Chapter 9: Rui (part 3 of 3)

  Michael's house was situated on a hill, inside a hutong in Jurong North, just on the edge of where the wealthy neighbourhood began. It was impressive enough on its own merits, a multi-storied building with a small central attic that gave it the appearance of the top of a pagoda. The front of the house was gated, featuring a spacious courtyard adorned by simple gardens. In this part of Temasek, the gardens alone were an ample symbol of status.

  I handed the rickshaw driver a five-hoon note and stepped off outside the gate. Despite having all of the ten-minute ride from the hospital to think about my life decisions, it was only when I alighted from the rickshaw that I developed a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. Speaking with Michael had become a chore at the best of times; I now faced the prospect of seeing him for the first time since he had to be physically restrained while cross-examining me in a court of law.

  If I can't even talk to my own brother, what hope do I have of saving the human race? Step by trepidatious step, I pushed myself past the front gate and across the courtyard, until just the possibility that someone inside the house had spotted me through the windows was enough to keep me from running away. The entrance to the house proper was ajar, and I heard voices and footsteps from within before a figure emerged.

  To my transient relief, it wasn't Michael, and it turned out to be two figures rather than one. Emily, my sister-in-law with my infant nephew swaddled in front of her chest, greeted me with a wave and a smile.

  "We were just talking about when you might show up."

  "Really?" I blurted in surprise. "Michael mentioned me?"

  "No," Emily said, her eyes twinkling. "I mentioned you to Robbie, wondering why his uncle hadn't come to see him in so long."

  She was petite with straight dark hair currently tied up in a bun. Where she wasn't covered by Robbie and his wrappings, she wore the loose-fitting cheongsam my mother had sewn for her pregnancy. I remembered a bygone time when Michael was routinely dragged to 'meetings' with many a family friend's daughters. Emily had been the only one he went on a second date with, and she negated the need for further arrangements. I was happy for Michael. Emily was a schoolteacher, yet outside of the classroom, she was the nicest person imaginable, quick with bubbly smiles and warm compliments—a stark contrast to her husband.

  I bent down to get a better look at Robbie, who directed a curious frown toward me for just a second before turning away and burrowing his pudgy face into his mother's bosom.

  "He's gotten big," I beamed, my anxieties forgotten for the moment. "And his hair, so thick and dark now. What're you guys feeding him?"

  "Oh you know, Manticore soup and grilled Oliphant steaks, the usual," Emily deadpanned, which was about as much as my vapid comment had deserved. "Aren't you going to come in? Michael's in the back."

  "Yeah. Yeah, I will," I murmured, once more becoming aware of the pit of my stomach. "Um, how is he?"

  "Well, I tell you what, I thought it would be nice to have him home, but he's getting on my nerves, that one. Always pacing about muttering nonsense or going around the house tinkering with things that aren't even broken. If you ask me, he's bored out of his mind," she let out a good-natured chortle then leaned in closer, lowering her voice. "What about you, Rui? Are you okay?"

  "I'm alright, I think," I said, not remotely convinced. "Starting to feel better. At least well enough to decide I ought to drop by."

  "You're welcome here anytime, Rui. You know that."

  "I know, sis. Thank you."

  I followed Emily inside, and she disappeared into one of the rooms near the front door while cooing to Robbie. She probably sensed—correctly—that I preferred to speak to Michael alone.

  The inside of the house was surprisingly tidy for a home with a baby. Emily likely hadn't exaggerated about Michael obsessively keeping himself busy around the house. Growing up in my own household, my parents never had to yell at me or Lucy to clean our rooms as Michael had done the yelling for them. The entry hallway opened into a lounge area that featured a neat array of smart-looking furniture and ink painting scrolls spaced judiciously along the walls. I could just imagine my father standing in my spot and inspecting every detail before giving an imperceptible nod of approval.

  Michael himself wasn't present, however, which meant only one thing. In the back of the lounge was a double-door—one side of which was currently ajar—that connected to a second larger courtyard that was shared with three other neighbouring houses. Sure enough, as I approached the doors I heard the whistles of a wooden stick cutting through air, accompanied by my brother's grunts.

