Seen from afar, the wall fills up Cam and Tam’s world like skin over a healed wound.
It starts as roughly hewn stones, almost ordinary save for their white, translucent color; and then, as it sweeps upward in a slow unfurling, it grows and stretches into a dome, and a pattern of dark blue lines spreads across what should be the surface of the sky—like the ribs of a leaf, or the veins of a corpse.
As they walk closer—and its shadow darkens, swallowing their own—even sunny, optimistic Tam falls silent.
“We can go back, Big’sis,” Cam says. “It was just a dream.”
She expects Tam to grow angry—to argue and yell, frustration barely contained; to accuse her again of lacking respect, pretending she can put restrictions on her elder sister’s life—to condemn her for not being Mother. But instead Tam is silent, watching the wall.
There are no birds, not this close to the wall. But a tall, slender coconut tree arches from the grass to the white, translucent area above the stones of the palace’s roof, where the sky would be, if there was a sky within the Palace of the Everlasting Emperor.
“Here,” Tam says. “Just like Mother said.”
It was a dream, Cam wants to say. Mother is dead; not only that, but her tomb is outside the wall, in the dusty little village where Cam and Tam grew up before the Emperor’s envoys took them and brought them to the palace to check the census; before their lives shrank to the company of the other girls, the abacuses, the reams of reports to be checked.
None of the census girls will ever be allowed out, beyond the skin of the wall, beyond the confines of the palace. The only way out is deeper in, through the Inner Vermillion Chambers—to become a high-rank official charged with doing the Emperor’s will, traveling the land to bear edicts and memorials. But Tam has that look again: those haunted eyes like when she was a child and she dropped her stone elephant in the village well, that stubborn cast to her face, and, really, when was the last time Cam didn’t follow where Tam led?
“She said we could fly, if we found the will. We could go home, back to Father and Grandmother and the aunts. Just forget all of this, same as a bad dream,” Tam says. She unknots her sash and loops it around the trunk of the tree, testing her hold thoughtfully. She doesn’t even look around—Cam does that, but this early on, all the supervisors are asleep, and the other census girls are still giggling at the mat chuoc game. “The wall is thinner at the top, isn’t it? I bet we could push through.”
Cam finds her voice, drags it from a faraway place. “The birds don’t get out.”
Tam snorts. “Like you know what you’re talking about.”
Cam doesn’t, of course. But neither does Tam. “Big’sis, I don’t think—”
But Tam is already shimmying up the tree, with the same ease as before—it’s as if no time has passed since their arrival in the palace; five years of imprisonment become an eyeblink. “Big’sis!” Cam calls out. “Be careful!”
The wind, rising through the gardens, mangles Tam’s answer as she ascends the tree—impossibly lithe, growing smaller and smaller as she climbs. Of course she can’t get out that way. Does she think it hasn’t been tried? There are hundreds of girls working on the census, hundreds of them from every dusty little village in the land, and dozens of them must know how to climb coconut trees. The Everlasting Emperor doesn’t let go of what’s his so easily.
Tam and Cam both want to go home—to sit once more with their family around a meal of fish sauce and rice, to chat about who did what in the village. Cam’s heart tightens at the thought—what she wouldn’t give to hear Second Aunt’s reedy voice complaining of lack of respect, or Grandmother’s soft, careful tread as she walks through the house in the morning, long before anyone is awake.
Tam says no one ever gets out—that none of the girls ever become high officials, that it’s just a lie to keep them quiet and docile. She puts her faith not in the Everlasting Emperor but in magic—in the tales Mother used to recite at night: flying trees and inexhaustible rice jars, and fish becoming dragons becoming humans.
Cam doesn’t believe in magic anymore. But then she was very young when Mother died, and doesn’t remember her as well as Tam.
“Lil’sis.” Tam’s voice floats down, carried by the wind. “You can see through the wall, at the top. The rice paddies, the forests, the cities. Everything is so different from up here. Like scattered jewels.”
