Dragon Pearl

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Then my brain caught up with the rest of me. Stealing litmus film would look weird but not suspicious. Not in the way I was worried about, anyway.

  I tore off a couple strips of film and stuffed them in my pocket, then shoved the rest of the roll back with my stash.

  Just then, Sujin ran in. “Come on!” they cried. “We have to get to our assigned stations.”

  It was a good thing Sujin had come to get me, because I’d blanked on where my assigned station was. It didn’t take long for me to figure out we were headed toward Engineering, along with a cluster of other crew members.

  “What’s going on?” I asked breathlessly as we hurried toward the elevator.

  “Shh!” Sujin hissed.

  The alarms quieted for a moment. I relaxed, but only for a second, because an announcement followed over the loudspeakers. “This is Captain Hwan.” I couldn’t tell whether the growl in his voice came from a fault in the speakers or his emotional state. Maybe both. “We un-Gated at Sycamore Station per our orders to survey the area. Unfortunately, it turns out that an unauthorized force of approximately ten ships has gathered here. All hands to battle stations.”

  My stomach dropped. I wasn’t ready for this. I was just a stowaway!

  “Ten ships?” I whispered to Sujin as we waited for the elevator to reach our deck. “That’s bad news, isn’t it?”

  “It depends,” Sujin said, also in a hushed voice, even if no one was around to overhear us. The goblin smelled rank with dread. “Are they big ships? Little ships? Ships tricked out with upgrades from some rogue station?”

  I was sorry I’d asked.

  We made it to Engineering in record time. The moment we showed up, one of the warrant officers took us in hand. She told Sujin to help monitor the state of the engine. I didn’t envy that work, which was both tedious and important.

  As for me, I was assigned to an engineer who was busy trying to put a hotfix on an unstable meridian before it became an issue.

  I frowned. “I thought the broken meridian was on Deck Three,” I said.

  “It is, but all the ship’s meridians are connected, and the damage has impacted other areas.” The engineer sighed. “You’ve never done this before, have you?” he grumbled. “Well, here’s your chance. Can’t say it’s not likely that you’ll make it worse.”

  I bristled a bit but tried not to take his attitude personally. After all, there was a lot at stake. Everyone’s life depended on the ship staying in one piece.

  “How bad is it?” I asked, thinking of all the warnings I’d heard in class, and the possibility that Jang might be the cause of the problem.

  The engineer was silent for a moment. “I was hoping we’d have a good long spell to fix it before we had to gallop around the sector some more,” he said. “I was against Gating as much as we already have. If we have to Gate again in a hurry, it won’t be pretty. But the captain wants what the captain wants.” He shook his head.

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked.

  The engineer didn’t trust me with the master flows, of course. Some meridians were bigger and more important than others. He set me to work with the smaller, less crucial ones. “Don’t think it isn’t important,” he said when he saw my dismay. “It’s good practice, and luck in small matters builds luck in large matters.”

  I took the seat he indicated. At first I had difficulty concentrating. I itched to be on the bridge so I could see what was going on outside the ship. Then I glanced over my shoulder at Sujin, whose station was across from mine. They were hard at work, and I felt ashamed. If they could do this, so could I.

  In its way, redirecting flows was like sewing—gathering up the lines of gi and guiding them to their proper channels. When I’d mended clothes at home, my mother had often criticized the crookedness of my stitches, much to my annoyance. Here, I sweated to make the flows as even as possible.

  In my imagination, the ten ships crowded closer to us. I listened for explosions, waited for the deck to shake beneath my feet. But no alarms went off; the ship sounded remarkably normal. I almost wished there were some evidence of the attack. It was hard to take it seriously when I was walled up in Engineering with no view.

  Then I heard shouting and a string of curses. Sujin jumped back from their workstation, clutching their side. An enormous burning line of light had seared the goblin from the neck all the way to their waist, as though someone had slashed them with a whip of fire, severing their safety harness in the process. Sujin struggled to remain upright, then slumped to the deck, unconscious.