  I never bothered to ask him why or how he picked it up, but Michael had a keen interest in a little-known Yamatoan practice involving wooden swords. I poked my head around the open door to find his lanky figure standing near the centre of the courtyard with said wooden sword in hand. He seemed to be in the midst of a repetition, swinging the sword down in a straight line in front of him, starting with the hilt above his head and finishing at the waist. With each swing, he let out a guttural exhalation that seemed to cycle through several different syllables, though not in any language that I recognized. He was also shirtless, having removed his changshan top and tied it around his waist. Of course he had.

  Every time I saw him do this in the past, I used to think he looked ludicrous. But today, for some reason, I was struck by a sense of awe. Perhaps it had something to do with my short stint with the Silver Crane adventurers. There was something commendable about one that was focused on keeping his body and mind fit. An obvious sentiment on hindsight, yet I seemed to be making a lot of these discoveries lately. Perhaps Michael would have had a much easier time marching in the jungle than I did.

  He finished with his current set of repetitions and let out an exaggerated sigh as he lowered the sword. As he reached for a towel hanging on the laundry line next to him, he finally noticed me and did a double take. He froze and blinked several times as his face contorted into and cycled through disparate expressions. I simply stared back, the ache in my stomach more pronounced than ever. Eventually, Michael settled on a look of righteous indignation. "How long have you been standing there like an idiot?"

  Annoyance rose in me immediately and I forgot all about my awkward misgivings about coming here. I hadn't seen him in more than a week and this was the first thing he spat at me? What did Emily even see in this guy? "You're one to talk! Maybe put some clothes on before you call someone else an idiot."

  "Well, it's a good thing you're here," Michael huffed while wiping down his face, his speech muffled by the towel. "I've been meaning to talk to you. Get inside."

  Back in the lounge, Michael sat down on one of the chairs on either side of the tea table, still panting slightly but fully clothed now. I surmised that he expected me to take the other seat, but I remained standing, edging my way toward the hallway from which I had entered. There was a part of me that still wanted to bolt at the earliest sign of unpleasantness.

  Michael had hung the towel around his neck and occasionally dabbed himself with it, but he said nothing and didn't meet my eyes. I started to panic, thinking that he expected me to open the conversation... perhaps with an apology? I hadn't come prepared, and my mind was too muddled for me to have any instincts about where to begin.

  "I'll start by saying I'm sorry."

  I blinked. Michael had spoken first, and he had opened with an apology. The last time I'd heard the words 'I'm sorry' from him must have been more than a decade ago, and it would have been an insincere mumble that had been forced out by our mother. He cast his eyes downward as he continued. "It was wrong of me to lash out at you. To make a fool of myself at the hearing. I lost my temper. I'm sorry."

  The sensation in the pit of my stomach lifted and became a lump in my throat. I swallowed and pushed out a reply, trying to keep my voice steady and nonchalant. "It's alright, man. I understand what you were going through. I'm... sorry too. Sorry that I wasn't more open with you from the beginning."

  He looked up at me then, cocking one of his eyebrows. I couldn't quite read his mind but it seemed he was waiting for me to say more, so I did. Some of the things I said then—I hadn't known myself that they were my thoughts until I'd spoken them into existence.

  "But I'm not sorry for going on that quest," I looked back at him directly and let my voice rise slightly, let it firm up. "And I'm not even sorry that Lucy was there. It's what she does, Michael, and I'm glad I was there to witness it. She was awesome. Is awesome. And... now I'm convinced more than ever that we need to chip in and do something about Maladies. I mean people like you and me—doctors, civilians. We can't keep throwing our adventurers to the wolves and letting them fend for themselves."

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I did not avert my eyes at the end of my spiel. My heart was pounding, not just from the nerves but also out of fervent conviction in what I had just professed. I had decided that our ways weren't good enough. It wasn't good enough for us to lionize the adventurers, shower them with commendations while we ourselves sat back inside our city walls. It wasn't good enough to forget about adventurers while they were hours and days away from civilization only to reduce them to problems to be fixed when they rode back with grave injuries.

  Michael also stared back at me, both of his eyebrows raised now. At any moment, I expected him to begin his retort, a lecture about how childish and irresponsible I had been, how I shouldn't stick my nose where it didn't belong. But instead...

  "You're absolutely right," he said, his lips curling into a wry smile. It was my turn to do a double take. I narrowed my eyes at him, expecting a sour turn.

  "You... agree with me?"

