A hot bubble of shame rose in Pong’s chest. He was leaving again. Running away — again. But couldn’t Somkit see that he had no choice? “Is that all you care about?” Pong shouted. “That stupid march?”
Somkit looked stunned.
“That march is your thing, not mine,” said Pong. “I was just helping because I owed you a favor. But I’m not going to stick around and put myself in danger for something so — so useless!”
“You don’t really believe that,” said Somkit quietly.
“How do you know what I believe?” said Pong. “You think we’re best friends and you know me so well, but you’ve got no idea. You don’t know what I’ve done, and you don’t know who I am!”
Somkit scowled. He picked up the oar and jabbed the wide end of it into Pong’s chest, hard enough that it knocked him backward into a seat.
“Hey!” gasped Pong, rubbing his chest.
Somkit stood over him, his face a jumble of sadness and rage. “Don’t you tell me I don’t know you. I know you better than anyone else does. Better than you know yourself.”
Pong swallowed, too stunned to speak. The sudden zhum! of an orb motor closed in on them from the starboard side. The little taxi rocked on tall waves, and the boys were temporarily blinded by a Gold spotlight shining through the raindrops.
“Stop and get your hands up!” demanded a voice, tinny and amplified by a loudspeaker. “In the name of the Governor, you’re under arrest!”
The guard rolled back the heavy gate and motioned for Nok to follow a maidservant standing behind him. “She’ll take you to the Governor’s receiving room,” he said.
Nok blushed, suddenly realizing the late hour. “I — I hope I’m not keeping His Grace up too late, but this is an urgent —”
“You aren’t keeping him up,” said the maid curtly. “His Grace works late into the night and is up again before dawn. The man has far too much to do to be asleep at this hour.”
Nok nodded and followed her down the path leading to the Governor’s house. Jasmine hung from wooden trellises lining the walkway. Tiny Gold orbs the size of cherry pits sat nestled in the blossoms.
Nok straightened the front of her tunic, wishing that she’d changed her clothes before coming. She imagined what her mother would say to her, showing up at a place like this wearing a spire-fighting uniform, but it was too late to worry about that now.
The maid led Nok into the house and up a short flight of steps to the second level. Everything inside was built from dark wood, polished to a gleaming shine. It was so plain and austere, very different from most West Side houses, with their gaudy furniture and show-off decorations.
The maid stopped at a door at the end of the hall and turned to Nok. “Put that over there,” she said, eyeing Nok’s staff and gesturing to a nook outside the door. Nok nodded and leaned it against the wall.
The maid swung open the door. “Your visitor is here, Your Grace,” she said with a bow.
Nok swallowed a surge of nervousness and bowed to the Governor, keeping her eyes down until she heard his deep voice say, “Welcome, child. Please come in.”
Nok walked forward. The maid stayed behind, standing at attention near the open doorway.
The Governor sat at the center of a long table, a neat stack of papers near his elbow. A faint ribbon of steam curled above the teapot and single cup of tea set before him. “Good evening, Miss Sivapan. I hear you have a message for me.”
Nok knew it wasn’t polite to stare, but this was only the second time she’d seen the Governor this close. He looked exactly as she remembered him.
Nok’s mother often said that she wished she knew the Governor’s secrets of youth. His face was smooth and unlined, though he must be much older than her parents. Nok knew he had come to Chattana as a grown man, and that was almost forty years ago. But she knew nothing of his life before that. Even though her schooling focused on the Governor’s teachings and his deeds, she had never been taught when he was born or where.
Some people claimed that he was a holy man who had come down from the mountains to save the city in its darkest hour. His strict and humble lifestyle made that story believable — after all, someone so powerful could easily have used that power to make himself extravagantly wealthy. Instead, he lived plainly, like a monk. But now that Nok saw him up close, she didn’t think he was much like a monk at all. Something tense hid behind his calm face, like a spring pressed into a tight coil.
Nok suddenly remembered what her father had told her years ago: when the Governor rose to power, the first thing he had built wasn’t a temple, but a jail.
She felt a chill, even though the windows were open to the warm night. She dipped her head and fixed her gaze on the table in front of her. “Your Grace, I apologize for disturbing you, but I have important information that I felt couldn’t wait.”
“By all means,” he said, waving her to the chair across from him. While Nok took the seat, he raised the teacup to his lips and took a small sip. “It must indeed be a matter of great importance if you felt the need to come to me directly.”
Nok caught a hint of amusement in his voice, like a grown-up talking down to a little kid. She held her chin up. “Yes, Your Grace, I believe it is.”
She kept her words slow and measured as she told him about Pong and about her quest to find him that led her through the city. She left out the details of lying to her parents, skipping instead to her trip to the Hidden Market and all that she’d heard there.
“I’m sure these people are planning some scheme that would bring you harm,” she said, leaning forward in her seat. The Governor was listening to everything so passively. She wanted him to take her seriously, but now that she was saying everything out loud, she realized that she didn’t have as much information as she thought. She knew there was a plot, but she didn’t know exactly what they were doing.
“Your Grace, I — I urge you to take up the matter as quickly as possible and send police right away to investigate.”
