The Unquiet City

The story so far

The Preview Night (chapters 1-10)

Yip Sau-lin has been dead since 1877, and she still keeps the old accounts of the building above Fong's Paper & Incense on Waverly Place, in San Francisco's Chinatown. Ashby Merritt Properties has renamed it Waverly House, and tonight's glamorous preview will open a basement wall that must stay sealed. Sau-lin bursts a pipe, cracks a mirror and blacks out the lights. Then Callum Rourke walks in, an ex-fire investigator who quiets haunted houses for money, carrying the jade hairpin found in his dead brother Declan's hand. He sets a trap for the killer he believes she is. Something under the city strikes through them both, and now the ghost and the ghost-remover cannot move three hundred feet apart without their hearts stopping. Killing her would kill him. And Callum can suddenly see every ghost in the building.

Complimentary Keys (chapters 11-20)

Ashby Merritt's gifts come on green ribbons, and the tenants who accept its brass keys begin to fade. When Mrs. Leung of apartment 3B cannot remember her own grandson's name, Callum has to choose whether to help or to invoice. With tenant advocate Jo Lau, shopkeeper Winnie Fong and his sharp-tongued former partner, Mara Ortega, he starts tracing what his brother was mapping, while Sau-lin answers every question sideways because some answers hurt her to speak. Something beneath the streets has begun to notice them. Then the hairpin opens her memory of her own shop in 1877 and of a young man named Silas Merritt copying her key, and Callum learns that Declan found that hairpin somewhere he never should have been.

Gifts With Strings (chapters 21-33)

Sau-lin and Callum cannot move more than three hundred feet apart, and neither trusts the other. Vivian Ashby, head of Ashby Merritt Properties, has more previews planned and more keys to give away. Somewhere in Declan's notes is the map he died for, if they live long enough to read it.

What Declan Knew (chapters 34-45)

Callum came to Waverly Place to find his brother's killer, and the only suspect is tied to his heartbeat. The closer he gets to the night Declan died, the more Sau-lin's silences cost them both, and the more the thing beneath the city learns.

Every Name Owed (chapters 46 onward)

Sau-lin has kept the old accounts for a century and a half, and some names in them were never paid for. Ashby Merritt has a launch to hold, Waverly Place has tenants to lose, and a ghost and a ghost-remover have one last account to settle.

Chapters 21+ unlock with coins or Unlimited.