The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

  “Dr Groundsel, you have to come to the lab.” It’s Tania.

  “What lab?”

  “Madame Dearborn’s lab. Where she makes the catcoats. Bring your bag—and hurry.”

  The lab is at the other end of the basement. In all these days, I’ve hardly left the clinic. I’ve been too afraid of what I might see.

  Tania takes me to where Madame Dearborn lies on the floor. Around her swarm more than thirty kittens, all emaciated and mewling. She’s covered in blood and scratches.

  I kneel beside her, draw a clean cloth out of my bag, and begin wiping away blood so I can see what’s going on underneath.

  One of the kittens leaps at my face. Makes a flying swipe at my eye. I swerve away. It misses and tumbles to the floor.

  Tania picks it up, and it begins to mewl mournfully.

  “She was rushing, trying to make catcoats for all of us. She’s bred too many in too few generations. Their genes are not as refined as they should be,” says Tania.

  The kittens yowl, dismayed at the violence they’ve wreaked upon their beloved caretaker and tormenter.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “They attacked me,” whispers Madame.

  She’s covered in gashes—deep ones. These kittens she’s breeding have inordinately long claws. She will need a lot of stitches.

  “Help me get her to the clinic. The wounds need to be cleaned well before I can stitch her up. I’m glad you brought back lots of moonshine from the NOA,” I tell Tania.

  Calyx comes to see what’s going on, and the three of us gently carry Madame to the clinic. As we leave, the kittens slink around us, yawping their sorrow and confusion. We kick them away and close the lab door on them.

  I send Calyx to brew herbs for pain.

  “There’s morphine,” says Tania.

  “What’s that?”

  “Strong painkiller from the time before, works great.”

  “You can just inject me with it,” says Madame. “You’re good with needles, aren’t you?”

  Through her pain, she explains how to measure it, and I administer a Saltwater City drug by needle for the first time. I clean her wounds thoroughly with mother moonshine, even though there’s also something they call “disinfecting alcohol.”

  She’s so badly gashed, it takes more than an hour to stitch her up. Although her cats knocked her over, no bones are broken. But there is a danger of infection. I’ll keep her down here and keep brewing cicada molt. I’ll dose her until the danger passes.

  Myra and Tania come downstairs every few hours to ask how she is doing. However wild and vicious these girls are, they care about their old teacher.

  NODE: SUMMER SOLSTICE

  DAY: 9

  I’M DREAMING OF A VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS WHEN THERE’S AN urgent knock at my door.

  “Dr Groundsel! Wake up, hurry!” Tania’s voice.

  I drag myself out of bed, pull on my old, soft spider-thread tunic.

  “It’s Madame. She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Her favourite girls are gathered around her as she lies, breathing roughly on her bloody sheets. The candles they’ve lit cast a pale yellow light over her sharp face. Her neck looks swollen. I press my hand against it. It’s hot. Her forehead too is warmer than it should be.

  “She can’t see,” Tania says. “Her vision is blurred.”

  “Is that right, Madame?”

  “My head hurts,” she says.

  She looks old and frail. The hair that was bright red yesterday has gone ashy.

  “The brain can swell,” I tell her. “It’s rare, but you were scratched very badly. I could cut? I’m a good surgeon.”

  “I know what you want to know, Doctor Groundsel.”

  “She knows, but she’ll never tell,” says Tania, moving loyally to Madame’s bedside.

  “Never,” says Myra. “Don’t you dare ask.”

  I prepare morphine as Madame taught me, find a place in her leg that can bear a needle, and inject her.

  “I’ll tell you, but you must promise to keep it secret.”

  “I have no one to tell.” Of all the times to get what I want.

  “Let her save you, honoured teacher. You can tell her then.”

  Madame speaks slowly through her pain. “You’ve landed right at ground zero of the Grist Commune.”

  “I don’t understand. There are no Grist sisters here.”

  “The Cordova School was the Grist Commune. It’s where Grandma Wun Ling came after the purge, and after her sister, Chan Ling, fled with many others to the quarantine rings. The school was a cover for it, so we could hide and survive. As our numbers dwindled, we brought in orphans so we could pass our history and survival techniques on to them. But it was to no avail. We lost our last doubler three years ago.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I begin to shave away the ashy red curls.