“Come down,” Cam says. It will be the Bi-hour of the Cat soon enough, and the supervisors will round them up once again, to the cavernous room where they do their accounting. “We’ll be late.”
Above her, Tam leans out, one hand pressing against the surface of the wall, the lines pulsing under her touch. “It’s so thin. I could—” Her legs barely cling to the trunk. Her chest juts out, dangerously unbalanced—
“Big’sis!” Cam screams, but it’s already too late.
Tam falls. Too late. Too late. Why did she—why did she even indulge her sister—why did she—
But as Tam falls, the wall wraps itself around her, the blue lines thinning and sinking beneath her skin like veins—fingers becoming the color of the sky, of the leaves; hands obscured by a thin, white veil that climbs over her chest and face—and, just as she would have hit the stones of the wall, she shifts and blurs and changes—and a white bird with blue streaks on its wings rises, catching a draft and banking back toward the wall.
She—
This only happens in stories. Cam stops, breathing hard, the world blurring and tilting around her. She watches the bird fly, again and again, toward the skin of the wall; and, again and again, hitting an impassable obstacle.
She said we could fly.
It was just a dream. Just Tam’s wild, impossible dream. But, as the bird comes down, wings ruffled and broken and bleeding—as it hops onto Cam’s clenched fist—it looks up at her, and the look in its eyes is her sister’s.
Cam can’t disguise Tam’s absence. The supervisors notice, of course, and castigate her for failing to keep an eye on her sister. They think she’s run away—that she’s hiding somewhere in the depths of the gardens.
“Foolish girl,” Supervisor Bach Kim says, with a sigh. “She’ll regret it, when we do find her.” And then, to Cam, a little more kindly—she’s always liked Cam, always praised her hard, relentless work—“don’t let that distract you from your accounting.”
But it does. Cam feeds the bird her charred rice and dumplings, watches it eat and move and fly, wondering how much of Tam is left. Twice, she takes it into the gardens, releases it toward the wall, but it always comes back, always in the same shape. Whatever happened at the wall, it will only happen once. “Big’sis,” she whispers, sometimes, after the day’s accounting is done. “What are we going to do?”
The bird never answers. Cam wakes up in the morning, picking out sand from her shoes—the smell of the sea saturating the room, blown in from the nearby beaches—and feeds the bird the noodles from her soup bowl. It slurps it avidly, throwing back its head like Tam used to do at breakfast.
At night, it sings—a quivering, warbling sound that rises in her dreams, becomes her sister’s voice. It wouldn’t be so bad, if the bird spoke of cryptic wisdom, or of the dream Tam had, the one that started everything, but instead, it’s small, everyday things, the kind of talk they had before Tam changed.
See, in Dai Sang Province, here? The inconsistency between the Hoa Khanh household now and five years ago. They can’t possibly have had thirteen children, not only with one wife!
And here, in Quang Phuoc Province. These fifty buckets of husked rice just vanish between one page and the next. And it happens here again. I bet the village headman is embezzling them. Has to be.
See, Big’sis? See?
Cam opens her mouth to speak, but all that comes out is the warbling song of a bird. Tam laughs, relaxed, good-natured. Don’t worry. It’ll all become clear, in time.
And everything blurs and whitens, becomes the color of the wall, blue veins stretching around her, as a sound resonates, again and again—she thinks it a gong, a bell calling to Awakening; but as Cam wakes up, gasping, to her empty room, she knows what it is: the sound of beads on an abacus.
During the day, Cam sleepwalks to her place in the census pavilion. She puts her hand on the plate by the doors—they open, recording her attendance, and she goes to sit at the end of one row, by one of the lacquered pillars painted the vermillion shade of the Emperor’s belongings, close to the courtyard. By her side, Tam’s mat is empty, her papers neatly folded, her abacus reset to zero, the ink dried on the hairs of her paintbrush. The other girls don’t like it: Hanh, who is superstitious, makes a sign of warding as she sits and takes her abacus from her sleeve. Census girls aren’t meant to disappear. They might be prisoners in the palace, but the Emperor keeps them safe, keeps them fed and clothed, while outside war and famine rage, and their families shrivel and die without the miracle of such protection.
