by Henry Lien
“Then I saw eighteen workers carry that palanquin to the site. They set down something small, the size of a skate. They blasted it with water from the sea pumped through a hose. Then there was a great crack and suddenly, the temple was there! I could feel the force against my back. It pushed the air so hard that everyone had to take a step to balance. It was so fast, Peasprout!”
“Cricket, you fool!”
“I haven’t done anything wrong! I didn’t face northeast.”
“How do you think it’s going to look if people find out that you watched how the temple was rebuilt? Suki’s going to say that the Empress Dowager sent me here to destroy the structures and that your job was to watch how they were being rebuilt to learn the secret of the pearl!”
“But we didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter! You have no idea how much danger we’re in right now because of your stupid fascination with architecture. All I’ve done to keep us safe, and you just skate right over it, like a worthless, ignorant Shinian peasant!”
Cricket is silent, his chin buried in his bony chest. At last, he speaks. “Peabird, don’t say I’m worthless.”
“Stop with the baby talk!”
“I’m going to win the sculpture competition and—”
“Enough about architecture!”
I have to keep him safe. I reach out and pat roughly all over his body. He shrinks from my touch. He hates when anyone touches him, because he’s ashamed of his body, and I understand why. His limbs are as skinny as a fawn’s. Every hard angle that I feel poking out of his rickety body stabs into my heart.
“Where is it?” I demand.
“You can’t have it! It’s mine!”
I realize that he only has courage to say this to me because it’s not here on his person. I turn and skate as hard as I can toward the dormitories.
“Wait, Peasprout!” he cries, skating after me. He almost catches me because I’m slowed by my ruined skate blades, but I arrive at his dormitory chamber first.
He has so little, but everything is arranged with such care. The little cloth adorned with images of blue turtles that our mother used to wash his face when he was a baby is folded crisply into the shape of a blossom and placed on his pillow. The sight of that thin rag from Mother turned by his little hands into a thing of fineness cuts me.
But I can’t hesitate now. I rummage through his things.
“Peasprout, please!” pleads Cricket, arriving breathless at the door.
I find it hidden behind the roll of his futon, gently wrapped in his sleeping garments. His entry for the architecture contest is a sculpture in miniature of the Temple of Heroes of Superlative Character. The likeness is remarkable. The detail is so fine that I can see through the arch of the doorway the individual hairs that he’s carved on the bare arm of Lim Tian-Tai. And it’s not even completed. It’s astonishing.
“Please, Peasprout!”
He looks up at me with those shining, frightened eyes.
I look at this work in my hand into which he’s poured his whole heart.
I can’t do this.
“Peasprout, I’ve spent over a hundred hours on it!”
I have to cut him down to stand him up. For his own good. For his own safety.
I know I have to do what I think I can’t do.
I drop the sculpture to the floor, lift my skate, and stamp my blade down on it, slicing it in two.
I chop the pieces with my blade, ten, twenty, thirty times until everything is slivers and powder.
I push past Cricket and skate out of his dormitory chamber. I wait for the howls but hear only silence.
My little Cricket.
I cover my mouth with my hands to seal in the sobs as I skate away so quickly that the wind shearing against my face sweeps a shimmer of tears in the air behind me.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Peasprout, focus.
I can’t think about Cricket. Or Suki. Or the Chairman. Everything depends on getting the wine. If only Hisashi had agreed to help me. I’m so hurt that he wouldn’t—
Focus.
I hop off the rails on the city side. The sun has risen and the city is waking up. I have to make my way back toward the markets near where we first disembarked from Shin.
I skate past great ceremonial gates, plazas terraced into the sides of hills of the pearl, gazebos perched atop outcrops, and cupolas carved so exquisitely that they look like lace brocades. There are shops and teahouses atop impossibly delicate arches. The sides of great public edifices bulge with rounded balconies in which I see officials at their desks.
Everywhere, there are fragile half-moon bridges spanning sculpted rivers. Many are topped with tiny tea pavilions wide enough to seat only two. The half-moons reflect in the water to form perfect moons everywhere. The whole city shimmers with the rivulets and waterfalls that spill from every structure.
The light from all the whiteness is starting to sting my eyes as the sun climbs in the sky. Ten thousand years of stomach gas, I forgot my smoked spectacles. I’ll have to hurry before it becomes so bright that it’ll be impossible for me to navigate through the city.
I arrive at a central market square ringed with tented kiosks opening for business. I have seven taels that I’ve saved up over the years doing wu liu performances at the street market. It should be plenty of money to buy a little wine. I find a few merchants carrying wine, but no one will sell it to a luckyteen-year-old girl. They ask me if my parents know where I am. One of them even threatens to report me to the police.
“You look for buy wine?”
I turn and see an old woman. I instantly recognize her accent as Shinian. She has a mole on her face the size of a fat tick. Three wiry hairs as long as my forearm sprout out of the mole.
“I make you best price!” she says in her broken Pearlian.
She chews betel nut. She blows the contents of her nostril onto the pearl. She lifts an earthen wine vessel.
“How much?” I ask.
“Two tael.” She looks me up and down and adds in perfect Shinian, “You’re a long way from home, young miss.”
