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she laid out what she had in mind. It soundedcrazy, but I didn’t have a better idea. And when we got to the room, she knelt in front of our door and soundlessly showed me two strands of hair, one hanging from the nail, the other from the doorknob.
    She held her fingers to her lips—it wouldn’t be safe to talk here anymore—and we went in to get some sleep.
    The next day, we’d start looking for her father. And it seemed we might have company.

Day Two: Monday
Kowloon–Lamma Island–Hong Kong

Chapter 15
    The mountainous desk clerk was still there in the morning when, following Ti-Anna’s instructions, I approached to ask if we could keep the room for a week.
    He swiveled to study his computer. Right, I thought, as if there’s a long line for that particular cell. But I held my tongue.
    “Twelve hundred dollars,” he said.
    That would give us a discount from the one-night rate, but not much of one, and Ti-Anna had told me to be sure to bargain. Easy for her to say: she was waiting in the room while the clerk glared at me. It was all I could do to keep from offering more than he’d asked for.
    I counted out the bills. It about cleaned me out of Hong Kong money, but Ti-Anna had said,
Pay in advance: we want them to be sure we’re staying put
. So I did.
    We packed our knapsacks wordlessly, like we’d agreed the night before. Toothbrush, air mattress, a change of clothes, Hong Kong map. Passports, of course. When Ti-Anna wasn’t looking, I slipped in my book, a biography of General MacArthur. The bags stilllooked small—as if we were heading out with guidebooks and cameras for a day of sightseeing.
    We left everything else in the room, Ti-Anna’s duffel neatly repacked, my stuff spilling onto the bed—a lived-in look, I thought.
    As we headed back down the Corridor of Doom and into the coffin elevator, I hoped we would make it back at least once. I hated to think what my brother would say if I came home without his backpack. But I knew it might be a while. I can’t say that I worried about missing the Rising Phoenix. I didn’t think our clerk would miss us.
    We walked down Nathan Road with throngs of commuters, all talking into their Bluetooths. At the first ATM, I decided we’d better find out if we could get money. I didn’t like transmitting our location so soon, but it was that or go hungry. Going hungry is never a good option.
    The screen was in Chinese, so I gave Ti-Anna the card and told her my password. We withdrew five hundred Hong Kong dollars and hoped we wouldn’t set off alarms.
    As we ferried across the harbor, the sun sparkled off the waves. Dozens of junks, patrol boats, barges and ferries crisscrossed before us and behind us. Off to the right you could see a navy destroyer, though I couldn’t make out its flag.
    We watched the ferrymen tie us to the dock and then stepped onto Hong Kong island. We were in Central, the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district, at the height of rush hour, and people in dark suits were rushing all around us, toting briefcases and looking anxious. For a minute we stood close to each other, overwhelmed.
    “Let’s sit,” Ti-Anna said.
    We found a bench near someone selling boxes of juice and soy milk and cut-up pieces of pineapple from a cart. The pineapple looked juicy and sweet, but Ti-Anna, of course, didn’t feel like eating.
    “I know it’s crazy, but I keep looking at faces,” she said. “Asif, if we sit here long enough, maybe he’ll just appear out of the crowd.”
    “And spoil our fun?”
    Ti-Anna smiled politely. We breathed in ocean smells and city fumes, listened to flags snapping and buses grinding their gears. People streamed past as if they all had someplace they had to be five minutes ago.
    Our first stop, Ti-Anna had said the night before, would be Horace Kwan, one of her father’s oldest friends. I’d heard of him. For years he had been a leader of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp. While Hong Kong was a British colony, until 1996,