Just the kind of kid I’m looking for. One more step to my ticket out of this place.
Here’s hoping he’s willing to play the part.
MEI YEE
There is no escape.
Those were the first words the brothel master spoke to me the night the Reapers pulled me out of their van — after endless hours of rutted roads, windowless darkness. I was still wearing the nightgown I’d pulled over my head days and days before — a thin, cotton thing with more than a few holes. A few of the girls beside me were crying. I… I felt nothing. I was someone else. I was not the girl who’d just been snatched from her bed. I was not the one who stood at the front of the line, waiting as the man with the long purple scar on his jaw inspected us. I was not Mei Yee.
That night, when the master got to me, he stared, inspecting me at every angle. I felt the crawl of his eyes on my skin, like insects creeping into hidden places. Places they shouldn’t go.
“Her,” he told the Reapers’ leader.
We watched as the coins changed hands, more money than I’d ever seen in my short life as a rice farmer’s daughter. More than ten times what the Reapers’ leader paid my father for me.
“There is no escape. Forget your home. Forget your family.” The master’s voice was flat, passionless. As dead as his heavy, opium eyes. “You’re mine now.”
These are the words I’m trying my hardest not to remember when Mama-san calls, “Girls?”
I’m sitting on my bed. Dread snakes through my every vein, and I look at the others. Nuo is by the foot of the bed, a cross-stitch dangling from her fingers. Wen Kei sits on the rug, and Yin Yu kneels behind her, weaving braids into the younger girl’s dark silken hair. Yin Yu is the only one who doesn’t freeze at Mama-san’s voice. Her fingers keep moving, tucking strands of Wen Kei’s hair in and out and into themselves again.
Wen Kei’s mouth is still open, cut off midsentence from one of her endless, amazing descriptions of the sea. I’m trying to imagine what waves look like when Mama-san appears in the doorway.
Mama-san — the keeper of us girls. The one who feeds and dresses us. The one who calls the doctor when we’re sick. The one who runs the brothel and matches clients to our beds. Some of the girls think she was brought here like us: in the back of one of the Reapers’ vans. It must’ve been a very long time ago, when her skin was smooth and her back wasn’t bent.
She certainly doesn’t look young now. Her face is pinched in all the wrong places, eyes distant.
“Girls. The master wants to see you. Now. He’s closed off the lounge.” Mama-san darts out of the doorway as suddenly as she came, off to gather the girls from the other three halls.
“She got caught.” Wen Kei, the youngest and smallest of us, sounds like a baby bird, her voice all fluttery and weak.
Yin Yu pulls her hair so tight that Wen Kei squeaks. “None of you breathe a word. If Master and Mama-san find out that we knew Sing’s plan… it won’t end well.” She looks to me as she says this, searching for words of support.
“We say nothing.” I try to sound as old as my seventeen years should make me, but the truth is, I feel just like the rest of them: shaking and whiter than rice noodles.
I don’t know why I’m so rattled. I knew this would happen. All of us did. That’s why we tried to get Sing to stay.
There is no escape. There is no escape. We whispered the master’s words to her like a chorus, along with dozens of reasons. Here, she had clothing, food, water, friends. And out there? What? Hunger. Disease. Unforgiving streets with teeth like wolves.
But in the end, there was no stopping her. I’d seen it months ago, the wildness that started in her eyes when she talked about life before this. It spread into everything, lit her up inside. Every time she entered my room, she would pull aside my scarlet curtain and stare, stare, stare out the window — the only one in the entire brothel. She was never good at keeping everything balled up inside like the rest of us. Yin Yu thinks this is because Sing’s family never sold her. They loved her, fed her, taught her how to read, and then they died. The Reapers came for her at the orphanage.
We find Sing spread out on the floor of the smoking lounge, hair wild and torn, arms bent back at a terrible angle. I don’t know for sure if she’s awake or even alive until one of the master’s men props her up. Blood, bright, shines down her arms and legs. There’s blood on her face, too, washing warm over her cheeks and onto the edge of her lips. Her dress — a beautiful piece of sky-blue silk and embroidered cherry blossoms — is ruined.
The rest of us stand in a line as the master paces a slow, endless circle around Sing’s fetal frame. When he finally stops, the tips of his lounge slippers are turned toward us.
He doesn’t yell, which makes his words even more terrifying. “Do any of you know what it’s like out there for a vagrant? For the other working girls?”
Not one of us replies, though we all know the answer. It’s one Mama-san drills into us every single time she sees our faces wither with emptiness. The one we tried so hard to make Sing remember.
“Pain. Disease. Death.” The words leave him like punches. When he’s finished, he brings the pipe to his lips. Smoke pours out of his nostrils — reminding me of the scarlet dragon embroidered on his lounging jacket. “How do you think you’d do out there, on your own? Without my protection?”
He doesn’t really want an answer. His question is more of a quiet shout, the same kind my father used to ask before his first cup of rice wine. Before he exploded.
“I give every single one of you everything you could need. I give you the best. All I ask for in return is that you make our guests feel welcome. It’s such a small thing. Such a tiny request.”
Just the fact that the master is addressing us should make my blood run cold. Mama-san is always the one who punishes us, with hissing lips and the sharp backside of her callused hand. The few times the master does talk to us, he always makes a point to remind us of how we’re treated better than other working girls. We have rooms of our own, silken dresses, trays of tea, and incense. Our choice of meals. Pots of paint to decorate our faces. We have everything because we’re the chosen. The best of the best.
“Now, Sing here”—he says her name in a way that crawls under my skin—“has just spit in the face of my generosity. I gave her safety and luxury, and she threw it away like it was nothing. She’s insulted my honor. My name.”
Sing sits behind him, still bleeding, still shaking. The men in black are breathing hard. I wonder how far she got before they caught her.
The master snaps his fingers. All four of his henchmen pull Sing to her feet. She flops like a doll in their hands. “If you dishonor my hospitality, break the rules, you will be punished. If you insist on being treated like the common prostitutes, then that’s what I’ll do.”
He rolls up his sleeves. Fung, the man with the scarlet tattoo on his face, gives the master something I can’t fully see.
But Sing sees it, and when she does, she lets out a shriek that would wake the gods. She comes to life again, with kicks and jerks so awful that the men holding her down can’t stand still.
Her screams manage to meld into words. “No! Please! I’m sorry! I won’t run!”
Then the master holds up his hand, and I see the reason for Sing’s terror. There, wrapped under all those tight, plump fingers, is a needle. The syringe is full of dirty brown liquid.