Chapter 33: Three Missing Cases

Item one was the cakes. She took him to the bakery by the east gate at dawn on the sixth, before the Bureau opened, through streets still blue with cold. The baker's wife was lifting the first tray out of the oven as they came round the corner, and the smell of sesame and brown sugar came out into the street to meet them. "Four," said Ming. "Hot." The baker's wife looked past her, at the space beside her where there was nothing to see, and then back at Ming, and wrapped six, and said nothing about the other two. They ate them on the bakery step. That is, Ming ate them. He sat beside her, a shimmer against the bakery's warm yellow window, and held one in his clear hand, where it rested like a leaf on water, and he made no move to eat it. He held it…