  “Please, Madame,” says Myra.

  “The girl who came to look for you was our last starfish.”

  “Enough, dearest Madame. You must stop.” Tania. “Just let the doctor fix you. You can tell her whatever you want later.”

  “It can’t be so,” I say. But my heart knows it’s true.

  Madame Dearborn says, “Why would I lie to you? I am the Grist Commune’s last groom.”

  “Not possible,” I breathe. I know I should stop her from talking if she’s to make it.

  “When I die, the Saltwater Grist Commune will be over. That’s why Carmela Sweetwater came to look for you. I advised her not to. We needed her starfish abilities, and Myra and Tania were already looking for the mythic Grist Village. But she was stubborn, said only she knew where to look. She was a half sister, descended from Wun Ling through her mother’s line. She found you, though she paid with her life.” Her eyes brim with tears.

  “But my sisters …”

  “Miss Sweetwater got there before any army, and she lost her hand to you. We heard you were attacked, though we don’t know by whom. Most likely Isabelle Chow and the HöST army. I sent Myra and Tania to look for remnants. That’s you and your sister Calyx Kaki. I’m so grateful you are with us. It means my dearest Carmela Sweetwater did not die in vain. Please look after the girls when I am gone. They are not Grist sisters, but they carry all the knowledge we were able to leave.”

  “Now you believe that she’s dead?” says Myra.

  I nod. “Is Isabelle trying to complete the extermination her grandfather began?”

  Madame’s voice is growing weaker, but she insists on telling her story. “Isabelle Chow has created a new technology said to cure the mind of the body. But to us Grist sisters, it is simply a death machine. It imagines the mind can be separated from the body. We don’t believe that. And it needs Grist sister DNA to feel real. It is why the Saltwater Grist was destroyed—through her relentless kidnappings and experiments. Before she murders you, she’ll extract your cultivation techniques for forget-me-do so she can make more and better N-lite. You are in grave danger.”

  My head reels with the twistedness of it all. Isabelle Chow is responsible for the attack on Grist Village. And indirectly for that Salty—Miss Carmela Sweetwater—coming to warn us, and bringing the flu that killed my Peristrophe Halliana. There are different kinds of Salties, with different interests. Will Our Mother’s wonders never cease? I flush red and hot as my old rage seeks a new target.

  “So I’m not here by coincidence.”

  “No, Groom Kirilow. You are here because I asked Myra and Tania to dance the connections dance. As they are also doing for the purveyors of tiger wine. You see why I love my girls, even though they are so far from perfect.”

  She sighs deeply. She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again.

  I begin to prepare my scalpels.

  “Dearest teacher,” Tania breathes.

  “Don’t leave us,” Myra whispers, choking in terror and sorrow.

  “My best girls,” Madame says, so softly we can hardly hear. “Look after them, Doctor.”
>
  Her breathing grows softer.

  I look to Myra. “Should I cut? The morphine is affecting her lungs.”

  “It’s not the morphine,” Myra says, her eyes brimming.

  “Dearest Madame …” says Tania.

  And like that, she is gone.

  PART III

  CASCADIA YEAR: 127 TAO (TIME AFTER OIL)

  UNITED MIDDLE KINGDOM CYCLE 80, YEAR 42 (WOOD SNAKE YEAR)

  GREGORIAN YEAR: 2145

  27

  OPEN SCALE

  KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: MINOR HEAT

  DAY: 1

  THE CORDOVA DANCING SCHOOL FOR GIRLS IS THE LAST PLACE KORA WANTS to go, but she has nowhere else now. Her heart is so full of dread and mourning, she thinks it might burst. But she still doesn’t cry. Why would her family leave her without a sign of any kind? What does K2 know that she doesn’t? She scuttles along the broken sidewalk, past two locked plague houses, a lady with a dog, six shivering girls huddled together, a side street crowded with N-lite junkies, and the long row of scale workshops that both manufacture and implant any kind of scale you want for the price you can pay.

