“I feel it,” Janet said. Her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. I could see her arms swimming. “Something is happening.”

“We’re close,” I said. The branch seemed to disappear beneath me. I could feel myself rising, or maybe the ground was falling. “We’re so close.”

“We are what we think,” Janet said.

“We are everything,” Laurel said.

“Form is emptiness,” I said. “Emptiness is form.”

But Serena was getting impatient.

“I’ve been thinking about Empress Consort Wu Zetian,” she said when we’d climbed down.

“‘Consort’ being the nice word for ‘whore’?” Janet said. She leaned against the tree, as if loath to leave it entirely. Laurel dropped her head onto her shoulder.

“She was the only woman who ever ruled China completely on her own,” Serena said. “She was a whore, I suppose, but that only makes it better.”

“Well, everyone loves a good whore,” said Laurel, without humor. Janet squeezed her knee.

Empress Consort Wu Zetian, Serena explained, was the favored concubine of the seventh-century Chinese emperor Taizong, and when he died, she married his son, and when the son had a massive stroke, she took control of China. She is said to be one of the most beautiful women who has ever lived.

“She had an affair with a monk,” she said. “He betrayed his god for her.”

“The best god is the one between a girl’s legs,” Laurel said. She reached into her pocket and slipped her button into her mouth: pop.

“The only true religion,” Serena said.

“People must be praying wrong,” Janet said.

“She also installed secret mailboxes in government buildings so people could more easily inform on her enemies,” Serena said. “When she found out that three of her grandchildren had been talking shit about her, she forced them all to commit suicide.”

“That’s not really suicide, then, is it?” Janet said. She was sitting up straight now, the dreaminess of the tree forgotten.

“One does what one must,” Serena said imperiously. “Her specialty was this thing she called the human pig. She did it to one of her rivals. A traitor.”

“Don’t tell us,” said Laurel.

“She cut out her tongue and poked out her eyes and cut off her arms and legs and then kept her alive, fed her slop, and left her to roll around in her own shit,” said Serena.

“Pigs have legs, last I checked,” Janet said.

“The point is,” Serena said, propping herself up on one elbow, “I’m tired of waiting.” Laurel put her button behind her lips again. Serena reached over and snatched it away: pop. “And I’m tired of this,” she said. “It makes you look ridiculous.”

I looked at Laurel, waiting for outrage, but she was examining her own knees. “I never said it didn’t,” she said.

“What is happening right now?” Janet said.