Aliette de Bodard
Now
Bao Ngoc has set her appointment with the witch at dawn—because it would make her leave the house in the dark, at a time when neither her sister nor her brother-in-law would be awake.
Things, however, never work the way they’re supposed to.
She’s made her morning worship at her ancestral altar, leaving oranges and apples for her parents’ spirits, mouthing the familiar litany beseeching them for good fortune, gritting her teeth against the agony in her chest. Now she’s rummaging in the kitchen for coconut water, opening the cupboard in the darkness. In the background, the familiar buzz of the fridge, a warbling Bao Ngoc keeps—with effort, with pain—from turning into the angry remonstrances of ghosts.
The lights go on. They flood the room, harsh, unforgiving. “You’re up early,” Bao Chau says. She stands in the doorway, her white shift outlining the darkness of her skin, the round curves of her belly.
Bao Ngoc loses her fragile grip on the ghosts. They bubble up from the kitchen’s floor: a woman with a bloodied chest; three young children with bare ribcages and shriveled lumps of lungs within. They stare at her and Chau with dark, hate-filled eyes, their voices a low, piercing hiss that never seems to vary cadence or pitch, a litany of hate that ceaselessly worms its way into Bao Ngoc’s brain.
Behave be grateful blend in.
In her chest, the remnants of the sword Bao Ngoc once swallowed start burning in earnest, a sharper pain that slowly spreads to her belly and arms. It’s her protection against the ghosts, the only thing that will let her dispel them without obeying their orders.
The ghosts are the dead of the Federation: the hundred, the thousand unappeased spirits clinging to flats and streets and parks. They want order, peace. They want Bao Ngoc and Chau and all the immigrants from the Khanh nation to fit in. To belong to the Federation as if the war had never happened; as though the Khanh’s own losses and their own dead and their own culture didn’t matter.
This isn’t a price Bao Ngoc is willing to pay.
Be quiet don’t embarrass us quiet quiet . . .
Ten thousand diffuse cuts in Bao Ngoc’s esophagus and in her stomach, spreading like fire. She’s burning up, and any moment now it’ll show on her face, and Chau is going to worry about her needlessly.
Too many ghosts and too much fatigue, and Bao Ngoc’s sword can’t exorcise them all.
No choice. She’s going to have to obey them, if only for a moment, if only for once. To follow a tradition of the Federation rather than a Khanh one. Bao Ngoc closes the cupboard. She reaches, instead of the coconut water she’d intended to take from her personal supply, for the coffee Chau so likes in the morning.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Bao Ngoc’s voice shakes. She can’t control her own fingers, digging into her palms so hard they feel like knife stabs. The ghosts are staring at her—wavering, fading. “Can you find me the milk?”
Chau raises an eyebrow. “You don’t like milk.” She sighs and waddles into the kitchen, opening the fridge to peer inside. “I don’t know where Raoul’s left it. Hang on. . . .”
Chau comes back with the milk, and with butter and jam for herself. Bao Ngoc pours the tea into a mug, slowly and deliberately. The kitchen smells of sliced bread and the acrid smell of coffee, and the ghosts have receded to barely perceptible outlines, their voices subsumed in the faint whirring of the fridge’s compressor. Bao Ngoc breathes out, deeply: The sword’s pain is almost bearable, a mere blood-tinged sharpness in her throat.
Chau moves through the ghosts as though they aren’t there. They turn, briefly, to follow her, and then lose interest. They aren’t aware of Chau’s daughter, just as Chau’s daughter isn’t aware of them—blissfully sleeping in the womb, making bubbles in the amniotic sac as she extends small arms and legs, making small bumps as she punches into Chau’s belly.
But when the baby is born, that will change.
Chau chose to abandon her own sword, to dispel the ghosts by obeying them rather than by exorcising them: She’s fit in and can’t see them anymore. She has peace, at a price.
Her child, newborn and fragile and unable to follow any of the ghosts’ rules, will have no such protection. The ghosts will crowd around her from birth, will mold her into the perfect Federation citizen, obeying them and fearing them. She will forget her own people’s language and culture, and leave her ancestors’ altars untended. She will eat bread and butter, and ignore her Khanh aunts, Chau’s entire side of the family. The ghosts’ hatred and venom will hack away at her heritage, at who she is—until nothing remains.
And the worst is that she’ll never be aware that things could be so different.
Bao Ngoc has tried, again and again, to raise the matter with Chau. Chau doesn’t want to talk about the ghosts. They don’t bother her, any more than they bother Raoul, and they certainly shouldn’t be a concern for her daughter.
