by Henry Lien
I think back to Suki whispering, “It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to look like it’s true.”
I go into the other stalls. Every single one of them is stocked with a thick stack of the paper dolls. She’s probably placed them in the girls’ bathrooms throughout the whole campus.
When I finally come out of the toilet, all the girls are kneeling on the pearl and looking at me.
“Well, hurry along,” says Sensei Madame Liao. “You’re the last one.”
It seems that while I was in the toilet, she tested the girls individually. In front of everyone.
Doi looks at me, expressionless, but Suki smiles her evil smile, her tongue poking into her cheek.
I face Sensei Madame Liao, ready to see what move I have to try to copy. She says, “Open-palm blossom foot single-toe jump.” She performs the move. I’ve never seen it before, but I’m relieved because it’s just a simple half spin with feet together, one skate extended farther than the other, and hands open for balance. She’s being easy on me.
“Use your stealthy powers!” says a girl. A giggle passes through the crowd.
The girl who interrupted me was not Suki. Has everyone else already seen the paper dolls?
“Silence!” cries Sensei Madame Liao. “Begin, Chen Peasprout!”
I attempt the blossom double jump, or whatever it is. As soon as I land, everyone bursts into laughter.
I must have failed on my very first move. A move that the other students have probably been doing since they were seven years old. Even worse, I thought I did it right. Are you supposed to land on both skates, not just one? I’m so ignorant of these moves; I don’t even know when I’m doing them wrong.
Class ends and the other girls sit, unscrew and snap the blades off their skates, and toss them into the trash bin. They take out new blades from packs of six and fasten them on their skates.
The amount of money that all those perfectly good blades they are throwing away cost could have fed our whole wu liu temple back in Shin for years. A memory of Nun Hou comes to mind, during the bad winter when I was eight, in the kitchen, scraping the grains left in the bowls when she thought no one was looking, after she had told me she wasn’t hungry and given me her rice.
It’s not just wasteful. It’s offensive. If being rich means skating through life so blindly, then I’m glad I grew up poor.
I wait until almost all the girls are gone and the rest aren’t looking. I paw through the bin to see if any of the blades will fit on my skates. The sockets connecting the blade to the boot are all differently shaped. I’d have to buy an entire new boot, and not just one but two, to match.
I look up to find that Sensei Madame Liao has been watching me. Heat flushes into my cheeks. So this is what it’s come to. Me, the greatest skater in Shin, picking through the trash of these Pearlian students. How stupid I was to think that I could find my way here, let alone achieve top ranking and get the lead in the Drift Season Pageant.
She skates to me and says, “There is much that you never learned.”
“I can learn all those moves before the second Motivation.”
“That’s impossible.”
Her words hit me like a stone fist.
She continues, “But you don’t need to learn the moves. You only need to learn how to copy what you see when you see it.”
“How is that any different?”
“Those birds that Sensei Madame Phoenix uses for her newspapers. They can sing the whole ‘Pearlian New Year’s Song.’ They can repeat all the words in sequence without understanding what the words mean. It’s like copying a sequence of logograms upside down, even if you can’t understand the words. You just have to learn to make your mind bend enough to hold these new forms.”
“How?”
“Chi.”
I nod to indicate my understanding, and Sensei Madame Liao skates away.
I have no idea what she means. Command of Chi is essential to wu liu, but how will it help me win the Motivation? Chi? Logograms? Birds memorizing “The Pearlian New Year’s Song”— Wait, that’s it! She’s talking about Memory Palace meditation!
I skate off to the Skybrary at the Conservatory of Literature to research it.
I learned about Memory Palace meditation during my studies, but I never had the chance to read a book like the Treatise on Chi Practice and the Visual Music of the Memory Palace that I found in the Skybrary. It must be a very advanced book because I had to execute two third-gate nightingale loops to reach the shelf where it was stored.
The book teaches how to turn information you want to remember into things such as songs, the layout of a house, silhouettes, and other patterns in your mind, in order to train your memory to memorize long sequences of details instantly. I need to practice these meditation techniques every free hour between now and the second Motivation.
That afternoon, I skate to the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness filled with hope. I’ve brought sheets of paper and a charcoal pencil. I’ll write a sequence of random numbers on one side and then, after meditating, see if I can reproduce it on the other side of the paper. Luckily, almost no one ever uses the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness.
I arrive and sit in one of the squares near the center of the eight rows of eight and begin to focus to start my Chi practice. Just as the gong in the clock pagoda begins to toll the hour before evenmeal, someone comes racing in.
Doi.
We both stiffen. She has not so much as looked at me since the horrible class with Sensei Madame Yao.
“What are you doing here?” she demands.
“I’m trying to meditate,” I reply. Who is she to be taking that tone?
“Meditate in your dormitory chamber then,” she says. “I need to use the squares.”
“There are sixty-three other—”
“I need all of them.”
“I got here first!”
She turns toward the clock pagoda as the gong finishes sounding the strike for the hour before evenmeal. Her face bunches with urgency and anger. She opens her mouth.
“Please,” she says. A softness comes into her face that reminds me that this is the sister of the boy who was kind to Cricket.
