Racing the Dark

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  "I'm sorry," Kohaku said abruptly. "I shouldn't have left you here. You were too lonely."

  Emea looked surprised. For a girl who was still so young, sometimes she acted much older. "I can't always tie you down like this, Kohaku," she said. "I have to learn to take care of myself."

  But Kohaku thought he saw traces of bags under her eyes, and her skin was paler than it had been before. "Were you sick while I was away?"

  She looked down and shook her head. He lifted her face back up by the chin.

  "There's no use lying, Emea. I can just ask Palau."

  "A little," she said. "I had a fever and a cough. The doctor said I should keep away from the docks ... I walked down there sometimes, hoping to see you coming back. I'm mostly better now, though."

  He hugged her tightly.

  "I'm sorry, Emea," he said out loud, because he knew she couldn't hear him. "I promise ... from now on, I'll be here for you."

  Lana's mother found work. There was a sailors' hookah lounge a few blocks from their boarding house, and they hired her to be a hostess. Lana's employment search took nearly a week because she was too young for hostess work and too unskilled to do anything else. A laundry service in the richer northeast part of the city finally took her on to do manual labor in the steaming laundry vats. After a week, Lana gathered that the job was so horrible no one person managed to stay in it very long. She dyed and scrubbed a seemingly endless supply of clothes, using harsh lye soap in water just a few degrees below scalding. Despite the gloves she wore her hands felt raw and sore by the end of the day, and the fumes made her eyes water and her throat hurt. Her only companion most days was the supervisor, an older woman with a bad back who had quite possibly been doing the same work since she was Lana's age. The thought terrified her. How could anyone possibly live like this her entire life? She came home late every night, with barely enough energy to stuff some food down her throat before she went to sleep.

  Her mother saw how tired she was, but Lana never told her exactly what her work entailed. She knew Leilani's job was hard enough without having to worry about her daughter. They both just had to make do until Kapa could send for them-they had to eat, after all, and the room cost money. Also, they had both bought second-hand clothes, which had consumed most of their small store of money. Their outer island clothes looked inappropriate here. Lana wasn't particularly fond of the way the dulled mother-of-pearl buttons up the front of the long shirt constricted her torso, but she absolutely refused to wear the heavy socks everyone here seemed to favor. It was still warm enough outside to go without them, and she had no intention of giving in until she had to-never mind the stares she got on the street.

  One night nearly three weeks after they had arrived, Lana was trudging back home on a quiet, rosestone-paved side street in one of the richest parts of the city when she saw two people hurrying toward her. The council guards sometimes gave her trouble for her dirty, lye-stained clothing in this part of town, so she ducked into an alley and pressed herself against the rough-faced wall.

  "They told me you could birth a stone," Lana heard one woman say quietly, "and still keep the mother alive. You won't get a kala till afterwards, so it had best be true."

  The other woman-whose faded clothes seemed out of place next to her companion's exquisitely dyed crimson cloak-snorted contemptuously.

  "Threats won't do you much good. I'm here because I choose to be, but I can leave just as easily and let your daughter die. I'll have a hundred kala before, six hundred kala after."

  The well-dressed woman clicked her tongue. "Seven hundred? It seems a little much for a one-armed midwife ..."

  "How about for your daughter's life?" The voice had a hardedged humor to it that fascinated Lana.

  The other woman looked around nervously. "Fine. If you save her, I'll give you what you want."

  Lana saw her pull a pink hundred-kala coin out of her pocket and hand it to the midwife. Lana nearly salivated looking at itthat coin would let her and her mother eat fish and rice every day for the next two weeks. They entered a large house across from where Lana was hidden. Defying all common sense, her exhaustion forgotten, Lana crept across the street and sidled through the narrow alley, picking her way through piles of refuse. Through the thick sandstone walls, she could hear a woman shrieking and the unintelligible words of someone trying to calm her.

  The woman shrieked again, this time so loudly that a raven, sorting through the midden heap, looked up in surprise and then flew away. Lana suddenly began to wish that she hadn't run so impetuously into the alley-or at least that she had worn some socks. She didn't want to even think about what liquid exactly was seeping between her toes. Still-the woman was making the oddest noises now, some strange cross between a gulp and a moan that sent shivers up her spine. She crept closer, avoiding as much of the refuse as she could. Up ahead, in the garden, she thought she saw dimly flickering lamplight, as though through a shuttered window. A short wall, reaching up to about her shoulders, separated the refuse-filled alley from the meticulously clean garden. Lana scrambled up over it and, without looking down, dropped on the other side. Instead of encountering solid ground, however, she fell with a splash into a pond. Luckily most of the noise was covered up a moment later, when the girl screamed again. The sound was much louder in the garden.

  "Put out the incense." The preemptory voice of the midwife cut through the room. For a moment, the subdued, worried voices and even the woman's gulping moans stopped in what Lana imagined to be surprise.

  "We couldn't possibly." It was the voice of the well-dressed woman Lana had seen on the street. "Perhaps you are unfamiliar with civilized customs, witch, but that incense is burning to pacify the death spirit-so it doesn't visit my niece tonight."

