Chapter 2 Picture a Girl
PICTURE A GIRL
Thirty-three years ago …
Picture a girl, floating in a storm-churned ocean.
Her arms hang limp, eyes lidded and unresponsive. She has a worker’s build, strong all over, hands blooming with calluses. Dark hair fans out in the water, forming a cloud around her face. A thin bracelet with a tiger charm encircles one wrist.
The current stirs and swirls. She does not.
Dead things surround her. A few drowned men drift in the water, limbs rigid and possessions scattered. The broken remnants of freshly sunken boats lie half buried on the ocean floor. History is eroding down here, rusting in the mud.
Beneath the water, her eyes open.
So does her mouth. She is drowning, floundering. Splayed hands paddle, sturdy legs kicking her upward. The instinct to live is strong.
She breaks the ocean surface with a gargling shriek. How long was she underwater? How did she get here? Questions without answers. She needs to get out of the ocean before she dies. The shore isn’t far, visible as a hump of indistinct trees. She swims.
And swims. Against the surf, against the tide. It drags her out and she rides the waves, knowing instinctively how to work with the ocean’s pull. This surprises her, to find how well she navigates water. She must be experienced at swimming.
Soon enough, the girl slogs onto the beach in the dead of night, feeling raw for reasons she can’t explain, yet knowing she has done a terrible … what? What is it? Something she does not want to remember and can’t think about. Not yet.
There is water inside of her, a lot of it. She spends a while vomiting it up, chest aching. But at the end of that ache is air, sweet and clear.
More water pours from her eyes. Not ocean water, though it tastes of salt. She is crying and can’t stop. You can’t cry under the sea without drowning. Who said that to her? Someone now lost. The crying only ends when her dehydrated body runs out of tears.
Thoughts and memories contradict each other inside her head and she can’t sift through the confusion. Slumped up against an abandoned fishing boat, entirely alone, she dares risk thinking about the memories which frighten her.
Names, first. She must have one, is sure she did once. She can’t recall it, though, which is scary. It is then that she notices the injuries along her forearms. In the stress of everything happening, those details have only just registered.
Firstly, there is the scar. On her left side runs a branching mark, from shoulder to wrist. It looks like a lightning bolt etched into her skin and it is violently red, still raw to the touch.
Secondly, there are the words. On her right arm, someone has scratched characters in a red weal along the skin. Just a simple name: Chen Mei Chi.
She traces the scratched characters, puzzled. No idea why she’d have her own name etched into her skin like a wound. Or who made that wound in the first place, or why she can’t remember more.
She examines the gold tiger charm on its plain bracelet chain. The sort of thing given to mark the zodiac of one’s birth year. But what year is it currently? That’s the real question. If she knew that, she might know her own age.
As for the rest, she has little enough to go on. She was swimming … where? A green place, on the ocean. An island, yes. Mei Chi can picture it, just, though the details slip away when she tries to focus on them.
A raging storm.
A girl who loved the sea.
A statue, standing in darkness.
The something she did, which she should not have done.
That is it. The full extent of her fractured memories.
Exhaustion is conquering her, and she can’t keep awake much longer. It feels as if she has been swimming for decades without rest. Maybe tomorrow will bring more answers. She lifts up the overturned boat and crawls beneath it, curling up.
Confused and exhausted, Mei Chi slides into an uneasy sleep.
Her first night is a difficult one. Initially, her dreams are a jumble of drowning-related things and screaming faces of sailors. Regular nightmare stuff.
Then, without warning, she wakes abruptly. Something is wrong. Instead of sand, she lies on a bed of lotus blossoms and curling vines, as if she has appeared in the middle of a forest. It is stuffy and hot in here.
Lifting up the boat, she finds the beach is a bleak landscape; the vines exist only under the boat.
The beach is now a place where the desert meets the sea, ash-white shore on one side (no trees, nothing for miles) and black water on the other.
The sand rattles like bones and the waves are turgid, barely moving, as if the water is too heavy for currents.
A woman stands ankle-deep in the surf, hair blowing in a wind that Mei Chi cannot feel.
Her skin is the color of light jade, her nails unnaturally long and sharp-edged.
She wears rags, the fabric drenched; rivulets of water run down her arms and drip from her limbs.
Strands of kelp wrap around her ankles, and her feet are caked in sand grains. The scent of brine overpowers.
The woman is speaking now. Or rather, she is screaming—the same phrase, over and over. It’s oddly difficult to hear because the air is thick, distorting and muting all noise.
“I can’t hear you,” Mei Chi says. Her words are distorted, too. She walks closer to the green-hued woman. Movement is difficult; it’s like trying to wade in thick jelly.
“SEA … SISTER!” The woman cups her hands around a wind-chapped mouth to holler. “SEA! SISTER!” Her eyes are impossible to see, hidden by her hair.