She’s wrong.
Hence Bao Ngoc’s appointment with the witch: the one who gave Bao Ngoc and Chau their swords, all those years ago. The one who can help Chau’s daughter.
“I have something to do at work,” Bao Ngoc says, lying with barely any effort. Chau wouldn’t approve of the witch, of superstitions like charms and dark magic. “Early meeting.”
Chau looks at Bao Ngoc suspiciously. Chau works as a magistrate and can tear lying witnesses to shreds in her tribunal, but she’s pregnant and exhausted, and of course she doesn’t want to believe that Bao Ngoc is lying. “You should say no,” she says. “They’re exploiting you.”
Don’t complain don’t make a fuss, the ghosts whisper in Bao Ngoc’s mind, but the sword’s pain is enough to shred their words into nothingness. “It’s just one day,” Bao Ngoc says. “It’s nothing.”
Again, that careful, skeptical stare from Chau. How she’s changed from the rail-thin, starved sister Bao Ngoc remembers from the war, from the camps. Chau, perfect, manicured Chau, with her dark, warm Federation woolen clothes, the kind that would have her sweating buckets, back home. The one with the well-paying job, with the husband and the unborn child—a good fortune she’s worked herself to exhaustion for, following all the rules, all the ghosts’ unspoken injunctions. No rice, no fish sauce, no hint of Khanh language in her home—no pictures of their parents framed on the walls, nor set on the table of an ancestral altar—the older aunties who escaped with Chau and Bao Ngoc seldom feasted at home for fear they’ll be an embarrassment. Chau, who no longer needs a sword’s protection, who has made herself so much part of the Federation she might as well have lived there for generations. No wonder she can’t see the ghosts anymore.
“You know what you’re doing,” Chau says finally.
Bao Ngoc thought she did, all those years ago in the camps. But it’s Chau who now knows exactly what she’s doing, and Bao Ngoc who has to struggle and suffer to fit into narrow, ill-defined gaps. “When is the sonogram?” she asks, to fill the silence. She can see the three ghosts, can feel their anger like a distant storm. They’re at bay; but they will come back, given half an excuse, given improper behavior.
If Chau knows what she’s doing, she doesn’t let on. She says, with a tired nod, “At five.”
“Are you sure? Raoul—”
Chau shakes her head. “He’s been to all the other ones. I want you there, big’sis.” She squeezes Bao Ngoc’s hand, smiles. It never quite reaches her eyes, but then nothing does, those days.
Bao Ngoc squeezes back. “Of course.” She’ll see the child: Chau’s child, the future. And, if the witch comes through, she’ll have what she needs, to offer her niece the best of all possible gifts: safety.
In the Federation’s camps, there were no ghosts.
Later, Bao Ngoc would realize it was because no one had ever lived there. Because there was no place in this flat, arid barrenness that the ghosts ever called home. Because putting refugees there wasn’t an invasion, but merely the natural order of things.
They heard about the ghosts, nevertheless. Not from the aid workers, but word was going around, in the makeshift temples and exercise rooms, around the narrow fires where they clustered, clutching the odd-tasting food that reminded them they were so far away from home.
The Federation was a land of ghosts—of hungry, angry spirits. Of howling, unappeased dead who hated interlopers and newcomers. Who hated immigrants and refugees, and endlessly tormented them as soon as they set foot on Federation land.
The aunts bought charms and amulets with calligraphied mantras, which they hung around Bao Ngoc and Chau’s necks. It’ll be enough, they said, again and again, their voices like a prayer. We’ll be safe once we’re in the Federation. People live there, and they’re not scared of ghosts. We’ll endure as we always have.
Bao Ngoc was old enough to know when adults were lying to themselves.
One afternoon, after the aunts settled down to play cards and mat chuoc, Bao Ngoc snuck into the tent and stole Ninth Aunt’s sword. She and Chau had their own swords, of course, for their self-defense; but they were small and ineffective. Ninth Aunt’s sword was the smallest of all the aunts’ swords, but it was light and easily wielded, and it was a real weapon.
Sword in hand, Bao Ngoc went to get her younger sister.
“Come on,” she said. She’d asked around; she’d tried to tell the aunts; but they’d smiled and patted her head, and told her to worry about her games and her toys.
Bao Ngoc couldn’t afford to be a child anymore.
“What’s wrong?” Chau asked.
“We need better charms.”
Chau didn’t say anything until they reached the outskirts of the camp, when the tents became frayed and old, and the only living things on the muddy streets were mangy dogs foraging in refuse heaps. “Big’sis . . .”
