by Henry Lien
“Go,” says Doi from behind the shoji. “Before Meizi starts gossiping about us plotting something.”
“Who?”
“That girl. Why do you still not know anyone’s name here except for the top-ranking girls?”
“I know plenty of names.”
“Name them.”
“Suki. And Etsuko. And Mitsuko. And Chiriko. And Mariko.”
She says nothing, as if in victory.
“And Hisashi,” I continue.
Again, her maddening silence. Ten thousand years of stomach gas. She would rather be burned to death than be wrong.
“And Cricket,” I blurt like a fool. She makes me angry and say stupid things.
“And Hong-Wei and Masa!” I say. “Those second-year boys.”
“You mean Hong-Gee and Matsu.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No.”
“So now you know better than I do what I just said?”
Why does she have to win every argument?
“I came to Pearl to become a legend,” I continue. “Not to learn names of random people who no one knows anything about.”
What an irritating conversation. I came here to say thank you, and instead she’s intent on disagreeing with everything I say.
She says, “That knee is never going to last on that broken blade if the third Motivation requires any significant jumping. You’re going to lose and get injured.”
“Thank you. You always know the perfect thing to say.”
“You should get better at Chi healing. You’re pretty weak at it.”
“You should mind your own business.”
“And stop doing those ending flourishes on your moves,” she says. “No one here’s done those for fifty years.”
Why am I having this senseless argument with this impossible girl through a piece of paper? I turn from her shoji.
“Peasprout, remember the first Motivation?” Doi calls out. “Suki cheated and put something in the powder pit that turned into pebbles when it got wet. If she comes at you about the pearlflute, mention that to shut her up. She won’t want to get expelled.”
After some effort, I manage to stuff my annoyance down enough to say “Thank you.”
* * *
Doi’s warning comes back to me that evening, in Eastern Heaven Dining Hall. There is a serious chance that I could lose and be injured, or else I’ll have to allow my left skate to bear the load of all the landings, which could break the coil on that blade.
As soon as Supreme Sensei Master Jio is finished saying “Ahihahaha!” I already know that his next words will contain my doom.
“Sweet, little embryos, the first-year girls’ third Motivation will be … Vertical Battlefield!”
The same as the boys’ second Motivation. The Motivation that is composed almost entirely of jumping. Conducted on the roofs of the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice. An eight-story structure.
* * *
The next morning when we begin training for Vertical Battlefield, I notice all the other girls have switched to skate boots with reinforced impact absorbers. The other students have so many different combinations of blades and boots, for jumping, for precision, for performances, for formal ceremonies, for dancing, and even for drinking tea anemones.
I have only these two boots and these one and a half blades.
Some part of me wants to just forfeit this Motivation. Save my knee for the other Motivations that hopefully won’t be as hard on it. It would also make me feel less guilty for making Doi get disqualified.
What am I saying? My top two rivals are eliminated from this Motivation and I want to throw away my only chance to pull ahead of them? Nobody said that becoming a legend of wu liu was going to be easy. If I wanted easy, I could have stayed in Serenity Cliff.
I’m just going to have to find some way to strengthen my knee.
Sensei Madame Liao has begun to lead us in brief Chi practices before and after every wu liu class to warm up and cool down. After the warm-up Chi practice, I raise my hand.
“Venerable and mighty Sensei,” I ask, “are there techniques of Chi practice that strengthen joints?”
“All Chi practice can be focused to bring healing energy to a particular point on the body. But it requires a great amount of Chi.”
I raise my hand again. “How much would it require?”
“A lot,” Sensei Madame Liao says slowly. “It takes years of meditation practice to summon that magnitude of Chi energy. But it is possible to receive Chi energy sent from another person.”
I’d heard about this back in Shin, but since it never worked for me, I figured it must be just superstition. I sneak a look to see if anyone is laughing at my questions.
Sensei Madame Liao continues, “It doesn’t work for those with only weak relationships, though.”
Why is she looking at me?
“The closer the relationship between the sender and the receiver,” she says, “the stronger and faster the transfer of energy and the farther it can travel. It is called Chi entanglement.”
Why would I want to have my Chi entangled with somebody else’s? I don’t want to rely on anybody that much.
“If the relationship is close enough, two people who are Chi entangled can send Chi instantaneously, regardless of distance, and can understand when the sending is interrupted.”
I shoot my hand up a third time. “And if you don’t have such relationships?”
“It’s especially powerful between siblings. Especially twins.”
Nonsense; I tried it once with Cricket. He tried to send Chi energy to me and I felt nothing. I tried to send it to him and he said it gave him a sinus headache.
“Although,” she finishes, “the relationship might not help if either the sender or the receiver is somehow … blocked.”
That wasn’t much help. I guess I’ll just have to work on building muscle strength so my right knee can take the impact of the jumps.
