I face girl after girl. Each time, when I finish in victory, I look down at my body and see my aura of Chi brighten briefly, but then it dims again, because I only earn average points against each girl. I try to move deliberately, hoping my opponent will follow my lead, but girl after girl panics and drives the pace too fast for herself until suddenly she is splayed on her rear end on the pearl in front of me.
I watch my body work its way through the line of opponents to the two beings who have the most significance for me in this space. Deep in this state, I can see the cords of energy binding my body to them; the one linking to Suki is orange and burning white in the center, but the one to Doi is a color I have no name for, a color that makes me feel like I am blind.
We three stand like pillars in a lake, for we are undefeated in all our rounds, but it is a shallow lake. The other girls keep losing to us before we are able to gather many points in any round.
Finally, I see my body standing before Doi. I use my Chi to try to establish a link with her and hope that she understands that we must skate as if carefully linking a string of beads; we are making a necklace between us, and we should make it slowly, bead for bead, until it is long enough to be worth winning.
We dive into a chamber of sound, air, sight, and instinct that becomes a conversation, punctuated with thoughtful pauses and courtesies and glorious style, as we chain our moves so that they’re answers to each other.
Doi leaps and kicks the air in a third-gate grasshopper backflip, to which I spread my arms to gather the air under them to add a luckieth-gate nightingale loop, since the nightingale eats the grasshopper, to which she retorts by leaping and spinning into a jump, then diving down headfirst in a fifth-gate falcon spiral, since the falcon eats the nightingale, all of which I perform and then surpass by springing off the coils under the heels of my faithful skates in a fifth-gate tiger leap. She conquers this by flinging herself into a furious spin on one skate with the other skate pulled behind her in a luckieth-gate triple phoenix spin, since the phoenix eats only bamboo seeds and harms nothing, and it tames all beasts with its grace.
It’s exquisite to dance against an opponent of such skill.
Around us, all the other girls gather, as they have long since ended their rounds, and when Doi and I have strung together thirty moves, we give in to the urge to push the rounds faster and faster. When I add in a single-footed orchid flip, Doi slips at this simple child’s move and lands with both feet.
I am hauled out of my state as if by a rope from the bottom of the sea. The scale of time in my mind collapses in and comes crashing into the scale of time around me.
I’m here at the Conservatory of Wu Liu. At the second Motivation. I’ve won the round against Doi. There’s no applause. Just murmuring as the other girls glare at me. Because someone or something attacked the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice just an hour ago. And everyone thinks I’m involved. The shock of the vandal attack and the accusations against me pushed me into a meditative state that helped me copy the moves of my opponents. A skating meditative state, just like Doi told me about.
There’s just one more opponent left to beat: Suki. We’re given only a moment to rest before the next round. I quickly center my Chi to get back into that state before I take on Suki.
“Don’t try to beat Suki.” It’s Doi.
“Please don’t interrupt me, I’m getting back into my meditative—”
“She’s better than you. You need to lose to her.”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do.” She’s sore that she lost to me.
“Count,” she says and skates away.
Count? What does she mean?
Then it’s my turn to go against Suki. There’s no time to get back into the meditative state.
“What did you use to attack the pagoda?” Suki says. “Did you fire thousand-year-old preserved bladder stones at it?”
Insipid laughter rises from the House of Flowering Blossoms girls who have gathered to watch the final round.
I shouldn’t have fled. I shouldn’t have panicked.
I say, “Even a thousand-year-old bladder stone wouldn’t be as old as that joke is by now. Are you going to do a move, or are you going to just stand there reusing jokes?”
“You’ll be reusing your clothes for toilet paper when they throw you in prison.”
“Maybe when I get to prison, they’ll give me a nice haircut like the nuns gave you.”
Suki seethes and begins the round by doing a kingfisher sporting in the Purple River quintuple jump. Everyone gasps, because this is a seventh-gate east-directional move, requiring her to jump and twist her body like a hunting bird to reverse direction lucky times while in the air. However, kingfisher sporting in the Purple River quintuple jump is one of the few moves in all of wu liu originating in the region of, obviously, the Purple River in Shui Shan Province. Where I’m from. It’s one of the moves that I mastered to become wu liu champion of all of Shui Shan Province, which qualified me to compete for the title of Peony-Level Brightstar. I’ve been doing it since I was six years old.
I execute the move flawlessly.
We launch into a furious round, whipping faster and faster. She’s using fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-gate moves to intimidate me. I’m not afraid, because they’re all centered on difficult