  The midwife didn't sound offended at the insult. In fact, she seemed amused. "Of the two of us, I think I have the most reason to know what will and will not pacify the death spirit. But as you like it-either you keep your incense, and I leave, or you put it out and I stay. Perhaps in the morning you'll see how well your incense kept the death spirit away."

  The silence in the room was broken only by the pregnant woman's gasping moans. It stretched on for nearly a minute, and then the well-dressed lady must have nodded, because the midwife began giving orders again.

  "Ignorant fools," the midwife said. Lana, trying to maneuver herself out of the waist-deep pond, looked up just in time to see her flickering silhouette through the latticed rice paper shutters. Abruptly, the woman turned and slid them back. Lana ducked quickly into the water, and then turned to stare at the woman standing in the open window. The one-armed midwife's nearly black eyes darted over the rippling surface of the pond as if she had seen her. Lana held her breath-not as large a one as she would have liked, but enough-and prayed that she would leave the window. The midwife had the oddest intensity in her eyes, as though she was almost afraid, but the corners of her mouth were smiling. A lao-lao fish, of the most expensive iridescent kind, swam close to Lana's rock-steady arm and began nibbling at it. It splashed its soft white light carelessly around the pond, and Lana could feel her heart thundering. The woman looked abruptly down at the water, at the exact spot where Lana was hiding. Her empty right sleeve terrified Lana for some reason that she could not fathom. For one bright, painful moment, Lana thought that the woman had seen her-that she would tell the owner of this house and Lana would be arrested and tossed into the notoriously accident-prone dockside jails. But the woman just nodded slightly and turned around.

  Lana waited until lack of air burned her lungs and made her vision go hazy. Then, very slowly, she raised her head out of the water. From where she crouched, she had a fairly good view of the low bed where a gasping, sweaty, and disturbingly bloody pregnant girl was struggling to give birth. The one-armed midwife held a glass filled with some gray-green mixture to the girl's mouth and gently forced her to drink it. A great deal dribbled from the sides of her mouth, but she seemed to get some of it down.

  "Tell
me, lady," the girl said, her voice trembling and hardly audible. "If I die here, will my baby die too? Can you at least save my baby?"

  The woman put her arm gently on the girl's swollen, heaving stomach. "I will save the baby," she said. "And I will save you. Perhaps no one else could promise you that, child, but because I am here, I swear to keep death away tonight."

  The girl's eyes grew wider, but she seemed to believe the woman, because she visibly relaxed. Lana was surprised. What powers did this midwife have that she could make such a rash promise? Because, Lana could tell, those had not been empty words of comfort-the midwife had been quite serious when she swore she would save the girl's life. But when Lana looked at that girl-so thin, apart from her swollen stomach-and saw how much blood she had already lost, she wondered how anyone could possibly keep death away from her.

  From the time she was born, Lana had been marked as a diver. She had never considered herself as anything else, and so she had never actually seen another woman give birth. Other girls from her island learned midwifery, and cooking, but not the divers. So Lana had the strangest sense that night that she was being given a glimpse of a new and different world. Perhaps it was more mundane than the one she had been trained for, but it still held a strange kind of fascination.

  The pregnant girl lived. An hour before dawn, when both she and the midwife were covered in sweat and panting with exhaustion, she gave birth to a female baby. After they cleaned her, Lana saw that she had a head full of hair-an odd shade of reddish burgundy that reminded Lana suddenly, painfully, of how Kali's hair had looked the day she died, after the sun came out.

  "What will you name her?" the midwife asked.

  She and the new mother were the only two people awake in the room. The girl's aunt and the two servants who had been helping with the delivery had fallen into an exhausted sleep. After all the noise of the past few hours, the world suddenly felt very quiet.

  "My aunt ... she thinks I should name her Hiapelo ... after my mother. But I don't know..." She gently stroked the baby's head. "She has such unusual hair, doesn't she?"

  "Kali," Lana whispered.

  She realized what she had done too late. The midwife turned her head toward the window, but instead of getting up to look, she simply nodded and faced the girl again.

  "Kali is a pretty name, I think," the midwife said.

  Lana's legs, already shivering uncontrollably from standing in the water for so many hours, started to buckle.

  The girl looked up. "Kali? It's nice ... rustic, I think. Kali ..." She looked back down at her baby and then closed her eyes. Lana waited to make sure that she was still breathing and then stood up slowly. It would be dawn in an hour, and suddenly she could not bear to think how much her mother must be worrying. With a last glance at the strange tableau through the window, she climbed back over the alley wall.

  Hours after Lana should have been home, Leilani pulled on her jacket and walked all the way to the northeast quarter, banged on the door of the owner of the launderer's, and demanded to know where her daughter was. She had left just after seven, as usual, the ruffled man had angrily told her. No, she hadn't looked any different than normal, and would she please take her petty domestic troubles elsewhere so he could kindly get some rest?

