The girl who interrupted me was not Suki. Has everyone else already seen the paper dolls?
“Silence!” cries Sensei Madame Liao. “Begin, Chen Peasprout!”
I attempt the blossom double jump, or whatever it is. As soon as I land, everyone bursts into laughter.
I must have failed on my very first move. A move that the other students have probably been doing since they were seven years old. Even worse, I thought I did it right. Are you supposed to land on both skates, not just one? I’m so ignorant of these moves; I don’t even know when I’m doing them wrong.
Class ends and the other girls sit, unscrew and snap the blades off their skates, and toss them into the trash bin. They take out new blades from packs of six and fasten them on their skates.
The amount of money that all those perfectly good blades they are throwing away cost could have fed our whole wu liu temple back in Shin for years. A memory of Nun Hou comes to mind, during the bad winter when I was eight, in the kitchen, scraping the grains left in the bowls when she thought no one was looking, after she had told me she wasn’t hungry and given me her rice.
It’s not just wasteful. It’s offensive. If being rich means skating through life so blindly, then I’m glad I grew up poor.
I wait until almost all the girls are gone and the rest aren’t looking. I paw through the bin to see if any of the blades will fit on my skates. The sockets connecting the blade to the boot are all differently shaped. I’d have to buy an entire new boot, and not just one but two, to match.
I look up to find that Sensei Madame Liao has been watching me. Heat flushes into my cheeks. So this is what it’s come to. Me, the greatest skater in Shin, picking through the trash of these Pearlian students. How stupid I was to think that I could find my way here, let alone achieve top ranking and get the lead in the Drift Season Pageant.
She skates to me and says, “There is much that you never learned.”
“I can learn all those moves before the second Motivation.”
“That’s impossible.”
Her words hit me like a stone fist.
She continues, “But you don’t need to learn the moves. You only need to learn how to copy what you see when you see it.”
“How is that any different?”
“Those birds that Sensei Madame Phoenix uses for her newspapers. They can sing the whole ‘Pearlian New Year’s Song.’ They can repeat all the words in sequence without understanding what the words mean. It’s like copying a sequence of logograms upside down, even if you can’t understand the words. You just have to learn to make your mind bend enough to hold these new forms.”
“How?”
“Chi.”
I nod to indicate my understanding, and Sensei Madame Liao skates away.
I have no idea what she means. Command of Chi is essential to wu liu, but how will it help me win the Motivation? Chi? Logograms? Birds memorizing “The Pearlian New Year’s Song”— Wait, that’s it! She’s talking about Memory Palace meditation!
I skate off to the Skybrary at the Conservatory of Literature to research it.
I learned about Memory Palace meditation during my studies, but I never had the chance to read a book like the Treatise on Chi Practice and the Visual Music of the Memory Palace that I found in the Skybrary. It must be a very advanced book because I had to execute two third-gate nightingale loops to reach the shelf where it was stored.
The book teaches how to turn information you want to remember into things such as songs, the layout of a house, silhouettes, and other patterns in your mind, in order to train your memory to memorize long sequences of details instantly. I need to practice these meditation techniques every free hour between now and the second Motivation.
That afternoon, I skate to the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness filled with hope. I’ve brought sheets of paper and a charcoal pencil. I’ll write a sequence of random numbers on one side and then, after meditating, see if I can reproduce it on the other side of the paper. Luckily, almost no one ever uses the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness.
I arrive and sit in one of the squares near the center of the eight rows of eight and begin to focus to start my Chi practice. Just as the gong in the clock pagoda begins to toll the hour before evenmeal, someone comes racing in.
Doi.
We both stiffen. She has not so much as looked at me since the horrible class with Sensei Madame Yao.
“What are you doing here?” she demands.
“I’m trying to meditate,” I reply. Who is she to be taking that tone?
“Meditate in your dormitory chamber then,” she says. “I need to use the squares.”
“There are sixty-three other—”
“I need all of them.”
“I got here first!”
She turns toward the clock pagoda as the gong finishes sounding the strike for the hour before evenmeal. Her face bunches with urgency and anger. She opens her mouth.
“Please,” she says. A softness comes into her face that reminds me that this is the sister of the boy who was kind to Cricket.
I shouldn’t have to, but I get up. However, I don’t leave entirely; I walk to one side of the square. I want to see why she needs the whole place to herself.
When she understands that I’m not going to leave the square while she does whatever she’s going to do, she begins to scowl but then covers it with a smile and a bow. She says. “Forgive me; you don’t have to leave, but could I please ask you to stand near the entrance to the square?”
I skate to the entrance. Doi stands with her back to me in the lower left corner of the grid. She stands there gathering her focus with her hands cupped in front of her as if about to receive
