by Henry Lien
And then Hisashi smiles in a friendly way and says, “Well, I suppose we should go back in and see how Yinmei’s doing.”
I’ve killed the moment with thinking. Ten thousand years of stomach gas.
Hisashi and I return to Yinmei’s futon-side.
Doi is sitting beside her, no longer doing Chi work on her. It’s no use.
I cup my hands and begin to channel my Chi into Yinmei’s energy points. I don’t know how much time passes, but I must fall into a deep meditative state because I feel the jolt associated only with coming out of such a state abruptly.
I look around. Hisashi peers at me with bafflement.
Doi regards me with a stew of emotions: gratitude, relief, but also hurt, jealousy.
In the center, propped on the futon, Yinmei blinks her long lashes at me.
“Thank you, Peasprout,” she says hoarsely.
I realize my Chi entangled with hers.
But how can I be the closest person to her here? I’m the one who’s been the most distrustful of her.
“Are you injured?” I ask.
“Not as seriously. Treading water apparently does not harm my heart and lungs like walking does. But may I have salt and cloth for my hands?”
Doi takes Yinmei’s clenched hands and uncurls her fingers.
A great strip on each palm has been rubbed bare of skin.
“What happened?” asks Doi.
Yinmei replies, “I did not use the drums to follow you because I did not want you to hear me and try to stop me. I did not think how poorly poles would serve as oars, even with my arm strength.”
Doi cries, “You could’ve died! Don’t you ever, ever do this to me again!”
“I am sorry, butterfly.”
“How far on the sea did you go?” I ask. “Please tell the truth.”
Yinmei hesitates, then says, “To the structure in the sea behind the Conservatory of Architecture. The one that you entered with salt.”
My Chi freezes as she says this.
“Did you see what we did inside?” I ask.
“No. When I arrived there, you were gone already. I heard the coiling water dragon’s roar, but it was many tens of li away.”
“Then how did you know how we entered the structure?”
“I scratched a handful of salt out of one of the soldiers and burned a hole through the pearl with it. But I did not go inside it.”
So she doesn’t know what the coiling water dragon is.
But now she knows that salt destroys the pearl.
Heavenly August Personage of Jade, if this girl isn’t who she says she is, if she isn’t here fleeing the Empress Dowager’s wrath, then we’re all in greater danger than ever. She could take this back to the Empress Dowager, who could threaten to melt our city with salt if we don’t share the secret of the pearl with her.
I look at Doi’s silent tears as she plucks splinters out of Yinmei’s scraped palm. Yinmei bears the pain without showing any of it on her face, but I can feel her Chi toss every time Doi’s fingers run over another splinter.
“Why did you follow us?” I ask.
“I wanted to see the coiling water dragon.”
“So badly that you would put yourself in danger?”
“Yes. Because I am like you, Chen Peasprout.”
I look at this girl before me, and quietly, I kneel and take Yinmei’s other palm.
“I don’t always understand why you do what you do, but you are Wu Yinmei, and no one is going to stop you from doing what you do. You’re just doing what you have to do,” I say as I gingerly begin taking out splinters.
You are not my enemy. Not any more than the coiling water dragon is.
And I am not yours.
And we are stronger together.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Cricket is busy with all that we learned after our discovery about the dragon. It changes everything. Now that we know it’s not actually a dragon, we abandon the idea of negotiating with it but we begin to consider how we can harness the power of a water cyclone. We also don’t have to worry about the Shinian soldiers capturing one. We don’t have to be afraid of going on the sea. Now that we can go on the sea, we can use the magnetization to turn our drumblades into the navy that Pearl doesn’t have.
But we still don’t know why the senseis were so intent on keeping us off the water in the first place. Clearly, they didn’t want us finding out that the coiling water dragon isn’t a dragon, but why did they install the coiling water dragons to keep us off the water in the first place? It’s obvious that the coiling water dragons are meant to prevent us from discovering something else in the water. Cricket thinks that it has everything to do with the “egg” that we saw it “lay.”
“Peasprout, close the door, please,” says Cricket as I squeeze into his dormitory chamber, which is littered with equipment on an afternoon after wu liu class.
“What have you got for us?” It’s only a little over six weeks left until the Third Annexation and we need all of that time to figure out what we have and how we can use it.
He whispers, “I think you need to see this first to decide what we share with anyone else. Because the terrible secret I’ve just discovered could destroy our world, whose fate now lies in our hands.”
“You sound like a promoter of a bad children’s opera, Cricket.”
His face sours with irritation. He lifts a hand wrapped in a fingerless kelp-leather glove and wipes the frosted bangs out of his eyes, one of which has a line of kohl stage makeup painted under it. He says, “My name’s Crick now, please.”
“So what did you find out about that slab of jelly egg we brought back?”
“Remember how I suspected that there’s something different about the seawater around Pearl that allows it to be magnetized? Well, that’s what the coiling water dragon is for!”
“What do you mean?”
Cricket hands me some sort of toy: a little disk of bark wood or thick paper with two holes near the center and twisted strings running through them, ending in finger loops. I know this game.
