Mama-san—the keeper of us girls. The one who feeds and dresses us. The one who calls the doctor when we’re sick. The one who runs the brothel and matches clients to our beds. Some of the girls think she was brought here like us: in the back of one of the Reapers’ vans. It must’ve been a very long time ago, when her skin was smooth and her back wasn’t bent.
She certainly doesn’t look young now. Her face is pinched in all the wrong places, eyes distant.
“Girls. The master wants to see you. Now. He’s closed off the lounge.” Mama-san darts out of the doorway as suddenly as she came, off to gather the girls from the other three halls.
“She got caught.” Wen Kei, the youngest and smallest of us, sounds like a baby bird, her voice all fluttery and weak.
Yin Yu pulls her hair so tight that Wen Kei squeaks. “None of you breathe a word. If Master and Mama-san find out that we knew Sing’s plan… it won’t end well.” She looks to me as she says this, searching for words of support.
“We say nothing.” I try to sound as old as my seventeen years should make me, but the truth is, I feel just like the rest of them: shaking and whiter than rice noodles.
I don’t know why I’m so rattled. I knew this would happen. All of us did. That’s why we tried to get Sing to stay.
There is no escape. There is no escape. We whispered the master’s words to her like a chorus, along with dozens of reasons. Here, she had clothing, food, water, friends. And out there? What? Hunger. Disease. Unforgiving streets with teeth like wolves.
But in the end, there was no stopping her. I’d seen it months ago, the wildness that started in her eyes when she talked about life before this. It spread into everything, lit her up inside. Every time she entered my room, she would pull aside my scarlet curtain and stare, stare, stare out the window—the only one in the entire brothel. She was never good at keeping everything balled up inside like the rest of us. Yin Yu thinks this is because Sing’s family never sold her. They loved her, fed her, taught her how to read, and then they died. The Reapers came for her at the orphanage.
We find Sing spread out on the floor of the smoking lounge, hair wild and torn, arms bent back at a terrible angle. I don’t know for sure if she’s awake or even alive until one of the master’s men props her up. Blood, bright, shines down her arms and legs. There’s blood on her face, too, washing warm over her cheeks and onto the edge of her lips. Her dress—a beautiful piece of sky-blue silk and embroidered cherry blossoms—is ruined.
The rest of us stand in a line as the master paces a slow, endless circle around Sing’s fetal frame. When he finally stops, the tips of his lounge slippers are turned toward us.
He doesn’t yell, which makes his words even more terrifying. “Do any of you know what it’s like out there for a vagrant? For the other working girls?”
Not one of us replies, though we all know the answer. It’s one Mama-san drills into us every single time she sees our faces wither with emptiness. The one we tried so hard to make Sing remember.
“Pain. Disease. Death.” The words leave him like punches. When he’s finished, he brings the pipe to his lips. Smoke pours out of his nostrils—reminding me of the scarlet dragon embroidered on his lounging jacket. “How do you think you’d do out there, on your own? Without my protection?”
He doesn’t really want an answer. His question is more of a quiet shout, the same kind my father used to ask before his first cup of rice wine. Before he exploded.
“I give every single one of you everything you could need. I give you the best. All I ask for in return is that you make our guests feel welcome. It’s such a small thing. Such a tiny request.”
Just the fact that the master is addressing us should make my blood run cold. Mama-san is always the one who punishes us, with hissing lips and the sharp backside of her callused hand. The few times the master does talk to us, he always makes a point to remind us of how we’re treated better than other working girls. We have rooms of our own, silken dresses, trays of tea, and incense. Our choice of meals. Pots of paint to decorate our faces. We have everything because we’re the chosen. The best of the best.
“Now, Sing here”—he says her name in a way that crawls under my skin—“has just spit in the face of my generosity. I gave her safety and luxury, and she threw it away like it was nothing. She’s insulted my honor. My name.”
Sing sits behind him, still bleeding, still shaking. The men in black are breathing hard. I wonder how far she got before they caught her.
