Behind the Mask
Page 16
The skin of the balloon is too smooth beneath her hand, and she loses her grip. She scrabbles for purchase but it’s to no avail—she loses her hold and starts to free fall off the side of the airship, bounces on its edge, and brushes past the edge of another roof. Mok-Seung continues to plummet and panics, looking for anything to break her fall, when she is stopped, suddenly, a hand grasped fast around her wrist. She looks up and meets bright brown eyes and an unrelenting stare under a green band. The real Jade Sword!
“Pay attention,” says the familiar voice, not unkindly. “You need to know where to throw your weight.” She flicks her wrist and the figure releases her, letting her drop painfully the final few feet to the ground. Mok-Seung pauses, her hand resting on an augmented bicycle; she lets herself breathe for a moment, the shame of being caught out curling in her gut. She admires the lean build and smooth pipes of the bicycle. One day she’ll have one.
A shout behind her spurs her back into action. Ahead, “Yong’s Chinese Laundry” is monogrammed in red above a brick building. She speeds up, darts through the red door, past the uncle at the counter and into the steam of the pressing room. The auntie emits a yell, “Out, out!” as another clasps her heart. “Jade Sword!” the second auntie yells, in what Mok-Seung hopes is awe and pride, even though she’s not who they think she is.
“Sorry,” she says as she trips over a steamer. “Sorry, sorry.” She bows to each auntie as she passes them and heads straight for the back window she knows opens onto a narrow laneway. At the last auntie, she pauses. “Lou Yap,” she says. “Your pau at festival last week was the greatest I have ever eaten.”
As she climbs through the back window, there is silence in the usually chatty laundry, broken only by the hiss of the press. She peers back through as the front door clangs open. Suddenly, the laundry swings back into action, and a number of large trolleys are completely accidentally wheeled into position between the door and the window. Lou Yap waves cheerily, and Mok-Seung ducks out of sight, running down the alley.
She leaps up onto a roof, delightfully low placed. She puts some distance between herself and her pursuers, until all she can hear is the city settling down.
• • •
Mok-Seung pulls the ribbon down from across her forehead and sweeps her hair away from her eyes. She smooths the fabric of her top and begins to unwrap it from her body. She hisses as she pulls it away from her arm. There is a gash across her skin, and a similar slash through her shirt. She grimaces, wonders if her embroidery skills are strong enough to hide such a mark.
She washes the blood from her arm and winces at the sting. The door swings open; Auntie Hong gasps. “You are not Jade Sword!” she declares, unsurprised, after looking around for anyone who might overhear. She closes the door.
Mok-Seung nods her head. “I’m not,” she agrees. As she sits through Auntie Hong’s admonitions and ministrations, she wonders if the real Jade Sword would have been caught out by her old Ayi.
• • •
(Auntie Hong already knows the real Jade Sword’s identity, because the real Jade Sword isn’t stupid enough to hide from her old friend. But if the real Jade Sword hasn’t told Mok-Seung that—well, it’s good for Mok-Seung to have to wait. Patience is a virtue she’s always lacked.)
• • •
The Chinese broadsheet reads “JADE SWORD FALLS OFF ROOF.” The Times reads “CHINESE BICYCLE THIEF THWARTED.”
• • •
Mok-Seung begins to read the papers—not only the Chinese broadsheets but the local English-language ones, too, and the papers brought down from Sydney and across from the gold fields. She engages in gossip on the streets and pokes her head into every restaurant, every sporting club, every place that doesn’t have a sign over the door banning her entry.
She looks for anything she can find, but she isn’t quite sure what she’s after. She finds breaths of shapes in the desert: wagons that run using sand, not horses; white deaths that find no retaliation, left with nothing but dust and the land; riots and thefts and gold and fire; and she wonders, why they have come to this place.
She hopes there’s something for them to learn all this way from home. She fears that there is not.
• • •
“NEW HEROES FOR A NEW TIME” declares the Times, beside a picture of the Mayor of Bendigo and a tall, strapping white man with a firm grip. The article text includes details: a tragic accident by one white worker and the completely reasonable retaliation resulting in native deaths and Chinese deaths, and maybe some other deaths; and they had not disrupted mining any further.
