Two days. That’s all I have left to prepare until the second Motivation. Learning about the pearl and why the Empress Dowager has put us in this position are important but so is performing well so that I don’t look like a mediocre skater sent as a spy.
I haven’t made anywhere near the progress that I needed to in my meditation memory practice. I’ve been training by myself every day before morningmeal in the memory palace exercises at the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness. During wu liu class, my ability to remember these strings of moves with many quick steps has been improving as a result. However, I know it’s still far from what I need in order to take first ranking at the second Motivation. I need to do more in these last two days. I need to make Doi teach me her meditation technique.
That evening, half an hour before evenmeal, I go to the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness and find Doi there just as she is finishing her meditation practice. It’s clear that she’s not happy about my being here.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her alone since the meeting with Hisashi in the Garden of Whispering Arches. I have to try to win Doi over so I can ask her about her meditation technique. Perhaps I can use what Hisashi told me about the history between Suki and Doi at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony.
I bow to Doi. She bows back, but there’s no expression on her face. Then again, there never seems to be anything on this girl’s face except two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
“What do you think the nuns at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters did with Suki’s hair after they cut it off?” I ask, trying for a smile. “Should one of us come in wearing it as a belt during the second Motivation?”
Doi’s face doesn’t change. “You don’t need to come here when I do. It’s not going to help you with the second Motivation.”
Her words feel like a slap.
“I’ve seen you meditating, but it won’t help you win,” she continues. “The second Motivation doesn’t really have anything to do with memorization.”
She’s so rude. How can Doi and Hisashi share the same mother and father?
“So,” I say, “if it’s nothing to do with the second Motivation, you shouldn’t mind me joining you here.”
“I’m done here.”
“What about tomorrow night?”
“I’d prefer if you’d not come when I’m using the squares.”
“There are sixty-fo—sixty-lucky of them. I only need one.” I cross my arms. “Why can’t I be here? What is it you’re doing?”
“It’s just a game that my brother and I came up with when we were young.”
“Then why won’t you tell me?” This girl is impossible. “I’m only talking to you because Hisashi—”
“Hisashi’s a fool!” She gets up and skates out of the square.
So I’m on my own for the second Motivation. Nothing new to me.
* * *
I skip my architecture, music, and literature classes the last morning before the second Motivation. I spend the extra time studying the Treatise on Chi Practice and the Visual Music of the Memory Palace and meditating. During wu liu class that afternoon, Sensei Madame Liao has us form a line and face her. We are to copy her moves, and any girl who makes a mistake is eliminated from the line.
I focus my Chi. I must be relaxed so I can absorb. I must loosen every muscle in my body, even the muscles that I didn’t know were clenched, muscles I didn’t know existed, muscles in my ears, muscles in my eyes, muscles in—
Suddenly, Sensei Madame Liao has already done two moves and all the girls beside me have done them in imitation.
I have no idea what they did and stand there stupidly.
“Chen Peasprout, you are eliminated!”
I skate to the sideline. I was trying too hard to relax. That only made it impossible to relax. How am I ever going to survive the second Motivation?
After our evening baths, as I am readying for sleep, Doi crosses my path.
“They never taught you back in Shin how to do walking meditation,” she says.
“Of course they did,” I say as I try to skate past her. What does she want? I need to get a good night’s sleep before the second Motivation tomorrow. The last thing I need is to be distracted by another argument with this girl.
“So then you must know that some people are able to stay in a meditative state while skating?”
“That’s impossible. You’d come out of the meditative state as soon as you moved.”
“Not if you are deep enough in it. You just need something strong enough to send you that deep.”
If she’s trying to intimidate me with how good everyone else’s Chi practice is during the second Motivation, it’s not going to work. I skate away from her, open the paper shoji door of my dormitory chamber, and slam it shut behind me.
I sleep a long sleep filled with uneventful dreams.
* * *
The morning of the second Motivation, we skate in a group down the path to the rails connecting to the Conservatory of Wu Liu. The path winds past the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice, where the boys will be doing Vertical Battlefield for their second Motivation while the girls do Lady Ming’s Hand-Mirror. When I near it, there is already a crowd of students and senseis gathered there, but the strange thing is that the students include as many girls as boys. Why aren’t the girls moving on to our Motivation? They’re all looking up at the pagoda.
I gasp as I see what they’re pointing at.
There are great gashes in the tiers of the pagoda. It looks like a giant took a sword and slashed it down the side of the pagoda, slicing through the roofs of the eight tiers, all the way down to the bottom one.
I know it couldn’t have been a giant sword, but look at the scale of the damage! It sickens my stomach. The sections of roofs next to the gash of each tier are buckled and skewed. Some of the pagoda’s inner parts show through. It looks like someone cut open a crab to pry its halves apart and scrape at the living meat inside.
One of the students says, “We’ve been attacked!”
Attack? Who would want to attack a pagoda? Murmurs rise. Several of the students look at me and whisper to one another.
“I told you,” says Suki, triumph cracking her voice. “Now do you believe me? She’s not a real skater. She’s just decent enough to pass for one. The ‘Stealthiest Skater in Shin’ is finally starting to do what the Empress Dowager really sent her here to do!”
