by Henry Lien
Doi asks, “Do you think they’re here as a last warning in case any students make it out here?”
“That seems a bit weak as a final warning. They must be here for another purpose.”
A salt soldier. Wearing a metal breastplate.
Metal. The Repeller. Salt. The pearl.
“I think I know how we can get inside!” I say.
I take my Repeller from Doi and swing it around hard and point the spoon end straight at the metal breastplate. The metal flies back, taking the salt soldier with it. The figure smashes against the wall behind it in a spray of grains and powder. The wall begins to sizzle and curl up vapor as the salt eats through it.
A hole forms in the wall with uneven edges. It yawns to twice the height of a person above the water.
Doi and I look at each other. We found out last year that salt eats through the pearl. I say to Hisashi, “Don’t tell Cricket about what salt does to pearl. New Deitsu wants to keep it a secret and it’ll endanger him to know this.”
“All right,” he says. “Eh, what about endangering me?”
“You’re Pearlian,” says Doi. “You can’t get deported.”
“Look!” I shout. The hole in the pearl slowly begins to shrink. The pearl is healing itself. This isn’t like any pearl that we’ve seen before.
“Hurry!” I bark.
We skate through the hole and it seals shut behind us. The wall shows no visible scar or discoloration. There’s nothing else in here, no pedestals with salt soldiers. So we’re trapped.
We’re inside a circular structure as wide across as Divinity’s Lap. We skate to the middle of it and look around. Nothing. Just a smooth round wall, with water below, open to the sky above us. Like a great tank.
Black water undulates below my skate blades. It’s so deep that it swallows all the light of the moon. What’s down there beneath our skates? It has to be the coiling water dragons.
This has to be their nest.
“What do we do next?” asks Hisashi.
“The architecture students said something about the Repellers sticking together,” I say.
The three of us look at our Repellers. Together, we lift them toward one another. The flat little bowls at the end of them leap at one another and stack, pulled together by magnetic force, like spoons cuddling spoons.
The water below the point where the Repellers meet begins to bubble. We watch, but nothing further occurs. Just bubbling.
“Didn’t they say something about stirring the water quickly?” I ask.
“Yes,” replies Doi, “and something about unsticking and slapping the Repellers down on the water.”
“So,” I say, “let’s join the Repellers and hold on to them while skating quickly in a circle. That must be what the handles must be for. Then we disconnect them and slap them down on the water. That’s how we summon the coiling water dragon.”
Now that the nest is here, lying below us, I hesitate.
We saw what it could do. The first time, it ripped Eastern Heaven Dining Hall off its foundation and flipped the entire structure on its side, along with every student and sensei at Pearl Famous within.
The second time, it grabbed the pavilion that the lucky of us were in and flung us who knows how many li or tens of li through the air, as if we were a pebble.
And that was just one of them. Who knows how many of them are below us, here in this nest?
The senseis said that coiling water dragons are normally rational and benevolent, but when they have eggs to protect, they turn vicious, vengeful, and devastating. I don’t know if we should believe that, but if it’s true, we’ve trespassed right into their nest.
When I find an enemy, why can’t I ever just turn and skate away? I could be safe. I could learn to live with unanswered questions, like everyone else does. I could come to accept that knowing the truth is often a luxury, that most people live lives shrouded in parts by mist. That most people learn to breathe mist.
But I am Chen Peasprout. And I need to know the truth like I need to breathe air.
I must face the coiling water dragon, even if it’s the most dangerous enemy I’ve ever faced, if I want us to be safe. I see in Doi’s and Hisashi’s expressions that there’s no turning back for them, either.
Holding on to the handles of our Repellers, we start skating in a circle. The bubbling in the middle of the tank begins to complain and intensify. The water within the great structure starts turning under our skates in a circular motion as well but in the opposite direction of our skating.
Doi’s grasp on her handle falters, and as she readjusts, she twists the ring of her Repeller. All three of us feel the Repellers start to come apart. She immediately levels it. The other two Repellers seal tightly again above and below Doi’s. So that’s how we disconnect. If we twist the handles, they pry apart.
We skate faster and faster, and soon the water is boiling. The speed of our skating is mirrored by the speed of the water churning in the opposite direction beneath our skates. The curve of the wall funnels the water along, intensifying the churn.
The water of the entire structure is soon rolling and leaping like breaching dolphins. The waves buck and toss the three of us, but we anticipate one another’s tumults and hop with them in time.
Something’s happening. A clear, light-colored disk appears below the surface of the churning water under our Repellers, surrounded by a larger, darker disk whose edges ripple and waver like the skirt of a jellyfish. It looks like nothing so much as a giant eye fluttering into being.
“Skate faster!” I holler at Doi and Hisashi over the thunder of the water.
We explode forward, with all of our collected Chi channeling into the churn.
The eye responds to our burst of energy by spiraling out in a pattern of light- and dark-colored bands like tails or tentacles on the surface of the water below our skates.
“It’s coming!” I scream at Doi and Hisashi. “The coiling water dragon is coming! Strike the water with your Repellers!”
