The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

“When did you see them last?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  “They were fine. Go back to the Cordova School, Kora. It’s what we all wanted for you. It’s the best thing.”

  “I miss you, K2.” Her hand throbs in its snug new wrapping.

  “Our paths are separate now, Kora. Go home.”

  “That’s what I want …”

  “To the Cordova School. Go.”

  “Let’s go see them, one last time. Come on. Please.”

  His eyes dart to the side. He opens his mouth to say something more, then closes it.

  “Just once, and then I’ll leave you to your future.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Please, Godwin Austen.”

  He sighs deeply. “Okay, sis. All right. One last time.”

  They head back the way they came. The catcoat lies on the ground right where Kora left it, but she is so preoccupied with the thought of seeing her mother and uncle again, she forgets all about it.

  24

  NASTY SALTIES

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD

  DAY: 15

  I WAKE UP IN A DANK AND FOUL-SMELLING BASEMENT. WHAT IS THIS, some twisted Salty prison?

  “Welcome to the Cordova Dancing School for Girls, Doctor Groundsel.” A tall woman about Glorybind’s age stands at my bedside. Her face is wide and flat.

  “Who by Our Mother’s farts are you?”

  “I’m Aurelia Dearborn. I’ve been running this clinic and wishing for the arrival of someone like you.”

  “I haven’t arrived anywhere. I’m gonna catch that dead mother Salty, whip its hide, then take it home to serve New Grist Village.”

  “I hope the Cordova School will help you change your mind. You’ll have your own beautiful quarters and this nice clean clinic. We’re one of the last places in Saltwater City where the denizens eat well every day. The girls are admittedly a little unruly, especially Myra and Tania. But they are generous, in their way. You won’t want for anything.”

  “No thank you. Need to catch that Salty and need to go home.” I turn away from her and close my eyes. Everything is tidy in this dark room, but I wouldn’t call it clean. It smells too much of damp earth and human habitation.

  I hear the door open.

  “Is she awake, Madame Dearborn?” I recognize that voice. “Good morning, Doctor Groundsel. You’ve been asleep for a few days. That is an excellent tea you and your sisters have cultivated.”

  I turn my head.

  “I hear you’re looking for a certain Salty.” It’s one of the Salties I saw in my forget-me dream. No, I saw this one when I was awake, with Elzbieta at the New Origins Archive.

  “Yes. I want the one with the new right hand.”

  “I’m afraid we lost her, Doctor.”

  I remember this one. Her Salt Inglish is funny. I can barely understand her. “What’s a doctor? Call me Groom Kirilow.”

  “You’re in Saltwater City now, Doctor Groundsel. You probably don’t remember, but I’m Myra. This is my teacher, Madame Dearborn. The Cordova Dancing School for Girls would like to invite you to live with us as our resident physician. You’ll be paid. And you’ll get a new family too, to replace the one you’ve lost.”

  “I don’t want a new family. I want the Salty with the new right hand.”

  “I believe your Salty died en route, Doctor Groundsel,” says Madame Dearborn. There’s sadness in this woman.

  “No. That Salty is alive. I saw it at the checkpoint.” The one thing I do remember.

  Myra says, “That ‘Salty’ was shot. I saw her shot with my own eyes. I’m sorry. And please watch your language. You can call us Cordova girls.”

  Our Mother curse the excellence of my own forgetting tea. These damn Salties dosed me good. I saw that new-hand Salty, I know I did. These sneaky Cordova girls are lying to me.

  NODE: SUMMER SOLSTICE

  DAY: 2

  THE CORDOVA SCHOOL LIES JUST INSIDE THE FIRST PLAGUE RING OF Saltwater City, among our ancestral enemies, the normals who drove our grandmothers out of the factories more than a hundred years ago. The girls who live here are a dirty, thuggish lot. They have open sores on their faces that they try to cover with a flesh-coloured liquid. It gives their skin a sticky, tacky look. They rim their eyes with charcoal pencils, which only accentuates the pus leaking from their tear ducts. Juicy, translucent lice play happy hopscotch in their matted hair. And infected metal threads drip off them like lace fungus from diseased trees. If these are Saltwater City’s strongest and fittest, then this city is not long for this world. I’ll free my sisters, get me a new starfish, and get out.

