Two lines.
I stare at them, legs crossed, fingers twitching. They stare back, thin and black. Like a pair of burnt, limbless trees or the pupils of a cat.
I’m god-awful at waiting. Four days is a long time to second-guess a plan (or in my case third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-guess it). For four days I’ve sat, looping through our plan on repeat, playing out every possibility in my head. One hundred times I’ve ducked into the brothel, made away with the book. Taken Mei Yee’s hand in mine and run. A hundred more times I’ve been caught, gutted on the end of Fung’s knife while Longwai smiled on.
It could go either way, really. So much is on the wire. One wrong move and I’m done. We’re done.
I make a noise at the marks. Chma lifts his head at the sound, ears pricked and paws edged straight in front of him. He’s been more than a little skittish these past few days. But I guess I’d be jumpy, too, if someone carved a chunk out of me with a blade.
I expected the cat to vanish into the next alleyway once he finished my bag of buns. But, like any self-respecting feline, he did the contrary—stuck close, claimed every inch of my apartment as his own. His fur wreaks hell on my allergies, but I don’t have the heart to send him away. We’ll all be out of here soon enough.
Chma stands, does an impossibly arched stretch that makes me want to move, too. A purr rattles the far reaches of his chest as he slinks over.
“Hungry?” My eyes stray over to the last meal we shared—a container of chicken drizzled in sticky, sweet sauce. One of Mrs. Pak’s creations. It was finished off hours ago. “Guess it is about that time.”
I haven’t been hungry for days. There’s so much worry in my stomach that there’s no room for anything else. I buy food for Chma’s sake, eat a little for the ritual.
“Downstairs then.” Chma is already at the door. Eyes alert and expectant as I pull out my keys.
We trot the stairs together, twelve whole flights, before Chma breaks formation. I look down and he’s gone, a silver flash. It’s the first time he’s left my side in days. My sinuses rejoice, but my eyebrows furrow. Something’s off.
I can think of only one thing, one person who’d make him move like that. This thought makes me move faster down the final flight, so that I’m not really descending the steps but leaping them.
Chma’s paws splay against the bottom door, claws making invisible needle marks in the water-worn wood. When I open it and unlock the gate, he pulls away, darts like a rat into the street.
No. Not into the street. Into Jin Ling’s lap.
I don’t recognize her at first. She’s wearing Hiro’s old clothes. They’re a bit big on her—the jeans bulge out like parachutes and the jacket swallows her altogether. From the back—with all that baggy fabric and mussed hair—she looks just like him.
But then she turns. The illusion vanishes like that last question mark breath.
Not Hiro. Jin Ling. The one I saved.
Now that I know, I can’t unsee her girlness. The turned curve of her nose, the slant of her cheeks. How her eyelashes curl up just so. It would be a mistake to think that any of these things mean she’s fragile. The very fact that she’s sitting here, eight days after being stabbed, is testament to that.
“Jin?”
Her fingers are running through Chma’s sterling fur. She looks up at me. There’s a smile on her face. “You found him.”
“Yeah, I’m about one day away from becoming a crazy cat hermit. What are you doing here?” I look to her side—the one that was slashed like a victimized tire. There’s no sign of hurt under the vinyl of Hiro’s old winter jacket. But just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
“I promised I’d help you get the…” Her eyes dart to the chewing mouths of the seafood diners and the noodle-makers covered in flour. “The thing you need to get.”
“You should be resting,” I tell her. Even sitting on this step she looks exhausted. An extra shade of white. “How’d you even get here?”
She ignores the question, squints up at me. “Is this because I’m a girl?”
“No. It’s because you were stabbed with a knife. Only a week ago.”
Her fingers are lost deep in Chma’s fur. I can hear his purr from here. “I’m here. And I’m going to help you. I gave you my word.”
“I never asked you to promise that. I’m handling it. You need to rest before your stitches tear open.”
Hurt colors her face, stabbing me. Chma looks at me, too, with narrowed, too-bright eyes. They glare like spoiled sunshine, like I didn’t just spend the past four days feeding him and trying to pour hydrogen peroxide on his tail stub while acquiring about twenty new scratches and two fresh bites.
Too stubborn to heal. Like cat, like girl.
“If you think I’m going to sit back and lose this one chance to find my sister…”
Jin Ling’s last word pushes me to an edge. To tell or stay silent. I feel like a child standing on the center of a seesaw, trying impossibly to make it stay straight. I want to give her hope. But if it’s false—if the Mei Yee behind the window isn’t who I think she is, or worse, if she is and I can’t free her—I don’t know if I could take it.
“What?” Jin Ling straightens. She must see the tension playing through my face. I’m not as good at hiding this stuff as I used to be.
It’s the secrets I can’t take anymore.
She looks at me like she’s dangling over the rooftops, clutching only a rope and I’m holding the other end. My lungs freeze, like I’m being pushed deep into ice-cold river water. I’m barely able to get the words out.
“I think I found her.”