  "Yes, though I will admit it wasn't something I gave much thought to until... well, all this," Michael threw a hand up in the air, waving at the general badness of the last few weeks. "Which is why I've been doing my own research while I've been away from work. Called in favours from old classmates and got my hands on some papers. I think you're right, Rui. There is a worrying trend of adventurers getting killed or hurt from Maladies that attack in... more intelligent ways. We'll get to what we ought to do with that knowledge, but first, there's something else we need to hash out first."

  He paused and nodded toward the chair on the other side of the tea table. Still unable to fully trust that this was to remain a civil discourse, I took my time in trudging over and lowering myself into the seat. In keeping with Luoyangese customs, both of our chairs were turned out to face the room and we both had our backs to the wall. We each had to turn our heads if we wanted to look at the other while speaking. I always thought this was needlessly uncomfortable and did not plan on reproducing it whenever I had my own home, regardless of how it might disappoint Father.

  "Right," Michael said, turning to me with the look of determined concentration he used to get whenever we were playing a particularly competitive game of chess. "I'm just going to assume we're agreed on one thing. We need to fix Lucy's leg, yeah?"

  I looked to him in surprise. It wasn't what I expected, yet as soon as I heard it, I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly. I nodded my emphatic assent.

  "Yeah, so, how are we going to do that?" Michael leaned toward me, and I knew from his tone that the question was rhetorical, a favourite method of his to lead into a lengthy extolment or two on life's virtues with Lucy and I as his captive audience. "If we go by current practice, our options are either or both of prosthetic limb and wheelchair. The most common materials we use for prostheses are either bamboo or some kind of titanium alloy. Now, assuming our goal is to return our sister to full function or as close to it as possible, we run into a few problems. Thoughts on what they are?"

  I sighed inwardly, not feeling as enthusiastic as my counterpart about this impromptu pedagogical exchange. But I had to admit to curiosity about where this was all headed, so I played along.

  "Well, for one thing," I said, trying to recall the few instances where I'd managed patients with prosthetic limbs, "prostheses don't approximate articulations and musculature very well. You can have hinges, but without neural input and the actual pulling by muscles, you're going to get a limited range of motion and a very stiff gait in general. Might somewhat overcome that problem if the subject can magick, but... Lucy is Igneous. She won't get bamboo or metal to budge."

  "Good," Michael graced me with a sanctimonious nod, and I fought down an urge to smack him upside the head. "Okay, just as a thought experiment, let's suppose we are capable of building a prosthesis that's amenable to Ignis-attunement. And let's say we got the best engineers in Temasek involved and this limb is as close to the real thing as possible. What would still be a major hindrance to daily use?"

  I had to think about this for a moment. It was a rather novel question with no answers easily pulled from textbooks or life experience. Despite myself, I was starting to enjoy this. "In order for her to use the limb like how she normally uses... well, her left leg, she'd be feeding it input almost constantly during her waking hours, really anytime she's moving on it. Even just walking on it would require enormous expenditure. If she wanted to sustain that for the whole day, she'd have to be stuffing herself every few minutes and carrying around... an inextinguishable torch or something crazy like that."

  "Exactly," Michael nodded more vigorously and broke into a wider smile. I couldn't quite say why, but I found myself starting to grin in solidarity. "Even if we somehow built the prosthesis into an Igneous device, she still needs a ridiculous amount of source and energy to power it. Unless she can somehow walk around with an entire fried noodles kitchen following her all day, she could only turn it on in short bursts—not much of an improvement over clunky metal. But what if I told you, there could be a way to solve both of our problems at once? Something that lets us use bamboo or metal as the material while still letting Lucy magick it into life, without running out of fuel within seconds."

  I was well and truly hooked. A way to cross-modulate Quintessences while also dramatically reducing the input requirements? If such a thing as Michael described existed, not only would that certainly be a life-saver for Lucy, it could also revolutionize Medicine—perhaps even Magic—as we knew it. Seeing that he had my full attention, Michael stood up and beckoned for me to follow.

  My brother's study was just as tasteful and well-organized as the rest of his house. Bamboo bookshelves covered the entirety of one of the walls, upon which sat several pottery pieces to complement textbooks, poetry collections, and scrolls of Confucian teachings. Again, they were the sorts of things our father was fond of, but I had to wonder how much of them Michael had actually read himself. The only thing here that could be construed as messy were the contents of the sandalwood desk at the centre of the room, upon which were scattered documents and loose paper with Michael's own scribbles. No doubt he would have put these away and laid out a fresh scroll and a calligraphy set whenever Father might visit.

