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(un)Talent, Chapter 7 of 11
Chapter 7:
Please see Chapter 1 for the Summary, Author's Notes, additional details, etc.
Avi woke up early the next morning. She was so high-strung on all the stress and recent developments that trying to get a good night’s sleep was no longer possible. Instead, she brewed herself a pot of herbal tea and spent the pre-dawn hours combing the Internet for information. At dawn, the files from the National Library of Talent had arrived, and she was combing through those for information instead. She tabbed the portions she felt most important or relevant, tabbing the sections that pertained to her Family with a different color. She also started scribbling down brainstormed ideas of her own on a separate yellow legal pad as she skimmed through the files.
A few hours later, her fax machine started beeping, and more information started coming through. As Avi sifted through her sister’s pages of brainstormed ideas, annotations, and research, she mentally thanked her sister for getting such thorough information back to her on such a short turnaround. The information wasn’t as organized as she might have liked, typical Susan all-over-the-place stream-of-consciousness, but organizing the information into some sort of system also allowed her to have a better grasp of major details and the most relevant ideas.
An hour before she and Jason were set to meet, Avi set off for the café, lugging her boxes of files with as much grace as she could down the stairs, along the street, cursing the whole way. Beijing’s streets were too crowded for the ordeal to be an easy one, and she got quite a few dirty looks as she bumped into people on her way to her destination. She arrived at the café half an hour early, and set up shop at a table in the corner, arranging files into piles from most to least important, with the files under the table containing other information that might be pertinent but wasn’t enough so to deserve table space.
By the time Jason arrived, she’d quite a system going. He raised an eyebrow at all her papers. “Well, it seems like you were certainly very diligent,” he observed.
“I’ve got some of my sister’s preliminary findings as well as my general theories,” she said, pointing to the respective piles in their spots on the table, “along with some files on the Yang Family and some background on symbology as a starting point.” Here she indicated the respective files and boxes under the table.
Jason looked impressed with the amount of work she’d already done. Then he snapped his finger, and three thick tomes thunked on the chair beside her, one on top of the other. “These are just some basic symbology and theory texts,” he said casually. “I went through and dogeared all the relevant pages, highlighted some important passages, and noted ideas in the margin.”
“Show-off,” Avi rolled her eyes at his melodramatic Talented stunt, but her tone was exasperatedly affectionate, without the sting. “So, what have you deduced so far?”
Jason laid out a copy of the map, used a few Words, and in a blue flash, a replica of the map was floating above the table, pulsing slightly. He flicked it until it was vertically between them, then used his finger to draw three concentric circles.
“His handwriting was atrocious, but he was very meticulous about his diagram. I think he layered some of his writing, but I couldn’t quite make out-”
“You mean he wrote over himself to convey the sense of multiple layers?” Avi interjected. “My sister ran an analysis of that and came up with this.” Avi flicked through piles of papers until she found the one that had been tabbed accordingly, then showed him the mockup her sister had done of three different layers. “It doesn’t make much sense though,” she freely admitted.
“That’s because your sister didn’t organize it the way I think Old Yang did,” Jason said. “If you take this …” -he used a few Words to peel the words off the paper and paste them to his map- “and do this … There.”
“Three layers bound by three different boundaries as well,” Avi said, impressed. “My sister didn’t think to look for three different-sized layers. So that means this is …”
Avi and Jason exchanged looks.
“A Blueprint,” they said simultaneously.
The two of them continued poring over the files in concentration, bouncing ideas off each other and going through each other’s notes, making the occasional call to an expert to ask about any variety of questions on topics ranging from Chinese gardens to Suzhou’s canals, to Chinese riddles. Avi found that she was glad she’d agreed to work with Jason, not just because of his useful connections in the Talented community. It was more useful than she’d thought, having someone to talk ideas out with, to laugh over absurd trivia with, to puzzle together with. And since Jason had been taken off the potentially-more-than-friends list and moved to the simply-allies list, there wasn’t even any latent awkwardness, just easy camaraderie with someone who was too charming to hate, even if she no longer completely trusted him.
They worked through the lunch hour, ordering some food as they worked, and Avi felt thankful quite a few times that the mundane unwillingness to see the supernatural meant nobody noticed much less questioned the way Jason often used his Talent as a shortcut in his research.
They finally agreed to rest after both were fighting off yawns (wading through dry material for five hours straight was tedious) and decided to meet again at the same time the next day. Avi wasn’t planning on quitting her research for the day, but the calls she needed to make and stuff she needed to do just required an Internet connection, and she could do it at home sprawled out on her bed while playing a TV show in the background.
Avi and Jason had just left the coffeeshop when Jason suddenly shoved her into the middle of the street. She stumbled, barely avoided getting hit by a swerving taxicab whose driver shouted out quite a few words out the window, just as Jason yanked her back onto the sidewalk in time to avoid a collision with a bus.
