The Apprentices (16 page)

Inside the gym, silver streamers shimmered. Most of the girls were in white, and blue gels over the lights gave everything an underwater glow. The balcony had been garlanded with fluffy cotton to suggest drifting snow. The boys grinned nervously under new haircuts, faces scraped with razors. A fog of aftershave and cologne hung in the air, masking the gym’s undertone of sweat, old basketballs, and disinfectant. The band was playing “Sh-Boom,” and a pale, pomaded singer crooned,
“Life could be a dream—if I could take you up—in paradise up above.”

Pip scanned the room. It was the first time he had seen a whole room full of American kids his age, and the girls were delightfully pretty. The boys were irritatingly tall. What did they
feed
these brutes in America?

Then a boy who wasn’t tall moved toward Pip. He was round and wore a brown suit. He approached Pip and stuck
out his hand. “Tadpole Porter,” he said. “Dance committee.”

Pip shook the offered hand. “I’m Pip.”

“Do you have a ticket?” Tadpole asked. “You’re a little underdressed.”

Pip decided to address the last accusation only. “Forgot my dinner jacket.”

“You’re British, aren’t you?” Tadpole asked. “I’m a big fan of English history. The War of the Roses and all that.”

“Great,” Pip said. “I’m looking for Janie Scott’s roommate.”

The boy narrowed his eyes. “Janie’s your friend?”

“From London,” Pip said. “We were in school together there.”

Something dawned on Tadpole. “Hey!” he said. “Are you the friend in England she had a letter from? I thought it was from a girl!”

Pip shook his head. “I’m not much for letters.”

“You know she got kicked out, right?”

“Of
school
?” It wasn’t like Janie.

The boy nodded, then tilted his head. “Have I seen you somewhere?”

Pip didn’t feel like having the
Robin Hood
conversation just now. “So where’s Janie’s roommate?”

Tadpole turned and surveyed the room. “Over there.”

Pip followed the boy’s pointing finger, and his mouth fell open. He forced himself to close it. Giovanna had been right that she was beautiful. “What’s her name?” he asked.

“Opal Magnusson,” Tadpole said. “She’s mean, though. Don’t get all excited.”

The girl was standing alone in a simple white dress that
clung to her body, no fluffy rampart of a skirt like the other girls wore. She had smooth, bare, caramel-colored shoulders and hair like a sheet of silk. She looked up and saw Pip staring. He was standing close to her—somehow his feet had moved him nearer without his knowing it. “Hullo,” he said. He was too dazzled to say more.

“Hi,” she said coolly.

“You’re Janie’s roommate,” he managed.

“I
was.
”

“Why’d she get kicked out of school?”

Opal looked vaguely in the direction of the band. “I don’t know about that.”

If she had been a better liar, or if her rotten lying had been the result of nervousness, Pip thought he could have forgiven her. But she wasn’t even
trying
to be convincing. That was how little she thought of him. He resolved to harden his heart. “She’s a friend of mine, Janie is,” he said.

Opal looked back at him. “Where are you from?”

“Mars,” he said.

“Ha. You came all this way to find Janie?”

“In a spaceship, it’s right quick.”

“Did someone ask you to come?”

“What, I need an invitation? It’s just a poxy school dance. Listen, I heard you two had a fight.”

“Not really.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t really go home, did she?”

Opal blushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know where she is!”

“How dare you accuse me!” She glared fiercely at him, and he knew he was right. No one got mad like that unless they were hiding something.

Then a shadow fell across Pip’s face, blocking the blue lights, and an enormous body loomed beside them. Pip looked up at the towering boy, who held two cups of punch in his oversized fists. “What’s going on?” the monster asked.

“He’s bothering me,” Opal said.

The creature handed both cups to her and grabbed Pip’s collar, but the boy in the brown suit yanked Pip out of his grasp. “Dance committee!” Tadpole said. “No fighting!”

“She knows where Janie is!” Pip said, struggling.

“I do not!” Opal cried.

“No ticket, no entry!” Tadpole said, with a forced cheerfulness, dragging Pip toward the gym doors.

Pip tried to twist free. “Let me go! I’ll buy a ticket!”

Tadpole shoved him out into the cold night air. “You moron! You idiot! That guy could twist your head off.”

“But she knows where Janie is!”

“So what? They’re roommates!” Tadpole was breathing hard from the struggle.

“But Janie’s in trouble!” Pip said.

“What kind of trouble?”

“That girl knows!”

“Well, you can’t just pick a fight with her and her gargoyle date. That’s really dumb, you know?”

“You got a better idea?”

They stood glaring at each other in silence. Inside the gym, the bandleader was singing in his saccharine croon,
“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.”

“How long’ll that thing go on?” Pip asked.

“The dance? Couple of hours.”

“Where do Janie and that girl live?”

“Carleton Hall,” Tadpole said, still winded.

“Show me their room,” Pip said.

B
y the fireplace in the empty house, Jin Lo broke two eggs into a pot. She had no card from the Party to collect rations, but the cat had led her to a nearby chicken coop, under cover of night. She had spoken quietly to the watchdog, who let her pass, and to the hens, who clucked to themselves but allowed her to gather a handful of warm, fresh eggs. The woman who lived next door had brought her some rice, and Jin Lo cooked that, too. The cat was right that she had to eat. Her wrists looked scrawny as she stirred the pot. She squatted by the fire because she’d lost what cushioning she’d had beneath her bones, and it hurt to sit.

On the other side of the fire was another pot, simmering gently. It wasn’t food. There was something she was waiting for: a smell that would tell her it was ready. She couldn’t describe the smell to the cat, because she didn’t know what it was yet, but she would know it when it came.

She picked up her chopsticks and realized she was ravenous. She forced herself to eat slowly, and gave a piece of egg to
the cat, who mewed in thanks. Soon her stomach was painfully full, and she set aside the rest of the food for later.