  She had trudged home in silence, praying that Lana would be waiting for her when she returned, but somehow knowing that she wouldn't. She paced the floor for hours afterward, debating whether she should call the council guards. But would those guardians of the wealthy help her at all, or simply ignore her-or worse, find some pretext to arrest her? She worked herself into such a state of worried exhaustion that she fell asleep despite herself a few hours before dawn. When she awoke, it was to the unmistakable sound of old, groaning wood. Someone was coming up the stairs. Lana appeared in the doorway moments later, soaked to the skin and shivering. She was smiling slightly, as though she was hardly aware of the expression, but Leilani thought she saw tear tracks on her damp cheeks.

  She'd had a furious barrage of questions prepared for when she managed to find her daughter again, but seeing her shivering in the doorway, looking so bewildered and inexplicably elated, she found she couldn't say any of them. Instead she stood up and fetched a towel.

  "You smell like fish," Leilani said as she wrapped the warm, faded rag around Lana's shoulders.

  "I was standing in a pond," Lana said, as though that explained everything.

  Leilani sighed. "Take off your clothes and lie down. If you go to sleep now you might get an hour of rest before you have to go back to work."

  Lana never told her mother about that night, but in the days that followed she found herself growing gloomy and distracted. She lost her appetite. Working at the launderer's sapped all of her energy, and the fumes irritated her throat so badly that sometimes it hurt to eat. Leilani was so exhausted after work herself that she rarely noticed how little Lana was eating. Which was just as well, as far as Lana was concerned. There was something bothering her mother-she could tell that much, but Leilani refused to speak about it. She would come home close to midnight, her eyes red and puffy. Lana worried about her, but in a distant sort of way. There were so many more things to worry about, these days-it was easier to work mindlessly, and forget about her other problems.

  Kapa wrote them a letter, finally, that arrived two weeks after the night Lana spent in the garden pond. It came on market day-the only day off either of them had all week, when people traditionally went to the bustling market fair at the Eastern docks. They were both exhausted, however, with barely enough energy to talk to each other, let alone explore the market for items they couldn't possibly afford. Leilani slowly stood up when someone knocked on the door.

  It was the landlady, holding a thick, folded letter.

  "This just came on one of the trade ships. From Essel," she said.

  A look of barely suppressed excitement came over Leilani's face. She thanked the woman profusely and took the letter in shaking hands.

  The pitying look the lady gave her mother just before she closed the door made Lana inexplicably nervous. Had her mother been acting strangely lately? She just looked tired to Lana, but maybe there were other signs that she had been ignoring.

  Leilani sat back on the floor and broke the seal.

  "Is it Papa?" Lana asked.

  Leilani gave her a tight smile and nodded. Despite her rush of excitement, part of Lana couldn't help but wonder if even being all together again would solve their problems. It would never be like it was back on the island, and in her heart, that's what she wished for the most, however childishly. But even "not as good as before" was better than now, with her endless, painful labor over the vats. They had been here for two months, and already the island seemed like a fairy tale of someone else's life. She had her memories of happiness, but the sensation was impossible to access-as though the steam and lye had burned it away.

  "What ... what does he say?" Lana asked, vainly trying to keep her voice calm.

  The paper crackled as her mother's hands started shaking uncontrollably. She rested them on the floor and put her head between her knees. When she lifted her head a moment later, she looked as though she wanted to cry, but her eyes were dry. Lana's breathing grew rough.

  "We have to stay, he says. At least two more months."

  So there would be no escape from the vats tomorrow.

  Two more months.

  The old lady hadn't come in for the past week. Lana stooped over the huge stone basin for dark-colored clothes and stirred it with a wooden paddle twice her size. She was more profoundly exhausted than she had ever been in her life. Even the smallest movement of her back sent daggers of pain shooting down her legs, but she hardly noticed that anymore. She worked in a strange haze, forgetting to eat, unable to think-concentrating only on getting through the next second. Lana took the paddle out of the water and settled it against the wall. She staggered back from the tub a little and tried to straighten her back. The effort made tears spring
to her eyes, and she collapsed against the nearest wall. What was wrong with her? Her back had never hurt this much before. She started to hobble to the bleach vat, but had to stop when a sudden coughing fit overcame her. This sort of thing had happened before, but she was usually able to control them. This time, however, the coughs were deep and explosive, searing her lungs and her throat until she was doubled over with the pain of it. Globs of rose-colored phlegm fell from her mouth onto the tightly packed dirt floor. The old woman was gone. There was no one else around to hear her call for help, but she struggled to yell anyway, sinking to her knees with the effort. Her head pounded each time she coughed, and the viscous, salty mucus coming from her mouth began to look bright red. She collapsed, watching the blood-streaked phlegm sink into the earth as her world went dark.

  A boy, out of breath and clutching his hat in his hands, appeared on the dusty wooden step outside the lounge. He was too young to be a customer, Leilani thought as she tapped the used ashes out of the hookah pipes. She wondered if he might be a young sailor, but his hands weren't rough enough. Even at that age, a few months out at sea made all sailors develop a set of unmistakable calluses. She stared at him curiously as Heluma, one of the other hostesses, approached him.

  "What do you want, boy?" she asked, wiping her forehead with a rag.

  He fidgeted with his hat a little. "I have a message. I was told a woman with a daughter who works at the launderer's up in the northeast district should be here."