“What the hell-” she started to ask, but something else caught her attention.
On the sidewalk, a glittering blue arrow was embedded in the stone tiles where she’d been standing mere moments ago. She reached out to touch it but Jason stopped her. “Those are the Family colors of …” Jason began, frowning in concentration, but Avi put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. He looked up at her, inquiring.
“It’s Zhang Family,” she finished for him. She looked up and around her until she spotted what she was looking for.
Maya stood maybe twenty feet away, a single breath of stillness on a bustling sidewalk. People brushed past her, walked around her, all without giving her any consideration. She had in one hand a giant bow, and in the other another arrow. Of course, mundane people see only what they want to see, so they didn’t give her or her weapons a second thought.
When Maya saw Avi looking, she held up the second arrow and broke it in half, tossing the halves over her shoulder. A moment later, she had flickered and disappeared.
“Who was that?” Jason had followed Avi’s gaze.
Avi came to with a start, realizing Jason had yet to meet Maya. “She works for Zhang Family. This was a warning. They gave me 48 hours to choose their side, or they would treat me as an enemy. She just let me know that my 48 hours are up …”
---
“It’s not safe,” Susan said predictably when they Skyped. “Come home at once. Take the first plane out of there, Avi – I’m not playing.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Avi said instead. “It’s an illogical move on Zhang Matriarch’s part, and out of character. She doesn’t do stupid things, and killing me would be a very stupid move.”
“I don’t care how competent or incompetent you found her, she ordered an attempt on your life, Avi!”
“It was just a warning. Maya wouldn’t just shoot me without advanced warning. She even threw away the second warning arrow,” Avi said, trying to calm Susan down.
“You told me Maya is a fucking retainer. She doesn’t exactly have free will in the manner. Throwing away the second warning arrow just means Zhang Matriarch is going to be more specific in her orders next time to make sure Maya doesn’t let you go,” Susan said, frustrated. “Look, I know you really want to stay, and you really want to follow up on this lead, but it’s not safe.”
“I just need to talk to Maya and find out what’s going on,” Avi tried to soothe.
“No! That is not what you need to do! In fact, that is the last thing you need to do. Zhang Family put a kill order out on you, and you want to meet the retainer who’s supposed to do the actually killing in a private, one-on-one rendezvous? Is the air in China curdling your brains?”
“I repeat, Susan, it was just a warning,” Avi said. “My life wasn’t in any actual danger.” At least, probably not. She hadn’t even told Susan how close the arrow had come to hitting her, or how lucky she’d been that Jason had pushed her out of the way. And from the way Susan was overreacting to this news, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring it up.
“Avi, you need to tell Mom and Dad.”
“No, I don’t. And you don’t need to either!” Avi said sharply. “Mom and Dad will just worry, and then they’ll overreact. They’ll try to come back to protect me or something, and they didn’t spend all that time building up our Family name just to ruin it all with one misguided attempt to protect their daughter.” And not even a daughter that was worth something, like Nadia – they’d be ruining it all for a Talentless Dud. Avi refused to be a liability.
“Our Family future is worth risking if your life is at stake, Avi,” Susan said exasperatedly. “My life’s not what’s at stake,” Avi said. “The only reason I called you at all was to check if you knew what the protocol in this situation was.”
“I’ll look it up,” Susan said.
“And-”
“Yes, yes,” Susan said. “I’ll do it discreetly. So even if somebody out-and-out asks me why I’m looking up what you should hypothetically do if your life is being threatened by a Family because you didn’t pledge allegiance to them, I will tell them it’s for a completely hypothetical school project and not at all based on a real-life situation that my baby sister is facing down by herself.”
“Thank you,” Avi said sweetly.
“In return, though,” Susan said seriously, “I need you to promise me that you won’t seek Maya out to ask her the hows and whys of what’s going on. I know you think she won’t kill you, but if she’s been ordered, there’s nothing you or she can do about it and the least you could do is keep out of her way and make it harder for her to do so.”
“I promise not to seek her out and endanger my life,” Avi said scrupulously.
Susan eyed Avi suspiciously through the webcam, probably trying to figure out how Avi would try to bend the words of her promise, but then her roommate was yelling at her to “Take the fucking Skype conversation out of the room or I’ll curse you I swear oh my god do you even know what ungodly hour of the morning it is!” and Susan had to end the call.
Avi sighed, and leaned back, working out the kinks in her shoulder. She checked her cell phone – one text from Jason (he’d been so worried about the whole thing, had insisted on walking her home, and was checking in every few hours to make sure she was still alive), another from Aly (she wanted to know if Avi was free for drinks and clubbing that night; Avi quickly texted back in the negative), and two spam messages about starting a new phone contract and an opportunity to win 1 million kuai, respectively.