Bao Ngoc kept tugging at Chau’s sleeve. Her other hand was wrapped around the hilt of the sword, ready to draw at the first hint of trouble. “It’s all right. Just a few more steps, I promise.”
She thought of the new patients in the infirmary: the ones who hadn’t “worked out,” the ones the Federation government wanted to send back into the hell that the Khanh nation had become. The way they sat hunched on the sides of the beds, folded tight upon themselves, faces hidden behind pale and skeletal arms, all bones, all translucent skin. The way they jerked from time to time, to no rhythm or noise that Bao Ngoc could hear. They must have had charms and amulets too; and yet that didn’t protect them, didn’t prevent them from falling to the ghosts.
She and her sister would make a home in the Federation. And if that meant calling on witches and black magic, then so be it. Bao Ngoc had learned her lessons, not from classics or stories, but from dust and smoke and bombed cities.
Sometimes, you needed the dark to defend against the dark.
It’s early morning and dark, and the trains are filled with the night shift: immigrant workers from different countries, not only the Khanh nation but dozens of other places. They sit tired and hunched in their seats, fingering necklaces and bracelets—the charms Bao Ngoc has learned to tell apart from ordinary jewelry, strong enchantments paid in blood and dark magic—the only defense against the ghosts.
The trains are full of the dead. Young people holding out the bloodied knives that have killed them, older men clutching their hearts grown enormous in their chests, bodies with missing arms, with missing legs, with heads smashed open like ripe fruit: shambling, almost inhuman monstrosities smelling of charred flesh, with the straight line of the third rail burned into torsos and palms like a criminal’s brand.
Bao Ngoc finds herself a quiet corner, and sits with her bag on her knees, not hunched, not tired, merely watchful. Her hand itches, as if she could draw the sword from her chest and use it to slay ghosts. As if this would change anything, do anything more than remove a few dead souls among a sea of them. As the train follows the curves of the track to the witch’s home—past metal and glass towers that pierce the heavens like shining spears, large limestone townhouses with wrought-iron balconies—into the poorer areas of the city, where the towers are larger and duller, clothes hanging like flags from dusty, narrow windows—Bao Ngoc rests her head against the window, and tries to sleep.
She dreams of Chau, pushing the sword into her own chest in the witch’s tent, stabbing herself to take it in rather than swallowing it, unafraid of blood or pain.
And then the dream shifts and stretches, and Bao Ngoc is back home. She dreams of her family’s house in the city of An Ky Lan: of apricot flower garlands in streets filled with the clash of gongs and cymbals, of Mother’s hands and the smell of garlic and fish sauce in the kitchen, of running shrieking into a muddy courtyard and smelling the churning earth in the wake of the monsoon’s passage. It was a short, doomed time. Adults remember the storm gathering, remember making plans to find shelter and safety, but she was a child. Bao Ngoc remembers long golden afternoons; the soft noise of the sea, the taste of soft-shelled crabs, flooding her mouth with salt and sweetness.
Gone. All gone now, bombed into ruins and shards: the aunties that had been chatting at table just a moment ago buried under rubble, the courtyard erupting into a maelstrom of debris and wounding shards, Chau screaming as Bao Ngoc dragged her, arms stinging and bleeding, into the shelter of the reception room . . .
Gone.
The sword wakes Bao Ngoc up. It’s burning within her. A ghost is sitting on her chest: an old woman with skin as dark as ink and bloody scratches on her neck, glaring at Bao Ngoc and whispering words the sword keeps cutting into shreds. Be good be grateful be happy. Bao Ngoc extends hands, reflexively. She’s been talking in Khanh, mouthing the old prayers, the appeals to gods and ancestors whose temples and graves are now ashes in a burned city.
She stands up, shaking. She’s in Ashford, at the heart of the Federation. She’s with Chau, with Raoul. There are no apricot garlands; no fruit-laden trees, no dragon dances. She pushes. It’s like walking through shattered glass, the sword flaring into unbearable sharpness within her as the old woman’s ghost fades into nothingness. As she walks off the train, she brushes past a middle-aged man: one of the living, who glares at her as her elbow digs into his side. She mouths an apology, all she can manage with the exhaustion.
Bao Ngoc doesn’t remember making it through the station. Everything hurts. Her legs are shaking—her hands feel like they’ve been stabbed with pins, again and again—and the ghost’s words are still there, running parallel to old prayers she can barely hold on to. Outside, on the street, Bao Ngoc leans on one of the barriers of a verdant park, catching her breath.
