Chapter 10
The Girls Are (No Longer) Fighting
HARPER
I wait until I’m locked in my room to fall apart. It begins with a shudderingly deep breath, then progresses rapidly into an acute realization that my lungs are burning and my face is numb.
‘Holy shit,’ I whisper. Tears sour the back of my tongue, tangled emotion punching down my chest, grabbing my insides and squeezing.
It’s April the third.
A sob rips from my throat, unbidden. No way of telling how hard I’m crying until I choke on my tears and cough, kneeling on the floor like a marionette snipped.
You have to go.
Sorrow hammers my head dizzy, and my eyes burn. The world drifts outwards, further from reach with every gasping breath.
It takes everything to tug my hoodie off and rummage through my cupboard when my body drifts before me in a haze, my fingers weak. Still, I find the T-shirt first, threadbare sky-blue-and-white Nike that ripples gently over my thighs.
It was Papa’s shirt. It doesn’t smell like him any more, and I’m okay with that because I’m grown up, even if I’m still wiping my tears on its sleeve as I reach out for the necklace.
Mama’s locket has a picture of the three of us, shiny where my fingers have traced fervent paths. When I put it on, it clinks beside my Fox medallion. Both chains tangle round my throat until I adjust them and slip the medallion under my shirt and out of sight.
By the time my cheeks have cooled, and my tears have slowed enough to well in my eyes without falling, it’s half past midnight and the house feels hollow and haunted.
I steal across the living room and into the lift. Just before the doors close, someone comes crashing through.
Tia brushes invisible lint off her shirt for a second before glancing over at me. ‘Going for your night thing?’ Her hair falls around her face limp and wet, her cheeks pink with the afterglow of a hot shower.
Not tonight. Not after everything today. Not after this. ‘I know I say this a lot to you, but I actually mean it as a threat now: leave me alone.’
Maybe Tia hears the warble in my voice as I fight to sound nonchalant, or the way my tone verges on breaking, or how that last word squeaks.
Either way, she edges back, leaving both emotional and physical space between us.
We exit the lift at the car park, and I make a beeline for a company-licensed motorcycle before Tia can say anything more.
In the time it takes me to calm down, the sky joins me in mourning.
As I peel out of the car park, rain splits the clouds and water slews into my collar, seeping through my windbreaker and into Papa’s shirt.
I shiver, but press on into the driving storm.
Damp hair tickles the back of my neck, and the visor turns spotty with rain.
The columbarium is closed when I get there, so I hop the fence.
I hadn’t had the time to bring alcohol like I usually do, so today there’s no clinking glass to disrupt my quiet landing on the other side.
There’s also no janitor to greet me at the columbarium as usual, in between setting up tables for offerings and clearing joss sticks off the floor.
White plastic flowers jut out from waxed-over metal tubes, sprouting between rows and rows of marble-tiled nooks.
Thousands of ancestors stare me down as I walk a path I can navigate in my sleep.
After the accident, I’d come every day. I’d come so much that I knew each janitor’s shift, and witnessed more grieving families in a month than I had in my life.
Lightning illuminates the dusty faces of my parents, and thunder rumbles when I kneel to put them at eye level.
‘Hi, Mama.’ I trace my mother’s face, then the engravings of her Chinese name in red. ‘Hi, Papa.’
Swirling rainwater washes ash from offerings and grime from neglect around my shoes, but I ignore it.
‘I didn’t get to buy new flowers today, but I promise I’ll be here at Qing Ming Jie to give you some, okay?
I know I missed yesterday, but it’s been busy.
I got my leadership assignment. It’s . . . not going well.’
I mix my English with Cantonese, finding the dialect only a little clumsy from disuse, and pretend not to register the answering silence.
‘No, yeah, I’m really trying to trust myself on this one.’ I pluck absentmindedly at the plastic flowers I’d left them last time. ‘But I have it handled – I promise. I’m fine. Don’t worry, I—’
I choke on a sob. ‘Wo gua zhu nei,’ I whisper, and my voice sharpens into a squeak as I cry.
I miss you.
I cry until my head spins, until my shirt’s slimy with snot. The sharp engravings in the columbarium’s marble imprint painfully into my fingertips, branding my parents’ names into my skin like cold fire.
Let me take you with me, I want to beg. I miss you and I’m lonely without you.
Everyone in the clan had said my parents were gone too young – died during a standard heist. Part of our car had exploded amidst a high-speed car chase with the Sentinels.
