The Apprentices (12 page)

She tried to stay firmly rooted in time. This was the year of the Horse. They had forced the bloom in the year of the Dragon, when the tree was planning—if trees
planned
—to bloom in the year of the Sheep. Those flowers should have been sheep, white and fluffy and sweetly unnoticed. Instead they became dragons, doing combat with a fiery atomic ball of light.

The master to whom she had been apprenticed had never given much credence to astrology. He said it was a superstition for grandmothers. But he had been a Tiger, without question: fierce and powerful. And Jin Lo, born in the year of the Snake, had become silent and dangerous, quick and cold-blooded.

But here was a question: Would she have become so snakelike if she had stayed with her family—if she had kept her heart? She might have married the dutiful boy who lived up the street and wanted to become a doctor. She might have a fat, sweet baby of her own by now. But perhaps coldness had been her destiny. Perhaps it was in the stars.

She cooked a yellow resin from the tree that grew in the front yard until it turned to black ash. She steeped a bit of persistent ivy she’d found growing up through the floorboards for a bitter-smelling tea. She made herself a makeshift mortar and pestle from two stones, and she ground the brown thistle heads of weeds from the yard into a dry, beige powder.

The cat licked the corked top of her vial of Quintessence and mewed.

“Shh,” Jin Lo said. “I’m working.”

The cat rubbed its head against her leg.

“Stop!” Jin Lo said. “I need to concentrate.”

She was no longer a child, but here she was still playing at “eluding the cat.” She smiled. It was the kind of joke her father would have made. “Are you there, Baba?” she asked the air. “Are you putting your jokes in my head?”

There was no answer. She brushed the thistle powder into a pot at the edge of the fire, and heard a child cry. She turned. “Shun Liu?”

The cat mewed.

“Not you,” she said. “Listen!”

Again there was a faint cry. She walked through the empty rooms and out the front door. She stood in the little yard where her family had faced the soldiers while she hid in the trunk, and her whole body started to tremble. She was shivering as if from cold, but she wasn’t cold. She looked up and down the street, but it was empty. Was there a child next door? She would have heard it before now, she was certain.

“Shun Liu?” she said.

“He’s gone,” the cat said.

She looked down at the striped creature. “Did you speak?”

The cat mewed at her. Then it licked its fur.

“Let’s go inside,” Jin Lo said, her teeth chattering. She watched herself as if from a distance. If the neighbors complained, the Public Security Force might come.

Inside the house, she opened the vial of Quintessence, and the sweet smell filled the room. The Quintessence was the fifth element, the source of all life. It smelled like the first flowers of springtime, like honey and sunlight, like new grass after rain. The cat had licked the cork. Had it really spoken to her? Or was she imagining things? She tapped a drop from the vial into the cat’s water bowl. Once she had been a serious chemist, conducting careful experiments. Now she was feeding a powerful substance to a cat for no scientific reason. She might be losing her mind. She was certainly losing control of her body, which would not stop shaking. She lay down on the dusty kitchen floor, near the fire.

The cat lapped up the water, then stretched and curled into the hollow of Jin Lo’s body. She felt its warmth, its rumbling purr, the beating of its heart.

“You’re right,” Jin Lo said. “They’re gone. I have no one.”

“Not true,” the cat said.

“I have you,” Jin Lo admitted.

“You have friends,” the cat said.

Jin Lo thought of the despairing apothecary, his frustrated son, the vanished Count Vili. “They’ve lost sight of our purpose,” she said. “They’ve lost sight of our plan.”

“Then help them to see,” the cat said.

“They won’t listen.”

“Not if you do not speak.”

“I’m too weak.”

“Because you do not eat,” the cat said. “You must eat.”

“There’s no purpose.”

“There
is
a purpose,” the cat said. “You must be the willow tree that bends but does not break.”

“No,” Jin Lo said. “That was Shun Liu. He’s gone. And I am broken.”

“
I
am Shun Liu,” the cat said. “And you are strong.”

J
anie slipped away during second period at East High, when she thought Mr. Magnusson’s day at the office might be starting. She went into the dim and empty school auditorium, and stood looking at the stage where
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
would be performed. She was proud of Raffaello for getting up there to audition, and for getting the part.

Then she sat in one of the worn, velvet-upholstered seats, which folded down with a squeak. She tapped a few grains of powder into a glass of water, watched them dissolve, and drank it down. She was supposed to contact Benjamin tonight, and the powder might not work then, but this was her best chance to learn something. She didn’t know how long the effects of the few grains she’d slipped into the wineglass would stay in Magnusson’s body.

She closed her eyes and thought about her roommate’s father, the first day she’d met him, blond and red-faced from carrying Opal’s boxes up the stairs. He had pumped her hand in greeting in the bare dorm room, blue eyes shining, and said
she seemed like a sensible girl. Opal needed a sensible roommate, he said.

Then she thought of him at dinner at Bruno’s, jolly and imperious, slighting Opal out of habit and calling for more water, more wine, more bread.

Again, she had the sensation of darkness closing in all around her, and then the room grew lighter behind her eyelids. She was in a modern office with tall windows, sitting behind a large, uncluttered desk. A hand reached out for a wooden box on the desk. The hand was pale and freckled and seemed enormous. It took a cigar from the box and cut off the end with a small knife, then dropped the end into a wastebasket. The cigar seemed to loom close to Janie’s face. The hand produced a gold lighter, and spent some time getting the cigar lit. She thought she could taste the bitter tobacco. She had come at the wrong time. All she was going to see was Mr. Magnusson smoking a disgusting, stinky cigar.