It will pass. It always does. There is always a price to pay, always sacrifices to make.
The address the witch gave Bao Ngoc is in one of the high-rise buildings: a city within a city where people walk hunched and quiet, where ghosts congregate thick and angry, a wall of pressure that would send Bao Ngoc to her knees, if she didn’t have the sword. She walks through them—a faint pain in her chest, nothing that requires a full exorcism—and moves on.
The apartment’s door is open: The place is full of people. It looks like a party. For a fraction of a second, Bao Ngoc thinks she’s got the wrong address, but then one of the numerous aunties clustered in the small kitchen spies her. “I’m Second Aunt. You’re here for Auntie Oanh? Come on in.”
Something is wrong inside. And then Bao Ngoc realizes, as the auntie holds out a plate filled with shrimp cakes, that there are no ghosts—only silence, and yet the kitchen smells of rice, and garlic—and the sword doesn’t hurt, doesn’t burn anymore.
Something Bao Ngoc didn’t know she had in her chest loosens. It feels like being able to breathe after decades of damaged lungs. The aunties speak in low, measured voices: a conversation about the neighborhood and people Bao Ngoc doesn’t know. Two of them are watching the contents of a frying pan like hawks, while others sip cups of tea. Bao Ngoc finds herself with a dumpling and some tea, and effortlessly included in one of the small groups as if nothing were wrong.
“Auntie Oanh is running late, I’m afraid. She’s got a difficult customer at the moment,” Second Aunt says. “Some people wait too long to get their charms.”
Bao Ngoc remembers the witch’s tent, back in the camps. Small and cramped, and deserted. Even the children gave it a wide berth, and only wild dogs and ravens foraged in the refuse heap. “I—” She struggles to speak, unsure of what she can say. “I didn’t expect there would be so many people.”
Second Aunt looks at Bao Ngoc, long and measured. “You met Auntie Oanh in the camps, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Bao Ngoc remembers drawing Chau behind her. She remembers drawing her sword, facing the witch on trembling legs.
“Things have changed.” Second Aunt sounds amused. “Need trumps fear. Superstition becomes necessity.”
It would sound like the cryptic pronouncements of monks or priests, but Bao Ngoc knows, all too well, what it means. One of her own aunts became like Chau: married a local girl, took on local customs. All the others turned brittle and thin over the years. She’s never asked, but she’s sure that in the end, they went to see a witch, that they got charms to help them stand against the ghosts.
At the other end of the cramped living room, a door opens. Second Aunt nods, briskly. “She’s ready for you.”
Chau cut her hair short and went to school, and came back with more teenage slang and curses than Bao Ngoc had ever thought existed in Common. She turned fifteen: an odd, alien birthday, for in the Khanh nation the only anniversaries they’d used to celebrate were those of the old, or of the dead.
One morning, Chau handed Bao Ngoc the boxed lunch Sixth Aunt had prepared for her. “You want something else?” Bao Ngoc asks.
Chau shook her head. Behind her, in the kitchen, the ghost of a young man with a bloody hole in his head. Chau moved away from him, shaking her head. The sword burned in Bao Ngoc’s chest, a faint pain that only lasted until the ghost faded.
“It—” Chau spread her hands. “Look, it doesn’t have to hurt this much, does it? None of the other kids see the ghosts. Just the Khanh and the other immigrants.” She didn’t speak Khanh, but Common.
Bao Ngoc’s heart sank. “You can’t just get rid of them.”
“Really?” Chau raised an eyebrow. “How about doing what they ask?”
Be happy forget do not stand out.
Bao Ngoc kept her voice even. “We can also cut off our own arms.”
“You’re being melodramatic.”
“Am I? You’ve seen the aunts. You’ve seen the ghost-touched.”
“Yes,” Chau said. “I’ve also seen everyone else. People live. They don’t just spend their lives hurting in order to give the finger to some ghosts!”
“So you—you just want to give up?”
“I want some peace,” Chau snapped. “Is that so hard to understand? We walk on broken glass. Through broken glass. Every word we speak”—she spat them out—“hurts like hell. Every mouthful of food, every memory, every conversation. Well, I’m done. If that’s winning, they’ve won.”
Bao Ngoc stared at Chau: a T-shirt with printed words and unfamiliar characters, a long flowing skirt with pleats and golden sequins. She looked alien. Not Chau, not the sister Bao Ngoc had grown up with, but a teenager of the Federation—and the thought made the sword writhe and twist in Bao Ngoc’s chest. “Lil’sis,” she said, in Khanh, forcing the words over the pain.
