A Wish in the Dark

by Christina Soontornvat

  Now here was Pong’s chance to ask his many questions, but he couldn’t speak. He looked down at the floor, guilt twisting its way between his ribs. He’d left Somkit behind. What kind of a friend does that?

  The room felt stuffy, the way it does when people go too long without saying anything. And Somkit rarely went for long without saying anything.

  He slapped his belly. “Well, I’m starved. And if I’m hungry, you must be double hungry. Let’s go down and eat.”

  By the time the boys got downstairs, most of the people sitting in the atrium had cleared away. Somkit went back into Mark’s kitchen and came out with dishes of fish meatball soup and fried eggs and scallions over rice.

  Pong inhaled almost his entire meal before he stopped and held one hand over his mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Somkit.

  Pong choked down his bite. “I’m not supposed to eat anything until sunrise,” he croaked.

  Somkit looked again at Pong’s shaved scalp. “A dangerous criminal hiding out in a temple. I don’t guess that has anything to do with you?”

  “I can explain . . .” started Pong.

  The weight of his situation fell on him hard. He thought of Father Cham, by now gone from this life, and the temple that he’d never see again. He thought of Nok, her piercing blackbird eyes and the vengeful way she’d looked at him before he leaped from the cliff into the water.

  “Oh, Somkit,” he whispered. “I am in so, so much trouble.”

  Somkit looked at him. He reached for the jar of dried pepper flakes and sprinkled some into his bowl, then Pong’s.

  “Trust me,” he said. “You’re safe here. This is the one place in the city where that”— he eyed Pong’s left wrist —“doesn’t matter. No one here is going to turn you in. And no one from the outside is ever going to find you, either.”

  Somkit picked a meatball out of his soup with his chopsticks and held it up to Pong. “Go on, you better take it. If you wait till sunrise to eat it, it’s going to smell super bad.”

  Pong smiled and took the meatball with his own chopsticks. He turned back to his soup bowl and shut his eyes, willing himself to feel as light as the steam rising into his face.

  You’re safe here. No one is ever going to find you.

  Nok swung the cottage gate shut behind her. She had her suitcase in one hand and her bamboo staff in the other. It was a four-mile walk up through the village and down the other side of the mountain to the school. She had told Mrs. Viboon to go home after her mother had left the day before. The poor woman was still so distraught over Pong that she didn’t do much besides weep, anyway. That left no one for Nok to say goodbye to.

  She had just set foot on the path when an oxcart appeared, slowly rounding the corner. A thin-faced monk sat behind the brown ox. Nok tried to remember his name. Was it Brother Yam?

  She bowed and he smiled at her. His face was drawn and tired. With a pang of sadness, Nok remembered that Father Cham had passed away the night Pong disappeared. She’d never had the chance to see him again. She told the monk how sorry she was to hear the news.

  “Thank you,” said Brother Yam. “I’m going to the village at the bottom of our mountain to let them know about the funeral and to bring up the elderly who can’t make the trek. Everyone loved Father Cham.” He smiled sadly. “And your parents? Are they gone?”

  “Yes, my father had to hurry back to the city for . . . for work. Otherwise, I know they’d go to the funeral and pay their respects.”

  “I know this hasn’t been the peaceful visit you likely imagined,” said Brother Yam. “I hope your family will come to visit us again and make happier memories. Can I give you a ride to the dock?”

  Nok blinked at him. “A — a ride?”

  He looked behind him at the dusty cart. “It won’t be anywhere near the style you’re used to riding in, I’m afraid.”

  Suddenly, Nok realized that Brother Yam didn’t know that she wasn’t supposed to go back to Chattana with her parents. In fact, other than the headmistress, no one else in the village knew she was expected at the school.

  Nok had never told a lie in her life. Oh, maybe she’d lied as a little girl about going to sleep on time, or to get a second helping of dessert, small things like that, but not since she’d gotten older, and never about anything that mattered. She had certainly never, ever even considered lying to a monk.

