The window-boy is tired. As soon as he appeared behind the bars and glass, I snuffed the lanterns so I could see his face more clearly. His cheeks and the snub of his nose burn with color, mixed bright by wet and cold. His dark eyes are shiny with water, the skin beneath them grayer than the rest of him.
But the sight of him still catches me—makes me prickle like cold skin meeting steam. Like panic, but stronger. It overwhelms everything: the ambassador’s promise, the bruise on my hip, the Brotherhood’s gold-toothed laughter. There’s just the boy and his seashell. Me and my painted ceiling tiles. My brittle vase of flowers.
“I did it,” I tell him, even though I wasn’t planning on it. For hours I’ve been weighing the names. Their risk. It doesn’t feel like such a small thing anymore.
The boy breathes out hard. His breath clouds everywhere, reminds me of the mists that blanketed the rice fields in the most magical hour of dawn. For a moment it’s so thick I can’t even see him. It gathers on my window, rolls down like tears.
“I needed some good news this morning,” he says through the ribbons of water and window fog. “I’m tired.”
“Too many sunrises?”
“Not enough,” he answers.
My hand rests over the window grating. There’s a chill seeping through the glass, coiling around the bars. Winter creeping through the cracks like ants, slow and steady and gnawing.
The boy feels it, too. He’s all shiver in his black zip-up hoodie. It’s soaked through, like the many rags I used to clean out Jin Ling’s cuts. It’s little wonder his teeth are chattering.
I wish I could reach through the window. Not just to grab my seashell or feel the rain. I wish I could touch the boy, give him some of the warmth that’s sweltering through my room, making me sweat.
Another impossible wish.
But even if I can’t give him warmth, I can give him the names. Try again to bring a smile to his face. If he’s handsome when he’s frowning, I can’t imagine what he looks like with a real, true smile.
“There were ten men there last night. And the mast—Longwai.” Saying his name feels like the worst of sins, but I speak it and the boy doesn’t flinch. “They didn’t always use names. I only caught four of them.”
The boy doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t frown, either. He’s looking at my fingers laced through the window’s grate, as if he knows just how badly I want to reach through. “Which ones?”
“There’s Fung. He’s the one with the dragon on his face. He collects tributes for Longwai every month. And it’s his job to… to deal with people who don’t pay. They call him ‘Red Pole.’”
The boy nods. “Go on.”
“And Leung. He keeps track of a lot of the drug runs. There’s a man with gold teeth named Nam. I don’t know what he does. They called him the ‘Incense Master.’” The unease planted in my stomach by the Brotherhood’s sickly sweet opium fumes so many hours ago grows into a full-blown ache.
I don’t have to do this. I can roll away. Pretend none of this ever happened. That I never really dreamed of seeing my sister again. Of visiting the sea. I can sit and wait and tell Ambassador Osamu yes.
These thoughts cause me to shift against the bed. My hip bone shoots pain. Remembers the harsh press of the ambassador’s hand.
“Fung. Leung. Nam.” The boy counts the names off. Three fingers poke out of his sleeve. “Who’s the fourth?”
My breath feels stale in my body. I stare at his fingers, pronging through the cold air like antlers. They’re smudged with dirt, knuckles raw and nails bit to the quick. I think of the way they held my seashell, so carefully, as if there were still life inside it, building chamber after chamber.
Those aren’t fingers that bruise.
“Chun Kit,” I say, breathless. “The last name is Chun Kit.”
“Good,” the boy says. “You’re right.”
“You… you knew?” A feeling swells up in my throat, like a balloon stretched to burst.
“Yes.” The boy nods. Hair as dark as a raven’s wing falls like feathers against his cheeks—softens the angles of his face. “I was testing you. To see if you really could get the information. You did well.”
“So the other six names… you don’t need them?”
“Well, yes. I do need them. In a sense.” The boy bites his lip, something he must do often because the skin there is dry. “Tell me, was there a ledger?”
“Ledger?” The word rolls, fat and clumsy, off my tongue.
