The taxi wound a fluid path through the Shanghai rush hour, taking the low roads under serpentine overpasses. Rosie closed her eyes and saw their location. Blake was sitting next to her. They had been in the car for over an hour, giving a series of convoluted directions to the driver. She kept an eye out for security cameras. If she were not careful, there would be a flash of brilliant white light, and the couple’s whereabouts would be known to someone, somewhere. In the last six months they had learned to be more than cautious, more than anonymous. Tonight, they had asked the driver to turn around and continue back the way they had come more than once. Such was their life now in this neon megacity.

Blake turned to her, wondering just how much longer they would have to endure the wrenching of their stomachs and the noxious fumes of the other cars.

“We’re getting closer,” she said. “We’ll have to get out and walk soon.”

The meter was already at 1,500 renminbi. The driver’s eyes trailed over to the steadily increasing fare, then flitted into the mirror suspiciously. He was no fool. He knew they were no ordinary passengers. Rosie did not think that he would kick them out, but that did not mean he was being charitable. They had only done this once before in Shanghai—about a month ago. That time, things had gone off without a hitch, but that only inspired a little confidence this time.

“Up ahead,” she whispered to Blake.

“Master,” Blake spoke in his schoolboy Chinese, “stop front side.”

The driver pulled over to the side of the road. He seemed glad to be rid of these strange passengers and their incomprehensible directions. The buildings looming overhead were lit with signs that flashed in the dusk that was just settling over the city.

“Cash or transport card?”

“Cash.”

They paid and exited onto the street. To their left was a small side street and to their right a Korean restaurant. An elderly couple was selling fried noodles from a street stall. Opposite them on the road was a local police department, a clothing shop and a dumpling restaurant.

Blake looked to Rosie expectantly. He knew the general plan, but he did not know what to do or where to go. Rosie motioned to the side street on their left and began walking. They threaded their way through the pedestrian weave and walked down a block and turned right. Rosie clung to Blake’s arm as she walked with her eyes closed. She was searching for cameras, turning off those she found in an attempt to minimize the digital trail that they would eventually leave.

All this for such a small thing, she thought.

“The bank,” she said, “is on the southern side of the next block. We need to get closer to it and then go into the stall together. Don’t go in right away. I’ve got to turn off their cameras before. We’ll probably only have a minute or so to put the card in before someone walks out to see what’s happening.”

“And you’re sure they won’t have just turned off access to my card?” Blake asked.

“I’ve been checking. It looks like it’s still up. I mean, no one has much legal reason to turn it off. I don’t even know who would want to. There’s something else. Whoever they are, they may use the card as bait.”

“So much trouble, just for an upstanding global citizen to sponge off his mother. I feel like a thief.”

Blake continued to lead her down the way she had directed. He must look like he’s leading a blind woman.

But the world around her was anything but dark. In the last year and two months since they had left England she had learned how to use her gifts, the gifts that Tinker and Odin, and even Biomerge, had given to her. Even with her eyes shut she could perceive cars, phones, cameras, and any other device accepting or receiving wireless signals. But with her special set of contacts, she could see them. This had afforded her some small power, even in the flux of what was happening all over the world. She was the first of the Seeds to blossom and, though she might wish it otherwise, this maturation had made her famous in a dangerous way. She and Blake had read the stories of other Seeds who had disappeared in the last six months; some found to have been kidnapped, killed, and dissected for the technology they inadvertently possessed, while others were simply caged and studied like simian lab pets. She knew where she stood in all this, just as she could place herself on the map.

She was the first, and perhaps even the most sought after. They had already had run-ins with hunters before. In Istanbul, she and Blake had both nearly been killed. Someone had been hunting them, a monster of a human being. Another someone had intervened on their behalf. She could not be sure. Now was not the time to think about it, she reminded herself. She stopped before she lost focus.

Be here now. Leave the speculation for later.

They were half a block from the bank in question and continued walking until its lighted row of cash machine compartments came into focus. Rosie persisted in her methodical shutdown of all the cameras nearby. Now it had become almost second nature for her. She wondered often about this. What would it look like on a map, to see a slow-moving surveillance blackout traveling down the street?

They were close now. She shut off the ATM cameras.

“Alright, let’s go!”

They ran over to one of the empty ATM stalls and jumped in. This gained them several quizzical glances from passing people. They locked the door behind them and Blake hurriedly stuffed his card into the machine and began inputting his pin number.

