by Karen Bao
Alex’s hand lands heavily on my shoulder. “For your attempt to deal with Parliament, Dove Girl, you can stay with the Odans in the park. I’m sure Wes won’t object.”
I suck in a breath, embarrassed and nervous at the prospect.
Wes starts glaring out the window, as if the adjacent party bus full of teenagers is annoying him. “Keep insinuating things, Alex, and I will object. To you. At a meal. With a bottle of green chili sauce. In your food.”
Alex chuckles, and Wes turns to me, smiling despite the threat he just made to his friend. “I’ll talk to my father and the rest of them first, so you won’t scare them, Phaet.”
His words remind me about the events in Parliament, and my burst of happiness ebbs away.
Whatever might happen in the future, today was disastrous, and I made it so. I couldn’t slip into my “Girl Sage” persona—words rolled off my tongue before I thought them through. The wrong words. But even if I’d said the right things, would it have made a difference?
THE HOVERCRAFT LANDS AT THE PARK’S EDGE. Wes and Alex disembark and hike toward the Odan camp. I’m sad to watch Wes go so soon after seeing him again, but I know our next reunion will happen in a matter of hours.
The sounds of the wood help alleviate my sudden loneliness. Insects stridulate in their leafy hiding places, their wings’ whirring cycling between soft and loud. Trees twist and tangle together, obscuring our view of the sprawling meadow upon which the Odans have erected nylon tents provided by the Batterers. Although their hosts initially offered the refugees accommodation in the international hostel, the Odans refused, preferring to live close to nature. The city has left an astonishing amount of green space undeveloped, perhaps to counter their vast carbon emissions. They’re lucky: they didn’t have to build an air filtration system, like the Lunars had to do on every base.
I step outside, into midday sunshine and onto packed soil. Squinting, Andromeda waves through the door of the hovercraft, and the driver says they’ll be departing soon.
Yinha jumps down and taps my shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to sneak into the hostel?”
“I don’t mind it here,” I say, shrugging. The hovercraft lifts off, stirring up leaves and sending shivers through the trees. “I owe the Odans a visit, in any case. . . .” And then something brushes over my foot, and I scream.
It’s a snake, skinny and green. As long as my leg, it has black beady eyes and a forked tongue that makes terrifying hissing noises.
“Phaet, don’t move!” Yinha’s shaking, bewildered by this Earthbound creature. She’s ducked behind a tree in fear. “Stay still—Wes and Alex will be back soon. . . .”
Running footsteps. Someone’s coming from deeper in the woods, drawn out by my cry.
“Why be afraid?” says a soft female voice. “That snake’s not even poisonous.”
A voice I remember very, very well.
* * *
Yinha and I jump. Out of habit, I raise my fists and slide one foot behind the other in a fighting stance; the startled snake slithers away into the shadows. I shield my eyes from the sun with my hand. As my pupils adjust, I make out the outline of a tall figure hiding in the shadow of a pine. She’s wearing a dark brown dress that camouflages her body, but her pale face and hands give her away.
“Murray?” I say, as Yinha slinks farther behind the tree.
Murray steps forward, expression unreadable.
“You’re back, Fay.” Her mouth hints at a smile, but then she frowns, eyes narrowed. “My apologies. Phaet.”
I lied to her. To all the Odans. And now they know. Most won’t confront me—they’re too peaceful for that—but will look at me with a mix of pity and anger. It will hurt just as badly.
“Why aren’t you in the camp?” I stammer.
“It’s suffocating me.” Murray steps out of the shadows. “Everybody knows what I’m doing at every minute. Not at all like home.”
I can see Murray’s whole body now. She’s changed: no small brown nightingale perches on her right shoulder, and she no longer holds herself as if the bird were the center of her universe.
Murray notices me staring. “Lewis flew off during the big fight last year. I don’t begrudge him. If I’d had wings, I would’ve done the same.”
Unable to look Murray in the face any longer, I rest my eyes on a streak of grayish-brown fur that nearly blends into the oak tree trunk behind her. An eavesdropping squirrel.
