DAI

All breath leaves my lungs at the sound of her name. My back is against the wall, the water glaze is leaking through my shirts. Creep and chill. The winter is getting too much for just a hoodie. I should’ve thought to wear my jacket.

This is what I think about while I stare at the girl’s face. Maybe because it’s easier to wrap my mind around it. Warmth—a jacket—is something I can control. Something I can manage.

But this… her… she’s more than warmth. She’s fire, a soul, a name. Mei Yee reverbs through my head, my veins. Lodges like shrapnel in the far reaches of my chest. More powerful than a pound of C-4. Uncontrollable.

Mei Yee. Who grew up on a rice farm surrounded by mountains. Just like Jin Ling.

What are the odds?

I study her face again, searching for traces of sisterhood. It’s not a perfect resemblance, but the harder I look, the more I see it. The way her lip quirks to the side when she’s nervous. The thickness and slant of her lashes.

But it could be that I’m seeing things. Mei Yee isn’t the rarest name, and a lot of times the brothel girls change theirs. I think of the placards on the doors. How the scarlet characters became almost invisible in the light.

There’s no way I can know for sure unless I ask.

I push off the wall. “Do you have a sister?”

“I did,” she says. “Before. Why do you want to know?”

That’s enough. Enough for me to know. Her words are sad, but they don’t carry the loss of death. They don’t hold the same hollowness mine do when I talk about Hiro. Mei Yee’s sister is still alive, somewhere. And I’ll bet that somewhere is my father’s mansion on Tai Ping Hill.

I can still feel Jin Ling’s taped hand squeezing mine, straining at the sound of my oath. It seemed like such a solid, simple promise—up there on the hill, surrounded by gates and carp ponds. Here on the ground it’s a different matter.

For a moment I consider telling her. But if Mei Yee isn’t the sister—or worse, if she is and I can’t get her out—I can’t give her false hope. It’s too cruel.

“Just a question.” I try to say this as dismissively as possible. My heart is thrumming, struggling to work out this excitement. This fear.

My excuse to get into the brothel is now crippled, on bed rest with Jin Ling, which means the book is out of my reach. And without the ledger, I can’t guarantee Mei Yee her freedom. I can’t get the book without Mei Yee. I can’t get her out safely without risking her life. Without flinging her forward like a queen on a chessboard.

I think of the silent girl with dragging hair. The bloody, tattered escape gone wrong. My heart squeezes high in my throat.

I don’t want to risk it. Risk her. But that’s probably me just being a selfish bastard.

Funny how quickly things turn.

Mei Yee’s fingers poke through the grating like tiny white seedlings. Tender, seeking out the sun. They push through so far I can see her nails, coated in slick red-hot paint. The color looks wrong on her. Too violent and bright.

“I’ll get the book,” she says, not quietly.

“We’ll do it together,” I tell her. “I don’t want you snatching Longwai’s ledger first chance you get. He’ll miss it for sure. We’ll need a way to get it out. Plus you’ll need a distraction to get up there and back without being noticed.”

My mind is like one of those mechanical windup clocks Hiro used to collect and take apart (in his the way things work are cool and I want to be an engineer phase). Only this one isn’t scattered in pieces across his desk. It’s working, whirring at its utmost speed. “How much time will you need? To get the keys and get upstairs?”

“Depends. Mama-san keeps the keys close almost all the time. Except…” Mei Yee pauses, twisting a hand along her lush starless-black braid. It wraps around her wrist like a rope. “Except when Yin Yu has them.”

“Yin Yu?”

“One of the other girls. She cleans rooms for Mama-san, which means she has access to the keys.”

“Do you trust her?”

Mei Yee’s hand stops wrapping. I can’t see her wrist anymore, swallowed in shiny, beautiful black. “Yes. If—if I can tell her why. Do you have money?”

Her question catches me off guard. “Some.”

“The other girls can help, too. The ledger’s pretty small. But it still won’t fit through this grating.” Mei Yee nods at the crisscross lattice. Not much besides a finger or two could slide through those gaps. “It’ll have to go out the door. When I take it, you should buy time with a girl named Nuo. Wait in her room and I’ll drop the book off there.”

“These girls, Nuo and Yin Yu, how do you know they won’t betray you?”

“A few weeks ago there was another girl, Sing. We knew she was going to run. Some of us even tried to stop her. But we never gave her away.”

“Silence is different from actively stealing,” I tell her. “But tell them if we get the book, I can get all of them out.”

Mei Yee looks at me. The way she stares, without blinking, reminds me of kids at the zoo. I must be the animal, stuck on the other side of the bars, doing and saying things she can’t completely understand.

“Is that true?” she asks finally.

I swallow, think of all of Tsang’s ash and apathy. The police don’t care about the girls, that’s for sure. But once the book is out, once all the arrest warrants are in place, once I hand over Longwai’s ass on a platter, there will be no one left to lock the girls’ cage. No one left to keep them from running.

I nod. “I can’t tell you more, because the secret is too big. But yes. Get the book and all of you will be free.”

“The other girls will help,” Mei Yee says, swift and certain.

“Just—be careful.” My chest feels tight. Even trusting these two girls, these two sisters, is a stretch. Adding other, faceless girls into the mix seems too much. Too many variables, too many chances for something to go wrong. “Be discreet.”

“When will we do this?”

Involving the girls changes a lot of things, but the biggest of these is the timetable. Before, when it was just my (and, I guess, Jin Ling’s) neck on the chopping block, I wanted to find the ledger as soon as possible. But I could run, and the girls… they’re mice snapped tight in a trap. If Longwai finds out who stole his book, he can—he will—crush every one of them.