  If my mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, were here with me, she would make me eat upstairs with them. But I looked in on them yesterday. They chew with their mouths open and throw food and insults at one another like the barbarians they are. Two larger ones had a smaller one on the floor and were pounding the moonlights out of her. Imagine directing violence like that towards one of your own! And for no reason that I could see. I’d prefer not to eat with them, though I would gladly isolate one or two of the more civilized ones to ask what they know about the Saltwater City Grist Commune, the invading Salty, and a particular batterkite full of Grist sisters.

  I wish I had my mother double to explain things and smooth the way for me. She spoke to me once about a thing called “social skills,” but I didn’t know what she was talking about. I’m starting to get it now. If no one comes to see me, eventually, I’ll have to brave that dining hall. I don’t want to.

  Calyx Kaki seems to have no trouble. She eats up there every night. But she also has no wits and can’t be trusted with important things. Every night, when she’s done exercising her social skills, she brings me a plate. I find their food unappetizing. I miss the dark leafy greens and rabbit stews of home.

  When she comes with my dinner tonight, she says, “They aren’t so bad. They just don’t have anyone to discipline them outside of one very tired old teacher.”

  I’ve been here for seven nights—three under the influence of my own good forget-me-do, four able to think but swimming in my own private lake of loss. Calyx starts to prod me. “Can’t stay down here forever, Groom Kiri.”

  I poke at the evening’s offerings. There’s a slice of some large animal, roasted. Some kind of vegetable too, in the form of little greenish-grey balls. The seeds of something maybe. They’ve been cooked so soft that there can’t be any goodness left in them. Surely Our Mother does not consider such things food. There’s sweet potato—a root we used to grow back at Grist Village. Rather than roasting it, they’ve boiled and mashed it and mixed it with rancid cow milk fat, which smells disgusting.

  “They call it butter,” say Calyx. “It’s kind of good once you get used to it.”

  I guess I have that disease that Mother Glorybind taught me was called “homesick.” She says Grandma Chan Ling used to feel homesick for Saltwater City. I can’t imagine such a thing. To miss this mouldy, flooded, ugly place, crawling with barbarians, completely uncivilized. Where girls beat each other to make friends and there is nothing good to eat.

  “Just try.”

  I eat a bit of the sweet potato and some of the greyish-green balls.

  “Have a bite of meat.”

  The meat is hard and tasteless. I long to see Peristrophe Halliana’s smiling face across the table from me. I long for a plate of her steamed pike and pan-fried greens.

  NODE: SUMMER SOLSTICE

  DAY: 3

  A SMALL ONE COMES TO SEE ME. MAYBE IT’S THE ONE I SAW THEM pounding in the dining hall the other night. She says she hurt herself in the forage dance. I don’t believe her.

  Myra and Tania brought many of the herbs and tinctures that Mother Glory and I used at Grist Village back from the New Origins Archive. Needles too. The storeroom is also stocked with Saltwater City medications, including drugs from the time before, all expertly foraged by the barba
rian girls. I know about some of them because Mama Glory told me their names, effects, and limitations, though I’ve never actually seen them, much less used them.

  I check the girl for concussion and broken bones. Make a panax poultice for her black eye. Pop a few needles into the anxiety points for good measure.

  “Do you know anything about the Saltwater City Grist Commune?” I ask her when she’s feeling a bit better.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. What’s that?”

  It was worth a try.

  NODE: SUMMER SOLSTICE

  DAY: 4

  ONE OF THE OLDER ONES COMES TO SEE ME AFTER HAVING BEEN caught and beaten for stealing shoes from a warehouse just north of the Eastern Night Market.

  “It was a fresh shipment from the UMK. We’ve foraged there before and made a killing in sales. Such beautiful shoes! Made of real calfskin leather. So worth the risk. I know the dangers, but it’s how we live.”

  This one gave as good as she got. Her knuckles are a mess, and she’s got a broken rib. But she’s strong. She’ll be fine in a few weeks. I bandage her hand, give her willow bark tea and half a cup of forget-me-do. The rib will have to heal on its own.