The Governor set down his cup and folded his hands on the table. He smiled, looking a little embarrassed for her. “I thank you for your concern, child, but, you see, I already know about this.”
Nok sat back. “You — you do?”
“Yes,” said the Governor coolly. “And you’re right. The woman you mentioned — Ampai — is indeed planning something. But it’s not a plot to hurt me physically. She is planning a march along the Giant’s Bridge.”
“Are you sure, Your Grace? Perhaps that’s their cover story for what they’re truly planning. From what I heard, it sounded so —”
“I have a spy who works with her,” interrupted the Governor. “A man named Yord. He lives in the building with her followers, a place called the Mud House. He’s told me everything.” The Governor took another slow sip of tea. “This woman, Ampai, has been working tirelessly over the past year to rally the poor to march against me. She will try to carry out her plans this very weekend.”
“March against you?” asked Nok. “You mean a riot?”
“Oh, no,” said the Governor, his lip turning up in the slightest of smirks. “She is determined to make it a peaceful march. She has ordered all who follow her to bring no weapons and even asked them to sign pledges against violence.”
Nok suddenly felt as though she’d shrunk in her chair to the size of a toddler. What a fool she was! A peaceful march. She’d been so sure that she’d uncovered a sinister scheme, but now that she remembered all she’d overheard in the Hidden Market, a march made perfect sense. She’d let Pong go again, and had come here and embarrassed herself, all for nothing.
“Your Grace, I am so sorry . . .” she said, hanging her head.
“It’s all right. Things like this happen from time to time,” he answered, not seeming to understand what she meant by her apology. “When you have been in power as long as I have, you learn that these little ripples of trouble are unavoidable. It has been almost forty years since I brought my light to Chattana. Th
e people have grown forgetful of what it was like before. But I remember.”
The Governor’s voice quieted. “When I first came here and saw the suffering and ruin, it nearly broke my heart. A once-great city flattened, and the people digging in the mud like dogs. I could hardly bear it.” For a moment the tightness in his face unwound. His eyes held a trace of that heartbreak, as if he were seeing all that suffering for the first time.
“I wanted to leave. It seemed impossible that the city could ever get back on its feet again. But I knew I had the power to make things better.” He held his hand palm up on the table and looked down at his open fingers. “The people were desperate for a leader, for someone to tell them what to do. I vowed that I would give them what they needed and that such destruction would never happen again.”
The more the Governor spoke, the more his face hardened back into that noble image that Nok knew so well from pictures in textbooks. She heard a faint buzzing sound, like a mosquito flying in and out of striking distance.
“It was my destiny to bring Chattana back to the light,” he said. “Every day since that first day has been a struggle to keep order, to keep the darkness at bay. Not just the darkness of the night, but the darkness in people’s own hearts. But it has all been worth it. Forty years later, there have been no fires, no wars, no disasters. And I intend to keep it that way. This Ampai woman talks of fairness and compassion, but she forgets that those things are meaningless without the rule of law.” He set his teacup down on the table and twisted it so that the design lined up with the teapot. “These little disturbances have cropped up before. I have always dealt with them quietly, but this time I realize that the best way to teach the people a lesson is to punish them.”
Nok raised her chin slowly. “Punish them? But you wouldn’t punish them for a peaceful march.”
The Governor’s eyes swung to meet hers, and for a moment Nok was afraid she’d said something wrong. She racked her brain, recalling her school lessons. But no, she hadn’t made a mistake. There was no law against a peaceful demonstration.
“Do you know who these people are that this woman is gathering?” the Governor asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Former convicts, the uneducated. The very lowest level of our society. Do you really think that their only intention is to walk peacefully across the river?”
Nok thought about the con men she’d seen selling orbs at the Hidden Market. She doubted they had good intentions. But what about their poor customers? What about the people she had seen begging? Nok didn’t believe they would turn violent.
She blinked, trying to see things clearly. “I — I don’t know what their intentions are, Your Grace. But the law . . .”
The Governor clenched his fingers into his palm. “Yes?”
Nok swallowed. She felt momentarily lost, as if she were supposed to repeat something she’d been taught in school but didn’t know what it was. She said the first words that came to her. The ones that felt true. “The law is the light. Don’t we all have to follow it?”
The Governor’s dark eyes flickered. All the amusement drained out of them, and this time Nok knew she had said the wrong thing.
“The law is a light that shines on the worthy and punishes the wicked,” he said crisply, repeating one of his proverbs word for word.
He kept his eyes on hers and inclined his face slightly. “Speaking of the law, does my Commissioner, your father, know that you’re here?”
A chill crept down the back of Nok’s arms as she shook her head. “I wanted to come here right away,” she said. “Thinking you were in danger, I didn’t want to delay.”
“How considerate of you,” he said, though it didn’t sound like a compliment. “I have known your father a very long time. It was his father, your grandfather, who did so much to help me in those early days. Oh, yes, your father and I go back very far. He once represented one of the finest and most noble families in Chattana.”
Nok swallowed at the word once.
