Chapter Eighteen
“Gu Ma went out for the night?” I asked the cat. “Baba and Sai Ma too?”
Prince Cannonball glowered with his yellow eyes, then leapt into the garden.
I’d taken to hiding a plain and shapeless shift under the myrtle bushes for when I sneaked back home. I slipped it over my dress before I went into the house.
Only the lanterns outside the windows were lit, and the night air was warm and syrupy. Under the moonlight I started up the stairs for my room, when I noticed the parlor door was open.
Goosebumps prickled my skin. “Susu?” I called out. “Tingting?”
I padded toward the parlor just to close the door. As I grasped the doorknob, I spied Tingting on the floor, unconscious underneath the sighing hem of the curtains.
I didn’t get a chance to scream.
From the dark of the parlor, someone grabbed me by the neck. His hand clamped over my mouth, the cold kiss of a metal ring against my teeth.
I didn’t fight. I didn’t think. I simply vanished.
My intruder gasped. That was enough. I squirmed free and ran to the other side of the parlor. He was blocking the door, which left me with only one choice: the gun.
It had been pecking at the back of my mind ever since I found it behind Sai Ma’s records.
When next I exhaled, I had it. I pointed it high—at Mr. Zhou.
“Well, well,” he said, putting his hands up in mock surrender. Moonlight from outside the window illuminated his face. “This is quite the curiosity. Who knew there was a little devil in the Chan family?”
“I’m not a Chan.” A ridiculous thing to correct at a time like this, but I wasn’t thinking straight. “Get away from the door.”
“And if I don’t, will you do that trick of yours again? Will you . . . vanish?”
The space between heartbeats suddenly became an eternity. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He bared that half smile I’d seen before. “That gun’s a special one,” he said, venturing a step forward. “I told your aunt not to keep it, but she’s always been a sentimental little rat.”
He spat the last word with a laugh, as if it were a joke I was supposed to understand.
“Get back.” My finger found the trigger, cold and smooth. “I’ll shoot.”
Mr. Zhou called my bluff. He dared another step, speaking amiably.
“She owes me money. A great deal of money. I did your uncle a favor during the war, you see. Since she’s been remiss in paying me back, I am entitled to take something else.
I thought about that maid”—he didn’t even glance at Tingting—“but now you’ve intrigued me.
” His tone dripped with a bright and unsettling zeal.
“Little devil, does anyone else know what you can do?”
I shivered. I should have disappeared right then and there—or fired the gun. Life would have been very different if I had.
He was fast. In two steps, he obliterated the distance between us. He shoved me against the wall and wrested the gun out of my hand. As it landed on the carpet with a thud, I caught a flash of gold—the rings on his fingers. My only warning before he punched me in the face.
I threw myself to the side. Metal bit my skin, Mr. Zhou’s knuckles ripping into the cartilage and flesh of my left ear.
A scream tore out of my throat. I lay curled up on the floor waiting for the next blow to come, trying to breathe through the searing rush of pain to my head but also not to breathe so I could turn invisible.
The parlor was swaying, the corners of the room constricting into an impossible contortion.
Mr. Zhou loomed over me and yanked me up by my hair. No! I twisted away. I sucked in a mouthful of air, about to make myself disappear—
When the blast of a gunshot came.
It sounded near yet far away—my ears were in warring disagreement. It didn’t matter. All of a sudden I was seven years old again. I dropped to my stomach and pressed my face to Sai Ma’s carpet as if it were the grass of Tunglam’s hills.
I didn’t know how long I lay there choking on the peppery tang of gunpowder and cupping my ear in agony.
Ying. I couldn’t tell whether the voice was real or only imagined. It swam inside me, resonating off my bones as if I were underwater.
“Ying!”
Someone was shaking me. I looked up. Yi Gor was bent over my face, and there was blood on his fingers when he touched my cheek.
His mouth was moving, uttering words I could not hear over the throbbing in my skull.
I mustered a smile for my brother. Then I gave into the pain and let myself drift, the edges of my vision growing dark and darker—until I found another way to disappear from this world.