  She thought about Pong. He was alive; she knew it. She could feel it in her bones that he had escaped. And if she could prove it — if she could catch him this time — it would more than make up for the failure of letting him go. It would save her family’s reputation and convince her parents that they didn’t have to be ashamed of her. Nok looked down the mountain road. If she were a fugitive, trying to disappear from the eyes of the law, there was one place she’d go. There was one place in the entire province where you could fade away without anyone asking questions.

  “Thank you, Brother Yam,” she said, swinging her suitcase into the back of the cart. “I think I’ll take you up on your offer. And I don’t mind riding in the back.”

  “Wonderful,” said Brother Yam, snapping the ox’s reins. “Let’s get you to Chattana.”

  Last one in the door is the first one to clean the toilet,” said the old woman, handing Pong a mop and bucket with a smile that was more gold than teeth.

  “He just got here, and you’re going to make him scrub the bathroom?” said Somkit. He hooked an arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Please, Auntie Mims, can’t we give the poor kid a break? I just fished him out of the river a couple of days ago!”

  “It’s okay,” said Pong, bowing to the old woman. “I don’t mind. I’ve cleaned toilets before. Everyone’s got to do their part.”

  Just as he’d done when he arrived at the temple, Pong had fallen into the daily rhythm of the Mud House. With so many people living under one roof, there was a lot of work to do, and Pong was kept busy cleaning or helping to prep food in Mark’s kitchen. Pong didn’t know if Mark ever slept. The man ran his own restaurant and kept all the residents fed. Technically, no one was supposed to be living in the building, so the restaurant served as the perfect cover-up for all the people coming and going.

  Some of the grown-ups who lived there worked in Mark’s kitchens, but most of them had one or two jobs in the city. They’d leave early in the morning and come home late, looking wilted and tired. Children and sick family members stayed behind, trying to find ways to stay busy. This section of town had no schools, so Pong often found himself playing tutor to the Mud House children.

  There were so many of them, these families with nowhere else to go. Pong would look at the kids playing on the stairs and sometimes think about Tanaburi Village School, and about the basket babies whose families must not have had a place like this to turn to.

  He knew everyone in the house must have a story, but he never asked, because he didn’t want any questions coming back at him. After almost a week of living there, he realized he had nothing to worry about. No one ever asked him where he came from or tried to figure out anything about his past.

  “It’s Ampai’s rule,” explained Somkit. He’d already told Pong about Ampai, the leader of the Mud House, but Pong had yet to meet her. “No questions asked. Everyone comes in the door with a clean slate.”

  “Everyone? Even a murderer?”

  Somkit rolled his eyes. “Ampai wouldn’t let someone like that in here. She knows how to tell good people from bad.”

  “She doesn’t know me yet,” said Pong.

  Somkit elbowed him in the arm. “She’s going to love you because you’re my friend and she loves me.” He lowered his voice a little. “And like I told you: she’ll be able to get you on a boat. As soon as she comes back, it’s the first thing I’ll ask her. Promise.”

  After that first night, Pong had told Somkit his entire story over a bowl of lychees. He told him everything about Tanaburi, and Father Cham, and Nok, and the cliff. And because Somkit was Somkit, as
soon as the story was over, he’d popped a lychee into his mouth and said, “Man, we gotta get you on a boat.”

  So Pong was willing to wait until the mysterious Ampai returned. She’d be his ticket south. His ticket to freedom.

  In the meantime, he mopped the bathrooms while Somkit sat nearby, jabbering away.

  “All right, what gives?” asked Pong one hot afternoon. He leaned against the mop handle and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “How come everyone around here works except you?”

  Somkit smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Oh, but I do.”

  “Yapping your mouth all day doesn’t count as work.”

  Somkit hopped off the edge of the table he’d been sitting on. “Friend, I keep this place buzzing.” He pointed overhead to the purple lights that swung from the balcony railings.

  “What do you mean?” asked Pong.

  Somkit’s eyes twinkled, and Pong knew he’d been waiting to be asked. “Follow me, good sir, and I shall show you.”

