by Faith Hunter
She never finishes her sentence.
A whistling sound, like gas from a pierced balloon—an impact that sends Giang reeling to the floor, filling her world with a piercing thunder. Everything goes black for a fraction of a second, as she kneels coughing in the dirt. Then she’s pulling herself upwards, in a rising cloud of dust and smoke—ashes and burnt flowers, a smell that clings to her as if it had claws of its own. “Mother? Cousin?”
“Child.” By touch more than by sight, Giang crawls to her; finds her, standing with her eyes on the sky. Mother’s voice is low and raspy. She hasn’t moved. She—just the way she’s standing…
A fist of ice tightens within Giang’s guts.
“Promise me, child.”
“Mother?”
“You remember where the border is. You have to leave. You—” Her face moves, then, with an expression Giang has never seen. “Make it worth it, child. Please.”
“No,” Giang says. “I can’t see anything. It’s just dust. Mother—”
Mother pulls out her hands. They come red, with blood pooling from the wound on her chest. “Never mind me, child.” She grimaces; starts singing in a low, wordless voice—something that starts as a song, but as she goes on, even the tune is lost, until there’s just a low-level drone, like monks’ prayers in the instant before they fall silent. In her hands is something. It takes Giang a moment to see what it is: a cicada, the same ones as in the courtyard, fat and blood-red. Mother moves her hands, and the cicada opens its wings, and flies. Mother crumples then, like a puppet that’s lost its guiding will.
“Mother!”
She doesn’t look up, or move—and Giang knows, with a pain like a knife twist in her chest, that it’s too late. Mother’s face is slack and unmoving; the blood pooling on her chest sticking to Giang’s hands, like tar—to Mother’s eyelids as Giang fumbles, trying to close them. There’s nothing left in Mother’s face: the eyes glazed and unseeing, with no warmth, no hint of recognition or even pain. She’s gone. Dead.
Cousin Ly. Where—
All is dust and silence, and the smell of smoke. She finally finds Cousin Ly on the edge of the cliff. Her eyes are closed, her breathing slow and regular; red spreads under her clothes, staining the bag—Giang snatches it away before she can think, trying to save the letters and photographs in it.
“Cousin.”
She’s not moving. Giang fumbles; tries to find the voice of the heart. Breathing, she’s still breathing.
Above them, in the cloud, a low buzzing—the fliers, coming back for a second pass.
Giang tries to lift Cousin Ly, passing one hand under the back and one under the legs and pushing upwards. She might as well be pushing at a wall—she gains one, two hand-spans away from the ground, and then falls back, her whole body shaking.
The low whine is becoming a thunder.
There’s no time left.
The cicada buzzes, heedless, heartless. Waiting, in a world that’s blurred and become meaningless.
If she waits, they’ll both die here. And she wants, so very much, so desperately, to live.
“I’m sorry,” Giang says to Cousin Ly. She rises, stumbling away, and starts running. Behind her is the thunder of fliers—and then the sound of more bombs dropping, obliterating the plateau where Mother died. Where she abandoned Cousin Ly.
* * *
The cicada moves away, step after step, through smoke and death and the smell of charred meat—and as Giang walks away from the ruins of the plateau, tottering on unsteady legs, it blurs and widens, and becomes the shape of a woman—a tall, shadowed silhouette wearing the fine-panel clothes of some old dynasty, the kind you only see in theatre plays. She wears a large, conical hat, its brim shadowing her face, and her bloodied hands are wide open, though Giang never manages to run into their embrace.
Giang stumbles towards the cicada woman—towards the border, never looking back.
* * *
Giang turns seventeen in the land of the Everlasting Emperor.
She’s finally found work in a restaurant, one of the rare places that will take in poor and unskilled foreigners: cutting up chickens and cooking rice for rich refugees, those who had the foresight and means to flee earlier. She sleeps in a courtyard with a dozen other kitchen hands, her mat under the red lacquered eaves of an old pavilion, tossing and turning with nightmares in which the song of cicadas follows her around in empty streets choked with dust and grit.
