by Ryan Graudin
“There’s nothing for you there,” he says, voice tight.
Ten days ago he would’ve been right. But now… I don’t close my eyes, but I still see the girl’s face, feel the stir of her deep inside my chest—twisting the truth out—remember the smoothness of the shell under my fingertips.
My promises don’t have to be empty. I might not be a good person, but I can become one. I can write in a new answer: the hero the window-girl sees.
I keep all this inside, because even if I say it out loud I’m not sure my father would hear. He was never the best at listening.
His eyes open, and instead of Dobermans, they remind me of ravens’ beaks. Cunning. Sharp. They study me, prodding every detail like a needle’s end. It’s times like this I wonder why he doesn’t hate me. Why he’s kept me alive for all these years with wads of cash.
“I’ll call the car around,” he says.
JIN LING
They give me drugs to take the pain away. Medicine that makes me feel as if I’m drowning inside my own head. Mostly it’s darkness. Heavy, heavy black. I don’t fight it. I don’t really want to.
I know the days are different only when the nurse comes in with a new outfit. Hooks the tubes up to a full bag of medicine. Takes the empty one away.
…
…
…
Then Dai. Dai? He’s standing by my bed. Talking. I try to listen, but sleep is crammed into my ears like cotton wads. I hear only a few words.
“Good-bye… going back… sister… need to rest… don’t follow…”
Going back? Dai’s going back? I want to sit up. Want to fight him. Make him take me. He can’t leave me alone to sleep on some nice feathery pillows while he’s getting Mei Yee.
I try to tell him this. Try to open my mouth, lift up my hand to grab him, but everything feels so heavy.
Instead of my grabbing him, he’s grabbing me. Taking my hand. Squeezing it in his.
This time, I hear every word he says. “I’ll find her. I’ll get her back.”
And for a moment, just before the black hits, I believe him.
DAI
My apartment feels smaller. Like some giant leaned against the other side of the wall and crushed it in. This isn’t the first time I’ve walked in and felt how empty it is. But it is the first time the emptiness bothers me.
I’ve got almost everything I need. Emiyo managed to scrub all the blood from my black hoodie and jeans. My gun is still tucked in my pants. There’s only one reason for me to be here.
There are so many things waiting to be found: Jin Ling’s sister, a ledger, a cat without a tail. I don’t have time to stay. I’ve wasted so much already, and the girl behind the window is waiting for me. I don’t even unlace my boots as I walk in. Three paces is all it takes to get to the wall. Four swipes is all it takes to erase the marks. My finger turns as black as my clothes. Never before have I wiped off so many at once.
Six.
It’s time to end this.
MEI YEE
The boy doesn’t even have to knock. I feel him there, behind the glass, waiting.
I pull back the curtain, press my face against the grating. Something about the boy is different. I stare through the gaps in the metal, taking in the set of strong shoulders under his sweatshirt. That’s the same. So is his hair, with its ends fringing by his cheekbones and jaw. He still looks chilly, with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
It’s nothing on the outside. He’s the spitting image of his previous selves—like a painting rendered the exact same way three times. The difference is in his eyes and the way he steps close.
Like someone lost who’s found his way again.
He’s not the only one. I’m not the girl who sat behind this glass a week ago—breathless, afraid. I know all the things I want the most, the wishes I would make if Jin Ling were here. If the stars fell.
And I’ll do whatever it takes to get them.
“Hello.” His voice is changed, too. Each word is strong, confident. They echo through my heart like brass, shake me to the core.
“I found what you’re looking for.” It’s hard not to be loud, but this news needs so much more than a whisper. “I was right. Longwai keeps it in his quarters. In the top drawer of his desk.”
My words come out so fast I’m surprised the boy can even understand them. But he does. I know because I can see his eyes fill, brim over with the same light that’s flooded my veins.
“His upstairs room?”
“Yes,” I go on, spurred by the hope in his face. “The stairs are at the end of the east hall. By Mama-san’s room.”