“Do you remember curly-whirly?” he says.
“Of course I do. I was champion of curly-whirly for all of Shui Shan Province twice by the age—”
“That’s what the coiling water dragon is! It’s a giant curly-whirly!”
He holds up a glass vial containing liquid. He says, “The curly-whirly acts as a centrifuge. When it spins, the heavier stuff goes out to the edges, and the lighter stuff is gathered in the middle. They’re using it to separate the seawater from the thing in the seawater.”
Cricket brushes glue onto the wooden disk and presses the vial against it. As it dries, he says, “The seawater is heavier than the thing in the seawater.”
He strings the curly-whirly onto my fingers and says, “Play it.” I tug the loops apart and then let the strings contract. The disk begins to turn with each pull and contraction. The wheel spins faster and faster until it’s a blur.
Cricket indicates for me to stop. He uncaps both ends of the vial. What I presume is seawater pours out one end. At the other end is a plug of something that looks like seawater, but Cricket has to puff into the vial to blow it out onto his palm. It stands there quivering. I touch it. The little clear cylinder is neither liquid nor solid. It’s just like the jelly egg that we cut the slice from.
He says, “This is a smaller sample of the substance that the dragon left behind. I think it’s some sort of sea mold that can be magnetized. They’re summoning the coiling water dragons to harvest it out of the sea.”
“But why do they want it?”
“Because of what happens when the substance dries and loses its magnetization. Look.”
Cricket places a little white sculpture in the shape of a sea turtle on my palm. I almost drop it, as it’s far heavier than it looks.
“Put it in that bowl of seawater,” he says.
I drop the sculpture into the bowl. As soon as it touches the water, it
explodes out larger than an actual sea turtle with such speed that it sends the bowl clattering across the floor. Just like the dragon-phoenix boat Doi gave me last year. Just like the trinket with the criminal inside. Just like the pavilion that Hisashi hid us in.
Heavenly August Personage of Jade.
“So this is where the pearl comes from!” I cry. “This jelly substance becomes the pearl when it dries!”
“Yes.”
“And they use the coiling water dragons to harvest it from the sea, by separating it from the seawater.”
“I wish I could have seen it doing that,” sighs Cricket.
“So New Deitsu must have been summoning coiling water dragons all this time out at sea to harvest the pearl,” I say. “And they staged the coiling water dragon attack to keep students and everyone else from going out on the water.”
“Yes. The coiling water dragon is both the method they use to harvest the pearl and the threat they used to keep us from learning that! It’s a self-protecting secret!”
“But why now?” I ask.
“I think it’s because of Yinmei,” answers Cricket. “All this started after she arrived. They must be even more afraid of the secret of the pearl leaking out now that we have the Empress Dowager’s heir and there is the real threat of Shin invading.”
“I still don’t understand what role the magnetization plays,” I say.
“They need to magnetize the sea to form a coiling water dragon in the first place. From what you described to me, the Repellers stimulate some natural motion between the yin particles and the yang in either the seawater or the pearl, which assists the churning motion. I also suspect that the nest is made of some specially treated pearl that further amplifies this effect.”
“So why can’t the city be magnetized? Does the pearl die after it dries?”
“No, it’s still alive, in some way. That’s why it can be destroyed by salt that is a higher concentration than the saltiness of the sea. I think there are three forms of the pearl. The raw state, which is the jelly that you saw pulled out of the ocean. Then the dry state, which is the little trinket. You can carve the dry pearl into any shape, such as a building. Then you strike it all over, very hard, like we did with the pearlstarch in architecture class. After that, it will lose its susceptibility to magnetization but will retain the shape of the carving and the hardness, even when it’s rehydrated back to full size by seawater, which is the third and finished state.”
So this is what the senseis and New Deitsu have been trying so hard to keep us from learning all year, even as they encouraged us to invent strategies for defense of Pearl against Shinian invasion.
I understand now their unease about this information getting out. Anyone who learns this would know how to steal the pearl from us. It’s just lying there in the water.
Anyone who wants it would understand why there’s no point in negotiating for Pearl to share it. We don’t make it; we harvest it. And like with any natural thing, there’s probably only so much of it in the sea at any one time.
We can’t let Shin know about this. They’ll invade and steal it all, like they tried to do with our bamboo during the Bamboo Invasion after they used up their own.
The Empress Dowager would do anything for this information. And the senseis were even more frightened of the secret getting back to the Empress Dowager after Yinmei fled to Pearl. That’s why they frightened the students into staying off the water.
Now that I know the secret of the pearl, I understand just how vulnerable we’ve been all this time. Pearl is like a wealthy lord whose gold grows inside magical peaches in his orchard. And the only thing stopping thieves and murderers from stripping him of his riches is the fact that they don’t know the gold is there for the plucking. No wonder New Deitsu and the senseis and all the authorities in Pearl are so nervous. However, knowing this doesn’t give me any comfort. It only makes me realize how likely they are to take extreme measures to keep the secret.
