“Then I saw eighteen workers carry that palanquin to the site. They set down something small, the size of a skate. They blasted it with water from the sea pumped through a hose. Then there was a great crack and suddenly, the temple was there! I could feel the force against my back. It pushed the air so hard that everyone had to take a step to balance. It was so fast, Peasprout!”
“Cricket, you fool!”
“I haven’t done anything wrong! I didn’t face northeast.”
“How do you think it’s going to look if people find out that you watched how the temple was rebuilt? Suki’s going to say that the Empress Dowager sent me here to destroy the structures and that your job was to watch how they were being rebuilt to learn the secret of the pearl!”
“But we didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter! You have no idea how much danger we’re in right now because of your stupid fascination with architecture. All I’ve done to keep us safe, and you just skate right over it, like a worthless, ignorant Shinian peasant!”
Cricket is silent, his chin buried in his bony chest. At last, he speaks. “Peabird, don’t say I’m worthless.”
“Stop with the baby talk!”
“I’m going to win the sculpture competition and—”
“Enough about architecture!”
I have to keep him safe. I reach out and pat roughly all over his body. He shrinks from my touch. He hates when anyone touches him, because he’s ashamed of his body, and I understand why. His limbs are as skinny as a fawn’s. Every hard angle that I feel poking out of his rickety body stabs into my heart.
“Where is it?” I demand.
“You can’t have it! It’s mine!”
I realize that he only has courage to say this to me because it’s not here on his person. I turn and skate as hard as I can toward the dormitories.
“Wait, Peasprout!” he cries, skating after me. He almost catches me because I’m slowed by my ruined skate blades, but I arrive at his dormitory chamber first.
He has so little, but everything is arranged with such care. The little cloth adorned with images of blue turtles that our mother used to wash his face when he was a baby is folded crisply into the shape of a blossom and placed on his pillow. The sight of that thin rag from Mother turned by his little hands into a thing of fineness cuts me.
But I can’t hesitate now. I rummage through his things.
“Peasprout, please!” pleads Cricket, arriving breathless at the door.
I find it hidden behind the roll of his futon, gently wrapped in his sleeping garments. His entry for the architecture contest is a sculpture in miniature of the Temple of Heroes of Superlative Character. The likeness is remarkable. The detail is so fine that I can see through the arch of the doorway the individual hairs that he’s carved on the bare arm of Lim Tian-Tai. And it’s not even completed. It’s astonishing.
“Please, Peasprout!”
He looks up at me with those shining, frightened eyes.
I look at this work in my hand into which he’s poured his whole heart.
I can’t do this.
“Peasprout, I’ve spent over a hundred hours on it!”
I have to cut him down to stand him up. For his own good. For his own safety.
I know I have to do what I think I can’t do.
I drop the sculpture to the floor, lift my skate, and stamp my blade down on it, slicing it in two.
I chop the pieces with my blade, ten, twenty, thirty times until everything is slivers and powder.
I push past Cricket and skate out of his dormitory chamber. I wait for the howls but hear only silence.
My little Cricket.
I cover my mouth with my hands to seal in the sobs as I skate away so quickly that the wind shearing against my face sweeps a shimmer of tears in the air behind me.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Peasprout, focus.
I can’t think about Cricket. Or Suki. Or the Chairman. Everything depends on getting the wine. If only Hisashi had agreed to help me. I’m so hurt that he wouldn’t—
Focus.
I hop off the rails on the city side. The sun has risen and the city is waking up. I have to make my way back toward the markets near where we first disembarked from Shin.
I skate past great ceremonial gates, plazas terraced into the sides of hills of the pearl, gazebos perched atop outcrops, and cupolas carved so exquisitely that they look like lace brocades. There are shops and teahouses atop impossibly delicate arches. The sides of great public edifices bulge with rounded balconies in which I see officials at their desks.
Everywhere, there are fragile half-moon bridges spanning sculpted rivers. Many are topped with tiny tea pavilions wide enough to seat only two. The half-moons reflect in the water to form perfect moons everywhere. The whole city shimmers with the rivulets and waterfalls that spill from every structure.
The light from all the whiteness is starting to sting my eyes as the sun climbs in the sky. Ten thousand years of stomach gas, I forgot my smoked spectacles. I’ll have to hurry before it becomes so bright that it’ll be impossible for me to navigate through the city.
I arrive at a central market square ringed with tented kiosks opening for business. I have seven taels that I’ve saved up over the years doing wu liu performances at the street market. It should be plenty of money to buy a little wine. I find a few merchants carrying wine, but no one will sell it to a luckyteen-year-old girl. They ask me if my parents know where I am. One of them even threatens to report me to the police.
“You look for buy wine?”
I turn and see an old woman. I
