Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword

final step is for you, Father and Mother, for all that you didn’t do. You didn’t bind my feet, like you thought the oracle meant when she said that our family’s destiny lay in my feet. You didn’t stay to raise Cricket and me. You didn’t take care of us and shield us from so many things that children shouldn’t have to face alone. But because you didn’t do that, I’m strong enough now to take care of myself and Cricket. I’m certain enough now to take these five steps toward my destiny, even if my destiny is uncertain. I’m brave enough now to do what I have to do. So thank you, Father and Mother. It is only because of what you didn’t do that I am now Chen Peasprout, and being Chen Peasprout is the truest gift you could have granted me.

The paths here in the Garden of Whispering Arches are laid in curves that weave back and forth, and there is not a single straight path in it. I’ve already lost half the momentum of my fifth step and I can’t even see the Arch of Chi Retuning yet.

I finally sight it. At the crest of the highest hill in the garden.

I sling my center of gravity in loops, extending my left leg and swooping in one pestle windmill after another, whipping my leg as hard as I can to push me forward farther, a little farther, just a little, on my right skate. Daggers shoot through my knee, as if someone were trying to pry off the bone of my kneecap.

At last, I arrive at the Arch of Chi Retuning, curving like a rib bone in the moonlight. I hold my position on my right knee and glide into the shadow underneath it.

I come to a stop just before passing fully clear of it. I look up. Half of my vision is the dark underside of the arch. Half of it is the night sky above me.

Is this enough? Has it retuned my Chi?

Or will my bones shatter when I take the sixth step?

I try to twist and sling my arms to nudge myself all the way through the arch, but every movement sends spears of pain through my knee that almost cause me to trip and step forward.

What if I come down and crawl the rest of the way out from under the arch? No, it can’t be that easy to defeat a Dian Mai. Any criminal could escape.

There’s no other way.

I have to take the sixth step.

I lift my left skate.

I place it on the pearl in front of me and step out from under the arch.

The stabbing in my knee stops.

I hear a great crack, as of bones breaking. I close my eyes and wait for my body to shatter.

Something strikes my shoulder, then pounds to the pearl behind me. Pain lances through me. I open my eyes to see a great chunk of bone-white pearl lying on the ground.

I look up at the underside of the arch and see a missing section where the chunk of pearl used to be. Fissures begin racing across the whole of the structure.

I burst forward as hard as I can, skid to a stop, and turn just in time to see the Arch of Chi Retuning collapse into rubble and send up a bloom of dust that sparkles like crystals in the moonlight.

The strain of absorbing the Dian Mai destroyed the Arch of Chi Retuning. Like all our kicking killed the Blame Tree back in Shin.

I turn back and look out across the campus of Pearl Famous. I didn’t know that I would ever gaze on this scene again. As I skated toward the Arch of Chi Retuning, I could have been skating past all these structures for the last time, because I could have been skating to my death.

But there they are all laid out before me now, like a landscape that I fully comprehend, a map that I know how to read to find what I’m looking for.

And what I’m looking for is justice.

“I know you’re out there, Suki, and I’m coming for you.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY

I race through the campus. During the days that I was imprisoned in the Dian Mai, great spinning fans on poles as large as windmills were placed along the perimeter of every islet near the water to suck the drifts of the pearl out toward the sea. They’re churning so fast that anything that gets caught in them would be tugged up and chewed to pieces. What powers them? I’d better keep my robes and braids far away so that they don’t end up sprayed in bits over the sea.

In the distance, I see someone hopping up the tiers of the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice, slinging some sort of bag. My Chi quakes. The vandal!

I race toward the figure. It’s definitely not Suki. She leads with her right leg. This person leads with the left, like most boys trained in Pearl. Could Suki have a male accomplice?

He turns to me but his hood hides his face in black. When he sees me, he abandons his ascent of the pagoda and backflips away, using the weight of his sack to launch himself into an open-toed scythe spin onto the roof of the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties.

I pursue him at full speed. Cricket’s modification of my skates is miraculous. It feels like they’re locked on to rails when I find the grain in the pearl. I quickly shrink the distance between the figure and me. As hard as he skates, he’s weighed down by the heavy sack he carries. When he lunges, I can see from the jostling of the sack that it contains several round objects. He sees me gaining on him, reaches into his sack, and tosses what looks like a snowball as large as a melon right into my path.

I leap forward and catch the snowball before it can hit the