I’m as shocked by this as anyone. No, it can’t be. The Empress Dowager wouldn’t order an attack on the academy. She must know what position that would leave Cricket and me in as the only Shinian students here. Some student who wasn’t happy with his or her ranking at the last Motivation must have done this. All I know is that I don’t know any more about this than anyone else.
Everyone is looking at me.
And Suki is still talking.
More and more students and senseis are arriving for the second Motivation. They’re starting to form a circle, and I’m in the center of it. I feel their stares and their whispers and, above all of it, Suki’s poisonous lies.
So I do something I have never done.
I turn and flee.
I hop on the rails to the Conservatory of Wu Liu.
* * *
When Sensei Madame Liao and the other first-year girls arrive, I don’t look up from my Chi-centering exercises.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “The first-year boys’ second Motivation shall be delayed. The first-year girls’ second Motivation shall proceed as scheduled.”
My emotions are still too uncollected for me to absorb this. I focus on the Chi energy filling from my toes. I visualize it carrying the venom of this news, rising out of me, exiting my body.
It’s not working. I can’t expel the shock. I can feel it lodged in my Chi, and every time I push against it, I only drive myself backward, deeper, down and back and down.
I open my eyes to a world moving so slowly.
The sounds of the girls around me are drawn out, even though some part of my mind tells me that they’re talking as quickly as they can, they must be talking about something significant that happened long ago this morning, but to me it’s like the sound of birds that I can mimic without understanding.
I skate as if outside my own body to take my place and face my opponent for Lady Ming’s Hand-Mirror. Now, I’m watching myself standing in front of this girl, and she is doing a move and I’m copying it and adding a move, and so it goes back and forth, and the moves are laying themselves out in a strip in my mind as a rhythm of musical beats. But the other girl acts before her Chi is centered. Even though the rounds aren’t timed, she’s quickening the pace to intimidate me, but I keep up, and it’s not long before she makes a mistake and the round is over, and I take a point for each move in the string, and my opponent takes nothing.
I watch my body skate to face my next opponent. My being is brightened because I have won the first round, but I know it would be better for my opponent and me to perform our parts slowly, until the number of moves has climbed higher. The longer and more complicated the sequence of moves we successfully complete, the more points each round will be worth when I win it.
I face girl after girl. Each time, when I finish in victory, I look down at my body and see my aura of Chi brighten briefly, but then it dims again, because I only earn average points against each girl. I try to move deliberately, hoping my opponent will follow my lead, but girl after girl panics and drives the pace too fast for herself until suddenly she is splayed on her rear end on the pearl in front of me.
I watch my body work its way through the line of opponents to the two beings who have the most significance for me in this space. Deep in this state, I can see the cords of energy binding my body to them; the one linking to Suki is orange and burning white in the center, but the one to Doi is a color I have no name for, a color that makes me feel like I am blind.
We three stand like pillars in a lake, for we are undefeated in all our rounds, but it is a shallow lake. The other girls keep losing to us before we are able to gather many points in any round.
Finally, I see my body standing before Doi. I use my Chi to try to establish a link with her and hope that she understands that we must skate as if carefully linking a string of beads; we are making a necklace between us, and we should make it slowly, bead for bead, until it is long enough to be worth winning.
We dive into a chamber of sound, air, sight, and instinct that becomes a conversation, punctuated with thoughtful pauses and courtesies and glorious style, as we chain our moves so that they’re answers to each other.
Doi leaps and kicks the air in a third-gate grasshopper backflip, to which I spread my arms to gather the air under them to add a luckieth-gate nightingale loop, since the nightingale eats the grasshopper, to which she retorts by leaping and spinning into a jump, then diving down headfirst in a fifth-gate falcon spiral, since the falcon eats the nightingale, all of which I perform and then surpass by springing off the coils under the heels of my faithful skates in a fifth-gate tiger leap. She conquers this by flinging herself into a furious spin on one skate with the other skate pulled behind her in a luckieth-gate triple phoenix spin, since the phoenix eats only bamboo seeds and harms nothing, and it tames all beasts with its grace.
It’s exquisite to dance against an opponent of such skill.
Around us, all the other girls gather, as they have long since ended their rounds, and when Doi and I have strung together thirty moves, we give in to the urge to push the rounds faster and faster. When I add in a single-footed orchid flip, Doi slips at this simple child’s move and lands with both feet.
I am hauled out of my state as if by a rope from the bottom of the sea. The scale of time in my mind collapses in and comes crashing into the scale of time around me.
I’m here at the Conservatory of Wu Liu. At the second Motivation. I’ve won the round against Doi. There’s no applause. Just murmuring as the other girls glare at me. Because someone or something attacked the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice just an hour ago. And everyone thinks I’m involved. The shock of the vandal attack and the accusations against me pushed me into a meditative state that helped me copy the moves of my opponents. A skating meditative state, just like Doi told me about.
There’s just one more opponent left to beat: Suki. We’re given only a moment to rest before the next round. I quickly center my Chi to get back into that state before I take on Suki.
