They had the most beautiful opera there. I escape to it in my mind whenever I need to.
All of Ling’s uneasy questions shifted into chilling answers: Wai-Mae was waiting for them when they arrived each night. She was never in the station or up above on the streets outside Devlin’s, as Ling and Henry were. When Ling had asked about the dreamscape, what had Wai-Mae said? I made it. She’d talked about Mulberry Bend and Bandit’s Roost, which were nothing more than blighted memories of Five Points, a slum wiped away and replaced by the greenery of Columbus Park. And then there were O’Bannion and Lee. The matchmakers who Wai-Mae insisted were bringing her over had been dead and gone for fifty years. Murdered in 1875. Murder! Murder! Oh, murder! They’d been murdered by the girl in the veil.
The clues had been there for them all along. George had tried to make her see them. In the tunnel, he’d told her to wake up. He’d wanted her to know about the ghost, to see who it really was.
And who had warned them against going inside the tunnel? Wai-Mae. Wai-Mae was the ghost.
But what if some part of Wai-Mae didn’t know that? What if the dream was her way of fighting that knowledge? Ling needed to talk to Henry, desperately. She wished he weren’t drunk. He’d been so upset about Louis… because Louis never showed up.
Louis, too, never appeared aboveground, Ling realized. Like Wai-Mae, he was always waiting for them in the dream world, shimmering in the sun. Shimmering. Ling’s head went light as she realized at last what had been poking at her these past few days. It was Henry’s comment about the hat. She’d thought it was his. But it had been Louis’s first.
She’d told Henry from the start: She could only find the dead.
A chorus of police whistles shrilled in the streets. They were answered by loud sirens. Through the windows, Ling saw a herd of police marching up Doyers Street.
“What’s happening?” Ling asked.
“Shhh.” Uncle Eddie turned off the lights and they kept watch at the windows. Across the way, the police battered down the door of an apartment building. There was shouting as people were forced outside and into police wagons. A truck with a searchlight mounted on its back slunk around the narrow curve. Its white-hot sweep illuminated frightened faces peeking out from behind curtained windows. Two men attempted to escape from an apartment window onto a second-floor balcony. They were met on the fire escape by policemen with clubs at the ready. Police were everywhere in the streets, whistles blowing, as they rounded up the citizens of Chinatown. Many weren’t going willingly, some shouting, “You cannot treat us this way. We are human beings!” A man’s voice came over a megaphone in English telling everyone not to move, that this was a raid.
Ling spied Lucky moving in the shadows. He was making a run for the opera house through the chaos on the streets. Uncle Eddie spirited him inside, and he and Ling waited for the Tea House waiter to catch his breath.
“The mayor has issued a full quarantine,” Lucky managed to tell them. “They’re taking us to a detainment camp.”
“Where are my parents?” Ling pleaded.
“Your father told me to go quickly out the back and come to you. I barely escaped.”
“Is Baba all right?” Ling begged.
Lucky hung his head. “I am sorry, Ling. They took your father. He couldn’t find his papers.”
“I will go to the Association and see what I can find out from the lawyers,” Uncle Eddie said, racing for his coat and hat.
“They’ll take you, too, Uncle,” Lucky said.
“So be it. I won’t wait like a dog.”
Lucky nodded at Ling. “Mr. Chan wanted to make sure they didn’t get Ling.”
Ling was torn. She wanted to go with Uncle Eddie, to be with her mother and father. But she also needed to get to Henry and tell him what she’d come to realize about the dream world.