Eternal

by Grant, Alasdair

  “But you have a valid question, Student Lily. Step forward so I can answer it.”

  Lily hesitates, obviously regretting her brashness, but she squares her shoulders and marches forward.

  “Grab my robe.”

  “What?”

  “Once again forgetting that rule about not speaking out of turn, are we? I told you to grab my robe.”

  Lily tentatively reaches forward, and, in a lightning movement neither of us expects, Mistress Jiu-Li snares Lily’s wrist, twists her arm, and plants her face against the floor. I wince. Lily’s arm is now extended at a painful angle, twisted across Mistress Jiu-Li’s bent knee.

  “More than two hundred fifty empty-hand self-defense techniques are hidden in this one dance. In a thousand nights, you could never hope to master more than a handful of them. Fortunately for you, Student Lily, four or five techniques learned to perfection should be enough. You will practice this first technique until you can imitate it in your sleep. Is that understood?”

  Lily nods. Mistress Jiu-Li releases her arm, and Lily gets slowly back to her feet. Her lips are pressed tightly together. I can already tell there will be no more unsolicited questions tonight.

  “The same movements,” Mistress Jiu-Li commands. “Repeat them. Both of you.”

  We do it in silence. We do it again. And again. And again. As with my first lesson, we go through the same motions at least a hundred times. This is followed by a half hour practicing the move against each other until our elbows are bruised and we’ve become thoroughly familiar with every knot and scratch in the wooden floor.

  Tonight I’m grateful for the mind-numbing repetition. It keeps my mind off Jenna’s Lily.

  “Return in two days,” Mistress Jiu-Li finally says.

  We meekly bow, don our sandals, and leave the pagoda. When we’re well beyond earshot, Lily whispers: “I never realized she could be so brutal.”

  I look at my friend. There’s a faint smile on her lips. Remarkably, her voice is admiring.

  “I’ll bet she could slip up behind us and slit our throats before we even realize she’s there,” she adds.

  I glance over my shoulder. I don’t find her observation humorous the way she does. We walk on in silence until Lily unexpectedly grasps my arm, pulling me into the shadows of the terra cotta statue near the Pagoda of Ages.

  It’s a frightening statue. A representation of the Eternal Emperor standing atop the severed heads of Xindalu’s subjugated colonist generals. Their tricorne hats and powdered wigs bend beneath his curled slippers.

  “What’s going on, Jade? You’ve been gloomy all day. Did my other self…die?”

  I don’t want to answer, but her eyes bore into me. She’s not letting me go until I reveal what I know.

  “She hasn’t died. Not yet. But her brain is bleeding. If she lives, she’ll never be the same.”

  Lily blanches. Then she takes a deep breath to steady herself.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing you can tell me about forming a mind link?”

  “I don’t even know how I started dreaming.”

  But is that the truth?

  “Maybe I do know something,” I amend.

  “Tell me.”

  “The dreams,” I say. “They started coming a few days after my mother’s funeral. I wanted to see her again. I wanted it so bad that I kept picturing her face every night before I fell asleep.”

  “And that’s when you started dreaming again?”

  “Yes. But everyone dreams until their minds are trained not to. Little children don’t form mind links with the people they dream about. As far as I know, no one did until Xu Fu discovered the Amplitudes.”

  “But you managed it without being trained.” Lily bows her head and rubs her temples. “It can’t be mere chance. There must be something more to it than that.”

  “There’s nothing more than that,” I assure her. “The only thing I did was keep dreaming about Jenna and her mother until the dreams became so real it was like I was living her life.”

  “Then that must be the key,” Lily says. “It’s about focus. Focusing your Fifth Amplitude while you sleep so you visit the same person’s mind every night.”

  She has a fevered look on her face, the one she had the last time she asked me to share this secret. But I don’t have the secret. It can’t be as simple as she thinks it is.