  Dark clouds are gathering for the evening rain, but she’s almost there. She wedges her hands into her pockets. The uninjured one finds the open scale she picked up from the kitchen counter.

  She turns it on, and a vision rushes up into the space before her eyes, fiery orange and red.

  Deep Scale Commune

  Pacific Pearl Parkade

  Gallbladder Hour

  2nd Day, Minor Heat

  Wood Snake Year 2145

  Two squelchy oblong figures with dangling tentacles, not unlike the squid she saw in her dream, pulse through the flashing letters. Gold and yellow flames chase and lick at them. The flames burn bright as real flames, though they shed no heat.

  Her heart fills with curiosity. Why would K2 invite her to the tiger parkade? She stares at the flickering projection, lost in thought.

  She’s so mesmerized that she doesn’t see or hear the procession coming up the street until it’s right there. Who are these sorry, wailing people, all dressed in grey? Through the flicker of the invitation she realizes it’s the girls of the Cordova School. They bawl and howl, some of them sincerely, others in ritual tones. Many of them have instruments—drums, kazoos, rattles, and horns—that they blow, bang, or shake in a deafening frenzy. Myra marches at the head of the parade, turning an airy grey pennant in a figure eight so that the fabric undulates above the motley crowd like the tail of a sorrowful dragon.

  Velma is at her arm. “Come on, Lady Kora! Don’t stand there like an idiot. Madame Dearborn is dead. We are marching her to the crematorium. What’s that?”

  Modesta is beside her. “Yeah, what’s that, Lady Kora?”

  Kora shuts the scale off fast. “Nothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like nothing. Looks like a fancy scale vision,” Modesta says.

  “Leave her alone, Modesta,” Velma says. “Obviously, it’s private.”

  “Give it here,” Modesta says. “Myra will want to know about it.”

  Kora closes her fingers tightly around her brother’s gift.

  “Come on, hand it over.” Modesta lunges at her.

  Kora steps back, then quickly forward, takes a swing at Modesta’s face with her already closed fist.

  “No point getting all belligerent.” Modesta comes again.

  Kora dodges to the left, and her bloody right hand comes up and out of her other pocket and flies at Modesta’s chin before she even thinks of it.

  Modesta ducks, and Kora misses.

  “Stop that, Lady Kora! It’s not a day for fighting. Madame Dearborn is dead,” says Velma.

  Modesta laughs. “What is it, Kora? Love letter from a tiger man?”

  “Shut up,” Kora says, mean as she can muster. Her injured hand throbs inside its wrapping, indignant at being put to work so soon. “It’s just something from my brother.”

  “Ooooh, family girl, is it?” Modesta’s hand darts out to grab Kora’s wrist.

  Kora swerves out of the way. The last man in Modesta’s family, a distant cousin, died last year. Kora contemplates At least I have a family as a retort, but this has become only dubiously true. “None of your business,” she says, too softly.

  It’s a stalemate in the battle of psychic pain.

  “Feast night tonight,” Modesta says, as the first drops of rain begin to fall. “To mark a death that might mean the end of us all.” She leans back against a solar lamppost, no longer interested in punching Kora. “Me, Tania, Soraya, and Myra got real meatballs. And chocolate.”

  Cocoa beans have been extinct for eighty years, wiped out in a single cocoa plague. Jemini has been promising for more than a year to bring them back, but they’re holding off to increase their value. If you’re really rich, you can buy chocolate from Gupta-Anderson, the only supermarket chain to stockpile it en masse before news of the extinction spread.

  “We did it with only three catcoats to share among four of us,” Modesta says, almost a dare. “Someone stole the new tortoiseshell one that Madame Dearborn made before she died. Her last catcoat.”

  Kora takes a sharp inhale, then immediately tries to disguise it as a cough.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, I don’t suppose?”

  “No,” says Kora, “Did Madame Dearborn successfully make another one? I heard it was in the works, but …”

  “We’ll catch you out one day, Miss Sly. Everyone already knows what a traitor you are.”

  “Oh, you mean frame me,” Kora snarls back. She’s getting better at holding her own.