In the kitchens, the only talk is of the wall: that the Everlasting Emperor will finally seal off the old country, making sure no bombs and no alchemical weapons can cross over. The ceremony is scheduled in three days.
Giang keeps her head down, cutting up onions until the smell closes up her throat; tries to think of the future—like standing at the edge of a cliff with nothing to hold her back.
When she comes back to her corner of the courtyard, there is a letter on her sleeping mat.
Who could be writing to her? She knows no one in the city: she came on foot and alone with no money, and the other refugees are kind in a distant way, knowing nothing of her or her family.
The letter is written on thin rice paper. It’s been carefully slit open, stamped with the vermillion seal of the Imperial Censorate.
Giang kneels to pick it up. The paper rustles under her fingers. The handwriting on the letter is as familiar as her own.
It’s from Cousin Ly.
The world wobbles and crumples, and she hears once again the buzzing song of the cicada in the dust of the mountains.
Cousin. I hope this finds you well, though in truth writing this is like floating a coconut shell downriver and hoping it reaches a particular fisherman’s village—I don’t know if you’re still alive, or how you have fared.
But I know people have found refuge in the Empire, and one of the traders who came back swore blind that he had seen you in the capital.
I am well.
Alive.
She’s alive.
Giang sits down, struggling to breathe. There are holes in the letter, where the imperial alchemists removed entire sections. Cousin Ly was found by the rebel army. She doesn’t say, but she has to have been taken prisoner; has to have been sent to work camps—but her tone throughout is matter-of-fact, telling her not to worry—food is tight but she survives, and she would be glad for any news Giang can spare.
She doesn’t mention joining Giang. Of course by now it’s a fantasy: the wall is merely the latest incarnation of the Empire’s rejections. There are more than enough penniless, hungry refugees in the streets, and no place in those gleaming, clean cities for any of them.
“You all right?” A voice cut through the buzzing of the cicadas in Giang’s ears: Lan Anh, one of the sous-chefs—the youngest one, with a muscled chest and small, almost invisible breasts that Giang envies.
Giang folds the letter, feeling small and ashamed. It’s too little, too late—she’s not even sure any answer she writes would ever get back to Cousin Ly in time, but she has to try. “I’m fine.”
Lan Anh stares at her, her broad face expressionless. Then she moves away—Giang breathes a sigh of relief, turning back to her pallet, and the difficult task of composing a reply—but a clatter of plates announces Lan Anh’s return. “Here,” she says. She’s holding out one of the midday spreads: concentric circles of shrimp, crisp five-spice pork belly, and diaphanous square noodles—and two bowls and two sets of chopsticks, precariously balanced atop the plate. “You can’t—” Giang says.
Lan Anh shrugs. “They won’t miss it.” She grins; for a moment Giang finds her breath catching in her throat, and it’s not out of sorrow. “All right, all right, maybe they will. I’ll tell them it’s on me.”
“They’ll fire you—”
Lan Anh settles down, holds out an empty bowl and chopsticks to Giang, and takes one set for herself. “Would be surprised. Many refugees, but not so many that can cook to local taste.” She grins again, irrepressible. “Come on. You’re too thin an
yway.”
Giang takes the bowl; feels the warmth of Lan Anh’s hands on hers; fights the urge to look away. “You’ve been here long.”
Lan Anh’s face is grave. “Five years,” she says. “Mother sent me abroad before the war broke out. They’d been saving money the entire time.”
“How—”
“The signs were there,” Lan Anh says. She shrugs, again, and the cicadas’ song all but drowns her voice.
Giang asks, because she has to. “Your mother—”
Lan Anh shakes her head. “Only enough money for one journey. I send part of my earnings back.” She grimaces. “Hard to know what will happen, after the wall. Word’s been that they won’t allow money out of the Empire, either—no point in wasting it on a doomed country.”
Giang opens her mouth to protest; to say that she can’t say that this casually; and then sees Lan Anh’s bruised, haunted eyes. “Who knows,” she says, finally. In her ears, the old country’s cicadas buzz.