The boy shuts his eyes, rests his head on the far cinder block wall. Still close enough that I can pick out each and every one of his sweeping eyelashes. His hands, I notice this time, are clean, dirtless. Though one of his fingertips is dusted black, almost as if it’s covered in soot. I wonder what made such a mark.
I’m so engrossed in these little details, so lost in the features of my boy, that his voice, when he does speak, startles me.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says with his eyes still closed.
“You need the ledger, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s… part of a deal I made with some important people. People who can get you and me out of here.”
“How are you planning to get it?”
“I-I don’t know,” he says again, shoulders bowing. “I had a plan. But things fell through. My partner got stabbed.”
Pain. Disease. Death. Longwai wasn’t lying about the Walled City’s streets. My breath dices into dozens of pieces. It takes me a moment to pull it back together, speak without a voice made of shake. “And if you don’t get the book to these important people… what happens?”
“Nothing good.”
Which means he’ll stay out there and I’ll be trapped in here. Choking on incense smoke and covering my bruises in powder, both chances at a different life ruined. I look over my shoulder at the door. At the cypress tree that will never grow.
I look back to the nautilus shell and the boy behind it. His eyes are still shut, his face turned skyward—as pale and flaring bright as a comet’s tail. My fingers curl harder into the grate, longing for the other side, where he is.
Just one of my wishes.
Whatever it takes.
“I’ll do it,” I tell him. “I’ll get the ledger.”
The boy’s eyes snap open, catch mine. The light behind them is gleaming, ferocious.
“If they catch you taking that book… if Longwai discovers what you’re up to…” The boy’s face looks grim, like a man who’s just discovered he has only a week to live. “It’s too risky. He’ll end you. And I can’t let that happen.”
My skin shivers from the same want, the same need, that was in the ambassador’s fingers. Trying their best to pummel, press, shape, and mold. Cramming me into his tiny, gravelly pot. Making me into something I’m not.
This is the only way.
And in my head I’m watching Sing twist, scream, and shout. I hear the slick of the needle under skin, see the dreamy look steal over her face. I feel the darkness of the hall pressing in, whispering the chorus: I need it. I need it. I need it.
Wishes cost so much more than dying stars.
“I know,” I say, because I do. “But I can’t live like this anymore. Sometimes an end seems so much better than my now. If there’s any way out, any open door, I have to take it.”
“Even if it seems impossible? Even if there are dragons behind it?”
Even then. I don’t say it out loud, because the boy asked in a way that meant he already knew.
We’re staring at each other. Eyes holding eyes. His gaze shatters glass, pierces metal. It hums through my body, charged and electric. Full of shine and hope and possibilities.
“I’m Dai,” he says. “My name is Sun Dai Shing. What’s yours?”
Dai. It’s not the name I would have picked for him. It’s too short, too blunt, too foreign. Bu
t I let it tumble around in my head for a moment. Let it settle into his hair, eyes, and skin. The more I think about it, the more I stare, the more it starts to fit.
The boy—Dai—shifts so the streaked sapphire light of the far streets falls off his face. My eyes strain, struggling to pierce the new dark between us. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out, as if my throat is a drought-stricken well.
I am nameless.
Dai leans back into the light. Something about its eerie, electric blue comforts me. I start to breathe, pretending that the air around me isn’t stuffed with incense and men’s sweat. I think of the mountains instead. Of the ginkgo tree and how my mother called me by my name over and over.
It shouldn’t be this hard to say my own name. But I think of the last few times I let my name slip to ears who did not deserve to hear it. To Longwai, who says it in a spider-creep way. To Osamu, who says it as if he knows me.
This boy standing across from me, with his folded hands and shadowed face, isn’t Longwai. He isn’t Osamu. He’s Dai. And he trusted me with his name. So I must trust him with mine. With everything.