How can she know I’m from Shin? There’s nothing Shinian in my speech, dress, or skating.
“I’ll take it,” I answer in perfect Pearlian.
The merchant sneers, switching back to her broken Pearlian. “You like speak Pearlian so much, we speak Pearlian. You think Pearl so fine and high. Don’t trust them. They love lie. They lie so much.”
I take out my small purse and count my seven taels.
When she sees the money, she says, “You look buy anything else? Betel nut? Sinkweed?” She looks at me harder, then recognition fills her face. “You Brightstar skater from Shin. You girl in Pearl Shining Sun newspaper.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She looks around to see if anyone can hear her. “You like buy nice salt?”
I’m about to wave her off when I think of Cricket and how little he seems to eat these days. It must be because of the lack of salt in the dining-hall food. If I could just get him a little salt, maybe he’d understand that I’m always thinking of him, no matter how my actions must seem sometimes.
“Pearlian so scare of salt. From children time they teach should very be scare of salt. They put little salt in children eye. Teach them salt terrible. Salt burn. Salt eat like fire.”
“How much is the salt?”
“Two tael one cup.”
Merchants back home in Shui Shan sold a whole bowl of salt for one tael. But what is there to spend my money on, anyway? Seven taels wouldn’t be enough to buy even one skate blade.
I drop lucky taels into her hand.
“Where you cup?”
“I don’t have a cup.”
“I sell you cup.” She lifts a rough, dented vessel. “Three tael.”
“Two taels for salt, and one tael for an old cup?”
“No. Three tael for cup. Two tael for salt. Two tael for wi
ne. Seven tael total.”
“I’ll go buy my own cup.”
“No. You buy salt in my cup or no sell salt. Or wine. And I call police.”
At this point, other people and merchants are beginning to watch us, so I relent again and pay this vile creature her seven taels.
“Pearlian no use salt,” she says. “You Shinian. You use salt. You burn all down.” Hatred fills her face, but it’s not for me. She’s not even looking at me. She’s looking at this city of Pearlians circling us two villagers from Shin.
I tie the wine with a sash around my waist, take the cup of salt, and leave her, but her words follow me.
I hear a voice, and by the time I hear “That’s the girl!” I’m already performing the single-toe fire dolphin flip. I land, ready to meet them, with one hand pulled behind me holding the cup of salt and the other extended toward them like a blade.
It’s the two boys who harassed Cricket and me when we first arrived from Shin. From Number-One Best Discount Noodle Academy or whatever it’s called.
“You made us smell like stinky tofu for two weeks!” says the square-shaped boy. “We almost got kicked out because of you!”
“We weren’t allowed to serve customers on the floor because of you,” says the slimmer boy. “You made us late with our tuition.”
They’re vile boys. But they’re poor. They work to pay for their wu liu schooling. I used to be them. I could soon be them, if I don’t get to Chingu in time. Thus, I hold back.
“What’re you doing outside of Pearl Famous?” says the square-shaped boy. “A little shopping, neh?”
Together, they lunge forward. My response is slowed by my jagged skate blades and the glare in my unprotected eyes. I block one boy, but the other one snatches my cup of salt. Ten thousand years of stomach gas!
“What is this?” says the square-shaped boy. He sticks his finger into the salt.
“Don’t touch it!” I cry.
He grins at me, deliberately stirs his fingers around in the salt, and wipes it on his tongue. When he tastes the flavor, his eyes widen. He spits and gapes at me.
“Where did you get this?” he asks.
“Give it back!”
“We should report you!”
They leap onto the edges of one of the open chutes that carry the cargo sledges and speed deep into the harborside marketplace.
I’ll be arrested for illegally buying wine and salt! I pump my skates hard and chase after them.
These boys aren’t academy-level skaters. I quickly catch them on a stretch of the chute high above a busy street. When they see that they can’t outskate me, they turn and come at me with not just chops and knees but open blades. They hop and flip back and forth between the thin edges of the chute, their moves made inaccurate by their fury. I have to be careful here. I don’t want them to strike me, but I also don’t want them to spill my cup of salt for Cricket.
I block each of their strikes successfully, but I fail to disarm them. They should be no match for me, but the brightness of the white city stings my unshielded eyes and my blades make my steps uneven.
I see how to win. We’re high above the city on a chute. My opponents can only balance on its left edge or its right edge. And they can only be behind me or in front of me.
I don’t need my eyes. I close them and let the sound of the boys’ skates and hands cutting through the air show me where they are. Their reflexes are mediocre. Within five moves, I’ve sliced the straps from their skates and snatched the cup of salt back from the boys.
As they fall out of their skates and begin plummeting to the pearl below, I feel the square-shaped boy’s unskated foot kick the cup of salt out of my hands. I open my eyes to see the salt shoot out of the cup and scatter in the chute behind me.
The cup lands on top of the salt. Then it disappears.
I scrape to a stop. Below me, the boys bounce as they hit the pearl on their socks, then continue shouting insults at me. I grab their skates from the chute and fling them in opposite directions as hard as I can.
I skate back to where the salt and the cup were.
