“Dia! Quick! Hide!”

  A hiss, a yank, and then I was crouched behind a display of fall-themed baking supplies next to my best friend, Aly.

  “What?” I whispered. “Why are we hiding? The store’s going to think we’re shoplifting.”

  We were high schoolers, and high schoolers’ reputation was bad enough that International Grocery Mart had a “Leave all backpacks at the counter” policy.

  But when I tried to rise, Aly tugged me back down and pointed with her chin. “MEC inspectors. There.”

  She was right. When I crawled forward and peeked around the plastic jars of ground cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and pumpkin spice, two middle-aged men were inspecting…the imported cookie section. Both wore white, long-sleeved, button-down shirts and black dress pants, even though it was amazingly hot and humid in August on Jade Island. That alone was enough to make them stand out, but what really gave them away were the headpieces they wore. A black earbud sat in each ear, connected by a band that ran around their foreheads. Little circles dotted the plastic like wolf spider eyes: individual scanners that measured their surroundings for traces of magic at all times.

  Rumor had it that MEC inspectors wore their headpieces no matter what they were doing – even when they were showering or engaging in, uh, other activities. Last year, the video of some Jadean teenagers accosting one of them and asking straight out had gone viral. The inspector’s mortified face had turned into a meme that dominated social media for two whole weeks. He hadn’t answered, at least not in a way that was caught on video, which had of course only fueled more rumors and more memes.

  Even I’d found it kind of funny.

  “Does that look waterproof to you?” I wondered, studying the headpiece. “What kind of magic do they even think they’ll find in a bathroom?”

  “Dunno, something in the shampoo, maybe? To grow a mane of thick, glossy hair?” Aly tossed her own thick, glossy, black ponytail to illustrate.

  And indeed, one of the MEC inspectors was going bald and could do with a good Corporeal spell to stimulate hair growth, like our World History textbook said people used to use. Except –

  “No one’s made stuff like that for, like, seventy years,” I pointed out.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody even knows how to make stuff like that anymore. Or wants to.” It wasn’t technically a lie, depending on how you defined “stuff,” but my voice was a little sharper than it should have been.

  Aly winked. “Uh-huuuuh.”

  I realized I was breathing in shallow gasps and forced myself to draw a deep breath. Relax. They don’t know. You’ll only look suspicious if you panic.

  I peeked around the spices again. A few giggly tourists had tiptoed into the store to take photos of the inspectors. You didn’t see them in most countries anymore, so they were a bit of a Jadean novelty. Even if none of them were Jadean.

  The inspectors determinedly ignored their audience. One held up a package to show the other. “Hey, Mike, look what they got here!” he said in English.

  A collective gasp from all the shoppers. The cashier gripped the edge of the counter so hard his knuckles turned white.

  The other inspector blinked. “Pumpkin Spice Oreos? Is that even a thing?” He also spoke in English. Most inspectors came from the US, perhaps because that was where the founder of the Magical Enforcement Commission had lived and where the MEC was still headquartered.

  “Apparently. Wanna give them a try?”

  “Sure, why not?” Then the second inspector saw the price tag on the shelf. After a moment to convert the currency, he yelped, “This costs six times as much as they should! What are these Jadeans playing at?!”

  Next to me, Aly was bristling. I darted a nervous glance at her. Aly had a bit of a temper sometimes.

  Correction: all of the time.

  The first inspector shrugged again. “Well, what do you expect from people who still abuse magic?”

  That was too much for Aly. She leaped to her feet and stormed out from behind the spices. “It’s called shipping costs and import taxes!” she snapped, also in English. (She was always at the top of our class at school.)

  “Aly!” I jumped up too and reached for her wrist, but she wrenched away.

  “Shouldn’t people who work for an international organization know about shipping costs and import taxes?” she demanded.

  Behind the counter, the cashier’s face was a mask of horror. Meimei, he mouthed, shh!

  The inspectors looked stunned for a split second. Then the first one curved his lips up in a toothy grin. “Hey! Your English is really good!”

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  Oh dear.

  Aly clenched her fists. “Yes, because we start learning it in the third grade! Also, I go to Silken Heights High School!”

  By this point, the cashier had squeezed his eyes shut and was mumbling prayers. “Please, Grandpa Earth, protect me, protect my store, please please please….”

  “Aly! Stop!”

  Keeping my head down, I grabbed her arm with both hands and started dragging her towards the door. “Sorry, sorry! Bu hao yisi! Bu hao yisi!” I flung apologies in English and Mandarin in all directions, at the inspectors and the cashier and the other customers and the fascinated tourists who were filming the whole thing.

  Once we were outside the sliding glass doors, the wave of heat and humidity hit us so hard that I staggered.

  Aly jerked away from me and glared. “What’d you do that for?”

  I started walking down the street, forcing her to follow me away from the grocery store and the inspectors. In Mandarin, I said, “You can’t say stuff like that to them, Aly. You just can’t.”

  She bulldozed her way through the crowd of shoppers, embassy workers, and tourists. Sticking to English, she declared, “Well, I think it’s arrogant of them to come to our home and act all arrogant and patronizing. ‘Ooooh, your English really good.’ Just because they have a weird headpiece and a fancy badge!”

  A Caucasian couple with young kids glanced at her and quickly averted their gazes.

