“So you’re just going to skate out of this chamber and confront Suki, and she’s going to break down and confess? As you’re writhing in pain with every bone in your body broken to bits.”
“You want me to just await my fate and hope the tribunal won’t agree with the Chairman’s interpretation? I can’t just stand by and do nothing! I’m going to find a way to get out of this Dian Mai.”
Fury flashes on Doi’s face before she pushes it down. She calmly turns and skates away from me to the shoji.
She hesitates there and looks back. Her eye is twitching. I can feel the tremendous pressure coming off her Chi. With a cry, she chops her hand down on my desk, splitting it in two and sending the halves crashing into each other.
I’m shocked by her violence.
“Why did you even come here?” I say. “Why are you so upset? Because I’m willing to take a risk to find the truth? I’m taking more of a risk by sitting here and letting other people decide my fate. I thought you, of all people, would understand that.”
Doi flings the shoji open and skates out.
I thought Doi was different. But in the end, she’s just another rich girl from Pearl who hasn’t had to do the things that I’ve had to do to take care of Cricket and keep us safe.
I look at the desk, split cleanly in half. It makes me think of the exquisiteness of the sculpture Cricket created, and his shining eyes, and the dull sickening snick that my skate made as I stamped down, and the silence behind me as I fled away.
That evening, shortly before the hour of sleep, there is another knock on my door.
“Enter.”
I’m so surprised to see Cricket that all the words that I had been practicing to say to him fly out of my head. He sees my skates set next to my futon and picks them up.
“I need to file the surface of the blades,” he tells me without meeting my gaze. “I noticed something when we were doing some of those fine-vision exercises during architecture class—”
“I don’t want to hear any more about architecture!” The words come out more sharply than I intended.
“Fine!” he yells. “You never listen to me. Even when it’s for your own good!”
“How dare you talk to me like that? I don’t know you. You are not my little Cricket.”
“That’s right,” he shouts as he flings my skates at my feet. “I’m not your little Cricket! I’m not anyone’s little Cricket!”
I’m so stunned and wounded that I can’t speak.
He says nothing. At last, he kneels down and picks up the skates. He works at the bottom of my blades with a file. Slowly, the nicks in them grow smaller and smaller until the notches completely disappear.
Cricket turns the file. He takes the sharp edge and scores one deft, long stroke after another on the bottom edge of the blade. Between strokes, he tests the blade, running it back and forth on the pearl like a child with a toy chariot.
As he works, he loses himself in the task, and some of his anger fades, and some of my little brother returns. The surface of the blade is so narrow but he’s able to work lines into the hard metal that are impossibly perfect. He always had eyes as sharp as an owl’s and hands as precise as the needles of a spider knitting its silk.
Cricket hands the skates to me. I feel them with my thumb. The blades are straight, but on the bottom side, there are now incredibly fine, regular ridges running along their lengths.
“I noticed that the pearl is formed with an almost invisible grain in it when we were examining it under lenses in architecture class.” Cricket makes a point of neither swallowing nor swelling the word architecture. “When you skate, you need to find the grain in the pearl and skate with it. You’ll know when you’ve found your grain.”
He stands up without meeting my gaze and skates to the door. Without turning to look at me, he says, “Architecture and wu liu have more in common than you might see. Architects often build secret doors for themselves into their buildings. If you don’t know how to look, they appear like mistakes or deficiencies. But if you learn how, you can glide right through them.”
As he is sliding the door closed, Cricket says, “To see things differently, sometimes all you need is to retune your Chi. Like how we would kick the Blame Tree when we were little and we would feel better.”
He leaves.
He was speaking to me in code.
He was telling me secrets in plain view, as if they were laid in marks on a grid. Is this something to do with the Dian Mai, and how to escape from it?
Deficiency.
Secret door.
Glide.
Retune Chi.
The Blame Tree.
Yes, we felt better after kicking the Blame Tree. I’m sure it helped us retune our Chi. But the Blame Tree was in Shin, thousands of li away, and it died years ago, and there’s nothing like it here at Pearl Famous that could retune our—
The Arch of Chi Retuning! Where the weird healer sent Mole Girl after her accident. In the Garden of Whispering Arches. That’s the most powerful antidote for Chi disturbances. But it’s all the way across the Principal Island. As soon as I took my sixth step toward the Arch of Chi Retuning, my bones would shatter inside me. It might as well be thousands of li away; it’s all the same to me here in the Dian Mai.
Is there a way for me to get out of the Dian Mai? I think of Cricket’s other clues. Architecture and wu liu. Where have I heard them mentioned together?
Sensei Madame Liao’s words come back to me. The steps of an honorable person lead through walls; the steps of a dishonorable person become a
