Scale-Bright (4 page)

Her phone cold in her hand, she dials Hau Ngai's number. It rings and rings. Then she taps out a quick message. With a tiny chirp it's gone; she can't even recall what desperate, garbled thing she sent.

The man is in the chair opposite hers, colossal. He rests his foot on his knee; he annexes the dimensionality of the chair, of the space around him. A scent of woodsmoke and lingzi wafts from him, medicinal, unpleasant.

Julienne pushes her own chair away from the tiny round table between them. "I'm waiting for a friend. But I'll find somewhere else."

"You are in mortal peril."

She grips her bag and cobbles together something like a smile, something like politeness. "I appreciate the warning—"

"Where is the snake?"

"I don't know who you're talking about."

"You gave her aid after I wounded her. It is not good to be friends with demons. They're treacherous creatures, able to think only of base needs and hunger for human flesh. Youthful flesh is best of all and their favorite."

A hard pressure against her neck. It moves—but looking down she sees nothing, even though she hears it, semi-precious stone beads clicking against each other. Constricting. "She hurt me. If I knew where she is I would tell you."

He looks down at his Rolex idly. His lips are not moving, even though his voice is clear to her, headset-close. "It is impious to lie to a holy man. You met her a second time and made no move to bring her to justice."

This time she won't be able to fool her body; this time she will hyperventilate.

Fire alarms shatter the air. He looks away.

An unveiling of colors passes through her.

* * *

The chair falls away. There is no chair. The chair is bamboo painted peridot instead of upholstery. There is—

Arms clasp her from behind, hold her upright in lieu of the bones in her that have eeled away, leaving her only fat and epidermis tethered to screaming blood.

"You better be worth the trouble," a voice hisses. She is spun around.

The woman. The viper. She wears a choker today, a stone furled in its center. Sapphire, Julienne recognizes with an eye Mary-trained to assess cut and transparency, carat and price.

The snake leans close. Her tongue runs slowly along Julienne's lower lip; her teeth gently test, then press in for a bite. Long incisors, razorish. Blood is not drawn, but it easily could have been. "Now you can stay here," she says against Julienne's mouth, "if only for a while."

Under Julienne's feet the floor settles. Around her tables and chairs are wicker, are bamboo, freshly vegetal. The marble tiles have gone from beige to black; the carpet has disappeared.

Chatter in Gunwa and Ciuzauwa. The lobby is busier and fuller than she remembers from minutes ago. Chandeliers hang low, heavy with golden Buddha hands languorously conversing in sign language. The indoor fountain has frozen solid, leaping waters crystallized midair.

The serpent takes Julienne's elbow, steering. Julienne thinks that there is something wrong with the other guests; it's only later that her mind composes together the ordinary faces and the extra eyes, the horns.

Only one receptionist is present. Her hair is profuse white gossamer and through the veil of it she peers at them. "This one has an immortal's touch on her, little sister."

"I know. I promise she won't be trouble."

"As long as that holds true I'll permit her in this house." The woman blinks eyelashes albino-pale. "I'll have a tisane sent up."

The elevator at least is ordinary, backlit buttons and metal. Julienne clutches at her phone and wonders if it still functions, wonders why Hau Ngai hasn't called back.

A key is produced. The room is polished mahogany and camphor, a platform bed draped in green, a writing desk with a Jikqing set and a laptop thin as a tabloid, futuristic-sleek. A bedside lamp sheds an aquarium light, sea-shallows with the movements of coral colonies that don't exist but which nevertheless daub the walls red, polyps and petals. There's no fish tank.

Julienne leans against the desk. A stray business card. On it, between lines of abstract design, nestles the name
Olivia Ching
twice, bilingual. "Is this you?"

"Call me that," she says, noncommittal to the idea of ownership. "Did you lead that madman to me on purpose?"

Her teeth lock tight against one another. "There'd have been no madman if you hadn't gotten me involved in—whatever this is."

"I just saved you from certain torture. He'd have flayed answers out of you piece by piece, hung you from some roof by the hair, and made taxidermy out of you." Olivia stands over her and though they are of a height there is a sense the snake is
more
. "You should show some gratitude."

