CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Doi’s heaving as hard as if she just skated a Motivation.
“Are you hurt?” I skate over and kneel by her side.
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re bleeding.” I reach to wipe the corner of her mouth with my cuff, but she flicks my hand away.
“Just leave it.”
I let her collect her Chi.
“I’m not going to let you send the orb to the Empress Dowager,” she says.
“Your father already has the orb. It’s too late.”
“I’m never going to put you in danger again. I’m going to keep you safe.”
Doi pushes herself up and kneels facing me, too close. She says, “Because all we have is each other.”
Her eyes are soft and needing and familiar. Hisashi’s eyes.
All those deeply private things that she got me to share with her while she was disguised as Hisashi. She deceived me. She tried to kiss me.
Doi reaches out to touch my face.
The thought of her touching my skin repels me. I feel so betrayed. I slap her hand away.
Doi’s expression swells with hurt.
She touches my arm, and I can’t help it. I shrink back. “Don’t touch me!”
“Peasprout—”
“Stop it! It was all lies!”
“It was never a lie. It was real. It wasn’t Hisashi; it was me.”
“It could never be real.”
“Why?”
I say nothing. I’ve said enough. I don’t want to be cruel, but Doi understands as if I’ve spoken every thought aloud.
“Because I’m a girl,” Doi says quietly.
She gets up, picks up one of the bags, and plucks out a salt ball from it.
“Fine; it could never be real. But now I’m going to do something so real, you’ll never forget me.” Doi hurls the salt ball at the floor beneath her skates. The pearl begins to steam and sizzle.
She stamps on the ball and the salt sprays outward. She brings down the other skate onto the material and with a crack, she disappears through the hole in the floor.
“Doi!” I cry.
I need to stop whatever she’s going to do, but I’ve struck a pact with the Chairman. I can’t go breaking out of imprisonment again. Not with my record.
But I also can’t let Doi do whatever it is she’s planning on doing.
I grab the other sack of salt balls and drop through the floor.
I spot Doi on the floor of the tower below.
“Doi, stop!” I cry again. But she leaps out through an arch and is gone. I lean hard and skate after her.
It’s dark and my vision is obscured by the drifts of pearl flake rising up all around me toward the night sky.
I see her. Doi is skating toward the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties with the bag of salt balls swinging behind her.
She’s going to destroy as many structures on the campus as she can. She only has three salt balls left, but three can cause plenty of devastation.
“Doi, stop! Please don’t do this!”
“What do you care?”
“Your father could do something even worse to you!”
“Oh, I know what he could do to me that would be worse.” She skids to a stop, faces me, and spits, “Nothing! Nothing he could do would be worse!”
She skates off. We hurtle on the rails down curving narrow alleys with the tall academy structures crowding above our heads. We wend around pillars and leap over arches. Bridges suspended with pearlcord sway as we race under them.
Doi nears the Palace of the Eighteen Outstanding Pieties and does a double-sleeved heron flip onto the spine of the roof. She lands sideways, and her skates catch on a bump in the roof. I use her stumble to catch up. She regains her balance and flings a salt ball down onto the roof behind her, but I do a backward tornado mallet and send it flying into the sky before it touches the roof. I hear it splash into the sea behind us. She has two salt balls left; I have four.
As she leaps off to a retaining wall beside the palace, I throw a ball at her feet to stop her. She catches the ball and turns to me. Now we both have three balls. “Peasprout, don’t! They’ll say the Empress Dowager made you do it.”
“You stop and I’ll stop.”
I fling myself in a triple-toe nightingale spin and try to seize the sack from her. I purposefully don’t curb my kick coming out of the spin so that I nick her shoulder with the edge of my skate blade to startle her. Doi drops a ball between us, leaving her two, but I crouch and kick the one she dropped aside with an inverted iron parasol sweep. I hear the ball splash far to the right. Doi whips away and hops on the rail leading to the Conservatory of Wu Liu.
She races away from me on the outer rails, over open water. If I can knock her into the water, all the salt balls will melt. I hope that the senseis will be merciful if I only attack a stretch of rail and not an actual structure.
Cricket’s modification of my skates is even more apparent here on the rails, which are carved to follow the natural grain. I shoot forward as if the pearl were propelling me.
As the length of rail between Doi and me closes and the path takes a sharp turn, I reach in my sack and fling one ball at the rail in front of her and one behind.
She leaps high and blocks them before they strike the rails, catching one and knocking one into the sea, giving her three balls and leaving me with just one. However, by the time she comes down, I’ve lunged forward and am there waiting for her. Before her skates touch the rails, I knee her into the sea.
Doi goes plummeting into the ocean with the sack. As it’s about to fall into the water, she kicks the sack so that her three remaining salt balls bump up. One ball comes flying back toward
