The two girls look at me, then at each other, and then turn their heads back to their scroll.
I skate over to see what they’ve written. Their prose is unbearable, their characterization tortured. Worst of all, these girls describe both the eunuch and the boy as heroes!
“Why are you referring to them as heroes?”
They look at each other. One of them says, “The boy refused to kill the eunuch when he had the opportunity.”
So they can speak, after all.
“That doesn’t make him a hero! The boy spared the eunuch who proceeded with the Great Leap of Shin, and the earthquake created a tsunami that destroyed your city! Pearl should hate the boy!”
“We know you hate the boy in Shin.”
“Of course we do! And the eunuch, too! The Great Leap caused the lakes and rivers of Shin to flood, and the earth cracked open and released poisonous gases. The Great Leap killed hundreds of millions of people in Shin! Everyone should hate both the boy and the eunuch!”
“They were heroes because the—”
“They were criminals! The eunuch was executed by Shin for his errors in calculation and the boy was executed in Pearl as a traitor!”
As the last drops of the water clock count down the final portion of the hour, I take my brush and blot out the word hero everywhere that it appears in the script and replace it with criminal.
The girls stare at each other with ghastly expressions, then turn and squeak, “Sensei!”
Sensei Madame Phoenix skates to us, furiously waving her Too Exciting! paddle, and says, “What is it now, Chen Peasprout?”
“This is supposed to be a group project. I get to make a contribution, too.”
Sensei looks at the water clock and says, “Finish now.”
I add lines at the end of the script for the Chorus of Heavenly Sages to denounce Mu Haichen and Lim Tian-Tai as filthy criminals with low characters. I submit the scroll to Sensei.
The two girls seethe. Let them. They’ll thank me when we get our grade.
* * *
In the last days before the fifth Motivation, this irritating experience in literature class makes me realize that whether I like it or not, sometimes I’m going to be forced by circumstances to rely on others. And the longer I wait to choose whom to rely on, the worse my options will be. I only have two days left to decide whether to ask Doi to partner with me at the fifth Motivation. Most girls paired up as soon as Sensei Madame Liao announced that we could choose our own partners.
Doi is clearly the best skater for me to choose. But what do I really know about her?
Why did she defend me over the soaps? Why did she fight Suki? Why won’t she talk with her brother? Is there any truth to what Suki said about their father causing their mother’s death?
Doi didn’t use a Dian Mai technique on Suki at the luckieth Motivation like I feared she might. However, what she ended up doing was almost as reckless, so I don’t know what else she might do. Maybe the Chi pulse exercise in the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness where she was talking about hostages didn’t have anything to do with the New Deitsu skaters. What if it had to do with a Dian Mai?
A Dian Mai could be used to hold a hostage, since it turns your own body into a prison. What if she’s planning to use a Dian Mai to imprison Suki as a hostage to make her miss the Motivation? Or use a Dian Mai on Suki during aerial combat? What could be a more spectacular way for Doi to take down Suki than to lock Suki’s body while she’s in midair so that she drops out of the sky like a stone for the whole academy to see? Suki could get killed. However, Doi is so extreme, she probably wouldn’t care if it gets her expelled or imprisoned. And her partner along with her.
All this time, I’d been trying to get closer to Doi. Not just because she could further my ranking or tell me about the hostages and what she knows about the Empress Dowager’s plans, but also because she was kind to me. But Suki was right. I really know nothing about Doi. If I’m going to make a decision about partnering with her, I have to know more about her than nothing. I need to find out once and for all whom she is communicating with through Chi pulses about hostages.
* * *
The night before the fifth Motivation, an hour before evenmeal, I’m here, hiding on the tiles atop the wall forming the far side of the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness. This is the side from which I’ll be able to read the logograms that Doi is forming in the boxes of sand. She made me stand at the other side near the entrance the first time so that the logograms would be upside down to me and I wouldn’t realize that they were words. If I can see the whole message, maybe I can find out what she’s planning and whom she’s gotten mixed up with.
She skates in just as the clock pagoda begins to strike the hour before evenmeal. She assumes the first square. She closes her eyes and cups her hand in front of her. Her Chi practice is outstanding because almost immediately, she has established the connection. She begins to walk across the sixty-lucky squares of sand, marking some and passing over others. The squares begin to form logograms, and the logograms begin to form sentences.
“Plan. Failed. Situation. Grown. Dangerous. Don’t. Tell. Anyone. About.”
She stops. She opens her eyes as if jolted awake. I know the look on her face. It’s how I feel when Cricket gets a coughing fit while we are Chi connected and the link is abruptly severed. Whomever she is talking to has been interrupted. Whomever she—
“Hisashi? Are you still there? Hisashi?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
So she’s been
