by Larissa Lai
“I’m not a Grist sister,” Kora says.
Tania glances down at the new pink hand. “Apparently you are. But don’t be afraid. I’m pretty sure we can get you across.”
The back of the truck is full of large empty fruit crates from some recent smuggling operation. They’re labelled Blue Elk Apples, Moravian Peach Farm, Akal Arnouse Pineapples, Takahashi Mangoes, Kuan Yin Lychees. All farms in the Fourth Quarantine Ring, where Kora has never been. She crawls into an empty walnut box. As the truck rolls along, she feels the texture of the streets she’s known all her life, jagged and broken like the city itself. Kora plays with the green tendril scale she took from the Isabelle shrine. If only it went two ways so Kora could talk to that kidnapper and murderer Isabelle, to ensure that Charlotte and Kai Wai, whatever their form, are safe.
They are all kidnappers and murderers, as, she supposes, was the uncle she thought was her father, Kai Tak Ko. What does this mean about her? She pinches her own flesh, thinking of her family history, the horror baked into her body. Myra holds her responsible. Maybe she’s right to. Still, of all the people to get stuck with as she flees everything she ever knew. At least Kirilow is back here with her, in her own fruit crate, rolling with her towards a strange and unknown future.
THE WALNUT BOX IS DARK AND REEKS OF ROT. THE SMELL CHOKES her. When she can’t stand it anymore, she crawls out.
“Hey, Kora!” Kirilow hiss-whispers. “Get back into your box. The plague rings are dangerous!”
Kora doesn’t care. Although she feels a tenderness for the doctor, she hasn’t forgiven Kirilow for cutting off her hand. She certainly doesn’t trust her. And this may be the last time she ever sees Saltwater Flats, the only home she’s ever known.
She watches it flow by through the crack between the folding halves of the back door. Night falls fast. She sees the black shapes of half-collapsed plague houses, the skeletons of office buildings, scale shops, and coconut palms. The truck crosses a neighbourhood where the fighting is live. By the light of a burning cop wagon, Kora sees women run. The truck speeds by. She sees a broken street light topple. It pulls long black wires with it. The wires crackle and shoot sparks that light up ruined houses. Kora mutters an awkward prayer for those who live in them now, if there are any left.
At a check stop, a Pacific Pearl cop on a motorcycle makes Myra get out of the truck. Kora hears him demand papers. Myra fires back some clipped words, impatient, subtly hostile yet still polite. Kora hears Tania get out of the truck. There is grumbling, accusation, a little righteous indignation. The two Cordova girls return to their seats, and the truck begins to move again. It’s only when Kora lets her breath out that she realizes she’s been holding it.
Kora knows they are at a border when she sees the rows of coiled razor wire on either side of the truck demarcating twelve aisles. There’s a long line of denizens, mostly women and children, from Saltwater City proper and Saltwater Flats extending as far as her view through the door crack permits her to see, denizens who have travelled on foot, as well as by every kind of vehicle Kora has ever seen on the streets—bicycles, rickshaws, handcarts, and rusted out shells of cars from the time before, pulled by dogs or mules. Each vehicle is surrounded by small clusters of mostly women and children. The Cordova School truck is the only eth-powered vehicle in sight. Red-uniformed Pacific Pearl cops and yellow-uniformed Cosmopolitan Earth soldiers pull the occasional group to the side.
A large group kneels just to the left of where the Cordova truck is stopped in line. Young children, all with the pale skin and black hair of Lewis Lai, quiver and cry. Only two women take care of the lot of them. Three red-uniformed cops and fifteen or so soldiers in yellow crowd around. The ones in yellow shout and argue. The ones in red raise their guns. In a second there is a spatter of machine gun fire, and the women and children fall to the ground. Kora pulls away from the crack between the doors and scrambles to the corner of the cargo space, guts heaving.
“Hey!” Kirilow whisper-yells from her greengage plum box. “You better hide! You want us to get caught?”
A cold, dry breeze blows through the crack between the doors. Kora begins to shiver and can’t stop. She crawls back into her walnut box.
There are voices at the window.
