by Alyc Helms
I must have gasped. The dragon at my side slid closer and said in a voice that was too intimate: “Shanghai. It is by far the best view of that city.”
“We… we’re under the river?”
“We are.” His hand ran up my arm, and I recalled myself enough to pull away.
“Where’s Mei Shen?” I demanded.
He leaned over the coffee table – a modern monstrosity of steel and glass – and plucked one remote from the collection that sat there. He pressed a series of buttons, and the entire wall of screens flashed to life. He spared me a brief glance to gauge my reaction, but he didn’t get much for his trouble. Apart from my pregnancy, I hadn’t missed TV during my years with Jian Huo, and high-tech gizmos were never my thing. He glowered when all I did was raise a brow. The glower slid into a malicious smile, and he pressed another button.
Mei Shen’s image flashed up on the screens, dwarfing me with her size. I sank onto the couch, hugging myself to contain my trembling. I wasn’t among friends; I couldn’t afford to break down. Mei Shen was safe, that’s what mattered. I don’t know what situation I’d feared to find her in, but seeing her sitting in the middle of a room that was an altar to gender norms, in every shade of Barbie pink, was not it.
Mei Shen hunched over a small bamboo cricket cage, ignoring the Toys ’Я’ Us collection around her. It was an artful display of blissful innocence, but I knew my daughter’s ploys as if they were my own. She knew she was being watched. She knew the toys were there to beguile her into complacency. Ignoring it all to play with a cricket was her way of being ornery. I wiped away tears and darted a glance at Lung Di. He only had eyes for Mei Shen, and he looked distinctly put out. He noticed me watching him and turned away from the screens.
“As you can see, she is happy and well-cared for in my keeping.”
I set aside all the censure I wanted to heap on him about his attempt to poison my daughter with western consumerism and misogyny. Mei Shen was fighting that battle very well on her own. Instead, I loosed my building anger at his literal interpretation of our bargain.
“You know that this isn’t what I meant when I asked to see Mei Shen.” I motioned to the monitors, where she was still speaking to the cricket. He’d even left the sound muted.
“Do I? Forgive me. I gave you what you asked for. In the future, you will have to be more specific.”
My mouth worked as I tried to come up with some counter to this, but I had nothing. He was right; I would need to choose my words more carefully.
“Fine,” I bit out. “If literality is how you want to play this, then that’s how we’ll do it.” I leaned back on the couch, crossing my arms and legs. I tried to hold my gaze steady on him, but my eyes kept darting to Mei Shen’s image, which rather ruined the effect I was going for. “I believe you had a manifesto you wanted to deliver?”
He flicked a button on the remote and the screens went dark. I jerked but held back my protests.
“In due time. You’re dirty and your clothes smell and you haven’t slept.” He reached down and pulled me to my feet. I resisted with my dead weight, but he was strong. “I will play the good host whether you wish it or not.”
He propelled me out of the room and down another hallway, this one carpeted and illuminated with recessed lighting. Templeton’s claws scrabbled for a moment on the polished stone floors behind us, before being muffled. I glanced back to make sure my shadow was keeping up.
Lung Di stopped at a set of black-lacquered doors with silver fittings. He released my elbow to open them with a grand gesture. The suite beyond rivaled the décor of any Ritz or Waldorf penthouse, right down to the wet bar and cabinet mini-fridge. Only the watery cityscape, gloaming through the skylight, gave a hint that this wasn’t a hotel suite in any major city around the globe.
“Take a shower,” he instructed with a sniff. “Take a nap. Ready your wits. We will dine together, and I’ll deliver my ‘manifesto’, as you called it. Then we may begin negotiations in earnest.”
With another lascivious look, he shut the heavy doors in my face. I knew without trying that they’d be locked, but I made the attempt anyway. They were so well-made that they didn’t even rattle. Templeton huffed and sniffed the seam of the door.
“I don’t trust him,” the rat observed with a shudder.
“I don’t either,” I said.
“What was that you said earlier about facing a dragon in its lair?”
I thought back. Yesterday seemed far away. “That only a fool does it.”