“It would probably look like a big notebook,” the boy explains. “It’s used to keep track of numbers and names. Official Brotherhood business.”
I think back to the meeting, to the scarlet book that sat in the drug lord’s lap. The one full of his black-ink scratchings. “The m—Longwai had a book. He was writing in it.”
“Could you see anything he was writing down?”
“Yes,” I pause, feeling the burn of shame stain my cheeks. “But I… I can’t read.”
“That’s okay,” the boy says, his voice soft. “The book… where did Longwai put it when the meeting was over?”
“I…” My voice fades out as I think back to the end of the meeting. The men didn’t linger. Most of them left through the front hall. A few went to the girls’ rooms. And Longwai… I strain my thoughts, trying to remember where the master had disappeared to after the dismissal. I’d been too busy trying to cement the four names into memory. “I don’t remember. He probably took it to his office.”
“His office?”
“It’s on the second floor. I think. I’ve never been up there,” I say.
“Do you think you can find out? For sure?”
Eavesdropping for names is one thing. But rummaging through the master’s office… the game—the risk—has taken a plunge that makes my stomach lurch.
He must see this in my face, because he doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Look, I know… I know what I’m asking is dangerous. I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I had any other choice. But I need this. I need your help.”
Need. His voice cracks at the word with a desperation that can’t be faked.
“Why?”
“Because every morning I wake up and wish for a different life. And this is the only way I can have it. This is the only way I can go home.” His voice is so raw, like his knuckles. It makes my hand press hard against the grate.
Home. That word flares in my chest, hot like a coal. I want to drink in the green of the rice paddies and distant mountain slopes. I want to find my sister and hold her in my arms. I want to be back watching for stars.
“We’re… we’re not supposed to think about home. It just hurts.” The way the boy is looking at me as I say this, I know he understands. The same bittersweet golden agony barbs through his chest. “But I do it anyway.”
“Where is your home?”
“I grew up in a place where there’s lots of rice. And mountains. And herds of water deer that leap like fish through the morning mist.” I pause, realize I’ve gone off track. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t go back. My father… he would just sell me again.”
The boy’s eyes go sharp. I can see his jaw working. Back and forth in an unheard grind of teeth. “Your father did this to you?”
“I wasn’t much help on the farm. The rice crops were failing. We were starving.” I hate that I’m making excuses for him. The man who left more scabs and bottle caps than he could count. We were starving, but he was thirsty. I know he drank away all the coins my flesh bought for him long ago.
“That’s no reason—” The boy stops. I know he wants to say something more, something laced in fire and flame. But he holds it back. Lets it burn inside. “So where will you go? When you get out?”
I don’t know the answer to his question. My stare settles back on the shell. I search the chambers of my heart for something, anything to tell him. But they all feel empty.
He follows my gaze down to the nautilus. Finds an answer for me. “I know you want to see the sea.”
His hand comes up against the glass, mirrors mine. So close. Not even an inch apart. I shut my eyes for just a moment, pretend that the metal weave and cold between us don’t exist.
My eyelids open and he’s still there. Eyes endless and brimming, night’s void crammed full of stars. If I look just close enough, I can see myself in them. A tiny, trembling constellation. Just like the ones Jin Ling and I once traced.
“I’ll try,” I whisper. To find the ledger. To see the sea.
His smile stretches all the way to his eyes, where I am. The sight is radiant. That’s the word Wen Kei always uses to describe the sun over the waters. I wonder if they’re at all the same.
The boy’s head jerks to the side, as if some distant voice just called his name. His name. I still don’t know it. I don’t know it and I feel closer to him than I do to the client who slides under my sheets every few nights.
“I have to go.” The boy starts to move. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Wait.” I press my cheeks into the bars, will him to stop. “I don’t even know your name.”
He pauses midstep, his foot hovering over the broken ribs of a rice-liquor bottle. “Next time. As long as you tell me yours.”
And then he’s gone. All that’s left is the nautilus and window tears and my fingers against the lattice, still reaching.