My knee is twisted. I can feel the heat coming off it and see it already starting to swell with fluid. It’s going to be bad. Stupid me, why can I never resist taking their bait?
Sensei Madame Liao has me sit out the rest of the class. After the other students leave, she comes to me.
“When we were little, my younger sister and I had a game. I would think of an object. Starting in one corner, my sister would place her finger on a square of a chessboard in front of her. If she felt me sending a pulse of Chi energy to her at that moment, she would place a marker on that square. If not, she would leave it blank. The patterns of the marked and unmarked squares would form a picture.”
I understand the meaning of Sensei Madame Liao’s story, but there’s no way that Cricket can send me pulses of Chi energy to help heal my knee. I want to tell her that Cricket doesn’t have the capabilities of other boys. That he’s allergic to his own saliva. That he’s afraid of moths. But I don’t.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “Do not be so quick to judge deficiencies. Sometimes, they are just advantages that are interpreted incorrectly, like trying to read a logogram turned upside down. Your ignorance of wu liu moves that involve more than six steps, for example.”
“I’ve learned thirty-eight of those moves now, and my memory palace Chi practice is greatly improved.”
“I’m not criticizing you.” Sensei Madame Liao rests her hand gently on my shoulder. “There is a strength hidden inside your ability to glide on one step. You could cross five li in five steps. No one else here can do that.”
She makes it sound like I’m an innovator. It’s true that to preserve my skates, I learned to stretch each step like a Meijing opera singer can hold a note. I invented a technique to sling my center of gravity so that I whip forward in loops on one skate for a very long time. But I wasn’t trying to innovate. I was just trying to save money.
“How’s that going to help me in the third Motivation?”
“It’s not. But one day, the third Motivation will be over. And you will still have your skills.”
“It’s not a skill; it’s just a crutch. I don’t want to need a crutch.”
She looks at me as if she’s about to say something she wants me never to forget.
“At the time of the Great Leap of Shin,” she says, “the population of Pearl was five-sixths female, since so many men died in various wars against Shin over the years. This seemed a deficiency.”
My Chi seizes up at this. Any time a Pearlian brings up the Great Leap, it’s not to say nice things about Shinians.
“Before she fled to the island of Pearl to seek refuge, Little Pi Bao Gu was a courtesan in Shin, where her owners abused and scorned her for her childlike size. This also seemed a deficiency.”
So she appreciates that Little Pi Bao Gu came from Shin. What does that have to do with the deficiencies in my wu liu training?
“However,” she continues, “as a dancer, Little Pi Bao Gu learned that there are many things that require smallness, litheness, and balance more than brute strength. Martial arts and skating are two of them. So she combined these two things.”
I know. She took the “wu” from wushu to indicate that it was a martial art and the “liu” from liubing to indicate that it was descended from ice-skating.
Sensei Madame Liao says, “She invented a martial art that took advantage of how female bodies are different from male bodies so that the island of Pearl could turn five-sixths of the population into warriors rather than just rely on the small remaining male population. With that, she created the force that stopped Shin from invading Pearl.”
Where is all this leading?
She goes on. “And since then, everyone in Pearl honors Little Pi Bao Gu, the failed courtesan and refugee, as much for the lesson she taught them as for creating wu liu. Do you know what that lesson was?”
“What?”
“Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.”
* * *
As I unroll my bed that night and lie down to sleep, my heart is still touched by Sensei Madame Liao’s beautiful words.
I need to think of my deficiencies differently. And Cricket’s. Perhaps our deficiencies are truly just advantages that need to be read the right way. Perhaps there is a way he can learn to send me Chi healing. We should try that game that Sensei Madame Liao and her sister played with the chessboard when they—
I sit upright in my bed.
I need to find the sketch that I drew of the pattern that Doi made in the boxes at the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness.
What if she wasn’t just meditating? What if she was receiving pulses of Chi energy from somebody to make a picture?
I find the drawing and unroll it. I look at the black and white squares forming a picture of a box with ears and little feet.
I realize that it’s not a picture. It’s a logogram. I just couldn’t understand it because I was reading it upside down.
I turn it right-side up. My Chi goes cold.
It’s blocky but legible as zhi.
The ancient word for hostage.
Does Doi know something about the Empress Dowager’s plan? Is she connected to the Empress Dowager somehow?
Whom was she receiving pulses of Chi energy from?
Could she have been talking with Zan Kenji and Zan Aki, since they skate with New Deitsu Opera Company and their fathers know each other?
Or maybe hostage wasn’t referring to the mayor’s sons at all.
Maybe it was referring to me.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The only thing that I am certain of is that Doi was not responsible for the attack on the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice. Suki’s continued insistence that she told everyone this was going to happen makes it clear that the attack was part
