In music class the next day, Sensei Madame Yao is demonstrating how to play a whole orchestra solo by using wu liu kicks to bounce beans off the strings of the instruments. Ping! Ping! Pah-Ping! The room fills with the sound of music.
As the class watches her, I skate up next to friendly Mole Girl and ask if she knows anything about Pearl Rehabilitative Colony, making sure I’m out of earshot of both Doi and Suki.
“That’s a horrible place!” says Mole Girl. “It’s a cram school penal colony that rich parents send their daughters to in order to make them shape up for the entrance exams for Pearl Famous—Ahh! There’s a bean in my nose!” She collapses to the ground, holding her nose.
Sensei Madame Yao stops the class and rushes over. As she helps Mole Girl to the Hall of Benevolent Healing, she commands, “Continue practicing on your own! Any students found slacking off will receive gong duty!”
“If they can’t get the bean out, she’ll probably suffocate. I heard of a second-year girl who died that way,” says Honking Girl, her eyes glimmering.
I hate gossips, but they can be good sources of information.
* * *
At midmeal, I sit next to Honking Girl and ask her if she knows anything about the history between Doi and Suki at this Pearl Colony place.
“Of course!” she says, her face lighting up. “I heard that they had to share a tiny cell together for years. Their captors forced them to cut parts off each other to prove their obedience. And the students were starved until they had to kill and eat each other to survive.”
That’s what I get for asking a gossip.
After midmeal, I go to the Hall of Benevolent Healing to check on Mole Girl. As well as get more information out of her.
“We discharged her after removing the bean,” says an old healer with a head as thin and angled as a folded paper figure. “It would have been interesting to learn if the obstruction affected the magnetization of the sinus bone, but Sensei Madame Yao wouldn’t let me remove the nose for study. Here. Feel how heavy the bean was.” She tries to drop it in my hand, but I pull away quickly. The bean sticks to her palm.
“No, thank you, Healer. Do you know where she is now?”
“I sent her to the Arch of Chi Retuning. Her Chi was terribly disturbed. I wanted to acquire her for further study, but Sensei Madame Yao can be so difficult.”
I skate to the Garden of Whispering Arches and find the Arch of Chi Retuning, but Mole Girl isn’t there. As I pass under it, I can feel the frequency humming from the arch resetting my Chi. Back home in Serenity Cliff, there was an old tree that the children called the Blame Tree. Whenever children scraped their knees or dropped a sweet in the dirt or had anything unlucky happen to them, they would kick the tree and feel strangely better. Until one day, the tree died. Passing under the arch makes me feel better in the same way.
I notice that the sound is strange here in the garden. Echoes don’t work the same. I read in the Pearlian guidebooks that if you clap your hands, it might echo once, twice, or never, or only after the count of eighty-eight beats, or after one year, depending on what sort of arch you’re standing under.
That’s why I don’t hear Hisashi skating here until after I see him. He’s on the far side of the false river of pearlsilk ribbons flowing under a whispering arch.
I raise my hand to wave to him, then hesitate. Has he heard about how his sister was humiliated by Sensei Madame Yao because of me? When Hisashi sees me, he smiles and gives a slight bow. Is his manner slightly colder than it was before?
Hisashi smiles again and bends to speak into the whispering arch, nodding to indicate that I should also lean in.
I bend near the base of the arch and hear his whispered message, carried over the arch as if he’s speaking next to my ear: “Gee-Hong went to take a nap.”
I whisper back into the arch, “Who?”
“No one you need to know about, apparently,” says Hisashi with a laugh. I don’t know what’s so funny, but I’m relieved that he’s laughing.
We skate atop the arch, but just as we meet in the middle, a terrible screeching of birds fills the air. We read the words being traced on the sky, standing side by side.
“Mayor’s. Sons. Send. Letter. Orb. Claiming. They. Are. Voluntary. Guests. Of. Empress. Dowager. Chiologists. Confirm. They. Hear. Blockage. In. Tone. Indicating. Words. Spoken. Against. Speakers’. Will. Buy. Pearl. Shining. Sun. News. To. Get. Whole. Story.”
“I don’t care if ten thousand Chiologists hear blockage in the skaters’ voices,” I cry. “Who knows why they might have spoken those words against their will? The Empress Dowager isn’t holding them as hostages. Your father sent Zan Kenji and Zan Aki because they were the two best New Deitsu Opera Company skaters. The Empress Dowager sent Cricket and me here in a cultural exchange between our two countries. We’re not spies. No one can possibly believe Suki’s allegation.”
“Peasprout, there is so much distrust right now,” Hisashi says, placing a hand on my shoulder and turning me away from the birds. “My father intended a goodwill gesture.” He leads us off the bridge and down through the path of whispering arches. “However, the government of Pearl believes that if New Deitsu doesn’t share with Shin the secret of where they get the pearl, the Empress Dowager will eventually invade and take our city apart, piece by piece, to build a pearl city of her own.”
“You don’t know that!” The sound of my words as we skate under a scalloped-shaped whispering arch vibrates in a sustained echo, as if my voice were being stretched on a torture rack and crying out with a voice of its own. “And, anyway, why can’t you share?”