The master snaps his fingers. All four of his henchmen pull Sing to her feet. She flops like a doll in their hands. “If you dishonor my hospitality, break the rules, you will be punished. If you insist on being treated like the common prostitutes, then that’s what I’ll do.”
He rolls up his sleeves. Fung, the man with the scarlet tattoo on his face, gives the master something I can’t fully see.
But Sing sees it, and when she does, she lets out a shriek that would wake the gods. She comes to life again, with kicks and jerks so awful that the men holding her down can’t stand still.
Her screams manage to meld into words. “No! Please! I’m sorry! I won’t run!”
Then the master holds up his hand, and I see the reason for Sing’s terror. There, wrapped under all those tight, plump fingers, is a needle. The syringe is full of dirty brown liquid.
The other girls see it, too. Even Mama-san grows stiff beside me. There’s no way of knowing what lies inside that plastic tube. Pain. Disease. Death.
Sing fights and flails, her screams rising far beyond words. In the end, the men are too strong for her.
I can’t watch when the sharp metal plows into her veins. When her screams stop—when I finally look up again—the needle is gone and Sing is on the floor, crumpled and shuddering. The shadows of the lounge crowd around her curled form, make her look broken.
The master’s hands brush together. He turns to us. “The first dose of heroin is always the best. The second time, the rush isn’t as strong. But you still need it. You need more and more and more until it’s everything you want. Everything you are.”
Heroin. He means to make an addict of our smart and beautiful Sing. This thought twists inside me: hollow and hopeless.
“You are mine.” The master looks down our line of silken rainbow dresses. He’s smiling. “All of you. If you try to run, this is your fate.”
I close my eyes, try not to look at the broken-doll girl on the floor. Try not to remember the words the master spoke into the night so long ago. They reach out of time, bind me like ropes: There is no escape.
JIN LING
It’s been two years. Two years since the Reapers took my sister from me. Two years since I followed them to the Walled City to look for her. Over these years, I’ve learned how to move like a ghost, make the most of my senses. That’s the only way to survive here: become something more than you are, or be invisible altogether.
I was invisible a lot when I was younger. There were only three years between me and my older sister, but Mei Yee was the one people noticed. Her face was round and soft. Like a moon. Her hair hung straight, sleek as midnight.
But being beautiful did no good on a rice farm. It didn’t help you wade for hours in muddy water, back bent under the hot shine of the sun, cutting rows of whipping grass. I was always stronger than Mei Yee. I knew I wasn’t beautiful: My feet were tough with calluses, my skin dark, my nose too large. Whenever our mother wound my hair back into a bun and sent me to the pond for wash water, I saw a boy’s face staring back at me.
Sometimes I wished it were true. Being a boy would be easier. I’d be stronger, able to overpower my father whenever the alcohol made him rabid. But most of the time I just wished for a brother. A brother to bend over the never-ending rice plants. A brother to stand up to my father’s drunken rages.
And, in my deepest heart, I wanted to be pretty. Just like Mei Yee. So I always tugged the bun out. Let my hair fall free.
My hair was the sec
ond thing I lost after my father sold Mei Yee to the Reapers. I knew from the stories that I wouldn’t survive in this city as a girl. The knife I used was dull. It was a bad haircut, full of awkward angles, one side slightly longer than the other. I looked just the way I wanted to: like a half-starved, dirt-streaked street boy.
And that’s what I’ve been ever since.
My elbows are raw, stinging by the time I reach my camp. I took the long way back, circling the same moldy, pipe-hemmed passages to make sure no one followed me. Long enough for the blood to scab over and split again. If I don’t put a bandage on it soon, the wounds will get red and puffy. Take weeks to heal.
I slide through the opening of my ratty tarp shelter, look through my belongings. It’s not much. A matchbook with a single flame left. A waterlogged, half-filled character workbook scavenged from a careless student’s satchel. Two oranges and a mangosteen snagged from an ancestral shrine. A blanket heavy with mildew and rat urine. One mangy gray cat that purrs and yowls. Does his best to make me feel less alone.
“Got lucky today, Chma.” I set the boots down. The cat slinks across the tent. Rubs his whiskers across the worn leather. Plops his downy body on the laces with a mine meow.
