“She’s drunk. But she’s shutting up now, right, Evil?” Theta said.
“Aye, aye, Captain.” Evie saluted. She turned and tripped, falling onto her backside in the dirt. “Ow.”
Memphis helped Evie stand. His fingers grazed something solid in the spot where Evie had been sitting. “Sam, would you kindly shine that light over here?”
The beam of light caught the gleam of polished gray in the dirt. Memphis crouched down and brushed away the years of dust. “I think we might’ve found what we’re after.”
“Congratulations, Evil,” Theta said, shuddering. “Seems like your can is a compass after all.”
Evie stared at the mummified remains—the sunken eyes and the exposed, rotted teeth and the tattered, bloodstained dress. “I don’t want to touch a thing on that.… that…” she said, wagging a finger generally in the corpse’s direction. “That.”
“Evil, we gotta know.”
“Okay,” Evie said after a pause. “For Henry, okay.” She struggled to take her gloves off. The half-empty sheaths flapped at the ends of her fingers. “These have stopped working.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Theta tugged the gloves free.
Evie’s mouth twisted into a pained grimace, the scream perched behind her teeth, as her fingers landed on the skeleton. “Why couldn’t I have been a dream walker?” she squeaked. “Why’d it have to be object reading?”
“Come on, Sheba. You can do this.” Sam nudged her.
Evie grasped the dead thing’s wrist, breathing in and out as she tried to relax. The vision began as a tingle that spread up her arms, tightening the muscles of her neck. And then she was under, the vision playing out like a movie across a bright screen.
“A ship. I’m on a ship,” Evie said. She gagged. “Seasick.”
“You okay?” Sam’s voice.
“You care,” Evie murmured.
“What?” Sam said.
“Nothing,” Evie mumbled. She allowed herself to ease back a bit until she felt better. “There’s a ship unloading passengers,” she said in a detached voice. “And a sign… Port of… San Francisco.”
Guards funneled passengers toward a building for processing. Evie felt unmoored. She could feel the girl’s fear pressing against her, making her heart race, so she tried to distance herself by concentrating on the paper in the girl’s hand. It was printed in both Chinese and English: “O’Bannion and Lee, Matchmakers.” Two men entered the stuffy building. One was a big, burly white man with muttonchop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. The other was a Chinese man in a Western-style suit who smiled without showing his teeth. They paid the immigration official fifty dollars to look the other way, and took the girl and two others with them. The reading threatened to slip away.
Evie gripped the bony wrist tighter and a squalid New York City slum came into view: Streets thick with mud and horse dung. Filthy ragamuffins begging for scraps. A toothless, grime-coated woman talking sweetly to a rag-enrobed baby at her bare breast. Flies swarmed her.
“Shhh, that’s a good boy,” the woman said, and Evie could see that the baby was dead.
A drunk hoisted his tankard and, in a thick Irish brogue, shouted, “Welcome to Five Points, hell’s backyard.”
From atop a soapbox, a man harangued the crowd. “… close our borders to the wretched Chinese, whose loose women pollute our young men, destroy our families, take the white man’s job…”
“Sheba? Anything?” Sam’s voice floated to Evie from far away.
Evie’s vision settled on a disheveled woman lying on a cot, clutching a music box. She had the glassy eyes of an opium addict. But it was the same girl. Evie sensed it.
“I think I found her,” Evie murmured.
She could feel the opium in her veins, making her woozy and sick. Distance. She needed distance.