“I’m not little anymore,” Chau said, in Common.
“I’m still your elder, and you’ll do as I say.” She reached out. But Chau danced away, and the ghost of the young man was between them, and the sword hurt so much Bao Ngoc had to bend over, stifling a scream.
“Don’t touch me!” Chau snapped.
When Bao Ngoc looked up again, Chau was gone. The door slammed; and in the spreading silence all Bao Ngoc heard was the ghost’s voice.
Monster. Can’t hold her back let her fit in monster monster.
On the following morning Bao Ngoc found glistening, bloodied shards in the trash. She thought they were glass at first, but then she found Chau’s white T-shirt bunched up at the back of her room, the chest area streaked with blood, and she knew.
The sword that Chau had once carried in the camps: expelled in dark, tiny, powerless fragments.
Now
The witch sits cross-legged on a large bed, watching Bao Ngoc. She’s old and lined, not bent over or weary like Bao Ngoc’s aunts, not pale or colorless like her Khanh colleagues: old like mountains, like temples, like pine trees, a presence that doesn’t ask for respect, but forces it all the same.
The room is dark, the only light coming from the plants on the lone bedside table. Four white flowers Bao Ngoc vividly remembers, their petals clenched shut, smelling sweet and sickly like the onset of rot.
No, not dark. There is light, and it’s coming from within her. She looks down, and sees the faint outline of the sword’s blade. She feels it pressing outward, as if it were going to escape her. And, from inside her bag, an answering light.
In silence, she reaches inside the bag, and withdraws the plastic pouch she’s kept in her desk drawer through two house moves. Within, the fragments of Chau’s sword shine in the dark. By its side is another pouch: That one contains all Bao Ngoc’s savings, all the money she’s painstakingly set aside from years of working extra shifts.
The witch smiles, lifting the first pouch up to the light. “Broken and pushed out of a chest—bit by bit, between the ribs. It must have hurt.”
Bao Ngoc thinks of Chau’s bloodied T-shirt. “It always hurts, doesn’t it?”
The witch smiles. “There are many ways to expel a charm, but they all hurt.” She reaches out, rests her hand, for a fraction of a second only, on Bao Ngoc’s chest. “And many ways to take one into one’s body. You swallowed yours, didn’t you?”
Bao Ngoc nods. “My younger sister didn’t.”
The witch lays the pouch on the bed, stares at her for a while. “No, she stabbed herself. I remember. The two sisters. Jade. Pearl. The daughters of Pham Thi Kim Lan and Nguyen Van Hoang.”
In Bao Ngoc’s mind, the familiar reflex, the litany of her ancestors: Mother, Father, her grandparents and their own parents, praying for good fortune and happiness. She’s bracing herself for the sword to hurt, for pain to clench her stomach and womb and lungs. But there’s nothing, a feeling that’s both disquieting and comforting.
“I knew your mother, once,” the witch says. “A long time ago in a different land. Before—before she died.” She looks . . . weary, and sad. Bao Ngoc finds it hard to reconcile with the dark, imposing figure of her memories.
“You never told us.”
“Would you have listened? You were so afraid.”
Bao Ngoc swallows. She can’t remember what it felt like, to draw the sword—to be so angry, so afraid that she’d have done anything to protect Chau and herself—not that dull, blunt fear she’s been living with for so long, but something pure and clean and incandescent.
“There are many kinds of courage,” the witch says. And when Bao Ngoc looks up, startled, the witch laughs. “You’re not so hard to read.” It’s not the laughter Bao Ngoc remembers, not the malicious expression of someone who delights in others’ suffering, but merely an old woman’s forbearing amusement, like Ninth Aunt when Bao Ngoc burned the pan-fried dumplings because she was too busy daydreaming about the girls in her class.
“You’re not with your sister,” the witch says.
“Chau—” Bao Ngoc pauses, tries to find words. The sword doesn’t burn within her; but it doesn’t mean there’s no pain. “She says she has no need for it.”
“Ah. But she’s still Chau,” the witch says. She shakes her head. “Some people change their names, too. Makes it easier.” She sounds . . . exhausted. Sad. “Impossible choices. What do you want, child?”
“You can banish ghosts,” Bao Ngoc says, finally. “This flat—”
Again, that amused laughter. “You should ask about the cost first. It takes more than a sword and magic to do this. Much more.” A cold wind rises, wraps itself around Bao Ngoc—ruffles the petals of the flowers in the pots, opening them up—and for a bare moment the earth brims with blood, and the petals are sharp fingerbones. “I told you, years ago. This is the land of the dead, and the dead don’t relinquish what’s theirs easily.”