She had found a small shard of mirrored glass on her walk to the chicken coop, and she studied herself in its narrow reflection. Her black hair was stringy and unwashed. Her eyes were sunken and dull. She went to the neighbor, who led her silently to a bath. Dirt came off Jin Lo’s body in gray sheets, and she had to scrub the bathtub when she was finished. Her hair felt lighter, as if she had halved its weight by washing it. The neighbor brought her a tunic and a pair of pants, and took away her clothes to wash them.

Jin Lo was startled by the woman’s kindness. But of course the neighbor had been kind from the beginning. Jin Lo just hadn’t gotten around to recognizing it and pointing it out to herself. She had so seldom
felt
kindness—she didn’t let it through her hard shell to warm her.

But there had been times with Marcus Burrows and his son when she had felt warmth. The girl, Janie, had wiped the Oil of Mnemosyne from Jin Lo’s wrists when it had given her such terrible memories. The boy, Pip, had brought them hot rolls in a paper bag for breakfast. The men on the
Anniken
had cheered Jin Lo for catching fish from the boat, and the old cook had brought the first fish off the grill to her.

And at Count Vili’s house in Luxembourg, where she had rested with Marcus Burrows and his son, they had sat by the fire roasting chestnuts and playing a game in which one person was the detective and one was secretly the murderer, and
the suspects made up stories about where they had been at the time of the crime. Count Vili was the best at the game, telling long tales about seeing an arm dripping with blood, hanging out of the dumbwaiter. He said he had seen Jin Lo washing something red off her hands in the pool.

“Red frosting,” Jin Lo said, because she was not the murderer. “From cake.”

“There was
cake
?” Count Vili said. “And no one saved me a piece?”

“Benjamin made it,” Jin Lo said.

“Benjamin
bakes
?” Vili asked.

“Badly,” Benjamin admitted.

“Perhaps this was the murder weapon,” Vili said.

“Poison?” Marcus Burrows, the detective, asked.

“Eggshell,” Vili said. “Left in the batter. Gets caught in the esophagus.” He drew a fat finger across his throat. “No more birthdays, no more cakes.”

They went on like that for hours, making things up, casting doubt on each other, becoming sillier. It was the first time Jin Lo had ever seen Marcus Burrows laugh. Benjamin, wrapped in a blanket near the hearth, laughed so hard he could hardly breathe. Count Vili grinned to himself, peeling hot chestnuts.

That seemed very long ago now. Vili had returned to Luxembourg in disgust after the Japanese fisherman died from the radioactive ash. And Marcus Burrows had become distracted, treating casualties of skirmishes in the jungle. Jin Lo had helped him as long as she could stand it.

“You heal these men and they fight again,” she had told him, the night she left.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“What about your plan?”

“My primary duty is to heal sickness,” he said, touching his left eye to keep it from twitching. “You may go if you wish. This is my plan, for now.”

In the end, she didn’t know why she had left Vietnam. It might have been because she couldn’t bear to see, any longer, what human beings were capable of doing to each other. The shrapnel, the bullet wounds, the blood. She had been drawn toward home.

The cat, curled by the fire, sat up and mewed. Jin Lo gave the green concoction a stir. The smell was the one she’d been waiting for—it still had the fecund stink of undergrowth, but it also had a sharp edge, as if it were just about to burn. She snatched the pot from the fire. Then she uncorked the vial of Quintessence and tapped in three drops. It sizzled and smoked, and let off that glorious smell, the smell of life. It brought back, unbidden, the smell of her baby brother’s skin. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she blinked at the blurry pot. Then she stirred the simmering mixture, and the sweet smell was swallowed up in the smoky green funk.

She wrapped her hand in her long sleeve, picked up the pot by its wire handle, and carried it outside, the cat dancing at her heels. She tilted the pot to drizzle its contents into the flower beds of dead weeds along the front of the house, then along the
side closest to the kind neighbor. She looked up and saw the neighbor watching her through a window, and waved.

Then Jin Lo rounded the back of the house, where her mother had kept a small kitchen garden of leeks and onions and leafy green vegetables. It was all dusty weeds now. She fed the green stuff from the pot to the empty garden, then to the beds on the other side of the house, then to the beds along the front gate where the soldiers had come into the yard.

She went inside the house and gathered her few possessions, tying them up in a handkerchief. The cat followed nervously.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We have a little time.”

They went outside and Jin Lo sat cross-legged on the ground, just beyond the gate. The cat climbed into her lap.

Green shoots first emerged from the winter soil along the front of the house. They unfurled their bright clusters of leaves and grew taller. The ones near the wall of the house climbed up it, twisting around each other for strength, reaching the window and running along the sill, then up the frame. The ones near the front path grew out in all directions like a carpet, covering the small yard. Vines grew across the door, weaving a lattice that was instantly obscured by waxy leaves. Moss climbed up from the ground over the peeling paint, making the walls furry and vibrantly green. The low fence around the house became a hedge. Long-dead bamboo shot up through the thick green web, spearing the eaves of the house as if it would simply push through the roof toward the sky. Then it did push through, with a creak and crack of dry wood.

A green branch broke through a window with a bright crash, and snaked inside the house. A vine reached the roof, coiling tightly around the chimney.

Jin Lo watched. The cat mewed.

A branch came out through the chimney from inside. Long-dead sweet peas wrapped around the walls from the kitchen garden in the back. The house was being swallowed whole. It still had the shape of a house, with a chimney and windows, but the corners were softening. It would soon be a green mound.

And then she saw it: A shimmering shape escaped from the chimney. It was small, no larger than a fat one-year-old baby, and it danced and dissipated in the air. It vanished like smoke, but it wasn’t smoke.