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No one stops me as I leave school. I guess Principal Martin knew exactly what the council asked. I didn’t even need an excuse, I just said, “I need to go home,” and she waved me off with a strange, sad look.

Feeling sick and heading home , I text Hannah. Hang out another time?

Of course. Let me know if you need anything.

I put my runebook in my pocket, my head clouded with uncertainty.

What did Mom find out about the Ritual? Why wasn’t it working? Did she discover a way to fix it somehow?

Back in my room, a lump forms in my throat as I read the matrix. I can see Mom in the careful way she crafted each part of the time travel spell, and I try to concentrate instead of focusing on how much I miss her.

The note about Uncle Chau’s shipment was dated after she died. So she hadn’t planned to do the Ritual at that time, then. She was still working on this spell—maybe she cast it once, maybe she needed more information and needed to go back another time.

I could go back, too. See what she saw.

Uncle Chau’s store is in a nondescript 99 Ranch plaza.

We’ve gotten groceries there since I was a kid, toddling behind Mom as she filled the cart with vegetables, thick knobs of ginger root, radishes with the dirt still clinging to their pink bulbous bodies, and bright leafy greens.

After, we’d go to Uncle Chau’s and they would gossip and haggle as he weighed out ingredients and bagged them for her.

I try to remember if she told me anything about the Ritual before it happened. She’d been working a lot, and I’d been annoyed at her for missing my idleball games that month.

It feels stupid now.

She was working on something that was bigger than all of us.

I rack my brain, but my memories are fuzzy. I was proud of her and awed by her all at once, certain she was going to change the world, put an end to this never-ending cycle.

Mom didn’t have time to finish whatever she was planning, but she chose to do it anyway.

I remember her kissing me good night right before she left, except I had no idea that it would be the last. Everything that happened after the Ritual—Councilmember Alvarez showing up at our door to give Dad the news, the quiet that followed me at school, the grateful calm from the Ritual taking hold and the mana surges coming to a halt—and in the midst of it all, Mom was just gone.

The apothecary is exactly how I remember it, right next to the 99 Ranch.

Almost every storefront in this plaza has signs in Chinese; it’s comforting and feels like home.

Even if I can’t read all of them, I know that’s the Hainan chicken rice place, Auntie Joanie’s fashion boutique, Ricky Zhang’s hair salon, and a magetech store owned by one of Mom’s friends, catering to older generations that haven’t learned to speak English but still want the best tech for their runebooks.

The sign above the door has seen better days, the Chinese characters faded from the sun but still standing proud, formed by a careful hand in red paint. Faded English letters in smaller script below the Chinese read CHAU HERB AND SUPPLY CO .

Inside, I’m met with the acrid scent of too many bitter and sharp and pungent smells all mixed together in a heady, intense aroma.

Open bins of common ingredients pack the small space, and I spot some familiar things that would not be out of place at a grocery store: dried ginger root, dried mushrooms, long slices of dried seaweed, preserved dates, goji berries.

There are ingredients here in every form: whole, prepackaged, sliced, and boxed, crushed or ground, and most importantly, charged with focus energy.

Behind two long glass counters and locked inside them are more expensive and rare items. Snake wine that has been steeping for decades, unicorn horn soaked in shimmering preservation fluid marked per ounce, and what looks like coils of fine, white hair, all priced exorbitantly.

“Farm raised,” I read, and smile. Nice to know that Uncle Chau has been supporting the sustainable way to obtain swallows’ nests.

Signs are written in marker on recycled cardboard, and despite the makeshift look, I know everything in here is immensely valuable. Uncle Chau’s not worried about theft, not with his formidable experience in warding spells, which is why the store is almost always unattended.

“Hello, Kat,” Uncle Chau says, appearing from behind a shelf. “I wasn’t expecting a pickup today.”

“No, I just…” I don’t know where to start, with how quickly everything seems to be unraveling. If the Order isn’t able to predict or control the portals anymore, and if a dragon was able to get through even their meticulous watch, how could they stop things from getting worse?

He presses his fingers together and waits, tilting his head. “How can I help, little one? We just got a new shipment of ginseng, very fresh. And the jansam is all fifty percent off. Perhaps your father might like some for his Pick-Me-Ups. I’m particularly fond of his Rest Well recipe.”