“How many of you?”
“Just two,” Myra says.
“Destination?”
“The New Origins Archive in the Third Quarantine Ring.”
“Huh. Step out of the vehicle please.”
“We’ve got nothing, and we’re in a terrible hurry.”
“Please step out of the vehicle.”
Kora hears Myra and Tania step out.
“You sure there’s no one else?”
Myra speaks with the same steady confidence she used to dominate the dancing girls. “There’s no one, ma’am.”
“Mind if we take a look?”
No amount of bravado is cover for a thorough truck search. Myra has to unlock the back doors.
I hear Tania’s voice. “Could you get Sloane?”
“Sloane?”
“I’m Tania Manuel, General Manuel’s niece. Sloane is your commanding officer, I believe. And my cousin.”
There’s a moment’s silence. “I recognize you, Tania Manuel. We have no time here for the ones who run when the going gets tough. Now, I have to do my job. Please open the back doors of your truck.”
Tania says, “You know, I could call you and my auntie traitors for handing the reins to the UMK. Where is she? Where is Old Geraldine?”
“She’s where you should be. With your mom, trying to bring an end to this refugee nightmare while the UMK rattles its sabres, and Pacific Pearl police kill Saltwater denizens right on our border. Come on, I don’t have time for this.”
There is a long stretch of silence.
“Don’t make me arrest you.”
“My cousin Sloane. Please.”
There are noises Kora can barely hear. Arrangements of some kind being made. Inside her box, Kora sweats like a pig at slaughter time.
“What’s going on here?” Another soldier, perhaps older, intervenes.
“It’s Tania Manuel, trying to smuggle god only knows what through council territory.”
“Tania.”
“Sloane.”
“You know how much your mom misses you?”
“I know.”
“The city you’re departing is generating thousands of refugees.”
“It is.”
“Know anything about it?”
“There’s been a messy regime change.”
“What’s in the truck?”
Tania sighs. “A couple of Grist sisters. Old gen ones from the time before.”
“Weren’t you trucking a couple of those last time? They’re worth a lot of money on the black market.”
“You wanna buy them?”
“Not really. Too stinky,” says Cousin Sloane. “These Grist sisters—dangerous ones or just ordinary ones?”
“Pretty ordinary.”
“Let me see.”
Kora hears Myra fiddle with the keys. The lock clicks. The doors fly open.
“Better come out,” Myra says.
Kora and Kirilow crawl out of their boxes and into the light, heads bowed. Kora sweats as her beloved goat must have sweated atop the roof of the Woodward’s Building on the day of her sacrifice. Please don’t let me die quick and unknown on this terrible border.
“Let’s see you,” says Cousin Sloane. Both Kora and Kirilow raise their heads.
The soldiers are imposing but beautiful, like Tania, with broad faces and brown eyes. They wear their dark hair tied neatly and tucked into their peaked caps. They look at the two sorry travellers, and Kora imagines what they must see—two young, dirty, scrawny girls of no account.
“That one has a lot of scales,” says the soldier who is not Cousin Sloane.
“They’re all infected. Look,” Tania says. She lifts Kora’s hair, and they can all see the insects crawling on
her scalp and red, angry flesh following the path of her halo. Kora feels ashamed.
“Leave the Gristies and I’ll let you go.”
Kora opens her mouth to say she’s not a Gristie, then thinks better of it.
“No deal,” Myra says. “We need the Gristies where we’re going.”
“And where would that be?”
“New Origins Archive.”
Why do the Cordova girls need us? Kora wonders. Wouldn’t they be better off dumping us? She doesn’t know what to want. The sweat pours off her. She begins to shake.
“It’s the Gristies or you, Tania. If I brought you home, I think I’d be forgiven for letting them go,” Sloane says. “The UMK is pressuring us like heck to shut the border altogether. Your mother and auntie need your skills of strategy and diplomacy.”
“Damn mothers and aunties,” Tania says.
“Don’t be disrespectful,” says Sloane. “Come home. It’s time.”
“Let me talk to my friend.”
Tania and Myra whisper together in low voices, so low Kora could not hear if she stood between them.
