Scale-Bright

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  There are three missed calls on her phone, all from Elena. The last is time-stamped six hours ago. Julienne still hasn't decided whether to ring back. Maybe not: Elena is probably on her way to the airport, if not already onboard. Her Hong Kong number will have been discarded, her Wan Chai flat emptied.

  Rain happens gradually, in grudging obligation to the Observatory. She stays out until it begins to come down in sheets and ducks into the Shangri-La.

  Her heels do not sink, deep and sudden, into the carpet. The lights are only electric chandeliers and the fountain just water. She pinches rain out of her hair and half-hopes to see the furniture—different. Not this beige orange. Something else. Different décor, different material.

  She comes so often that the lobby staff must recognize her on sight and not for the first time she considers checking in: she can afford it, too. Ever since her aunts have taken over expenses her saving book has grown surplus-fat. She's been watching bemused as the figures chart an unrelenting upward curve.

  Her aunts. She can't stop thinking about them. To adore each other so much after so long, for all the complications neither will voice. Julienne hopes that by the time she looks their age she'll have fixed herself. All her neuroses will be gone, as amusing and harmless as baby pictures. She doesn't want to think that it's taken Hau Ngai and Seung Ngo centuries to become who they are. They have forever, she has only a handful of decades. It doesn't seem right that at twenty-four she still finds herself with problems that should've been shed with adolescence, like bad hair and acne.

  When she's gone will they get another niece to shelter; will Seung Ngo take some little girl shopping, plait her hair? Will they adopt a daughter? They enjoy having someone to care for.

  It's irrational to be jealous this way, obsessive. Julienne knows that; she's been to so many child psychologists, courtesy of parents then relatives, and they've always said that Julienne was a girl prone to cries for attention. So she's quieted herself, stopped acting out, and learned to wear an epidermal silence.

  A woman, in crisp uniform white and gold, comes by to inquire if she needs anything. Julienne stares at her uncomprehending, then, "Do you have a room?"

  "How many nights, miss?"

  "Just one. No. Three?"

  She is ushered to the reception, where she is informed they have nothing cheaper than a premier. The price would have made her blanch if she didn't deal with figures more ridiculous every day at the shop. Still not something she can afford on a whim, but she can hardly back out. Embarrassed because it is too expensive, embarrassed because she doesn't have the social competence to step away, she hands over her debit card. No one asks why she, a Hong Kong native, needs a room. Maybe they think she's escaped an abusive husband. Does her uncertainty, her nerves—do they make her look like a victim, like she's hiding bruises under her sleeves and makeup?

  The receptionist tells her, smiling in that practiced service-staff way, that she will have a room with a harbor view. She thanks them, takes the keycard, and realizes that she has no change of clothes. That must've deepened the impression that she's a runaway. In the lift she checks to make certain that she looks fine, composed, well-adjusted. Makeup plain but faultless.

  Her nerves jangling she reminds herself that she's here for a reason. She dials her aunt.

  "Yes," Hau Ngai answers on the third ring. Her breathing sounds erratic and—too much imagination, too little decorum—Julienne turns red.

  "Is this a good time to call?"

  A low, delayed chuckle. "I'm alone, child. And Seung Ngo and I can occasionally keep our hands off each other. We weren't wedded yesterday."

  "I didn't mean... I checked in at the Kowloon Shangri-La. I don't suppose you could bring me my laptop and some clothes? Just clothes." The idea of Hau Ngai arranging her underwear in a suitcase mortifies her.

  "When you said you'd stay at a hotel I assumed you weren't serious."

  "I thought so too." She pitches her voice toward teasing laughter. "But you deserve a holiday from me."

  "That's not the real reason."

  Julienne gazes at her reflection, at its brittle edges. "I know I'm squandering, but it is close to the shop. I needed a change of pace."

  "Nor that."

  She stares at her hand. It is convulsing, for no good reason. "You sound angry."

  "Not with you." A glassy tinkling. "I'll ask Seung Ngo to bring you clothes. She's be much better at picking outfits for you than I am. Stay safe. Don't put aside the arrowhead for any reason."

