As they fall out of their skates and begin plummeting to the pearl below, I feel the square-shaped boy’s unskated foot kick the cup of salt out of my hands. I open my eyes to see the salt shoot out of the cup and scatter in the chute behind me.
The cup lands on top of the salt. Then it disappears.
I scrape to a stop. Below me, the boys bounce as they hit the pearl on their socks, then continue shouting insults at me. I grab their skates from the chute and fling them in opposite directions as hard as I can.
I skate back to where the salt and the cup were.
There’s a hole in the pearl of the chute. Through it, I squint and see the city street below. The faint sparkle of my metal cup against the whiteness down there catches my attention.
The edges of the hole are sending up tendrils of vapor. It looks like flesh that has been turned to liquid and healed over in smooth pink scars. It looks just like the damage done to the academy buildings.
Salt!
It eats through the pearl!
That’s how Suki’s been doing it. She must have placed great blocks of salt on the buildings. Where did she get it? Suki has plenty of money, but salt’s not just expensive, it’s forbidden.
It’s like plants that die if the water is too salty or not salty enough. Or like the rice stalks that were killed when the fields in Pearl became salted after the Great Leap. Is the pearl some strange giant vegetable, like bamboo?
That must be why Pearlians don’t use salt in their food and why they teach their children to fear salt. The pearl can’t burn, but salt could destroy their whole city like fire could destroy other cities.
With this information, and Chingu’s oracle, I’m going to prove that Suki caused the destruction and finally end her hold over me. I just have to get back into my dormitory chamber without being seen.
Luckily, it’s still midday, so the whole academy is sleeping. As I ride the final stretch of the gondola rails back to the campus, I skate through a tumbling cloud enveloping the path.
I come out and scrape to a stop at the shore of the Principal Island.
In front of me, under the Gate of Complete Centrality and Perfect Uprightness, are all the senseis.
They have their backs to me.
They’re carrying someone up the incline leading past the Gallery of Paragons of Honor toward the Hall of Benevolent Healing.
At the sound of my skates skidding on the gondola rail, Sensei Madame Yao turns and sees me.
“Chen Peasprout, what are you doing violating curfew?”
She pushes the sleeves of her robe up above her muscled forearms and pulls me off the rail. Her fingers embed in my arm and haul me up the incline.
“Sensei, I can explain! I was just running an errand—”
She plucks the vessel of wine from my sash, smells it, and fumes.
As she yanks me past, I look to see whom the other senseis are carrying.
It’s a boy with eyebrows as thick as stage makeup, dressed in what used to be a fine embroidered robe. He’s older. Not a student. He’s dressed like a professional Pearlian opera company performer. I realize I recognize him from somewhere. But he’s not wearing skates. What happened to his skates?
I turn back and look again.
Something’s wrong with him.
Where are his feet?
The ends of the boy’s legs are bundled in pink silk half the length of feet.
They’re exactly the size and shape of lotus blossoms, bound tightly shut.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sensei Madame Yao takes me to the nearest structure, the Gallery of Paragons of Honor. She pushes me onto a bench in the middle of the hall and says, “Don’t you dare step outside until we come back for you.”
The portraits of the academy’s paragons of honor stare down at me. All the first-ranked skaters in academy history. All the past leads in the Drift Season Pageant. All the graduates of Pearl Famous who died in the Bamboo Invasion and other wars against Shin.
“Dyun Bee-Chyin. Died Valiantly in Battle Defending Pearl, Bamboo Invasion, Second Year.”
“Lao Ying-Lian. Died Valiantly in Battle Defending Pearl, Bamboo Invasion, Second Year.”
They didn’t even get to graduate. Their young faces stare blankly ahead, unaware that I’m here.
I remember now where I’ve seen the boy that the senseis were carrying, the boy with the bound feet. I look for his name and find it. His eyebrows weren’t stage makeup, as his portrait has them as well.
“Zan Kenji. Wu Liu First Ranking, First and Third Years; New Deitsu Opera Company First Recruit.”
He thought he was going to Shin as a goodwill ambassador. Instead, he went there as a hostage and came back as a sacrifice. All those years of training. All that work and talent and dedication. One of the greatest living skaters in Pearl. He’s never going to skate again. He’ll barely even be able to walk.
The Empress Dowager did this to him.
And this is just a warning.
She still has the other performer, Aki. Not a performer. A hostage.
If binding Kenji’s feet doesn’t get her the pearl, what’s she going to do to his little brother until she gets it?
And now that she’s mutilated Kenji, what are the Pearlians going to do to me and my little brother? We’re just two children from Shin. Just because she chose me as the Peony-Level Brightstar doesn’t mean we approve of the Empress Dowager’s actions.
We didn’t choose the Empress Dowager as our ruler any more than people choose for winter to be cold. But I don’t know if Pearlians would understand this because they elect their leaders. Of all the strange privileges they have here, this is the strangest of them all.
I realize that the Empress Dowager sent Cricket and me here in exchange, even though she was already planning to use Kenji and Aki as hostages. She never cared what might happen to Cricket and