“I’ll let him know that,” I say with a smile. “I’m actually here on something Mom was working on.” I pull out my runebook and show him the list I’d copied over from Mom’s work. “Do you have these items?”

He gives the list a once-over. If the contents surprise him, he doesn’t show it.

My heart pounds nervously. It feels like everything is on the line. “She started this a few years ago… she said you were preparing focus items for this spell?”

“Hmm,” Uncle Chau says, stroking his chin.

He says something in Cantonese that I only catch about half of, something about me being late or perfectly on time.

“You have her stubbornness,” he says in a stern voice that is something like approval. “It will serve you well, especially with this. Follow me.”

“Thank you,” I reply in stilted Cantonese.

Uncle Chau lifts the much-taped-over piece of cardboard that acts as a barrier between two glass counters and steps through, holding it up behind him.

“Come along,” he says, gesturing impatiently.

I duck under and he quickly drops it back, the hastily scrawled EMPLOYEES ONLY sign flopping back into place.

Uncle Chau has already disappeared down a hallway I hadn’t noticed, but I can hear him behind Chinese newspapers taped up like curtains and follow his voice to a cluttered back room.

The scent of herbs here is even more thick and cloying, each one competing with another in dizzying discordance.

I try to keep up as Uncle Chau navigates a spindly set of stairs down a dark hallway to a musty storage room that appears empty. He gestures for me to step back.

Uncle Chau takes a deep breath and raises his arms, slowly using his body to draw a set of runes.

His movements are deep and controlled, an ancient art that predates Western runes combining tai chi and the physical movement of words written with your body to invite the energy of the universe into your spell.

It’s impressive to watch, and I wonder if his old invitation to learn is still open.

A rumbling sound echoes deep within the basement and an entire stone wall opens, sliding back with significant force.

Uncle Chau pulls a long string from the ceiling and a single electric bulb flickers to life, lighting a dusty workspace covered in thick cobwebs, like it hasn’t been disturbed for some time.

Crates stenciled with names and dates are stacked high to the ceiling.

Some dates go back decades, and I feel the potency brimming just walking past them.

There is old power here, deep and substantial, like a coiled snake ready to strike.

The labels are varied, some in Chinese and some in English.

The ones I can read are enough to unnerve me: moonlight-soaked rowan wands, ground linzi infused with the power of three solar eclipses, anteater scales dating back decades, glistening with raw potential.

This type of energy infusion is time-consuming and very detail-oriented; it takes a lot of patience to build up power this way naturally.

Uncle Chau sets down a crate stenciled with Mom’s name. The familiar characters are inked dark against the dusty wood, and I stare at our family name.

My name, too.

I look at the parts of Mom’s name, the characters for light and hope and long life , and wonder if my grandparents knew when they named her that their hopes would be short-lived.

Uncle Chau slowly creaks the crate open with a crowbar.

Inside, nestled between wood shavings, are a number of jars.

He proudly pulls out one filled with thick, round seeds that seem to radiate their own light.

“Nganhang seed harvested from Tianmu Mountain and soaked in the moonlight of every lunar eclipse.”

“How many years have you been…?”

“About fifteen.”

I gulp. The jars all thrum with energy, and I check them against my list. This is everything, except…

“I know this isn’t something you’d keep in stock, but would you happen to have, or know where I could get, two phoenix down feathers?”

Uncle Chau shakes his head.

“Do you know what Mom was trying to see?”

“She wouldn’t tell me exactly, said it was too dangerous. I figure with three feathers… about a hundred years or so.”

Traveling to the past is practically unheard of.

Not only is it complicated and easy to get wrong, you need a direct connection, either to the place or to the person you’re trying to observe.

You’d need one of their focus objects or something to anchor you to them.

In Mom’s spell, she tied the anchor to our bloodline and a specific place in Los Angeles. More than a hundred years ago.

Jìngyi.

“The very first Ritual,” I breathe. “But if it worked, why did she order more ingredients?”

“Perhaps she needed to review the memory. Or take someone back with her.”

“Like proof,” I mutter to myself. Whatever Mom discovered, she wanted to show someone else. As evidence. “But she didn’t order more phoenix feathers.”