Dragon Pearl

by Yoon Ha Lee

  “Jang,” I whispered into the air, “can you come with me and keep a lookout? We might learn something from the prisoners in the brig.”

  He didn’t materialize or speak, but a cold breeze touched my cheek, as if in agreement.

  Emboldened, I walked quickly toward the brig. I only slowed when I felt the chill of Jang’s presence again, cutting bone-deep this time. That was all the warning I needed.

  I emerged into the corridor just as two soldiers marched by—a man and a woman. They scarcely gave me a glance. I was going to need their help to get into the brig. I focused my Charm on them and flashed a smile at the man.

  “Yes?” he said, grinning goofily at me as if I was his new best friend. Which, in a sense, I was.

  “I’m supposed to do some toilet-scrubbing in the brig,” I said in a woeful voice, “but I can’t remember the codes to get in there.”

  Might as well put all my latrine-duty experience to good use, I thought.

  My magic was more wobbly than I’d reckoned on, though, because I still wasn’t feeling well. “Why would they schedule someone to do chores in the middle of an interrogation?” the other soldier demanded.

  Yikes. I invented an emergency and directed more magic at her, even though my head ached. “There was a problem with the plumbing,” I said, “and the interrogators were pretty upset about it.” I lifted my hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, I’m just a cadet. They don’t tell me everything.”

  The nice thing about Charm was that I didn’t need to come up with a great excuse, just one good enough to give the magic something to fix on. A small voice in my head suggested that I stop relying on my magic to solve problems for me, because at some point all of this was going to catch up to me in a bad way. But I didn’t see any alternative right then.

  The two soldiers exchanged glances. I held my breath and tried to act unhappy about the mythical chore, rather than anxious that they would catch me lying. Then the woman said, “It’s four-four-one-two. Better you than me, Cadet.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and continued to the elevator. Since no one was in there with me, I sagged in relief. Jun, I reminded myself. You’re doing this for Jun, and Jang.

  But I hadn’t seen Jun in nearly two years, and Jang was already dead, and in the meantime I was becoming less and less certain of what I was doing.

  The elevator chimed, prompting me to exit on the appropriate deck. I squared my shoulders and walked to the door, then punched in the code. The world swam before me as the door opened. I heard voices yelling: the interrogators.

  Jang’s ghost-wind swirled against me, a warning to be cautious.

  In the holos I’d watched, starship brigs were full of dramatic shadows where the villains crouched with their eyes gleaming threateningly. Sometimes on the cell walls you could catch a glimpse of scratched graffiti, which offered clues to what would happen next. Often patches of fungus grew on the deck.

  Here, however, bright light sliced out of the doorway. I slipped through, drawn to the voices. Their words sounded muffled at first. As I tiptoed closer, I heard them more clearly, and I froze.

  “Pox spirits.”

  Sweat trickled down my back, and my palms felt unpleasantly clammy. Were the prisoners sick? I hoped there was a medic down here, preferably one who was also a shaman, in case our guests had brought any vengeful disease spirits with them.

  I had entered an observation chamber, where a pair of crew members with data-slates was looking through an immense window into a well-lit interrogation room just beyond. I cloaked myself with Charm so I would blend into the back wall. Through the window, which I assumed was a one-way mirror so prisoners couldn’t see out, I saw an interrogator and a stooped man sitting across from each other at a table. Two other people, a man and a woman, slouched behind the bars of separate cells on the left side of the interrogation room. The man at the table and the other two captives wore matching plain dun shirts and trousers. I wasn’t sure whether those were their uniforms or our prisoner outfits. And without rank tabs to go by, I didn’t know which one of them was the most important.

  The person being questioned, weasel-faced and of stringy build, met the interrogator’s gaze squarely. He didn’t look frightened, just resigned. His words came through a speaker in the observation room. “You don’t want to go down there,” he was saying. “No one has magic powerful enough to deal with that many ghosts. And even if you did somehow manage to get past them, there’s a chance the pox spirits still hold a grudge.”

