“I’ll get Longwai to unlock your door.”
He’s gone, through the door without even a good-bye.
The doors open, just as the ambassador promised. Mama-san doesn’t linger. She continues down the darkened hall, undoing locks with iron twists of her key ring. I hover at the threshold and watch her. I look for her bruise, but it’s gone. Healed or hidden. I’m not sure which.
The skin on my hip is splotchy — blood that can’t be freed — pooling in shapes and shades that remind me of an exotic flower. The same flowers that freckle the other girls’ bodies. The same flowers that used to circle my mother’s wrists whenever my father gripped her too tightly.
I had them, too, my first few months in the brothel, when there was no limit on who came to my bed. Before the ambassador arrived and rescued me from all that. Or so I thought.
It was a mistake, I tell myself. He didn’t mean to.
My hip throbs with every heartbeat, reminding me that those are the same words my mother said every morning after. She wouldn’t even look at Jin Ling’s bandages or her own battered limbs. She slouched over the cooking fire, waiting for the water to hiss like a dragon caught in a pot.
“He didn’t mean to do it. He already told me he was sorry.”
But the bruises kept blooming — yellow, green, bright pink, purple, blue — a whole garden of marks to undo my father’s words.
“Why doesn’t Mother leave?” Jin Ling asked me one night when I was cleaning out a terrible split over her left eye. “We could go and start another farm. Or move to the city.”
My sister made it sound so easy: leaving. As if we could just load up the oxcart and go. And I could never find a way to explain it to her, why our mother stayed. It was just something I knew in my heart. Father was the familiar, the known. It didn’t matter that his breath stung like pine needles every night, or that his knuckles battered our flesh. We expected that.
She would never leave him. Not for the world. Not even for us.
My mother was not a person made of risk and run. Not like Jin Ling. Not like Sing.
And me… I don’t know what kind of person I am.
The girls come, one by one. Crowding my doorway like sparrows jostling for spare crumbs. I know it hasn’t been so long since we last glimpsed one another, but their faces could almost belong to strangers. Even tiny Wen Kei, the youngest, has a weight in her eyes that wasn’t there before.
“I didn’t think they’d let us out so soon,” Nuo says once we’re all in the room. “I wonder why.”
I wonder, too, what the ambassador said to sway the master’s decision to unlock not just one but an entire score of doors. Whatever it was, it worked. I have no doubt he could talk me out of this brothel altogether.
My thoughts are still a raging typhoon — speeding around and around — so loud I can barely hear the other girls as they talk about their time behind the doors.
“And then he tried to make me…”
A pool. A garden. Gourmet food. Heaven on a platter.
“…I had to yell for Mama-san.”
Yes. Why didn’t I say yes? Any one of them would. In a heartbeat. Yes. Yes. Yes. A heartbeat.
“…haven’t slept for days… I keep hearing her scream—"
Sing. Would she have said yes? I’m not so sure. She was all fire, all risk. Her heart might as well be my seashell. Sitting on the other side of my window. Unhindered by bars. Just out of reach.
“Wen Kei?” I speak out.
The other girls stare at me.
“Have you ever seen a nautilus?” I still stumble over the word, uncertain.
The girl’s eyes brighten. A twinkle that waltzes with the weight. “Oh yes. My father used to catch them sometimes. He sold the shells to tourists in the market. If you split the shell open, you can see how it’s grown. Whenever it gets too big to fit in its old space, it seals it off. Over and over again. Until it’s all curled up.”
The last image makes Nuo sigh. “Like a fern? My grandmother used to grow ferns in her garden. And radishes, and carrots, and—"
“We shouldn’t talk about home,” Yin Yu interrupts. Her voice is itchy and distracted. Hotter than usual. It makes me notice the stain of wine on her serving dress. Still wet and dark, like a wound. “All we’re doing is hurting ourselves. Nothing good can come of it. This is what got Sing into trouble in the first place… talking about home. It got in her head.”
No. It didn’t get into Sing’s head. It sabotaged her heart, fed it so it grew and grew and grew. Until she was forced to seal everything off — try for a wider, better life.
I wonder if the boy knows about what’s inside the nautilus. If those moon-clear eyes can see how my own shell is squeezing tight. How soon it will be more than I can bear.
It’s not so simple as a yes or a no. It’s not even a matter of escape. It’s a question of what I want more. The ambassador’s penthouse or whatever lies past the bars of that window. The familiar or the risk.
I’m not like my sister. I never was. Jin Ling always ran faster, fought harder. Whenever she was around, I didn’t even bother.
But I don’t want to be like my mother, either. Waking up every morning and watching the sun rise on fresh wounds, wondering in the secret chambers of her heart if there was something more. Through the rice fields and over the mountains.
And this is my race. My risk. Jin Ling’s not here to take it for me.
Maybe I’m a faster runner than I realize.
I don’t know why I thought getting the names would be easy once I found a way out of the room. As if I could just walk up to the master’s henchmen and shake their hands. The only way for me to get the names, to wander freely around the brothel without suspicion, is to ask the master for a job. A job that will get me the closest to the Brotherhood’s secret meetings. A job serving plum wine and lighting pipes.
Yin Yu’s job.
There are leaping frogs in my stomach as I get closer to the unsettled smoke of the master’s den. I’ve thought of how to ask him, so the request will sound innocent. But the master is smarter than his drooping lids suggest. How else would someone become law in a lawless place?
The lounge is almost empty. There are no clients stretched out on the couches, no long pipes spewing smoke into glazed faces. Nuo is not in the corner; the silence of her zither is deafening. I hear every one of my footsteps, creaking and sliding against weathered wood.
Master sits alone. His legs are crossed, tucked with a flexibility I’m surprised he still possesses. There’s a pipe in his hands, but it stays down.
“Mama-san says you requested to see me. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, but after my most recent discussion with your client, my curiosity is piqued.”
He tilts his head at the last word. All I can look at, all I can see, is that awful purple hook of a scar. I turn my stare down to the floor. All ten toes are curling beneath the silk of my slippers, like worms stabbed, sacrificed to find fish.
He knows. He’s smart. My fears whir; cautious, docile Mei Yee is scrambling, trying her hardest to stop me. Don’t ask. Just go back. Sit. Wait. Say yes.
I wet my lips, gather up all my scattered fragments of courage. They’re sharp, spinning, and newborn, enough to push out the words. “I was wondering if, maybe, you might let me take up some duties. I’d like to learn how to serve wine.”