Chapter 37. Lin Imperial Island
My room was a prison. The balcony doors were locked. The door: locked. A little light shone in between cracks in the shutters and the doors, but for the most part the room was dark. Only two lamps, burning low. I lay in bed, my gaze on the ceiling. Something had happened down there in Ilith’s lair. The last thing I knew was Ilith’s face melting, and me trying to fix her. I strained to remember, but it was like trying to get a fishing line free from the rocks. Each tug only served to lodge the memory deeper from my reach.
No. There had been more. I looked to my hand, still clenched, hoping somehow that it had been a dream. But when I opened my fingers, Thrana’s bloody crane stared back at me. I didn’t know what hurt more – the guilt or the loss. Father had killed them, but I’d led him there.
And then the gasping realization returned to me: I was something he’d made.
It explained so much: how I didn’t remember before five years ago, my memories of the chrysanthemum-ceilinged room upon waking. I lifted my hands in front of my eyes, wondering how he’d accomplished this. Bayan had said he was growing people. Not just a person. Was I not the first?
I pressed my palm into my forehead. Bayan was a construct. My father had tried to change something within him the way I’d tried to change something in Ilith. Only it had gone all wrong. And then Bayan had shown up in my room, begging me to help him and to hide him.
We were both my father’s creations.
But up in Uphilia’s nest, there was a record of my birth. Then again, there was also a record of my death. If I was not Lin Sukai, if I was not the Emperor’s daughter, then what was I? I curled in on myself in the blankets, my belly a dark, rotting hollow. Did I have a will of my own? My father had made me for some purpose. Whatever his purpose was for me, I knew this: I did not wish to know it. I needed to get out.
I rose from the bed, though it was an effort. A heaviness lay in my chest as if I’d been weighed down with stones. Perhaps I had – what did I know of what I was? A mad laughter bubbled within me. I shoved it down, took a few deep breaths in and out. Think. Father might have made me, but I was not some halfwit. I went to the door, tried the handle again.
It was locked.
For the first time in my memory, I wished Bayan were here. We were more similar than I would have ever guessed. We could have helped one another. Perhaps I could have pried away at the shards inside of him, released him from my father’s service, found a way to unlock the memories my father had erased.
The memory machine.The growing people. I needed to know the rest.
I went to the balcony door, to the shutters. Locked. All of them. And each time I touched my hand to a door or a shutter, I could feel the weight of failure pressing in on me. I sat back on the bed, tempted to shrug off the jacket, the slippers, and to lie down again.
Maybe I’d already done this once before. I couldn’t be sure.
My heel touched something. I reached down and pulled the green-bound journal from beneath the bed. I’d hidden it carelessly, but my father rarely came to my room. Unsure of what to do and too frightened to try and fix myself, I flipped through it again.
This time, new details seemed to jump out at me. The trip to the lake in the mountains. The weather had been unseasonably good, I’d written. But if I’d been sixteen, then it would have been the dry season. The weather was nearly always good in the dry season. The sea snake that had bitten me. I’d written that I’d been swimming in the bay. The first time I’d read it, I’d assumed I’d meant the harbor – but why would I write the bay when everyone referred to Imperial harbor as a harbor? And I’d made some reference to the fish my mother cooked. Why would my mother, the Emperor’s consort, cook fish when she had servants to do it? I’d thought when I’d first read it that perhaps my mother enjoyed cooking and so went to the kitchen sometimes to indulge herself. All these assumptions I’d made because I’d read this journal wanting it to be some record of past memories. There hadn’t been a sickness; I hadn’t lost my memories. I’d only begun to form them five years ago, which was when my father must have made me.
This journal, though in my handwriting, wasn’t mine. I wanted it to be mine; I wished for it with all the fierce longing of a thwarted child. Without it, I had even less an idea of who I was. But then my father had been pleased when I’d responded with the answers I’d found inside the journal. Who had written it? Who was it that my father hoped I’d be? I wanted to find out… but the door was locked.
I hugged the journal to my chest, hunching over the edge of the bed. My slippers and jacket felt suddenly pointless. I wasn’t going anywhere.
A knock sounded at the door and then it creaked open. I shoved the journal back beneath the bed. Father hobbled into the room on his cane, a bowl of steamed rice with chicken and mustard greens in his other hand. I watched him as he went to the desk and set the food upon it. And then he looked at me and sighed. “I’m sorry it must be this way.”
I kept my expression carefully neutral. “What way?”
“You must understand, by the time I figured out what to do, my wife – she was too long gone. I’d burned her body, sent her soul to the heavens. So I had to make do with what I could find. I’ll find a way to fix it,” he said, as though I’d said nothing at all. “My memory machine will fix you.”