  Something about his manner of speaking bothered me. I mulled it over while eavesdropping, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “That’s not your concern,” the interrogator said. While her voice didn’t waver, I caught a faint whiff of fear from her, even through the window. She had to be really worried.

  “What killed all those colonists generations ago was no ordinary plague,” the man said. “The Fourth Colony was one of the flowers of the Thousand Worlds. They had doctors and magicians and shamans as skilled as anyone you’d find in the core worlds today, but none of them could save the colonists after they neglected to appease the spirits.”

  Now I knew what troubled me about his voice. Watching the holos had led me to believe that all pirates were ruffians who solved their problems by shooting them, and my experience on the Red Azalea had borne that out. But this prisoner spoke with the measured accents of a scholar. He sounded like the narrator of some of the recorded history lectures my mother had forced me to listen to as part of my schooling.

  “That’s very interesting.” The interrogator said this so sympathetically that I almost believed she felt for the man and his friends. “But it doesn’t explain why you attacked us. Surely you knew that you couldn’t hope to defeat a battle cruiser? If you’d persuaded your commander to stay in hiding instead of ambushing us, you would have avoided this whole mess.”

  I squinted at the interrogator. She wasn’t using magic, but it was a kind of charm nonetheless. The more she befriended the prisoner, the more he would let his guard down around her, and the higher the chances he would let something slip.

  For a moment I felt sorry for the man. Since he was already talking to her, he would eventually spill everything. Then I recalled Sujin’s cries when the goblin got burned during the attack, and my moment of sympathy evaporated. The sooner this was over, the better.

  The man’s shoulders slumped. “You’re military,” he said, “so you can’t understand. I’m not brave. I only told my commander what he wanted to hear.”

  The interrogator raised her eyebrows. “Being a soldier isn’t about never being afraid,” she said, still kindly. “It’s about doing your duty even when your gut is knotted up with fear. But, you know, unless you’re afraid of bones, your commander can’t threaten you anymore—he’s dead.”

  Huh. So this man wasn’t a pirate, but some kind of informant or advisor? Curious, but it made sense the more I thought about it. A smart pirate would seek counsel from someone who knew the history of the area.

  The man averted his eyes for a long moment. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “I—I lost a lot to that scandal. My husbands, my children, my reputation, everything. The commander was the only one willing to take me on. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was something.”

  I had to stop my toe from tapping. The cold air that brushed against my skin told me Jang was still with me and feeling as impatient as I was. Presumably they’d discussed this “scandal,” whatever it was, before I’d arrived. I didn’t care about that. I wanted to hear more about the Fourth Colony.

  They went back and forth in that vein for a while, to my increasing irritation. Apparently the scholar—for that’s what he was—had, in desperation, made up an entire “ancient chronicle” in the hopes of establishing his reputation. Someone had caught him in the lie, and it had ruined him. The story made me uneasy, not least because it reminded me of all the lies I’d told to get here.

  Eventually they wound back t
o the point. By this time I’d developed a healthy respect for the interrogator, who had been forced to nudge all the information out of the prisoner the hard way, without being able to rely on Charm. I paid close attention to her methods—it would be nice to have a fallback in case I was ever too tired to use magic.

  The scholar bit his lip, complicated emotions playing across his face. He was making a difficult decision. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “Our commander was hired by one of your captain’s enemies. Councilor Chae-Won of the Pearled Halls.”

  Jang, did you hear that? I mouthed.

  There was no response.