Lan Anh doesn’t ask about Giang’s own mother; but then she’s seen the band of mourning on Giang’s arm, and she knows it’s only for deceased parents—a one in two chances of getting it disastrously right. Instead she says, “You get used to it, you know. Not being there.” She lays a hand on her chest, where the heart is. “It’ll always be home to us—the place where we grew up; but it doesn’t mean we can’t be happy here.”
Giang says nothing, for a while. She picks up one of the pork belly pieces, letting it crackle under her teeth—the sharp taste of five spices filling her mouth to bursting. “While others suffer elsewhere?” She tries, so very hard, not to think of Cousin Ly; of stumbling away from her, bloodied and panicked. Of leaving her to die.
“You do what you can, with the gifts you’ve been given,” Lan Anh says, at last. She picks up a square noodle, holds it to the light, thoughtfully. “I don’t think anyone can claim more than that.”
Gifts. A cousin close enough to be a sister, on the other side of a wall that won’t allow anyone out. “I don’t know,” Giang says.
Lan Anh smiles, and there’s very little of joy in it. “No. Neither do I.” When she speaks again, her tone has changed. “You should apply for a sous-chef post. The pay is better, and there’s less risk of being dismissed when they find someone cheaper to hire.”
“Me?” Giang snorts. “I can’t cook.”
“I couldn’t either.” Lan Anh shrugs. “I can teach you, if you want. In your free time, of course. There’s no room for dawdling, here.”
“Why would you bother—” Giang starts, and then she catches Lan Anh’s burning gaze. She holds out her hand, slowly, carefully; and when Lan Anh doesn’t protest, runs it on Lan Anh’s cheek, feeling the warmth of the other’s skin under hers, a tingling fire taking over her entire body—and the cicadas in the background fall blessedly silent, leaving only the barely familiar song of desire.
* * *
“First mommy, first mommy, there’s a letter!”
Giang is trying to paint: paralyzed by the idea that her brush should move in a slow, assured line and create the first hint of a mountain crest on the rice paper. “Give me a moment,” she says.
The paintbrush slips. It always does, and her mountain becomes smudged—not in a way that artfully suggests fog, but simply looking and feeling wrong. She sighs, looks up.
Her eldest daughter Hai Ngan is holding a folded sheet of paper—a familiar shape that stabs at her heart, with the vermillion shape scrawled across the back. “Where did you find that?”
“It was on the terrace,” Hai Ngan says. She frowns, stares at it. “Are you going to put it with the others?”
The others. The thin thread still tying her back to a life she left a lifetime ago: Cousin Ly’s handwriting, speaking of life in Thu Huong; of her own wedding, of living with distant relatives Giang only dimly remembers meeting. “I will,” Giang says. “But I have to read it first.” She hesitates, and then says—because Hai Ngan has been asking, again and again, about the letters— “You can help me if you want.”
Hai Ngan pulls a chair and effortlessly clambers on it, settling down at the table with the eager seriousness of a five-year-old. “All right. What does it say?”
“It’s from the old country. Where Mommy was born.” She unfolds the letter, carefully. There’s a sound at the edge of hearing, getting louder and louder—one she hasn’t heard in a while, the low humming that becomes the buzzing of a cicada. Her hands feel stiff, as if with blood. But from the kitchen comes a loud noise as baby Chau repeatedly bangs a wooden toy against the floor; the laughter of Lan Anh, egging Chau to show her again—and the cicadas and the blood both seem to go away, leaving just a tightness in Giang’s chest, as if she’d been running for too long.
Cousin. More things floated your way—who knows, these days, what gets out and what doesn’t. I hope you are well and prosperous.
“Who’s writing?” Hai Ngan asked.
Giang thinks, for a while, of what she can say—of dusty mountains and blood, and cicadas in a courtyard. “Your Second Aunt. She—she grew up with Mommy. Like you and baby Chau.”
Hai Ngan makes a face. “I don’t like baby Chau.”
“She’s your sister.”
Hai Ngan’s face is set in that stubborn way and doesn’t move. Giang scans the letter: more holes, entire passages removed by the imperial censors, inappropriate sentences—what could Cousin Ly have to say, that doesn’t fit in with their view of the world?