  Presently, he sifted through the pile of documents on the desk, pulled one out, and handed it to me. It was a few pieces of crumbling paper barely held together by twine. I tried to read it for a few seconds before I realized that the characters were foreign. I looked up to meet Michael's satisfied grin.

  "I just wanted to show you the original for effect. You know how much trouble I—well, my friend in Changi—went through to dig this up and get it translated? It's in this sorry state because it was once jammed in somewhere on the back of an adventure party's wagon for miles. Here," he reached behind him again and pulled out several loose pieces of paper with ink handwriting. These were in Anglish, the lingua franca of academic discourse. "This is the translation. Take it home and read it, think about it, do your own research if you want. Then come back to me next week and we can talk about it some more."

  "What is this, you're giving me homework now?" I let a bit of disgruntlement show in my voice, but readily accepted the document nonetheless. "Can't I read it now? What's it about anyway?"

  "You can, but let's hold off on discussions until you've had time to digest it," Michael insisted, dipping into the tone he used when he wasn't about to harbour any arguments. "I want to hear your informed take on it, before I start infecting you with my ideas. Besides, I might want to do more reading on this myself. It came to us all the way from Kemet, you know. I've got to hand it to those people; they sure have some fascinating ideas about Medicine. They aren't the progenitors of Magic for nothing."

  I nodded and carefully folded the papers several times before tucking them into the fold inside my sleeve. Then we... both just stood there, having lost the momentum in our conversation. So far, the visit had gone much more swimmingly than I could have hoped, with barely a glare or a snarled insult between us. It seemed Lucy's ordeal and the intervening weeks since had mellowed both of us and brought us toward a unified purpose. Yet, outside of that commonality, there was still an awkwardness between us that was far removed from the days when we used to talk, play, and fight freely under one roof.

  My mind began searching for a smooth excuse to make my exit. Michael started to turn toward his desk, something on it ostensibly catching his interest. Then as though she had been attuned to the rhythm of our conversation and knew exactly when rescue was called for, Emily poked her head in to deliver us from our own troubled thoughts.

  "Rui, do you want steamed buns or pancakes? I need to decide how long to let the dough sit for."

  Somewhat startled, I swivelled on my feet and began to stammer. "Oh, well, you don't have to, sis. I was just about to head out anyway."

  "Nonsense, it's rare enough that you visit us at all. You can't leave before dinner."

  "No, it's alright, really, I—"

  "Stay."

  I swivelled again to the source of the command. Michael kept his eyes lowered onto his desk, but his voice was firm and earnest.

  "Stay and eat with us. Buddha knows what kind of rubbish you subsist on in that dinky dorm of yours. Besides, it would be good for us to... catch up."

  I felt tears welling up again for about the umpteenth time today, but I would have rather died than let Michael see them. I blinked them back, turning my body toward the book shelves in an effort to hide my face from both my brother and sister-in-law. From the corners of my eyes, I could make out Emily's self-satisfied smirk.

  "Alright," my words came out in a hoarse whisper. "If you insist."

  ***

  I retired to the lounge again while I obediently waited for dinner. Emily brought out Robbie and set him on my lap. Michael hadn't yet emerged from his study.

  I held Robbie by the armpits and bounced him lightly on my lap, taking pleasure in the way his cheeks pushed out to fill his shoulders in the absence of a real neck. He was in that phase where babies solemnly frowned at anything that confused them, which was nearly everything. Today, the source of his confusion was his sniggering uncle and my propensity for softly pinching his cheeks.

  I looked around me for some kind of toy, some fresh tool to confuse my nephew further. Remembering an old trick I had used on some of my younger cousins, I pulled out a one-hoon coin from my sleeve. I pinched the coin between my thumb and index finger and waved it in front of Robbie, making sure that his frowning eyes were following its movement. Then, accessing just a gentle smidgen of Induction, I let go of the coin. It stayed in the air, having not moved an inch from where I had held it earlier. With a few lazy flicks of my fingers, the coin flew through the air in zigzag patterns in front of Robbie's face, pulled by an invisible string. The frown faded as his eyes widened and chased the coin. Even his mouth hung open just a little.

  I turned off Induction and caught the coin easily as it dropped, and I hugged my nephew close, laughing and delighting in his warmth and baby fat. Only much later, as I sat on a homebound rickshaw, my belly full and taking in the crescent moon that lit the dark blue sky, did I realize that my Magic was back.