Finally, they fall silent and move apart.
“I will come home,” Tania says. “I’m not averse to coming home, you know. I never was. If the old ladies would just take my advice once in a while.”
So Tania is returned to her people, and the truck goes through the checkpoint.
Kirilow climbs into the cab of the truck. Kora goes with her, even though she’d rather not be in such close quarters with Myra.
“Praise be to Our greatest Mother of Chang light and Eng night,” Kirilow chants. “Praise to her mountains and rivers. Praise to Our Mother of deliberate actions. Praise to Our Mother of luck. Praise, at least for now.”
Kora is exhausted. She closes her eyes and dozes as the truck sails across the Second Quarantine Ring.
She wakes when Kirilow asks Myra, “What did you mean when you said you need us at the New Origins Archive?”
“Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. It was just a way of getting out.”
Kirilow casts Kora a worried glance. Kora gazes back with eyes that say, Watch out.
The road continues alongside a mountain that grows ever steeper as late afternoon becomes early evening.
As the land flattens out, the misshapen heap of the New Origins Archive looms on the horizon. It’s very dry now, and the air is full of smoke from the forest fires that burn up north. The NOA sits atop the sagebrush-and-sand-dotted earth like a giant pile of snakes. Or naked ladies’ legs.
I know what it looks like, thinks Kora, remembering the first scale Wai ever gave her, on the subject of reefs and corals. It looks like a brain coral, a really enormous one. This one’s all curves and convolutions, pale violet flecked with green. Off its surface, fine, translucent tendrils wave, so fine she doesn’t see them at first. They are a million times finer than her own tendril scales and infinitely longer. When she first registers them, she thinks they’re made of pale blue light, beaming down from Eng, who hangs high, small, and round above the archive as they arrive. The tendrils don’t touch the distant satellite but only wave gracefully at it, like the finest seaweed swaying with a gentle tide. As they get closer, Kora’s horrified to see a tendril snatch a little sparrow out of the sky and yank it down into the hungry folds of the archive’s pulsing surface.
The New Origins Archive has been built into the side of a copper quarry with a lake at the bottom. Its structure looks like a stack of vertebrae for some prehistoric gargantua, spine diving deep into the ground. The visible part of the spine leans into the wall of the quarry and seems to merge with it, as though the stone and earth of the wall are all that remains of that gargantua’s flesh, older by far than the Caspian tiger brought back from extinction to make tiger-bone wine. The earth of the wall glimmers a rusty green. Down one side, a steep, narrow waterfall tumbles, feeding the artificial lake below.
38
MI CASA ES SU CASA
KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // NEW ORIGINS ARCHIVE!
NODE: AUTUMN EQUINOX
DAY: 9
THE LAST TIME I CAME TO THE NEW ORIGINS ARCHIVE WAS AFTER THE HöST destruction of Grist Village, after the death of old Auntie Radix Bupleuri and my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, under a fog of my own forget-me-do. And it was only a year and a half ago that I came to the New Origins Archive with my mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, for my rite of spring. It feels like a lifetime. I ache for the old Grist Village that I will never see again. Let this be the briefest of stopovers, a place to rest and refuel, quick so quick. I want to find the place where I killed that elk last summer, the place where Bombyx Mori, Corydalis Ambigua, and their fresh litter of puppies wait for me and Kora to come and start a new sister village.
When I see Elzbieta’s face, I want to weep, but I know I can’t show any such weakness. We are safe from the clutches of the new tiger police, but that does not mean safe generally.
“Our Mother has blessed us, Kirilow Groundsel. I feared I might never see you again.” Elzbieta’s small teeth are too white, too sharp.
I beam at her, bright as I know how. “My hands have been a little full.” I nod in the direction of my dwindling entourage. “There were many more, but our luck has not been the best.”
“Myra Mao of course I know. Welcome back,” says Elzbieta.
Kora casts Myra a resentful glance.
“That’s not Peristrophe Halliana is it?” She nods at Kora. “She looks young. And if you don’t mind my saying, she needs to wash her face.”