Rosie closed her eyes, saying only, “Tell me when you’re done.” She was making sure the cameras inside the bank stayed off. If someone was tracking them, as they no doubt were, they would pick up on the transaction sooner or later. All she could do was prevent them from seeing faces. She heard more beeps around her.

“One round done,” said Blake.

“Everything’s good. Do another.”

More beeps issued from the console as Blake started another round of withdrawals, but Rosie kept her eyes closed. The ATM camera, and the six outside cameras, remained off. She heard the sound of Blake’s card ejecting and felt his arm pulling her toward the back of the stall.

“Another done. Let’s get out of here.”

They took another taxi back to their apartment. The bank where they had withdrawn money was in Gubei District, west of the city center, but they lived much farther south, several blocks from the Middle Ring wall in south Xuhui. Blake once again requested the driver take a circuitous route through the city, first giving the names of two crosstreets near Jing’an, then another pair in Pudong, then finally two more near their apartment.

Blake opened his wallet and thumbed through the contents. Rosie looked over.

“Just over three hundred thousand,” he said. “Rent and another few weeks of living. Maybe a month if we really stretch it.”

Rosie put her arm on his thigh and edged closer to him in the back seat. She closed her eyes, this time to blackness, and nestled her shoulders underneath his arm.

“I’m so sorry to have dragged you all this way,” she said.

He laughed in spite of himself. He knew she was apologizing with all seriousness but after the long road they had been on since London last year, it seemed like it could only be a joke. She looked up into his eyes. He loved the way her hair curled long and thick against her pale shoulders. She punched him softly.

“If you knew what was good for you, you might have left.”

“Where might I have done that? When?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Before we started our goose chase. Before we left England. Or in Brussels, or Luxembourg, or Geneva,” she thought a second.

“Ljubljana was next,” he reminded her.

“Or there, or Zagreb, or Sarajevo, or Tirana, or Skopje, or Sofia, or Nicosia, or Beirut, or Amman, or Manama, or Doha, or Mumbai or in Bangladesh or Burma or Laos.”

He chuckled, thinking about it, where they had been in the last year, what little he remembered of these places, as if they were water trickling through cupped hands. He noticed she had not mentioned Istanbul, but he chose not to remind her. It was a purposeful omission. It was a frightening memory for them both.

“Or Kunming or Changsha or Hangzhou,” he finished quickly.

They were silent a while as the cab made its way back to their apartment complex. They asked the driver to stop a block away, then paid and got out.

This area of the city was much at odds with where they had just been. It was one of the few poor areas left inside the city walls. Most now were on the outside, where migrants from all over the country lived in the dilapidated sprawl of concrete blocks and dredged a living on jobs that supported the city center. Garbage collectors, recyclers, cleaners, construction workers, prostitutes, and security guards, these were types of jobs fit for the workers outside the wall. So the kings and queens of the status quo had decreed.

Even in Shanghai, which was now so famous worldwide for its exorbitant real estate prices, pockets of the city seemed to thrive beneath the surface of the glossy consumer capitalism that chartered most of its undertakings. Wherever one went, the looming shapes of thirty, forty, or fifty story buildings were inescapable. Although no buildings in the city could compare in size or audacity to the Villas in London, the sheer scale of development here was nothing short of awe inspiring. The golden age at the turn of the century long over, China had been a pendulum swinging from boom to recession for the last forty years, but somehow the construction had never stopped. The workers must keep their jobs, or the Party will be over. Over seven decades had passed since the repealing of the One Child Policy and thirty years since the Age Complication — when the elderly had once made up forty percent of the population — and now the city was once again on the world stage and taking advantage of the influx of migrants to satisfy the demands of the economy.

Still, this neighborhood next to the Middle Ring Walls seemed somehow situated outside of these maneuverings. Blake couldn’t quite place his finger on why. Perhaps the feeling came from the people on the street, their looks, their manner, their lack of money. Perhaps it was just a feeling that could not be explained because he had not been here long enough.

They walked the remaining hundred meters and turned down a concrete drive that ran into the middle of the city block.

In front of them, to the south, the Middle Ring Wall towered in clear view. Faraji had told Blake that it was once a freeway overpass, but only two years ago had been converted into a fifty foot thick concrete edifice meant to stem the tide of eager migrants bent on getting work in the metropolitan area. Checkpoints were installed to allow those with family ties and previous arrangements to come and go as was proven necessary, but few people inside or outside of the wall had any illusions as to its purpose — to maintain control. Rosie, with no small amount of help from Faraji, had barely managed them entrance, and, ever since their entry, Blake had felt uneasy at the sight of it. He knew that, if they had to leave quickly, for any reason, they would not escape.