  The arrowhead. She's almost forgotten that she wears it like a pendant, forgotten why or when it was given to her. Clutching it she says, "I won't."

  In the ensuing silence she puts her head against her knees. When she's calmed down a little—just hormones, just body chemicals—she throws the curtains open. She's disappointed when she sees… what? Or doesn't see. The parameters and layout of the room too is familiar. The bed here, wall-mounted flatscreen there, even the placement of lamps.

  She measures the width of the room, the length of the walls. Her heart hammers.

  In the end Julienne finds herself, for no good reason either, in tears. It's been years since she last took antidepressants. These spells aren't bad enough for her to return to that yet. She hopes. She can get better.

  * * *

  Xihe's fruit—Xihe's fire—does not easily rest. Houyi's rhythms have not been regular since swallowing that, her heart hammering like a mouse's. She strips, inspects herself. Blisters from Xihe's hand have gone, but her back remains a banner of burn scars. She recalls waking up on those roots. It took a long time to extract herself, longer still to regain lucidity.

  The clothes she's cast to the floor, Earth attire all artifice, are crusted. Over her waist there are spots where her skin is translucent. Beneath that frail layer tongues of light shimmer and swim. Carp in summer. There will be no hiding it.

  So she remains as she is, half-bare and gold, when Chang'e arrives home.

  Her wife drops everything she's been carrying, a pile of crackling paper and plastic. "What happened? What did you do to yourself?"

  "Should that not be what did this to me?"

  "Nothing could have done this to you unless you allowed it. You're very ill."

  "Not exactly." She does not protest when Chang'e presses her to sit. "It's fine. They're only scars now, and in a day even those will heal. The rest is Fusang's fruit, a useful edge should I need to directly confront Dijun."

  Chang'e rubs one of the patches where fire laps under flesh. "Xihe. She could've granted you this without hurting you. I know you killed her children—"

  "Were a demon to hurt Julienne, you'd permit them no leniency."

  "I'd see them dead just the once. You've already been through mortal death and afterlife. Promise me. Don't do this again. For eons you've repented. It's enough."

  "It's not so simple."

  "Promise me." Chang'e presses her mouth to Houyi's fingers, lips fluttering over each knuckle one by one. It reminds Houyi, immediately and acutely, that they haven't touched since Chang'e came back, that too much has kept them preoccupied and apart. Their thoughts might have coincided, for Chang'e looks up. "I could be very, very careful."

  "No."

  "No?"

  "You don't have to be too careful." Houyi licks the edge of her wife's lips, the inside of her mouth and the rimed teeth that do not thaw under Fusang's heat.

  As her duty has changed Houyi, so her wife's sentence has altered Chang'e. Immortal doesn't mean immutable; better than most they know this.

  Her belt falls, a clatter of buckle and leather on parquet floor. She stays Chang'e's hand and clasps it to her breast. "The months you were away—to bear your absence is to suffer a wound. If I've ever given you cause to doubt me..."

  "You haven't." Chang'e traces her thumb over the base of Houyi's throat, and pushes her back—far back, until her head and shoulders are off the mattress, until she's suspended under her wife's weight sharp as winter.

/>   She whispers "Chang'e—" like a bowstring pulled to its tensile threshold, stretched between one harsh gasp and the next.

  "When you say my name so," Chang'e murmurs, "there's nothing I wouldn't do. Nothing."

  Houyi's hands tighten on fistfuls of linens as her teeth clench down on her wife's name. It is one word; it is every word.

  She dangles, limp, from the bed's edge, her pulse a drum against the thin shell of her skull. Her voice, when it emerges, is hoarse. "You'll have to let me up."

  It is some time before she gathers herself and grips her wife's hip, pushing away the skirt with a haste that causes her wife to laugh, then to cry out.

  They settle twined, side by side.

  "Sometimes I forget that you can be so sudden, so definite." Chang'e sighs, her eyelashes tickling Houyi's cheek. "I've missed you so much. Your skin, your mouth."

  "But not my conversation or company?" Houyi navigates the width and curvature of her wife's spine. They've mapped and measured each other so well, every knot of bone and tendon, every indentation and ridge, the width of waist and thighs. Houyi cannot remember a time when this knowledge, this awareness of Chang'e, was not embedded in her deep as marrow in bone. "This must be the modern sensibility I've heard so much about."