I wanted to scream at him. What was he talking about? Was making me something he’d discussed with his late wife? The only thing that needed fixing was what he’d broken within me back in Imperial’s streets. I tried another question. “Why won’t you let me go?”
A flicker passed across his face like the shadowy wings of a moth. “You shouldn’t have done that – rewriting my constructs. You did well. I didn’t notice until after Uphilia. That was when I knew you’d go for Ilith. But Ilith is complicated. You still almost managed it. It will take me some time to fix her properly.” He looked me in the eye and even in that moment I couldn’t hate him.
He’d broken other things in me before he’d killed Numeen and his family. This time I didn’t care if he saw the sorrow on my face. “I wanted you to be proud of me. The way a father would be proud of his daughter. I have done everything you’ve asked. I’ve done more than you’ve asked. And still you favored Bayan over me.”
He turned my desk chair around and lowered himself into it. The woven reeds of the seat creaked at his weight. He waved a dismissive hand as though all my years of grief were a thing to be wafted away like smoke. “You always did better with competition. And you see, I was right. You found a way to steal from me. You found a way to learn the things I’d forbidden you. You learned them better than Bayan.”
He’d known. All the times I’d thought I’d been clever, that I’d found a way around his rules, he had been watching me, silently approving. My stomach dropped.
He was watching me, nodding as though he knew what I was thinking. “You, I can forgive, as long as we get your memories fixed and get the proper ones in there. You’ve gotten better, but you’re not quite there yet. But those who helped you had to pay the price.”
My head ached and my eyes burned. All of my resolve to give him nothing, to show him none of my feelings, drowned in the tide of my anger. “And Bayan? Have you killed him too?”
“Why would I do that? He’s not the final version, but he’s useful.” He rose abruptly and strode over to me, his cane tapping against the floor.
I clenched my hands into fists. I should have punched him, I should have wrapped my small hands around his neck. But I couldn’t. I sat on the bed and just watched him, hoping he read the anger in my eyes.
“Lin,” he said, and he reached out a hand to touch my cheek.
I hated myself for leaning into his touch. All I’d wanted was his approval, his love. I’d wanted to feel like a daughter, like part of a family. But there was something strange in his touch, the way his fingers trailed across my cheek.
“I’m so sorry it has to be this way.”
“Why did you have to kill them? They never hurt you.” I thought of Numeen’s hesitation to help me, his quick hands at the forge, the way he’d brought me into his home and let me eat dinner with the people he cared about the most. All of that was gone because of me. Because of my father. “I hate you.” The words were like fire on my tongue, roiling out from the furnace that was my belly.
“No, you don’t, little one.” The tenderness in his voice confused me, extinguishing the other words I might have said and leaving my tongue only tasting ash.
He turned to leave, and I let him. I couldn’t reconcile my feelings with my inability to move, to do anything. I was like a doll who laments the way a child moved her limbs. And then the door shut, and I was up from the bed. I was running to the door; I was pounding my fists against it. The skin on my hands numbed and the bones beneath ached. I should have hit him. I should have killed him.
At last I sagged, cradling my fists in my lap. The right memories? What to my father were the right memories?
The journal. The memories in there from what I’d thought was my younger self. Someone had hidden the journal in the library, and it hadn’t been my father. Not many people would have had access to the library. My father, Bayan, the constructs. I thought back farther to a time before I existed.
I went for the journal again, my fingers trembling so hard I could barely open it. Somewhere, there had to be another clue; I just hadn’t bothered to look closely enough. I peeled through every page. And then I noticed, on the back cover, the edge of paper glued to it. The corner was curled up a little, loose. I tugged at it, peering beneath.
Someone had tucked another piece of paper there. I pulled it free and unfolded it.
They look at me and all they see is a young girl of unremarkable beauty. But they’re all wrong about me. Someday I will be more than this. Someday, the world will know me. Nisong will rise.
I dropped the secret note. I knew the name, though I knew it in conjunction with another. Nisong. Nisong Sukai.
My mother.
Bile mixed into the taste of my tears. I remembered the sad condition of my father’s room, how he wouldn’t let the servants touch any of her things. He never wanted to talk to me about my mother. He’d had all the portraits of her destroyed. I’d thought him fueled by grief, but now I could glean other motives. They explained his experiments, the way he’d shut out human advisers and most of his staff.
He hadn’t discussed the making of me with his wife; he was trying to make me into his wife. He must have used that memory machine on me, hoping somehow to instill me with my mother’s memories. I wasn’t his daughter. She’d died, just as the records said. Of course he’d never loved me. I was a vessel for someone else – a secret, an experiment.
I curled into a ball and wept.