Suddenly, Sensei Madame Liao has already done two moves and all the girls beside me have done them in imitation.
I have no idea what they did and stand there stupidly.
“Chen Peasprout, you are eliminated!”
I skate to the sideline. I was trying too hard to relax. That only made it impossible to relax. How am I ever going to survive the second Motivation?
After our evening baths, as I am readying for sleep, Doi crosses my path.
“They never taught you back in Shin how to do walking meditation,” she says.
“Of course they did,” I say as I try to skate past her. What does she want? I need to get a good night’s sleep before the second Motivation tomorrow. The last thing I need is to be distracted by another argument with this girl.
“So then you must know that some people are able to stay in a meditative state while skating?”
“That’s impossible. You’d come out of the meditative state as soon as you moved.”
“Not if you are deep enough in it. You just need something strong enough to send you that deep.”
If she’s trying to intimidate me with how good everyone else’s Chi practice is during the second Motivation, it’s not going to work. I skate away from her, open the paper shoji door of my dormitory chamber, and slam it shut behind me.
I sleep a long sleep filled with uneventful dreams.
* * *
The morning of the second Motivation, we skate in a group down the path to the rails connecting to the Conservatory of Wu Liu. The path winds past the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice, where the boys will be doing Vertical Battlefield for their second Motivation while the girls do Lady Ming’s Hand-Mirror. When I near it, there is already a crowd of students and senseis gathered there, but the strange thing is that the students include as many girls as boys. Why aren’t the girls moving on to our Motivation? They’re all looking up at the pagoda.
I gasp as I see what they’re pointing at.
There are great gashes in the tiers of the pagoda. It looks like a giant took a sword and slashed it down the side of the pagoda, slicing through the roofs of the eight tiers, all the way down to the bottom one.
I know it couldn’t have been a giant sword, but look at the scale of the damage! It sickens my stomach. The sections of roofs next to the gash of each tier are buckled and skewed. Some of the pagoda’s inner parts show through. It looks like someone cut open a crab to pry its halves apart and scrape at the living meat inside.
One of the students says, “We’ve been attacked!”
Attack? Who would want to attack a pagoda? Murmurs rise. Several of the students look at me and whisper to one another.
“I told you,” says Suki, triumph cracking her voice. “Now do you believe me? She’s not a real skater. She’s just decent enough to pass for one. The ‘Stealthiest Skater in Shin’ is finally starting to do what the Empress Dowager really sent her here to do!”
I’m as shocked by this as anyone. No, it can’t be. The Empress Dowager wouldn’t order an attack on the academy. She must know what position that would leave Cricket and me in as the only Shinian students here. Some student who wasn’t happy with his or her ranking at the last Motivation must have done this. All I know is that I don’t know any more about this than anyone else.
Everyone is looking at me.
And Suki is still talking.
More and more students and senseis are arriving for the second Motivation. They’re starting to form a circle, and I’m in the center of it. I feel their stares and their whispers and, above all of it, Suki’s poisonous lies.
So I do something I have never done.
I turn and flee.
I hop on the rails to the Conservatory of Wu Liu.
* * *
When Sensei Madame Liao and the other first-year girls arrive, I don’t look up from my Chi-centering exercises.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “The first-year boys’ second Motivation shall be delayed. The first-year girls’ second Motivation shall proceed as scheduled.”
My emotions are still too uncollected for me to absorb this. I focus on the Chi energy filling from my toes. I visualize it carrying the venom of this news, rising out of me, exiting my body.
It’s not working. I can’t expel the shock. I can feel it lodged in my Chi, and every time I push against it, I only drive myself backward, deeper, down and back and down.
I open my eyes to a world moving so slowly.
The sounds of the girls around me are drawn out, even though some part of my mind tells me that they’re talking as quickly as they can, they must be talking about something significant that happened long ago this morning, but to me it’s like the sound of birds that I can mimic without understanding.
I skate as if outside my own body to take my place and face my opponent for Lady Ming’s Hand-Mirror. Now, I’m watching myself standing in front of this girl, and she is doing a move and I’m copying it and adding a move, and so it goes back and forth, and the moves are laying themselves out in a strip in my mind as a rhythm of musical beats. But the other girl acts before her Chi is centered. Even though the rounds aren’t timed, she’s quickening the pace to intimidate me, but I keep up, and it’s not long before she makes a mistake and the round is over, and I take a point for each move in the string, and my opponent takes nothing.
I watch my body skate to face my next opponent. My being is brightened because I have won the first round, but I know it would be better for my opponent and me to