“A life—” Bao Ngoc is about to offer hers, but her lips clamp down on the words—because, even for Chau, even for the child, she wouldn’t.
“Much more than a life,” the witch says. She strokes one of the flowers, as if it were a cat. The faint, sickly smell becomes that of rot, of charnel houses. “Souls, cut off from the wheel and the brew of oblivion, bound to floors and walls and bloodied earth—doomed never to be reborn . . .” Her voice is a faint chant, and now she no longer looks like Bao Ngoc’s aunts, or like a friendly old woman, but like something that prowls the edges of the world, preying on the weak.
Bao Ngoc would be frightened, but there’s not even fear left in her. She says, stubbornly, “Chau is pregnant. Her daughter—”
“Half-breed,” the witch whispers: the insult Bao Ngoc has heard hurled on playgrounds and in schools.
“Chau thinks she’ll be fine. She—” Bao Ngoc tries to speak through the knot in her throat. It feels as though the hilt of the sword has broken in half, and jammed itself in her vocal chords. “She doesn’t see.”
“A child of two worlds,” the witch says.
“Stop it,” Bao Ngoc says. “You’re making her sound special.”
“No more and no less than hundreds like her, all over the city. The ghosts can rage, but they can’t stop life from going on. Do you know why they hate you?”
“Because we’re alive.”
“Ghosts are static,” the witch says. “Their deaths root them. They crave the familiar. The unchanging. They’re angry at anything that reminds them that they’re not alive. That the world moves on, while they are trapped. People—our people, and dozens of others—arrive and settle onto the land, and the culture of the Federation changes. It reminds the ghosts that time passes, and leaves them all behind.”
Bao Ngoc would have felt sorry for them, years ago; but there’s no space in her for anything but cold hatred. “You’re saying it will be worse for the child.” Her niece.
“You know this already.” The witch picks up the sword’s shards, purses her lips for a while. Her teeth gleam in the darkness, as if shadowed with blood. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”
“Can you—”
The witch smiles, again. “Exorcise ghosts? No. But I can give her the gift I once gave her mother.” She sings words in a low, guttural voice, in a language that Bao Ngoc can’t make out but that still is comfortingly familiar. And, as she does so, the fragments of the sword move and melt into one another—like paint, like ink, dark and viscous and slowly hardening, until it’s whole again, a large piece of blade with a gleaming edge, and the same pale gleam as the flowers, as the bones.
Then
At Chau’s wedding, Bao Ngoc got drunk.
She didn’t mean to—and Raoul was kind, and doting on Chau, always there to offer her food or drink—and so obviously radiant and happy, his pale, freckled face awash with inner light. Bao Ngoc didn’t begrudge them their happiness, or the way they posed for pictures, oblivious, besides the blue-skinned ghosts of drowned children by the lake.
“She’s lucky,” Ninth Aunt said. She sat at the table with Bao Ngoc, frail and wan and hunched over, clutching the charm around her neck. She was old now. All the aunts were: spent and outmatched, their lives cut short by war and ghosts; an uncomfortable, fearful thought.
“I’m happy for her,” Bao Ngoc said. She held out the plate of toasts to Ninth Aunt before helping herself. Around them, ghosts hovered: a sea of vague faces with hollow eye sockets, with crooked and broken limbs, with distended bellies and bloodied organs hanging out of killing wounds; voices on the edge of hearing. Neither the aunts nor Bao Ngoc were doing anything wrong—Federation food, Federation hospitality—but the ghosts watched them, all the same. The sword burned like spent embers, a low-key, almost invisible pain.
Ninth Aunt snorted. “Are you?” And, when Bao Ngoc didn’t answer, “That spat you had as teenagers—”
“It’s sorted out,” Bao Ngoc said. In a manner of speaking. She couldn’t put the sword back into Chau, or change the white wedding dress into the red tunic embroidered with golden threads. Couldn’t stop the twinge of envy when she saw Chau move with the ease of a dancer, her smile bright and carefree, hiding no sharp edges of pain. But then she remembered that Chau couldn’t speak Khanh, couldn’t worship at an ancestral altar or pagoda, couldn’t wear Mother’s rounded necklace or use the turtle-scale combs, or even eat rice and fish sauce as staples.
“She says you’re moving into their house,” Ninth Aunt said.
Bao Ngoc nodded. She didn’t want to talk about it, but of course Ninth Aunt, who’d always tackled everything head-on as she’d tackled soldiers on the battlefield, wouldn’t be so easily deterred. “They won’t keep the old customs,” Ninth Aunt said.