"I would've been fine if I never met you." Julienne pushes the other woman away. Too close. That tongue running across her lips. "Why should I do anything for you?"

Olivia throws up her hands. "Why are you so selfish? Do you always think only of yourself and what will profit you?"

"Selfish," Julienne repeats quietly and realizes, jarred, that she is imitating Hau Ngai's tone. "Because I saved you and you fed off me knowing it could have been my death. Because I've kept quiet from my aunt about the other night so she won't hunt you down."

The serpent glares. "It wouldn't have
killed
you and what few years you lost have already been restored by a god. What is it that you want, then? Such fortune that you may move through the world without resistance, such wealth that you may eat shark-fins and bird-nests gilded in gold, such charm that you may enthrall goddesses with a glance, and have them lie down each night to card ivory fingers through your hair?"

She stares at Olivia and can think only to say, "What makes you think I like women that way?"

"What? It's obvious. The unpurified mortal body is like a demon's—a collection of appetites. So what'll it take to get me an audience with Lady Seung Ngo? Say what it is that your heart longs for, what your thoughts are bent toward every waking minute."

To be well, to know confidence, to have someone like Hau Ngai—just a little like, more human and less legend—for her own. "I told you, Auntie Seung Ngo isn't in Hong Kong. She's traveling. Her wife…"

"No," Olivia snaps. "I refuse to court death. The monk's eager to exterminate all my genus, but at least he is much limited. The archer is armed with both insanity and almost limitless might. Once she's set her sight on a quarry she
never
relents. A lover of unprovoked butchery."

Julienne tries to reconcile that. "She's a very composed person."

"Most natural-born killers are."

Her nerves are finding their level. She can be reasonable and logical again and this woman's equal, not a trembling senseless thing in Olivia's arms. "Why do you need Auntie Seung Ngo?"

A frown indents Olivia's forehead. "You know the story of the white snake?"

There is a small-screen adaptation every few years, cinematic now and again; of course she does, though—"You're the green serpent." The younger one, the one who lives on past the story's end. Julienne glances at the business card. The surname. It should have been obvious. It would have been, if she accepted that all the legends—or at least most—are rooted deeper in fact than history textbooks suggest.

"Yes." Olivia looks away; the set of her shoulders loosens and the line of her spine bows. The clear, unlined skin is suddenly a veneer, seeming youth spread thin over an accumulation of centuries. Julienne has seen this in her aunts, at odd moments. "You'll have seen the movies and the operas. Her life and mine reenacted for your amusement. All the shame, all the mistakes, all the failures. Why not."

"I've seen classroom plays of the suns falling down, of the girl who flew to the moon."

"That's different. Their story's just an outline to mortals and even much of that is understood wrong. There's none of the—personal, the details. And they are together now, aren't they? They got their happy ending."

Olivia draws the curtains. The sky outside roils. Planets hover far too close to be true, a ringed giant that might be Saturn, a red bonfire that might be Mars. What wing between them are not birds, too many appendages, not all of them feathered. Julienne can't see clearly; despite the glare there are more shadows than light.

"This is banfaudou," Olivia says. "The place between. From here there are gates back to your world, and paths to mine."

"Not heaven?"

"They really don't teach you anything. There's no way there. It's not topographical, or don't you think your astronauts and the like would've found Lady Seung Ngo, the woodsman, or the rabbit when they made lunar landings? The immortals' realm is open to the pure, the divine." The snake shrugs. "Not that I especially want to see it."

Julienne inches closer to the window. The mountain's shape is different, too jagged, the wrong shade. All white, as if in eternal winter. Down below, on what should be Salisbury Road, there are cars, but there are also rickshaws and palanquins, and horses with peacock tails. "Why my aunt? Why not—I don't know—Gunyam?"

"She already aided us once, and she isn't so much compassion as... never mind. I just thought Lady Seung Ngo would sympathize, since she was trapped on the moon." Olivia grimaces. "Not quite the same as what binds my sister. And having been married to the archer for so long she probably hates all things demonic by now."

"I don't think she does, she's her own person. You're wrong about Aunt Hau Ngai. She's—kind, in her own way, and I'll speak to her. For what that's worth."

