Driftwood orphans, p.37
Driftwood Orphans, page 37
To me, Sasa is everywhere. But I encounter her most often when I’m looking at those knives. Those are the moments when her voice is so clear, I can practically feel the breath of her words on my neck. When I have my lonely meals of instant noodles in salt-water broth, I can see her across the table from me, healthy and whole. She’s sitting, even though I don’t have another chair.
And always, she has an invitation for me: Pick up the knife .
Sometimes, the invitation is to join her. More often, it’s to pick up the sharpest one and go out on to the Slats looking for trouble. Specifically, trouble with a red rose on her coat.
There are days when she’s easy to brush off. There are days when the temptation is overwhelming. She lost her life because she gambled on me. Every day I leave the pahingán unfulfilled is an insult to her memory.
One night, I get as far as the street corner before I turn back around and put the knife back on the wall with an unsteady hand.
I start seeing Sasa less and less after that.
I shave my head and get a job fixing boats. I was always a little interested in them, but it turns out I’m almost as good at putting boats together as I was at taking people apart. My back hurts at the end of a day, and sometimes I have to soak my hands after a long shift, and it seems like nothing can ever quite get the grease out from under my nails. But the boss pays me in cash, he pays me on time, and he doesn’t ask what my hands did before they turned bolts in his garage.
I work every shift expecting a familiar silhouette to fill the doorway: Tenny, maybe, or one of the shitkickers she runs with now. She’s kept away up to this point, but who knows how that mind of hers works? And even if she honors her word … who’s to say that silver-haired bastard will?
But the silver-haired Samnati who shows up one day isn’t the White Rose; they’re a salvager I’ve seen around. They’re slight and short, and a little bit older than me, with a narrow and clever face. They’ve hauled in a fishing boat for me to break down, so they can sell off the scrap. But while most salvagers would just drop it off and leave me to it, this one sticks around. I’m relieved when they cut right to the point instead of trying to corner me with it. More than a few folks have learned the hard way what I do when I’m cornered, and my old habits die harder than I do.
“So,” they say mildly. “This is an interesting place for Diwata Lacanilao to wash up.”
My hand tightens around my wrench. “What did you say?”
“There’s only a small number of folks like us across the Slats,” they go on, nodding at my workbench. Sure enough, I’ve left my pills sitting out there. I ain’t ashamed of them, but I don’t like giving folks a window into my personal business. “Fewer still that are Biranese. And fewer still,” they add, “with arms like yours.”
“If I’m who you say I am,” I say after a pregnant pause, “then you know how dangerous it is to walk right up and talk to me like this.”
They hold up their hands. “I’ve known who you were for a long time. If I wanted to let people know, they’d know by now. But I don’t want to do that.”
I frown at them. This isn’t the first time I’ve been recognized, but every other time I’ve had to punch and stab my way out. “Why not?”
“Because,” they say, “Nanay Benilda would listen to the wind, and believe what it told her.”
Immediately, my understanding of the situation changes. “A zephyr,” I breathe.
“One of the very last, the way things are going,” they say darkly.
“If you want me to do something about that, I ain’t your woman.” I turn back to the boat hull. “I’m done playing the crooked game.”
“No, that’s not it.” Smoothly, they step into my line of vision. “I wanted to let you know that there’s … a group. For people like us.” They nod to the pills again. “Folks whose engine wound up in the wrong chassis.”
“And why would I need a group?” I say, annoyed.
“Because everyone needs someone.” They prod something into my view: a folded-up piece of paper.
I take it, smudging it with grease in the process. I don’t need to bother unfolding it to know that it’s a telephone number. Wordlessly, I drop it to the floor next to me.
They step back, putting their hands up again. “You might want to hang on to that number, just in case.”
“I know you’ve got that scrapyard out in the Shoots … Pamin Tuklangjinukmanir,” I say casually. I leave two other pieces of knowledge unspoken in that sentence: I know where you live is the obvious one.
The less obvious one is, I know you went very far out of your way to talk to me here.
“Fair enough,” they say, with another sly grin. It’s obvious they understand me perfectly. “I look forward to hearing about my boat, then.”
They depart with a bow.
After they’re gone, I slip the paper into my boot.
The explosions up on the Rock echo everywhere in the Slats. Everyone’s come out of their houses to watch the fires burn. And I, who’ve done my best these past few years to keep out of the sun, can’t help but join them.
I’m up on my roof with my neighbors. All of us watch spellbound as the stately mansion of the Pak Clan tears itself free of the mountainside and tumbles down it, like a die across a felt table. I see it hit the Rock hard, but don’t hear the crashes and crunches until a few seconds later. And I stare and stare until it dips out of view and crashes down on to the Slats.
Silence falls over the roof. Over the neighborhood. Over the whole damn city, as far as I can tell. Even Benilda at her most powerful never dreamed of taking down the Paks.
The neighbors are all muttering to themselves about what it could possibly be about, but I already know. My mind is full of roses.
When I stagger back downstairs into my apartment, I dig that greasy, folded-up piece of paper out of the bottom of a drawer, and get my coat. There’s a telephone booth down the way from here, and given what’s going on, I know there’ll be a queue.
