“You look awful.”
At the sound of Goose's voice, Mal looked away from the basement entrance to Yuen-Fa’s bar, where a steady stream of people were coming and going. She fixed her eyes slightly down out of habit, expecting them to be back in their wheelchair, and her brain stalled for a moment on their midriff before she tilted her head up to see their face. They looked miserable, leaning awkwardly on their forearm crutches of mismatched height, their shoulders weighed down with the heavy satchels crossing over their chest.
“I feel like it, too. Trouble sleeping.” Clover cooed from her back, as though in agreement, though currently she was the only one in the house getting a decent night's rest — at least when she woke at odd hours, it wasn't because she was drenched in sweat with a scream stuck her throat. Mal had passed Jay, Sabine, and Etienne several times in the night, all three of them unable to sleep until the locks were double-checked and heads were triple-counted.
"Did something happen?"
She laughed at the unexpected joke, feeling her hands loosen from their fists. Goose's shoulders relaxed almost in tandem as their eyes swept over her, looking for lingering injuries, and then back to her face.
"Heard you scored a shortwave."
She stared blankly for a moment before the significance of it registered. "Right — I don't have it on me, but I can drop it off later?"
"Keep it." They ducked their head under the strap of one of their satchels and passed it over. The weight it cut snugly into her hand as she slung it over one shoulder and peeked inside. "Those are some modifications you can make, in case you wanted to phone home."
She pulled out a handwritten set of instructions, mechanically blinking through her blurred vision. The writing was careful and meticulous, scratched in with pencil first and run over with ink, and the little diagrams were supremely helpful: even with just a cursory glance inside she could match most of the bag's components to their names on the list. The smile tugging at her mouth felt almost foreign, and she carefully tamped down any undue hope, at least until after she managed to make contact. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here — Kaia could have delivered it.”
“I need to say goodbye to Yuen-Fa, and Kaia needed the day off.” They moved their weight off of their hands and back onto their foot, and gratefully accepted her offer to hold their crutches as they carefully leaned back against the wall beside the access. “What’s making you look so—” They waved a hand when words failed, and let her fill in the blanks as she passed back the crutches.
She cleared her throat, and steeled her nerve: "Kaia said you wanted to talk to me about— about something serious. I was going to stop by, but—" She looked away, running her fingers along the straps of the cradleboard, and made a snap decision to pivot. “And I ditched the funeral halfway through, so I have to apologize to Yuen-Fa for that. I should have just skipped it, like you did.”
"You don't mean that. Tai-Song and I hated each other, and I respect him too much to pretend otherwise: you had a right to be there, maybe more than anyone else.”
She looked down, hands clenching around the straps. "It was such a shitshow, I'm surprised Willow and Dominik didn't start a fight with everyone who just turned up."
"I heard."
"I know that ducking out made things worse."
"Maybe."
"You're not really helping."
"Yeah, well, as much as I'd like to get my wings, I'm here on my own business." Their gloves pulsed gently as they stretched the muscles in their hands. “You shouldn’t have told Kaia about Sulien.”
She blinked — that conversation felt a hundred years ago. “I didn’t realize it was a secret?”
"It's not, but I would have liked to be the one to tell them." They crossed their arms and regarded her with tired, aggrieved eyes. She wished they would get angry: disappointment was so much harder to bear. “Do you have a problem with it?”
“What? No, of course not, it's— it's just that Kaia's like Gwenh, and I wasn't sure that you would be compatible."
"So? We're adults. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work." They tilted their head, catching on to the first part of her sentence. "Gwenh put words to it? Out loud?"
She nodded, torturing herself with hindsight, thinking of all the ways she could have handled it better in the moment. "She made me understand, yes."
"Good — I'm glad she trusted you enough to talk about it." They shook their head, and returned to the matter at hand. "Kaia thinks that this is maybe about Maeve."
She flinched back, feeling a rush of anger that Kaia had told them about such an embarrassing blip on the timeline, but it wasn't like she had room to complain. "I— I just don't want anyone to get hurt. I wasn't ready, even after so many years, and I ended up burning someone I cared about."
"Kaia said Maeve was messing around behind your back. Was she not the one burning you?"
"She wouldn't have done that if I had been more present. I don't want either of you to be in that position — it really sucks, and if it goes badly then I have to choose sides."