No message from Maya.
Avi sighed, and guessed that calling Maya and asking her to meet in public, or asking her to ask Avi to meet, probably both qualified as breaking her promise to Susan. Fortunately, Avi knew enough about Family lore to know that warnings usually came in threes. The first one had been that morning. If she oh-so-casually took a public walk in the nearby park, by chance putting herself out there as a target to anyone who might want to issue more warnings, and then Maya who may or may not be stalking her nearby just happened to take a potshot, there really wasn’t anything Avi could do about it or could do to prevent it, so certainly she wouldn’t be breaking her promise then.
---
It was afternoon, so many of the disgustingly fit grandmothers and grandfathers who spent the morning practicing Tai Chi or dancing Yang Ge in the park had gone home already. There was still plenty of hubbub, though, and Avi enjoyed the fresh air and pale sunlight as she leafed through the symbology text Jason had tabbed.
When the attack came, it was quick and sudden. One second she was making a note in the margins of the book, next second she was tumbling backward over the bench as a huge wind swept her way. Fortunately, most of it subsided upon hitting her unTalented self, but it still gave her bruises, and she filled the air with curses, glad that the kids around (who were mundane and hadn’t seen the wind, just seen the funny lady do a back-somersault over the back of the bench for no reason) didn’t understand English.
Avi looked up and saw Maya, her hands still glowing blue from the Talent she’d expended with her wind. She mouthed, “That’s two,” and probably would have left if Avi hadn’t gone running straight at her and grabbed her, negating the transport spell at the last possible second.
Avi didn’t feel a thing, but Maya reeled a little from the backlash. She’d probably have a killer headache for the rest of the day. Avi might have felt bad, but she’d already almost died twice that day, so she wasn’t feeling too sympathetic.
“We need to talk,” Avi said firmly. “And I’ll be holding on to you the whole time, so don’t get any ideas about using your Talent.”
Of course, Maya could still do more complicated and powerful spells and could still kill Avi in the blink of an eye if she felt like it, it would just take a little more time and be a little more difficult, and Avi didn’t think Maya really wanted to kill her that badly. Probably not, at least.
Maya didn’t say anything, but she didn’t resist as Avi pulled her over to the bench, so Avi took that for agreement.
When they’d settled down, Avi unleashed her questions.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Zhang Matriarch gave you 48 hours to respond to her offer of alliance or leave the country. When you didn’t respond, she assumed that you would rather be allied with her enemies and is reacting accordingly. You have been issued two warnings already. Upon the third, your life will be forfeit,” Maya said evenly, as if she’d done this a thousand times, as if this wasn’t crazy.
“My life will be forfeit? She put a termination order out on me?” Avi asked, shocked. Sure, she’d joked with Susan about a kill order, but she hadn’t thought there’d really be one. “Why would Zhang Matriarch put a termination order out on me? My Family would never stand for it.”
“Well, apparently you made a certain promise to a certain Matriarch of a certain other Family that your Family would not step foot in China within the next decade.” Here, Maya slit her an admonishing look very much along the lines of I told you that you shouldn’t have messed with Liang Family.
“I said my Family wouldn’t expand into China within the next decade!” Avi corrected. “I didn’t say they wouldn’t step foot here.”
“Avi, do you have a handle on the situation at all?” Maya asked tightly. “Your Family can’t step foot here without taking a side, which you’ve promised they won’t do, or making their own side. If they ever step foot, it’ll be construed as an act of war.” Maya sighed. “They can’t do anything to avenge your death. You’ve promised they won’t expand, and even if there wasn’t anything binding about your promise, it was a promise made nonetheless. If they take any action to retaliate, all the Families will rise up against them, and your Family can’t afford that.”
“I …” Avi realized that she hadn’t even considered this when she’d made her promise to Liang Matriarch. It had seemed like such a small thing at the time.
“Avi, what were you thinking of to make such a promise?” Maya said exasperatedly, but Avi could hear the very real stress behind the exasperation.
“I was thinking that my parents weren’t planning on expanding here anyway. I certainly didn’t realize some people would be taking it as license to kill me!” The Talented world wasn’t normally this cutthroat. And even if the Family Feuds had flared up in recent weeks, there must be something more serious in the works for Zhang Matriarch to risk killing her and making an enemy out of her Family, non-binding promise or not.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Maya said grimly. “You have a termination order out on you, Avi, and I’ve given you two warnings already. You get one more warning, and then I have to finish the job. I’ll put it off for as long as I can, Avi, but you know that it’s impossible for me to disobey a direct order, so you need to leave the country.”