"You will?"

"As soon as I'm in range of a cell tower."

Olivia lets out a harsh breath. "I misjudged you. You probably won't sway her any more than you will sway those stars, but it does mean something. For now you should remain here; the monk's marked you, and he has no qualms about harming the innocent."

"My aunt's… going to take it the wrong way. If I disappear."

Pained amusement creases Olivia's mouth. "I'll find a courier. Until then, do you want to see more of banfaudou?"

* * *

The tickets are old paper stained gray and pink, hints of other writings and printings that have gone before, and Olivia pays for them with oblong turquoise chips. She also kisses the little girl who takes the fare on the forehead. No one seems a stranger to Olivia, who calls every woman a sister or auntie, every man a brother or uncle, as she switches dialects to exchange gossip flying fast and thick.

Julienne bites her knuckles and tries to pretend she is in a normal auditorium, a normal Hong Kong where people don't have so many eyes apiece, where the woman sitting one tier down doesn't have dragonfly wings folded around her shoulders. She pretends that, and stares regardless—she can't not, at blue capillaries that as on a leaf catch light, the wing-membrane thinner than a whisper of glass.

The woman peers over her shoulders, eyes bulbous, all black facets. "Human girl, do you want to touch them?"

Olivia extricates herself from an old man telling her about some wedding, some sage of heaven ensnared by a tortoise. "Yunyan, you say that to every girl."

"Oh, but this time I mean it." The woman smiles with a small yellow mouth. "She can touch me anywhere. Delicious girl, I'll look more human for you if you like."

Julienne's cheeks warm. "I'm flattered. But."

"Don't, Yunyan. Have some decorum; you know how mortals are."

The other woman's laugh rises deep from the throat. "This coming from one who seduced hundreds of country girls and left them crying."

"Please. I was perfectly decorous with them."

The ceiling and walls are orange, lobster shells stitched and pinned into place by gleaming rivets, and jellyfishes hang upside down to provide the function of lamps. Julienne shifts her feet uncomfortably; her heels keep sinking into a carpet of seaweeds. Astoundingly it does not smell; a faint hint of salt but nothing more, as though every dead lobster has been scrupulously cleaned, as though each tendril of living seaweed has been scolded and bred into giving off no stench. Up in the back where seats cost round perfect pearls instead of black-veined turquoise, long slender arms extrude where the armrests should have been.

Lights dim. A white face appears, powdered operatically and crowned likewise with a wig elaborately coiffed, a headpiece heavier than any neck should be able to bear. Unseen cymbals ring; the face opens its mouth and spits firecrackers, loud as New Year, that leave a cloud of pale smoke.

What follows is a strange play, in the bombast of operas but not in Gunwa, Gwongdongwa, or any language Julienne recognizes. The curtains never rise, a backdrop of unrelieved black; the actors appear erratically, glimpses of sleeves and faces in profile, slippers and horns and tails. There is a sinuous meeting of lovers, whose costumes mark them as women, always negotiated from opposite ends of the stage. They sing against instruments, they sing against silence, and leave twisted scrolls for each other center-stage.

It is stark and Julienne doesn't comprehend a single word. Her breath is pulled out of her chest even so, the tempo of her pulse yoked to the play's.

Afterward, when applause submerges the auditorium, Julienne asks Olivia, "Why did you take me to see this?"

"Didn't you like it?"

She puts her hand against her sternum. "I did, of course I did."

Olivia's features lie half in shadow. "Good. So you will see that we aren't just animals." She weaves her way out, fluidly between seats and seat-arms, through gaps in the crowd. Julienne scrambles to keep up.

1.4

The moment Julienne is pulled out of this world, it empties Houyi's senses, leaving her blind and deaf.

It is disorienting. She's put a thread of herself into that arrowhead, but the wrenching is stronger than she expected. In all the years she has existed she has never invested so much of herself in protecting an individual. A town, a village—those were different, not half this personal.

The calls log tells her Julienne rang some half-hour ago—it must have been while she was out, the phone left behind. A message as well, incoherently cheerful, telling her all is fine and there's nothing to merit worry.