“I’m not Chau,” Bao Ngoc snapped. “I’ll have my own life.” The ghosts surged, hands coming into clearer focus—nails encrusted with dirt and blood, curving as pointed as claws—don’t make a fuss be grateful be ours—the sword burned and burned, sending them back. The world crumpled and shrank to pain. Bao Ngoc stopped speaking, caught a slow, shuddering breath.
Ninth Aunt gave her a piercing look. She raised her jade-colored cigarette holder, winced. Her charm must have started burning. “Still keeping an eye on her, after all these years?”
Bao Ngoc didn’t know why she’d agreed to move in with Chau and Raoul. To save money, to be with Chau, to watch over her, all those things, none of these things. “Out of all of us, surely she’s the one who needs the least watching over?” Chau was throwing her bouquet now, laughing as the single girls behind her raced to catch it. The ghosts were watching her with burning eyes: girls in gray, cobwebbed wedding dresses; children in elegant clothes so old they look over-formal, their lace jabots spattered with blood drops; old women with pale, bloodless faces, gloved hands holding out shriveled hearts, plucked from their skeletal ribs.
“Is she?” Ninth Aunt drew a long, measured breath from her cigarette, blew out smoke in lazy ribbons. “You tell me, child.”
Now
When Bao Ngoc gets home, with the sword precariously balanced in a canvas bag, Chau is waiting for her in the living room, her face dark. She’s sitting on one of the upholstered armchairs, her back digging into the oval-shaped cartouche, her hands curved over the ends of the short armrests. Behind her, the dim, barely distinguishable shapes of ghosts: a young, fair-haired man with the imprint of the noose on his crooked neck, and a woman with blood pouring out of slit wrists—her hands at a disjointed angle from her arms, as if they’d been pulled free from her body. They’re translucent, their voices barely audible.
“I’m late,” Bao Ngoc says, but she already knows that’s not what Chau is going to say.
“If you’re going to lie,” Chau says, “do take the time to make it credible.” Her voice is tight, cold. “You never showed up at your workplace.”
“Because you checked?” It’s stupid and ugly, and yet Bao Ngoc can’t help it.
Chau’s mask cracks a fraction, showing the dark rings of exhaustion, her whole body sagging for just a moment. “No, I didn’t. They were the ones who called. They were concerned for you.”
She’d notified work. Had she? She feels as exhausted as Chau, drained from an argument they haven’t yet had. The sword is a dull, diffuse pain in every cell of her body. It’s been burning ever since she got out of the witch’s apartment, ghosts flickering in and out of existence, hissing at her like tigers on the prowl. She’s brittle and fragile. If she lets go, if she forgets to stand straight or breathe, the pain will spread like wildfire, consume her utterly until she has no choice but to fall, screaming, to her knees in the middle of Chau’s pristine living room. “I’m fine,” Bao Ngoc says.
A long, measuring gaze from Chau. “You’re not. Big’sis, what the hell are you playing at?”
Well, there will never be a better time. Or a worse time, she’s not sure. Wordlessly, she hands out the canvas bag to Chau. “This is for you. For the baby.”
As soon as it leaves her hands, the ghosts move—arms extended, fingers curving like claws, voices climbing from unintelligible hiss to high-pitched screams that pierce ears. Ungrateful wretch you have no right be silent be good behave . . . Bao Ngoc raises her hands, as if that would make a difference. But the sword is there first, burning like wildfire within her. She takes one, two trembling steps, grabbing on to the back of a chair. The ridges of the frame dig into her hand, a reminder of everything that isn’t fire or pain.
Chau grimaces. She pushes the canvas bag onto the table, nudges it open with one hand. The sword tumbles out: a short, curved blade with a rounded wooden handle. No engravings, no ornaments, just a faint, barely visible light trembling on the blade.
Be good behave be grateful how dare you.
Chau’s face is set. “For the baby?” Bao Ngoc thought she was angry before, but she wasn’t—not that uncontrolled fury that seems to grip her like a storm. She’s shaking: She stops herself with a visible effort. She rises, gripping both armrests until her knuckles and hands go pale. “You—”
“I had to,” Bao Ngoc says. She wants to lift her hands to placate Chau, but the sword is burning so bright, so painfully within her that all she can do is move them to the height of her chest. “You can’t mean to raise her unaware.”
“Unaware of what?”
“Of where we came from.” The pain has let up, or perhaps it’s simply that she’s used to it now. The ghosts are barely visible again, but their faces are frozen in the same fury as Chau’s. “Of Mother and all we gave up to come here. She has that right.”
