Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  Sword in hand, Bao Ngoc went to get her younger sister.

  “Come on,” she said. She’d asked around; she’d tried to tell the aunts; but they’d smiled and patted her head, and told her to worry about her games and her toys.

  Bao Ngoc couldn’t afford to be a child anymore.

  “What’s wrong?” Chau asked.

  “We need better charms.”

  Chau didn’t say anything until they reached the outskirts of the camp, when the tents became frayed and old, and the only living things on the muddy streets were mangy dogs foraging in refuse heaps. “Big’sis . . .”

  Bao Ngoc kept tugging at Chau’s sleeve. Her other hand was wrapped around the hilt of the sword, ready to draw at the first hint of trouble. “It’s all right. Just a few more steps, I promise.”

  She thought of the new patients in the infirmary: the ones who hadn’t “worked out,” the ones the Federation government wanted to send back into the hell that the Khanh nation had become. The way they sat hunched on the sides of the beds, folded tight upon themselves, faces hidden behind pale and skeletal arms, all bones, all translucent skin. The way they jerked from time to time, to no rhythm or noise that Bao Ngoc could hear. They must have had charms and amulets too; and yet that didn’t protect them, didn’t prevent them from falling to the ghosts.

  She and her sister would make a home in the Federation. And if that meant calling on witches and black magic, then so be it. Bao Ngoc had learned her lessons, not from classics or stories, but from dust and smoke and bombed cities.

  Sometimes, you needed the dark to defend against the dark.

  Now

  It’s early morning and dark, and the trains are filled with the night shift: immigrant workers from different countries, not only the Khanh nation but dozens of other places. They sit tired and hunched in their seats, fingering necklaces and bracelets—the charms Bao Ngoc has learned to tell apart from ordinary jewelry, strong enchantments paid in blood and dark magic—the only defense against the ghosts.

  The trains are full of the dead. Young people holding out the bloodied knives that have killed them, older men clutching their hearts grown enormous in their chests, bodies with missing arms, with missing legs, with heads smashed open like ripe fruit: shambling, almost inhuman monstrosities smelling of charred flesh, with the straight line of the third rail burned into torsos and palms like a criminal’s brand.

  Bao Ngoc finds herself a quiet corner, and sits with her bag on her knees, not hunched, not tired, merely watchful. Her hand itches, as if she could draw the sword from her chest and use it to slay ghosts. As if this would change anything, do anything more than remove a few dead souls among a sea of them. As the train follows the curves of the track to the witch’s home—past metal and glass towers that pierce the heavens like shining spears, large limestone townhouses with wrought-iron balconies—into the poorer areas of the city, where the towers are larger and duller, clothes hanging like flags from dusty, narrow windows—Bao Ngoc rests her head against the window, and tries to sleep.

  She dreams of Chau, pushing the sword into her own chest in the witch’s tent, stabbing herself to take it in rather than swallowing it, unafraid of blood or pain.

  And then the dream shifts and stretches, and Bao Ngoc is back home. She dreams of her family’s house in the city of An Ky Lan: of apricot flower garlands in streets filled with the clash of gongs and cymbals, of Mother’s hands and the smell of garlic and fish sauce in the kitchen, of running shrieking into a muddy courtyard and smelling the churning earth in the wake of the monsoon’s passage. It was a short, doomed time. Adults remember the storm gathering, remember making plans to find shelter and safety, but she was a child. Bao Ngoc remembers long golden afternoons; the soft noise of the sea, the taste of soft-shelled crabs, flooding her mouth with salt and sweetness.

  Gone. All gone now, bombed into ruins and shards: the aunties that had been chatting at table just a moment ago buried under rubble, the courtyard erupting into a maelstrom of debris and wounding shards, Chau screaming as Bao Ngoc dragged her, arms stinging and bleeding, into the shelter of the reception room . . .

  Gone.

  The sword wakes Bao Ngoc up. It’s burning within her. A ghost is sitting on her chest: an old woman with skin as dark as ink and bloody scratches on her neck, glaring at Bao Ngoc and whispering words the sword keeps cutting into shreds. Be good be grateful be happy. Bao Ngoc extends hands, reflexively. She’s been talking in Khanh, mouthing the old prayers, the appeals to gods and ancestors whose temples and graves are now ashes in a burned city.