  “The Fifth Amplitude is unconscious thought,” I say. “How do you focus unconscious thought?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily admits. “Maybe you’re just special. Maybe your brain is different from everyone else’s. But maybe not. Maybe anyone can form a link if they figure out how to focus their dreams.”

  I shake my head.

  “What else do we have to go on?” Lily asks. “My other self will die if I don’t try. Maybe I can’t form a link, but I definitely won’t form one if I don’t learn how to dream again.”

  “It’s dangerous,” I whisper.

  “I think we moved beyond dangerous once Mistress Song and Mistress Jiu-Li began training us.”

  We stare at each other for several long, uncomfortable moments. I can’t stop Lily from trying. I don’t even have the right to ask her not to. The worst that could happen is she will fail. But if she succeeds…

  “It’s getting late,” I say. “We should get to the dormitory before people start asking questions about why we’re always so late.”

  Lily nods.

  I have a new fear now. Fear that she’ll fail. Fear she’ll succeed.

  FORTY-THREE

  四十三

  JADE

  I can’t sleep. In part I remain awake because I can’t bear the weight of Jenna’s anguish, but there’s something else, too. I’m feeling strangled, suffocated by impossibly huge burdens. I’m only fifteen years old. I can’t handle so many problems. I wish I could exchange this life for a different one.

  I flinch as I finish this thought. This is the kind of yearning that put me in this situation in the first place.

  The bathing hall’s rose-colored tiles feel smooth and cool beneath my sore feet. At this hour the dormitory is silent. In fact, I’m probably the only girl still awake. Fortunately, a few lanterns are always left lit in the halls and common areas. This includes the bathing hall where the big bath pool is likely still warm. A short soak in warm water might erase some of the tension in my muscles.

  As I enter the bathing area, something clatters noisily against the floor. The sound echoes from every corner, making me jump.

  “Hello?” I say, heart thudding nervously. “Is somebody in here?”

  No answer.

  I move timidly along a wall. The two burning lamps cast threatening shadows across the room. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here alone.

  I don’t search long before I locate the thing that made the noise. A long-handled mop, still tangled in a half-closed shower curtain, lies across the floor. Someone must have leaned it there, off balance, and it chose the moment I entered to fall. I press a hand against my chest, willing my racing pulse to slow.

  “Just a mop,” I whisper. “Don’t be such a faint-heart, Jade.”

  The sound of my own voice helps to calm me.

  One of the linen closets is open, and I approach it and step inside. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust enough to spot what I’m looking for. I’m in luck. The shelves have been restocked with towels for morning baths.

  I lean forward to take one but let out a startled gasp when something yanks me backward. My gasp ends in a gurgled choke as something loops around my neck, constricting like a tourniquet.

  “Where did you put it? Tell me, stupid girl!”

  Even if I wanted to answer, I couldn’t. My attacker holds the cord so tight I’m unable to fill my lungs to make a noise.

  I fall to my knees, clawing with frantic fingers at the cord. It’s a sash. The sash off someone’s robe. My attacker’s lithe shadow ripples over the shelves. My vision begins to go black around the edges.
<
br />   “If you survive this,” she hisses, “perhaps you’ll think twice about meddling in Dikang affairs!”

  My limbs are going numb. I feel a cold tingle in my fingertips. I try to fight back, but this only makes her laugh.

  I’m going to die.

  No. I can’t die. I’m immortal, and nothing she does to me can be permanent. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling pain or suffering the desperate burning in my lungs.

  I reach back and touch her knee. She responds by twisting tighter, forcing me face downward so I dangle as if by a noose. I feel her hatred course through me like an electric current. Whoever this is, she despises me. I read her emotions as if they’re my own.

  “How dare you!”

  The sash loosens, and I fall, gagging, on my hands and knees.

  “How dare you attempt to read my amplitudes!”

  I hear a sharp crack as something strikes my rib cage. The blow knocks me onto my stomach, leaving me gasping and wheezing. Before I can recover, my attacker lands a second bone-breaking kick against my face.

