“Whitest man I ever see,” observed the Chinaman dispassionately. “His hair … what color you call that?”

“Ginger. Hey, I think I heard about you, boy.”

Rector forced a smile. “Is that right?”

“You’ve been dealing from the orphanage, haven’t you? I heard about a boy so white you could see right through him, with hair the color of rust, besides. Is that you?”

“I reckon it must be,” he confessed.

The Chinaman asked, “You know this boy?”

“I know about him,” the white man said. “He uses Harry, don’t he?” he asked down at Rector, who still cringed against the light. “Harry’s your chemist, ain’t he?”

“That’s right, sir. I buy offa Harry.” Or at least I used to. “And Harry gets all his stuff right here, through Yaozu. He don’t truck with Caplan or O’Reilly, so you can trust I’m one of yours.”

The white man snorted as if trust wasn’t something he handed out quite so easily, but Rector knew the lingo and he’d dropped enough names to prove himself.

“Caplan and O’Reilly … Either one of them ever approach you?”

“No sir.” But that wasn’t quite true. He’d met Caplan once in passing, through one of Harry’s rival chemists. Harry’d been laid up with consumption and hadn’t been able to cook, so Rector’d been forced to look up another source. “And if I did, I wouldn’t work with ’em. I know which side my bread is buttered on.”

“All right, then. Hold on. We’ll throw down the ladder. Be careful hoisting yourself up. We don’t care to scrape anybody’s bits and pieces off the rocks, you hear me?”

He unrolled a long ladder; it unfurled like a flag, in a great lurching arc that hit the ground mere inches from Rector’s toes. He jumped back with a start.

“You see it?” the Chinaman prompted.

“Sure enough, I do. Say, could you maybe aim that light somewhere else? I can’t see with it shining down in my face. You said you don’t want to scrape me off the rocks, and well, I’d rather not require that service, either.”

The light wobbled, wavered, and the beam shifted a few feet to the right.

Once Rector’s eyes stopped swimming with bold white orbs that obscured all the evening’s details, the remaining glare was enough to see by—so long as he didn’t need to see anything directly in front of him. But the glowing white ghosts seared into his vision refused to disperse entirely, so he held out his arms and relied on his peripheral vision until he could swat the rope ladder into his hands.