Free The Ultimate Secret by David Thomas Moore

and gold sari off the line and wrapped it around herself, folding the end up and over her head.
    The alley brought her out on another main road. Kim paused briefly to get her bearings and headed off in another direction. The footpath was crowded in the early afternoon traffic, and Kim couldn’t be sure if she was being followed or not. At least the car – if it had been following her – was nowhere to be seen.
    Kim brushed by a young Chinese man in a grey suit, who didn’t acknowledge her apology. She stared at him briefly; Chinese were a rare sight in Mumbai.
    A rickshaw and a handful of rupees took her closer to Smith’s office. Kim craned her neck the whole time, but couldn’t see the battered old car. She stopped the driver a half-hour away from Smith’s office and continued on foot again.
     
     
    T ICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK.
    Kim started at the sound, heart hammering in her throat.
    She’d been on foot for more than half an hour, and was still no nearer Smith’s office. Jumping off the rickshaw, she’d cut through two open-air markets, trying to lose herself in the crowd. As she did, though, she’d seen four more suited Chinese men, and nearly run into one of them, who had also woodenly ignored her. Trying too hard to act nonchalant, too slow to react when she surprised him. There was no way this was a coincidence.
    They must have followed the rickshaw, or have friends who were able to track her, coordinating their efforts on the ground. She’d stopped on a street corner and looked up, trying to see if there were people in the windows of the high residential blocks around her, watching. She’d looked up in the sky; there were five or six airships over Mumbai, but there were always airships over Mumbai. Any of them could be coordinating the men she kept seeing. Agents for the Chinese Imperial Bureaucracy? Triads? It didn’t matter. She needed to move under cover.
    That was what had brought her into the covered alley behind the fish market, where she’d started hearing the sound. She’d seen another of the Chinese strangers as she ran through the market, and he’d started, turned to move towards her, so she’d ducked into the alley. An elderly beggar had called out to her as she’d jumped over his splayed legs. She hadn’t heard what he said, and hadn’t wanted to turn back. She’d heard him chuckling to himself behind her. Then had come the sound.
    Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
    The alley was shadowy and muggy, if cooler than in the open. A couple of the locals had set up improvised stalls at the near end, selling watches – stolen, she guessed, sold off the beaten path to avoid the attention of the automaton policemen – and trinkets. The sellers watched her placidly but didn’t speak to her. Further down the alley, however, were pools of darkness, the impression of shapes and people waiting out of sight.
    There. Near the far end of the alley, next to a pile of rotten boxes. A shape, taller than a man and broader, shifting slightly, and again that sound.
    Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.
    Just then, the Chinese man from the market came into view at the mouth of the alley. One of the watch sellers broke into his spiel, assuming he was a tourist, but the stranger walked past him. Kim, trapped, looked desperately around her and opened one of the doors in the alley, charging into the home beyond.
     
     
    T HE HIGH TENEMENTS in most of central Mumbai were a warren of rooms and corridors. Original Britannian designs had been modified endlessly – walls knocked out or put in, corridors blocked off, even extra floors added in, creating cramped sleeping spaces for the numberless families crammed into the towers. Arcane and obscure boundaries separated one family’s space from another, with doors and walls having little to do with the matter. If you knew what you were doing, knew what to look for, it was possible to travel the length of one of these buildings, room to room, crawling, climbing, ducking and