by Ryan Graudin
I nod. “Looks like you got a new friend.”
Dai’s sneeze is a sudden, explosive thing. Mr. Lam’s loogie times ten. He throws his arm to his face, but the damage is done. If anything can make a vagrant look less threatening, it’s a face full of snot.
I lower my knife. “When’s the run?”
The older boy finishes mopping his face, shoves his hands back into his pockets. Chma is still planted on the boy’s shoes. Purring.
“The run takes place in two days. Four hours after sunset. We meet in front of Longwai’s brothel.”
“I’m in.” And there it is. The second rule broken. Me trusting a boy with a scar on his arm. A hunt in his eyes. All for my sister’s sake. “But I want sixty.”
“Done.” He says this with a quick, desperate speed. Without even blinking.
I should’ve asked for seventy.
“I trust you’ll show up, Jin. If you don’t…”
“I’ll be there,” I tell him.
Dai nods and turns to go, dislodging his feline squatter with a gentle shake. I watch him leave with a heavy sigh. Part of it’s relief. Part of it is weariness. Now that Dai has discovered my camp, I’ll have to move. All my secrets, my terror, spill into the cool air. Misty and milk white. Like my sister’s skin.
When my breath cloud vanishes, the boy is gone. I stand in the yawn of my alley, fingers ever-tight around my knife. Alone again.
MEI YEE
It’s a wonder Sing fought as hard as she did, with all the blood she’s lost. She’s not fighting anymore. What Yin Yu and I lift is deadweight. Both of us are panting by the time we lay Sing out on her bed.
There’s blood on my hands. I hold them in front of me, stare long and hard at the bright smears. They’re bringing back memories. Awful, awful memories of the life before.
Whenever Father wasn’t in the fields, he would be all but collapsed in his cheap folding chair, his fist clamped around a bottle. All of us knew to be careful by the time he unscrewed the third metal cap. Most nights he stayed there—arms and legs limp like dead fish. The nights he didn’t, our skin flowered purple and pain under his blows.
Jin Ling’s eyes hovered constant over that dangerous corner. Her beatings were always the worst because she wouldn’t just lie back and take them. She fought, her tiny limbs flailing like twigs caught in a typhoon. Sometimes she even managed to hit him. Our father would bellow and thrash her twice as hard. I think she did this on purpose, to steal all of our father’s rage onto herself. He never beat me or my mother after he was done with Jin Ling.
Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts, Yin Yu leaves, returning with a silver bowl of water. I dip my hands in, and the blood that’s not mine washes away, swirling like phoenix fire to the bottom of the bowl.
I thought, at least here, I would be done with blood.
I pick up a linen rag and get to work. Try to right all the wrongs gashed deep into Sing’s skin.
“She’s lucky he didn’t use the knife,” Yin Yu says.
Lucky. I want to balk at the word, but I know the other girl is right. “Longwai wouldn’t mark her up. He wants to keep her working.”
The drug lord wants to squeeze as much profit as he can from a pretty face. No matter if it’s flushed with heroin highs. He’ll squeeze, squeeze, squeeze until nothing is left. Until she’s a husk.
That’s the way it always goes.
“Why did you do it?” Yin Yu whispers as she holds our friend steady. “Why did you have to run?”
No answer. Sing’s staring at the ceiling, eyes dull and vacant. I’ve never seen her so still before. As long as I’ve known her, she’s been a fireball of energy. Always telling stories, stealing cigarettes from clients’ coats, teaching us how to curse in clattering sounds she called English. Even in the morning, when most of us would steal some hours of sleep, Sing sat awake with a book in her hands. Reading.
Now the only signs that Sing’s still alive are the painfully slow rise and fall of her chest and bursting pink cheeks.
My hands move quickly, like hummingbirds. They fish a large piece of emerald glass out of Sing’s bony left knee. The blood there is starting to dry in crusts—making strange, snaking symbols across her very white skin. My rag, now sodden and pink, wipes them clean.
Neither of us expects her to speak when she does. “I had to see it.”
“See what?” Yin Yu doesn’t miss a beat.