The letter is short, with its removed fragments. Cousin Ly married and is expecting a child of her own. She jokes about the difficulty of getting white rice; about the fish in the market that’s all gone from fresh to dried, all the meat going for prices dearer than they can afford. Not prosperity, then, or at least not for her.
The sound of the cicadas is like thunder in Giang’s ears.
Cousin Ly has enclosed a portrait of herself at the spring festival table, with the others of the family behind her—half as many cousins as Giang remembers, and far too many blurred pictures on the ancestral altar behind Cousin Ly. The table is spread with food, an abundance that seems almost obscene in a country wracked by war, but of course Giang knows all about appearances, and saving the best to honor the ancestors.
“Is that Second Aunt?” Hai Ngan, peering over the edge of the table at the portrait. “What is she writing?”
“She’s giving news,” Giang says. “Of herself, and your other aunts. And your ancestors.”
“Oh.” Hai Ngan pops her thumb into her mouth, frowning at Cousin Ly. “She doesn’t look happy.”
“I don’t know,” Giang says. She folds the letter, carefully—she’ll set it on top of the other in a portrait of her desk. She’ll write an answer, too; though she suspects it won’t be delivered. No letter she got acknowledged her previous ones. She’s about to put the picture away, too; but Cousin Ly’s face stares back at her, and she can’t bring herself to bury her a second time. So instead, she sets it on the bookshelves, on the left side of the ancestral altar.
“First mommy?” She turns, to find Hai Ngan has dragged an atlas larger than her to the table. “Show me.”
Oh.
“The old country,” Hai Ngan says, with a touch of impatience in her eyes—always commanding, in spite of Giang and Lan Anh’s best efforts to teach her otherwise.
Giang kneels, opening the book to the right page—slowly tracing the circle of the old country, the sea on the east, the Everlasting Empire on the west; and the shape of the wall. Slowly, carefully; ignoring the sound of the cicadas in the background, faint and almost indistinguishable, drowned out by the rustling of the pages and Hai Ngan’s voice. “Here. That’s Thu Huong, where I used to live. And here.” She points, carefully, to a place north of the city. “That’s where your ancestors are buried.” She avoids, studiously, the other place—the plateau where Mother crumpled and died, where she failed Cousin Ly. “You can’t visit—”
“I know.” Hai Ngan snorts, and rolls up
her eyes. “The war.”
“It was bad,” Giang says. She feels ashamed, circling around a subject she’s never quite sure how to broach. “But we’re safe now.”
“Mmm.” Hai Ngan’s fingers are tracing the lines of the rivers at the southern edge of the Everlasting Empire. “When I’m grown up, I’ll travel the world.” Her face is set—looking, in that moment that clenches around Giang’s heart like a fist, oddly like Cousin Ly when she was younger, when they both sat in a cart waiting to cross a border since long closed. “Like you did, first mommy. Finding new things.”
“That’s not—” Giang opens her mouth to say that’s not why she left, and closes it. Does she really want to encourage curiosity and attachment to a country there’s no going back to—even though it’s her home and her ancestors’ home, and her mother’s last resting place? She flexes her fingers again, trying to banish the memory of the cicada’s sound from her ears. “I’m sure you’ll make a tremendous traveler.”
“The best.” Hai Ngan grins, tapping the atlas with a proprietary air. “I’ll make you proud.”
Behind her, baby Chau screams—they’re so easily frustrated, at this age—and Giang can hear Lan Anh whispering soothing sounds, singing the words of a lullaby about coming home at the end of the day—again and again, until the baby’s howls fade into restful silence.
* * *
The nightmare starts in the year of the Wood Rooster, just as Giang turns fifty-nine.
Lan Anh died a year ago, and the letters have stopped: Giang goes out on the terrace every day, half-hoping to catch a glimpse of a vermillion seal, but there is nothing. The last letter she had from Cousin Ly mentioned the birth of a grandchild, and Cousin Ly’s worries about the baby’s health, in a country where medicine is scarce and doctors charge a fortune for the least service.