“But you have a plan, right?” He looked up at me. “Right?”
“As much a plan as I ever have.” Turning away, I headed deeper into the suite to examine my new prison.
“Oh,” Templeton whispered behind me. He gave the door another half-hearted nudge.
* * *
It took me an hour of dithering to get over the idea that Lung Di could be watching me. He didn’t have to be. His demonstration with the screens was enough to set me to self-surveilling. Just make me think that he could be watching, and I’d do the rest of the work myself.
All lascivious looks and suggestive physicality aside, I wasn’t under the delusion that Lung Di wanted me. He just wanted me to know my place. He’d already evidenced a strong predilection for stereotypes – the Bondian Batcave he lived in, the Pink Princess Palace where he’d cloistered Mei Shen. I wasn’t going to let him turn me into the rope for a sexual tug-of-war with Jian Huo. That whole “sleep with your brother’s girl to get at your brother” thing was bullshit. No way was I going to yield him that kind of power.
With these rationalizations buttressing me against the specter of surveillance, I got over myself enough to strip out of my dirty clothes, though I kept my pearls on.
In keeping with the rest of the suite, the bathroom was enormous. The shower had a multi-setting showerhead that I would have killed for during my student days with Jian Huo. Not that I’d be making use of it here and now. I shut the opaque glass door and steamed up the place the good, old-fashioned way.
By the time I got out of the shower, my clothes were gone. I wrapped myself in a thick, terrycloth robe and went in search of a more suitable replacement. I found Templeton hiding in the shadows under the coffee table, checking over his remaining two baubles. He was sitting on my knapsack.
“Servant?” I asked.
“Shadows. Two of them,” he responded. “I would have tried to stop them, but I thought your bag was more important.”
“You did right.” I patted his head and checked the pockets of my knapsack. All present and accounted for. The bones of my plan remained undisturbed. “Did they give you much trouble?”
“They fear me.” His voice was tinged with surprise at the novelty. “I am the only shadow here that he does not control.”
“Well, that’s something. I’m glad to know I can leave the bag and its contents in your excellent care.” I gave him a smile and another scratch behind his ears. His tail twitched in guilty pleasure.
I left the rat to his baubles and went in search of clothes. Sure enough, the wardrobe in the bedroom was filled with designer clothes and underthings, all of them hyper-sexualized in one way or another. Good god, this guy needed a Bond girl to get his adolescent fantasies out of his system. I thought of my giggle-fest with Si Wei and had to stifle a laugh. Maybe we hadn’t been that far off the mark.
The aborted giggle turned into a yawn. I couldn’t face wedging myself into one of those slinky ensembles just yet, so I lay down on the bed and rationalized a nap. After all, it had been almost two days, and I did need my wits about me.
I fell instantly asleep, and almost as instantly, I dreamed.
I stood in a pagoda of widely-spaced bamboo beams. They stretched above me like interlaced, golden bars. A pretty reflecting pool rimmed with well-polished stones sat in the center of the pagoda, and a giant cricket, its metallic carapace burnished blue-green, stood beside me. Twin antennae twitched, shining with a pearlescent light. It regarded
me with patient, viridian eyes. I’d been the subject of that gaze before.
I was still in my bathrobe, pearls around my neck. Figured. At least I wasn’t naked.
“Forgive me, Lung Xin Niang, for not coming to meet you earlier when you called. I did not think you would desire me to leave my charge,” she said, though on reflection I was pretty sure all I heard was a cricket’s chirp.
“Mother? Mother, is that you?” Mei Shen’s face pressed up against the bars, ten times larger than it had been on Lung Di’s big screens. The qilin chirped a warning.
“Hush, Lung Mei Shen Mi. Do not alert your nurse. Your mother is here, but she cannot walk these halls. If you wish to speak with her, you must practice subtlety.”
Subtlety was not my daughter’s strong suit, any more than etiquette was mine. Watching Mei Shen trying to school her features into nonchalance, I felt a momentary sympathy with Jian Huo’s pained forbearance when he had to watch me bungle through the complex social rules of our life.
