When they reached the top of the uppermost one, she turned left on a narrow street and began hiking up a street traversing the slope. By now they were both sweating from her haste in walking up so many escalator steps. It was warm and humid, and smelled like the tropics; it didn’t smell like a city. From time to time Qi stopped to catch her breath.
“Do we have to hurry like this?” he asked her.
She gave him a look. “I want to get off the streets as soon as possible.”
“Your friend is up here?”
“Yes!”
She led him up a switchbacking route, one small lane after another. The buildings lining these narrow alleyways were reduced in size to cubical things two or three stories tall, made of concrete, and sometimes wood. An older district. Then as they rose higher the roads angled up slopes covered more by trees than by buildings, and what buildings there were looked like houses with wooden shingles. An old residential area, no doubt very expensive. The hill was so steep that its side had been concreted over in most places, presumably to keep rain from sluicing its soil down onto the streets. Each tree on these concrete slopes had a hole of its own in the tilted concrete. Runnels incised into the concrete of the slope shot vertically into deep culverts on the streets’ uphill sides.
Eventually they came to a big cube of a building, where a knot of roads converged. This giant concrete cube was set right on the main ridge of the city’s backing mountain, in a low point between two broad peaks. The city-facing side of the cube served as the upper terminus of a little cog railway, which ran up into the building at what looked like a forty-five-degree angle.
“Inside,” Qi said, and she pulled Fred through a doorway into the big cube, past the cog railway terminal and farther inside. Four floors of balconies, all filled with open-walled shops, looked down into a big empty central space. The shops sold tourist trinkets and T-shirts. Qi hurried up stairs rising against one wall, then pulled Fred into one open-fronted shop of trinkets that was already closed for the night. The entire cube was closing, it appeared. Qi pushed open a door at the back of the shop and looked inside, nodded, gestured around them at the shop.
“We can spend the night here.”
She blew her hair away from her eyes, wiped her brow. She was still huffing and puffing. They looked around the little shop they were in, full of knickknacks and scarves and postcards. Protect us now, little Chinese goddesses, Fred thought as he stared at a row of them. Qi was checking for security cameras and found none aimed at the back of the store, where there was also a little toilet room.
“You’ve been here before?” Fred asked.
“Yes, I saw this place a long time ago. A woman selling stuff here let me use this bathroom, and I remembered it.”
They sat down on the floor, put their backs against the wall. The lights went off, and after a while a pair of security guards made a cursory circle around each floor, chatting as they went. Then it was silent. Qi got up and made a bed and pillow out of scarves, and lay on her side and fell asleep. Fred tried to get comfortable, but soon after falling into a doze, he woke up feeling sick. Then a wave of nausea passed through him, causing sweat to pop from every pore. He quickly staggered into the little bathroom and kneeled over the toilet and threw up in it, flushing it time after time to reduce the smell. Then he felt Qi’s hand on his forehead, holding his head up as his body convulsed, her other hand pressed against his back. After each spasm of throwing up, she handed him lengths of toilet paper to wipe his face with. This repeated a few times. For a while the clenching in his gut relented, and then he began the stage of dry heaves, his body still desperately trying to vomit up something that wasn’t there anymore. He felt truly wretched as he coughed up spittle and chyme and whatever else might remain down there. Qi stayed with him throughout the ordeal. Later, after he seemed done, and had crawled back out to their nest on the shop floor, she sat by him and wiped his face clean with a scarf wetted from a water bottle. She handed him a roll of mints she had found on the counter of the shop in a stack of candies for sale. He popped one into his mouth against a cheek, tentatively swallowed a few times.
“Thanks,” he said. “I guess I ate something that disagreed with me.”
“Apparently so. Although I feel okay, and I ate the same stuff. But who knows. My appetite has been crazy.”
“No morning sickness?”
“Not now. How are you feeling?”
“Better. Shaky. But I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up anymore.”
“We have quite a few hours to go before they open this place. Try to sleep.”
He tried, failed; but then woke up, feeling queasy. Then slid under again.
When he woke again he felt parched, but Qi had found him a bottle of lemonade from a cooler in the corner of the shop. The big windows on the upper floor of the cube showed dawn was coming.
“There’s an awkward time coming, maybe,” Qi said. “Between when the shopkeepers arrive and when the first train of tourists gets here. I’d like to keep hiding and only come out when the tourists get here, then mingle with them and leave. So I don’t think we can stay in this shop. But I think there must be public restrooms somewhere in here, and maybe we can just hide in a stall in one. It should only be for an hour or less.”
“And if I get sick again we’ll be in the right place,” Fred offered weakly.
She nodded with a little smile and led him through the darkness down the stairs, looking around for security cameras. Then into a ladies’ room, where they sat down on the floor and waited. Noises of people came from outside, so they crammed into a stall together, ready to stand on the toilet if anyone came in; no one did. Finally they heard, or possibly felt, the first train of the day leave the station, and ten minutes later the first one from below was hauled in with a clanking sound. Then the noises of people filtered into their hideout. Qi took a look out the door, and when she gave the all clear, Fred followed her.
Qi took him by the hand and led him after that, and he followed her, hoping not to have to think. He was surprised when Qi handed him a wrapped pastry she had taken from their shop. “I have some candy bars too, if you feel like eating.”
“Thanks.” He felt weak and shaky, possibly with hunger, although he didn’t feel hungry. Far from it; he felt dreadful.
Then Qi became very absorbed in trying to find an exit from the cube. The only doors they could find led them either into the cog railway’s terminal, or into some kind of tourist trap, it looked like a wax museum, but it was hard to tell, as she kept tugging him past its entry and cursing under her breath. “Damn this place!” she said at one point. “They don’t want you to leave! They want you to buy more of their crap and then take the train back down!”
“Looks like it.”
They descended stairs that led only to an emergency exit, with ALARM WILL SOUND marking its door. She cursed again, they ascended the stairs, took another narrow passageway that led to different stairs. They descended again, and here as luck would have it a man was unlocking the exit door from the outside. As he opened it to come in, Qi thanked him in Chinese and hustled Fred out and away. They found themselves standing on a little plaza between the big concrete cube and a big knot of tourist shops. One of the mountaintop’s ridge roads edged this plaza. Sunny morning, some overcast clouds, a slight breeze.
Qi led him into a coffee shop and ordered coffee for herself, and a pastry; Fred had another lemonade, feeling parched and unsteady.
Then they were back out onto the high plaza, looking around. It was about nine in the morning, sun up over the ridge of the mountain rising to the east of them. A few tourists were wandering the plaza. Westward on the broad ridge one road sloped up to the right, another down to the left. A little botanical garden flanked the left side of the road headed uphill, and on the other side of that road stood a large apartment complex, rising over a tall wall that guarded it from the street. The north-facing apartments in this complex would have spectacular views over the city. The south slope of the ridge was green, nothing but treetops falling sharply away, and a view out to sea, which again was as smooth as a lake, a hazy blue in the morning sun.