Khalid took his foot off her hand and gave the bucket a kick. It rotated out from beneath Yuxia’s head and emptied its contents onto the deck, which meant that Zula got soaked. Yuxia’s head was still hanging upside down just out of Zula’s reach. She coughed water out of her lungs, gasped once, and then vomited. When she was finished with that, they upended her again and sat her back down on the chair. The first thing Yuxia must have seen was Zula lying stretched out on the deck at her feet with blood pouring from her trashed pinky. Zula couldn’t really get a good look at Yuxia until Jones had hauled her back up onto her feet. She wanted to go and throw her arms around Yuxia and tell her how horribly sorry she was that all this had occurred, simply because Yuxia had, a few days ago, taken it upon herself to befriend a group of lost Westerners wandering around the streets of Xiamen. "No good deed goes unpunished" was one of Uncle Richard’s favorite aphorisms. But Jones was gripping both of Zula’s upper arms from behind and was dragging her back toward the ladder. "Time to go," he was saying. "The sooner we get under way, the sooner she is free." He spun her around to face the ladder, then shoved her into it hard enough that she had to bring both hands round in front of her to stop herself from slamming teeth-first into a rung.