“Oh. Yes, I can do that. Hello, Mother,” she said in a whisper as loud as a yell, though that might have been a matter of perspective, what with my reduced size. She poked a finger through the bars, as wide and long as my leg. I hugged it anyways, and kissed the bend of her knuckle. No one can rival the weirdness that is my life.
“Oh, Maybug. I’m so glad you’re all right. I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you about the nurse.” I wanted to babble more apologies, but the words came too fast, choking against one another.
“It’s all right, Mother. I’m fine, but I have been bored, even with the qilin to keep me company, and I miss you, and Father, and Mian Zi. It’s no fair that he got to leave and I didn’t. I hope he is as bored as I am. He had best not be having any fun. Father promised to show us how to fly kites when we returned. He better not have shown Mian Zi without me. I will never forgive him if he has.”
More than anything else, Mei Shen’s torrent of words convinced me that she had come to little harm. I sent the qilin a grateful look of apology. I should never have doubted her.
“Are we going home soon, mother? I should like to go home.” Mei Shen ran out of words, blinking at me with trust that I hoped wasn’t misplaced.
“Yes, Maybug. I’ve come to take you home.” I reached out to touch the shadows, but everything beyond the cage was smudged in a cocoon of viridian fire. I glanced again at the qilin; her antennae waved at me.
“He cannot know I am here,” she said. “Or that I’ve brought you here in your dreams. You must find your own way to us.”
“That’s OK,” I said with a shrug. I’d have been disappointed if things ended up being that easy. Really. “I have a plan. Mei Shen, I need you to tell me everything about your nurse.”
I spent the next hour plotting with my daughter. It was a strange sort of mother-daughter bonding, and I had to engage in logical gymnastics to keep her from launching a dozen ill-conceived plans. My respect for Mian Zi vaulted to new heights, given that it often fell to him to keep her out of trouble. The qilin sat apart from us, watching with many-faceted eyes. I wondered how many of Mei Shen’s plans she’d had to foil in the last several months.
The world grew fuzzy around the edges. Mei Shen’s whisper-shout receded to the edge of hearing. I tried to answer but couldn’t speak. The qilin’s voice resounded throughout my skull.
“Our time here is done. I dare not bring you again. Do not fear. I will do as I have pledged. That which is Lung Huang’s will come to no harm while in my care. Wake, and remember.”
The fuzz cleared into darkness. I opened my eyes to a ceiling patterned with spiraling tessellations. It was hypnotic. I forced my eyes away. The bedroom was still empty, and I was still in my robe, but I imagined I could hear Templeton snoring in the other room. Poor rat. I’d run him through the wringer, and we weren’t even half-done.
Padding over to the wardrobe, I opened it and regarded the contents with a heavy sigh. Spandex and sequins winked back at me. I was getting too old for this shit.
* * *
“You look lovely,” were Lung Di’s words when he came to collect me an hour later. I said nothing and kept my face impassive. If we were going for literal interpretations, then I wasn’t giving him any more than I’d agreed to. I’d chosen a dress because I didn’t have a choice. I’d listen to his manifesto. But for the rest of his games, he was on his own. He escorted me down the carpeted hallway in silence, back to the room with all his toys.
“I imagine it must be nice to wear something that doesn’t take an hour to figure out how to get into,” he offered as his second sally. It was, but I wasn’t about to admit that to him. I just pursed my lips with a non-committal grunt and let him seat me at a table set for two.
In keeping with the rest of his businessman-playboy shtick, the dining area was furnished in chrome and glass, just off the main room. Above us, the underwater skylight continued to shift with the murky glimmers of the Shanghai skyline.
My brief perusal of the wardrobe had yielded a blue silk wraparound dress as the least sexualized of the offerings, but I was revising that opinion. When I sat down, the damn thing kept sliding open along the line of my thigh, revealing way more of that skin than I was comfortable showing to anyone but Jian Huo or a gynecologist. After a few futile attempts to tug it into obedience, I gave up on subtlety and bunched it closed between my legs, clamping my thighs shut to keep it that way. It would wrinkle the silk, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
Lung Di fell silent again as two waiters served us the first course. They looked mortal. I didn’t know whether to be more surprised by them or by the plate of food they placed before me.