“PERMISSION TO TRANSPORT BODIES HOME FOR BURIAL RESTRICTED BY AUTHORITIES” reads the Chinese broadsheet.
Mok-Seung’s stomach turns.
• • •
She sneaks out into the night, careful of running into Auntie Hong, careful of her shiny, dark hair reflecting in the moonlight.
It’s a warm night, and she sweats beneath her layers. An Australian summer is nothing like the summers of her childhood, but she struggles all the same.
She eyes the steam rising from generators and is careful to weave around them as she leaps from roof to roof, across to the edge of town and back again, watching for traces of the Jade Sword, of some hero, of the desert of which she hears and reads but has never seen.
In the distance, she hears a half-choked scream. She cocks her head, then takes off without pause and leaps fast, with surety, mindful of the advice of the Jade Sword.
She lands—her left foot light on the cobblestones, her right heavy on the hand of a large man. She shifts all her weight onto her left; she kicks, her right foot pointed.
Mok-Seung lifts the girl and her purse off the ground. Her arms are just strong enough. She really should increase her training, she thinks, as she pants and increases speed, dragging the girl with her.
• • •
“MINERS TERRORIZED BY COLORED VIGILANTES!” says the Times, followed by mention of a slow in production and meetings broken up in migrant camps.
The Chinese broadsheet is no less excited. “JADE SWORD SAVES TWO MINERS; MAY BE WORKING WITH LOCALS.” She wonders how the Jade Sword travels between Melbourne and Bendigo, what secrets are being harbored out beyond the city.
• • •
Mok-Seung sits at her table, The Art of War pushed as far away as her arm can push it. She’s stuck on Pian Ten, unsure how to move forward. She has her atlas before her instead, mapping the route from Melbourne to the gold fields of Bendigo. She considers how one fortifies such a town in such terrain. She looks for more available information on inhabitants and history and threats. Mok-Seung considers the indigenous population and the possibility of their ghosts and spirits and bunyips, and hopes she’s making the right leaps.
She knows she’s making excuses, but she tells herself it is a useful real-world application of her studies, and no tactician could disapprove.
It’s with relief that she hears the sounds of the front bell heralding the arrival of some visitor. In the absence of Baba and Mama, she must set aside her studies and greet the guest.
Can Sin-Man is short and firm, plainly dressed as if she were a monk or a scholar. Although Mok-Seung thought such people kept themselves to the mainland, she wonders if perhaps Can Sin-Man might be both monk and scholar, here in this place.
Can Sin-Man bows and takes the proffered seat facing the door with a contented smile. She directs a sharper smile to Auntie Hong, who hovers by the door with a smug grin on her face.
“Oh, you’ve come for a visit, have you?”
Can Sin-Man’s smile widens before she turns to Mok-Seung.
“Mok-Seung mui mui,” Can Sin-Man says after inquiring after her parents, after the business. “I have brought you a present.”
Mok-Seung is confused by this gesture from Can Sin-Man, friendly and well-known by name but ultimately still a stranger. Confused, that is, until she unwraps the red fabric to find green fabric within: a ribbon with the character for jade emb
roidered on it. “Oh,” MokSeung says, with a start. “This isn’t mine.”
“It is mine.”
Mok-Seung looks up, meets Can Sin-Man’s eyes. She glances back at the empty door where Auntie Hong was—and from which she has silently disappeared.
Can Sin-Man smiles and picks up The Art of War from where MokSeung dropped it on the table. “Pian Eight is my favorite,” she says, turning the pages. “I have read it many times, though it feels unusual to read it now, in this place.” She reads aloud, “If, on the other hand, in the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.”
Mok-Seung thinks upon the words, familiar from frequent encounters but sounding so new from Can Sin-Man’s presence. Can Sin-Man smiles welcomingly as she returns the book to the table.