We twist the ring handles of our Repellers. We fly apart from one another toward the wall of the nest. The three of us whip our Repellers over our heads and slam them down with the last of our strength onto the water.
A column of spiraling water explodes up in the form of an inverted cone. Before I crash into the wall of the nest, I am lifted up and whipped into the sky, along with the sea itself.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
I’m tumbling through water, through air, through water in air. There’s nothing below my skates. I’m slinging through emptiness, then hit in the face by a wall of water that I can’t find my way out of.
I’m going to drown. But how can one drown in the sky?
I’m shot through a great pocket of air, and I suck in breath. I squeeze the salt water out of my eyes and see that I’m in a column of air. Its walls pulsate around me in black and gray, alive with tails and tentacles.
Then I’m flipped toward the moving wall of water, and suddenly, I’m flying through open sky.
I’m free of the coiling water dragon! I survived it!
I orient myself as I fall. Dark ocean spreads below me, tens of stories down. From this high up, I’m going to hit the water as if it were stone. There’s no way I can survive such a fall. I open my mouth to scream, but the air whips the sound away.
As I plummet toward the water, I feel something happening.
I’m not accelerating.
I’m slowing down.
The magnetization of the sea! It’s repelling my skates. The magnetized sea is pushing back at them.
I come down on the water with a muffled impact. I bounce up and come back down again steadily. The repelling force of the magnetization perfectly balanced against the force of my fall. The faster I fell, the more it pushed back.
I turn to look behind me in the direction of the howling roar, at the coiling water dragon.
What I see, twisting in the sky before me, astonishes me.
The coiling water dragon is no dragon.
It’s a water cyclone.
It’s like the little water cyclones that infest Pearl during the Season of Spouts and chased us into the teahouse where we had the infinity noodle. I hopped into one of them to win the First Motivation last year. But this one is forty, maybe fifty stories high.
Chingu’s oracle finally clicks into place. The architecture students and the senseis are able to summon the coiling water dragons, I mean, the water cyclones, using the Repellers, the magnetized sea, and the circular structure that they call the nest. They orchestrated the attack on Eastern Heaven Dining Hall to frighten us from coming onto the sea. So that we wouldn’t learn things they didn’t want us to know. But it must have gone out of control.
I look for Hisashi and Doi, wondering if they were also picked up by the coiling—I mean the water cyclone. I realize I can’t even see anything that looks like the nest anymore. It must have lifted us out of the nest and zoomed us far across the water.
Unlike on campus, which is filled with structures, out here, the water cyclone can’t hurt us, because it can’t throw us into anything since there’s nothing here but water. Even falling from a terrible height is harmless, because the magnetization of the sea softens the fall.
Two hands slap on my shoulders. I turn to see Doi’s and Hisashi’s faces. They’re pointing at the water cyclone with their Repellers in disbelief. I can’t hear them over the roar in our ears, but the three of us skate after the water cyclone as it churns in the distance ahead, weaving in the moonlight like a slender skater as it drives through the water.
I laugh at the unlikeliness of this all. Three children, skating on a magnetized sea, chasing a dragon into the night—a dragon that turned out to be a cyclone. If a scene so strange can be real, then anything is possible. And for some reason, the thought fills me with joy.
Before us, dolphins dive deliberately into the twisting column of water. They go spiraling up inside its center and come shooting out the top. They fly through the air until they spear back nosefirst into the sea.
The coiling water dragon—it’s going to be hard to stop calling it that—churns into a river of wayward luminous octopuses. Suddenly, its entire height, fifty stories high, blazes with light, shimmering gold and pink and sea-foam green and blue.
When the octopuses are flung out of the top, they spread their arms by some instinct, stretching the webs between them. They catch the buffeting gusts and sweep in patterns like petal-fall stirred in a spring wind. When they get distance from the water cyclone, their luminous forms float gently down around us, as if the stars were blanketing down to sleep the night in a welcoming sea.
Why am I crying?
I know.
Because it is not my enemy. It is not my enemy.
The most frightening thing I have ever faced turns out to wish me no harm.
It is just powerful. It is just doing what it needs to do.
Its power might be fearsome.
But it does not wish me harm.
It is not my enemy.
I wish Cricket were here to see it.
I look over at Doi. I know she’s thinking the same thing, wishing that a person she cares about were here to see this remarkable thing.
I wish she were here with us, too, Doi, I think. We wouldn’t have seen this without her contribution.
Within half an hour, we see the coiling water dragon dwindle and die out in an elegant flourish of silver vapor.
But it leaves something behind.
We skate toward it.
It’s difficult to make it out because it’s the same color as the seawater. We can only identify its contours by the sheen of moonlight against it.
Where its center had been, the coiling water dragon has left behind a dark object shaped like an egg, as large as the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice.
I reach out to touch its side. It’s neither liquid nor solid. It’s like a jelly or a preserved thousand-year-old duck egg.
It begins to sink back down into the sea.
Some instinct tells me that we can’t let it slip out of our hands. The coiling water dragon turned out not to be a dragon but that doesn’t mean we can’t harness it. In fact, it’s probably going to be even easier to harness it since it’s just a phenomenon of water and wind and not a thing with a mind and will of its own. And maybe we can find a use for this “egg” that it has birthed. Something tells me that this is the mystery we’ve been seeking, even more than the coiling water dragon itself.
