Ryan Graudin - The Walled City

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 the 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.

I nod. “Looks like you got a new friend.”

Dai’s sneeze is a sudden, explosive thing. Mr. Lam’s loogie times ten. He throws his arm to his face, but the damage is done. If anything can make a vagrant look less threatening, it’s a face full of snot.

I lower my knife. “When’s the run? "

The older boy finishes mopping his face, shoves his hands back into his pockets. Chma is still planted on the boy’s shoes. Purring.

“The run takes place in two days. Four hours after sunset. We meet in front of Longwai’s brothel.”

“I’m in.” And there it is. The second rule broken. Me trusting a boy with a scar on his arm. A hunt in his eyes. All for my sister’s sake. “But I want sixty.”

“Done.” He says this with a quick, desperate speed. Without even blinking.

I should’ve asked for seventy.

“I trust you’ll show up, Jin. If you don’t…”

“I’ll be there,” I tell him.

Dai nods and turns to go, dislodging his feline squatter with a gentle shake. I watch him leave with a heavy sigh. Part of it’s relief. Part of it is weariness. Now that Dai has discovered my camp, I’ll have to move. All my secrets, my terror, spill into the cool air. Misty and milk white. Like my sister’s skin.

When my breath cloud vanishes, the boy is gone. I stand in the yawn of my alley, fingers ever-tight around my knife. Alone again.

It’s a wonder Sing fought as hard as she did, with all the blood she’s lost. She’s not fighting anymore. What Yin Yu and I lift is deadweight. Both of us are panting by the time we lay Sing out on her bed.

There’s blood on my hands. I hold them in front of me, stare long and hard at the bright smears. They’re bringing back memories. Awful, awful memories of the life before.

Whenever Father wasn’t in the fields, he would be all but collapsed in his cheap folding chair, his fist clamped around a bottle. All of us knew to be careful by the time he unscrewed the third metal cap. Most nights he stayed there — arms and legs limp like dead fish. The nights he didn’t, our skin flowered purple and pain under his blows.

Jin Ling’s eyes hovered constant over that dangerous corner. Her beatings were always the worst because she wouldn’t just lie back and take them. She fought, her tiny limbs flailing like twigs caught in a typhoon. Sometimes she even managed to hit him. Our father would bellow and thrash her twice as hard. I think she did this on purpose, to steal all of our father’s rage onto herself. He never beat me or my mother after he was done with Jin Ling.

Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts, Yin Yu leaves, returning with a silver bowl of water. I dip my hands in, and the blood that’s not mine washes away, swirling like phoenix fire to the bottom of the bowl.