I let the fabric fall and squint around the room. The details register in pieces: stainless steel counters, woks left on stoves, blunt cleavers lying on cutting boards, bottles of vinegar and soy sauce, more pots hanging in a neat row like clothes on a laundry line, flickering lights. A kitchen. It looks like the back of any restaurant, except for the fake blood splashed everywhere.

“So that’s where the haunted part comes in,” I say, leaning over with mild curiosity to inspect the dark red liquid dripping down the closest wall. “Looks like someone was murdered in here. Daisy’s not going to enjoy this very much.”

“We should look for a password of some kind” Cyrus is saying, businesslike. The bulbs above us flash off for three seconds, throwing us briefly into darkness, and creaking can be heard from somewhere deeper in the teahouse, like a rusted seesaw. I’m not sure if all of it succeeds at making the atmosphere eerier, but it certainly does add an element of danger; I almost knock my chin against Cyrus’s shoulder as I fumble my way forward. “Any numbers or letters or diagrams,” Cyrus continues when the lights come on again, like nothing happened. “Any objects that look like they’ve been moved—”

“There’s something here,” I say, pointing at the keypad lock on the back door. The numbers are already starting to fade in places. “It requires a code.”

“Let me see.” Cyrus steps forward and starts punching in a few numbers.

“What are you doing?” I ask. “We don’t know the password yet.”

“Testing to see how many numbers we need,” he replies over the beeping. “Look. It only lets you enter up to six numbers. And it should involve some combination of …” He shifts a little closer, running his hand over the digits that have been carved into the metal. “Two, five, seven, and nine. You can tell those are the main numbers people have pressed in the past because they’ve been worn away the most. Of course, there’s always a chance that the staff here figured it was obvious and have changed the passcode since, but I doubt they do it very frequently because it would require them to update all the clues.”

“Right. That makes sense,” I say, grudgingly impressed.

“Of course it makes sense, qin ai de,” Cyrus says, craning his neck to inspect the dangling pots.

I narrow my eyes at him. “What did you call me just now?”

“Hm?”

“Qin ai de, or whatever that was,” I say. “It sounded like an insult.”

“It means my worst enemy,” he says casually without even turning around, and proceeds to pull open the drawers beneath the stove one by one. “There’s nothing here. Nothing in here either— Oh.” He pauses.

“You found something?”