  "Oh, shush, you haven't even taken me to dinner or bought me beautiful things." Chang'e wriggles when Houyi's hand traces up her calf, stops at the back of her knee. "Take all of this off. Don't leave a stitch."

  She obliges, undoing hooks and buttons with fingers long made nimble from fletching. This time they pace themselves, and when they finally part to lie loose-limbed and sweat-glistening it is as if—for all she's told Julienne otherwise—they are new brides. Intoxicated, delighted, every care pushed aside.

  Houyi does not say that the year she's wrung out of Xihe will soon be up and that there might not be another after it.

  2.3

  Houyi listens to the push of water against water, the passage of pelicans and hornbills, and watches a parrot peck at a pomegranate. A white mynah flits by and settles on her shoulder. Animals often do that, drawn to her stillness, in blithe disregard of what she does.

  It is so lulled that it remains perching on her after a blue-white feather, the quill sharp as any arrowhead, strikes where she sat. By then she has stepped behind the lanky boy who smells of pomade and leather. She seizes his hair and, pulling it back, opens his throat.

  The mynah darts into the canopies. Houyi catches the body as it crumples; they are obscured from mortal sight and security cameras, but the blood may stain. She holds him over the water as he turns from boy to bird the size of a hound. His pinions are indigo, his belly ivory.

  "Why did you kill him?"

  "He believed he'd win unrivaled glory by attacking me." She wipes the blade on the feathers; later she will have to properly clean it. "Do serpents not kill?"

  "Only for food. He couldn't cast out his spirit in time—he died, in truth and finality, with his flesh. As they say, you have no mercy." The snake crosses her arms. She remains under palm shade, keeping a distance they both know is more cosmetic than useful. "It's not even that you kill in anger."

  "I rarely do that."

  "That makes it worse."

  "He did," Houyi says as she wills the knife away, "stalk my niece. To devour, as far as I could make out. Certainly not to make friends."

  The sound the viper makes is too specific, a hiss too protracted, to come from human tongue or larynx. "He did, did he? Give me his carcass. I'll eat his innards; that way he'll never reincarnate."

  "A moment ago you were criticizing my lack of mercy."

  "Julienne—" Olivia hunches into her thin sundress. "How is she?"

  When Chang'e found her, Julienne had worn herself out crying. An anxiety attack, she explained, one that would pass—as though it was nothing, as though she was not on the verge of breaking. "We'll talk about that. First tell me what you did to her. Be precise."

  "Are you looking to dismember me?"

  "Not yet."

  "I gave her the same brew any mortal must take who enters and exits banbuduo. Yes, I added something to make her forget me from the moment we met—her recall would've been inconsistent otherwise. I've kept the monk away from her, as I promised you. What more do you want?"

  "Julienne's been upset these last few months over what she can't remember." Houyi lets go of the bird that was a boy, now that its throat has run dry. The corpse starts to dissipate.

  The snake glances down, for the first time showing shame. "I didn't mean to hurt her."

  "That's ever the refrain with your kind. Whatever your intent was, it'll buy you no clemency. Undoing this damage might."

  "You've the lunar rabbit. The best apothecary heaven has to offer."

  "My wife considered that, but apparently it'd need to know what went into the brew, whether the memory was blocked or outright erased, and how much. You alone would be privy to that." Houyi frowns at the streaks of gore on her clothes. She'd need to remove them before she sees Julienne again. Her niece has never seen her kill; best to keep it that way. "Unfortunately."

  "I can't believe how arrogant you are when you're asking for my help."

  "I'm astounded at your ill manner when it's evident you want something from me. It can hardly be concern for Julienne that drove you here. Appalling though it is, we've something the other requires."

  The viper's jaw tightens. "Among immortals Lady Chang'e is said to be one of the most beautiful. Why hasn't she divorced you yet? What does she see in you?"

  "The simplicity of frankness." Houyi is well aware that she isn't always frank: but that is for another time. "Not that your species values such a quality."