“I lost my beloved Peristrophe to the flu, remember? That’s my sister, Glorybind Groundsel’s last daughter double.” A white lie to keep Kora safe.
“My good friend, I’m so sorry about Peristrophe. I had forgotten. This Wood Snake year has been one of many changes.” Elzbieta’s look of sympathy might be genuine, but there is something beneath it that unsettles me.
“I had hoped to come back sooner, with your money.”
“Never mind that. Come in, come in. Mi casa es su casa, let’s have a good catch-up and talk about business later.” She hasn’t forgotten either.
I beam brighter to hide the squirming in my belly.
She beckons us in through the navel of the archive, this gorgeous conservatory of seeds, spores, and cells from which new life could spring and make the world anew.
Lights from the time before made of sparkly teardrops hang from holy high ceilings, over a glorious, wide hall all grey stone and cedar beam. Those teardrops catch light from sky-high windows, cast sparkles and shadows over red leather armchairs and sofas, tiger-skin rugs, and elk-wool wall weavings.
“Please, sit wherever you like,” says Elzbieta. “Make yourselves at home.”
Myra flops down in one of the comfortable armchairs. I wonder how long she’s been trading with the NOA. Her relaxed posture says it’s been years. In a moment, a trio of lovely women—one very young dressed in yellow satin, one perhaps my own age in green linen, and one quite elderly in vibrant pink silk—file into the room bearing flasks of tea and baskets of steaming food. Elzbieta introduces them as Buttercup, Vera, and Rose. I remember Vera from that long-ago night of the bonfire at Mourning Rock.
Kora eats six dumplings and has a few sips of tea. While the rest of us chat, she nods in her comfortable armchair, unable to stay awake. The shame of it! My mother double would have rapped me across the knuckles with her arbutus wood cane or popped me on the skull with the back of her pipe. Wake up, girl! Did that old Cordova Madame teach you nothing of Our Mother’s simplest etiquette? Kora actually begins to snore, though softly. I’m mortified.
The pink and green clad attendants appear as if from nowhere. One of them casts me a discreet glance, as though asking permission. What to do? I nod. They wake her gently and guide her to the back of the archive, where the guest sleeping quarters are.
“Where did you find her, Groom Kirilow?” Elzbieta asks, as soon as the girl and the two attendants are out of earshot. “She’s the spitt
ing image of your elegant Peristrophe Halliana, or she would be, if she were cleaner. But she’s not really your sister, is she?”
Myra takes six dumplings at once, leans back, and slurps them down. Leans forward again and takes six more. She doesn’t belong to me the way Kora does. I don’t have to feel shame for her.
“Of course she is. Who else would she be?”
“I think you found her in Saltwater City. I think she’s a descendant of the Jemini escapee and Grist queen Chan Ling but from the left-hand line of tiger wine factory workers, the ones who were hidden and so not expelled in the Great Grist Purge. Am I right, or am I right? But she’s a mongrel. There’s some non-Grist blood in her too. Don’t deny it.” Her eyes follow mine until I’m forced to look at her. She holds my gaze and won’t let go.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“You’re fond of her, aren’t you? Planning to adopt her?”
“It’s not like that.”
“A lover? Aren’t you the precious pair …” She beams, but there’s something dark and troubling beneath her teasing.
“Don’t be rude.” I wish she would stop, and I know she won’t. “She’s nothing, just a girl I found …”
“I thought so. In Saltwater City.”
“By Our Mother’s teeth, she’s travelling with me, and it doesn’t concern you.”
“And yet you eat my food and drink my tea.”
“I thought we were friends. I thought you might help.”
“Of course we’re friends, Groom Kirilow. Aren’t I helping you?”
“I’ll find the renminbi I owe you and pay you back on the next visit, I promise I will.”
“Kirilow Groundsel, you wouldn’t lie to me, would you? When I’m such a good friend to you? I know Grist Village was burned to the ground. I know there are survivors who have moved it elsewhere. You’re going to New Grist Village, and you are not coming back.” She claps her hands twice, and yet another lovely attendant darts out from behind a cedar post.
“Bring us some wine. Gan bei, gan bei!”