“Tuna tartar with persimmon chutney,” Lung Di said, in response to my raised eyebrows. He flipped a napkin into his lap and lifted his fork. I couldn’t help staring. I hadn’t seen a fork in ages. “You should eat. I imagine it has been a while since you’ve eaten, and much longer since you’ve had anything this good. If ever.”
I wanted to be pigheaded, but I was hungry, and the food looked edible. It reminded me of Jack. A reluctant smile tugged at my lips. I fumbled with my own fork, trying to recall how to use one, and took a cautious bite. It was delicious.
“It’s good,” I conceded. “What did you do, seduce away the Shanghai Marriott’s executive chef?”
“Hilton, actually. The owner’s brat insulted his pea puree. It was either come work for me or waste away in a Hong Kong prison for poisoning her morning Weetabix.”
I stopped chewing. Poison hadn’t occurred to me.
Lung Di smiled. “Please don’t concern yourself. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Well, that’s comforting,” I muttered. I took another cautious bite. We continued to eat in silence. It would have been unnerving if the food weren’t so good. Who was I kidding? It was unnerving as hell.
The salad course came next, some kind of tomato and salmon thing.
“Grilled heirloom tomatoes and goat cheese.” Lung Di said. I goggled. I hadn’t had cheese in… God, too long. Like most Chinese, Jian Huo wasn’t a fan of cheese.
I paused with the fork halfway to my lips. Remembered that the first bite’s free. Set it back down and struggled to recall my purpose.
“I believe you had a manifesto to deliver?” I said, as the waiters placed the next remove before us. I took a sip of wine – when had I been given wine? – and tried to look stern and businesslike.
Lung Di regarded me for a moment over his fork. He placed the bite of food back on his plate, untouched. “Do you really want to disturb this lovely meal?”
“Yes. You’re being charming… or at least, not threatening. The food is good, and somewhere along the way I acquired a glass of wine. I don’t trust any of it, and I’d rather be reminded of that.”
He smiled. “Hardly an argument designed to encourage me to speak.”
I leaned back and folded my arms, ignoring the siren call of whatever that was on my plate. Some kind o
f shrimp lime salsa on fried bananas, though I imagined there was a fancier name for it. Lung Di regarded his own plate with a sigh.
“Very well. You are as pugnacious as your daughter, you realize.”
“You can skip the compliments.”
He hid a smile behind his napkin. “What has my brother told you of me?”
I frowned, unsure what angle he was trying to play. There was no question in my mind that he had an angle. He mistook my expression for reticence.
“Oh, come now. He must have told you all manner of horror stories, or you would never have risked my wrath by refusing me entry that day on the mountain. So, what am I guilty of, according to my little brother?”
I tucked away that little tidbit for later consideration. I knew that Jian Huo was older than Shui Yin and Lung Pan, but I hadn’t realized that he was younger than Lung Di. I didn’t know what to make of that.
“He told me that the two of you used to be inseparable. You’d ditch heaven to go down to earth and mess around with mortals; innocent stuff, mostly, which is why your older siblings let you get away with it. After Jian Huo got busted for the whole writing incident, they cracked down. He tried to get you to stop sneaking down the mountain, but you wouldn’t listen. You mocked him for being a kiss-ass. You started going off on your own, started manipulating people just to see what would happen. At first it was small stuff like theft and rape and murder, but you kept pushing. You started wars to see who would win and how. You stacked the deck in favor of one side or another to see how people would react. You loosed plagues and natural disasters to watch how humans dealt with the suffering.”
I took a sip of wine. I was good at playing ignorant about my lover and his family. Easier than dealing with the knowledge that they were gods. It was hard to comprehend the scale of havoc that Lung Di had wreaked. It was like reciting facts out of a history book. I tried to imagine all the individual faces that had been affected, but it was just too big. I took another sip of wine and waited as the waiters brought in the next remove. My appetite had deserted me.