I reach out for the blanket. It’ll have to do. I tug my knife from my tunic, start to cut the blanket into strips. Try to ignore the stench and damp of the fabric.
Mei Yee always tied my bandages. Before. She looked over the cuts my father made, eyes soft. Sad. Her fingers were feather-gentle when they wrapped the fabric. She had to use the strips so many times they were stained the color of rust. But she always made sure they were clean. Always tied them well. Always took care of me.
But I’m alone now. And it’s a lot harder to tie your own bandages. I end up using my teeth, gagging on the taste of rat and rank. Mei Yee would be horrified that I’m using this rotten blanket to cover my wounds. Horrified I’m here at all.
Going after Mei Yee was never a choice for me. She was all I had. Without her, I had no reason to stay on the farm, taking my father’s blows. Watching my mother wither like our rice crops.
I don’t know why I thought finding my sister would be easy. I wasn’t really thinking at all when I jumped onto that rusted bike and pedaled after the big white van. I didn’t think when I sliced off my hair. Or when I first reached City Beyond and asked questions in my slow, country speech.
Now I know how young and stupid I was, thinking that I could just walk into this place and find her.
The Walled City doesn’t cover much land—it’s only as big as three or four rice paddies—but it makes up for all that with its height. Its shanties stack on top of one another like sloppy bricks, crowded so high they blot out the sunlight. Streets that used to be filled with day and fresh air are now just cable-shrouded passages. Sometimes I feel like a worker ant, running these dark, winding tunnels in a never-ending loop. Always looking. Never finding.
But I won’t stop looking until I find her. And I will find her.
Chma stops nuzzling his new boot-bed. His yellow eyes snap to the entrance of my shelter—wide. Ears pricked high. Fur bristling. I hold my breath, listen through the Walled City’s eternal song: the distant rumbling of engines; a mother yelling at her children through thin walls; dogs howling in an alley far away; an airplane roaring over the city every five minutes.
There’s another noise. Softer, but closer. Footsteps.
I was followed.
My fingers wrap tight around my knife. I edge over to the tarp flap, fear rattling high in my throat. My thighs cramp tight as I wait. Listen. My knife hand is rice white, shaking.
The steps pause. A voice calls out, husky and doubtful, “Hello?”
Not Kuen, then. But that doesn’t mean I’m safe. These streets are crawling with thieves and drunks. People who would knife you in a heartbeat.
“Go away!” I try to make my voice as throaty as possible. All male. All threat.
Through the slit in my tarp, I glimpse my visitor. A boy, older. He’s leaning against the alley wall with his hands stuffed in his pockets. One knee up. The sheen of water that always glazes the city’s walls soaks the fabric of his sweatshirt. But he doesn’t seem to notice or care.
His stare lights straight on the flap of my tent. His eyes—they’re different from most people’s here in Hak Nam—they’re dark brown, yes. But they aren’t the same savage cruel as Kuen’s. Or the deadpan glaze of the grandmothers who squat on the corners, gutting fish after fish. Day after day.
No. This boy’s eyes are more like a fox’s. Sharp. Shining. Smart. Wanting something very, very badly.
I’d better be careful.
“It’s Jin, isn’t it?”
My name. He knows my name. It’s enough for me to push the flap back, teeth bared. Ready for a fight.
“Get out of here.” I raise my knife. Some far-off streetlight glints, echoes the blade back into the boy’s stare. He doesn’t flinch. “This is my last warning!”
“I’m not going to hurt you.” The boy pushes off the wall. Pulls his hands from his pockets. They’re empty.
My teeth are still bared when I stop. Look him over again. Black hoodie. Jeans so new they haven’t even frayed. Pale, empty, outstretched hands. Then I study his face—his sharp-cut cheekbones. The tight pull of his lips. Arched, cocky eyebrows.
“How’d you find me?” My knuckles are all ache around the hilt of my knife.
“Mr. Lam told me you usually camp in this sector. All I had to do was look. And follow my allergies.” As if on cue, the boy’s nose scrunches. The ugly agony of a sneeze never freed. “Closest thing I’ve got to a superpower.”