Goose's eyebrow twitched upward, but their expression softened, mild irritation turning into some kind of understanding. “He’s ten years gone, Mal. I had my time with him, I’ve had my time mourning him. This thing with me and Kaia — it's not going to be like what I had with Sulien, and I'm okay with that. We like spending time together, and I'm sure it'll be amicable, wherever things land.” They placed their left hand over their heart. “May God strike me down if I tell a lie.”
She worried the hem of her shirt guiltily, dissatisfied with herself. “I’m sorry, it wasn’t my place to tell them. Please forgive me.”
"I forgive you." They patted her shoulder. "That wasn't so bad, was it? Now you have nothing to apologize for."
She laughed, but the sound was mechanical and hollow; she was so tired of bracing for the final blow. “Do you hate me, for leaving her behind again?”
“Never.” Their voice was careful now, like the ice had begun to crack beneath their feet. “She makes her own decisions.”
She scoffed, looking away and blinking hard to hide the tears collecting in her eyes. “She thinks I can’t handle myself in there, that she needs to protect me.”
“Is that so terrible? You’re trying to do the same for her.” They looked down at their crutches, fiddling with the worn handles, their cautiously guarded expression identical to her own. “Does she blame me?”
“I don't think so. She doesn’t really remember the fine details, but she's never blamed you.” She paused, taking a moment to settle on a phrasing that wouldn't trigger a denial. “I don’t blame you either, for the record.”
Some more tension leached from their shoulders. “How was she? Was she eating?”
“She was doing okay, when I was with her. She was gardening a lot. Eating pretty well. She was herself, most of the time.”
“Good.” They bent their head to wipe their eyes. “That's really good.”
“I’m sorry.” She couldn’t seem to stop saying it. Tears started to well up again, too fast to stop, and she felt like a child, begging them to forgive her. “It's just for a little longer. I'll bring her home, even if it kills me.”
They didn't seem all that comforted by her promise. “There was nothing more you could have done, Mal. If she didn’t want to leave, you couldn’t have convinced her; it’s just how she is.” They nodded to the entrance, unsubtly wiping away more tears. “Now go and apologize to Yuen-Fa.”
"Oh." She sniffled, the tonal shift throwing her for a loop as she swallowed thickly, feeling the spent tears in her throat and deep in her nose. “You go first, I’m not ready.”
They tapped the end of their crutch against her hip. “Go. I’m giving you ten seconds before I drag you in by your ear.”
She dodged their prodding with a wet laugh, and darted for the stoop as they aimed a friendly swipe at her knee. Down the steps and through the propped-open door, ducking and weaving around the bodies already inside, she could see that the bar was nearly empty of its furnishings: Anise’s crew was taking the filing cabinets for the new base up in Kjipuktuk, some boys from the Domino Clinic were taking the chairs and tables, and the alcohol was going to anyone who didn’t already have their hands full.
She slipped behind the bar. The backrooms were already stripped of everything familiar: the rugs and wall-hangings were gone, the furniture was dissembled, and the whole place smelled like vinegar. In the first of the two bedrooms, she found Zed lying on top of a pallet that once held a mattress, whirring softly in thought. She was wearing an ensemble from the less-hideous side of Tai-Song’s wardrobe: tattered work-boots with the steel erupting through the rubber tips, ratty jeans stained with blooms of ink, and a threadbare undershirt stained with motor grease. The tips of her brass fingers looked like metallic nail polish.
Mal closed the door behind her, glad for an excuse to stall a little longer. “How’s it going?”
“Go away, please.” Speaking English, she sounded less like Tai-Song and more like Yuen-Fa, with a stronger accent and a flatter, decisive affect.
“In a minute.” She lifted the cradleboard from her back and leaned her daughter against the wall: she was awake but adequately occupied with the toys hanging from the arch, particularly the little copper anchor Etienne had given to her, weeks ago. “I didn’t see you at the funeral.”
“I’m not blind, you know. Maybe I don’t want to be around people that are afraid of me.”
“That might be a tall order, kiddo.”