  “Do you know anything about a batterkite from HöST raiding villages in the Fourth Plague Ring?”

  “I heard that HöST has been doing raids all through the third and fourth rings. Looking for some kind of animal or plant they need for some kind of technology. I’m sorry I don’t know more. I’m just an ignorant Cordova girl. Chang knows the answers to such questions maybe. But he is locked from us. And no memory scale gonna give you those kind of answers.”

  “Ever meet a Salty that looks like this?” I ask after I’ve poulticed her swollen eye.

  I show her a drawing I made of the invading Salty. She examines it with her good eye.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I think maybe that girl used to live here.”

  “Our Mother bless you,” I say, like an idiot.

  “Can I have an ibupro?”

  “What?”

  “An advil. It was a painkiller in the time before. I heard you have some.”

  “That is not good for you, little sister. The people in the time before, they were smart but in a really stupid way.”

  “Please, Dr Gristie. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the ibupro works.”

  I give her what she wants. I’m all agitated by the thought that the invading Salty might have lived at the Cordova School. Maybe I’ll brave the dining hall tonight to see what more I can learn.

  In the afternoon, Madame Dearborn steps into the clinic. “I hear you’ve been doing a great job helping the girls.”

  “I have much to learn about Saltwater City healing techniques,” I say. Mother Glory taught me to be modest.

  “And I hear you’ve been asking questions.”

  “Yes. I’m looking for my mother double. And an ugly red-haired Salty who invaded our village,” I blurt. Was that rude? I register Madame Dearborn’s red hair streaked with white only now that the words have left my mouth.

  “You must stop asking these questions if you want to continue working here,” says Madame.

  “Oh.” More than rude, I’ve been naive.

  “I’m not being inhospitable. It’s for your own good.”

  “I have to find my mother double. I need that Salty, or my sisters will die.”

  “Then you have a hard choice to make, Doctor Groundsel. We cannot help you with those questions here.”

  25

  THE RETURN HOME

  KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: MINOR HEAT

  DAY: 1

  KORA AND K2 MAKE IT TO THE IRON GATES OF THE WOODWARD’S Building. Kora punches in the ancient entry code, and the gates buzz open.

  “Did you know that we were the last family living here?” K2 says.

  “Of course we weren’t. There were the Singhs on the thirty-second floor. And the Carters on the eighth.”

  “Carters moved to the Second Quarantine Ring. The Singhs all died of the flu. We were so preoccupied with our lives we didn’t even notice.”

  The foyer is dark, except for the elevator area, which is lit with expensive tungsten bulbs, the kind you can only buy in the Coast Salish Timeplace. The elevators are new. That’s strange. And there’s an odd smell in the air, like rotten fish. Kora presses the shiny new button. Bright steel doors open, and they step in. The fish smell intensifies. Are those fish bones on the floor?

  They stop at the fortieth floor. Walk down the long dark hallway to the apartment where the Ko family has lived for three generations.

  A scale in her wrist lets them in. She calls for Charlotte. She calls for Wai. “You won’t believe where I found K2!”

  The apartment is dark and quiet. Wings flap above her head. A pigeon. How did that get in?

  “Charlotte! Uncle Wai!”

  Still no answer.

  K2 has gone all silent and docile. She takes his arm, sensing that he might run. Touches a light pad, but no light comes on. Why hasn’t Charlotte been tending the solar panels? The flicker of unease she’s been feeling intensifies to a churning fear.

  She pulls K2 up the stairs one flight to the bedrooms. She goes to Charlotte’s room first. The bed is neatly made. There is no dress hanging over the chair. A layer of dust lies over the vanity, but it is otherwise tidy. Too tidy.

  She goes to her uncle Wai’s room. The bed there is perfectly made too. There is no jacket hanging on the hook beside the door. She opens his closet. Inside hang his three shirts, all clean, though a little dusty. As in Charlotte’s room, a thin layer of dust covers everything.

