It took Tori half an hour to get Mr. Gao calmed down enough to start making sense again. Then it was another half hour before he let Lu close enough to check his vitals.

“I don’t like the way your lungs sound,” Lu said. “I wish I had access to Hope’s medical database. It might have an idea what this is—or what we could do about it.”

“Huan Xiang Zhou have medical database,” Mr. Gao said.

The way the man butchered verb tenses while using complicated vocabulary broke Tori’s brain a little. Did she sound that stupid when she was talking in Chinese?

Probably worse. Her grammar was iffy, and her vocabulary didn’t even approach Mr. Gao’s English mastery.

Of course, she hadn’t been practicing muc...

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