I shouldn’t have to, but I get up. However, I don’t leave entirely; I walk to one side of the square. I want to see why she needs the whole place to herself.
When she understands that I’m not going to leave the square while she does whatever she’s going to do, she begins to scowl but then covers it with a smile and a bow. She says. “Forgive me; you don’t have to leave, but could I please ask you to stand near the entrance to the square?”
I skate to the entrance. Doi stands with her back to me in the lower left corner of the grid. She stands there gathering her focus with her hands cupped in front of her as if about to receive a thrown ball. Her Chi practice must be very advanced, because she finds her focus also immediately. Maybe I can learn something from her.
She steps to the next square and stands for a moment, then moves to the next square. Sometimes she makes a cross with her skate in the sand of the square before moving on to the next square. She quickly proceeds through the eight columns of eight squares. When she is finished, she goes to the end farthest from the entrance where I stand and looks back for a moment at the pattern. She seems satisfied with what she sees. She kicks the frame, making the sand in the squares shudder and clearing the marks she made in some of the squares.
When she has completed this lucky times and is about to kick the frame again, we hear shouts of excitement from outside the square.
“There’s been a letter orb! From Shin!” It’s the girl with the honking voice. “It’s probably from the hostages! There’s going to be sooo much trouble!”
Suki will find some way to use this against me. I can’t let Doi see this affecting me, though, because I’d just look guilty. However, Doi seems more upset than I am. Is it because people are blaming her father for putting the mayor’s sons in this position by sending them to
Shin as goodwill ambassadors? Doi abruptly skates out of the square after Honking Girl.
I try to go back to practicing my Memory Palace meditation, but I’m too distracted to do any real Chi work before evenmeal. I’m about to kick the frame of the boxes to clear the squares of sand when I notice something. The pattern of squares that have a mark in them forms a strange picture. It looks like a box with ears and little feet. I draw it on the back of the paper that I brought to practice number memorization on. It looks like the form of a logogram, but unlike any I’ve ever seen. What could it mean? As I slip the paper back into my pocket, Doi comes racing back in. She frowns at the sand, then at me. She kicks the frame and clears the pattern from the squares.
This must be something related to preparation for the second Motivation. Some secret technique that she doesn’t want her rival to learn. That’s why she was so angry to find me here. But it seems like there was some time limit on it. I recall that certain wu liu maneuvers can only be done at a certain hour. Doi was pressed for time, so she performed it in front of me even though she clearly wasn’t happy about it.
I have no idea what it means. All I know is that somehow, this holds the secret to how I can make it through the second Motivation. And I’m going to find a way to make Doi teach it to me.
I know the key to convincing Doi is to present myself as an ally against Suki. But to do that, I need to find out why they hate each other so much, so I can decide the best way to insert myself between them. I need to find out what happened between them at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
In music class the next day, Sensei Madame Yao is demonstrating how to play a whole orchestra solo by using wu liu kicks to bounce beans off the strings of the instruments. Ping! Ping! Pah-Ping! The room fills with the sound of music.
As the class watches her, I skate up next to friendly Mole Girl and ask if she knows anything about Pearl Rehabilitative Colony, making sure I’m out of earshot of both Doi and Suki.
“That’s a horrible place!” says Mole Girl. “It’s a cram school penal colony that rich parents send their daughters to in order to make them shape up for the entrance exams for Pearl Famous—Ahh! There’s a bean in my nose!” She collapses to the ground, holding her nose.
Sensei Madame Yao stops the class and rushes over. As she helps Mole Girl to the Hall of Benevolent Healing, she commands, “Continue practicing on your own! Any students found slacking off will receive gong duty!”
“If they can’t get the bean out, she’ll probably suffocate. I heard of a second-year girl who died that way,” says Honking Girl, her eyes glimmering.
I hate gossips, but they can be good sources of information.
* * *
At midmeal, I sit next to Honking Girl and ask her if she knows anything about the history between Doi and Suki at this Pearl Colony place.
“Of course!” she says, her face lighting up. “I heard that they had to share a tiny cell together for years. Their captors forced them to cut parts off each other to prove their obedience. And the students were starved until they had to kill and eat each other to survive.”
That’s what I get for asking a gossip.
After midmeal, I go to the Hall of Benevolent Healing to check on Mole Girl. As well as get more information out of her.
“We discharged her after removing the bean,” says an old healer with a head as thin and angled as a folded paper figure. “It would have been interesting to learn if the obstruction affected the magnetization of the sinus bone, but Sensei Madame Yao wouldn’t let me remove the nose for study. Here. Feel how heavy the bean was.” She tries to drop it in my hand, but I pull away quickly. The bean sticks to her palm.
“No, thank you, Healer. Do you know where she is now?”
“I sent her to the Arch of Chi Retuning. Her Chi was terribly disturbed. I wanted to acquire her for further study, but Sensei Madame Yao can be so difficult.”