  Pong set his mop aside and followed Somkit up the stairs to the top floor. Somkit slid open a paper-paneled door and climbed another narrow flight of dusty steps. At the top, he rested a long time, catching his breath before pushing back a rippled metal hatch. Sunlight flooded the stairway. He popped his head out for a minute, then looked back down to Pong.

  “We’re all good,” he said. “You can come on up.”

  Pong followed Somkit onto the roof, blinking against the blinding light. A flock of pigeons startled and took off, swooping over their heads in a wide circle before landing back in the same spot again.

  Pong walked slowly across the tar rooftop. “Whoa, this is unbelievable.”

  From where they stood, he could see most of the East Side, a patchwork of sheet-metal roofs of different shades of rusted brown, silver, and black. Past the edges of the buildings, the gray-green river snaked north to south, dotted with boats zipping up and down the invisible lanes of traffic.

  “Okay, that’s enough sightseeing, buddy,” said Somkit, pulling Pong’s sleeve. “It’s pretty safe up here, but until your hair grows out a little more, we should still try to keep you out of sight. Come on, I’ll show you my workshop.”

  “Your workshop? Up here?”

  “Don’t be so impressed. It’s nothing fancy, more like a cramped closet than anything else.”

  Somkit led Pong to a narrow structure that looked like a garden shed at the far end of the roof and swung open the door. Cramped closet was right. The little shed was lined to the ceiling with shelves full of nuts and bolts, wires, tools, jars filled with shards of glass and broken bits of sheet metal. A wood slab of a desk was also covered in the same array of junk.

  “Hot in here,” said Somkit, reaching up to slide open a window. “That’s better. I mostly come up here in the early mornings. By noon the place is hotter than a rice cooker and I can barely breathe.”

  Pong leaned over the desk and tried to make some sense of what he was looking at. He thought back to their days at Namwon, when Somkit would hoard any little bits and bobs they could fish out of the river through the prison gate. He was always keeping his eyes out for scrap metal and saving things like nails and screws. Back then, they never had tools to do anything with Somkit’s stash, but now it seemed like his friend had enough supplies to fill a hardware store.

  Pong picked up a strand of small orbs, the same kind that hung from the rafters inside. Each glass ball was cradled in a cone of tinfoil. “You said you keep the Mud House buzzing,” said Pong. “You mean you keep all the orbs charged up?”

  Somkit sat on a stool in the corner and shook his head pityingly. “You really don’t know how orbs work, do you?”

  Pong shrugged. “I told you. In Tanaburi we didn’t have them.”

  Somkit took a deep breath and set his hands on his knees. “Okay, I’ll try to explain. The Governor makes all the light in Chattana. All of it. Got that?”

  Everyone knew that, of course, and Pong had seen the Governor’s magic with his own eyes. But when he stopped to consider the million lights of the city, that statement seemed almost unbelievable. One man made all that light.

  “The Governor puts his light into orbs that are shipped in from the glass-blowing factories down by the sea. When an orb’s light fades away, only the Governor’s magic can fill it back up again,” said Somkit. “But the Governor isn’t going to waste his time charging up each orb one by one. Instead, he fills up the Charge Stations. He does it a couple times a year — more often now that the city is growing and getting bigger. You’ve seen them, right? The great big towers with the blinking Gold lights on top?”

  Pong nodded. “The barge I rode on passed one of them on the way up the river.”

  “Right, exactly. So if you want light, you have to buy it from a merchant who gets it from those towers. You have to go to the Light Market.”

  “The Light Market?”

  Somkit spread out his arms. “It’s amazing. Orbs everywhere — every color, every size, millions of them! And food and music. And the best part . . .” He gazed up at the ceiling dreamily, as if he’d just spooned dessert into his mouth. “The ground floor is one big open space full of nothing but orb motors! Just gorgeous machines in every direction, as far as the eye can see. It’s my favorite place in the whole city.”

  Pong smiled. The only thing his friend loved more than fruit was motors.