Cam stares at rows and rows of numbers, trying to make sense of them all: the returns of Kien La Province, their production of fermented fish, their corvée attendance, and rice-wine consumption by household. Little things that should add up, that don’t always: too much rice wine, too many banquets to honor the Emperor, too little salt sent to the capital . . .
Around her, the familiar clacks of beads on the abacuses, rising and rising to fill her world, girl after girl sinking deeper and deeper into strings of numbers, tracking down the inconsistencies, building a true picture of the Everlasting Empire and its people, bead after bead after bead.
It becomes the song of a bird, the warbling tone of her sister’s voice that haunts her dreams. Don’t worry, Lil’sis.
Of course she worries. She always has.
Cam comes to, startled, to a touch on her hand. For a single, heartbreaking moment, she thinks Tam has come back, but it’s the bird, hopping up and down between her fingers, making small, satisfied noises in the back of its throat. When Cam reaches out, it flies away to Tam’s mat, bright eyes on her; hopping over Tam’s abacus, the beads dancing beneath its legs; and from there to the steps leading down to the courtyard. The message is clear.
Follow me.
Cam rises, slowly. She looks at Supervisor Bach Kim, mouthing an apology. I just need a moment. Supervisor Bach Kim nods, makes a gesture telling her to be quick. She hasn’t noticed the bird, but why would she see anything remarkable about it?
The bird—flying and hopping and pausing when Cam stumbles—takes her through the courtyard, weaving its way between rows of stone elephants and attendants, and then into the walled corridors that lead from the census quarters to the gardens—for a moment Cam worries that her authorizations won’t be good there, but as she lays her hand on the plates, each door opens with a soft exhaling sound. The air is thick with the cloying scent of osmanthus.
The bird stops, then. When Cam joins it under an arch of yellow stone, carved with the characters for longevity and good fortune, it hops toward the lawn and rises up in the air, flying toward the faraway shape of the wall. Its movements are slow and deliberate—her elder sister’s through and through, that stubbornness that even five years of confinement haven’t dented.
Cam watches, her heart in her throat. “There’s nothing there. Come back.” Please, Big’sis. Please. Please stop whatever you’re doing. Come back.
The bird stops, turns back toward her. Please please please, Cam thinks, a prayer to her dead ancestors; to Mother, who has to be watching from the ancestral altar, protecting her daughters from beyond the grave. Make her come back. But the bird turns again, banks toward the wall, and then, with the same deliberateness, toward Cam, and again and again, movements that become a slow dance, as the sound of beads on an abacus rises, filling the air like thunder.
See here, in Quang Phuoc Province, the famine of the Metal Tiger Year . . .
The blue feathers on the bird’s wings shine under the skin of the wall—a radiance that spreads to its entire body until it seems to glow like jade held under the sun, and they’re the veins of the wall again, pulsing with that same slow heartbeat. White mist rises from the lawn, reaching upward. The bird still dances, and every beat of its wings draws more white, translucent mist, which grows thicker and thicker. Cam looks at the wall, and at the bird, and sees tendrils of mists connect both, thin threads thrown from a loom.
“Big’sis. Please.”
The bird shivers and shakes, and changes again. Its shape stretches upward, wreathed in a white that hurts Cam’s eyes. The mist sweeps over it; the wall closes in for a brief heartbeat; and then there’s no bird left, nothing but the thin shape of a tree, branches stretching outward, and the same thin network of blue markings on its trunk. It bears a single round, golden fruit at its crown: a decandrous persimmon, the sweet, ripe smell of it trembling in the air, thick in Cam’s throat like a promise of a feast.
Big’sis.