There’s a hole in the pearl of the chute. Through it, I squint and see the city street below. The faint sparkle of my metal cup against the whiteness down there catches my attention.
The edges of the hole are sending up tendrils of vapor. It looks like flesh that has been turned to liquid and healed over in smooth pink scars. It looks just like the damage done to the academy buildings.
Salt!
It eats through the pearl!
That’s how Suki’s been doing it. She must have placed great blocks of salt on the buildings. Where did she get it? Suki has plenty of money, but salt’s not just expensive, it’s forbidden.
It’s like plants that die if the water is too salty or not salty enough. Or like the rice stalks that were killed when the fields in Pearl became salted after the Great Leap. Is the pearl some strange giant vegetable, like bamboo?
That must be why Pearlians don’t use salt in their food and why they teach their children to fear salt. The pearl can’t burn, but salt could destroy their whole city like fire could destroy other cities.
With this information, and Chingu’s oracle, I’m going to prove that Suki caused the destruction and finally end her hold over me. I just have to get back into my dormitory chamber without being seen.
Luckily, it’s still midday, so the whole academy is sleeping. As I ride the final stretch of the gondola rails back to the campus, I skate through a tumbling cloud enveloping the path.
I come out and scrape to a stop at the shore of the Principal Island.
In front of me, under the Gate of Complete Centrality and Perfect Uprightness, are all the senseis.
They have their backs to me.
They’re carrying someone up the incline leading past the Gallery of Paragons of Honor toward the Hall of Benevolent Healing.
At the sound of my skates skidding on the gondola rail, Sensei Madame Yao turns and sees me.
“Chen Peasprout, what are you doing violating curfew?”
She pushes the sleeves of her robe up above her muscled forearms and pulls me off the rail. Her fingers embed in my arm and haul me up the incline.
“Sensei, I can explain! I was just running an errand—”
She plucks the vessel of wine from my sash, smells it, and fumes.
As she yanks me past, I look to see whom the other senseis are carrying.
It’s a boy with eyebrows as thick as stage makeup, dressed in what used to be a fine embroidered robe. He’s older. Not a student. He’s dressed like a professional Pearlian opera company performer. I realize I recognize him from somewhere. But he’s not wearing skates. What happened to his skates?
I turn back and look again.
Something’s wrong with him.
Where are his feet?
The ends of the boy’s legs are bundled in pink silk half the length of feet.
They’re exactly the size and shape of lotus blossoms, bound tightly shut.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sensei Madame Yao takes me to the nearest structure, the Gallery of Paragons of Honor. She pushes me onto a bench in the middle of the hall and says, “Don’t you dare step outside until we come back for you.”
The portraits of the academy’s paragons of honor stare down at me. All the first-ranked skaters in academy history. All the past leads in the Drift Season Pageant. All the graduates of Pearl Famous who died in the Bamboo Invasion and other wars against Shin.
“Dyun Bee-Chyin. Died Valiantly in Battle Defending Pearl, Bamboo Invasion, Second Year.”
“Lao Ying-Lian. Died Valiantly in Battle Defending Pearl, Bamboo Invasion, Second Year.”
They didn’t even get to graduate. Their young faces stare blankly ahead, unaware that I’m here.
I remember now where I’ve seen the boy that the senseis were carrying, the boy with the bound feet. I look for his name and find it. His eyebrows weren’t stage
makeup, as his portrait has them as well.
“Zan Kenji. Wu Liu First Ranking, First and Third Years; New Deitsu Opera Company First Recruit.”
He thought he was going to Shin as a goodwill ambassador. Instead, he went there as a hostage and came back as a sacrifice. All those years of training. All that work and talent and dedication. One of the greatest living skaters in Pearl. He’s never going to skate again. He’ll barely even be able to walk.
The Empress Dowager did this to him.
And this is just a warning.
She still has the other performer, Aki. Not a performer. A hostage.
If binding Kenji’s feet doesn’t get her the pearl, what’s she going to do to his little brother until she gets it?
And now that she’s mutilated Kenji, what are the Pearlians going to do to me and my little brother? We’re just two children from Shin. Just because she chose me as the Peony-Level Brightstar doesn’t mean we approve of the Empress Dowager’s actions.
We didn’t choose the Empress Dowager as our ruler any more than people choose for winter to be cold. But I don’t know if Pearlians would understand this because they elect their leaders. Of all the strange privileges they have here, this is the strangest of them all.
I realize that the Empress Dowager sent Cricket and me here in exchange, even though she was already planning to use Kenji and Aki as hostages. She never cared what might happen to Cricket and me. She sent us right into the mouth of the tiger. All this time, some part of me wanted to believe that no matter what the Chairman or Suki or Pearl Shining Sun threatened, the Empress Dowager would use her power to protect us. Now I know that I’m truly on my own.
The door slides open. It’s Doi.
“My father is on his way here,” she says, closing the door. “I’m going to try to talk to him.”
“I know how Suki destroyed the buildings! With salt! It melts the pearl!”
“How did you find that out?”
“I went into the city to buy wine for Chingu, and I bought some salt and it spilled.”
“I see.” Doi’s expression is unreadable. “Peasprout, don’t say anything about that to my father.”