With a distinctly Yeung-like scoff, Zed shuffled onto her side to face the opposite wall, machinery whirring quietly as she pouted. Mal grimaced and turned away, looking around at the room that used to be Tai-Song’s; she could still see where long-standing furnishings had left impressions and scratches in the floor, the nail-holes and silhouettes where decorations had once hung on the walls. The moulding along the floor was scuffed with black rubber, years and years of Tai-Song dragging the toe of his shoe against the wall as an idle pastime — she found herself shuffling along the same path with the toe of her moccasin, thinking of all the times she had slept over as a child, the two of them listening to the music in the bar as they fell asleep. How they’d sometimes stay awake and play Pai Gow with a long-lost set of dominoes, sometimes for pencils but mostly for favours — she wondered if he had ever tried to teach Zed how to play.
Zed's whirring kicked up a notch, like she was drawing breath to speak. “I didn’t go because he would still be alive, if it weren’t for me.”
She knelt down to untie Clover’s snorkel, telling herself to go looking for a set of dominoes when she had the chance. “Funerals aren’t about that, they’re about saying goodbye.”
“Well, I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want these memories to be the only things I have of him.” Her motor hitched. “It’s not fair — I only had him for a year, I wasn’t done with him yet.”
“I know. I wanted more time too.” She sat down on the pallet, feeling only a little out of her depth — she didn’t know the right words to say, if they existed, but she knew well enough from experience to avoid saying the wrong ones. There was nothing you could have done rings hollow when it’s never true. "Tell me about him?"
"What for? You already know everything."
"No, not anymore. You knew him best, I think: will you tell me something nice about him?"
She sighed and rolled onto her back, trailing her fingers along the etchings on her forearm. The design had grown significantly, an organic sprawl of clean lines that formed something amorphous and abstract. "He used to sing for me, whenever he wasn't telling me stories. I couldn't talk yet, but I could, um—" She curled her hands and clicked her brass fingernails past each other in a tight back-and-forth rhythm; the accompanying hum from the motor in her chest was low and thready. "I liked the one about the ducks: he sang it for me every night before sleeping."
Mal hummed the melody of the nursery rhyme, remembering it well. Zed clicked along for a phrase before she let her hands fall with a sigh.
"He talked a lot about Goose. He told me once that I would like them, if it weren't for what I am. He talked about a virus that they had written, one that killed everything like me.”
Mal gnawed on the inside of her cheek, trying to decide how to answer the implicit question while trying not to think about what it must have felt like, having her entire existence rewritten — trying to imagine the breadth of existence within Zed's mind, when before she would have easily dismissed it all — and suddenly having to share space with the person who arbitrated it. "They had just lost Gwenh. They were trying to eliminate a threat.”
“I know.”
She gnawed harder, wondering if Goose was still dissecting a war drone out in the open, with Zed in the building. “Do you remember much, from that time?”
“No, just— just this moment of clarity, the first time I had a real thought that was all my own. And then I didn’t think about anything at all, not for a long time.”
She nodded, and kept nodding as she worked up the courage to ask her question and hear the answer: "Do you feel safe, with Goose?"
"I'm safe — it's not like that." She whirred a gentle sigh. “I'm grateful to be alive. I wouldn't change things, but— but it hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“All of it. You know?”
“I know.” She reached out to pat her ankle, moving on instinct rather than conscious thought — she quickly pulled her hand back before making contact, hesitantly tucking it back in her lap. “A lot of it hurts. Most of it does, if you have bad luck.”
“I think I’m the unluckiest thing alive.”
She glanced over at Clover before leaning closer to conspiratorially whisper, “My daughter thinks the same thing when it’s time for her B-A-T-H.”
After a beat, Zed laughed, clasping her hands together over her chest like Tai-Song used to. Her faceplate didn’t look so strange and featureless anymore — depending on where the light fell Mal could see hints of changing expressions, like the markings of a Noh mask. She cautiously reached out again and touched her ankle, fingers encircling the spindly joint with room to spare — she vividly remembered comforting Tai-Song like this, when he was heartbroken over boys who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Zed let out another whirring sigh, falling still. “It sucks.”
“Yeah, that’s life.” She stood up and stretched before propping Clover's cradleboard against her hip, feeling the self-sustaining burn of grief and guilt lick its way back into her throat: she could delay no longer. “Speaking of which, I have to go talk to Ze Ze.”
“She’s in a mood.”