Murray follows my eyes . . . and her gaze lands on Yinha.
She shouldn’t have come here.
Murray shrinks from Yinha as if she were a predatory animal. When Murray’s hair blows into her field of vision, she pushes it back, hand lingering over the laceration scar on her right eyelid. Her feet begin shifting in a frantic dance. Whether she’ll advance or flee remains unclear.
Yinha stares back at Murray, hands up to show they’re empty. She steps out from behind the tree and takes one, two slow steps forward. As she approaches, Murray inches backward, into the shelter of the trees.
I reach out to pull Yinha back. But Murray’s already tied her down with her gaze.
“Demon soldier,” Murray says from the shadows. “Why? Why did you come back?”
Her glass shard of a voice cuts the air. Even from here, I see lightning in her one undamaged eye. I brace myself for the explosion. Any second now.
Yinha hangs her head. She’s never looked so small, so vulnerable. “So you remember me too.”
“How could I forget?” Murray says. “What more do you want from me?”
My mind reaches back to the moment I found out that the soldier who crippled Wes’s sister is the same one that trained us in Militia. When I first realized the connection, it tainted my thoughts for days, like formaldehyde in the mind.
Murray’s eyes dart about, looking for an escape. “I have to go,” she says. Then she spins a hundred eighty degrees and strides into the woods.
* * *
It doesn’t take long to catch her—because of her damaged vision, she has to pick her way over roots and brambles with care. Yinha and I call out to her.
We follow Murray until a boulder-lined stream bars her way. Sensing she’s trapped, she spins around and presses her back against a mossy rock that stands taller than any of us.
“Tell the demon woman to leave me alone, Fay.” Her voice sounds oddly childish. “Please.”
“Her name is Yinha, and she tried to help you.” If Murray’s the child, I have to be the parent.
“Help?” Murray scoffs. “I see half of what everyone else can, and she’s the reason for it.”
I hear Yinha breathing hard behind me.
“If it weren’t for Yinha, you wouldn’t see or hear or breathe at all,” I say. “She knocked you out so her squad wouldn’t kill you. Militia could’ve expelled her for not shooting you dead.”
“Shh, Phaet,” Yinha says. She edges in front of me—it’s not hard, given her small stature. “I messed up, Murray. No excuses. I’ve spent eleven years regretting that mission and cooking up what else I could’ve done to save you. I took myself off active duty and haven’t harmed an innocent person since. This . . . is my first time on Earth since it happened.”
Rarely have I heard her commander’s bark reduced to a whisper. It makes me nervous, as if the ground under my feet is trembling.
Murray’s indignant expression doesn’t change. “Regret it all you want. That doesn’t make it fair.”
Yinha takes a deep breath and stares right into Murray’s eyes. “I know. It’ll never be fair. But maybe it will get better.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Sorry as I’ll ever be about anything.”
Murray’s angry expression yields to a puzzled one. “When I saw you, I thought you’d come back to kill me. That was my first thought, even though you’re with Fay.” Yinha shakes her head, speechless. “How silly,�
� Murray continues. “Maybe you hit my head too hard back on Saint Oda.”
“I shouldn’t have hit you at all,” Yinha says. “I’m done hurting you, forever.”
“Then why are you here? What more do you want?”
“From you?” Yinha cracks a half-smile, and just like that, my cool Militia instructor is back. “A conversation would be enough.”
Without a word, Murray begins walking back into the woods, and we follow. On Saint Oda, I noticed that every time she threatened to boil over with emotion, she took to the rocky footpaths overlooking the sea, hiking for hours until she was calm again.
Here in Battery Bay, it’s harder; understory shrubs grow thick and twisted beneath the colorful oak and maple canopy. I recognize witch hazel, with its asymmetric veined leaves, and the globular cones of swamp cedar. Twigs catch on Murray’s tangled waist-length hair, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She still holds one shoulder lower than the other; Lewis always favored her right side. Birds chirp around us, but none of their calls sound like his.