And even if I acted alone—bought time with a girl or angled for an invitation—I wouldn’t put it past Longwai to punish the girls anyway, take his rage out on those who would fight the least. There are too many things tying us together. For better or worse, we’re all tangled now.

This is the only path we can take.

The turnaround has to be quick—so that Longwai won’t even realize his book is gone before the cops beat down his doors. Our swipe has to be at the last of the final minutes.

“New Year’s Eve. Five days from now. I’ll come to your window right before I swing back around to the lounge. I’ll distract Longwai and your Mama-san long enough for you to get upstairs and out. Then I’ll buy Nuo’s time and wait in her room until you drop the book. I’ll leave, and Longwai will be none the wiser. Then I’ll come back for you.”

Mei Yee swallows. “What about between then?”

“Keep him downstairs, smoking. Until midnight hits.”

“How do I know you’ll come back?” It’s the question of a girl who’s been left behind. Again and again and again.

The braid unravels from her wrist, and I see a mark there. A spoil of color in the midst of flawless white. Too odd to be a shadow, smudged like the ink fingerprint of a criminal. The signature of a certain middle-aged selfish bastard.

Goddamn Osamu.

I look at her face and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that her father sold her for pocket change. Or that she could be Jin Ling’s sister. Or that my freedom, my life, now rests in her hands. Or that the seashell was made in a factory.

Even with her bruises, I’ve never seen anything as perfect and whole as her. As Mei Yee.

“I will come for you. No matter what it takes.” These are the words of a goddamn hero pouring out of my mouth. The best of me—the part she woke—reaching to her through the glass.

I don’t know if I’ve spoken truer words in my life.

I only had a few years with my grandfather, but there are some memories of him I can’t shake. How he always froze at the sound of any airplane. How he always clutched a cane—the veins of his right hand bulging out like teal worms as he walked.

I was five when I finally became brave enough to ask him about his knee.

His chin trembled—cloud-white beard hair shuddered like the wind was combing it. “A long time ago, long before you or your mother were born, I was in a war. Did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“I was a pilot. Not the fighter kind, mostly dropped supplies to the men on the ground.” He paused. Both hands gripped the cane, all his weight falling on that single piece of wood. “I was on a mission when my plane got shot down. I survived, but I was torn up pretty bad. Got a whole piece of metal stuck under my kneecap. I never could walk right after that.”

It never made sense to my young mind, how a hurt from so long ago could keep a man from walking right. Stay with him the rest of his life.

But now that I’m older, now that I’ve fought my own wars and fired my own guns, I understand. There’s a hurt in my heart as I walk away from Mei Yee’s window, like the flare of an old war wound. An ache I can’t really explain. An ache that won’t let me forget.

I thought I spent these two years erasing. Getting rid of my pain, pushing it back to a place only nightmares could touch. But it was really just a deep freeze: hurt suspended in time.

I walk the old paths. Past factories and mills of exhausted humans working tireless machines. By the corner where a toothless old man huddles in a moth-gnawed blanket, hands cupped out like a bowl of flesh and knobby-boned joints. Past the prostitutes slouched in their doorways, shoulders bare to the winter. Children dash by, barefoot. I wonder who they’re running to. Or what they’re running from. If they’re playing or fleeing.

I used to walk this track without feeling a thing. On and on and away. I looked at these faces—wrinkled, painted, deadpan, scared, hollow—and felt nothing. Not even a pinprick. Now my heart feels ready to explode with hurt. Hurt for Jin Ling and Bon and Lee and Kuen and Chma and all the starving things on these streets.

But it’s not just hurt that’s waking. The ache goes even deeper, sears like lava in my bones. An anguish that makes me feel unbearably awake, alive. The agony of her, wedged inside my heart. Shrapnel that will never, ever leave.

I’m not very hungry, but when I pass Mr. Kung’s glowing oven of cha siu bao, I buy a bagful. Their heat bakes through the paper, lighting up my fingers and palms. I think of Jin Ling. I should tell her—find a phone and call Emiyo.

Or maybe I shouldn’t. She’s supposed to be on bed rest—a rule she’d break in a heartbeat if she found out. And if my plan doesn’t work, if we don’t get the ledger… it would be better for Jin Ling to never know in the first place.

A long, low howl erupts at my feet. Loud enough to make me stop and hope that I heard right. All through my walks, I’ve been scanning the streets. Looking, looking, looking for a feline sans tail.

I look down. At first all I see are puddles swallowing the electric lights of shops and spreading them like gold at my feet.

Brrrrooow?

I look to the side, by my right boot. Chma’s yellow eyes glare back at mine. He slides over my leg, brushing my jeans with long, matted fur. The stuff of sneezes. It’s speckled with dried clumps of blood. I see the stump Kuen’s knife made. I’ve come across worse, but my stomach doesn’t act like it.

“What are you on now? Your fifth life?” I ask, and kneel down in the middle of the street. Chma’s dusky-pink nose pushes into the bag of stuffed buns. His whine grows longer, louder. I reach into the bag and pinch apart one of the buns. Chma swallows it all: dough, juice, and meat. It’s gone in seconds. He noses the ground and then blinks at me.

More. It’s not so much a question as a demand. Voiced with about as much authority as a tailless cat can muster.

“You pompous little—”

Chma! Chma! My term of affection is cut short by the animal’s sneeze. He even manages to look dignified with a glaze of snot on his nose. Chma!

Seems Jin Ling was right. Cat sneezes do sound different.

I pull out more cha siu bao and wish again Jin Ling could be here. To see all that she’s lost found again.