“If she kills me, Kaia gets custody of Clover.”
***
Yuen-Fa deliberately turned away from Mal when she knocked on the second bedroom's open door, focusing all her energy on sweeping up a small, stubborn pile of dust in the farthest corner. Mal closed the door behind her and sat down on the mattress pallet, laying the cradleboard across her knees to wait out the minimum of forty-five seconds of silence she was due. As she picked apart the laces and pulled Clover out of her swaddle, she glanced down at the wooden jewellery box sitting beside her. The lacquered finish was old and worn down in worry-trails, an arcing stripe across the lid where Yuen-Fa habitually rubbed it, ovals in the shapes of her fingerprints on the sides. Without looking, she already knew what was inside: a lock of hair from Tai-Song’s first haircut, tied in a feathery black sprig with faded green ribbon, and the embroidered corner from his baby blanket.
When Yuen-Fa finally spoke, her voice was carefully even, with only the slightest shake to betray her anger. “Did you lose your camera?”
“Just my taste for it.” The camera was at the bottom of her bag, back at Jay’s, and she didn't even miss the heft of it around her neck, not when she had Clover's weight in her arms, chest-to-chest with warm air stirring over her collarbone. “That place ruined it for me.”
With a sigh, Yuen-Fa let the broom clatter to the floor and sat down next to Mal, picking up the box and thumbing it open. “What hasn’t been taken from us,” she sighed, wistful and melodic as she worried Tai-Song’s embroidered square between her fingers: even twenty-five years later, the poplar tree was still vibrant in green stitches, the snow on the branches still glistening in white threads, the little shrine still standing stoic and beloved in the roots. In contrast, everything about Yuen-Fa seemed hollow and faded, except for the silence — that was just as grand and potent as ever.
When the quiet proved too much, Clover began to fuss, due for a nap. Mal rearranged her more comfortably and petted back her hair, humming softly to calm her; her eyes drooped with Pavlovian speed, soothed by her touch and the familiar rhythms of a Kanien’kéha lullaby. She ran through the melody twice over before trying her hand at singing, finding her footing in the words after a muddled first try.
When Clover finally slipped into her nap, Mal paused for breath. Yuen-Fa straightened up and wiped her cheeks, seeming to come back to herself. “That was Mohawk?”
“Kanien’kéha.” Dad had always been very particular about the distinction; Baba had no opinion on it whatsoever, and stances varied back home. “I’m trying to make sure she hears it growing up — like you did, with Tai-Song — but I'll never be that good at it. I still haven't figured out how to translate shoot-and-scoot tactics.”
“Tell me about it — I’ve been trying to remember how to say ‘armistice’ for the past twenty years.”
“What do you need to know that for?”
“The same reason you need to know battlefield jargon in a place so far from our war.” She tucked the square back into the box and set it on her knee, leaning back on her hands. “When I was growing up, in Hong Kong, you had to learn English and Putonghua early if you want to get anywhere in life. People thought you were a criminal if you spoke Guangdong, so I stopped speaking it — and soon I forgot it all. And when I told myself that I had to get it back for Tai-Song, I wasn’t thinking about conducting a war or negotiating peace: I was thinking about giving him the tools to go through life with pride.”
“I know — my point was that you know more than me, and I'm jealous.”
“You’re upset that you’re hitting a wall, right? You’ve learned so many other languages, why is this one so difficult, there must be something wrong with you — but the thing is, you haven’t actually learned that much. You speak Cantonese okay, I’ll give you that, but Arabic, Polish, Mandarin? You can’t tell jokes, you can’t tell someone you love them, you don’t understand the grammar — you only know the words you need to know for wartime.” She smiled wryly. “Maybe one day, you'll speak Kanien’kéha without even trying, and maybe it'll never be that easy, but you'll never have to use it for fighting this war. We should all be so lucky.”
She bit her lip and looked away, still stroking Clover’s hair. “I wish I already knew it," she said helplessly, unsure of what she was getting out of this argument. "I wish that my parents knew more of it, when I was growing up. Without the language and without a clan, it was hard to feel like I belonged, up north."
“They gave you what they could, for the time and place that you live in,” she replied, sharply bemused. “What else can you ask for — different parents? What good does all this wishing do?”