  The scholar kept spilling secrets. “She wants the Dragon Pearl so she can reduce their reliance on the Dragon Society. Whoever possesses it will control the next wave of colonization, and the Thousand Worlds’ expansion. That’s not just an ordinary fortune at stake—that’s guidance over our very future, and wealth beyond imagining.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, flushed with fury. I thought of all the old clothes I’d mended over the years, the countless times I’d worked to repair the environmental filters and suits because we couldn’t afford new ones, the dust that got into everything on Jinju. Whoever this councilor was, I doubted she was thinking about people like me and my family, who could use the Pearl’s powers to make our lives less desperate. I knew, too, that my planet wasn’t the only one in the Thousand Worlds that had suffered from a botched or incomplete job of terraforming, or the only one that hadn’t been able to afford the expensive fees to set things right.

  The interrogator didn’t speak, only nodded. I admired her self-control.

  “We were supposed to find and claim the Pearl for Chae-Won while preventing Captain Hwan from getting any closer to it,” the man said. “But we hadn’t figured out how to get past the ghosts. What I do know is that, long ago, the colonists grew arrogant and stopped making offerings to the pox spirits, and the spirits took their vengeance by wiping out the colony, as a lesson to the Thousand Worlds. The colonists’ ghosts, in turn, became bitter and vengeful.”

  “A lot of people know that much,” the interrogator said.

  The man laughed painfully. “You mean they know the spooky stories they see in the holos, where ghosts come rampaging from the planet. That won’t be far from the truth, if you offend them. And it seems to be what your captain is spoiling to do. It can’t end well.”

  That did sound like Hwan’s plan, based on what I’d read in his private log. Dread seized me. Had he gotten my brother embroiled with not only angry ghosts but also pox spirits?

  To my frustration, the interrogator said, “You sound tired. It’s time for you to have a break. Let’s get some food into you.”

  I wasn’t about to hang around to watch the man eat, and I didn’t want the interrogator to catch me, either, so I hightailed it out of there before the observers could turn and notice me. Jang saved me from taking a wrong turn, and I murmured a hasty thank-you to him.

  My thoughts churned as I headed toward Lieutenant Ju-Won’s station to report in, however belatedly. Captain Hwan wanted the Dragon Pearl as a weapon of one kind, and his enemies wanted it as a weapon of another. Even worse, getting to the Pearl—and finding my brother—sounded like it would require finessing my way past spirits who’d held a grudge for a couple of centuries. I liked the whole situation less and less. But I couldn’t give up now.

  “You got lost again?” the lieutenant demanded when I checked in.

  I fidgeted and did my best to look penitent. Instead of using Charm, I’d settled for trying to persuade her that I’d messed up rather than taken an intentional detour. It probably helped that I looked ghastly, which I knew because I’d peered at myself in the shiny expanse of a polished bulkhead. Despite the reflection’s blurriness, I could see that I had dark circles under my eyes.

  The lieutenant went easy on me, probably because I was tottering so much she thought I’d keel over. She assigned me to a shift of doing paperwork: helping to compile post-battle damage reports. When I reported to the sergeant in charge, I got the distinct feeling he didn’t need or want my assistance. “Be careful,” he said gruffly. “If I have to fix even one record because you got it wrong, you’re going to have to weld this ship back together by yourself.”

  I knew he wouldn’t literally follow through on that threat. Still, I bobbed a nervous nod to show that I got his point.

  I didn’t catch up with Sujin and Haneul until mess that evening. By then, even though I’d spent all afternoon sitting at a desk and only occasionally getting up to fetch tea, sweat drenched my uniform and my legs wobbled as I stood in line to get my food. I caught some of the other cadets raising their eyebrows at me, and my cheeks heated. Word must have gotten around about what had happened to me in Engineering.

  Sujin had no trace of a burn, but their pallor did look slightly gray. Even their horn had an unhealthy gray tinge. An effect of the healing pod, I assumed. Still, they waved at me cheerily enough.

  For once, Haneul didn’t lecture me when she saw me. She’d gotten in line right behind me. I realized why when she reached out to steady my tray just before I would have dropped it.

  “Careful there,” Haneul said, quickly and subtly removing her hand so I could save face.

