There’s the slick sound of metal sliding against itself. Behind me. I hardly have time to piece the two together. I jerk the tapestry back over the window and dive into bed.
The first thing I see are his flowers. A dozen white chrysanthemums burst through the door, and the ambassador follows. He’s a big man, and his steps shake the room. I smell the wet on his coat as he sheds it, but I can’t see any drops. He must have used an umbrella.
My pulse is all race and beat when he comes to my bed. There’s something in his hands: a gleaming gold box with a ribbon. The ambassador sets it in my lap.
“I brought you chocolates.” His voice is calm. Steady. Just the sound of it reminds me of how flustered I am.
I smile and say thank you. I untie the ribbon slowly. All I can think about is the window at my back. Is the boy still behind it, waiting for me? The burn of his eyes stays in my stomach. I pray to the gods that my cheeks aren’t flushed.
None of the lace-cupped chocolates are the same — they aren’t circles or squares, but strange shapes I’ve never seen before.
“Seashells,” the ambassador offers when he sees the bewilderment on my face. “What clams and oysters come from.”
“Seashells.” I trace the edge of one. “From the sea?”
“Yes.”
Wen Kei always loved to describe the sea. She could talk about it for hours. How it rose and fell with the size of the moon. How it gnashed like an angry cat on windy days. How its waters gleamed like fire against the sunrise. It was always impossible for me to imagine that there was so much water in the world. Sing even said there were mountains underneath — something she’d learned in school long ago. None of us believed her. “Have you ever been to the sea?”
“Many times.” He smiles. “I grew up on an island. I couldn’t go anywhere without crossing water.”
I know I’ll never be able to imagine so much water until I actually see it with my own eyes. “Do you think, maybe one day, you could take me to see the sea?”
The smile vanishes. “That’s not a good idea.”
Normally I wouldn’t push — I would stay demure and quiet, the way he likes, follow our unspoken rules — but my heart is full and thrumming from my meeting at the window. “Why?”
“You’re my princess. This is your ivory tower. You have to be protected. People outside… they wouldn’t understand us. It’s best if you stay here.”
These walls are made of cinder block. Not ivory.
I’m not sure I understand us, either.
But I’m not brave enough to tell him these things.
We go through our ritual. Our dance. By the end, my cheeks are hot. This time, instead of gazing at the stars, I look at the window and its crimson curtain. I think of the night behind it. The sharp dark of the boy’s eyes.
Maybe it wasn’t the cinder block and trash Sing loved. Maybe it was the possibility, the knowledge that the universe isn’t all opium smoke and cross, sweating men. There is a world outside, with shrimp restaurants and star secrets. A place where it rains and handsome boys get dirt wedged into their palms. A place where the sea stretches all the way out to the sky.
15 days
DAI
The window was hard to find, even after I knew it was there. It took me a good half hour, dodging the storm leaks in the pipes above while I circled the brothel, trying not to be seen, before I spotted the patch of scarlet from the other end of the alleyway. But if finding the window was hard, then facing what was behind it was even harder.
I wasn’t ready for the girl.
City of Darkness. That’s what the people of Seng Ngoi call this place when they glimpse it from their penthouse apartments and high-rise offices. A black spot of slum and crime in their shining city. A better name, I think, would be City of Pain.
The suffering is everywhere here. Crouching inside the steel workshops and weaving mills, where workers hunch over their machines for fourteen hours every single day. Threading through the corridors of strung-out prostitutes and knife-scarred youths. Lurking around the tables where drunken men toss money at one another and curse at the speed of their betting pigeons.
Usually I can ignore it, look the other way, keep walking.
Not this time.
I don’t really know who I expected to find. A prostitute, yes. But the girl behind the glass was nothing like Hak Nam’s other prostitutes — the ones with bloodshot eyes who hover in doorways, trying to lure men with bare shoulders and heavy lids. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot, but they were full. Full and empty at the same time. When she stared at me, I knew she was both young and not.
Haunting. Yearning. Hungry… Her eyes showed the bars for what they are: a cage. Her want reached through the grating and lodged its claws in my chest, made me babble about food poisoning and second-class seafood. Made my palms sweat like a lovesick middle schooler.
I looked at this girl, saw myself staring back. Ghosts of Dai etched in glass, fragmented, held back by the metal weave of grating. The trapped soul wanting out.
Other than the haunt in her eyes, she was beautiful. I can see why Osamu is obsessed with her — black hair woven into a braid over her shoulder, like night against her star-white skin. The kind of girl my brother and I would’ve whispered about while the maid brought us puffed rice chips and scolded us to finish our homework. The kind of girl I might’ve asked to a movie or played the street arcades for just because she wanted the prize.
But Hak Nam doesn’t have any feature films or cutesy plastic kittens with bobbly heads. And I’m not going to ask her on a date. I’m going to ask her to spy on the Brotherhood. To find the thing I can’t.
Hunger preying on hunger.
Will she have what it takes? This is the question I ask as I shove my hands into damp pockets and duck through Hak Nam’s cursed streets.
I don’t know. It’s a huge gamble I’m making. If worse comes to worst, I always have a second door into the brothel. As long as Jin keeps running for me. I can get all the key information from the girl and make a break for it at the last possible moment. A suicide mission at best.
That’s my Plan B. There is no Plan C.
Most of the shops are dark as I glide past, but a few are still lit, their keepers hard at work. A clock on the far wall of a dumpling shop tells me it’s three fifty. Early morning. If I don’t hurry, I’ll miss my meeting at the Old South Gate, where I’ll give my report and he’ll remind me in his stern voice that my time is waning.
I start jogging. The shoestring cinch of my hood taps against my chest as I run through the city, dodging the crumpled, blanket-covered forms of sleeping vagrants.
The Old South Gate is the oldest, largest entrance to the Hak Nam Walled City. In the daylight hours it looks like the entrance of a beehive, hundreds of people moving in and out. Postal workers lug satchels of envelopes. Vendors carry piles of fruit on their backs or wheel them in carts. A few even balance boxes on their heads. But in the hours between midnight and dawn, it’s gutted and empty, a yawn into the world outside.
My handler is already here. He leans against the entrance, one foot planted in Seng Ngoi and the other edged into Hak Nam. His cigarette burns bright against the dark, lighting his face like a steel mill. When he sees me, he flicks the butt on the ground, grinds it with his shoe.
There are two cannons on either side of the gate. Relics from the ancient days, when Hak Nam was a fort instead of a dragon’s den. Before the government left it to rot. The cannons are so covered in rust that they look like giant, weeping boulders. They’re my markers. When I reach them, I stop. Not one step farther.