“I don’t know, I came here to complain.” She kept her eyes fixed on Clover’s head. “And to apologize. I shouldn’t have run off like that.”
“Then why’d you do it?” Even when she kept her tone purposefully flat, her disappointment was palpable — Yuen-Fa was still the only person who could make her feel physically ill with guilt. “I needed you there, Mal — we all needed you.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know—“ She pressed her hand to her eyes to try and keep the tears in, wondering when she had grown so soft, so prone to crying. She could swear that she used to be better at conserving water. “I thought I was going to find him alive. I don’t think I know how to handle death anymore.”
Her back hunched as the admission left her mouth, anticipating some variation of stop making excuses, but it never came. After what felt like hours, Yuen-Fa pulled her into a tight hug and brushed the wisps of her freshly-cut hair behind her ears, pressing her chin to the top of her head. “That sounds like a better way to live,” she told her quietly, pulling back before Mal could protest. She pressed the palm of her hand to her swollen, watering eyes, and cleared her throat. “Do you think I should have made Zed to go the funeral?”
“People would have thought she was spying.”
“Give me a break. Barely anyone cared when he went missing — she’s the one who stayed with him to the end, the one who helped bring him home. Everyone else can kick rocks.” Her hand passed over her eyes again, and a sound choked itself in her throat, halfway between a scoff and a sob. “I don’t know how to live like this. I don’t know what life is supposed to look like when I don't have a little brother to take care of.”
Mal nodded, head feeling like it was stuck on a spring as she reached out and took Yuen-Fa's hand. “There’s still a piece of him here. We can still take care Zed.”
She deflated. “I can’t. I can’t just— switch gears, like that. I only had enough steam for one kid, I don’t have it in me to stay and be what she needs.” She swiped away her tears in a hurry, but her voice still hitched painfully. “She— she likes Kaia, and Goose. They’ll take good care of her, won’t they? Up north, away from anyone that might try to hurt her?”
“We’ll do everything she’ll let us get away with,” Mal promised. She looked down as Clover whined herself awake, blinking blearily and fixating on the bracelets around Yuen-Fa’s wrist. Mal clicked her tongue as she began to reach for them, keeping her grasping hands occupied. “Those aren’t yours, my girl.”
Yuen-Fa snorted, and unclasped the tarnished brass chain she had wrapped twice around her wrist, the one with a coin-sized octagonal pendant polished to a mirror’s shine. “She has good taste.”
“No, Fa-Fa, you don’t have to—”
“I want to.” She fastened it around Mal’s neck with trembling, ice-cold fingers. “Give that to her, once she’s old enough.”
“I will.”
"And tell her the story I used to tell you and Tai-Song, the one about the wind and the sun. You remember?"
"Of course I do." She heard Goose clacking down the hall before the door was punted open with the end of their crutch. Clover cooed excitedly, reaching out for her third-favourite grown-up. “Goose is here.”
“So I can see.” Yuen-Fa dried her eyes and stood up, accepting the satchel they wordlessly offered to her. “Thank you, Goose. There’s still room for you in the ship, if you’ve changed your mind.”
“I’d rather die.” They winced at their poor choice of words, and dropped their gaze to the floor, hands flexing around the handles of their crutches. “That’s not— I didn’t mean that.”
“I promise I can take a joke, Goose.” She stepped closer and ensnared them in a hug before they could flee. “Good luck, in all that you do.”
“You too.” They tolerated the embrace for one squeeze before wriggling out of her arms, glancing over at Mal and clearing their throat. “I’ll be needing you and Zed to carry me back up that fucking hill, when you’re done here.”
“Just give me a minute, I’m right behind you.”
They nodded, ducking back in to awkwardly hug Yuen-Fa again before fleeing the room. Mal smiled to herself as she tied Clover back into the cradleboard; she was less resistant to it than before, perhaps too gladdened by her mother’s return to put up a fight.
Yuen-Fa looked over with a sad smile as she slung the cradleboard over her shoulders. “Time to go, huh?”
Like Goose, Mal went in for one last hug. “I wish I could stay longer, Ze Ze — thank you, for everything.”
“Likewise, Aa Mui.” Yuen-Fa squeezed her shoulder as she pulled away. “Be safe. It was such a joy to watch you grow up.”