Sensei Madame Liao teaches us moves that will help us leap most efficiently between the tiers of the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice, meaning that they give us a lot of vertical lift but with little wasted horizontal displacement. Everybody gasps when she demonstrates a riven crane split jump, but then we realize that it wasn’t done with a one-legged backward flip. It is a mock riven crane split jump and it is done with a backward flip and a half twist, which makes you land facing the opposite direction of how you started and therefore cancels out the jolt of the landing impact on the knee. Although it is far less beautiful than the authentic riven crane split jump.
I’m glad that there are moves that can spare my knee, but I still avoid doing the jump since it uses the placement of the liver for its center of gravity and thus can only be done on the right leg. I skate to a corner and pretend to be getting ready to do jumps instead of actually doing them like everyone else.
Chiriko and Etsuko are watching me. They and the other House of Flowering Blossoms girls have been doing their best to make up for Suki’s absence by taunting me whenever Sensei Madame Liao can’t see or hear. Chiriko and Etsuko look at each other, do a mock riven crane split jump in unison, and look at me. I can’t show any weakness. I look back at them and do a mock riven crane split jump in return. I land hard on my damaged right blade.
They unscrew and snap off their skate blades, which are perfectly undamaged, and toss them in the trash bin. They smirk at me, their eyes spiteful under their bangs. They screw on new blades and do two mock riven crane split jumps in rapid succession, the coils of the blades under their heels absorbing the impact. I do two of the jumps in rapid succession and land on my right skate with a double punch of force into my knee.
The girls again snap off their perfectly good blades, throw them in the trash, and put on new ones. They do three of the jumps in rapid succession and land balanced on their right skates, their left skates lifted high.
I swing my knee into the air and fling myself into three of the jumps in rapid succession, one, two, snap! My broken blade lands
wrong on the third jump and a pain shoots through my knee like a shaft of steel.
Everyone turns to look at me as Chiriko and Etsuko skate away, smiling with satisfaction.
My knee is twisted. I can feel the heat coming off it and see it already starting to swell with fluid. It’s going to be bad. Stupid me, why can I never resist taking their bait?
Sensei Madame Liao has me sit out the rest of the class. After the other students leave, she comes to me.
“When we were little, my younger sister and I had a game. I would think of an object. Starting in one corner, my sister would place her finger on a square of a chessboard in front of her. If she felt me sending a pulse of Chi energy to her at that moment, she would place a marker on that square. If not, she would leave it blank. The patterns of the marked and unmarked squares would form a picture.”
I understand the meaning of Sensei Madame Liao’s story, but there’s no way that Cricket can send me pulses of Chi energy to help heal my knee. I want to tell her that Cricket doesn’t have the capabilities of other boys. That he’s allergic to his own saliva. That he’s afraid of moths. But I don’t.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “Do not be so quick to judge deficiencies. Sometimes, they are just advantages that are interpreted incorrectly, like trying to read a logogram turned upside down. Your ignorance of wu liu moves that involve more than six steps, for example.”
“I’ve learned thirty-eight of those moves now, and my memory palace Chi practice is greatly improved.”
“I’m not criticizing you.” Sensei Madame Liao rests her hand gently on my shoulder. “There is a strength hidden inside your ability to glide on one step. You could cross five li in five steps. No one else here can do that.”
She makes it sound like I’m an innovator. It’s true that to preserve my skates, I learned to stretch each step like a Meijing opera singer can hold a note. I invented a technique to sling my center of gravity so that I whip forward in loops on one skate for a very long time. But I wasn’t trying to innovate. I was just trying to save money.
“How’s that going to help me in the third Motivation?”
“It’s not. But one day, the third Motivation will be over. And you will still have your skills.”
“It’s not a skill; it’s just a crutch. I don’t want to need a crutch.”
She looks at me as if she’s about to say something she wants me never to forget.
“At the time of the Great Leap of Shin,” she says, “the population of Pearl was five-sixths female, since so many men died in various wars against Shin over the years. This seemed a deficiency.”
My Chi seizes up at this. Any time a Pearlian brings up the Great Leap, it’s not to say nice things about Shinians.
“Before she fled to the island of Pearl to seek refuge, Little Pi Bao Gu was a courtesan in Shin, where her owners abused and scorned her for her childlike size. This also seemed a deficiency.”
So she appreciates that Little Pi Bao Gu came from Shin. What does that have to do with the deficiencies in my wu liu training?
“However,” she continues, “as a dancer, Little Pi Bao Gu learned that there are many things that require smallness, litheness, and balance more than brute strength. Martial arts and skating are two of them. So she combined these two things.”
I know. She took the “wu” from wushu to indicate that it was a martial art and the “liu” from liubing to indicate that it was descended from ice-skating.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “She invented a martial art that took advantage of how female bodies are different from male bodies so that the island of Pearl could turn five-sixths of the population into warriors rather than just rely on the small remaining male population. With that, she created the force that stopped Shin from invading Pearl.”
Where is all this leading?
She goes on. “And since then, everyone in Pearl honors Little Pi Bao Gu, the failed courtesan and refugee, as much for the lesson she taught them as for creating wu liu. Do you know what that lesson was?”
“What?”
“Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.”