  “Mummy, why’s she so mad?” one kid asked in an Australian accent.

  “Shh! Kids, why don’t we go – ” And the mother hastily herded her family into the closest convenience store.

  Traumatizing tourists wasn’t going to help our international standing. I soothed Aly, “I know, I know. But what if the inspectors actually got mad? What if they arrested you or something?” After all, they had the authority to arrest anyone on suspicion of being a mage. Just because they didn’t do it (much) anymore didn’t mean that they couldn’t. “Anyway, you’re the one who thought they’re so dangerous we needed to hide.”

  Aly gave a firm shake of her head. “I wasn’t worried for myself. I was worried for you. Just in case – ”

  Remembering that we were in public, she cut herself off.

  My jaw set. Now it was my turn to storm through the crowd on the sidewalk. There had never been any danger of the MEC inspectors detecting any trace of magic use on me. I was the fifth daughter, not the seventh. And Aly knew it.

  My best friend trailed after me in apologetic silence for a whole block. We were about to enter the Metro station when she gasped, “The baking supplies! We forgot the baking supplies! We have to go back!”

  Oh no, we were definitely not going back there today. Probably not this week, either.

  “It’s okay, we can make something with what we have.”

  Aly shot me a horrified look, more horrified than if the MEC inspectors had actually arrested her. “But the Activities Fair! We have to recruit club members. We need to prepare something that will grab everyone’s attention.”

  As Vice President of the Silken Heights High School Cooking Club, Aly took her duties seriously. She kept a detailed record of all the dishes we had prepared for our booth at the Activities Fair, as well as the number of people who had come to talk to us and how many of them had ultimately joined the club. Data indicated that smallish desserts such as cookies had the highest success rate. Potential recruits could grab one, munch on it while listening to our pitch, and take another to eat as they went on to the next booth. It helped cement their memories of us.

  Unfortunately, every cookie recipe we had called for butter, which our local grocery store didn’t stock. Jadean savory cooking used vegetable oil or lard, never butter, and most Jadeans didn’t bake Western-style desserts at home or even have an oven, for that matter. Why would they, when amazing bakeries were everywhere, often just around the corner, and always within a short Metro ride?

  “We can probably find a recipe that doesn’t use butter,” I mused, moving into the shade and pulling out my phone to search the internet. “Um…. How about meringue cookies?”

  “No. Way too sweet.”

  That was true. Jadeans already thought Western desserts were obesity and diabetes in a tiny package, and we didn’t want to scare anyone off by giving them a toothache on top of that. I didn’t know how much you could cut the sugar in a meringue. “Hmmm, macarons?”

  Aly’s response was an expressive “Ugh.”

  Ugh indeed. The one time our club had organized a macaron-making event, practically everyone’s cookies had failed, half of them so dramatically that they resembled flat, almond-flavored smears on the baking sheets. Macarons were not a practical dessert to make in large quantities.

  I kept scrolling through the search results. “Well, it looks like you can make chocolate chip cookies with vegetable oil….”

  “Except we’re running out of chocolate chips too! That’s on our shopping list, remember?!”

  Oh, right. We’d been planning to make one big shopping trip to replenish all of our hard-to-get baking supplies before the school year started.

  “And we need flour too!” Aly wailed.

  “Hello Mart has it,” I consoled her.

  Enough people made dumpling wrappers at home that our local convenience store carried wheat flour, thank goodness.

  “But only all purpose. They don’t have bread flour.”

  “Bread flour?” asked a boy’s voice, sounding surprised.

  I glanced up. A boy about our age was coming up the steps of the Metro station. He had black hair like us, but his skin was too pale and his features too pronounced to be Jadean. A hunxue’er, then, with one Asian and one Caucasian parent.

  For a moment, our eyes met. His were the same dark-chocolate brown as ours.

  Then he gave me an embarrassed smile, ducked his head, and hurried after two adults who were probably his parents. The woman was Jadean, the man Caucasian. Just like I guessed. For a moment, I looked after them, I wondering whether they were tourists and, if so, what they were planning to visit in Jade City.

  “No.” Aly’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “We’ll come back another time. Next Thursday, to be safe. They’ll be gone by then.”

  She was right: MEC inspectors never stayed long. They popped up, checked in at their headquarters, and rushed off to gorge themselves in the night markets (“in case the vendors target the appetite or taste buds with Corporeal spells”), visit famous landmarks (“in case anyone put attention-drawing Spirit spells on them”), and buy postcards and keychains and plushies (“in case the shopkeepers touched up the colors with Matter spells”). Then they lugged their beer bellies back to Peach Garden International Airport and flew home with their loot. We were all used to it. More or less.

  I typed a quick text to our group chat: Saw 2 MEC inspectors in Lakeside, before following Aly down into the Metro station.

  It would be okay. My family was meticulous. In all these decades, we had never given the MEC any cause to search our home. We’d get through this inspection unscathed, the way we always did.

  A/N: Thanks to my awesome Patreon backers, Autocharth, BananaBobert, Celia, Charlotte, Ed, Elddir Mot, Flaringhorizon, Fuzzycakes, Just a Kerbal, Kimani, Lindsey, Michael, TheLunaticCo, V0lcano, and Anonymous!