“It is time for this old Jade Sword to take an apprentice. You know some of the old styles, but you’re adapting to these new ones. I think you will flourish with me. And your encounter with the airship tells me that you need a teacher.” Her hand rests lightly on her tea cup, and Mok-Seung hastily reaches for the pot.
“You’re mistaken,” she replies mildly. “I have a teacher.” Can SinMan touches her finger to Mok-Seung’s wrist, and for a moment, Mok-Seung thinks Can Sin-Man is taking her pulse, but she shakes the thought and leans forward to pour.
“Auntie Hong has taught you all she knows.” She pauses significantly, brings her tea to her mouth and sips politely, carefully. “I know, because she was my teacher before she retired. But there is more for you to learn.”
Mok-Seung shakes her head. “What Auntie Hong has taught me serves me well.”
“But will it serve you further?”
Mok-Seung will not be pressed, not even in the face of Auntie Hong’s silent disappearance and Can Sin-Man’s knowing smile, and she refills Can Sin-Man’s teacup in lieu of an answer.
They speak a little longer, but here it is, the point Can Sin-Man has come here to make. She is blunt, as is their way, elder to youth: Mok-Seung is adaptable and keen, and Can Sin-Man wants to impart and, unusually, wants to learn, too. Mok-Seung thinks of the hints of the desert, of the Jade Sword’s technique, of giving meaning to their presence here in this place.
Can Sin-Man soon takes her leave, gathering her skirts around her as if she always wears them and is never leaping across the roofs and bounding lightly between rising airships. She stops at the door.
“We are in a different country,” she says, “and there are always new advances to make. What kind of warrior would you be if you were to stop here, where you are? There is no room for us here if we cannot adapt.”
Can Sin-Man’s words—and her smile—sit with Mok-Seung through the fading afternoon, twisting around the shadow already in her heart, until Lou Kong comes to light the lamps, and Auntie Hong tells her she will be late for dinner.
• • •
The summer rains fall and bring with them a sudden chill and the smell of petrichor, staining the cobblestones red as they mix with the dust blown in with the wagons.
The broadsheets report nothing.
• • •
Mok-Seung climbs out of her window and scales the eucalyptus up onto the roof. She keeps climbing higher, until she can climb no further. If she had the skills, she could scale the side of the Darrods building and keep on going, but she knows Can Sin-Man is right. She can go no further.
She sits above Melbourne, watches a night officer ride past testing his new augmented bicycle, watches airships floating high as points of light that dull into shadows as the sun rises over the city.
She looks out toward the city’s edge.
• • •
Mok-Seung rests her hand on the brush, its bristles long and clean. She imagines it as an extension of her body. Imagines a fountain pen in her hand instead. Imagines a paint brush. Imagines using her finger. “I should pay Sin-Man cheche a visit,” she says. “I enjoyed her company.”
Auntie Hong hums. “I’m sure she would appreciate it. Your Mama always enjoyed her visits.”
Beside Mok-Seung sits The Art of War, a note in Pian Ten. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.” She knows nothing about her terrain and the situation she is in, and she knows very little about herself.
She pauses her brush; when has Mama ever visited Sin-Man cheche? She turns to ask Auntie Hong, but her Ayi’s grin is beatific, and she merely pushes Mok-Seung back to her work.
And so she writes, focusing on the brush strokes, breathing slowly as the sun fades to red.
Stephanie Lai is a Chinese-Australian writer and occasional translator. She has published long meandering thinkpieces in Peril Magazine, the Toast, the Lifted Brow and Overland. Of recent, her short fiction has appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Cranky Ladies of History, and the In Your Face Anthology. Despite loathing time travel, her defense of Dr Who companion Perpugilliam Brown can be found in Companion Piece (2015). She is an amateur infrastructure nerd and a professional climate change adaptation educator (she’s helping you survive our oncoming climate change dystopia). You can find her on twitter @yiduiqie, at stephanielai.net, or talking about pop culture and drop bears at no-award.net.
Origin Story
Carrie Vaughn
Living in Commerce City, odds are you’re going to get caught up in something someday—pinned down in the crossfire of some epic battle between heroes who can fly and villains with ray guns, held captive in a hostage crisis involving an entire football stadium, or even trapped by a simple jewelry heist or bus hijacking.
