If I say yes now, I’ll fail the boy, destroy his wish for home. I’ll fail myself, destroy all of my hundreds of wishes.
There’s only one way, and it isn’t this.
“No.” I expect my voice to be a willow branch: wispy, bending, and supple. The way my courage feels. Instead, I’m bamboo: made of splinters and stab.
The ambassador feels it. For the briefest moment he even looks as if he’s been knifed. His jaw goes slack, his eyes glass.
“I want to stay here, with my friends…” The strength that was in my throat fades, wilts against the look that rises up behind my client’s face. The storm cloud, the demon.
“You’re cheating on me, aren’t you? There’s someone else! I know there is!” His shout is thunder and fire. It spews over the room, flecks into my face with the heat of his saliva.
“No!” I start to protest, but it doesn’t matter.
Those arms, those fingers break their routine and pin me down, gripping with a power I never knew they had. The sharpness of my hairpins digs into my scalp as I’m shoved into the pillow.
So much sweat and skin. Everywhere. Wrapping tighter and tighter around me. And pain. I’m being pried, shredded, ripped. Opened and closed. Exposed and smothered.
No. No. No. Maybe I’m saying this out loud. Maybe not. I can’t hear anything anymore. I can’t see, either. My vision is covered in spots — like electric-blue lichen — the way it did when I stared out the window and waited for the boy.
It’s only when the ambassador lets go and falls back that I realize he’d had a hand over my throat. The air that floods my lungs is thick with smoke. Breath by breath the world comes back. The dust-filmed plastic of the orchid petals. A dozen unseen bruises on my arm, my neck. The hot stick of scarlet trickling down my legs, staining the sheets.
He’s out of the bed, piecing himself together with zippers and buttons. He doesn’t look at me or the bonsai tree. The door opens and he’s halfway out before he glances back over his shoulder.
I don’t know how to read his face. His emotions might as well be inked characters — squiggles and dots. Whatever the feeling inside him is, it’s intense. Like fear, anger, and love all thrown into a pot. Like the colors of my neighbors’ firework.
“It doesn’t really matter if you’re here or there. You’re mine. Remember that.”
He shuts the door. The vase full of dead flowers leaves with him.
The ambassador meant to break me. This is what I decide when I hobble over to the mirror, see fingerprints smudged like ink around the base of my throat. I spend extra minutes with my makeup brush, piling layer after layer of powder against my collarbone. But no matter how much I put on, I can still see his marks. A shadow gone wrong.
He meant to break me. But I’m stronger than he knows. I’m stronger than I knew. The only thing the ambassador broke was himself — the image of him I built up over the months, the idea that he might be able to save me from this place.
There’s only one way out. And it was never by his side.
The other girls notice the bruises, but they don’t ask questions. It’s a mercy, because I know I would never be able to answer. I could never tell them about the ambassador’s offer — how I turned down heaven on a silver platter and he punished me for it.
Instead, they gather in my room and talk about the one girl who has a worse portion than we do.
“They’re still making Sing take clients,” Nuo tells us as she struggles to thread her needle. The cross-stitch is coming together — a carp with scales of fire and white, swimming against some sapphire current.
“The master wouldn’t keep her here unless she was making him money.” Yin Yu says this with her tongue concentrating on the edge of her lips. She’s holding my hand in hers, wielding a wand of scarlet nail polish. She’s made it to the final nail without a slip.
Nuo frowns. Her needle stabs hard into the cloth; she pulls the mandarin-tinged thread through.
“I think…” Yin Yu goes on. The brush slicks cool paint down to the edge of my pinkie nail. Drops off. “It’s better than the alternative. She wouldn’t last long on the streets. None of us would.”
She finishes — both my nails and her words — and screws the polish shut.
“I should go,” Yin Yu says suddenly. It’s only when she’s standing straight that I realize how thin she’s become. “There’s washing to be done in the west hall. Mama-san will be angry if I don’t finish it soon.”
I stand, too, trying to ignore the pain in my thighs. “You’re cleaning too much. Let me take some of the rooms.”
“You’ve helped enough. Besides, you shouldn’t ruin your nails.” Yin Yu waves me back down, vanishes through the dark of the door.
There are only the three of us now, sitting in silence. Wen Kei eyes the door as if it’s the jaws of some sea beast, threatening to swallow her frail body. Nuo stabs the needle into the cloth. It slips, digs deep into her skin. A soft swear leaves her lips as she places the wounded finger between them.
“Yin Yu thrives off work,” she says when she pulls her finger out, pinches it between the silk fabric of her dress. “It’s the thing that keeps her going.”
“I know.” The other two girls are staring at me. Four eyes dark and full of question, bottomless wells. I can’t hold their gazes for long, so I look at the crimson window covering. It matches the new shiny color of my nails.
I can still feel Nuo staring. “Why did you take over her duties? Do you want to be Mama-san?”
“That’s what Yin Yu said,” Wen Kei pipes in.
If there’s any time I should tell them, it would be now. Memories — ghosts of the boy and his promises — file through my mind like a line of orange-robed monks. There’s a fire in my heart, twisting, wanting to reach out and show them the light. The curtain’s red looks brighter, more like blood than flames.
I want to pull it back, show them the shell. But every time I think of doing this, I hear Sing’s desperate pleas, clawing and scrabbling inside my head. I know the others won’t understand. The way I didn’t understand.
They’ll only try to stop me. The way I tried to stop Sing.
“The meeting is soon.” I change the subject. “We should get ready.”
Nuo lifts her finger to her face. The blood is still there, smoothed out like a second layer of red skin. Her needle must have gone deep. I think of all the many strings stretched tight across her zither, made of cruel steel. “Can you still play?”
She frowns, tucks the cross-stitch under her arm. “Do I have a choice?”
None of us speak, because we all know the answer.
This meeting my hands don’t shake. The black lacquered serving tray is steady as I shuffle through the room, pouring wine and offering lights. So much smoke wisps up from the Brotherhood’s pipes and cigarettes that soon enough I can’t even see Nuo clearly. I only know she’s there because of her music. Despite her bandaged finger, the notes stab through the air, steady and strong.
And despite the hurt in my legs, I walk straight, keep a smile pasted to my face.
We’re stronger than they think.
Longwai holds the ledger close. It’s smalclass="underline" the same size as those notebooks Sing used to sketch our faces in. As long as a brick and as thick as a thumb. The cover is a red as bright as Nuo’s wounded finger, crowned with the crest of a shining gold dragon. Every few minutes he flicks through the pages, running over cryptic characters written weeks and months before. All through the meeting he fills it with notes; a few of the numbers I recognize — characters I learned when Sing tried to teach us how to read. Sometimes he’s so focused on writing down inky lines and loops that the men have to repeat themselves to be heard.