Mr. Lam. I think back to the old shopkeeper. Toad-crouched. Collecting spit in a can. Guarding his shop of splintered furniture and antique coins.
And then my thoughts travel to the other stoop. Memories of shrimp and noodles. Eyes just as sharp as the ones watching me now. “You… you’re noodle boy.”
“The name’s Dai, actually,” he says. “I’m here to offer you a job.”
“I work alone,” I say quickly. I do everything alone: eat, sleep, run, steal, talk, cry. It’s the curse of the second rule: Trust no one. The cost of staying alive.
“Me too.” Dai doesn’t move. His stare is dead on my knife. “But this drug run is different. It takes two people.”
I’m no stranger to drug runs. I do them a lot for lesser drug lords, the ones who trade behind the backs of the Brotherhood. Hope not to get noticed. They pay me in bread crusts and spare change. But the real payment is going inside their brothels. I’ve looked into the faces of many drug-hazed girls, searching for my sister.
“What kind of run takes two people?” I ask.
“It’s for the Brotherhood.”
A drug run for the Brotherhood of the Red Dragon. Just the thought makes my heart squeeze high. Flutter like a dying thing. I’ve heard too many stories about the gang and its cutthroat leader, Longwai. How he carved out the tongue of a man he caught lying. How he chiseled a bright scarlet character into the cheeks of anyone who tried to cheat him. How he shot one of his own double-crossing gang members in the head, but only after whittling away at the man slowly, watching flesh fall away like wood shavings. How he laughed when he did these things.
“Since when does the Brotherhood use vagrants?”
“Longwai’s men keep getting arrested whenever they make runs into Seng Ngoi. He’d rather use street kids. One to do the run and one to sit in the brothel as collateral.”
Collateral. One of the many tongue-tumbling words I wrestled with when I first got to the city. Tried to get rid of my sun-slowed farmspeak. Didn’t take too long to figure out its meaning: “hostage.” Waiting, waiting, waiting with a blade to your throat. Your life held tight in the speed of another person’s legs.
“You’re a good runner,” Dai says. “Most kids don’t get away from Kuen.”
“So I’d run. And you’d sit. Risk Longwai’s knife?” My own knife is still high in th
e air between us.
“Yep. It’s good pay.” Dai jerks his chin to the shredded edges of my tarp. “You look like you could use it.”
He’s right. Good pay means I can spend time searching for my sister instead of scrounging for food and clothes. But tangling with the Brotherhood, even for just one drug run, is a bad idea.
There’s only one reason I’m considering this. Longwai is the single most important man in the Walled City, the leader of the Brotherhood of the Red Dragon. His brothel is the biggest. It’s also impossible to get into. Most of his girls serve important clients, people of power and influence in City Beyond. It’s the last large brothel I haven’t searched.
This could be my only chance to get in. To look for Mei Yee.
“You don’t look like you need the job.” The tip of my knife waves at his straight white teeth. His clothes without holes. Just the way he stands smells of money. “Not bad enough to risk your life.”
Dai shrugs. “Looks can be deceiving. You want to run or not?”
I should say no. Everything about this screams against the second rule. Trust no one. But if I say no, he’ll move on. Find someone else to do this crazy run. I’ll lose my chance to find my sister.
Good pay isn’t worth risking my life. Or trusting a stranger.
But Mei Yee is.
The tarp by my foot wrinkles. Chma’s silvered head pokes out, his poison-yellow eyes narrow at Dai. I look the boy over, too. There’s no trace of the Brotherhood’s dragon on him. No jewelry. No tattoos. Just a raised, shiny scar that snakes up his forearm. Knife work. It’s too ugly not to be.
Dai catches my eyes, shoves his hoodie sleeve down, hiding the mark.
Chma slinks over, wraps around Dai’s legs like a scarf. Lining those nice jeans with silver sheds of fur. His plumed tail climbs high into the air: a happy greeting. After a few circles, Chma settles over the boy’s feet. Tucking his paws into themselves with another solid mine meow.
If my cat can trust him, then I guess I can, too.
For now.