Mom and Tania still working?”

  I tipped my head at the closed workshop door. It had good soundproofing, so I couldn’t hear anything from within. But Mom had said this morning that she and our youngest sister would be busy with the Special Order.

  Mei turned a page so aggressively that she nearly tore it. Without looking up, she grunted. It meant “yes” in Mei-speech.

  I hoped Mom and Tania finished before the MEC inspectors reached our district. Their scanners had gotten a lot more sensitive over the years. It was why no one used woks with Spirit spells that promoted familial harmony anymore. Families had become a lot more fractured since Mom was a kid.

  “Any customers today?” I prodded.

  A slightly different grunt, which meant “no.”

  “Did you see my text? About the inspectors?”

  “Mmph.”

  “Don’t forget we’re on dinner duty tonight.”

  “Mrgh.”

  Just to test if she were really listening, I said, “Don’t forget it’s your week to dust.”

  Dusting the shop required moving all the dolls very carefully, one at a time, and then rearranging them artistically afterwards. It was all of us sisters’ least favorite chore, although Mei complained the most and Tania the least. They might look the same, but no one ever confused the twins.

  “No it is not! It’s your week!” At last, Mei slammed her book shut and glared up at me. “Go shower, Dia! You stink! You’re gonna scare away the customers.”

  There wasn’t a single customer crazy enough to trek out here in this weather, but it was too hot to argue. “Come up to the kitchen after your shift. Don’t forget.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know! Now let me read!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Edging around her, I trudged up the stairs to the second floor. My maternal grandparents, Gong-Gong and Po-Po, sat on the sofa in the living room, watching a historical drama. Po-Po was wrapped head to toe in electric blankets to protect her joints from the air conditioning. Gong-Gong was on the far end of the sofa next to a fan.

  “Hello, Dia,” Po-Po called in Jadean when she saw me through the doorway. “Your mom and sister done yet?”

  I shook my head and replied in Mandarin, “The door’s still closed, so probably not.”

  She shook her head too. “It’s taking too long. It shouldn’t take so long.”

  “Well,” I defended my youngest sister, “it’s her first time, so….”

  “It still shouldn’t take this long.”

  Ever since her failing eyesight and arthritic fingers had forced her to hand the business over to Mom, Po-Po had been bored out of her mind. Watching soap operas about ancient Chinese court drama wasn’t nearly stimulating enough for someone who used to work with the Association of Shrines and Temples and create images of Grandpa Earth himself.

  I remembered something all of a sudden. “Oh yeah, did Dad or Mei tell you that I saw MEC inspectors? In Lakeside?”

  “Again?” asked Gong-Gong. “Isn’t that the second time this month?”

  Po-Po extended an arm towards him. “Help me up. I’m going to see if they need a hand.”

  He started the long process of peeling electric blankets and heating pads off her.

  I waited to see if they needed my help, then started for the stairs up to my bedroom before the scene in the kitchen caught my eye. Dad was sitting at the dining table, the sewing box open next to him and heaps of fabrics spread out around him. He had a bald doll in one hand and held up a swatch of navy-blue silk as he planned her gown.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Normally he’d be in the workshop, but today he’d gotten kicked out.

  I wandered in for a closer look. “Hey, Dad. Is that the Chang’e doll Madame Yang ordered?”

  The President of the Association of Shrines and Temples had been collecting our dolls for decades.

  “Mmhmm. She wants it by the Mid-Autumn Festival.”

  “That’s still weeks away!”

  “Mmm, but I forgot to get the other dolls out of the workshop, so I might as well finish this one. How was shopping? Besides the MEC inspector part?”

  My shoulders sagged. “Not good. Aly got into an argument with one of them. I got her out of there, but we didn’t buy anything. We’ll have to go back next week.”

  His eyebrows shot up at the mention of Aly arguing with an inspector right in front of me. “Well, it’s good you got her out of there” was all he said.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I gestured at the fabrics on the table. “Do any other dolls need dressing?”

  He hesitated, running through a mental list of projects that were in various stages of completion. “Yes, but unfortunately they’re all in the workshop. It’s fine, Dia. Go rest. You need to start dinner soon.”

  That was true. Cooking for a family of eleven was no small feat. So I did as he suggested and went upstairs for a nap.

  There wasn’t anything else useful for me to do anyway.

  In the workshop, the sheet music for The Spell swam as Tania blinked back her tears. She ran her fingers down the silky sides of the xiao, the bamboo flute that had been passed down in the family for generations. All she had to do was play the piece that she had been practicing for months. She’d thought she was ready. Mom had thought she was ready. And she’d played every note right.

  But it just wasn’t working.

  “Again,” said Mom. She didn’t sound mad or disappointed, just neutral, which was worse.

  Sniffling, Tania lifted the xiao to her lips. She’d barely gotten her fingers positioned over the holes when Mom stopped her.

  “Don’t forget the intro, Tan-Tan.”

  Tania flushed and repositioned her fingers. There was a little intro section that hadn’t been written down, that she was needed to play before The Spell itself. That part was simple. She’d memorized it, no problem. Why’d she forgotten it just now?

  She took a deep breath and played the intro plus the spell again.

  And again, nothing happened.

  A cockatoo gurgled at Clementine Chen when she entered the NJU lab where she planned to spend her sabbatical. Alastair Chiu, the professor who was hosting her, raised an eyebrow at the bird.