  I roll on my side, stars flashing before blurred vision, flames burning through cracked ribs. More by instinct than through conscious thought, I reach under my robe and retrieve a folded tessen.

  I block her third kick with the tessen’s silver handle. By the fourth kick I’ve snapped it open and sliced her ankle. She curses, staggers backward, slips in her own blood and falls. I try to see her face, but all but her eyes and a thin black strand of hair are hidden beneath a hood.

  My head is still spinning from lack of oxygen, and my larynx feels swollen. I can barely swallow, but some part of Mistress Jiu-Li’s training has activated itself, and I stagger into a Wind Dance stance.

  She attacks again, but the tessen can’t stop this attack. I stare at the thrown dagger, buried to its hilt in my chest. When I look up at the girl, she seems as surprised about what she’s done as I am.

  Something between a whimper and a moan escapes my throat. It’s cut off by a warm rush of blood. Not only am I coughing it up, it seeps through the hole in my chest, plastering my thin night robe like a sticky bandage against my flesh.

  There’s no bandage strong enough to stay the flow from this wound. Thick pain compresses every organ in my chest cavity, and I hear a dull thudding in my ears. Slower…slower… My pulse stutters. I’m dying. Master Ning was mistaken about me. I don’t have an eternal link.

  The Dikang assassin approaches, nudges me with one toe as I crumple into a spreading pool of my own blood. Everything goes momentarily black. Then I’m sitting upright in my bed, gasping, tangled in sweat soaked sheets. My heart beats like a jackhammer, beats as if pumping blood for two people.

  Jenna collapses, clutching her chest, and I’m back in my own world. Consciousness returns as if I’ve been jolted by lightning. My trembling fingers grip the dagger’s hilt, and, with an agonized cry, I wrench it free.

  The searing pain in my chest swirls back on itself and slowly subsides. For several moments I stare, shell-shocked, at the thin, dripping blade. My attacker stares too, and she yelps when I rise to my feet.

  I should be dead. We both know it. But I’m not. I can’t be killed.

  She doesn’t stay around to ponder how this could happen. She saw the knife go in, and she saw it come out. It’s too much for her. She leaves bloody footprints across the tiles as she flees.

  Right before she disappears, the trauma of what just happened hits me full force. Everything goes fuzzy around the edges. I need to sit down.

  A wooden dressing bench stretches along one wall, and I move toward it. I don’t quite reach it. Instead, I fall like a damp leaf through thick fog. I’m not sure if I reach the floor.

  FORTY-FOUR

  四十四

  JADE

  We’ve finally mopped up all the blood, but I swear the tiles hold a rusty hue in places where it pooled. Even my skin, although I scrubbed and scrubbed it in the shower, seems faintly crimson to me. It’s a trick of my eyes after staring so long at so much blood. I feel like I’m now seeing everything through wine-colored glass.

  “What will we do with the knife and the robe?”

  My voice startles Lily. She’s been dazed and jumpy ever since I woke her. I suppose I’d be, too, if a blood-smeared apparition unexpectedly appeared beside my bed.

  Lily looks at the wadded night robe and blood-pinked towels scattered over the floor.

  “I know a place,” she says, “where no one will find any of this.”

  I nod, stare at my hands again, and wilt onto the dressing bench. Someone tried to murder me and would have succeeded if not for my eternal link. But I can’t tell anyone about it. No one but Lily. I can’t afford an imperial investigation.

  “Do you have any idea who it was?” Lily asks.

  “No. I couldn’t see her face.”

  Lily breathes nervously. “You probably shouldn’t go anywhere on your own anymore. Especially not at night.”

  I won’t disagree with that. My body bears no visible marks, but I’ve never felt so…so mortal. Physically I’m fine, but emotionally I’ll never be the same.

  “When I passed out…,” I quietly say. “This time I didn’t wake up in Jenna’s world.”

  “Maybe she was asleep.”

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work? You’ve never explained it to me.”

  “I always fall asleep when she wakes up, and vice versa. It’s like I never really sleep because I have two lives. Sometimes I start to lose track of who I am.”