  Modesta says, “What happened to your hand anyhow?”

  The bandaged right hand throbs harder, as though in response to the question. Kora sticks it back in her pocket. “Know how much info you have rights to? Exactly none, Tin-Can Stan! Zip, zero, zilch. Because you have no family, and no one cares about you.”

  “It’ll all come out, Our Lady of the Flu. Then we’ll see how tough you are.”

  They have to run to catch up with the procession. Once they’re at the Buddhist church turned crematorium, it’s a long wait behind thirty other families bringing their loved ones dead of the flu to the nuns who run the operation. The air smells of smoke and incense, with an undercurrent porky odour of charred human flesh. Chang rises for the ninth time today when they give the makeshift coffin to two sturdy sisters in saffron robes. The nuns place the coffin on a dais, and the girls line up before it to kiss Madame one last time and say their farewells.

  Myra’s face as she approaches her beloved teacher is grim and pinched with grief. Tania’s eyes stream with tears. When it’s Kora’s turn, she gazes for a long time at the closed eyes of the old woman kind enough to take her in. “I’m all kinds of asshole,” she tells the dead lady. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.” She leans forward and presses her lips to Madame’s gashed, cold cheek.

  The nuns make them step over a bowl of water on their way out, to be cleansed of the bad luck. Outside, the line of sad families with their cargo of the dead is even longer. The nuns will be working all night.

  The girls get back to the Cordova School just as it begins to rain. The ones whose turn it is to serve lay spaghetti and meatballs out on large platters.

  Myra rises. “No one touches the food until speeches are said.”

  Too late. The girls are ravenous, already stuffing their faces.

  Tania gets up. “Did you not hear our new leader speak? Dear ones, we must not descend into chaos! If we are to survive the changes that are coming faster and faster every day, we must maintain discipline!”

  The girls don’t stop gobbling, though a few slow their pace. A large cockroach scuttles over the head table.

  Myra stands. “The food you are enjoying was obtained by Tania, Modesta, Soraya, and myself, with the use of only three catcoats. We have a fourth—Madame Dearborn’s last catcoat. But it has gone missing. Tomorrow,
we will have a group assembly until someone fesses up. Whoever does not come will be suspect and subject to beating. Times now are not what they were. We can’t afford to be soft. May Madame rest in peace.”

  Kora can hardly eat. Although the meatballs are delicious, her throat refuses to swallow.

  Her neighbour, a sickly thing called Amanda, leans over and whispers, “Tiger party tonight at the Pacific Pearl Parkade. Modesta’s intel. You coming?”

  Kora’s stomach turns over. She swallows the acidic, half-digested spaghetti and tries to look calm. As though with a mind of its own, her injured hand begins to pulse with a strange new pain.

  “Something’s wet,” Velma says. She looks down at Kora’s hand, resting on the bench beside her. “Lady Kora, you’re bleeding bad.”

  Kora lifts her hand and examines it. The old stains of the bandage are soaked through with bright new blood.

  Velma says, “Did you know the Cordova School has its very own doctor? She can help you.”

  Kora’s been ignoring her screaming hand, but now that Velma has pointed out all the blood, it really hurts. She allows the young girl to lead her to the basement, where the Cordova Dancing School for Girls houses its clinic.

  28

  GIRL WITH AN INJURED HAND

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: MINOR HEAT

  DAY: 1

  GRIM WITH GRIEF AT THE SUDDEN GAIN AND LOSS OF ANOTHER GRIST sisterhood, Calyx and I fit together a medicine cabinet we’ve cut and jointed from salvaged boards the Cordova girls brought us. Madame’s revelation and her sudden death three days ago have made my homesickness worse. And my chance of finding another starfish has just dropped. But I can’t leave without one. Until that fine day, we must make this alien place as much like home as possible.

  A young student with sad eyes and a snotty nose brings in a girl with an injured hand.

  “She got attacked by feral dogs,” the young one says. “She got bit.”

  She takes her older companion’s hand and holds it out for me to see. The hand is wrapped in a dirty scrap of T-shirt. Fresh blood seeps into old, crusty bloodstains.