  She stands up, shaking. She’s in Ashford, at the heart of the Federation. She’s with Chau, with Raoul. There are no apricot garlands; no fruit-laden trees, no dragon dances. She pushes. It’s like walking through shattered glass, the sword flaring into unbearable sharpness within her as the old woman’s ghost fades into nothingness. As she walks off the train, she brushes past a middle-aged man: one of the living, who glares at her as her elbow digs into his side. She mouths an apology, all she can manage with the exhaustion.

  Bao Ngoc doesn’t remember making it through the station. Everything hurts. Her legs are shaking—her hands feel like they’ve been stabbed with pins, again and again—and the ghost’s words are still there, running parallel to old prayers she can barely hold on to. Outside, on the street, Bao Ngoc leans on one of the barriers of a verdant park, catching her breath.

  It will pass. It always does. There is always a price to pay, always sacrifices to make.

  The address the witch gave Bao Ngoc is in one of the high-rise buildings: a city within a city where people walk hunched and quiet, where ghosts congregate thick and angry, a wall of pressure that would send Bao Ngoc to her knees, if she didn’t have the sword. She walks through them—a faint pain in her chest, nothing that requires a full exorcism—and moves on.

  The apartment’s door is open: The place is full of people. It looks like a party. For a fraction of a second, Bao Ngoc thinks she’s got the wrong address, but then one of the numerous aunties clustered in the small kitchen spies her. “I’m Second Aunt. You’re here for Auntie Oanh? Come on in.”

  Something is wrong inside. And then Bao Ngoc realizes, as the auntie holds out a plate filled with shrimp cakes, that there are no ghosts—only silence, and yet the kitchen smells of rice, and garlic—and the sword doesn’t hurt, doesn’t burn anymore.

  Something Bao Ngoc didn’t know she had in her chest loosens. It feels like being able to breathe after decades of damaged lungs. The aunties speak in low, measured voices: a conversation about the neighborhood and people Bao Ngoc doesn’t know. Two of them are watching the contents of a frying pan like hawks, while others sip cups of tea. Bao Ngoc finds herself with a dumpling and some tea, and effortlessly included in one of the small groups as if nothing were wrong.

  “Auntie Oanh is running late, I’m afraid. She’s got a difficult customer at the moment,” Second Aunt says. “Some people wait too long to get their charms.”

  Bao Ngoc remembers the witch’s tent, back in the camps. Small and cramped, and deserted. Even the children gave it a wide berth, and only wild dogs and ravens foraged in the refuse heap. “I—” She struggles to speak, unsure of what she can say. “I didn’t expect there would be so many people.”

  Second Aunt looks at Bao Ngoc, long and measured. “You met Auntie Oanh in the camps, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Bao Ngoc remembers drawing Chau behind her. She remembers drawing her sword, facing the witch on trembling legs.

  “Things have changed.” Second Aunt sounds amused. “Need trumps fear. Superstition becomes necessity.”

  It would sound like the cryptic pronouncements of monks or priests, but Bao Ngoc knows, all too well, what it means. One of her own aunts became like Chau: married a local girl, took on local customs. All the others turned brittle and thin over the years. She’s never asked, but she’s sure that in the end, they went to see a witch, that they got charms to help them stand agains
t the ghosts.

  At the other end of the cramped living room, a door opens. Second Aunt nods, briskly. “She’s ready for you.”

  Then

  Chau cut her hair short and went to school, and came back with more teenage slang and curses than Bao Ngoc had ever thought existed in Common. She turned fifteen: an odd, alien birthday, for in the Khanh nation the only anniversaries they’d used to celebrate were those of the old, or of the dead.

  One morning, Chau handed Bao Ngoc the boxed lunch Sixth Aunt had prepared for her. “You want something else?” Bao Ngoc asks.

  Chau shook her head. Behind her, in the kitchen, the ghost of a young man with a bloody hole in his head. Chau moved away from him, shaking her head. The sword burned in Bao Ngoc’s chest, a faint pain that only lasted until the ghost faded.

  “It—” Chau spread her hands. “Look, it doesn’t have to hurt this much, does it? None of the other kids see the ghosts. Just the Khanh and the other immigrants.” She didn’t speak Khanh, but Common.

