Not long after, we hear a great popping sound. Sensei Madame Liao puts her ear to the pearl below our skates. She announces that we may resume use of all lucky directions. I turn south, but the palace is far off on the Principal Island and obscured from view by the clouds. We hop on the rails and skate back toward the Principal Island. Out of the clouds comes Cricket, skating directly into me. He’s beaming.
“I heard it, Peasprout!”
“Heard what?”
“After I got taken out of the training session, I skated in the direction of the worksite.”
“You didn’t look at it, did you? We can’t afford to break any rules!”
“No, I promise! I skated backward and stayed on the south side of the Conservatory of Wu Liu. The palace was across the water, and I kept my back to it. I heard a great sizzling sound. And then I heard water washing over something. And then there was a great popping sound.”
“I heard it, too. Don’t go near it again. Wait here.”
I leave Cricket and the other students and senseis. I skate toward the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties. Clouds obscure it, but when the wind changes direction, they part.
The palace is completely restored. The sloping roof is covered in tiles like a dragon’s scales, as if nothing happened.
Someone grabs my arm. I feel the long nail of the Chairman’s little finger digging into my sleeve.
I cry out, but there aren’t any senseis or students around. He hauls me toward where the New Deitsu team is gathered.
We enter the palace. Within it is a structure I have never seen before. A small, simple pavilion with a sloped roof and a door. He pushes me inside it. I have to duck to avoid striking my head on the lintel.
He remains outside.
“So the Empress Dowager sent you here to learn about the pearl, little bird?” he says. All his false smiles and charm are gone, and I no longer see any resemblance to Hisashi. “By attacking the structures and seeing how we rebuild them?”
“I didn’t have anything to do—”
“Since you want to learn about the pearl so badly, I will share a fact with you. You have noticed all the water that flows over and throughout every structure here? What do you think it is for?”
From the way he asks, I know that it’s not to keep the pearl from burning.
He continues, “Seawater keeps the pearl from shrinking. There is a law in Pearl that gives New Deitsu Pearlworks Company authority to punish criminals who threaten the secret of the pearl. The criminal is sealed inside a structure. Then we cut off its supply of seawater. The structure shrinks around the criminal day by day until he’s slowly crushed to death.”
I’d thought that Pearlians were so different, so evolved. They can be just as brutal here as the Empress Dowager.
“All that’s left at the end is a miniature black structure, small enough to wear as a pendant. We have a chamber full of these trinkets at New Deitsu,” the Chairman continues. “If you are endangering the secret of the pearl, you could be number 2,021.”
The trinket. On the pendant. That I put in my mouth. That’s why it weighed so much. It was the body of a prisoner trapped inside a shrunken structure shaped like a tiny pavilion.
Like the pavilion I’m standing in now.
I try to push my way out, but the Chairman and his team block me.
They’re going to seal me inside it.
But they can’t legally do that! I take a deep breath to calm my Chi. They don’t have enough proof. That’s why he hasn’t thrown me in prison yet.
He’s just trying to intimidate me.
The Chairman starts pounding on the roof of the pavilion above me to scare me, like a boy taunting an animal in a cage.
He’s pouting! Because he can’t figure out a way to beat me!
How can I get him off my trail?
By finding the true criminal who caused the attacks.
But how do I do that?
I try to focus my Chi, but it’s hard with his palm beating on the roof and the pavilion ringing around me like a war drum, as if he were a spoiled, deranged—
That’s it! I know how to find out who the criminal is!
“Stop it!” I cry. “I’m going to prove to you that I’m innocent.”
The beating sounds stop. The Chairman ducks his head down to peer at me. “How?”
“I know the identity of the true criminal. I just need to gather the evidence.”
I begin to press my way past him. He tries to push me back into the pavilion.
“Let me go so I can get you your evidence. Or do you want to wait until another attack happens?”
“You’re not going anywhere, you disrespectful, corrupt, lying girl!”
“Yes, I am. Because you don’t have a choice. And you know it.”
The Chairman steps back. His eye is twitching.
“See,” he says. “This is why I hate children. You’d better hope that another attack doesn’t happen before you get your evidence.”
I skate away as quickly as I can and don’t look back until the palace is out of sight. I stop and catch my breath.
Why didn’t I see it before? It should have been so obvious how I can prove that I’m innocent and find out who the true criminal is.
I have to consult Chingu, the oracular monkey.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
At the Skybrary at the Conservatory of Literature, on a platform high above the central atrium, on the fifth tier of shelves that required me to do fifth-gate grasshopper double jumps while bouncing between columns to reach them, I find the Master Record of the Academy Rules and Statutes of Perfectly Upright Character.
I note with relief that statute 547 states that if someone accuses someone else of causing damage to the property of the academy, the accuser must bring proof. That’s why