I remember the sound. I remember the searing metal, the debris lodged in my back.
I remember the smell of burning flesh, I remember crawling out on my elbows as the world rang and the night sky turned black with smoke.
Then there was another Fox coming up behind me, lifting me off the road and telling me I needed to move.
The Foxes had retrieved my parents before the Sentinels could, but the damage had been done.
I used to think the car blew up because the Sentinels attacked it, and I’d hated them so deeply.
But I recovered the dashcam, and the Sentinels hadn’t opened fire that night.
The car had combusted of its own accord – faulty, Ah Ma had surmised, and it left a taste so bitter in my mouth that I hadn’t been able to sit in a car for months afterwards.
The back seat made me claustrophobic, and much later, when I grew old enough for the driver’s seat, I chose a motorcycle licence instead.
Back then, Niko had also offered the internship, and Kiran floated the idea of taking me into the penthouse.
They didn’t know they’d chased my parents to their deaths, but they’d known I lost my parents in a car crash.
I was almost seventeen – fresh graduate from the academy, smart but lost, and they’d made exceptions in the internship programme so I was the only intern allowed to stay with them.
And after Mama’s death, the Elders began considering me for leadership, with the spot freshly vacant.
I took the chance – I had a promise to keep.
But, as much as I loved my clan, the wound, so freshly scored by my parents’ deaths, was too sore to stay with the Elders.
Plus, I was the first Fox with magic that the Sentinels let so close, and the clan saw an opportunity for me.
So I picked the Sentinels, both for myself and for the Foxes.
And here I am, straddled between two families, part of both and belonging to neither.
By the time my sniffling dies down, the rain outside has steadied to a heavy drizzle, and water rises over the soles of my shoes. My toes squish like moss in my socks, and I draw my phone from my pocket to watch the clock hit three a.m.
‘Bye, Mama, Papa. See you soon. Sorry I was late today.’ I lean down to kiss the cold marble surface, and trail my fingers over their pictures before I leave.
Rain battered my windbreaker sodden a long time ago, a wet chill setting in and chattering my teeth through cruel gusts. It numbs my skin and throbs through my bones.
I welcome the pain – it’s my only tether amidst my storm-drowned senses, and I stuff my hands in my pockets as I hurry to my motorcycle.
But when I turn the key it stays silent, a shamed traitor.
‘Crap,’ I mutter, and I try again. ‘Crap. Not now.’
I kick the side of the motorcycle and fumble for my phone to call Maria.
The call goes straight to voicemail. Who else? Niko? I don’t want to disturb them. There’s only one person who might possibly still be awake, and I chew the inside of my mouth as I tap the contact.
‘Kit?’ Tia’s voice is tiny through the rain, the drop of a needle against the roaring torrent.
‘Are you still out?’ I have to shout to be heard over the rain. ‘My ride broke down.’
A pause. ‘I can be there in half an hour if you give me your coordinates.’
‘I’ll text you.’
‘Okay.’ The line beeps. My mind kicks into gear. There’s no need for Tia to know I’m at the columbarium in case she puts two and two together and realizes why I’m here in the first place. I don’t need nor want that pity right now, and especially not from Tia.
So I give her the name of a bus stop nearby instead, and begin my swift jog over once I’ve sent the text.
The run warms me up temporarily, but for a tropical country, Singapore is frigid at night.
I stand tight against the bus shelter, listen to the trees whip around in the storm, my shoes squelching in the growing puddles.
The shelter’s roof barely staves off the rain, and the wind wicks heat off my skin the second my body tries to regulate itself.
Overhead, the fluorescent light flickers weakly.
By the time a white car rolls up to the stop, I’m shivering again, hands tucked under my elbows.
The car window rolls down.
Tia’s eyes are wide, her jaw parted, and she scans me with a scrutiny tinged by disbelief. ‘You’re soaked, are you okay? Get in.’
The air conditioning is blasted all the way up. It hits me as I slide in, my butt soaking the luxury pleather seat.
Tia glances down at the rapidly expanding puddle I leave, but she doesn’t comment. Her eyes trace the road ahead, obscured by sheets of rain, her shoulders tense.
‘Bunny,’ I try to say when we hit a red light. My teeth chatter too hard and the word distorts in a garbled mutter.
‘What?’ Tia glances over, and baulks. ‘Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. Give me a second.’ She switches off the air conditioning and grabs around in the back of the car until she produces a towel. ‘Don’t worry – it’s clean.’