Doi does a flying golden dolphin flipper kick and flings herself up backward onto a rail. She tosses the last two salt balls into her cloak and wraps the fabric to form a sack around her body as she races forward.
The rails divide into two tracks, and we race alongside each other. Now that we both have two salt balls left, we’re willing to risk throwing them at the rails. We each hurl a ball at the track in front of the other and leap over the explosion of salt, vapor, and the pearl.
We shoot together in an arc toward the Principal Island, our arms and skates locked in a lucky-fisted palanquin formation. We each only have one salt ball left, and we can’t let the other steal it. Doi and I are hurtling toward the hard pearl, and we’ll be injured if we don’t break apart, but I don’t let go. She’ll have to be the one to let go.
Doi does, and she comes slinging out of the lock in a brilliant half spin that carves a crescent into the pearl. I land harder.
“Why are you doing this?” Doi says, her voice breaking. “Why are you trying to stop me?”
“Because I’m your friend!”
“I never wanted you as a friend!”
I don’t know what to say to this.
“Do you know,” she says, her chest heaving, “what it’s like to want something? And then learn that you can never have what you want? Do you have any idea how that feels?”
“Yes, I do! He was good and kind, and he made me feel something I’d never felt before, but I’m never going to see him again, because he never existed!”
Now Doi’s the one who doesn’t know what to say. She turns and skates hard, clutching her last salt ball.
I follow her through the Garden of Whispering Arches, but she’s starting to get away from me. With a pang, I remember the last time I was here with Hisashi—no, Doi. My knee flashes with pain. She continues to skate through and under and over the arches at full speed, and I’m starting to slow. I skate over an arch and my broken skate heel catches on some ornamental filigree. I nearly trip and drop my last ball.
She turns back, sees me, and cries, “Peasprout, not there!”
“Why?” I say. The tablet on the arch says that it’s the Arch of Buried Whispers. “What are you hiding here?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Haven’t you lied to me enough?”
“There’s something irreplaceable here!”
“Tell me!” I cry, and I swing my arm back, ready to send the ball flying at the arch.
Doi’s face crumples, then she skates over to the structure. With a nod, she indicates that I should skate to the other end and place my ear to it. She gently taps with the heel of her hand and the tips of her fingers in a rhythm.
One, two, three, lucky.
One, two, three, lucky.
One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, lucky.
Each beat of lucky ends with the gentle pressure of her full palm on the arch. And then the arch begins to ring with a high hum.
As I crouch next to it, I hear a voice in my ear, stale and thin, like a sound from long ago but bright and joyous. It’s whispered, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s a boy’s or a girl’s voice.
It says, “Today, on the thirtieth day of the sixth month, the last day of the Season of Spouts … I finally found what I thought I’d never find.”
I press my hand over my mouth. The voice is the same voice that I heard whispering into my ear from an arch so long ago. Like a voice from the dead. Which it might as well be. That boy who whispered words that lifted me so is gone now, forever.
I turn to look at Doi far away at the other end of the arch.
“See,” she says. “I told you. Something irreplaceable.”
And as the pearl rises from the ground in silent drifts around her, Doi falls to her knees, buries her face in her hands, and weeps.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
The senseis find both of us guilty of violating curfew. The only destruction we caused was to the outer rails. No structures were damaged. We could have been expelled and maybe arrested if there were.
The damage from the prior attacks can’t legally be used against Doi because it was covered by the contract for service with New Deitsu, so it cost Pearl Famous nothing. The academy suffered no legal harm and any claim it had was transferred to New Deitsu when they repaired the damage. The last thing that the Chairman wants is more attention to this matter, so he’s unlikely to press charges against his own daughter.
Our sentencing session is all smeared in my memory, but I remember many of the senseis being vicious toward us. I wrinkle into ash at the memory, because we deserved their anger. However, I also remember Sensei Madame Liao staring them down, stabbing her finger at clauses on the scrolls of academy rules. The other senseis raged when they couldn’t find a path around her logic. I recall Supreme Sensei Master Jio saying that when they attain sagehood, they’ll understand the justice in mercy, and Sensei Madame Yao punching a hole in a table, and at the end of it, Sensei Madame Liao proclaiming, “That is final!”
Our punishment is harsh but less harsh than we deserve. Doi and I are both required to surrender our skates for the rest of the term. We’ll both forfeit the last Motivation.
* * *
I am grateful that no mention is made of Cricket in all of this. No one suspects him of having any part in the vandal attacks. Further, his speaking in code to help me escape out of the Dian Mai protected