The trees don’t get out, either—not even their leaves, borne by the wind, can breach the wall. It’s pointless. No matter how many times Tam can change her shape—no matter where she finds that power, how long she can sustain it—there is no escape. Only the high-ranking, trusted officials are allowed outside.
Cam walks toward the tree, kneels by its side. The abacuses have fallen silent; now there’s just wind in the branches. When she lays her hand on the trunk, she feels her sister’s thoughts—Tam’s annoyed affection for Cam, who tries so hard to be responsible—she loves Cam, she really does, but sometimes Tam could shake her, with her insistence on propriety and submission—Cam has to see, hasn’t she, that it’s illusory, that they’ll never be chosen to be high-rank, that they’ll live and die within the census pavilion, without husbands or children or families?
Oh Big’sis.
The world is blurred again. Cam brushes tears from her eyes. Don’t let this distract you from your work, Supervisor Bach Kim would say, and she has to go back before they start looking for her. There’s work to be done, numbers to check from page to page. She needs to make sure it’s all impeccable—all taken forward to the Grand Secretariat, sealed and checked by the Emperor himself.
Around her, thin white mist pools, the remnants of the wall that swept over Tam, that changed her. You won’t get out this way. You have to see.
The wind whistles in the branches, and it’s her sister’s voice again. Maybe I will. We won’t know until I try, will we? Mother said—
Cam wants to say, Mother is dead. She stops herself with only an effort, because it’s not what Tam needs to hear, because it won’t change anything. Mother has no voice within the palace. You should know this, Big’sis. It’s a tree. It—it can’t leave, rooted in the earth of the garden. Can’t you— There has to be another shape. But nothing gets through the wall. Not leaves, not birds, not girls—not the sister of her heart, the one who’s always had enough fire for both of them, dragging her into scrapes and trouble, as if there were no other way to live.
Her heart stutters, misses a beat. The bark of the trunk is as smooth as the beads of her abacuses, and she finds herself sliding her fingers up and down, as if she were counting again—picking shape after shape, discarding them. Nothing works. Nothing gets out. Except . . .
Except the air of sea, the sand that they find in their shoes in the morning, clogged in their porcelain bowls on the breakfast table.
White pools around her, mist shot through with blue veins. The wall rises around her, thick and rough and warm. She slides her fingers down the trunk, as if holding a five-unit bead, and light spreads from her fingers to her sister’s shape.
The tree crumbles into dust. The trunk first, and then the branches and the leaves; and, last to go, the golden fruit, its fragrance becoming unbearably thick against Cam’s tongue, like mango juice, like liquid honey. Around her, yellow dust dances and shivers on a held breath; and the wind lifts it, carrying it toward the skin of the wall—where it sinks among blue veins until no trace of gold is left.
Cam’s hand remains hanging in the air, with the touch of Tam’s fingers still on hers, not sure whether she should laugh or cry or both.
Please, Big’sis . . .
Please be well.
When Supervisor Bach Kim asks Cam into her office, Cam is convinced it’ll be about Tam, about the still-empty spot among the girls, the one they all sidestep with fear in their eyes as time passes and no one can find her anywhere.
But she got out. The dust passed the wall. It had to. Never mind that the wall is just a wall now, that Cam’s dreams have been silent for a year, and that she’s gone into the garden, time and time again, and found nothing but immaculate lawn and emptiness beneath a stone arch.
Supervisor Bach Kim doesn’t look angry, merely thoughtful, watching Cam as if weighing her worth. “Tea?” she asks.
Cam sits on her knees as Supervisor Bach Kim pours tea the color of cut grass into a cup, breathing the almost-familiar smell. It’s from the Inner Vermillion Chambers, a delicate, expensive thing the like of which is never given to the census girls. “Is this about my work?” she asks.
Supervisor Bach Kim’s lips purse. “In a manner of speaking.”