I skate to the Garden of Whispering Arches and find the Arch of Chi Retuning, but Mole Girl isn’t there. As I pass under it, I can feel the frequency humming from the arch resetting my Chi. Back home in Serenity Cliff, there was an old tree that the children called the Blame Tree. Whenever children scraped their knees or dropped a sweet in the dirt or had anything unlucky happen to them, they would kick the tree and feel strangely better. Until one day, the tree died. Passing under the arch makes me feel better in the same way.
I notice that the sound is strange here in the garden. Echoes don’t work the same. I read in the Pearlian guidebooks that if you clap your hands, it might echo once, twice, or never, or only after the count of eighty-eight beats, or after one year, depending on what sort of arch you’re standing under.
That’s why I don’t hear Hisashi skating here until after I see him. He’s on the far side of the false river of pearlsilk ribbons flowing under a whispering arch.
I raise my hand to wave to him, then hesitate. Has he heard about how his sister was humiliated by Sensei Madame Yao because of me? When Hisashi sees me, he smiles and gives a slight bow. Is his manner slightly colder than it was before?
Hisashi smiles again and bends to speak into the whispering arch, nodding to indicate that I should also lean in.
I bend near the base of the arch and hear his whispered message, carried over the arch as if he’s speaking next to my ear: “Gee-Hong went to take a nap.”
I whisper back into the arch, “Who?”
“No one you need to know about, apparently,” says Hisashi with a laugh. I don’t know what’s so funny, but I’m relieved that he’s laughing.
We skate atop the arch, but just as we meet in the middle, a terrible screeching of birds fills the air. We read the words being traced on the sky, standing side by side.
“Mayor’s. Sons. Send. Letter. Orb. Claiming. They. Are. Voluntary. Guests. Of. Empress. Dowager. Chiologists. Confirm. They. Hear. Blockage. In. Tone. Indicating. Words. Spoken. Against. Speakers’. Will. Buy. Pearl. Shining. Sun. News. To. Get. Whole. Story.”
“I don’t care if ten thousand Chiologists hear blockage in the skaters’ voices,” I cry. “Who knows why they might have spoken those words against their will? The Empress Dowager isn’t holding them as hostages. Your father sent Zan Kenji and Zan Aki because they were the two best New Deitsu Opera Company skaters. The Empress Dowager sent Cricket and me here in a cultural exchange between our two countries. We’re not spies. No one can possibly believe Suki’s allegation.”
“Peasprout, there is so much distrust right now,” Hisashi says, placing a hand on my shoulder and turning me away from the birds. “My father intended a goodwill gesture.” He leads us off the bridge and down through the path of whispering arches. “However, the government of Pearl believes that if New Deitsu doesn’t share with Shin the secret of where they get the pearl, the Empress Dowager will eventually invade and take our city apart, piece by piece, to build a pearl city of her own.”
“You don’t know that!” The sound of my words as we skate under a scalloped-shaped whispering arch vibrates in a sustained echo, as if my voice were being stretched on a torture rack and crying out with a voice of its own. “And, anyway, why can’t you share?”
“I’m not sure. There might not be enough to build and maintain two cities,” Hisashi says. “That’s not my father’s fault. But we Nius seem to get blamed a lot for things that aren’t our fault.”
He must have heard what happened to Doi over my soaps. Heat flushes up my whole head in shame for what his sister suffered for me.
“Your sister must hate me after what happened in Sensei Madame Yao’s class.” As I speak these words, we skate under another whispering arch that has an underside patterned with little indentations. They must capture very select sounds, as only one word of my sentence is whispered back in echo. “Me, me, me…”
He pauses but then says, “No, I’m sure she knows that whatever happened was Suki’s fault.”
Here’s
my chance to ask about the hatred between Doi and Suki!
“Yes, Suki clearly has some history with Doi,” I say quickly. “What happened between them at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters?”
“All the girls have to get their hair cut when they arrive there. On the first day, Doi helped the nuns cut off Suki’s hair. You can imagine how happy Suki was with Doi after that.”
“Is that why Suki and the other girls all have bobbed hair?”
“Yes.”
“How did Doi avoid it then? Her hair is like a waterfall. It couldn’t have grown back so quickly.”
I turn to him as we skate under another whispering arch. I see his mouth open and start to form words, then close, open, then close, but I hear nothing. Is this an arch that swallows sound? No. He wants to speak, but he doesn’t want to speak. Another secret.
I see that my question has made Hisashi uncomfortable. Maybe Doi and Hisashi get special treatment as the Chairman’s children. Whatever it is, he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Well, whatever the explanation, I’m glad,” I say. “If for no other reason because of how furious it must have made Suki.”
He smiles. I like it that I made him do that. He says, “Peasprout, sometimes appearances— My sister might not seem very— You’re not like anyone Doi—or I—have ever met, so if she acts confused … or I mean— And how Suki— Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. Just remember that every time something good happens to Doi or you, some part of Suki dies inside.”
“Good,” I say.
He smiles. How did I ever think that he smiled too much? His warmth is endless, like the sun’s.
“But even if Doi and I both beat Suki,” I say, “at some point, it’s going to be Doi against me. Only one of us can take first ranking and get the lead in the Drift Season Pageant.”
“Don’t worry about that until you take down Suki. Doi won’t.”
“Did she tell you that? I thought you avoid each other.”