  Without thinking, I rushed over to my friend. The status indicators in their station flashed a garish red. “Cadet Sujin needs help!” I cried.

  “Take over Sujin’s work for now,” the engineering chief said tersely.

  As I sat in Sujin’s chair, I could hear the chief calling Medical for assistance. I hoped they’d be able to revive the goblin and do something for those burns, which stank of charred flesh. Meanwhile, my engineer mentor swore and assumed the functions I’d been overseeing.

  I could tell at once what had happened. Something had damaged Meridian 3, and the resulting backlash had burned Sujin along the corresponding meridian of their own body. Suddenly I appreciated how dangerous engineering work could be. By taking up Sujin’s station, I was risking my life in the same way. But I was acting the part of Jang, and I couldn’t let down my friends, or the rest of the crew.

  The next minutes passed in a haze as I frantically wrestled with the lashing currents of gi. I kept flinching from the task, remembering the livid burns inflicted on my friend. It didn’t help that I could hear their ragged breathing behind me.

  Yet the longer I managed the flows, the more natural the task felt. Whenever I wasn’t sure what to do, I just trusted my instincts. Sure, it might have been dangerous, but it was producing good results. I could almost see the flows as a tapestry I was weaving.

  Finally, an orderly arrived to take Sujin to Medical. I could only spare the goblin a glance as the orderly hoisted them onto a hover-pallet. Don’t get distracted, I told myself.

  As I became more confident in my work, I was able to listen to the others’ terse conversations with half an ear.

  The chief engineer was in constant touch with Captain Hwan on the comm channel. “We’ll either have to run soon, or figure out some clever way to outfight the remaining nine ships,” she was saying. “The gi is stable for now, but I can’t guarantee that the current state of affairs is going to last.”

  “You’re going to have to do your best,” Captain Hwan said from the bridge. “We need to take them alive if we can.”

  “Take them—?” The chief engineer swore at him. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “Do your job,” the captain said calmly.

  “You requested this mission,” the chief engineer said bitterly. “Even knowing this entire sector is bad luck, and it’s only going to worsen the closer we get to the Fourth Colony.”

  “I said, do your job,” the captain repeated, more menacingly, and the chief engineer shut up.

  I flinched as if Hwan had addressed me. The gi currents bucked and trembled, and I scrabbled at the controls, worried that I hadn’t reacted in time. But the flows steadied, and I sighed in relief.

  I’d relaxed too soon. The gi snarled again like fouled thread, knotting up dangerously. What had I done wrong? I gasped as my insides clenched, feeling as though someone had punched me in the gut. Not just that: A burning sensation roared up through my body, and my vision swam.

  Luckily, one of the warrant officers had been keeping an eye on me—probably because she didn’t trust me to get things right, but at the moment I didn’t care about that. She ordered someone to key in an override from another station.

  “Stay alert!” she snapped at me. I had to remind myself that my embarrassment was unimportant when the ship’s safety was at stake. “That wasn’t your foul-up,” she went on. “That was an attack getting through the shields. And if the
shields are going down . . .”

  I swallowed. Had that burning sensation meant that the ship was in real trouble?

  “You feel the connection, don’t you?” the warrant officer said in a low, relentless voice. “That’s good. Give yourself over to it.”

  The chief engineer started arguing with the captain again. The racket was giving me a headache. Nevertheless, I forced myself to focus on the warrant officer’s words.

  “You were starting to go into Engineer’s Trance,” she said, “synchronizing your gi with the ship’s so it’s like a part of your own body. See if you can do it again.”

  “But isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. “Cadet Sujin just—”

  “Sujin wasn’t in control,” the warrant officer cut in. “For you it would be different. You seem to have a knack for this, and you’d be going into a trance deliberately. It’ll make guiding the gi flows come more naturally.”

  I’d just had a small taste of what it felt like to be in sync with the ship, and I wasn’t looking forward to more of the same.