By the time my first meeting is done that night, the full story has broken in the news. The young man I know as Cole has declared himself the city’s new governor. He’s formally revealed the incredible powers I’ve always known about, and he’s called the fall of his own ancestral house the first note of a new movement in the symphony of Driftwood City. And he’s claimed that beloved labor organizer Pham Binh Cong is dead, and that he personally avenged the man’s murder by his girlfriend, Cheza Tenlonghari.
It was shocking for me to read her name printed like that, plain on the page. I’ve never thought of her as a Lacanilao, but I’ve never really thought of her as a Tenlonghari either, or even as a Cheza. She was just Tenny. But that name was nowhere to be found. It was almost like the news story was about a different person.
I stay quiet while everyone else speculates about what this means for them. The tone in the air’s not optimistic; it’s always been pretty hard to get the Rock to give a shit about people with needs outside the baseline. Three months from now, after the first wave of hormone patches rolls into the clinics, they’ll all be wearing white roses on their coats.
Pamin is quiet the whole time. That, I get. The Thorn Orphans made the zephyrs an endangered species. Of course they’d have mixed feelings about their former guild’s greatest enemy up and crowning himself king of the city.
Sitting across the loose circle of chairs from them, I’m quiet, too.
“How much of it do you think is true?” they ask me afterwards, as the two of us sidle to a bar down the street. It’s been many minutes since we were all talking about it, but I know what they’re asking about.
“You think I’m just gonna up and tell you? What kind of a zephyr are you?”
They sigh. “You know, I got into this job because I like knowing things. I didn’t realize until it was too late that I’d fallen into a trap.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What trap’s that?”
A weary chuckle. “When your life is your work, your work’s your life.” Their face softens. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But this isn’t a transaction.”
I don’t answer the question as the two of us walk in silence. But I turn their question over in my head with each step. I want to say one hundred percent of it is absolutely true. She killed my sister. She turned my birthright into rubble. Of course she’d kill her own main squeeze and wind up with a friend’s bullet in her back.
Of course she would.
But by the time Pamin and I have claimed seats at the bar, and had a few beers, and we’ve maybe given each other some lingering looks over our latest round, I still can’t bring myself to say “yes.”
Later in bed, my tears ambush me. I hate myself for wasting them on her. And when Pamin lets it pass without a word, just a gentle hand between my shoulder blades, I hate them for seeing me.
One morning, I wake up next to Pamin and realize I haven’t seen Dalisa for a long time.
Pamin and I have a good thing going. It isn’t a full-time thing, but neither of us wants that. Pamin wants more than any one person could give, and I don’t have enough to give anyone for long. But even when we aren’t doing our thing, I enjoy their company. I enjoy the whole group, really, and even the folks I’ve met who aren’t a part of it: their families. Their own friends. Sometimes, I’ll go hours without remembering that I ain’t the Diwata they think I am.
For so long, I hold on to that idea: that there’s some “real” Diwata nested inside the boat mechanic I’ve become. The real Diwata would never spend hours on small talk with people about their little lives. She wouldn’t go with them to driftball games, and shout when Sasaki throws an intercept for the thousandth gods-damned time. She wouldn’t smile patiently as their children tell long, rambling stories about what they’d learned in school today.
But over time, that feeling drifts further and further out of reach. My days as a throat-slitter and shot-caller start to feel more and more like a motion picture I watched once, and then a dream I half-remember.
The lumpia I make myself for my birthday that year, with the newly abundant ingredients at the market, are not Benilda Lacanilao’s lumpia; they’re mine.
The dead woman on the couch is snoring loud enough to wake the actual dead.
She stayed on her feet just long enough to say hi, and then promptly collapsed. It took me some serious doing just to drag her in here. And now I stand over her, a mug of lapsang tea in one hand and a knife in the other.
She looks like hell. She’s darker than me now, which I take to mean she’s been holed up somewhere sunny. In her long-braided hair, faint threads of grey are starting to show: the steel of a hull beneath paint that’s just begun to peel. But even relaxed in the hold of sleep, it’s the deep-worn lines on her face that really age her.
I wrinkle my nose a bit at the stench of stale frying oil, and wonder if she’s spent the past four years as a carny.
“You swore pahingán.” Dalisa’s voice doesn’t point an accusation my way. It’s just a statement of fact. That’s all Sasa ever needed: the facts. I know she’s not really there, but I see her standing next to me just the same. She’s prim and coiffed, like she always was, instead of the pulped-up mess she became courtesy of the woman in front of me. She looks like someone who would’ve been the best player the crooked game had ever seen.
I nod. “I did.”
“And she’s come back to you, begging for death,” says Dalisa.
I nod. “In a roundabout way.”
“You have no reason not to put that knife through her,” says Dalisa.
I nod. “I don’t.”
“Then you know what you need to do.”
I do.
I really do.
But I can feel the phantom touch of a hand between my shoulder blades, and it’s not Dalisa’s.
33
Now
Age 30
It was like the reel ran out on a projector. One moment, I was standing over myself, holding cold steel and warm tea. The next, I was sitting on a porch, staring at my own two feet. Above me, the sky was turning pink around its edges.