The thin path leads under a stone bridge. A stream flowed through here once. When we’re gathered underneath, sheltered from the sun, Murray stops walking. How Lunar of her, I think. It’s as if she’s hiding from the Committee’s eavesdroppers. But the closest she’s ever gotten to the Moon is the highest peak on Saint Oda. Her caution comes from years of hiding secrets—but from her watchful parents, not a tyrannical government.
“Your name’s Yinha,” Murray says. “Am I pronouncing that correctly?”
Yinha leans against the tunnel wall. “Well enough. No one in my family remembers how to say it in the original language. We only speak English on the bases.”
“So, Yinha. One would think you’d try to forget me. Why are we speaking?”
Yinha scratches her head, grimacing. Finally, she says, “It’s a selfish reason. Believe me, you don’t want to hear it.”
Murray crosses her arms. “Now I’ve got to.”
Yinha gives her a look that says you asked for it. “I was a soldier, and now I train them for a living. I’ve sent so many killers out into the world.”
“And now you want me to say that being a war machine hasn’t cost you your soul. Is that it?”
“No. I need to know I’m more to the world than that—a war machine.”
Murray rubs her eyes with both hands. The bridge’s shadow is deep; I can’t tell if she’s crying or not.
“Odans love their enemies,” I offer. A cliché that I’d heard Odans say again and again.
“Love? Mercy will have to suffice.” Murray paces back and forth within the confined space, and then stops in front of Yinha. “You let me live. But I want you to understand what my life has been like.”
“That’s fair,” Yinha says. She swallows nervously.
And so Murray tells us the story of her long recovery from trauma, of finding solace in nature because it never judged her like people did. Of meeting Lazarus Penny and rejoicing that he, this man who’d survived a hellish childhood and become a respected protector of Saint Oda, loved her despite her imperfections, perhaps even because of them. Then he left for the Moon, followed by her brother. And when Lazarus ended things with her, she went through the same pain again, this time alone.
“But I’ve made sense of Lazarus now,” she says as the sun begins to slip through the trees. “Broken people can only love in a broken way.”
Yinha’s nodding, deep sorrow etched onto her face. And I feel it too.
Soon after, Wes returns for me, saying that I can sleep in the Odan camp. We leave Murray and Yinha and step into the afternoon sun. As we walk away, the leaves crunching under our feet block out the whispers sounding from under the bridge.
DISTANT MUSIC, PERCUSSIVE YET MELODIC, wakes me after dark. I’d come to the wooden gazebo after leaving Murray, intending to nap for half an hour, but the day has already gone by.
There’s a tiny earthquake in my stomach. Hunger aside, though, I feel excellent. My limbs are floppy, but in a comfortable, well-rested way. I roll onto my back, and the jacket with which someone has covered me falls to the floor. I rub crumbly rheum off my eyelashes and nearly yell when I see Wes’s face hovering over mine.
“Good morning,” he says. “But more precisely, it’s closer to bedtime.”
I sit up, shocked—the Free Radical and Battery Bay are in different time zones, and I’ve dozed through the afternoon and evening as if they were night, lying on a pile of blankets in an octagonal wooden building with a roof but no walls. The city lights surrounding the unlit park blot out the stars; the full, golden Moon hangs in the sky.
“Is Yinha here too?” I say.
“She kept putting off pickup. The hovercar driver turned in for the night. He’ll fly Andromeda here tomorrow so they can talk with my father. The driver’s not working until morning—tonight’s a holiday for some Batterer cultural groups.”
“Speaking of cultures, do your parents know you’re . . . with me?” We’re alone together, even though I’m underage—something Odan propriety would never allow.
Wes adjusts the legs of his cotton pants. He wears tough Batterer military boots under flowing Odan clothes, and the juxtaposition is striking. Modernity and tradition, war and peace.
“Monitoring my interactions with you has slipped far down my family’s list of priorities. In any case, most of the camp is asleep—Odans still rise and set with the sun.”
