“What brought you here?” I jump when my companion finally speaks. “You’re a good thief. Not to mention whip-smart. You’d do well in Seng Ngoi. Why stay in Longwai’s territory?”
I’ve never told anyone about my sister. Not even Chma. It’s too painful to talk about her.
“I’m not ready to leave yet.” Really, there’s nothing else to tell him. I don’t know the answers. I don’t know where my sister is. I don’t know what I’ll do when I find her. Where we’ll go. What we’ll eat. How we’ll live.
“What about you?” I ask, pushing those worries into a far, dusty corner. “Why are you here?”
Dai stares out at City Beyond. Light is coming. Shining soft, clean colors between the skyscrapers: the purple of lotus petals, the dusty pink of Chma’s tongue, and blue. So much blue.
“I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he says. The want I saw that first night swims in his eyes. Shimmering with city lights and sun fire. Reaching for the skyscrapers. The sea beyond.
“You look like you’ve got money.” I glance at the bag Chma is buried in. Those stuffed buns aren’t cheap. “Why don’t you just move?”
“It’s not that easy.” A story lurks behind his words. I wonder if it has anything to do with his scar. With the reason he’s agreed to risk his life every time I run. But I can’t ask him these things without having questions thrown back at me. I don’t want this boy of scars and secrets digging into my memories.
I don’t trust him that much.
An airplane stretches out just over our heads, eating Dai’s words with its ear-throbbing roar. The hot air of its engines bellows down. Tears at our hair. Gnashes at our backs.
Dai is so, so close to the edge. Too close. When the wind hits us, my fingers fly out. Snag the edge of his hoodie. A motion made of speed and instinct. The same way I always reach for my knife.
The plane disappears. My hand is still digging into the softness of his hoodie. Dai is still on the edge, sitting solid. He looks at my hand. His face drains: pale, paler, palest.
“Sorry.” I let go. Cross my arms back over my chest. “I–I thought you were going to fall. I was trying to stop you.”
Dai keeps staring at me. The way he did when I met him in front of Longwai’s brothel. His eyes are on me, but he’s not really looking. He’s seeing something — someone — else.
Then he blinks. And the spell is broken.
“It’ll take more than an airplane to send me over the edge,” the older boy says. “You always so protective?”
I look down at my bare arms — so white after two sunless years. Scars cover them. Shiny lines and circles. My father’s fists wrote them all over my skin. Stories he wanted to tell Mei Yee. My mother. I never let him.
I think about when I found Chma — a shuddering whimper of a kitten — being battered like a football among a group of vagrants. I was outnumbered. Four to one. It didn’t matter.
I’ve never been able to sit back and watch things happen. Not without a fight.
“It’s a good thing.” Dai doesn’t wait for my answer. His hands are out of his pockets, gripping the roof’s ledge hard. His knuckles look as if they’re about to break. “My brother was like that.”
“You’ve got a brother?”
He blinks again. As if he’s just now realized what he told me. A secret he let slip. “He’s… gone now.”
Gone. Just like Mei Yee.
Maybe Dai and I have more in common than I realized.
The sun rises fast. Reminds me that the world isn’t all gray cracked concrete. Its orange fire licks the buildings. Sets the world ablaze. Everything around me, everything the light touches, is beautiful.
“I always wanted a brother.” I don’t know what makes me say it. Maybe it’s the buns in my belly. Or the warm sun on my skin. Maybe I feel like I owe Dai a secret in return.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because then life would’ve been different.” My nose wouldn’t be crooked and broken. My mother would’ve smiled. The crops would’ve grown. My father wouldn’t have sold Mei Yee just so he could have money for rice wine. I would still have a family.
“Funny,” Dai says. “Sometimes I wish the same thing. Just opposite.”
I don’t know what he means until he continues, “Sometimes… sometimes I wish I’d never had a brother. Because then life would be different.”
We’re both silent for a minute. Both staring at the yellow sun. Both wishing for different lives.
“But this is it.” Dai wads the empty bag into a ball. Tosses it far into the air. “This is it. And we do what we can. We keep going. We survive.”
I watch the bag fall. Down, down, down. Until it’s gone. Swallowed by the streets below.
DAI
Jin’s gone now. His cat, too. Swallowed back into the labyrinth of Hak Nam’s alleys and stairwells. Off to sleep in that ramshackle shelter of his.
This is the first time I’ve brought someone up here, to my thinking spot. The place I go when I’m at my lowest. When I sit on the very edge of Hak Nam and trace the scar on my arm. Round and round.
Don’t do this, Dai! This isn’t you. You’re a good person. My brother’s final words float up on the wind, fill the empty space where Jin just sat. Another 747 rips across the sky. Its wake rakes through my hair and crams my eardrums. It should be all I hear: molecules of air splitting and screaming, torn apart forever.
I’ve tried my hardest to escape him — to forget all the things that happened between us — but my brother’s ghost is hunting me down. Slipping into my waking hours through Jin’s face, his motions. The kid even looked at the night sky with the same gleam in his eyes. I wonder what Jin would think of my brother’s brass-plated telescope, or the encyclopedia of star maps he read to pieces during his I’m going to be an astronaut phase. My brother always stayed up way too late, barefoot and bursting onto his bedroom balcony, babbling if I got too close about whatever new formation he saw. I always pretended not to care, but some things stuck. Like Cassiopeia. Like regret.
And the way the kid grabbed my hoodie and tried to stop me from falling: It was the exact same way my brother seized me that night. Same wide eyes. Same tight fingers.
My brother’s voice keeps swirling, reaching, clawing. Trying to stop me again.
Don’t do this, Dai!
“Get out of my head!” I scream the memories away. It’s so much better when the amnesia settles in and I’m numb.
I think about the kid instead. Part of me wishes I hadn’t brought Jin here. Hadn’t bought him breakfast. Hadn’t started to care. My risky-as-hell plan was so much easier to carry out when the people helping me were just chess pieces. Polished pawns without faces. Not a starving street kid and a trapped girl whose beautiful eyes twist and tangle my insides. Show me pieces of myself.
Hunger preying on hunger.
This isn’t you.
The dead don’t sleep easily. Just like me.
I shut my eyes, feel the wind whip up stories and stories of these rotting buildings into my face. I don’t see the long fall just inches from my toes. I don’t see the skyscrapers stabbing the morning sky.
You’re a good person.
I wish my brother had been right.
But he wasn’t. And now — instead of dreaming about dancing in zero gravity, making footprints in moondust — he’s six feet under. Shattered beyond repair, broken just like everything else I leave behind.