  She goes to her own room. Her toy owls are lined neatly in a row on their shelf. Her bed is made. Her collection of scavenged machine parts, gathered for their beauty and strangeness, not for any use, are also laid out more neatly than she ever would have laid them.

  She checks K2’s room. It is similarly well ordered. He follows her, uncharacteristically quiet.

  She ascends the steps to the rooftop garden. The stairs are dark and she doesn’t see her uncle’s boots placed tidily at the top step until she trips over them and has to catch herself with her bloody right hand. If he’s not wearing his boots, he can’t be up here working. She pushes open the hatch. Everything is there: the half-collapsed goat shed, its bloodstained floor, the jars of depleted earth, the raised beds, and the rain barrels. The garden is unusually neat. But nothing is growing. All the cabbages and carrots have been harvested. She stares for a long moment.

  “Do you think they moved?” she asks her brother, stupidly.

  “I don’t think so, sis.”

  “Were they abducted?”

  He says nothing, but his pupils shrink.

  “What happened to them, K2?”

  He gazes at her, a long gaze full of grief. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Turns and runs down the stairs with only the slightest limp.

  “Where are you going?” She tears after him, through the apartment and out the door. His legs are much longer than hers, and he is down the hallway and in the elevator before she’s even halfway there.

  She doesn’t pursue. She returns to the roof. Minutes later, she sees him run across the courtyard below and out the iron gates. She watches the tiny figure run down Hastings Street until it disappears into a covered alley.

  She sits down on her uncle’s resting bench and stays there for a long time.

  Under the cool and mournful light of Eng, she smooths the already smooth dirt of the raised beds. Chang rises and turns the grey light gold. She puts her uncle’s boots in one of the potato jars and covers them with depleted earth, though it’s hard to shovel with her bitten, throbbing hand. She ought to pray, or chant, but she doesn’t know any prayers or chants. She doesn’t worship Our Mother, as Charlotte did. Does.

  She sits with the dirt and watches Chang rise and set four times. The sky grows light, and Eng too disappears over the horizon. No amount of sitting is going to bring them back. The
stuck stone feeling she’s had since she left them intensifies.

  She goes down to the kitchen for a glass of water. There’s a thin film over the water in the barrel and some kind of bug swims in it. On the counter glints an open scale—the old-fashioned, non-implantable kind. It looks like a large fish scale. What’s this doing here? She picks it up and puts it in her pocket. She casts a final lonely glance at the stairs leading to the rooftop garden. Above the stove, Charlotte’s figure of Our Mother gazes at Kora without judgment. Kora clicks the door shut behind her and heads back towards the Cordova Dancing School for Girls. She has nowhere else to call home.

  It’s then that she remembers the catcoat, dropped by the roadside hours ago so she could rescue her spoiled brother. She hurries back to the spot. There is no sign of the catcoat anywhere. Madame’s going to be killing mad. And the Cordova girls will have a field day.

  26

  MADAME DEARBORN’S KITTENS

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: SUMMER SOLSTICE

  DAY: 9

  I WAKE EARLY, WIRED. THE DANCING GIRLS HAVE BEEN OUT ALL NIGHT, thieving and mugging. The whole building seems to slumber. Perhaps Our Mother woke me so I can leave my clinic to go greet Chang and Eng. I slip out and find the stairs to the roof.

  The whole city lies at my feet. The sky is hazy, but I can still see the Pacific Pond stretching to the west and the endless crumbling suburbs and low mountains to the east. All the houses on the North Shore are dark. Silhouetted against them stands what must be the collapsing ruin of the old sulphur refinery my mother double once told me about. Although the polluted air smells foul and rotten, there’s a damp sweetness beneath it, the rich undercurrent of life trying to fight its way through all the nightmares laid over the land in the time before. Several sturdy gulls careen overhead. Like these dancing girls, they are good scavengers. And above them, distant Eng looks down benevolently, casting her blessings on me. It’s the first time I’ve stood alone in her pale light, without Glorybind and Peristrophe beside me. I raise my arms to better absorb her grace.

  Chang rumbles up over the horizon and begins his rapid path across the sky, large and ungainly. The sky changes colour from pale blue to orange-grey. The gulls scream away from Chang’s shadow.