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“Good morning,” Zula said. “You were right. I drank all that tea.”

“Ha, ha, you are full of shit!” said Blue Boots delightedly.

“You’re right. I don’t need any more today, thank you.”

“You want a distributorship?”

“No,” Zula began, but then perceived that Blue Boots was only teasing her and broke it off.

“You are so fricking lost it’s sad,” said Blue Boots. “Everyone on the street is talking about it.”

“We are trying to find a wangba,” Zula said.

“A turtle egg? That is a very bad insult. Be careful who you say it to.”

“Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong.”

“In English?”

“We are trying to find an Internet café,” Zula said.

Blue Boots wrinkled her nose in a way that from most other females her age would have seemed like an effort to be cutesy but from her seemed as pure as the mountain waters of her native region. “What does Internet and coffee have to do with each other?”

“Café,” Zula said, “not coffee.”

“Café is a place where you drink coffee!”

“Yes, but — to do with each.”

“This is China,” said Blue Boots, as if Zula might not have noticed. “We drink tea. Have you forgotten our conversation of yesterday? I know we all look the same to you but — ”

“I’m from Eritrea. We grow coffee there,” Zula said, thinking fast.

“Here instead of a café we would have a teahouse.”

“I get it. But we are not looking for something to drink. We are looking for Internet.”

“Come again?”

Zula looked to Csongor who wearily held up a piece of paper with the Chinese characters for wangba printed on it. They had been showing it to random people on the street for the last half hour or so. Everyone they talked to seemed to have at least a vague idea of where such a thing could be found and pointed them in one direction or another while speaking earnestly, usually in Chinese but sometimes in English.

“Why didn’t you say so?” said Blue Boots. She pointed. “It’s that way, just above the — ”

Zula shook her head. “How do you think we got so fricking lost?”

“Come on, I’ll take you there.” And she took Zula’s hand in hers and began walking with her. The gesture was a bit familiar but, at least for now, it felt nice to be holding anyone’s hand and so Zula laced her fingers together with her guide’s and let her arm swing freely.

It seemed inconceivable that any of them, even Sokolov, would defy her, so Csongor and Sokolov dutifully fell in behind.

The pixie haircut was shaking in dismay. “You need translator, man.”

“Agreed.”

“Excellent!” And Blue Boots let go of Zula’s hand, stopped, pivoted, and thrust out her right. Zula, out of habit, began to extend her hand, then realized she was about to enter into a binding contract and hesitated.

“Awwa!” said Blue Boots, and snapped her fingers in frustration. “Almost had you over a barrel.”

“We don’t even know your name.”

“I don’t know yours.”

“Zula Forthrast,” said Zula quietly. She looked back at Sokolov, who was distractedly gazing around with his habitual, posttraumatic, thousand-yard stare. A trace of a grin came onto her face.

“What?” Blue Boots wanted to know.

Zula killed the smile and shook her head. She had passed her name on to someone. And if that someone were to google the name, what might come up? Perhaps an article from the Seattle Times about a young woman who had inexplicably gone missing.

“I am Qian Yuxia.”

Zula, who had spent her life with her nose pressed up against the window of the straight-haired world, was growingly obsessed with Qian Yuxia’s haircut, which was one of those wedgy, short-on-top, longer-on-the-bottom productions. Someone who loved Qian Yuxia and who was very good with sharp objects had been maintaining this, and Qian Yuxia had just as determinedly been ignoring it.

“Is that a common name where you are from?” Zula asked, just making conversation.

“Yongding,” Yuxia reminded her. “Where the Big-Footed Women make the gaoshan cha. High mountain tea.”

“Are you a Big-Footed Woman?”

Yuxia looked at her like she was an idiot and extended a blue boot.

Zula shrugged. “But you might have a very small foot inside there!”

“I am Hakka,” said Qian Yuxia, as if that should put this entire part of the conversation to rest immediately. “I told you yesterday.”

“Sorry, I forgot the name.”

“What is up? Why are you here?”

Sokolov had now drawn close enough that Zula felt it best to stick to the script. Because they had worked out a script yesterday. “You’ve heard about the conference? About Taiwan?”

“Yes, what are you, the ambassador of Eritrea?”

“I’m here with the American delegation,” Zula said. “Csongor, here, is with the Hungarians and — ”

“Ivan Ivanovich,” said Sokolov, with a courtly nod.

“Ivan is with the Russians. We have a couple of days off and so we are just — ”

“Chillin’?”

