Chapter 1

—Meow.

Liu Zhiyi stopped. The dim streetlight threw down a beam and stretched the shadow at her feet long.

The narrow one-way street was empty.

A cat?

She listened for a moment.

—Meow.

This one was much louder than the last, with a soft mewling tail to it. Cutesy, almost.

The wheedling little cry tugged at her. She thought of her mother, still unburied at home, and couldn't harden her heart. She went toward the sound.

The cat was hiding behind the lamppost, out of the light — a small black lump.

She softened her steps without meaning to and went over, one step at a time.

She'd been feeding a little black cat for a while now. Its voice wasn't this cutesy — but the black lump looked like the one she fed.

—Fzzt.

The streetlight flickered.

Liu Zhiyi paused and looked up.

The light steadied.

—Meow.

The cat cried again.

She walked faster. Curled in the shadow, it didn't move. It didn't seem afraid of people.

So she crouched and made little pss-pss calls at it.

"Come here, come here…"

The black ball of fur stirred, slowly lifted its head, as if it wanted to come closer.

Black cats all look alike; she wasn't sure it was the one she always fed, but it seemed friendly.

Liu Zhiyi reached out, arm hovering, meaning to give its head a gentle stroke.

The moment her palm touched it —

the round little head rolled in her hand and came off.

—Meow.

Her heart jerked. On reflex she flung the head away. It bounced twice on the ground and rolled under the lamppost.

Only then did she see it for what it was — a toy cat's head.

She let out a breath.

"…They make dolls this real now?" she muttered — then felt something was off.

She glanced at the head under the light.

The green plastic beads set into it caught the light, and really did look like a pair of live cat's eyes.

She cut the thought off fast, not wanting to follow it any further.

Since her mother died, her mind kept wandering to ghosts and uncanny things on its own.

But thinking of her mother only left her hollow. No grief, no pain — just empty inside.

Even now she couldn't believe it. How could her mother just be dead?

Liu Zhiyi sighed, stepped around the head, and walked on toward home.

The old complex was a warren of narrow paths. She climbed a flight of stairs, crossed a landing, digging in her pocket as she went and fishing out the elevator card.

Fitting elevators into the place had dragged on for years over who would pay. In the end they sealed the second-floor entrance, and everyone else ran the elevator by swiping their own floor's card.

The elevator would take a while to come.

Liu Zhiyi pulled out her phone and skimmed the latest notifications.

Nothing new. What she found was an old message.

Mom: Zhizhi, coming home Saturday? What do you feel like eating? Sweet-and-sour ribs?

It was dated Wednesday — three days ago.

None of it felt real to her yet. Her mother had died of a brain hemorrhage; she'd rushed back from out of town, and still it hadn't landed.

Not long ago the woman had video-called to ask when she'd be home — a living person. How does that turn, just like that, into a lifeless corpse?

—Ding.

The elevator arrived.

Liu Zhiyi shoved the phone back in her pocket, put the key in the security door and pushed. With a clunk, the old door finally gave.

As it opened, a wave of osmanthus drifted out — cheap, harsh stuff that made her sneeze.

"Mom, you sprayed that perfume again — didn't I buy you the good kind?"

The complaint came out on reflex — until her own voice echoed back around the empty flat.

The woman from her memory, her perm always frizzed tight as instant noodles, didn't appear.

Liu Zhiyi froze for a few seconds, suddenly at a loss.

Then she stood in the doorway, head down, and laughed once. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and pulled the door shut.

She followed the smell to the perfume bottle on the shelf above the shoe cabinet. It had tipped over.

She must have knocked it when she went out for her keys. The cheap bottle sealed badly, and it had leaked a big puddle.

She went hunting for a rag. Somewhere in the search she barked her foot on a bed that had been pulled out, and kicked a box out from under it.

Liu Zhiyi looked down. The box was labeled Toys.

She wasn't in the mood to tidy just now, and went back to looking for a rag.

In the end she couldn't find one, and made do with a few tissues to wipe the perfume off the shelf.

As she wiped, a piece came away from the shelf.

The piece that fell — a flap of white skin — stuck soft against the tissue.

Liu Zhiyi studied it for a while. However she looked at it, the soft skin was nothing that came off a wooden shelf.

She wondered if, while she'd been away, her mother had let someone talk her into redoing the place again.

The next second, a line of blood ran down from the broken skin on the shelf.

—Meow.

Liu Zhiyi heard the cat again.

The muffled meow, threaded with a fzzt-fzzt of static, poured into her ears — and somehow shaped itself into a strange human voice.

"Time's short. Open the door, quick — see if you can get out!"

Liu Zhiyi's mind went blank. She watched the walls of her home tremble faintly — no, not tremble, exactly. They were swelling slowly from the top down, the way a belly rises when a person breathes.

Any way you looked at it, this was wrong.

She spun and rushed the door, reaching to pull the security door open.

The instant her palm met the handle, the metal melted in her grip like a candle touched to flame.

The whole security door melted away.

"Looks like your luck's not great. Go find the two-faced Buddha, now."

The cat's cry came again.

"We don't keep a two-faced Buddha." Realizing the cat might be helping her, Liu Zhiyi said under her breath, "What is going on?"

Cat: "No time to explain all that. There's definitely a two-faced Buddha in your home — every game has one!"

A game?

Liu Zhiyi caught the word it used.

The split in the shelf widened, racing across the whole living room like a spiderweb.

Liu Zhiyi turned at once, sweeping her eyes fast around the room — and snagged on a statue that had appeared behind her mother's memorial portrait.

That spot had been where she burned incense for her mother.

Cat: "That's the one!"

"It's not two-faced, though." The statue had only a single face, nothing like the two-faced Buddhas she'd seen in temples.

She said it aloud, but ran to the statue anyway.

Up close, she saw a ring of golden light hanging behind its head.

Cat: "Got incense?"

Liu Zhiyi pulled open a drawer and took out three sticks — the same way she'd been offering it to her mother's portrait these past days.

At the same time she heard a very familiar set of footsteps, very soft.

Like when she was little, sneaking TV at home, straining to catch her mother's footsteps coming back outside the door.

Cat: "Offer the incense first, then I'll go over the rules of the game with you."

Liu Zhiyi held the three sticks together, tilted them, and lit the tips with a lighter.

Were the footsteps just her imagination? she thought.

Cat: "Whatever stirs in a minute, pay it no mind. Whatever you do, don't let them notice you — and never mind who they are!"

She thought she heard the click of a key sliding into a lock.

Liu Zhiyi: "Them?"

Cat: "Ghosts, usually."

"Zhizhi."

A full, hearty voice rang out.

Liu Zhiyi went still, but her body answered on its own, her shoulders turning back — the way they had a thousand times when her mother called her.

She turned her head, naturally, without thinking.

A ghastly white face was turned quietly toward her.

"How'd you go and knock over the perfume?"

Liu Zhiyi: "…Mom?"

Cat: "They form out of your feelings. They're powerfully alluring."