“I—” Since the tree crumbled a year ago, Cam has been living as through a gray veil, adding and subtracting numbers with no memory of what she does, or of the meaning of what she’s looking at. It was bound to catch up with her. “I apologize—”
Supervisor Bach Kim laughs. “No need to apologize, child. Your work has been exemplary.” She sips at her own cup of tea, lays it down on the low lacquered table, over the shimmering display that keeps cycling through the symbols for the Three Fortunes. “The last two days alone, you’ve gone through more reports and memorials than your three neighbors combined.”
Cam sits, waiting for—she’s not sure what. More compliments? She’d have lapped them up once, but now they feel hollow, meaningless. “Then—”
Supervisor Bach Kim slides a piece of paper toward her, with slow, careful reverence—and of course she would, because at the bottom of the page is the vermillion seal of the Everlasting Emperor, with its delicately etched traceries of circuits. Cam bows down to the unseen presence, and only then does she raise the upper half of her body and look at the paper.
Words blur and shift; she catches only a bare glimpse of them before they become too weighty to hold. Whereas our servant Nguyen Thi Cam has shown exemplary devotion and dedication to the Imperial Throne . . .
By this decree it pleases us to elevate her to Second Rank Official in the Grand Secretariat of the Inner Vermillion Chambers . . .
The Grand Secretariat.
Official.
Second Rank.
She.
She’s going to get out. She’s going to become a high-rank official, to move, effortlessly, in and out of the palace bearing the imperial will. She—she can go home.
“It’s much to take in, I know.” Supervisor Bach Kim’s voice is almost kind. “You will get used to it, eventually.” And then, letting go of the official dialect and decorum, she hugs Cam, as fiercely as a mother. “I’m so happy for you, child. I always knew you could do it.”
Cam sits very still, watching the words. “I—” She stops, tries again. Her throat is filled with something sweet; with the taste of the decandrous persimmon. “Thank you, Elder Aunt. It means so much to me.”
It would have, once upon a time, but now all she can think of is Tam’s voice, whispering in her ears, and none of it seems to lift the gray veil over the world.
On the day of her presentation to the Everlasting Emperor, Cam takes a long, long bath, immersing herself into the scalding-hot water, as if it could finally scour her clean. The attendants she’s been assigned have withdrawn at her request: as she gets out of the carved bath pool, she stares at herself, at her skin. It’s lighter after six years in the census pavilion, but it’s still the dark, rich skin of a peasant girl who grew up replanting rice in paddies, kneeling in the churned mud until it seemed to be her entire world; singing rhymes with Cousin Hoa and Cousin Lan and all the rest of them.
Tam is with them now, laughing and smiling, stumbling as she picks up seedlings, like she always did, under Father and Grandmother’s fond eyes. She’s gone home.
She must have.
Please, Mother. Please let her be well.
In the bedroom—her new one, impossibly large, impossibly luxurious—someone has laid out a five-panel tunic of rich brocade, with the hen insignia of the second rank picked out in threads so thin it seems like a painting. Cam lets the attendants dress her, as if in a dream: one layer of dresses after another, in rich shades of red, and then a thin, long sleeveless over-tunic, so dark it’s almost black. She stares at herself in the mirror, and a stranger gazes back at her, her hands drowned in large gold-embroidered sleeves, her face whitened with ceruse, her long hair piled up in an elaborate topknot with golden pins in the shape of turtles. Her lips are painted the color of imperial ink, a slash of blood red like a wound.
She’d thought she’d feel victorious, but there is nothing but emptiness in her chest, as if her heart had been removed.
Cam stares at herself in the mirror, forces herself to smile, and watches her reflection move, vermillion lips parting on the black-enamelled teeth of officials.
Time.
The door opens, with that same soft exhaling sound like a last breath. Cam steels herself for more attendants and more guards, for the long journey into the Inner Vermillion Chambers and everything she’s ever dreamed of.
Tam stands on the threshold.
Time slows down, becomes trapped in honey. Cam breathes in, slowly. “Big’sis?”