  “It sounds…difficult,” Lily says.

  I close my eyes and rub my head.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Lily adds after a moment. “That you didn’t wake up as Jenna, I mean.”

  I nod, but I can’t shake off my disturbed feeling. There’s an old Xindalu superstition about cats having nine lives. Is that how it works with a link? Except Jenna and I had only two and we’ve now used one up?

  “The person who tried to kill me thinks I took something she wants,” I say.

  Lily flinches. “Like what? It’s just an academy. Does she plan on stealing Master Yao’s medals of commendation or Mistress Song’s art supplies?”

  I hear the assassin’s venomous voice again. Where did you put it? Tell me, stupid girl!

  “She wanted something,” I say. “I think she was the same person who was controlling my mind the night I nearly stabbed you. I think the thing she wants belongs to Master Ning.”

  “If he has something that valuable, he wouldn’t be leaving it here unattended. He probably took it with him when he left the academy. I don’t understand why some Dikang agent would think you had it.”

  “Maybe she saw us going in and out of his pagoda.” A cold chill shivers up my spine. “That could put you in danger, Lily. She might come after you!”

  “I’ll be careful,” Lily says. She doesn’t look worried. “Both of us will. From now on we need to stick together.”

  She puts a hand on my arm, and I place my hand over hers.

  “We need to get rid of these things,” she says, nodding toward the sticky pile of befouled fabrics. “We need to get back in our beds before someone wakes and notices we’re missing.”

  “What if they’ve already noticed?”

  “We’ll tell them you were sick. It will explain why you’ve changed out of your night clothes.”

  I wish I was as good under pressure as Lily is. I wish I could come up with convincing lies.

  “You go back first,” she says, “while I hide these things. I’ll be back soon.”

  “What happened to ‘sticking together’?” I ask.

  “I don’t think she’s going to try anything else tonight. You probably rattled her when you rose from the dead.”

  Lily smiles. I try to laugh, but the noise coming from my mouth is a disgraceful imitation of laughter. I watch Lily wrap the stained towels around my ruined night clothes. She places the Dikang dagger on top o
f the bundle.

  “Hurry!” she urges. “Get back in your bed.”

  I head for the front entry, and she goes toward the back exit. I keep one hand pressed against my abdomen where the war fans are hidden.

  I’m not allowing anyone to kill me again. One death is enough to last me a lifetime.

  FORTY-FIVE

  四十五

  JENNA

  A dull ache lingers in my chest. The actual knife might have slipped through Jade’s ribs, but I still remember every excruciating moment of our shared pain. And when she fainted, both of us were plunged into a mindless coma. I don’t know about her “nine lives” theory—maybe it does work something like that—but for now our link remains.

  I saw every pint of spilled blood while she and Lily frantically mopped the shower room floor, and I still feel a little queasy remembering it. I wish I had Jade’s battle fans. Like her, I have no desire to experience another near death. I think we’ve had a gentle preview of the agony the Emperor has in store for us.

  Before coming to school, I tried to hide two of Mom’s steak knives in my pockets. They didn’t fit, of course, and, even if they had, there’s a high likelihood I would have stabbed myself the first time I tried to sit down. My best defense for the moment is to stay in public places. I don’t think the Emperor will come after me in front of witnesses. At least I hope he won’t.

  Mom must have the same idea. These days she waits in the car outside the school doors until she sees I’m safely inside. That protects me, but who’s going to watch out for her? What’s to stop him from getting her as she walks across her faculty parking lot?

  I shudder. I have to have more faith in God than that. He wouldn’t let that evil monster touch my mother. And yet He allows a lot of things to happen that I don’t really understand…

  The halls are already bustling with students when I head to my locker to stow my book bag. I seriously considered hiding our biggest kitchen knife in this bag, but the school conducts random locker checks and I’m not ready to risk expulsion. Maybe Derek will find me in the Quad at lunchtime and teach me a few more karate moves. I’ve been practicing the one he already showed me.