  “Anyway, about my job,” continued Somkit. “The brighter an orb, the more expensive it is. The Mud House can only afford Violet orbs. They’re so dim that they’d be useless if I didn’t give them a little help.” Somkit pointed to the tinfoil cones cupped around the lights. “Those things help reflect the light. I do the same for the Crimson orbs in the kitchen, so we can get more soup out of each one.”

  “Crimson is stronger than Violet, right?”

  Somkit took a deep breath, and then, very carefully, as if he were talking to a toddler, he began to explain the levels of orbs. “Violet’s the weakest. That’s what we have at the Mud House. Blue is a bit brighter. Crimson, yes, that’s red. It gives off good light and it gets hot — good for cooking. Amber is even brighter — the nicer shops use it for lighting — and it’s good enough to power small machines. But for big motors, like the ones on boats, you’ve got to use Jade. It’s the strongest and most expensive.”

  “Except for Gold.”

  Somkit nodded. “Gold orbs give off the brightest light, but they never get hot. You can even hold them in your hand without getting burned. They’re strong enough to power any motor, but they’re way too pretty for that. They’re the best, and they cost a ton. If you put all the Mud House money together in a pot and added what’s in Mark’s cash register, you might have enough to buy one.”

  Pong remembered the lovely Gold orb he’d held in his palm once, long ago. “That’s why no one on this side of the river has any, right?”

  “Anyone who can afford Gold orbs isn’t going to be living over here,” said Somkit. “But I wouldn’t say no one has any. There is . . . me.”

  Pong eyed his friend. “You?”

  Somkit couldn’t contain the grin spreading over his face. He picked up a small glass orb from his workbench. “I’ll show you.”

  Sunlight streamed down through a jagged hole in the roof of the shed. It was baking hot now, and sweat rolled down the sides of Pong’s nose. Somkit picked up a small black metal box and held it in the beam of sunlight.

  “This was the hardest part to figure out,” said Somkit. “I call it the Catcher. You put it in the sun, like that. This one has already been sitting out all morning, so it should have soaked up some good juice.”

  “Juice?”

  Somkit laughed. “Light juice.” He pointed to two thin strands of copper wire connected to the black box. “The Catcher grabs the sunlight and it flows down through these wires to this.” He pointed to a thick glass jar filled with cloudy liquid and a shaft of metal stuck in the middle. “This thing is really complicated, so I won’t —
hey, don’t touch!” Somkit swatted Pong’s hand away. “That stuff’ll give you a nasty burn if you’re not careful, okay? Anyway, I won’t go into how that works, but basically, the light juice gets stored in that, and when you attach these . . .”

  Somkit took two more wires with little metal clamps on the ends that looked like tiny bird beaks. He gently clipped one onto a flap of metal sheeting that he’d fused to the switch on top of the orb. “You ready?”

  Pong nodded, backing away. The mention of getting burned had scared him. Somkit clipped the second clamp onto the metal sheet. Instantly, the orb glowed with a warm Gold light.

  Pong’s mouth hung open. “Whoa,” he whispered.

  “Pretty good, huh?” said Somkit. “But look — this is the best part.” He unclipped the orb from the metal bird beaks and held it up in his palm. It still glowed. He passed it to Pong.

  Pong held the orb out warily, then brought it closer. The light was bright, but the glass was cool to the touch. He thought about that day in the courtyard of Namwon, when the Governor had stood before him and handed him a Gold orb just like this. That had felt different somehow. When the Governor made light, the air had crackled with pressure. There was something tense about the Governor’s orbs, something that made Pong nervous. But the one that Pong held now wasn’t like that. It didn’t buzz at all. Even though it glowed just as bright, it felt more natural.

  As Pong leaned closer, the orb blinked once, then went out.

  Somkit took the dull orb back from Pong. “It didn’t have time to soak up much juice. If I leave it connected all afternoon, the orb will burn bright for a few days — even longer if I keep it switched off.”

  Pong shook his head at his friend. “This is amazing. And you can do Gold light, even? The most powerful one?”

  Somkit laughed. “The sun is bright, man! It lights up the whole sky. Lighting up a little ball of glass is nothing.”