“That right? Look at you, big’sis. Just look at you. That’s your gift to her? Pain every day of her life?”
“If pain is the price to pay.” How dare she—how dare she reproach Bao Ngoc for her own failings? “You don’t speak Khanh anymore. You—you left our own ancestors’ altars untended. You dropped it all in return for silence in your ears, and an easy life. You’ve forgotten,” she says, and there’s more anguish in that scream than she’d thought possible—something raw and primal and so much pain tearing out of her, a sword with its own edge. “I want her to have more than this. I—” She stops, then, starts again. “If she has to forget, then let her make that choice when she’s older.”
“As I did?” Chau’s voice is quieter now. She reaches out, runs a hand on the edge of the sword. Her movements are still slow and graceful, but her face is locked in a grimace of pain. “An easy life. You don’t understand, do you?”
Bao Ngoc, exhausted, clings on to the chair’s back. It’s the only thing keeping her upright.
Behave behave be quiet.
Chau smiles, and there’s no joy in it. “I still see the ghosts. I still hear them. All the time.”
“I— Surely—” Bao Ngoc stares at her. “You do everything they ask!”
“You can never do everything they ask,” Chau says. She grips the sword, her face alight with concentration. What is she seeing now? Ghosts? Silence, in return for the pain Bao Ngoc has borne all her life? “You merely make them a little quieter, to have some space in which you can breathe. To bear it all. It’s a rigged game. It always was. But I know how much I can endure. It will be much easier for my daughter.”
“Pain,” Bao Ngoc says, flatly.
“It’s not painful.” Chau’s smile is jarring and wrong. “Else what would be the point? A little draining, that’s all.”
A little draining. Chau sees them. She hears them. Bao Ngoc, shaking, stares at the ghosts—the translucent, silent shapes now out of her hearing—imagines what it would be like, to wake up, straddled by a ghost strangling her because of a stray word, a stray remembrance they don’t approve of—to go through life hearing a constant stream of screams and insults and belittling orders, no matter what she does. Imagines her niece, growing up fenced by implacable, relentless hatred.
A little draining. A little lie.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be.” Chau doesn’t look up. “We’re going to be late for the sonogram. Just . . . just take that out with the trash, please.”
Then
The sword tasted like garlic and fish sauce when it slid down Bao Ngoc’s throat.
It was the smell of evenings, when her mother would fry anchovies and shrimp from the river—of Grandmother’s hands when she came out to burn incense sticks on the ancestral altar—of the monks chanting sutras at the pagoda, praying to Quan Am to intercede for the salvation of mankind—of days long gone by in a city now turned to dust.
As it went down, it felt less and less material—fading away, absorbed into her own body, metal fused to flesh and muscle, leaving just a faint aftertaste of blood in her mouth.
Now
Bao Ngoc stands outside her sister’s room, breathing slow and easy.
She holds the smaller, blunter sword in her hands. It burns, but not as much as the one within her. In the corridor, barely visible, the ghosts of a mother and her daughter, blotched with the sores of plague. They have no eyes. Their mouths are thin and dark, slits in pus-filled faces. The swords rip their words to unintelligible shreds, but Bao Ngoc doesn’t need to hear them to guess what they’re saying.
How dare you how dare you.
Within, Chau sleeps—the mound of her belly resting against the edge of the bed, Raoul hugging her back, curled around her as though he were her shield. Even in sleep she looks exhausted, darkness under her eyes like mottled bruises.
She’s said it was a rigged game, that she knows how much she can endure. That it will be easier for her daughter.
She’s wrong.
Bao Ngoc thought it was a choice between remembrance and peace, between the sword’s pain and forcibly fitting in. But it’s not, is it?
A rigged game.
Whatever the baby does, whatever choices she makes, the ghosts will never be happy. Because she’s alive. Because she’s a reminder of how things are changing—in such a small way—in the heart of the Federation. She’ll grow up making herself smaller to placate ghosts whom she can’t please: day after day of hearing them scream in her ears until nothing is left but hollowed-out alienness.
If the game is rigged, if none of those with Khanh blood can hope for silence and peace, then they must fight.
Bao Ngoc hefts the sword, feeling its weight in her hands like a burning brand—thinking of it sinking into Chau’s belly, dissolving as it goes—into amniotic liquid and the squat, curled shape of the baby. She’s seen the sonograms. It should be easy enough to slide it into the baby’s back, all the way along the length of the spine.
It’s a small sword and it won’t hurt, going in.