* * *
As I unroll my bed that night and lie down to sleep, my heart is still touched by Sensei Madame Liao’s beautiful words.
I need to think of my deficiencies differently. And Cricket’s. Perhaps our deficiencies are truly just advantages that need to be read the right way. Perhaps there is a way he can learn to send me Chi healing. We should try that game that Sensei Madame Liao and her sister played with the chessboard when they—
I sit upright in my bed.
I need to find the sketch that I drew of the pattern that Doi made in the boxes at the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness.
What if she wasn’t just meditating? What if she was receiving pulses of Chi energy from somebody to make a picture?
I find the drawing and unroll it. I look at the black and white squares forming a picture of a box with ears and little feet.
I realize that it’s not a picture. It’s a logogram. I just couldn’t understand it because I was reading it upside down.
I turn it right-side up. My Chi goes cold.
It’s blocky but legible as zhi.
The ancient word for hostage.
Does Doi know something about the Empress Dowager’s plan? Is she connected to the Empress Dowager somehow?
Whom was she receiving pulses of Chi energy from?
Could she have been talking with Zan Kenji and Zan Aki, since they skate with New Deitsu Opera Company and their fathers know each other?
Or maybe hostage wasn’t referring to the mayor’s sons at all.
Maybe it was referring to me.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The only thing that I am certain of is that Doi was not responsible for the attack on the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice. Suki’s continued insistence that she told everyone this was going to happen makes it clear that the attack was part of her grand plan to use every weapon she can to get me expelled or arrested.
I’m just grateful that there’s no way that she could plausibly accuse Cricket of having the skills to cause the kind of damage we saw done to the pagoda. I should warn him never to talk to Suki, though.
The next morning, I look for Cricket after the morning assembly on the Principal Island of the academy. I don’t see him among the first-year boys headed to their literature class.
I find him backed up against a pillar covered in carvings of curling eels. A girl is standing in front of him, talking to him.
It’s Suki.
I pump my skates to reach them and swallow down the spikes of pain in my knee.
“Get away from him, you witch!”
She turns to me and smiles. “Cricket and I were just having a very interesting conversation. It seems that you weren’t the two best skaters in Shin.”
“How dare you?” I say. “I was the Peony-Level Brightstar and wu liu champion for all of Shui Shan Province five times before—”
“You might have somehow managed to win some village contests. But this one’s never won anything. So tell me, why would the Empress Dowager send him to represent Shin?”
She’s going after Cricket. He is my soft spot that she’s been looking for.
“And he’s done so well in the first two Motivations,” Suki continues. Cricket seems to crumble as he finally realizes his mistake. “Twenty-seventh in the last Motivation. Tied for last in the one before it. Two poor performances could be coincidence, but three is evidence. As soon as the third Motivation is done, I’m going back to Pearl Shining Sun with his miserable result. And with this.”
She reaches into her sleeve and pulls out her pearlflute, which she slaps against her palm like a weapon.
“It’s exactly like I said. You’re not really skaters. You’re just spies with enough basic skills to pass for skaters.”
What did Doi tell me to use against Suki if she came after me about—
That’s right! The thing that Suki put in the
powder pit at the first Motivation that turned into pebbles when the other girls got their socks wet.
I smile at her and say calmly, “Why do I make you so uncomfortable, Suki?”
“You wish.”
“You look very uncomfortable, like you’ve got a pebble in your sock.” I skate closer to her. “Don’t worry, all you have to do is turn it upside down, and whatever it is will be expelled.”
Suki’s face goes from sourness to confusion to rage.
“You don’t have any evidence!”
“One way to find out, right?”
“You wouldn’t risk me going to the newspaper.”
“Try me, Suki.”
She seethes and sputters, but all that she can finally say is “Infuriate me to death!”
I grab Cricket, and we skate away quickly. Once again, Doi has saved me from Suki.
* * *
Cricket has to do better at the third Motivation. Our safety depends on it now. My stomach clenches when I remember that the boys will be doing Links of Eternity, a pairs combat exercise where each boy must keep hold of at least one of his partner’s hands while performing moves.
Back home in Shin, Cricket only learned girls’ moves. He learned mostly jumps, spins, and evasions, not punches, chops, and tackles. The first and second Motivations only involved racing and jumping, but now he’s going to be doing combat against boys employing boys’ moves. There’s no way he’s going to survive, much less place well. He can’t ask the senseis for special tutoring. And what boy would be generous enough to spend time to teach a potential rival?
Hisashi’s kind face comes into my mind. I can’t expect him to choose to pair with Cricket. Hisashi’s ranked fifth. But I have to try to persuade him and explain why it’s so important that Cricket do well. I make up my mind to tell Hisashi about the ivory yin salts.
He’s never easy to find. It’s clear that he doesn’t like crowds. I look for him where there are no gatherings of students. He’s not at the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness. Maybe he knows that Doi meditates there, so he avoids it. He’s not at the edges of the Principal Island. There are only Shinian servant girls washing the shore with buckets and brushes where the sea laps at the pearl.
