I’m about to leave and give the two of them some much-needed privacy, when the man spins the woman around, lifting his weak jaw up at an angle to offer a clearer view of his face, and I’m suddenly gripped by the feeling that I’ve seen him before, in a newspaper or—

The photos. Of course.

I pull out my phone again just to double-check, and sure enough, that same round plain-featured face is staring back at me.

But in the brief time it takes me to glance down and up again, the two have already broken apart, the woman now holding the flowers instead of the old man in her arms. She says something to him that I can’t make out, and he laughs, a loud rumbling sound. Together, they set off down one of the brightly lit lanes by the river.

It’s clear what I need to do next. I wait until there’s a few more yards of distance between us, then follow them, like a ghost getting ready for its first haunting.

It turns out that stalking people is much harder than I thought.

The crowds in Solana seem to grow as the sky darkens, and more than once I find myself almost losing sight of my target, or forced to take a step back by a group of very evidently intoxicated young men.

“Hey, meinu,” one of the men calls after me, making my skin prickle. Meinu means beautiful girl, which I guess is meant to be flattering, except people around here call pretty much anyone between the ages of twelve and thirty that. Even if that weren’t the case, I’d rather fail a midterm than have some creepy guy comment on my looks.

I pick up my pace, trying to get as far away from the group as possible—and almost bump straight into the back of the old man and his girlfriend.

Heart pounding, I quickly duck around the closest corner before they can see me. They’ve come to a stop outside what looks to be a fancy Chinese restaurant—the traditional kind, with crimson lanterns swaying from the painted overhanging eaves and images of coiled dragons carved into the front doors.

A waitress dressed in shimmering black comes out to greet them.

“Cao xiansheng!” she says warmly. “Please follow me upstairs. We’ve already prepared your favorite dishes, and you’ll be pleased to know the barramundi dish for today is...” The rest of her sentence is lost beneath an enthusiastic chorus of huanying guanglin and the clink of plates and champagne glasses as they move into the restaurant.

I try to follow. Now would be a great time to turn invisible, but of course my new curse—power, affliction, whatever—isn’t cooperating when I actually need it. Based on the detailed records I’ve kept in my notebook, the invisibility thing tends to happen once every two days or so, and only when I’m awake. And since I haven’t transformed in the past thirty hours, the probability of it happening sometime tonight should be high.