Chapter Three: No-Light Alley

Shen pushed the unexposed paper through. It flashed in the darkness and produced an image it had never received: a vast city hanging upside down beneath Linchuan's night sky, every window a white hole in a negative. The door opened. Tang pulled him through and slammed it shut. She still wore the jacket from the archive. She was pale, but so unmistakably real that Shen could not speak. “Don't use my name,” she said first. “Things here locate people by their names.” The room resembled an abandoned portrait studio. Thousands of photographs covered the floor, the face cut out of each one. In the center stood an enormous print of the red-umbrella image. Tang pointed to the reflection in the café window.