The ambassador is unraveling, like a ball of yarn no one can catch. All the perfectly selected masks he put on for me, for Longwai, have been shucked away like played cards. Now he’s just standing in the cold—the age spots on his face are tinged purple, the way my bruises were—staring at the boy and his gun.
There’s something brutal, something familiar about the boy with the gun. He’s staring at the ambassador the way Jin Ling used to stare at my father: eyes full of poison, fists full of fight.
I think of my sister and find myself staring harder at the boy.
It can’t be.… Not here…
The ambassador tugs me tight to himself, crushing me into his girth so that it’s my body blocking the bullet’s path. As soon as this happens, the boy’s features change, soften into the face I saw so many nights just by moonlight. When we shared the window together, hunting stars.
It can’t be.… But it is.
The sight of my sister is the strength I need. She fills my insides with steel and bravery and the impossible. My freedom, my escape, is right in front of me. And I’m the only one who can seize it.
The ambassador’s arm is locked around my throat. His hand is just by my shoulder, the tendons cording and taut. I sink my teeth deep, deep beneath his skin.
He howls and the taste of his blood fills my mouth: all salt and bitterness. His arm yanks away and I rush past the boys and their knives. They don’t pay any attention to me. They close in around the cursing ambassador. I can see the ridged bones around their eye sockets. The knobs of their knuckles, too big around their knives. I think of the stray dogs in my old province. How hunger hollowed out their bones and created fierce, desperate creatures. Beasts that knew no fear.
My sister grabs me by the hand and starts pulling. We’re running down the street, sliding into a dark alleyway, when the ambassador’s screams start in earnest.
I’m not sorry.
Sometimes, when Father’s rage became too unhinged and his hits were murderous instead of battering, we would hide. Jin Ling always led the way: out the door, past the ginkgo tree, into the vast maze of rice field rows. We would dip waist-deep into the water, slink like the snakes that actually lived in those long waves of green.
I feel like that now. But instead of rice fields, Jin Ling leads the way past walls of slime and over hills of trash. Through gaps I didn’t even notice until she slipped into them, pulling me after her with urgent strength.
The ambassador’s screams are long gone by the time we finally stop. Jin Ling is breathing hard, much harder than she should be, and sweat drips from the hacked ends of her hair despite the cold. She’s still holding my hand, fingers wrapped tight around my thumb, the way she used to cling to me when she was first learning to walk.
We stop in a dark, empty corner and look at each other. Wordless. We stand, stuck in the moment. Staring and trying our best to believe.
“Mei Yee.” She says my name and holds my hand so hard I don’t think she’ll ever let go. “It’s me.”
After all I’ve been through, all that’s been done to me, I thought I had no more tears left. But the sight of my sister—the sound of her saying my name—is enough to break me. The water wells up, salty and free across my cheeks. “You came for me.”
Jin Ling doesn’t fit so well in my arms anymore. She’s almost as tall as I am. Her face buries into my shoulder as it did when we were little, but she has to bend over to do it. And I feel her bones more easily, despite the jacket she’s wearing.
When we finally pull apart and face each other, I study her. Not so many freckles anymore. And she’s grown into her nose. And—
“Your hair,” I gasp, and laugh through the rest of my tears.
“I cut it.” She swallows and smiles, but her voice is shaky. “When I first came to find you.”
“First?”
“I chased the Reapers’ van when they took you,” Jin Ling explains. “I cut my hair so I could pass as a boy. I’ve been looking for you ever since.”
I don’t have the words. I look at her—my fierce, fighting little sister—and tuck a strand of her hacked hair behind her ears. The thought of her cutting it all off and coming here to look for me is too much. Impossible, even though she’s here now, saying it.
But I remember the way Jin Ling made her wishes. How she said I wish we could be together forever with the bite of a tigress. Nothing would be impossible enough to keep her wishes from being fulfilled. Not even the Walled City.
“How did you find me?” I say this and then stop. Know. I see the answer on my sister’s face, feel it on the insides of my chest where I’m crumbling to pieces.
My freedom cost so much more than a dying star.
“Mei Yee…” Jin Ling is looking at me again. “The boy, the one who came up to your window…”
I shut my eyes. It’s so, so cold, but I can’t even shiver. People only shiver when they remember what it means to be warm.
“Dai.” I say his name, but it doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring him back to me.
“Yes,” my sister says. “What happened to him?”
“Dai.” I say his name again, but the empty space is still there. Jagged-edged and howling, like the hole in my window, letting winter’s chill slip in. I don’t want to say what I’ll say next, because if I do, what I saw will be real and true. But even words unsaid can’t take back two bullets from Longwai’s gun. “Dai’s dead.”