I WAS CERTAIN THEY WOULD START TO CHECK US OUT AT THE airport. Naturally, we passed through passport control without any problems—the vigilant Taiwanese border guards saw nonexistent Taiwanese visas in our passports, and the smart Taiwanese computers docilely swallowed their nonexistent numbers. Arina dealt with it—to be honest, I would have preferred simply to pass through the control point while invisible, or walk in through the Twilight. But the Witch preferred to create the fake entry documents, muttering: “Just to keep my hand in . . .” We hadn’t got any sleep in the plane after all, but we had drunk plenty of champagne and cognac, and our eyes were tired from watching films, so we were looking in really fine shape. All I personally wanted was to get to the hotel and collapse into sleep.

After passport control we passed through the control point for Others, and once again it all looked remarkably friendly. No one blocked our way: as we approached passport control we simply saw a poster that was only visible to our kind, politely inviting all Others to “visit the check room.” For humans, the poster had a far more frightening message—it declared that in Taiwan the penalty for importing narcotics was capital punishment, and if you had anything suspicious that had been left in your pockets by oversight, it would be best to drop it into the rubbish bin thoughtfully placed below the poster . . .

“What remarkable trust,” I said as we made our way towards the “check room.” “And what if we simply decided not to go? The way out’s wide open.”

“Don’t be a dunce, charm-caster. I’m sure we’ve been followed from the moment we left the plane—or rather, from when we were still on the plane.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked in amazement.

“Our hostess was a Light Other. Weak, only Seventh-Level. But we weren’t concealing ourselves—and I think we did right not to.”

The check room was tucked away closer to the exit, between the toilets and a souvenir stall. (I can’t imagine who would buy souvenirs when they’ve only just got off the plane, but there were a couple of strange individuals like that standing at the stall.) We walked through the door into a perfectly cozy little area with soft furniture, a tiny bar counter, its own toilet, and a supervisor’s desk. In this case the term “reception desk” would have been rather more appropriate. I really didn’t want to think of the two pretty girls behind the desk as supervisors. In Russian the word carries far too many bureaucratic associations. The girls were twenty at the outside, and they looked even younger than that: they both had pretty, smiling faces—but one was Light and the other was Dark.

That applied in the literal sense too—one of them had very thoroughly bleached hair.