“Everyone is entitled to make a mistake,” said the Governor. “But no one escapes the consequences of their errors, and your father has made many. It started when he married that woman.”
“You mean my mother,” Nok whispered.
“No,” snapped the Governor. “Not your mother. You are not the daughter of your father’s wife, as anyone with eyes can clearly see.”
Nok winced. It was a shock to hear someone speak her family secret out loud, like hearing a bad word you knew but never said. Was it really so obvious? Had she been fooling herself all this time, thinking that no one noticed the truth?
“Your father’s wife — the mother of your siblings — came from a common family,” he went on. “It was quite a scandal when they married. She had no money and no connections, but at least she abided by the law. Not like your birth mother.”
Nok held her breath as the chill spread from her arms to the rest of her body.
The Governor didn’t seem to notice she’d gone stiff. He spoke without emotion, as if they were chatting about something ordinary, like the weather or the fishing report.
“Your real mother was a criminal. I don’t know how your father met her. Some people are just drawn to the wretched, I suppose. Some time after they began seeing each other, she was caught robbing a man. Your father tried to get me to pardon her and hush it all up, but I refused. I sent her to Namwon, and that’s where you were born.”
Nok’s teeth chattered. She hugged her arms in tighter.
Born in Namwon.
It couldn’t be true.
The Governor flicked his fingers open and closed absentmindedly. Each time his hand opened, Nok’s eardrum flexed from the pressure change. A pea-size ball of light formed in the Governor’s palm, then went out as he curled his fingers shut.
“After your real mother died in childbirth, your father and his wife wanted to adopt you. They must have realized it would be easier to keep the truth a secret with you under their care. Against my wishes, they brought you into their home and raised you as their own. I suppose she must have forgiven him.
“However, I did not,” he went on. “But I felt I owed him a debt because of all that his family did for me in those early days. I let him keep you on one condition: that he take the job as warden of Namwon, so that he would never forget the price of turning away from the law. For a while I thought that everything had worked out for the best. I had heard you were growing up to be a good, upstanding student. But now I see that I was right about you from the start.”
Nok couldn’t listen to any more of these lies.
They must be lies.
She couldn’t have been born in a prison.
Nok had to get out of the room. She placed her hands on the table in front of her to steady herself. As she rose from her seat, the Governor reached out and grabbed her left wrist, pinning it to the table.
“Have you still got that scar?”
Nok stood frozen.
He twisted her palm up and pressed his fingers down on her wrist. “I heard it was quite a bad burn.” He still held the little ball of Gold light in his other hand. “They tried to hide what you were,” he snarled. “But they can’t erase your true nature. I can tell that you sympathize with Ampai and those dark forces moving against me. I’m troubled by this but not surprised. Not at all.”
Suddenly, the Governor squeezed the light into his fist. The air between them wavered and crackled like static. With a disgusted huff, the Governor let go of Nok’s wrist and sat back in his chair. The light was gone from his hand.
The skin beneath Nok’s left sleeve tingled. She fumbled with the cuff and pulled back the fabric.
The scar tissue on her arm glowed. The tiny ball of light the Governor had held a moment ago seemed to be floating beneath her skin. It swam back and forth like a flickering minnow. Nok gasped as the light rose to the surface, blazed brightly for a moment, and then faded. The light was gone, but it had etched something onto her wrist that had never been erased, ju
st hidden for years: the indigo ink of a Namwon tattoo.
The Governor gave a short nod to the maid standing at the door. “Send a message to this girl’s father and tell him to come retrieve her.”
Nok bolted from the table and ran for the door, but two servants blocked her way. Another stood behind them holding Nok’s staff. It didn’t matter. She was shaking too hard to use it.
“Lock her up,” the Governor told the guards. “Treat her well, but keep an eye on her. I don’t want her to run off before her parents see what she’s done to their good name.”
Pong had never imagined that the first time he set foot on the West Side of Chattana, it would be under arrest. The police officer who’d picked them up on the river — a man named Winya, with a round belly and a thin mustache — had marched them through the quiet jasmine-lined walkways with hardly a word. The same was not true for Somkit.
He’d jabbered on, asking again and again to speak with some other officer — a man named Manit. Pong wished his friend would shut up. Surely they’d meet every police officer they’d ever want to see once they got to the station. But to Pong’s surprise, they weren’t taken to a police station at all but to some sort of stable.
Officer Winya slid open the stable door, and a sour whiff of hay billowed out of the dusty building. Barred stalls lined the walls, and a wide aisle ran down the center. The stalls were all empty and scrubbed clean, though the strong odor of animals meant they must have been in use not long ago.
“So you see, sir,” said Somkit in a voice sweet as palm sugar, “we were just testing that taxi out so we could fix the motor. Ask Officer Manit — he’ll vouch for me.”
Winya grunted and swung open a stall door. He motioned with his thumb for the boys to file inside. “I told you, he’s busy,” he grumbled. “The Governor called a big meeting for all the senior officers. I’m not gonna go disturb him just because some street rat wants me to. When he gets out, he can come deal with you.” Winya swung the door shut and locked it. “Then we’ll see who’s telling the truth.”
A Wish in the Dark Page 16