They walked through a copse of grey apartment blocks. They were sorely in need of painting. Their walls were cracking. Rusting grates hung along the lower windows while long bars for hanging clothes jutted from the upper floors. The colors of the clothes stood out as they waved gently in the breeze, adding much needed dye to the cloudy, smoggy sky.

Their building did not stand out among the others. It was near the rear of the complex. They walked to the outside door, keyed in the entry code, let themselves inside, and walked up the stairs to the fifth floor.

Later after they had both showered and eaten a late dinner, they lay on the sofa together. Rosie reclined on her back with her head on Blake’s lap.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Good question, my love.”

“Another month to find him.”

“A month. After more than a year. He’d better be here.”

They were silent a while, thinking. More than a year, Rosie echoed in her head. After they had left England they had wandered aimlessly throughout Europe, searching for nothing except solitude from the publicity they had brought upon themselves in Villa 6. Only after the attack in Istanbul had they started to consider the implications of their actions, and the implications of the Seeds’ story. There are so many more of them—of us. How many of them can we help if we don’t find Tinker?

Blake broke their silence.

“I think we need to meet with Faraji again.”

“The kid is a marvel,” Rosie agreed.

The apartment around them looked much better than the outside of the building. The floors were tiled, although the city’s constant construction and reconstruction meant that they attracted dust more readily than seemed possible. The kitchen was small but adequate. The living room was comfortable but tastelessly designed. The furniture was minimal, and rather uncomfortable, but at least they had a bed to share. They had only been in the city five weeks, but still the place was a semblance of a home.

They spent the rest of the night discussing their plans. Tomorrow they would make an effort to contact Faraji. This was a risk, Blake had noted, because the boy was now quite famous in some circles, especially within Oz. Still, this was part of the reason why he had been such a tremendous help to them in the past six months; in the last year the boy had gained the connections of someone many times his age. Many months ago, Jay had introduced them and expressed his admiration for the boy, who, he said, was wise beyond his years. Since then, Blake had irregularly been in contact with both of them, although he dared not do so often, not after Istanbul.

Only an ironic twist of fate allowed them to enter Oz at all; for over a century the Chinese had been stereotyped for their abilities in reverse engineering, and so few, except perhaps the minds behind the original experience rooms, were incredulous to learn that a new invention had reached the vast and quicksilver eastern market. For the last six or seven years, businesses in China had been renting something called Ganshou Jian, roughly translated as “perception rooms.” Blake had never been to the Villas’ rooms, but he had heard of the difference between the two types. One type was expensive, exclusive and made to last decades while the other was cheap, prevalent but often malfunctioned. They had met with Faraji once before in a Chinese Ganshou room. It had been dirty and poorly designed, but for two people like them—who only wanted to speak with their friend, dared not own a computer or phone, and had never experienced the emersion of the Villa's experience rooms—the Chinese Ganshou rooms suited their purpose well enough.

Hopefully the boy would have some information for them on Tinker’s whereabouts, and, if not, they would have an even more difficult task ahead of them. They were strangers here. Like so many of the other foreign people living in Shanghai, they could only get so much information. They could not speak the language, not well, at least. They were simply laowai trying to navigate their way through the squally seas of misunderstanding. They had already been searching for months, using Rosie’s talents to try and find the man, but he was infinitely cautious.

“And so it is,” he said, half jokingly, “that we cannot find the man we are trying to find. He is a ghost. He is one of the few people in this world that knows how to fly under the radar.”

“We’ll find him.”

“If it takes us our entire lives?”

“We’ll find him, even if it takes us to another conversation with Faraji. The boy can find him. Or maybe he will find the boy. We’ll get there eventually, no matter where he is, no matter how many conversations we have to have in cyberspace.”

“Let’s hope that’s all it takes. Or better yet, let’s hope he finds us."

Blake was quiet a while longer. He had no idea how long the search would last. They were mixed up in the drama of the Seeds. Rosie was being hunted. He knew that now, although it had taken him too long to realize how valuable she was to them. A year before, they had courted that public opinion with such interest, knowing that it could help them in the short term, but now they knew that publicity held only danger. He knew that Rosie was the first and most valuable Seed, that her power was nothing short of miraculous, that it was something akin to magic.

This train of thought ran its course and then began to repeat without any resolution. Blake shook his head, sighed and then realized that Rosie was asleep. Her head rested still on his lap.

As he carried her to the bedroom, she whispered to him with her eyes closed, perhaps only half-asleep.

"Something is wrong."