I’d never know whether the hearing in my left ear could have been saved, for Gu Ma refused to take me to a doctor. At the time, I didn’t care. I was about to lose something far more precious.
Two nights after Zhou Hin Kong came to collect his debts, my brother stood at the threshold of my room. It was late, the moon a silvery thread above the surrounding hills, and he carried a scruffy leather suitcase, the same one he had arrived with.
I jolted up on my bed. The movement sent a stab of heat to my ear, and I noted the pool of dried blood on my pillow.
“Where are you going?” I rasped.
“I’m leaving for Malaya.”
“Now?” I swayed, lightheaded from the numbing medicines Sai Ma had fed me. “Because of Zhou Hin—”
“Don’t ever mention that piece of shit again,” interrupted Yi Gor. “Never, do you hear me?”
In my daze, I thought he was asking me literally, so I tapped my left ear. The sound was quieter than it should have been, and blurred with the whir of the aircon upstairs. More disorienting than painful, which I supposed was a good sign. So yes, I could hear him. I just chose not to.
“Did you kill him?”
At the question, the anger drained from my brother’s face. “I pulled the trigger.”
My chest clenched. No wonder he looked awful.
No wonder Gu Ma had hung charms over my bed and in the hall for expelling ghosts and evil spirits.
My brother had killed a man. Thanks to him, the only person who’d known my secret—besides Mama—was dead.
Was it so horrible that I felt more relief than anything else?
“Are you running away from the police?”
“There’s no need. Gu Ma’s taken care of everything. It never happened.”
It was obvious the words had been drilled into him. “Then why are you going away? Malaya’s so far.”
“There’s a fortune to be made overseas in palm oil.” He ventured a step deeper into my room. “I’ve got friends who will help.”
Friends? Since when did Yi Gor have friends? This was when I realized how little I knew about his life. Although his room was across from mine, our conversations had been limited to grumbling about our stepmother. I only knew what he had deigned to share.
I peeled off my blanket. “Give me a few minutes to pack, then we can pick up Lily and—”
“You’re not coming.”
“What?”
“Don’t look at me like that. Someone has to stay in case Mama needs to leave China. You’ll be safe here—”
“Safe?” I raised my voice. “Did you just say I’d be safe here? After what happened?”
Yi Gor shrugged. “He was a lowlife gangster collecting a gambling debt.”
If there was one thing my brother and I had in common, we were bad at lying. “A lowlife gangster?” I repeated. “Then why aren’t the police here? Why do you have to go away?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me, damn it!” I slapped him angrily on the shoulder. How could my own brother protect Gu Ma over me? Then I understood.
“She’s bribing you to stay quiet.”
“Yut Ying—” Yi Gor started, but a ripple of guilt crossed his face, betraying him before he could finish. “It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Then get out,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You’re safe here,” he repeated, this time with a note of pleading. “You have a roof over your head, you have food, you have our family. It’s what Mama wanted for you.”
I refused to listen.
“Mama didn’t send you here to chase your dreams,” said Yi Gor. “She sent you here to be safe. I think you know this by now.”
Yes, I knew. I knew more than he could possibly imagine. She sent us here because she’d known, no matter how unpleasant life was in Hong Kong, that China would become mired in civil war and revolution. A life there, if we’d stayed, would have been far worse.
“She wanted us to be together,” I said through my teeth, “and now you’re leaving.”
“Once I make enough money, I’ll send for you. I’ll send for Mama, too.”
Lies. I twisted my hands as if that could lock the anger inside me. Yi Gor and I had never been close, yet these last few years living as Baba’s leftover children had bonded us. I never thought he would abandon me.
“I risked my life for you once,” I said. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t.”
I meant for the words to stab at his conscience, for them to twist in deep and maybe, just maybe change his mind. But Yi Gor merely hung his head, and he backed into the hall.
I would come to regret that I didn’t plead with him more, that I let those bitter words be the last between us. But in this moment, I was too young and too proud.
I shut the door on him without saying goodbye.