  Bao Ngoc’s heart sank. “You can’t just get rid of them.”

  “Really?” Chau raised an eyebrow. “How about doing what they ask?”

  Be happy forget do not stand out.

  Bao Ngoc kept her voice even. “We can also cut off our own arms.”

  “You’re being melodramatic.”

  “Am I? You’ve seen the aunts. You’ve seen the ghost-touched.”

  “Yes,” Chau said. “I’ve also seen everyone else. People live. They don’t just spend their lives hurting in order to give the finger to some ghosts!”

  “So you—you just want to give up?”

  “I want some peace,” Chau snapped. “Is that so hard to understand? We walk on broken glass. Through broken glass. Every word we speak”—she spat them out—“hurts like hell. Every mouthful of food, every memory, every conversation. Well, I’m done. If that’s winning, they’ve won.”

  Bao Ngoc stared at Chau: a T-shirt with printed words and unfamiliar characters, a long flowing skirt with pleats and golden sequins. She looked alien. Not Chau, not the sister Bao Ngoc had grown up with, but a teenager of the Federation—and the thought made the sword writhe and twist in Bao Ngoc’s chest. “Lil’sis,” she said, in Khanh, forcing the words over the pain.

  “I’m not little anymore,” Chau said, in Common.

  “I’m still your elder, and you’ll do as I say.” She reached out. But Chau danced away, and the ghost of the young man was between them, and the sword hurt so much Bao Ngoc had to bend over, stifling a scream.

  “Don’t touch me!” Chau snapped.

  When Bao Ngoc looked up again, Chau was gone. The door slammed; and in the spreading silence all Bao Ngoc heard was the ghost’s voice.

  Monster. Can’t hold her back let her fit in monster monster.

  On the following morning Bao Ngoc found glistening, bloodied shards in the trash. She thought they were glass at first, but then she found Chau’s white T-shirt bunched up at the back of her room, the chest area streaked with blood, and she knew.

  The sword that Chau had once carried in the camps: expelled in dark, tiny, powerless fragments.

  Now

  The witch sits cross-legged on a large bed, watching Bao Ngoc. She’s old and lined, not bent over or weary like Bao Ngoc’s aunts, not pale or colorless like her Khanh colleagues: old like mountains, like temples, like pine trees, a presence that doesn’t ask for respect, but forces it all the same.

  The room is dark, the only light coming from the plants on the lone bedside table. Four white flowers Bao Ngoc vividly remembers, their petals clenched shut, smelling sweet and sickly like the onset of rot.

  No, not dark. There is light, and it’s coming from within her. She looks down, and sees the faint outline of the sword’s blade. She feels it pressing outward, as if it were going to escape her. And, from inside her bag, an answering light.

  In silence, she reaches inside the bag, and withdraws the plastic pouch she’s kept in her desk drawer through two house moves. Within, the fragments of Chau’s sword shine in the dark. By its side is another pouch: That one contains all Bao Ngoc’s savings, all the money she’s painstakingly set aside from years of working extra shifts.

  The witch smiles, lifting the first pouch up to the light. “Broken and pushed out of a chest—bit by bit, between the ribs. It must have hurt.”

  Bao Ngoc thinks of Chau’s bloodied T-shirt. “It always hurts, doesn’t it?”

  The witch smiles. “There are many ways to expel a charm, but they all hurt.” She reaches out, rests her hand, for a fraction of a second only, on Bao Ngoc’s chest. “And many ways to take one into one’s body. You swallowed yours, didn’t you?”

  Bao Ngoc nods. “My younger sister didn’t.”

  The witch lays the pouch on the bed, stares at her for a while. “No, she stabbed herself. I remember. The two sisters. Jade. Pearl. The daughters of Pham Thi Kim Lan and Nguyen Van Hoang.”

  In Bao Ngoc’s mind, the familiar reflex, the litany of her ancestors: Mother, Father, her grandparents and their own parents, praying for good fortune and happiness. She’s bracing herself for the sword to hurt, for pain to clench her stomach and womb and lungs. But there’s nothing, a feeling that’s both disquieting and comforting.