“My name…” I push past the hoarseness. My words become steadier, as clear as Dai’s bottomless, electric eyes. “My name is Mei Yee.”
DAI
All breath leaves my lungs at the sound of her name. My back is against the wall, the water glaze is leaking through my shirts. Creep and chill. The winter is getting too much for just a hoodie. I should’ve thought to wear my jacket.
This is what I think about while I stare at the girl’s face. Maybe because it’s easier to wrap my mind around it. Warmth—a jacket—is something I can control. Something I can manage.
But this… her… she’s more than warmth. She’s fire, a soul, a name. Mei Yee reverbs through my head, my veins. Lodges like shrapnel in the far reaches of my chest. More powerful than a pound of C-4. Uncontrollable.
Mei Yee. Who grew up on a rice farm surrounded by mountains. Just like Jin Ling.
What are the odds?
I study her face again, searching for traces of sisterhood. It’s not a perfect resemblance, but the harder I look, the more I see it. The way her lip quirks to the side when she’s nervous. The thickness and slant of her lashes.
But it could be that I’m seeing things. Mei Yee isn’t the rarest name, and a lot of times the brothel girls change theirs. I think of the placards on the doors. How the scarlet characters became almost invisible in the light.
There’s no way I can know for sure unless I ask.
I push off the wall. “Do you have a sister?”
“I did,” she says. “Before. Why do you want to know?”
That’s enough. Enough for me to know. Her words are sad, but they don’t carry the loss of death. They don’t hold the same hollowness mine do when I talk about Hiro. Mei Yee’s sister is still alive, somewhere. And I’ll bet that somewhere is my father’s mansion on Tai Ping Hill.
I can still feel Jin Ling’s taped hand squeezing mine, straining at the sound of my oath. It seemed like such a solid, simple promise—up there on the hill, surrounded by gates and carp ponds. Here on the ground it’s a different matter.
For a moment I consider telling her. But if Mei Yee isn’t the sister—or worse, if she is and I can’t get her out—I can’t give her false hope. It’s too cruel.
“Just a question.” I try to say this as dismissively as possible. My heart is thrumming, struggling to work out this excitement. This fear.
My excuse to get into the brothel is now crippled, on bed rest with Jin Ling, which means the book is out of my reach. And without the ledger, I can’t guarantee Mei Yee her freedom. I can’t get the book without Mei Yee. I can’t get her out safely without risking her life. Without flinging her forward like a queen on a chessboard.
I think of the silent girl with dragging hair. The bloody, tattered escape gone wrong. My heart squeezes high in my throat.
I don’t want to risk it. Risk her. But that’s probably me just being a selfish bastard.
Funny how quickly things turn.
Mei Yee’s fingers poke through the grating like tiny white seedlings. Tender, seeking out the sun. They push through so far I can see her nails, coated in slick red-hot paint. The color looks wrong on her. Too violent and bright.
“I’ll get the book,” she says, not quietly.
“We’ll do it together,” I tell her. “I don’t want you snatching Longwai’s ledger first chance you get. He’ll miss it for sure. We’ll need a way to get it out. Plus you’ll need a distraction to get up there and back without being noticed.”
My mind is like one of those mechanical windup clocks Hiro used to collect and take apart (in his the way things work are cool and I want to be an engineer phase). Only this one isn’t scattered in pieces across his desk. It’s working, whirring at its utmost speed. “How much time will you need? To get the keys and get upstairs?”
“Depends. Mama-san keeps the keys close almost all the time. Except…” Mei Yee pauses, twisting a hand along her lush starless-black braid. It wraps around her wrist like a rope. “Except when Yin Yu has them.”
“Yin Yu?”
“One of the other girls. She cleans rooms for Mama-san, which means she has access to the keys.”
“Do you trust her?”
Mei Yee’s hand stops wrapping. I can’t see her wrist anymore, swallowed in shiny, beautiful black. “Yes. If—if I can tell her why. Do you have money?”
