Where is he?

Taji does not ignore my calls. He never has. Not when he's embarrassed, not when he's mid-argument with his mother, not even the time he burned his hand on the stove and still called me back before he'd finished running it under water. It is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the few genuinely reliable constants in his otherwise chaotic existence.

It's been hours now. Hours of calling, hanging up the moment it rings out, and calling again, and I still have nothing to show for it but a sore thumb and a battery draining faster than I'd like. As it rings out once more, all I can do is try to figure out what situation he could possibly be in.

He's dropped the phone somewhere it can't be heard. Unlikely, but not impossible.

He's found something more interesting to do than answer his girlfriend. Also unlikely — and, if true, deeply insulting.

Someone from that hotel finally decided we owed them for the bin.

That one, uncomfortably, is the only possibility that survives more than a few seconds of scrutiny.

There is a fourth option, one I keep trying to dismiss and keep failing to. That this is a joke. That he is, for reasons known only to him, playing some elaborate prank at my expense, and any moment now he'll call back laughing at how well it worked. It is, without question, the most irritating of the four, not because it's likely, but because some small, treacherous part of me thought of it first, and I resent that part of myself a great deal right now.

I redial, again, for what feels like the hundredth time today. It rings. Once, twice—

It picks up.

"Taji—"

"Hello there, bao bao!"

It is not Taji.

The voice is bright, almost musically so, pitched a full register higher than anything a grown woman should need to use over the phone. There's the clatter of something metal in the background, a pan perhaps, and a burst of what might be laughter, quickly swallowed.

"Where is he," I say.

"Hmm? Where is who, darling?"

"You know who."

A small, delighted pause. "Ohh, Taji! Right, right, of course. He's here, don't you worry, came by looking absolutely starved, poor thing, said his delivery route had him running all over and he just had to stop somewhere proper before finishing it. Couldn't very well turn him away, could I? You should have seen him eat, three helpings, I honestly—"

"I was on the phone with him."

The bright voice pauses, just slightly.

"When it happened," I say. "He was mid-sentence. Telling me about a road that had been blocked off. People who stop for a nice meal do not go silent mid-conversation and stay silent. They call back. He hasn't called back."

There's a silence on the other end now, no longer than half a second, but I hear it the way you hear a single wrong note in an otherwise perfect piece of music. Once you've heard it, you cannot unhear it.

"My my, Mei," the voice says, and it has cooled by several degrees, the bright edges sanded flat, "you're a sharp one."

I don't need her to say a name for me to know it. I've known for several sentences now, if I'm honest with myself, ever since that particular lilt landed on my name, half affection, half performance, the exact cadence of every strained family gathering I've been dragged to and every awkward silence that followed whenever her name came up at the dinner table.

"Where is he, Tai."

"He is unharmed," she says, as though I had asked something else entirely. "For now. Whether that continues depends on some very simple questions being answered, and I would prefer to ask them of him rather than his phone. So. I'll be taking my leave of this conversation."

"Wait—"

"I really wouldn't recommend involving the police, if that thought is forming. It would end badly, and not for me." A pause, and then, almost gently, "Give my regards to your mother. It's been a long time."

The line goes dead.

I stand there with the phone still pressed against my ear, listening to nothing, for longer than I should.

Then I move.

I find my mother in the kitchen, mid-service, sleeves rolled and hands buried in dough she doesn't have time to finish. I don't waste time on an introduction.

"I need you to leave. Now. It's about Taji."

She looks up once, takes in whatever is currently on my face, and doesn't ask a single question. She wipes her hands, calls something to the line cook that I don't fully register, and is already untying her apron before I finish speaking again.

"Where does Tai have her restaurant?" I ask.

My mother's hands go still on the apron strings.

"Mei—"

"I don't need the history. I need the address."

She looks at me for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes, and then, quietly, she tells me. The Green Dragon. Old industrial road, tucked between two warehouses, easy to miss unless you know to look for it.

"It's easier if I drive," she says. "I know the way. You can explain on the way, or you can not explain. Either is fine. Just get in the car."

The address leads us to a storefront exactly as unremarkable as she described, wedged between two warehouses, the kind of place you'd pass a hundred times without a second thought. Red lanterns, a laminated menu taped to the window, a faint smell of ginger and hot oil drifting out from somewhere behind it.

"Stay with the car," I tell my mother, and I'm out the door before she can tell me otherwise.

I don't go through the front.

There's an alley running down the side of the building, and at the end of it, a service door propped open a few inches to let the kitchen breathe. I slip through it before I let myself think too hard about what I'm doing, past crates of vegetables and a rack of hanging aprons, moving fast and low.

I make it as far as a second door, heavy and metal, with a keypad beside it and a hum coming from the other side that sounds distinctly like refrigeration, before a hand closes around my arm.

"Hey. Staff only back here."

I twist to pull free, but there are two of them now, then three, materialising out of the kitchen like they'd been waiting for precisely this. One of them mutters something into a radio clipped to his collar, low and fast, before I can catch more than a syllable of it.

"I need to get through that door," I say, and I hear how thin my own voice sounds, stretched too tight over something underneath it.

"No one gets through that door. Now leave before we make you leave."

I pull free anyway, hard enough to stumble back, and run.

Back the way I came, through the alley, out into the street where I left my mother and the car. My lungs are burning by the time I clear the corner of the building, and that's when I see it, further down the road, easing out of a gated drive at the rear of the property.

A truck. Plain, dark, unmarked, already turning onto the main road, already picking up speed.

I don't waste a second chasing it on foot. I sprint for the car instead, wrench the passenger door open, and I'm barely inside before I'm already pointing.

"That one. The truck. Follow it, now."

My mother doesn't ask a single question. The engine is already turning over before my seatbelt clicks, and then we're moving, tyres biting the road as she pulls out hard enough to press me back into my seat.

The truck is three streets ahead of us and gaining distance with every second we lose to red lights and slower traffic, but it's still in sight. Barely.

"Don't lose it," I say, mostly to myself.

My mother's hands tighten on the wheel, and the car surges forward.