  “I knew your mother, once,” the witch says. “A long time ago in a different land. Before—before she died.” She looks . . . weary, and sad. Bao Ngoc finds it hard to reconcile with the dark, imposing figure of her memories.

  “You never told us.”

  “Would you have listened? You were so afraid.”

  Bao Ngoc swallows. She can’t remember what it felt like, to draw the sword—to be so angry, so afraid that she’d have done anything to protect Chau and herself—not that dull, blunt fear she’s been living with for so long, but something pure and clean and incandescent.

  “There are many kinds of courage,” the witch says. And when Bao Ngoc looks up, startled, the witch laughs. “You’re not so hard to read.” It’s not the laughter Bao Ngoc remembers, not the malicious expression of someone who delights in others’ suffering, but merely an old woman’s forbearing amusement, like Ninth Aunt when Bao Ngoc burned the pan-fried dumplings because she was too busy daydreaming about the girls in her class.

  “You’re not with your sister,” the witch says.

  “Chau—” Bao Ngoc pauses, tries to find words. The sword doesn’t burn within her; but it doesn’t mean there’s no pain. “She says she has no need for it.”

  “Ah. But she’s still Chau,” the witch says. She shakes her head. “Some people change their names, too. Makes it easier.” She sounds . . . exhausted. Sad. “Impossible choices. What do you want, child?”

  “You can banish ghosts,” Bao Ngoc says, finally. “This flat—”

  Again, that amused laughter. “You should ask about the cost first. It takes more than a sword and magic to do this. Much more.” A cold wind rises, wraps itself around Bao Ngoc—ruffles the petals of the flowers in the pots, opening them up—and for a bare moment the earth brims with blood, and the petals are sharp fingerbones. “I told you, years ago. This is the land of the dead, and the dead don’t relinquish what’s theirs easily.”

  “A life—” Bao Ngoc is about to offer hers, but her lips clamp down on the words—because, even for Chau, even for the child, she wouldn’t.

  “Much more than a life,” the witch says. She strokes one of the flowers, as if it were a cat. The faint, sickly smell becomes that of rot, of charnel houses. “Souls, cut off from the wheel and the brew of oblivion, bound to floors and walls and bloodied earth—doomed never to be reborn . . .” Her voice is a faint chant, and now she no longer looks like Bao Ngoc’s aunts, or like a friendly old woman, but like something that prowls the edges of the world, preying on the weak.

  Bao Ngoc would be frightened, but there’s not even fear left in her. She says, stubbornly, “Chau is pregnant. Her daughter—”

  “Half-breed,” the witch whispers: the insult
Bao Ngoc has heard hurled on playgrounds and in schools.

  “Chau thinks she’ll be fine. She—” Bao Ngoc tries to speak through the knot in her throat. It feels as though the hilt of the sword has broken in half, and jammed itself in her vocal chords. “She doesn’t see.”

  “A child of two worlds,” the witch says.

  “Stop it,” Bao Ngoc says. “You’re making her sound special.”

  “No more and no less than hundreds like her, all over the city. The ghosts can rage, but they can’t stop life from going on. Do you know why they hate you?”

  “Because we’re alive.”

  “Ghosts are static,” the witch says. “Their deaths root them. They crave the familiar. The unchanging. They’re angry at anything that reminds them that they’re not alive. That the world moves on, while they are trapped. People—our people, and dozens of others—arrive and settle onto the land, and the culture of the Federation changes. It reminds the ghosts that time passes, and leaves them all behind.”

  Bao Ngoc would have felt sorry for them, years ago; but there’s no space in her for anything but cold hatred. “You’re saying it will be worse for the child.” Her niece.

  “You know this already.” The witch picks up the sword’s shards, purses her lips for a while. Her teeth gleam in the darkness, as if shadowed with blood. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

  “Can you—”

  The witch smiles, again. “Exorcise ghosts? No. But I can give her the gift I once gave her mother.” She sings words in a low, guttural voice, in a language that Bao Ngoc can’t make out but that still is comfortingly familiar. And, as she does so, the fragments of the sword move and melt into one another—like paint, like ink, dark and viscous and slowly hardening, until it’s whole again, a large piece of blade with a gleaming edge, and the same pale gleam as the flowers, as the bones.