Unless we can find a way to use it to prove our value and loyalty, knowing the secret of the pearl only puts Cricket and me in even more danger. I say to Cricket quietly, “Don’t share with anyone what you’ve discovered yet. This is dangerous to know.”
Cricket says, “I’m not telling anyone until you instruct me to. You know when it’s the right time to share information. You’re the captain.”
I might be the captain, but I’d be a better one if I had even half the tact and kindness he has.
“Thank you,” I say, “Crick.”
* * *
What the senseis share with us about the Third Annexation confirms everything that Cricket—I mean Crick … it’s going be hard to remember to call him that—figured out. We are told that the Third Annexation will test our strategies for defense against bombardment. If the Shinian forces fail at breaching our perimeter or invading our cities, they can retreat to the sea and bomb us from afar. Why are they telling us this five weeks before the Third Annexation? We’ve already lost seven weeks since the Second Annexation, time we could have spent working on this. Are they just making this up as they go along?
Third-year students will have skiffs on the water, firing projectiles at all the battlebands on the Principal Island, who will demonstrate ways to both defend against and neutralize the bombardiers. There is a timer, though.
There’s no wind during the Season of Drifts, which is why we need the great propelling fans to suck the flakes floating up from the pearl out to sea so that they don’t impede visibility and get into everyone’s clothes, food, and eyes. However, the Third Annexation is scheduled on a special day. At sunset on one day each year during the twelfth month, wind comes blowing out furiously to the west for three hours. They call it the Western Belch. We will all be unbalanced by the wind, and worse, all projectiles shot at us from the east will travel with extreme speed, making them nearly impossible to dodge. So we must plan on scoring as many points as possible against the bombardiers before the edge of the sun touches the sea and chaos reigns.
I try to hide the contempt from my face when the senseis tell us that they have signed an addendum to the contract with the coiling water dragons that allows the students to enter the water on the day of the Third Annexation. As long as nobody goes beyond the Conservatory of Architecture, of course.
How convenient.
The inability of other students to see through their ruse baffles me. I guess that the senseis achieved their goal of frightening the students with the attack on Eastern Heaven Dining Hall.
It makes our task easy, though. We don’t say anything to the senseis about what we have learned. For one thing, we were violating curfew and I was stepping beyond the borders of the campus of Pearl Famous, jeopardizing my sanctuary status. Further, we want to save up this information to use to our advantage at the Third Annexation. While all the other battlebands will struggle on the shore to shield against the bombardiers, we can magnetize the sea and go after them directly on our drumblades. One swipe unleashed by Crick’s and Yinmei’s drumsongs will flip a skiff over. Further, the magnets we used in class might not be strong enough to pull the nails out of a Shinian ship, but Crick said that they might work on the skiffs.
I know I’m skating dangerously close to revealing what we know by magnetizing the sea. But if we use it, we’ll take first place at all three Annexations and I’ll secure my safety. Further, our use of the drumblade on a magnetized sea and possibly pulling the nails out of ships are undeniably powerful tactics that Pearl can employ against Shinian invasion. It gives Pearl the navy it needs but doesn’t have. Nobody will be able to argue that I’m not valuable to Pearl when they see my battleband drumming across the sea and using music to take down a fleet of bombardiers.
* * *
The day before the Third Annexation, after morningmeal, Sensei Madame Liao skates to me. She takes me by the arm, which alarms me.
“Peasprout,” she whispers, “please come to the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues at White Hour.”
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“What is this about, Sensei?” I’m still angry at her for being no help at all this entire year. For not telling me the truth about the coiling water dragon.
She pours her Chi into me through that hand on my arm and says softly, desperately, “Peasprout, this is important. Please come, and tell no one.”
That afternoon, I arrive at the Hall of the Eight Precious Virtues. I slide the doors closed behind me. All thirteen senseis stand in the central atrium in a crescent formation except for Sensei Master General Moon Tzu, who snores softly in his bladechair, the tails of his mustache curled like kittens in his lap.
“What’s going on?” I ask. I look at Sensei Madame Liao but she avoids my gaze.
Supreme Sensei Master Jio stands before me, a letter orb in one hand, the other wielding a sword. He bellows in a strangely resonant tone, “Chen Peasprout! We have received a letter orb from the Empress Dowager. She has offered immunity to you and to Pearl Famous if we serve as a base for her soldiers to lead a secret coup to overthrow the government of Pearl. We have accepted.
“Are you with us, or are you against us?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-LUCKY
I am so stunned that I just gape at them silently.
If this is true, then he might dispose of me if I refuse so that I can’t report their treasonous plot to help Shin.
But what if this isn’t true, and they’re just testing my loyalty to Pearl?
Without thinking, I blurt out, “I’m not helping you.”
Supreme Sensei Master Jio nods sternly and raises the sword. I back away as he points it at me. “Then you shall die, wretched girl, so that you cannot betray our treacherous plot to the—oh, ahihahaha, I cannot do this! This is such silly dialogue, Sensei Madame Yao. I told you I would not be able to keep a straight face. You should have let Sensei Master Ram write it.”