“Quick, grab on to it!” I order Doi and Hisashi.
We try to grab on to it, but it’s like trying to hold on to a whale.
As it dips down between us, Hisashi stabs his Repeller into it. The spoon end bites in deeply. He twists the ring handle and a section of the egg pops off while the rest sinks below the water.
He wraps it under one arm and says, “Let’s set Crick on figuring out what this is.”
It’s hard to tell how long it takes us to skate back to the pier. An hour? More? The night has seemed so unreal, and the Chi of all three of us is seriously depleted, so it’s impossible to tell.
We leap up from the water onto the pier and replace the three Repellers in their slots at the end of the pier. We skate down to our skiff, which is tied to the ladder leading down to the water. We row out to the final Repeller, still impaled in the water and keeping the sea magnetized.
I pull it out of the sea.
Out across the dark water, we hear a noise.
“What was that?” I say.
We listen.
It’s the sound of splashing and a struggle.
Then a voice coughs out, “Help me!”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
I stab the final Repeller back into the water.
We leap out of the skiff and onto the sea and skate in the direction from which we heard the struggle and the cry.
A boxy shape like a kite floats above the water, twisting in place. Near it, a figure frantically treads water.
As we rush toward the person, we see it’s not a kite—it’s a drumchair tipped onto its side, the magnetization of the sea pushing at its blades and making it spin.
And in the water is Yinmei.
She’s sinking into the sea even though it’s magnetized, because she’s not wearing skates. Hisashi rights the chair. Doi and I haul Yinmei out of the water and onto the seat of her chair. When we reach the Principal Island, Yinmei says, “Don’t take me to the Hall of Benevolent Healing. Doctor Dio is useless.”
Doi says, “But we need to know if treading water made your heart and lungs grow. The exertion could be like taking five steps.”
“I can already tell that it did, butterfly. I am sorry.”
I still would have taken her if Doi insisted, but she nods and her face crumples.
We carry Yinmei quietly to her dormitory chamber, change her out of her wet clothes, and wrap her in blankets. Doi enters into a healing meditative state to try to drive the chill out of the core of Yinmei’s body and to her extremities. She stifles a cry when Yinmei drifts into unconsciousness.
“It’s not enough,” says Doi. “My Chi’s helping, and I think that the heart and lung growth wasn’t as bad as when she took steps on the pearl, but I can feel from the shudders in her Chi that the cold has entered into her whole circulatory system.”
“But she wasn’t in the water that long,” I say, “and it wasn’t that cold.”
“The circulatory system can be susceptible to radical changes in temperature with profound exhaustion.”
“She needs healing through Chi entanglement,” says Hisashi.
Doi says, “But she needs a twin or a sibling or someone she’s very close to for Chi entanglement.”
“What about you, Wing Girl? You’re closer to her than anyone.”
Doi says softly, “I tried. The connection between us is apparently … not strong enough.”
I feel her disappointment, and I’m hurt for her, but
I know she doesn’t want my sympathy.
“Let me keep trying,” says Doi.
I step outside the dormitory chamber to give her privacy.
A moment later, the shoji door slides open. Hisashi skates to me.
I ask him, “Have you and Doi ever healed each other through Chi entanglement?”
He laughs and says, “Yes. Once, when we were very young, she healed a blade slash on my arm.”
“A wu liu injury?”
“No. Someone threw a pair of scissors at me.”
“Who?”
“She did. It was my fault.”
“What happened?”
“I came into her room when she told me not to. She hadn’t come out of it in three days. I was worried. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut with crying. She screamed at me to get out, then she threw the scissors at my arm.”
“What did you do?”
“I skated to her, put my arms around her, and embraced her.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I knew she must be in terrible pain to act like that. And then I saw the dead baby bird in the basket. When she was ready, Doi told me that she found it outside her window. It was so small and underformed that she guessed its parents had shoved it out of the nest so as not to waste food on it, knowing it would never survive. She nursed it for weeks. When it died, she cried for three days.”
“But you didn’t know that when you embraced her.”
“I didn’t, and I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I knew that that baby bird wasn’t the only one who knew what it felt like to be shoved out of a nest. That’s why I never assume that someone truly means me harm.”
“Even when they actually do harm you?”
“They get one free shot at me,” he says, smiling.
I don’t know what world he lives in. But I want to live in that world. Perhaps he’s a fool and that world doesn’t exist.
But it should.
I want to throw my arms around him and press my cheek against his and hold him tightly. But should I start with a lean-to-friend embrace and then see if he wants to turn it into a more-than-friend embrace? How can I tell if that’s what he wants? The Imperial Anthology of Pearlian Courting, Romance, and Flirtation Protocols stated that there is a transitional embrace between lean-to-friend embrace and more-than-friend embrace but there wasn’t a diagram to display how it is performed. How I can recognize if he’s initiating it? Should I ask him? Or will that kill the moment with thinking while he’s waiting for me to do something?