  On the other hand, I did want to know what was happening to the Pale Lightning.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, nodding firmly even though I was shaken.

  The warrant officer clapped me on the shoulder, making me wince, and turned her attention to some new emergency.

  I took a deep breath and focused once more on the control panel, which showed pulsing lines of light. I concentrated on them, carefully mapping each of the ship’s meridians to its equivalent in my own body. As I worked with the gi flows, my breathing slowed, and my pulse along with it. After a while, I could detect the ship’s wounds. Two shots had gotten past the shields; one hole was already being patched up. My muscles and joints ached as though I’d been sprinting pell-mell and making sudden starts and stops.

  I found myself in two places at once. One version of me sat in front of the panel, adjusting the controls with more certainty than I’d had before. I knew what to do without having to think about it.

  The other version of me was flying through deep space. Before, I’d always thought of space as cold and empty. But as the ship, I felt at home there, and I could sense other ships moving through the dark. I knew where the local star and its planets were, and I could detect the pulsing gravitational knot of the nearby Gate, the grand sweeping paths that connected star systems to each other like a skein of ever-shifting constellations.

  The Pale Lightning gathered itself and fired its mass drivers. There was a burst of white light behind my eyes.

  Then something slammed into my body.

  “You went too deep!” I heard someone cry from a distance, but I didn’t understand the words. Everything dissolved into static, and I plummeted into blackness.

  I woke up on a pallet in Medical. I’d been dreaming of Jinju—the red skies, and the dust that got into everything—and of my mother shaking her head at me. Then I remembered where I was, and who I was. Who I was pretending to be, that is. I looked down at my body and saw with relief that I was still in the guise of Jang.

  I was a bit groggy, but I didn’t appear to be injured anywhere, and my body didn’t hurt. Perhaps I had only fainted. Or maybe they had injected me with a painkiller. If so, I was grateful it hadn’t interfered with my fox magic. The aunties had told me once that ordinary medicine wouldn’t do that. Still, I didn’t trust drugs, and I preferred not to spend any more time in the medical bay.

  Since the ship was still in one piece, another of the engineers must have taken over for me when I passed out. I winced, remembering the sensation of the Pale Lightning taking fire. I’d been so deeply linked with the ship that I’d felt the assault as if it had happened to me.

  This time, I knew my way around and, with the aid of Charm, it didn’t take long for me to sneak out. With everyone so preoccupied by the attack on the ship, it wasn’t difficult to persuade anybody I came across that I was no one significant.

  I already knew where I was going. I would never get a better chance to check out the captain’s quarters. Because right then I was guaranteed that Captain Hwan would be on the bridge dealing with the battle.

  Is it really worth it? I wondered. They think you’re Jang. They’re counting on you to get back to your station and help.

  But I’d only be gone a little while, long enough to see if the captain had secreted away any information about who was behind the mercenaries or where the deserters had gone. I couldn’t forget my promise to Jang or my quest to find my brother.

  Like a heart-stab, an image came to me—Jun pointing out the local constellations on the nights we snuck out to stare up at the sky. I remembered the way we’d stolen a single honey cookie from the pantry—Auntie Areum saved up for honey to make them, on account of her sweet tooth—and we passed it back and forth, nibbling each time we could name one of the Thousand Worlds. We’d drawn out the process as long as we could, but even so the cookie disappeared quickly.

  Somewhere in the Thousand Worlds there must be people who would be willing to help restore Jinju, Jun had said. If I have to, I’ll visit every world to find them. I’d believed him then, and I believed him still.

  I paused for breath on the way to the elevator. My heart was pounding too hard. My body didn’t like the way I was pushing it, and I wasn’t even walking all that quickly.

  I slowed down until my heartbeat eased. I would have to take it easy while being careful not to get caught. The delay was aggravating, because I had no way of telling how long the battle would last. Part of me wanted the Pale Lightning to emerge victorious quickly, of course. But another part wanted as much time as possible.