“Yes. Chillin’.”

“Is one of these guys your boyfriend?”

“No. Why?”

Qian Yuxia gave Zula a playful backhanded slap on the arm, as if to chide her for being a slow pupil. “I want to know if it is cool to flirt with them!”

“Sure, go ahead!” Zula had been kind of assuming that Qian Yuxia was a dyke. Maybe she wasn’t. Or maybe she was a dyke who found it amusing to flirt with heterosexual males.

“Your hotel doesn’t have Internet!?”

“Of course it does.” Which did not answer the implicit question. “Csongor is such a nerd that he can’t go a whole hour without checking his email.”

“Hmm. Well, here is a place.”

Yuxia had led them across an intersection and down a side street lined with little shops. Next to one of these, a stairway led up and into the interior of a building. It was unmarked except for an old piece of World of Warcraft paraphernalia, the head of a creature called a Tauren, pasted to the wall. Like a medieval tavern sign, almost.

They paused there for a moment.

“They are called stairs,” said Qian Yuxia.

YESTERDAY IT HAD seemed as though they were harvesting an impressively large number of IP addresses and latitude/longitude pairs. When Csongor had actually produced a map of these, though, and overlaid it on an image of Xiamen, it had looked discouraging: their data somehow managed to be sparse and clumpy at the same time. A few trends had been evident, though, and had given them reason to believe that the IP address still written in fading ink on Sokolov’s hand was assigned to an access point, not way out in the suburbs, not near the university, and not even in one of the more far-flung parts of the island, but within a kilometer or two of the safe house.

They could probably see the Troll’s building from their window. Which was a little bit like saying that you could see Earth from the moon. But it was a kind of progress.

The general plan for today, then, was to visit all the Internet cafés they could find that lay in the general zone of interest, and try to get some finer-grained data.

While making this plan in the presence, and under the close supervision, of Ivanov, they had all spoken confidently of Internet cafés, as if it were a subject on which they were knowledgeable. And why not? They were hackers; they were from Seattle; Peter’s loft was all of about a mile from the world headquarters of Starbucks, an organization that had shotgunned the planet with coffee bars featuring Wi-Fi.

They had, in other words, been assuming three things of Chinese Internet cafés: (1) that they were all over the place, (2) that they were easy to find, and (3) that they served coffee; that is, that they were literally cafés, as in small cozy places where customers could curl up with a laptop to check their email.

The pathetic naïveté and Seattle-centrism of these assumptions had already begun to infiltrate Zula’s awareness but clobbered her in the teeth as she followed Qian Yuxia to the top of the stairs. The helpful strangers who had been giving them useless directions always seemed to be saying that the Internet café was “upstairs of” or “in the back of” such-and-such a business, and this had given Zula the idea that they were talking about tiny backroom enterprises.

Now she understood that these business had to be upstairs of, or in the back of, other enterprises because they were so enormous. This one occupied an entire floor of the building. Brand-new PCs with flat-panel screens were packed in together as tightly as the laws of thermodynamics would allow, and essentially all of them were in use. There were at least a hundred people in here, all wearing headphones and therefore weirdly silent.

“Holy Jesus,” Csongor said.

“What?” asked Yuxia.

“It is ten times as big as the biggest one we have ever seen,” Zula explained.

“This is only half of it,” said Yuxia, nodding toward another stair that led up to an additional story. “How many you want?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How many of you want to use computer?”

“One,” said Zula, “unless — ?” She looked at Sokolov, who had been staring at more decorative swag posted on the wall. It was one of a series of promotional posters that Corporation 9592’s marketing department had produced shortly after the launch of the game, when they were making a ferocious effort to steal customers away from World of Warcraft. They were fake travel posters, rendered in photorealistic detail. This particular one showed a Dwinn perched on a boulder at the edge of a pristine mountain lake, fishing rod in hand, battling it out with a toothy, prehistoric-looking beast that could be seen breaching from the surface in the middle distance with a lure hooked through its lip. The real purpose of the poster had been to show off the incredible realism of Pluto’s landform-generating software, which was on spectacular display in the mountain slopes on the far side of the lake. But the riggers and animators, not to be outdone, had lavished a lot of time and energy on getting the Dwinn’s posture exactly right: leaning back against the tension on the line, one foot planted, the other just coming up off the ground. It was as good, for Zula, as seeing a snapshot of home and hit her hard; she’d not been ready for it here.