  We sat down, and her anxious eyes studied me from across the table. “You almost look worse than Sujin here. Are you sure you don’t need a stint in a healing pod yourself?”

  “I don’t want to make excuses,” I said, more bravely than I felt. “I’m eager to get back to work with everyone else.”

  Her expression softened. “You have a good spirit,” she said, “even if you can be an idiot sometimes. I heard what you did in Engineering.”

  “Makes two of us,” Sujin said, winking at me.

  “Yes,” Haneul said, “what is it with you two and Trance?”

  “The physician said I was very brave,” Sujin crowed. “I heard you hung in there a long time, Jang, and you didn’t even get burned. That’s really impressive!”

  I forced myself to smile despite the tremble in my hands. “Anything to avoid cleaning the bathroom.”

  Sujin laughed. “No kidding.”

  “You two missed out on the action while you were recovering, obviously,” Haneul said, “but we beat the pirates, just like I knew we would.” She looked as proud as if she had won the battle singlehandedly.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” I said to Sujin.

  Sujin fiddled with their spork, then made a small gesture, conjuring up a thin rectangular box. “Thank you,” they said, with an oddly formal half bow. “For looking out for me.” They held the box out with both hands, as though they were honoring me. “I remembered that you like the chocolates best.”

  “Thank you,” I said, accepting the gift.

  We smiled shyly at each other. Then I opened the box and passed the chocolates around. They were delicious. The three of us devoured them in silence, but it was a friendly silence. For a change, Haneul didn’t chastise Sujin for using magic.

  I thought about how much I would miss the two of them when I left the ship. I’d heard from Lieutenant Ju-Won that the Pale Lightning would be putting in for supplies and repairs at Abalone Spire in two days. Repairs would take a couple weeks, maybe longer. I couldn’t wait that long to go looking for Jun. I needed to depart soon, and I had an idea about how to do it.

  “Jang!” Sujin was snapping their fingers in front of my face. Back home, my cousins would kick my shin to get my attention, but doing that here would have earned the goblin a demerit. “Mess is ending. Hurry and have more tea. It’ll wake you up.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, feigning dizziness. It wasn’t much of a pretense.

  Later that night, after the roster of the next day’s duties was announced, I reported to barracks and crept into my bunk. I listened as the others’ breathing changed to the rhythm of sleep, or, in Haneul’s case, snores. It was tempting to close my eyes, but first I had to plan my getaway.

 
; I knew that, once the ship was repaired, the captain intended to head to the Fourth Colony. I had to beat him there. The map I had memorized from his notebook would guide me, but I would need transportation, and I would also have to come up with a way to slow down the Pale Lightning.

  I had no idea how to pilot a shuttle. Figuring it out on the fly, while being on the run from a battle cruiser, didn’t strike me as a great move. No, but there was another solution for getting off the ship, if my Charm didn’t let me down. . . .

  As far as the Pale Lightning was concerned, I had learned enough about the ship’s meridians to do a little sabotage. Thinking about that made my stomach clench. If I caused even minor damage to the ship as it journeyed through space, I’d put the engineers at risk of injury. I remembered Sujin’s burn and grimaced.

  If I tampered with the Pale Lightning’s systems while it was docked, however, people wouldn’t get hurt. (At least I hoped not.) And it would serve as a distraction while I deserted.

  Deserted. I rolled over on my side and shivered, staring into the darkness. I wasn’t even a real cadet, and here I was, feeling regretful. Despite all the toilet scrubbing, I’d come to enjoy life in the Space Forces. I had finally gotten used to all the rules and regulations, I’d performed well in the training, and I’d made two good friends.

  But none of that mattered. I had come to find my brother, and I hadn’t completed that mission yet.

  It wouldn’t take long for people on the ship to notice that Jang was gone. There was no way I could Charm the entire crew into believing he was taking care of important business elsewhere or he had never existed at all. After he was missing for a while, Jang’s comrades would conclude that he’d taken the coward’s way out and left.