Salt! It’s a ball of salt, so dense that its weight is slowing me down.
“Stop!” I say.
The figure pumps his skates even harder. I can tell that he’s an outstanding practitioner of wu liu to center his Chi so perfectly and move with such speed while carrying these salt balls.
“Stop! Who are you? Are you working for Suki?” As I grow closer, he throws another ball, aiming for the roof in front of me. If the salt touches the pearl, it’ll eat away the roof from under my skates. I quickly throw my cloak out to catch the second ball, then snap the cloth with a flourish so that it ties itself around my shoulder in a sling. I toss both balls in it.
He throws another ball at my skates, and again, I catch it before it meets the pearl.
He’s faster now that he’s only carrying five balls, and I’m slower now that I’m carrying three. If it weren’t for Cricket’s modifications, I’d have lost him already. I gather all my remaining Chi into forward momentum, swing the bag of salt balls around me, and use it to launch myself into an east-directional, sixth-gate flying heron hook.
I land behind the boy and yank at his hood, releasing a length of beautiful waterfall hair.
No.
Doi. Why? You have so much to lose.
We stare at each other, and the look in her eyes is pitiable, her hair lashing across her face in the wind produced by the churning fans. Doi takes another ball and attempts to drop it on the short span of roof between us, but I grab the ball. We push against each other. For a moment, we’re balanced so perfectly that we threaten to crush the ball between our hands.
I twist the ball away from her, then perform the same two-heeled sesame-seed pestle jump that won me the first Motivation. As I sweep over Doi’s head, I reach out and grasp her waterfall hair to startle her just like she herself did to her attackers during the luckieth Motivation.
Her hair comes away in my hand.
I’m holding a wig of fine, black threads of pearlsilk.
We both scrape to a stop, and I look into the face of the person before me: those big, soft eyes; that short, dense hair; those cheeks where I know dimples lie dormant.
Not Doi. Hisashi.
No. It can’t be. Not my Hisashi. He’s not the vandal, because he can’t be the sister of the boy from Shin. And because … because he’s good. I need him to be good.
I stagger back a few steps and then slump with shock.
“Hisashi, why?”
He lunges for the wig, but I lift it up close to the spinning fan near us. The blades slap against the tips of the tendrils of pearlsilk hair.
“Why did you do this?” I demand. “Why were you pretending to be Doi?”
“Peasprout, I need that!”
“Answer me, Hisashi!”
“I’m not Hisashi!”
“What?”
“There is no Hisashi here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Peasprout…”
I lift the wig even closer to the fan. The blades snag on a lock of hair and I tug back. With a whine, the fan pulls the lock out by its roots.
“Peasprout, I’m not pretending to be Doi. I am Doi. It was always me. Both of us.”
Both of them. The same person.
That’s why they never appeared together. That’s why she had to sabotage the boys’ Motivations. So that they wouldn’t take place at the same time as the girls’. I think of Doi’s smile when she said, “No one can be in two places at the same time.” My hand is trembling so fiercely that I almost lose my grip on the wig. All those things that we said to each other when I thought she was Hisashi. At the Arch of the Sixteenth Whisper. On the dragon-phoenix boat during the Festival of Lanterns. I squeeze my eyes shut to force the tears of confusion and shock back down inside me.
She swipes at the wig again, but I open my eyes and tug it back behind me with a snap.
“Peasprout, I need that!”
“Why did you have to pretend to be two people?”
She tries to lunge around me, but I block her by hooking my leg around hers.
“Where is Hisashi? Do you really even have a brother? Answer me!”
She scissors her legs around mine and twists in midair, sending me spinning. I fly onto my rear and slide across the path from her.
“Were you disguising yourself as Hisashi to get close to me?” I ask. “So you could spy on me for your father? Is that whom you were talking to in the Courtyard of Supreme Placidness?”
Doi lunges at me. While she’s in flight, I whip the wig behind her. She snatches at it but misses. I spring forward in a double somersault leap as she tumbles to the ground and snatch the wig out of the air.
“Peasprout, someone will hear us!”
“Tell me the truth!” I cry and lift the wig to the spinning fan again.
She leaps with both hands stretched like claws to snatch the wig from me. I flick the wig onto my head to free both arms to fight her, then crouch with my fists extended to meet Doi.
Seeing this, Doi changes the position of her leap midair. She rams her skates hard under the broken blade of my right skate, sending me hurtling into the air. The wig goes flying off my head.
She leaps up and plucks it from the air. She lands, clutching it to her chest, then turns to skate away.
With a yell, I yank at the strands of hair that trail behind her and haul her back like a horse on reins.
A sound rises across the campus. Someone has seen our battle and pulled an alarm.
“Please let go of the wig!” Doi says. “We have to get back before they find