  "You insufferable—" Another reptilian noise. "Very well. I can try to reverse what I did. But before we get to that, I want to know if you've given the monk your blessings."

  "Should I want to hunt you down, I'd do it myself. Why?"

  "Nothing. Let me see Julienne. I'll have to do it in person."

  Houyi holds out her hand.

  Olivia looks at it as though it is a consecrated blade. "Just tell me where she is."

  "You'll have to forgive my discourtesy when I say that I don't trust you to be alone with her. The sooner this is done the better, and you cannot move through the mortal world as I do."

  The demon inhales sharply, taking her hand, and the park falls away.

  * * *

  They reappear in a hotel corridor that Xiaoqing knows well. Not the exact floor corresponding to the one she inhabits back in banbuduo, but the layout is identical.

  When she stumbles the archer keeps hold of her, balancing her weight in one hand. She jerks away and leans against the wall, forehead against wood paneling, gasping as her bones and stomach resettle. This method of travel must surely kill a human.

  Houyi is murmuring into her phone, a black bar sheathed in aluminum. Somewhere between there and here her clothes have become immaculate, not even a drop left to mark the bird boy's passing. "Seung Ngo and Julienne will be back shortly."

  The archer lapses into silence, evidently not one for small talk. In spite of herself Xiaoqing supposes she understands what Lady Chang'e might find appealing about this creature, in body if not in personality: a frame tall and muscle-taut, a ruthlessness of being. It still doesn't seem a good basis for a relationship eons-long.

  The lift opens, and at the sight of Julienne the knit of Xiaoqing's thoughts frays apart. The girl gives her an uncertain smile. "Do I know you?"

  "This is Olivia Ching," Houyi says. "She can help you."

  "I didn't know you had a therapist friend." She turns to Xiaoqing. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you, Ms. Ching. I'm Julienne Lau."

  Lady Chang'e gives Xiaoqing a direct, searching look. The rumors are true: she is lovely, a chiseled face and skin like dawn-touched pearl. Xiaoqing keeps her eyes demurely downcast. By all accounts Chang'e is easier to appease than her wife, though next to the archer a stone would be sweet
and tender

  Xiaoqing kneels before Julienne, and wishes for nothing more than to put her head in the mortal's lap and whisper, My dreams have been full of you. I couldn't stop thinking of the girl who took me into her arms. I... "I'm going to need to touch you," she says, "and this might be uncomfortable."

  Julienne smiles, uneasily fussing with her hair.

  Laying her hand on the girl's belly, she searches for the fleck of ground scale that she added to the tisane. As a piece of her it answers immediately, passing through stomach lining and flesh and skin: no larger than a grain, glinting wet and green.

  Julienne leaps to her feet, gagging. The bathroom door doesn't close in time to shut out the noise of her vomiting. It goes on for too long, as if she is retching up her lungs and everything she's ever eaten since she grew teeth. When she emerges her eyes are streaming and she grips the doorframe for support.

  "Olivia?" The mortal's voice is hoarse.

  Without meaning to, Xiaoqing reaches for Julienne. She's shoved back. It's without strength, but the surprise stings far more than the push.

  "Don't touch me," Julienne says, wiping her eyes, "not after what you did."

  Xiaoqing stares at the girl and resists the urge to scream at her.

  "I need to be alone. Aunties."

  Julienne storms out. The archer follows, mouth pursed shut.

  "My wife will keep her from doing anything foolish," Chang'e says, settling at the desk's edge. "I believe you've been wanting—what was it—an audience with me."

  "I've hoped for it." Xiaoqing drops to one knee, bowing her head. "One in better circumstances, Lady Chang'e."

  "They surely can't get any worse, but I shan't tempt fate. What is it?"

  "I'm Bai Suzhen's sworn sister. A monk, Fahai, trapped her in a pagoda without just cause. It's a wrong I've sought to right since."

  "It's a rare demon that doesn't deserve her chastisement."

  She bites the inside of her cheek. "Her only crime was to want more than what was allotted her. It was such a small thing, to have a husband and a child, and to live in peace as any human woman might. Great Guanyin took pity and granted her reprieve once; what was one mortal man, monk or not, to contradict that?"