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her only hope. She must alert him. He’d come and rescue her.
    She opened her mouth to scream. But the only sound she made was a muffled “Hmmm” against a hand that was suddenly clamped over her face.
    “Be quiet!” the outlaw whispered.
    Her eyes bulged. The outlaw spoke with the voice of
Amah
.
    She had no time to react. Amah pulled her forcefully along the fifteen paces or so to the storeroom. The next thing Ying-ying knew, they were inside the storeroom and Amah had collapsed.
    The aura of power and danger that radiated from her was gone. She lay in a heap, her breaths alternating between quick gasps and gurgling, painful-sounding wheezes. Ying-ying stood petrified, her mind empty except for an ever-expanding shock.
    “Shut the door, you stupid girl.”
    Her feet felt like two clumps of mud, but Ying-ying made herself move. Outlaw or not, the woman was still her amah, the person who had brushed her hair and laid out her clothes every day of her life.
    She had enough wits to close the door as quietly as she could, peeking into the courtyard as she did so. Bao-shun had not yet returned from the alley, and no one else was astir.
    “Get me on the
kang
,” Amah ordered.
    Ying-ying would never have believed Amah, who wasn’t much taller than her, could be this heavy. She thought her back would break. Amah’s teeth ground with pain as Ying-ying, unable to lift her fully, half dragged her along the floor. At the edge of the
kang
, Amah grasped onto its side, and Ying-ying used her shoulders and back to push the older woman up. At last they had half of Amah’s body on the
kang
; Ying-ying strained and flopped her over.
    Amah sucked in a breath. Ying-ying tried to put a pillow under her head.
    “Don’t waste time,” Amah panted harshly. “Make a fire in the stove.”
    Then she vomited a stream of blood onto her own chest.
    That set Ying-ying running. Despite the darkness inside the room, she was able to find the basket of scrap paper and wood chips without any difficulty. Making a fire with shaking hands, however, was much harder: It took her five tries to get one going.
    “Boil water.”
    Amah kept a wide-mouthed, knee-high crock of water near the door. Ying-ying lifted the woven reed lid and filled an empty clay pot. She fed a few bigger pieces of wood to the fire.
    While the water heated, Amah rasped more instructions. Ying-ying located some dried flower buds on the bottom shelf. Tossed into the water, the buds gave out a clean, fresh scent, almost enough to mask the smell of regurgitated blood.
    She was then directed to climb onto a chair and bring down a cloth bundle that had been concealed above the lintel. Inside were round balls the size of quail’s eggs wrapped individually in squares of silk, and a small porcelain jar. She unwrapped two balls, plopped them into the clay pot, and took the jar to Amah.
    Amah struggled to pull her shirt up. A small package fell onto the
kang
. She ignored it and snatched Ying-ying’s palm to rest against her rib cage, below her left breast. “This is where you apply the salve.”
    Ying-ying gasped—what she touched was cold as ice. She yanked back her hand, opened the jar of salve, and dug out a dollop.
    “Warm it first,” Amah warned hoarsely.
    Ying-ying kept the salve between her palms until it smelled faintly of leaves and bark. It began to sting her hands, making her palms prickle hotly. She smeared salve where Amah’s skin was unnaturally cold and kept her palm over Amah’s strange injury until Amah called for the brew.
    When Ying-ying brought the bubbling potion, Amah drank it directly from the clay pot, stopping only to cool her tongue and gasp for air. When she had finished with the potion, she told Ying-ying to pull her shirt down and place the still-hot clay pot over where she had applied the salve.
    “And put another pot on the stove. I must keep continuous heat over this.”
    Ying-ying scampered around the tiny room, heating pots, ladling water to keep