“Sea Sister?” Mei Chi says, with an uneasy spark of recognition. She should know the answer to her own question. The fact that she doesn’t sends a thrill of panicked anxiety down her spine. “Who is Sea Sister?”
The green-hued woman throws back her head. The hair streams back from her face and her eyes are solid orbs, glistening and dark, like a sea lion’s. Inhuman, yet oddly beautiful.
Then she lunges for Mei Chi, who yelps and leaps backward.
There is no ground behind her, though. Only blackness. She steps into that blackness and falls forever and a day, while the green-hued woman shrieks from an ever-growing distance.
In the shadow of an overturned boat, Mei Chi wakes with a gasp. Just a dream.
Even so, she bursts into tears. Outside, the rainstorm has taken a turn for the worse, battering the hull. The noise is tremendous. Eventually, she drifts to sleep again, and this time the night lets her rest.
In the morning, her already scant memories feel even more shaky and uncertain, like something she merely imagined.
Mei Chi (if that is her name) eases out of the overturned boat into a brand-new day.
The beach is quiet, which strikes her as odd.
There should be fishermen going about their business; this boat should be in use.
Fishermen. So. She knows about their habits, their life. That only amplifies her frustration with what is unknown. It’s as if seeing things she should know helps trigger the memories, but she can’t summon them of her own volition.
It’s too hard to think; the distractions are mounting. She is hungry, but has no food. She is thirsty, but the ocean isn’t drinkable. Find those things first. Once she is safe and warm, that will be a good time to examine the half-remembered echoes which fill her with inexplicable fear.
The scratched name on her arm stings as she walks; she pulls down her tattered sleeve to cover it, and tries not to think too hard about anything for now.
There is an overgrown trail, leading away from the beach and through clusters of trees. Mei Chi follows it until she emerges through leafy foliage at a small village. A few houses, some chickens. If anyone is awake, they are still inside.
Well, except one. A man is crouched down, trying to fix a broken fence. Next to him are barrels which look to be full of rainwater; Mei Chi’s thirst intensifies.
She hobbles over. The man stiffens at her approach, turning to regard her with a wary expression.
“Good morning, uncle.” Her voice is raspy and creaky; she tries to clear her throat in vain.
The man glowers. “What do you want?” He uses no honorific for her, she notices.
“Do you have any water?” she asks, inching closer. Looking pointedly at the barrels. “I am lost, and very thirsty.”
“Lost? What do you mean? Did you come from the city?”
“No,” she says, unsure which city he means. She adds, on impulse, “But I am trying to get there. Do you know which way I should walk?” A city sounds more promising than jumping back into the ocean.
His lip curls. “Are you mad, or just stupid?”
She recoils. “What do you mean?”
“Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese months ago,” he says, half snarling. “They called it Black Christmas. You must know that.”
She shakes her head emphatically. “I … have been living on the islands.” She intends it as a half lie to cover her ignorance, but it feels oddly like the truth in her mouth.
“The islands?! That’s very lucky. Did you sail through that storm, then?”
“I think so,” she says, in a small voice. “The boat turned over. I managed to swim to shore.”
“Lucky you, twice over. Anyway, Hong Kong belongs to the Japanese troops, now.” He spits on the ground. “You must be insane or a simpleton to think of going there.” His eyes narrow. “Or maybe, you work for the Japanese. Is that what you are? One of their collaborators?”
“I am not anything like that!” She begins to cry. “I am just lost and confused!”
Far from being moved by her plight, he seems alarmed by her neediness, her vulnerability. “We cannot help you, we cannot help you! Go away, little miss!” And he shoves her bodily down the road.
She resists, just trying to keep her balance. He shoves her again and something dark within her flares in sudden fury.
Catch him.
She snatches his wrists.
Hold him.
“Let go of me, kid!” he says, full of revulsion and anger.
Drag him to the water and—
One moment her fingers are tight around his wrists and the next she is hauling him to a nearby rain barrel, oddly strong despite being shorter and smaller than this grown man.
—keep him down until his blood is salt and his eyes are food for the fishes—
He’s yelling and thrashing and still, somehow, she wrestles him down and shoves his head into the barrel. The villager screams horribly with his head underwater, bubbles churning as he expends the air from his lungs.
—and there is nothing left of him but empty skin.
“Stop her!” People are bursting out of nearby houses, shouting and pointing as they sprint to her victim’s rescue.
Mei Chi gasps and releases the man, backing away so fast she stumbles and nearly falls. What is she doing? Why did she do that? There are no good answers to that question. She simply felt a terrible urge, heard those awful intrusive thoughts, and acted on them.
“Demon!” The man has pulled his head out of the water barrel, face bright red and streaming with water. “Demon bitch!”
Villagers are converging, furious and frightened. Mei Chi can’t blame them. She’s furious and frightened, too. At herself, as much as them.
There are thick woods, not far from here. Perhaps she can find safety there. Mei Chi flees, cringing at the villagers’ shouting.