Chapter Three: Whose Face Did the Moon Borrow?

The other Shen Wu stepped forward, and everyone in the street moved with her. "Who are you?" Shen Wu asked. "You should not ask the face," the woman said. "Ask the name." She inserted the keys into an abandoned mailbox at the crossroads. When the lock turned, machinery rumbled below. A hairline crack opened in the street, spilling silver-white light upward, as though another moon lay buried underground. Black crescents surfaced on the townspeople's necks. Shen Wu raised her offline camera. Through its screen, the crowd became a hundred indistinct shadows dressed in human clothing. Only her double remained painfully sharp. A paper label on the woman's chest read: Wen Mo. The black-coated singer's name. "Were you the woman onstage?"