When my turn came, I got stuck in a bank robbery.
I was waiting in line to make a deposit when a hole opened up in the ceiling. A glowing green laser light traced a perfect circle, and that section of ceiling dropped to the floor, scattering the line of people underneath in a cloud of dust and noise. I was too far back to really see what was happening, just that there was debris and screaming, some of which might have been mine. Then Techhunter rappelled through the hole, wielding a laser pistol and shouting at everyone to get down and lie still. We did.
He was just one guy. No henchmen, no partners. That was Techhunter’s M.O. in the news stories I’d read. He worked alone, with only his machines as backup. This time, he had a swarm of hovering metallic balls zooming down the hole in the ceiling with him. They fanned out around the room and trained tiny cannons on everyone. They probably shot lasers or tranquilizer darts. Surely in a place like Commerce City, with so many vigilantes and criminal gangs battling each other, bank tellers would be trained how to handle situations like this, but the ones here all stepped back from their counters, arms in the air, staring at Techhunter with trembling gazes. As if they didn’t live in Commerce City, where this kind of thing happened on a monthly basis at least.
Techhunter didn’t ask for the manager to open any safes; he just drilled through the locks with his laser pistol, collected cash and emptied a pair of safety deposit boxes into a hard-sided case. He wore wide goggles that hid most of his face, and a headset with all kinds of wires and antennae sticking from it, probably what he used to control all his devices. His suit was made of some slick material, supple as leather but appearing to be much stronger, probably armored. Pants, tall boots, padded shirt, and a fitted trench coat, all in a midnight blue so dark it looked black, except when the light caught it right.
Everyone cowered. Except me. I couldn’t help it, because by that time I’d had a chance to really look at him. The superhero stalker website Rooftop Watch had posted a half dozen or so pictures of Techhunter over the last couple of years, blurry action shots in semi-darkness, and I hadn’t paid much attention because he was just another guy in a mask. Now, seeing him in person, the way he moved, smoothly and urgently; the way he studied the room and pursed his thin, slightly chapped lips—it was all familiar. I should have thought it was just a coincidence, but I was s
ure. Even under those face-obscuring goggles, I knew him.
Then he looked across the room at the one person not cowering in his presence. Through the goggles, he caught my gaze. His lips parted and he froze, just for a second. He knew me.
Before I could call his name—or think that maybe I shouldn’t call his name, or find any way at all to ask what the hell he was doing here, a masked villain with a super-high-tech armory—the guy next to me reached out. While I’d been staring at Techhunter, this unassuming young businessman with a goatee and a red tie had very slowly and carefully drawn a gun out from inside his jacket. Was he an undercover cop or just paranoid? Didn’t know, didn’t care, because he proceeded to take aim at my old boyfriend.
I grabbed the gun out of his hand and threw it across the room. He wasn’t expecting that, and he stared at me in consternation, stammering out, “What—”
And I was kneeling there, shocked at what I had done, wondering if this made me a bad guy now. Again, Techhunter and I looked at each other, and I started to call out, “Jas—”
But he shouted me down. “You—get up!”
I knew that voice. It was definitely Jason. I stood, and then it all happened very fast. Police sirens blared—the whole incident had only started a couple of minutes ago—and some guy on a megaphone shouted at him to stand down and lower his weapons, and someone else yelled that Techhunter had a hostage. Remote gun spheres altered course to zoom toward the front of the bank and aim their weapons outward.
Techhunter—Jason?—went into action, hauling the case’s strap over his shoulder as he wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close. He clipped himself to the rope, then clipped me, and at some command the thing wound up on a winch and carried us to the roof of the bank and then into his stealth hovercraft. The floating gun spheres swarmed back up with him. A dozen police cars surrounded the bank now, and cops poured out of them with weapons drawn, ready to fire until they saw me, the hostage. The hatch at the bottom of the ship closed, Jason went to the cockpit, pulled back on a control stick, and I fell over as the thing tipped back and zoomed away.