Then a very pretty blonde in a pencil skirt and a green blouse walked into the office and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know how you can stand to smoke those things, first thing in the morning,” she said.

“And I don’t know how you can stand
not
to,” Mr. Magnusson said. “That’s what makes the world go round.”

The woman sniffed.

“Don’t pout, my love,” Mr. Magnusson said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“And cigars don’t suit
you
.”

Janie thought of the princess, Opal’s mother. Did she know about this woman her husband called “my love”? Did Opal?

“Be happy for me, Sylvia,” Mr. Magnusson’s voice said. “My plan is working.”

“And are you going to tell me what it is?” Sylvia asked.

“When it’s further along.”

“Is it to do with the mine?”

“Perhaps.” He sounded pleased with himself.

“Will your wife approve?”

“She won’t say so if she doesn’t,” he said. “She’s not like you, full of opinions and contrariness.”

Sylvia raised an arched eyebrow. “
That’s
why you need me. Remember, it’s her island.”

“But it’s my mine,” he said. “I like the way that sounds.
My mine.
All mine.” He clapped a hand on his knee. “Come sit on my lap.”

“Tell me your plan first.”

The picture was starting to fade. Janie concentrated harder.

“Oh, don’t be difficult,” Mr. Magnusson said faintly. “I want it to be a surprise.” He exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke, and Janie strained to hear Sylvia’s response, but the office vanished as the smoke dissipated. Sylvia was gone, and so were the desk and the enormous windows.

Janie was alone in the dark. She opened her eyes and saw the school stage and the empty seats. If only she’d started a minute later, she might have heard the plan and missed the cigar-trimming. It was so frustrating, not knowing when to
try the connection. It was like picking up a telephone receiver and hoping the other party would
happen
to say something useful on the line.

Still, she guessed she could have found Mr. Magnusson in the bathroom, on the toilet. That would have been worse. She wondered if she should tell Opal about Sylvia, then quickly rejected the thought. Poor, tiny, frightened Mrs. Magnusson. She would never be able to compete with that spirited blonde.

Janie tried moving her head and didn’t feel too nauseated, so she stood. The theater seat folded itself up with a squeak. She felt dizzy. Was it possible to lose your hold on your own world by spending too much time looking at other people’s?

She’d think about that later: Right now she had to get to class. She turned and saw Raffaello in the aisle of the auditorium, smiling down at her. “Oh!” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“Just got here,” he said. “What are you doing in the dark?”

“I needed to get away. To think.”

“About what?”

“Everything. I don’t know.”

He shook his head, smiling. “You’re so mysterious,” he said. “I never know what goes on in your head.”

“Not much, really.” He was standing awfully close.

“I know
that’s
not true.”

“Um,” she said. “Should we go to class?”

“They won’t miss us.”

“But we might miss some valuable information.”

“I don’t think there’s anything that important.”

Then his hand went to the back of her neck, under her hair. Benjamin had touched her like that, and it made her very confused. Raffaello’s fingers sent a shiver down her spine. He leaned down and kissed her, tentatively. His lips were soft and warm. Then he pulled back to look at her, and there was a question in his eyes: Was this all right?

It was, and it wasn’t. She ought to be pulling back. But there was something so tender about the kiss that she didn’t. Encouraged, he kissed her again, with more confidence and sureness. But then she found her hand on his chest, pushing him away.

“I’m sorry!” she said.

Raffaello looked hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I can’t—I don’t…I have to go.”

She ran past him toward the auditorium doors, stumbling a little, her face burning with embarrassment. What had she done? And why? She had kissed him and then she had shoved him, and she had to live in his apartment. She might have ruined everything.

“Janie!” he called after her.

She should stop now, and talk to him. But instead she pushed open the auditorium’s door, her cheeks hot, and stepped out into the crowded hallway. The girls’ restroom was across the hall and she dodged students to get to it. She splashed water from the cold tap on her face at the sink. She could still smell his skin. Raffaello. She looked in the mirror at her wet, miserable face.

“Janie,” she said. “What are you
doing
?”

B
enjamin was supposed to make contact with Janie at midnight her time, which was tomorrow morning for him. It was still evening, and the last of the light filtered through the obscenely lush trees overhead. But he couldn’t wait. He needed to know what was going on.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t met other girls in the last two years. But girls were more protected in the places he had been, and he had never been anywhere long enough to get to know any of them, or to earn their parents’ trust. He’d been busy—working alongside his father, and making a code to send messages to Janie in case she needed him, and developing the powder that would let him see her. But now all the powder had shown him was that Janie hadn’t been thinking about him in the same way. She’d met other boys in America, where everything was all free and easy, apparently. She was
living
with another boy. It was the last thing he had expected.

He had cooked the last of their rice and soup in another burned-out village, and his father had eaten distractedly while making notes about the medicinal plants of Vietnam.
Being forced to treat the murderous general had knocked his father out of his obsessive, despairing loop. They were going to Hanoi, where a steamer might take them across to the Philippines, where his father had a colleague. So at least they had forward movement. That was a good thing.

It would be mid-morning for Janie now. Benjamin went to the back of the hut, where his father wouldn’t see him, and draped a mosquito net over himself so he wouldn’t get eaten alive. Then he dropped a few grains of powder into the last of the water in his canteen. He drank it down, leaned cross-legged against the wall of the hut, and closed his eyes.

He thought of Janie as he had seen her in the mirror, with her new, older face. Then of Janie at fourteen in London, tapping him on the shoulder in the Underground when he’d been spying on her. He thought of the pain in her face when he’d told her, under the influence of the boiled truth-telling leaves, that he fancied Sarah Pennington.