  “This, I’m afraid, is Le-Le. Our lab pet. He has a talent for imitating…ambient sounds.” His affectionate tone reminded her of Asian parents who referred to their children as “my dumb son” or “my silly daughter” before launching into a humble-boast about their many, many accomplishments.

  “Hello, Le-Le,” Clem greeted the bird she’d only seen on video chats up until now.

  The cockatoo squawked like a human clearing his throat, and repeated, “Hello! Hello!” Then he went back to the gurgling, which sounded suspiciously like a flushing toilet.

  A pair of grad students were doubled over their lab bench, shaking with laughter.

  At Alastair’s stern look, they straightened and put on serious faces long enough to shake her hand and introduce themselves. Then Le-Le emitted another watery glug, and they melted into helpless giggles.

  Clem set her backpack on the battered desk she’d been assigned, avoiding the tea stain. “Do I want to know?”

  “No,” the postdoctoral fellow answered wearily. “No, you don’t, Professor Chen.”

  “You can call me Clem.” She’d given up on convincing any Jadean students and postdocs to drop the formality, though. To them, addressing a professor by first name, even in English, was appallingly rude. “Did you find anything exciting?”

  Alastair had emailed her right before she got on the plane to tell her that they were analyzing the data from their latest experiment and hoped to have exciting results to share when she landed. The dejected headshakes all around, however, told her that they didn’t. No wonder the students had snatched what scraps of victory they could from the jaws – well, beak – of defeat.

  By teaching a bird to imitate a toilet.

  Ah, grad students. They were still so young and energetic and optimistic that their research would lead to a dissertation, and a dissertation to an academic job.

  To be honest, she felt a twinge – just the slightest twinge – of relief that they hadn’t found anything new before she arrived.

  Alastair said to his lab, “Why don’t you run through the experimental setup for Professor Chen?”

  One of the students opened his laptop, pulled up a Powerpoint presentation, and described the Chiu Lab’s latest attempt to disentangle the Realms. Which had failed like every attempt before it.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise.

  Disentangling the Realms? It couldn’t be done. The strong coupling among them was a law of nature, a fundamental reality of how the world worked. Perform a spell in one Realm, and pay a Toll in the other two. It was as inescapable as toll roads on the American east coast.

  If you could pull the Realms apart and affect one without touching the others, some mage in the thousands and thousands of years of recorded human history would have figured it out. Ancient Egypt and Greece and China and Rome wouldn’t have been built on the backs of disposable mages. Later imperialist powers wouldn’t have split the role of the mage, who composed the spells, from that of the spell-worker, who performed the magic, and outsourced spell-work to their colonies. After all, why ruin the mental and physical health of your own people and destroy your own environment when you could make it somebody else’s problem?

  Disentangling the Realms. The pipe dream to end all pipe dreams.

  Just five years ago, the American Magical Association’s March Meeting organizers would have shunted Alastair Chiu’s talk into the crackpot session, and the MEC would have tossed his grant proposal straight into the recycling bin. It was a measure of everyone’s desperation to find anything that might justify their field’s existence that the MEC actually funded him.

  And that the Wolf clan hadn’t protested that it would be too embarrassing for the wife of the MEC High Commissioner to be associated with such a project.

  “We thought something in this range of frequencies would work,” the postdoc was saying glumly, and Clem yanked her attention back to the present. “We were sure it would disrupt the couplings, even if only for a picosecond.”

  Alastair’s idea was that if you hit a spelled artifact with the correct pulse of energy, it should weaken the couplings between the Realms. His lab hadn’t found a pulse energy that worked yet, though.

  “So you didn’t see anything at all?” Clem confirmed. “The coupling strengths didn’t change.”

  “No.” The grad student pulled up a plot to show her. The data was noisy, but the best-fit lines that ran through them were horizontal. “Here, and here, and here, are where the pulses hit.”

  Clem squinted at the data. There were no changes whatsoever after those timepoints.

  “Maybe we need better time resolution,” said Alastair. “Maybe the disentangling and re-entangling happen even faster than we thought. If we can push our resolution to the femtosecond scale, maybe that’s where we’ll see it.”

  He was suggesting that after the pulse hit, the Realms decoupled for a truly miniscule length of time, so miniscule that “length” didn’t even seem like the right word, and that, for all intents and purposes, the system returned to normal at once.

  As Alastair and his lab spoke, Clem felt more and more as if they were grasping at straws. If you kept saying that the reason you didn’t observe an effect was that you needed a more advanced instrument, well, you could put off ruling out that effect forever. Which, she supposed, wasn’t necessarily a bad way of getting more funding in the short run. And in the long run…. Who could worry about the long run when you were struggling to get through today?

  It was what her aunt had told her once, years ago. Clem had been horrified to find a very, very illegal spelled wok in her grandma’s kitchen. Her aunt had explained that spell-work used to be a cottage industry on Jade Island, back before its economy took off, in the days when farmers ate meat once a year at the Lunar New Year. “If spell-work affected their bodies or minds, their lives were harsh enough that they barely noticed. Or considered it part of the normal aging process,” she’d said. “And anyway, if you can’t fill your belly today, how can you worry about tomorrow?”

  Staring at the data that yielded not the slightest hint of new or interesting results, Clem wondered, How indeed?