  The corridors of the Pale Lightning seemed to stretch out forever on either side. On the few occasions I passed people, I relied on nudges of Charm to keep them from looking at me too closely, even though wielding magic caused my head to swim. I was used to the ship being busier, but everyone was at battle stations.

  The elevator ride to the officers’ deck felt like it took longer than usual. My skin was clammy with sweat, even though I hadn’t walked any great distance. I leaned heavily against the side of the elevator, clinging to the rail. I wondered if the engineers had had any difficulty with the ship when I fainted. I shuddered at the thought. Nothing I could do about that now, and I hoped that Captain Hwan, as much as I distrusted him, had matters under control.

  I made a beeline to his quarters. The lock on the door—a number pad combined with a fingerprint reader—glowed intimidatingly red. I studied it with narrowed eyes.

  First, the easy part. I fished the litmus film out of my pocket. Fortunately, it hadn’t gotten too crumpled. I pressed the central dot on the purple film for three long seconds until it turned transparent to indicate that it was ready. Careful to handle it only by the edges, where it changed to pale red in response to the acidity of my skin, I placed it over the fingerprint reader and pressed it there for just a second.

  The reader beeped forbiddingly, and I snatched the film away. I listened for alarms. None went off. I let out my breath in relief.

  I’d been counting on this. The locks weren’t so sensitive that they responded to every chance touch. If they did, false alarms would go off every time someone tripped and fell against a door, or tried the wrong door by mistake. I didn’t intend to push my luck, though. The next time I touched the reader, it would have to be for real.

  The film had done its job. Several overlapping fingerprints showed up on it in sharp lines of red. I squinted at the whorls and ridges and concentrated on changing the tip of my index finger to match. Then I stopped and cursed my stupidity. If I copied this view, the print would be reversed.

  I flipped the transparent film over so I wasn’t looking at the mirror image anymore. Then I gathered Charm again. The good thing was that this wasn’t my real body to begin with, so making small adjustments to it wasn’t hard. I would just have to remember to use this process again to change my fingerprint back to Jang’s.

  Now for the hard part, which was f
iguring out the passcode. I scowled at the keypad. I knew that people often got lazy and used the dates of anniversaries or graduations. Even if Captain Hwan was the lazy type, though, I didn’t know enough about his past history to guess what he might have picked.

  Or did I? Come to think of it, he had mentioned that time when his comrade died. In the early 1480s, he had said. It had sounded like he’d respected her greatly. Did I want to gamble on that, though?

  Another idea occurred to me. There was a way to check first. . . . I pulled out a second strip of litmus film. The buttons that the captain pressed would have a residue of skin oils. If the film had reacted to the fingerprints on the reader, it would react to the fingerprints on the buttons, too. And I doubted the captain was in the habit of randomly fiddling with any buttons he didn’t need to press. That would help me narrow things down.

  The red marks showed me that the captain had pressed four different buttons: 1, 3, 4, and 8. If the number was indeed a year, only one of those combinations would make sense.

  I took a deep breath, then pressed my index finger to the reader. It lit up blue, which was a good sign. It had accepted my fingerprint. I exhaled in relief, and then carefully entered the numbers one by one, my hand trembling: 1-4-8-3.

  Nothing happened for a beat. I held my breath, hoping an alarm wouldn’t sound. Then the lock snicked open. I’d done it! I darted inside and then nearly whimpered when my body reminded me it wasn’t in the best of shape.

  The door closed behind me as the lights flicked on. I looked around, blinking. Captain Hwan’s outer office featured an impressively white carpet—I knew how hard it was to clean stains—and an immense desk bolted to the deck. I hated to think of how much it would hurt if it came loose during maneuvers and slammed into me.

  An old-fashioned sword in its sheath hung on the wall, fixed in place by several ornamented brackets. I sniffed the air, then drifted closer to the sword, eyes narrowing. Was that—? I knew that smell. Just as I recognized it, I sneezed, only barely covering my mouth in time. Someone had used fox magic in here, so much that it lingered. My brother.