He stands and holds out a hand to help me up. When my palm meets his, a shiver ripples through my torso and down my suddenly watery legs. I dismiss it and pull myself to my feet, squeezing his hand tighter before letting go.
“So we don’t have to sneak around,” I say. “That’s one advantage to being nocturnal.”
As soon as the brazen words leave my mouth, I want to take them back. Wes just laughs, and I don’t know what to make of it. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
We put on wool Odan jackets and knitted hats that flop over the tops of our heads like mushroom caps. Then Wes leads me between two rows of tents. After several seconds, he stops and points to a large green tent lit from within by candlelight. I see two silhouettes inside, heads bowed together, and hear the faint mumble of voices as they whisper to each other.
The shorter figure—Yinha—pats the taller figure’s back. Murray’s shoulders are hunched. There’s austerity between the two women, but also an intimacy that only occurs between total strangers, someone you might never see again.
“. . . after he broke off the engagement—through my brother, no less—I felt worthless,” Murray is saying. “Like God created me by mistake. If Lazarus preferred demon girls to me, was I destined to be alone?”
“He doesn’t prefer people, Murray, he uses them,” Yinha says. “But most men aren’t like that, I think.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
Yinha’s shadow looks downward. “I—well, I mean, most people aren’t like that.”
We’ve eavesdropped long enough. I’m proud of them—Murray, for confronting her past mistakes and present fears, and Yinha, for trying to understand.
“I didn’t think Murray would ever talk to Yinha,” I say to Wes. “Or that Yinha would talk too. Let alone talk like this.”
Wes beckons, gesturing to me to keep walking. At the edge of the Odans’ camp, we turn right and walk onto a field of cut grass, the sharp green blades reflecting moonlight.
“Is this it?” I say. “What you wanted to show me?”
“Patience, sagacious one,” Wes teases.
We walk across the lawn, shoes slipping on the moist grass, step onto the street bordering the park and into a cloud of scarlet paper lanterns. Flutes and pipes play atop a background of thumping drums, like a runner’s heartbeat. Most of the celebrants look East Asian, like me, but a number of other ethnicities are also present. Children dressed in embr
oidered silk chase each other through the dense crowd, narrowly missing the food stalls that line the road; each one hawks pungent delights advertised in characters I can’t read. Munching on fried goodies, adults turn their faces toward the full Moon. Some even have binoculars.
I see why it catches their interest; I couldn’t have drawn a more perfect circle in the sky with a compass.
What’s going on? Why has Battery Bay’s East Asian population stepped out to gaze up at my homeland—with happiness on their faces? The sentiment is infectious; my own mouth curves into a crescent of a smile.
“Seems like they’re engaging in moon worship,” Wes whispers to me. “A tad ironic, given the Committee’s recent tricks.”
Trying to orient myself, I turn toward the glass skyscraper at the end of the lane. One façade serves as a video screen, so bright it almost blinds me. Standing dozens of meters tall, a white-faced, red-cheeked woman in a floor-length red dress drinks a magic potion, and begins to rise into the night sky. She flails her wide sleeves and tosses her knee-length black hair, but gravity refuses to pull her back down.
On the ground, a handsome man, presumably her husband, extends both hands upward, as if trying to catch her. Then he takes a bow off his back and shoots arrows, trying to bring his wife back down to Earth, but to no avail. The woman keeps rising until she lands on the pale yellow Moon. There, she folds her hands in her lap and sighs. In front of her, a white rabbit leaps across the foreground.
“Yao yuebing ma?” says a childish voice nearby. Startled by the foreign language, I turn away from the light show and look for the speaker.
Standing next to me is an Asian boy with a bowl haircut and a missing front tooth. He reaches into a plastic bag and offers me a round yellow pastry with an intricate flower-petal design on top. Obeying my rumbling belly, I nod. The boy places the cake in my hand and skips away to rejoin his friends.
Several people around us are eating the same kind of cake. I break off half for Wes and take a bite from my portion. The yellow exterior crumbles away on my tongue; sweet red bean paste, like the kind Mom used to make, fills the pastry’s interior.