“Don’t try to beat Suki.” It’s Doi.
“Please don’t interrupt me, I’m getting back into my meditative—”
“She’s better than you. You need to lose to her.”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do.” She’s sore that she lost to me.
“Count,” she says and skates away.
Count? What does she mean?
Then it’s my turn to go against Suki. There’s no time to get back into the meditative state.
“What did you use to attack the pagoda?” Suki says. “Did you fire thousand-year-old preserved bladder stones at it?”
Insipid laughter rises from the House of Flowering Blossoms girls who have gathered to watch the final round.
I shouldn’t have fled. I shouldn’t have panicked.
I say, “Even a thousand-year-old bladder stone wouldn’t be as old as that joke is by now. Are you going to do a move, or are you going to just stand there reusing jokes?”
“You’ll be reusing your clothes for toilet paper when they throw you in prison.”
“Maybe when I get to prison, they’ll give me a nice haircut like the nuns gave you.”
Suki seethes and begins the round by doing a kingfisher sporting in the Purple River quintuple jump. Everyone gasps, because this is a seventh-gate east-directional move, requiring her to jump and twist her body like a hunting bird to reverse direction lucky times while in the air. However, kingfisher sporting in the Purple River quintuple jump is one of the few moves in all of wu liu originating in the region of, obviously, the Purple River in Shui Shan Province. Where I’m from. It’s one of the moves that I mastered to become wu liu champion of all of Shui Shan Province, which qualified me to compete for the title of Peony-Level Brightstar. I’ve been doing it since I was six years old.
I execute the move flawlessly.
We launch into a furious round, whipping faster and faster. She’s using fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-gate moves to intimidate me. I’m not afraid, because they’re all centered on difficult jumps, and I’m the best jumper in the class. The dragon tail coil under the heel of each of my skates is absorbing the jumps beautifully, so I feel nothing on the knees, while giving me lift for the next jump.
When we’ve strung together thirty-one unbroken points, my focus wanders and I start thinking that I need to win this Motivation to prove that I’m not a spy. It’ll prove that I was sent here because I truly am the most talented skater in all of Shin. I begin tallying up my score. I’ve gained thirty-one points from the round against Doi, so Suki has to win thirty-two points herself.…
Suki leaps in the air and pivots with one knee lifted before her in a north-directional metal monkey spin, but I was too busy counting my points and can’t remember if she did three rotations before landing or lucky, but I don’t want them to see me hesitate. I know that Suki is reckless, so I complete the move with lucky rotations.
As soon as I do so, the House of Flowering Blossoms girls erupt in sneering laughter and cheers.
It should’ve been three rotations. Suki has won thirty-two points, enough to take first ranking.
Too late, I realize my mistake.
Count! That’s what Doi meant!
I’ve given Suki the thirty-two points she needed to win. If I had deliberately failed immediately, rather than matching her move for move and building up the value of the round, Suki would’ve only gotten one point from me and I would’ve finished with the top points. I should have intentionally lost the round against Suki to deny her enough points to win. Now, I’ve thrown away first place.
Doi wasn’t trying to intimidate me. She was trying to help me.
I’ve taken second place in this Motivation. Because of the weight given to this Motivation, that combines with my performance at the first Motivation to drop me to second place overall.
I quickly gather my things and skate away from the other girls who are now crowding around Suki to congratulate her. After all the work I did to make up for the deficiencies in my training. Am I just going to rank lower and lower in every Motivation? Was I just lucky in the first Motivation?
Now, I have to finish first, not just for myself or Shin or the Empress Dowager. I have to finish first because my safety depends on it. I must prove that I deserve to be here, that I’m not just a barely decent skater sent here to spy on Pearl.
As I skate toward the rails leading back to the Principal Island of the academy, something catches in the dragon tail coiled under my right heel. I turn and see that Suki has lodged the front tip of her skate in the coil of my skate. I stop so that her skate doesn’t damage my blade.
Before I can say anything, Chiriko and Etsuko race up and shove me forward just as Suki twists the toe of her skate.
The tip of her blade breaks as the dragon tail of my blade snaps off.
“You broke my skate blade!” says Suki. “You’re so clumsy.”
I test the weight on my skate. Three of the supports connecting the blade to the boot are intact, but the luckieth support connecting the coil at the heel is now connected to nothing but a pocket of empty air that sickens me. It feels like Suki cut off half my foot. My life is in my feet. How am I going to compete at the Motivations? How am I going to prove that I truly was sent here because of my skill as a skater if I don’t even have two complete blades?
I look for Sensei Madame Liao. She is at the far end of the training court, with her back to us. She saw nothing. It’s my word against all the other girls’.
Chiriko opens a pack of blades and gives one to Suki. Suki replaces her broken blade with a fresh one. She finishes screwing it in. She and the House of Flowering Blossoms girls hop onto the rails and skate away.
Suki makes a half turn on the rail and skates backward while looking at me. As she recedes, she holds the coil of my dragon tail to the side of her head, like a peony tucked behind her ear.