“Outside. N-no more walls.” Sing’s words stick together, pull long like melted candy. Her voice is fuzzy and sweet and unfocused. Just like her eyes.
Yin Yu and I stare at each other. Then back at her. I don’t understand why these things are worth the gashes in her skin, the needle in her veins. Why she just threw her life away.
Yin Yu asks my question for me: “Was it worth this?”
Silence.
Somewhere, in a room far from here, there’s a scream. It dies as soon as it rises, stillborn. Somehow I know it belongs to Mama-san, though I don’t know how I’m so sure. In the two years I’ve spent in this place, I’ve never heard her scream before.
Sing’s not the only one who’s being punished. We’ll all pay for what she did.
Our friend’s eyes close—paper-thin lids fluttering like a pulse. I can tell by the way her head rolls back that the heroin is in complete control. A smile curls into the rose flush of her cheeks. It looks strange on her, framed by so much blood.
“The end is here,” she slurs on. “It’s beautiful.”
There’s a creep in her voice that makes my shoulders hunch. Yin Yu’s hands hold our friend tight. I unravel a long white strand of gauze and begin winding it around Sing’s raw pink flesh.
The doorway darkens with shadow. Mama-san’s face looks tight, tired. Her makeup is fresh—I’ve never seen her wear so much of it before. It isn’t hard to guess what’s hiding under so much powder and paste: the violet beginnings of a bruise, or maybe even the fresh ooze of a wound—remains of the master’s anger.
She’s still for a moment, filling up the doorway with her weary, false beauty. Those hard, hurt eyes study Sing: her bandaged arms, wild-nest hair, and wasted drug-haze face.
“They’ll catch you. He’ll always catch you.” Mama-san is still looking at Sing, but the words are meant for us. They’re broken, ground up finer than cocaine powder.
But when Mama-san’s eyes break away from our friend, as if she’s pulling out of a dream, she becomes her hard, unforgiving self again. “Leave her.”
We leave Sing lying half naked on the bed. Mama-san towers in the doorway, waiting until we slide past to shut the door and lock it into place.
“Both of you are to go to your quarters until further notice. Girls will only be let out to tend to their chores.”
Girls with more practical functions. Girls like Nuo, who lulls the master’s guests into a deep drug haze with her delicate zither strings, and Yin Yu, who lights pipes and fills glasses of plum wine at every snap of a finger. I have no chores to my name, which leaves me roombound.
“How long?” I ask.
“As long as it takes.” Mama-san’s voice snaps like a whip, lashing away further questions. “His memory isn’t short.”
I can’t stop seeing the master’s face in my thoughts. So stone cold and steady. So lacking fury. The face of a man long dead to any sort of forgiveness or mercy.
Mama-san’s right. We’ll be here for a long time.
Sing’s words loop through my head for hours. Over and over: the end, the end, the end. Their chill stabs my bones, makes my bedroom colder. I want to sleep, but every time my eyes close, there are visions of blood and needles. There’s no room for anything else.
I’m still shaking when Ambassador Osamu arrives.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Girls like Yin Yu are forced to take in three, four men a night. The ambassador is my only client. He pays our master dearly for the favor—to have me all to himself. I don’t know why he chose me out of all the girls. I just know that one day
he stopped seeing the rest of them, and stopped the rest of the men from seeing me.
I’m exclusively his—cornered and prized.
The ambassador isn’t as terrible as the men who came to my bed before. He doesn’t hit. Doesn’t yell. Doesn’t look at me as if I’m gum to be scraped off the sole of his shoe. Instead, he tells me I’m beautiful. Every time he visits, he brings me flowers. Bright, sweet-smelling spots of cheer.
Today they’re nestled in his arm like an infant, violet petals standing out against the charcoal sleeve of his pressed suit. Neither of us says a word as he plucks the bouquet of withered roses from the vase. Petals flutter to the tabletop like dried-out pieces of parchment. With one vast sweep of his hand, the ambassador sends them to the floor.
He sloughs off his dinner jacket before he comes over to the bed, where I’m sitting. Shivering.
“I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long.” He sits and the bed shudders. The mattress slopes down under his weight, pulling me closer to him. The heat of his skin bridges the air between us, reminds me how cold I am. “I’ve been traveling for meetings.”