I tried to stand, and it felt like my knees had rusted. Braced myself with my bad wrist, and immediately regretted it. Managed to get to my feet eventually, but I was still reeling from everything I’d experienced. I could feel fresh anguish in my chest, and I knew the pain had nothing to do with you or Binh or anything else that had happened to me in the past day. It was like opening my mouth to sing, and hearing someone else’s voice come out.
Behind me, the door scraped open. Diwata stepped out, Pamin on her heels. They each had a mug of steaming hot tea, plus something else. Diwata had a cigarette, freshly lit. And Pamin was carrying a simple brown envelope.
I reached for the mug. “You didn’t have to—”
Diwata leveled a stare at me as she calmly pulled the tea out of my reach and took a long sip. I let my hand fall to my side. Fair enough.
“I’m sorry, Dawa,” I said. “You were trying to help me the whole time, and I kept shutting myself off from you. If I’d let you help me, Cole might already be dead.” I hesitated. Drew in a big breath. I might not ever get another chance to say this to her. “And I’m sorry about D—”
“What’d it show you?” Diwata calmly cut across me. “Figure it must’ve been interesting, if you sat around to catch the whole thing.”
I shot a look over her shoulder at Pamin. “I think it’s family business.”
Casually, Diwata slipped an arm around their waist. “Yeah, it is.”
I looked between the two of them. “Why didn’t you tell me they were more than just a zephyr to you?”
She snorted a puff of tobacco smoke. “Why didn’t you tell me … well, anything?”
I looked away. “It showed me what I needed to see.”
“I swear to every god in every temple,” groaned Pamin. “Are all Biranese this cryptic, or is that just a family thing?”
“You didn’t find something new and latch on to it,” I went on. “You made little choices. You chose to stay. You chose not to go after me. You chose your favorite zephyr. All those little choices …”
“Until they added up to a life,” said Diwata. “You wanna move past this? That’s how. You build something new.” She spread her arms wide. “I built this.”
Pamin cleared their throat.
“Metaphorically ,” Diwata clarified. “It’s that simple, Tenny. If you’ve got nothing left to live for, then at least keep living ’cause you’re too selfish to die.”
“But,” Pamin said, “you’re not just going to live for yourself, are you?”
I glared at them over the top rim of my glasses. “What do you know about it?”
“Wrong question to ask a zephyr,” they said, their pale eyes dancing like sunlight on ice. “Especially a zephyr who knows you. Are you really going to let Cole get away with what he did to you?”
I bristled at the question. It still felt like none of their business. But I couldn’t argue with my sister’s arm around them. So I swallowed my objection and said, “But everything good he’s done for the city …”
“They weren’t asking about that,” said Diwata. “And they weren’t asking about Binh either, before you jump to that.”
“I wasn’t gonna! ” I said, too quickly.
“Then be straight with me,” she said. “Could you really live the rest of your life letting him skate on this?”
“He lit hundreds of salters on fire just to get what he wanted,” I said slowly. Beneath my words, I could hear strings and horns gently stirring. “Killed his own best friend for it, too. I can’t trust a guy like that to run things. Who knows what he’ll burn down next?”
“Well, there you go, then,” Diwata said. “Sounds like you’ve got your way forward. Get out there and beat his ass again.”
I shook my head and leaned hard against the porch railing. “It ain’t enough to kick his ass. I did that. You know where it got me.”
“The front page,” Pamin mused.
I ignored them. “If I’m gonna do this,” I went on, “I can’t destroy him. I hate him, but the guy built something good. Something actually good.” Admitting it hurt me worse than another go-around with the Black Rose. A realization hit me, and it almost felt like your words were coming out of my mouth instead of my own. “If I destroy what he built, it’ll be up to me to build something to replace it.”
Pamin glanced at Diwata. “Are all members of your family this self-involved?”
“Nah, this one’s special. She was always like this, even before she turned into a wizard.”
I glanced at the shoulder of Diwata’s robe. Under it, I knew she wore a white patch. “You’ve always had something at stake if I won this. Why the hell have you helped me so much?”
“I fucking knew she’d ask,” Diwata said, nodding to Pamin.
They held up the envelope. I recognized it from my first visit here. It was the one that contained Diwata’s answer of why she was helping me against the Thorn Orphans.
“Zephyrs give information in exchange for three kinds of currency, Red Rose,” said Pamin. They sounded businesslike, as if they’d just flicked some kind of professional switch in their head. “Cash, information, or favors. If you accept the onus of a personal favor from me, you can read what’s in this envelope.”
I stared at them. “You know if I really wanted to, I could just use my powers to find out now.”
“I’m trusting that you won’t,” Diwata said. “What’ll it be, Ten?”
I stared at the envelope. Even felt the faint echo of a song’s opening notes as the city’s spirit asked me if I wanted its help here. And by the Bird’s pointy beak, Cole, it was tempting. You know how our powers get. It gets to be impossible not to use them, sometimes.
But I pulled back. Nodded. “Name your favor.”
They shook their head, then handed over the envelope. “I’ll name it after you’ve read.”