Tam smiles. She’s wearing the rough tunic of a peasant, and her hair hangs loose on her shoulders, but she hasn’t changed. Her face is the same—moon-shaped and dimpled around a fierce smile—and she holds herself as though going into battle. Behind her are Supervisor Bach Kim, and guards. The supervisor’s face is closed, angry. “See?” she says to Tam. “Your younger sister is moving on to better things. She has no need of you.”
“You . . .” Cam takes in a deep, shaking breath; has to stop, because it hurts so much, with the clothes encasing her. “You were outside.”
“She turned herself in,” Supervisor Bach Kim says, sounding angry.
Tam shakes her head. “I went home, Lil’sis. I—” Her face twists, for a moment; loses its familiar smile and becomes hollow and taut. “I tried. With Grandmother and Father and the aunts, and I—” Her hands clench. “They— Every time they would reach for chopsticks close to the points, every time they would say a word wrong . . .” She’s shaking now. “I sat with Cousin Lan and we didn’t have anything to talk about anymore. Her world was the village and the rice harvest and who she was going to marry, and there’s so much more out there that she couldn’t see!”
“They’re our family,” Cam says, but Tam shakes her head.
“The way they looked at me—they tried, but it was awe and fear—like they worshipped me. I just couldn’t bear it anymore.”
“Of course you’re no longer peasants,” Supervisor Bach Kim says. “As if you could ever stifle what you have become.”
Tam walks into the room, past Cam, toward the tiled pool and the steaming water. Her gaze rakes the bed from end to end: Cam’s discarded clothes, the rich, alien scents saturating the room, changing Cam from peasant’s daughter to imperial official. “We can’t go home, Lil’sis. We’ve changed too much.”
Cam opens her mouth to say no, that of course they can, that she will—and then she remembers the stranger staring at her in the mirror, the official the least of whose acts is now imbued with the authority of the throne.
Instead, she says, “You didn’t have to come back. Why—” Why couldn’t you stay away? Why couldn’t you be careful, for once in your life? Why—
Tam’s gaze holds her. She raises her hands—dark and thin and elegant, their veins shining blue beneath the translucency of her skin. “Don’t you know?”
And her eyes are the bird’s, quick and bright and fierce; her arms moving in a slow dance, like wings.
Behind her, Supervisor Bach Kim says, “Come, child. Your sister has to see the Emperor, and you have to be assigned a suitable punishment.”
Tam says, quietly, “We can’t go home, but that doesn’t mean we have to be caged. Remember how everything looked different, up there?”
“Like jewels,” Cam says, the words rising from the morass of memory.
Tam smiles, and it’s radiant and infectious. “So many precious places to discover. Come on, Lil’sis. Let’s go see them together.”
Mist rises, from the water in the bath, thickening with every pass of Tam’s arms—and Cam can hear, growing louder and louder, the sound of an abacus, resonating under the roof until the entire palace seems to shake with it—until it seems to take root in her chest, as sturdy as the branches of a tree. Under her fingers, the rounded shape of abacus beads, a vast array of shapes to be weighed and discarded; in her mouth, the taste of decandrous persimmon, thick and sweet and earthy, a reminder of what things taste like, outside, strong and desperate and alive.
“We can’t possibly leave . . . ,” Cam starts slowly, desperately. She wants to talk about dreams, about magic—about how the power of shape-shifting can’t possibly sustain either of them, in the long term, but all the words seemed to have melted in her throat.
Tam watches her from within the mist. Nothing left of the room now, of the clothes on the bed, of the guards or of Supervisor Bach Kim. “Can’t we?” She holds out a hand, her eyes dark and shadowed.
Be reasonable, Cam wants to say—and then she realizes that Tam is right—that being reasonable will not undo the bars of her cage, or give her anything but hollow victories. She shakes her head. Her hair streams, long and black and uncouth, the color of churned mud. She slides a final invisible bead down, as if finishing the day’s tallies, and reaches out to Tam through the mist.
Cam clutches her sister’s hand and lets the mist gather them both, dust and sand dancing on the wind—out and out and away, toward the wealth of the world outside.