Chapter One
The Man Who Counted Lanterns
Linh Tran noticed him first because he was the only person on the bridge with his back to the lanterns.
Full moon night, the eighth of the year, the waterfront dark and glowing: silk light on the water, the crowd moving slow and soft the way crowds move when a town has turned its brightness down on purpose, and one man at the bridge rail, facing downstream, tapping at a tablet, wearing the particular vest of the internationally practical, counting.
She knew he was counting because she was carrying a delivery pole of lanterns to the bridge stalls, and as she passed she heard him mutter it, in Vietnamese that was fluent and rusted at once, city vowels over something older underneath: two hundred and forty, two hundred and fifty. He was counting her lanterns. On the river, at the night's soft climax, as the first wishes went onto the water upstream and came drifting down under the bridge in their small fleet of glowing colour, the man in the vest photographed them, not the way tourists did, but in grids, with a scale bar, and made notes, and Linh Tran stood in the dark of her own festival with her pole of silk on her shoulder and felt, for the first time in her keeping of it, surveilled.
"Three hundred and eleven," said the man at last, to his tablet, in English, and then, in his rusted Vietnamese, to himself, in the voice of a man doing sums he did not enjoy: "Say ten festivals a year. Three thousand a year into the river. Wire, silk, wax." He rubbed his face. "Beautiful. Of course it's beautiful. That's the whole problem."