I try to smile, but there’s an impossible weight on my lips. I can’t stop thinking of the screams, the slurring words. All that noise from Sing’s mouth.
“What’s wrong, Mei Yee?” My name doesn’t sound like my name the way he says it. It took me many weeks to fully understand the strange chop of his foreign accent.
The ambassador’s dark eyes push into me. The concern on his face is real, shining through the slight wrinkles of his skin. The round cheeks and jaw that always remind me a bit of a panda bear.
His fingers reach out, resting just barely on my arm. Even that touch is searing. “You can tell me.”
What happened in the lounge explodes inside me. The words burst out. “One of the girls… she tried to run. The master had her punished.”
“And this made you upset?”
I nod. The question seems silly, but then again, he wasn’t there. He didn’t hear Sing scream. He didn’t soak up tributaries of blood.
“You shouldn’t worry. You’re a good girl. An exemplary girl. Longwai has no reason to punish you.” He pulls me closer, so our thighs are touching.
“I missed you,” he says.
“I missed you, too,” I tell him, because I know it’s what he wants to hear. What I’ve really missed for the past week are the colors and scent of fresh flowers.
The ambassador leans in to me. So close I can taste his breath. It’s heavy with ginger and sesame and honey. My stomach growls, but he doesn’t seem to hear it. He’s too busy touching, wreathing his fingers through my hair and pressing me closer against his chest and face.
This is what I do not miss.
My eyes are open and I stare past the silvering hair on his temple. There’s a shelf on the far wall filled with books I can’t read and the tough evergreen leaves of a plastic orchid. At the very end of the shelf is a statue of a golden cat. I stare at its green eyes and the characters on its chest—the ones Sing says are meant for good luck. I count the whiskers, again and again. There are twelve.
Twelve. Twelve. Twelve.
The number sticks in my head. Running over and over and over until it becomes only a single humming word, trying its best to distract me.
Twelvetwelvetwelvetwelvetwelvetwelve.
When he’s finished, the ambassador lies back on the bed, breathing like a horse that’s galloped five hundred li. His chest—pinched and taut like naked chicken skin—rises and falls in a maddened tempo. His cheeks are the same shade of red my roses were before they died.
I lie still, stare at the ceiling tiles. Whoever lived here before me painted tiny golden stars all over them. After so many months upon months of gazing, my eyes don’t need to be open to see them. I know their constellations better than the real stars, the ones Jin Ling and I used to watch through our bedroom window. The ones that crowned the mountains and showered light along the rice paddies. The ones that actually shined.
I watched them for the shimmer. Gems of silver and shiver and beauty. Jin Ling watched them for their names, their stories. When we were very young, our mother told us all she could about the stars. The White Tiger of the West, which rises when the ginkgo trees yellow and shed all their leaves. The Azure Dragon of the East, which crowns spring’s first shoots.
But my mother’s knowledge wasn’t enough for Jin Ling. She kept watching and wondering with a thirst I could never understand. Asking questions none of us could answer.
The times we felt the closest, the times our wonders collided, were when the stars fell. Jin Ling usually saw them first. Her eyes were quicker, cut light out of the darkness faster. Her breath would draw in, short and excited, and she would point to where sky met earth. Her other hand shook mine.
“Quick, Mei Yee! You have to make a wish!”
I always frowned and stared into the black. There were so many wishes locked up inside my soul. Picking just one seemed impossible. “I don’t know.”
My little sister sighed, in that sharp, dagger way of hers. “What’s the thing you want the most?”
I never knew. Instead, I asked the question back at her.
Her fingers tightened around mine, full of strength that always surprised me. “I wish we could be together forever. Away from here. Away from hurt.”
The ambassador drapes his arm around me, frightens off the memory of my sister’s voice like a feral cat. His heat is no longer startling. It’s everywhere, like a blanket, folding and pressing me together with its warmth.
We stay like this for a long time. Skin to skin under false stars. The ones that never fall.