“I’m not sure. There might not be enough to build and maintain two cities,” Hisashi says. “That’s not my father’s fault. But we Nius seem to get blamed a lot for things that aren’t our fault.”
He must have heard what happened to Doi over my soaps. Heat flushes up my whole head in shame for what his sister suffered for me.
“Your sister must hate me after what happened in Sensei Madame Yao’s class.” As I speak these words, we skate under another whispering arch that has an underside patterned with little indentations. They must capture very select sounds, as only one word of my sentence is whispered back in echo. “Me, me, me…”
He pauses but then says, “No, I’m sure she knows that whatever happened was Suki’s fault.”
Here’s my chance to ask about the hatred between Doi and Suki!
“Yes, Suki clearly has some history with Doi,” I say quickly. “What happened between them at Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters?”
“All the girls have to get their hair cut when they arrive there. On the first day, Doi helped the nuns cut off Suki’s hair. You can imagine how happy Suki was with Doi after that.”
“Is that why Suki and the other girls all have bobbed hair?”
“Yes.”
“How did Doi avoid it then? Her hair is like a waterfall. It couldn’t have grown back so quickly.”
I turn to him as we skate under another whispering arch. I see his mouth open and start to form words, then close, open, then close, but I hear nothing. Is this an arch that swallows sound? No. He wants to speak, but he doesn’t want to speak. Another secret.
I see that my question has made Hisashi uncomfortable. Maybe Doi and Hisashi get special treatment as the Chairman’s children. Whatever it is, he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it.
“Well, whatever the explanation, I’m glad,” I say. “If for no other reason because of how furious it must have made Suki.”
He smiles. I like it that I made him do that. He says, “Peasprout, sometimes appearances— My sister might not seem very— You’re not like anyone Doi—or I—have ever met, so if she acts confused … or I mean— And how Suki— Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. Just remember that every time something good happens to Doi or you, some part of Suki dies inside.”
“Good,” I say.
He smiles. How did I ever think that he smiled too much? His warmth is endless, like the sun’s.
“But even if Doi and I both beat Suki,” I say, “at some point, it’s going to be Doi against me. Only one of us can take first ranking and get the lead in the Drift Season Pageant.”
“Don’t worry about that until you take down Suki. Doi won’t.”
“Did she tell you that? I thought you avoid each other.”
“Doi doesn’t talk much. She’s different from other people. You must know what it’s like not to fit— I mean, it’s hard for Doi to know people. Don’t let her confident Chi fool you. It’s like how so many Pearlian opera performers are really shy when they’re not onstage playing a— No, it’s not like that; it’s like sometimes a boy likes a girl—he’s afraid he’ll be made fun of by the other boys, and he’s confused by his feelings, so he pushes her into a puddle, or he talks and talks whenever she’s around about everything except…” He catches himself and slows. He looks into the sky as if the words he needed were written there and finishes: “… what he’s really thinking.”
He pauses, and the awkwardness rings in the silence.
Now it’s my turn to be confused and silent. I’ve never sought attention from any boy because I never wanted it. Now that I might have this boy’s attention, I realize I wanted it from him. Because he’s not just any boy. But now that I have his attention, I don’t know what to do with it. All I know is that I understand what it is to be confused.
“Aiyah,” he says. “I’m sorry. If you, ah, heard all these noises come out of my mouth just now, it’s just a trick of the, ah, sound here in the garden. I didn’t say anything. Not a word. Is my face red? Please say no.”
“That’s the nicest thing a boy’s ever said to me,” I say.
“Is it? Well, I practiced to get all the words just right.”
When he smiles, it’s like beams of sunlight are shooting out of his dimples.
“I’d like to show you a special place in the garden. The Arch of the Sixteenth Whisper.”
He takes my hand in his. Despite the gentleness of his figure and manner, the knuckles on one hand are all rough, as if he’d been training in fist work. The palms are rough and scratchy. I find that I like it.
“It was built by Cloud-Tamer Zwei herself, as one of her first experiments,” he says as he leads me to a slender, filigreed arch. “You whisper words into the base of the arch at this end. The sound will rebound back and forth sixteen times before it can be heard at the other end of the arch, sixteen beats later. Only eleven students in the history of Pearl Famous have been fast enough to get to the other side in time to hear their own voices. Want to try it?” Hisashi’s eyes are shining. “You can be the twelfth.”
I look at the vast arch and the span I have to cross. Does he really think I can do it? Or is he trying to make me attempt something he knows I can’t succeed at to make me question my skills? I am his sister’s rival, after all. Whatever his intention is, I don’t want to risk failing in front of this boy. So I’ll just have to make sure I don’t fail.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
“Ready yourself. San. Ni. Ichi!”
He whispers something into the base of the arch, and I explode out toward the other end. I lunge forward with each stroke of my skates, as my will reaches for the other end and the arch rises above me, then descends again. I must not miss Hisashi’s words.
I arrive at the other end of the arch, slap my hands against it to halt myself, and press my ear into the base just in time to hear Hisashi’s voice whisper, “I knew you could do it.”
Eight beats later, Hisashi himself arrives. He touches the end of the arch, his fingers brushing a bit of my shoulder, then skates on without a word.