Her question catches me off guard. “Some.”
“The other girls can help, too. The ledger’s pretty small. But it still won’t fit through this grating.” Mei Yee nods at the crisscross lattice. Not much besides a finger or two could slide through those gaps. “It’ll have to go out the door. When I take it, you should buy time with a girl named Nuo. Wait in her room and I’ll drop the book off there.”
“These girls, Nuo and Yin Yu, how do you know they won’t betray you?”
“A few weeks ago there was another girl, Sing. We knew she was going to run. Some of us even tried to stop her. But we never gave her away.”
“Silence is different from actively stealing,” I tell her. “But tell them if we get the book, I can get all of them out.”
Mei Yee looks at me. The way she stares, without blinking, reminds me of kids at the zoo. I must be the animal, stuck on the other side of the bars, doing and saying things she can’t completely understand.
“Is that true?” she asks finally.
I swallow, think of all of Tsang’s ash and apathy. The police don’t care about the girls, that’s for sure. But once the book is out, once all the arrest warrants are in place, once I hand over Longwai’s ass on a platter, there will be no one left to lock the girls’ cage. No one left to keep them from running.
I nod. “I can’t tell you more, because the secret is too big. But yes. Get the book and all of you will be free.”
“The other girls will help,” Mei Yee says, swift and certain.
“Just—be careful.” My chest feels tight. Even trusting these two girls, these two sisters, is a stretch. Adding other, faceless girls into the mix seems too much. Too many variables, too many chances for something to go wrong. “Be discreet.”
“When will we do this?”
Involving the girls changes a lot of things, but the biggest of these is the timetable. Before, when it was just my (and, I guess, Jin Ling’s) neck on the chopping block, I wanted to find the ledger as soon as possible. But I could run, and the girls… they’re mice snapped tight in a trap. If Longwai finds out who stole his book, he can—he will—crush every one of them.
And even if I acted alone—bought time with a girl or angled for an invitation—I wouldn’t put it past Longwai to punish the girls anyway, take his rage out on those who would fight the least. There are too many things tying us together. For better or worse, we’re all tangled now.
This is the only path we can take.
The turnaround has to be quick—so that Longwai
won’t even realize his book is gone before the cops beat down his doors. Our swipe has to be at the last of the final minutes.
“New Year’s Eve. Five days from now. I’ll come to your window right before I swing back around to the lounge. I’ll distract Longwai and your Mama-san long enough for you to get upstairs and out. Then I’ll buy Nuo’s time and wait in her room until you drop the book. I’ll leave, and Longwai will be none the wiser. Then I’ll come back for you.”
Mei Yee swallows. “What about between then?”
“Keep him downstairs, smoking. Until midnight hits.”
“How do I know you’ll come back?” It’s the question of a girl who’s been left behind. Again and again and again.
The braid unravels from her wrist, and I see a mark there. A spoil of color in the midst of flawless white. Too odd to be a shadow, smudged like the ink fingerprint of a criminal. The signature of a certain middle-aged selfish bastard.
Goddamn Osamu.
I look at her face and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that her father sold her for pocket change. Or that she could be Jin Ling’s sister. Or that my freedom, my life, now rests in her hands. Or that the seashell was made in a factory.
Even with her bruises, I’ve never seen anything as perfect and whole as her. As Mei Yee.
“I will come for you. No matter what it takes.” These are the words of a goddamn hero pouring out of my mouth. The best of me—the part she woke—reaching to her through the glass.
I don’t know if I’ve spoken truer words in my life.
I only had a few years with my grandfather, but there are some memories of him I can’t shake. How he always froze at the sound of any airplane. How he always clutched a cane—the veins of his right hand bulging out like teal worms as he walked.
I was five when I finally became brave enough to ask him about his knee.
His chin trembled—cloud-white beard hair shuddered like the wind was combing it. “A long time ago, long before you or your mother were born, I was in a war. Did you know that?”