16 DAYS
DAI
I don’t believe in ghosts. Not like my grandmother, who knelt at our ancestral shrine every dawn with smoking sticks of incense folded in her palms and offerings of rice liquor and oranges tucked in her pockets. I always thought it was stupid, wasting fruit and good booze on the dead. Those who were long silent and gone.
He haunts me anyway.
My brother comes to me in dreams. It’s the same nightmare I have every time I shut my eyes. The “night that changed everything” loops on repeat. My brother’s voice rattles and stings, unchanged through all these years of death.
“Don’t do this, Dai. This isn’t you.” He’s always reaching out, clawing the edge of my hoodie. Trying to stop me. “You’re a good person.”
Then comes the blood.
There’s always so much of it. On my arm. On him. It pours and gushes in an unreal way. Like the old cartoons we used to watch where the red spurted out like a fountain. I try to stop it, holding his hand as he slips away. His final breath curls out into the winter night like an English question mark. Bad punctuation. It should’ve been a period. A solid end. Not like this…
I wake up, heart gasping and chest aching. There’s no blood on the dingy white tiles of my apartment. Just the marks I drew—charcoal and straight. The marks I’ve been erasing, day by day, with a smudge of my thumb.
I sit up, blink the terror of sleep from my eyes.
The world is unchanged. My scar is still here. My brother is still dead. I’m still trapped in Hak Nam, and there are sixteen lines on my wall. Telling me that soon—oh-too-soon—my time will be up.
Half of me doesn’t really expect the kid to show up. I lean against a wall across the street from Longwai’s brothel, counting the seconds with twitchy fingers. A yeti-size guard hulks by the entrance, watching me with slits of eyes.
I try to ignore him, focus instead on the paper lanterns over the brothel’s entrance. Their scarlet light melts into the dragon etched on the door. It’s the Brotherhood’s symbol: a beast the color of luck and blood inked on the walls of every building in Hak Nam. A reminder that they own everything here. And almost everyone.
The minutes stretch on, and I begin to think the kid I picked is too smart. He must’ve smelled trouble. My fingers are twitching faster than festival drums by the time Jin dashe
s out of the shadows.
Maybe it’s the bluish quiver of the streetlight hanging from the overhead pipes. Or the pieces of nightmare still crusting my eyes. Whatever it is, the kid’s face jars me. It’s so full of anxiety and angles. The perfect mix of worry and fierce.
Just like my brother’s.
“Something wrong?” Jin steps into the lonely slant of light, and the moment passes. My brother’s likeness slips, yanked off like a transparency sheet. It’s just this street kid in front of me now. Eyes hard with distrust. Arms crossed tight over his chest.
“Nothing.” I swallow back memories (I’m on a steady diet of force-fed amnesia) and push off the wall. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t be late.”
Yeti-guard steps aside, and the door to the dragon’s den yawns open. Traces of opium smoke—sweet, earthy, tart, and choking—roll down the hall, past rows and rows of shut doors.
I hold my breath and shuck off my boots, adding them to the neat line of slippers and leather loafers in the marble entranceway. Jin stops behind me, his mouth grim as he looks down at his own boots.
“Nothing will happen to them. If it does, I’ll get you new ones with my cut.” Promises spill out of my mouth just to get the kid moving. We’re already almost late, and I can’t afford Longwai getting suspicious. “Ones that actually fit.”
In the end, he takes them off. We move down the hall to the lounge.
The smoke is thicker here. Long couches form a ring around a rug. They’re full of Seng Ngoi’s finest businessmen, suits wrinkled and arms dragged to the floor by invisible opium weights. The place isn’t quite as fancy as I’m sure Longwai wants it to be. There’s a poseur quality to it, a fadedness. One corner of the rug is frayed. There are smoke stains in the couches’ fabric. The red-gold wall tapestries all have loose threads. Before the night that changed everything, I would’ve called this place a dump. After two years of giant rats and streets paved with human shit, it looks like an emperor’s palace.
One of the men studies us with quick eyes. He’s wearing a silk lounging jacket, embroidered with scarlet thread, a dragon snaking up and down his sleeve. A puckered purple scar runs down his jaw. There’s a slight bulge of his belly—soft from years of ordering others around.