“I can’t leave, Maya. I’m so close to figuring everything out.” Not that she’d figured out the riddle, of course, but she was so close to figuring out her life, why her siblings were prodigies and she had … nothing.
“This is your life we’re talking about, Avi! It’s not a game!” Maya was growing visibly agitated, a sign of her distress. She was normally so good at hiding her emotions.
“I know that! Don’t you think I know that?” Hell, it was her life she was risking. But she was so close to figuring out the mystery, and she was sure there was more to this termination order thing than a simple matter of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” She could figure out the map, and she could figure out how to get out of the termination, she just needed time! “I just … I need time to think.”
“Time is a luxury you can’t afford. At the very least, buy a ticket to Taiwan, or to Korea, or to some place nearby. Think of it as a vacation. Wait it out there, think it through, just leave China!”
“I… I can’t promise anything,” Avi said, letting go of Maya and symbolically setting her free of responsibility. “But I promise I’ll try not to make things too hard on you.”
Maya recognized the vague non-promise for what it was. “You’re really going to stay, knowing that assassins are after you, because there’s an off-chance you might find your Talent even after you’ve always made such a point that you don’t need to have a Talent to be validated?” Maya said.
“I need to know,” Avi said. And really, that was it. Her whole life, her unTalent had defined her and she’d fought against the definition but now that she had the chance to change things, she couldn’t just … pass it up completely. She’d spend her whole life wondering “what-if.” “Anyway, just because there’s a termination order out on me doesn’t mean I’ll die or anything,” she said with false cheer. “You, and anyone else out there, will have to find me first.”
---
Unsurprisingly, Avi found it almost impossible to sleep that night. She’d been all bravado with Maya, but she really had no idea what to do. Or rather, she knew that there must be more to this termination order than Zhang Matriarch was letting on, and until she knew her real motive, she couldn’t decide how to negotiate with her.
Because meditating on her impending death was too much of a headache, she started working at the map instead. She read the poems and the riddles so many times she had them memorized, analyzed them so thoroughly she could recite them backwards as well as forwards, compared and contrasted them to the map, considered them in conjunction with the symbols, and then considered them separately, as if they were two separate pieces of the puzzle that just happened to be on the same page because the restaurant’s napkin hadn’t been big enough for a multi-page dissertation.
She worked through the night until the next morning, so she was pretty startled when someone knocked on the door, jumping out of her skin. For a moment, she was terrified Maya had come to kill her, but then sense reasserted itself. Maya hadn’t issued a third warning yet, and she wouldn’t ever knock.
“Who is it?” Avi called out.
“It’s me,” she heard Jason’s voice on the other side, and remembered that after the incident yesterday, she and Jason had decided to minimize public appearances in case of a repeat incident and agreed to meet at her apartment at the same time the following day.
She opened the door and let Jason in.
“You alright?” he asked. “You sounded kind of frazzled through the door.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not every day people put a kill order out on you,” Avi half-snapped.
“Zhang Family’s got a termination order out?” Jason asked incredulously. “And you’re just … here?”
“Look,” Avi said, “this is the safest place I can be, right? Termination orders rarely happen on home turf because of the narrative disadvantage, and nobody’s going to kill me in front of Heir to Liang Family. It could be construed as an indirect attack on your Family.”
“Using me as a shield?” Jason asked wryly, but he accepted her assurances. What she said was true – the likelihood of being attacked in the next week, actually, was unlikely. Termination orders generally took a bit of time to take effect. As long as Zhang Matriarch didn’t give Maya a specific order of expedition (unlikely, order amendments were a costly waste of Talent), Avi had a little time before she might have to fly out of the country to regroup. It did give her a time limit, though – a week to solve the mystery.
Unlike the day before, Jason and Avi had made enough headway on the puzzle that they no longer needed to brainstorm together. In fact, they had separate facts to check and leads to follow, and the room quickly became filled with the sounds of their polite Mandarin attempts to make contact with someone important enough to know what they needed but not too important that they got blown off.
Avi was so busy trying to find an English-speaking Sinologist specializing in the symbolism of botany who would give her the time of day that she didn’t notice someone had entered the room until Jason gave a shout of surprise.
Avi looked up expecting to find he’d made some sort of breakthrough, only to see a man with a gun walking toward her. “What on Earth?” she said, wondering if she were imagining things.
“Compliments of Wang Family,” he said in Mandarin, scowling, and raised the gun to fire.
Before Avi could react, Jason stepped in front of her. “You may not realize,” he said smoothly in the same language, “but I happen to be Heir to Liang Family. If you want to shoot Avi, you’ll have to get through me first. And I’d like to remind you that if you shoot and kill the Heir to Liang Family, Wang Family will have more to worry about than the to-be-decided alliance of the Lau Family.”
“Thank you for letting me know,” the assassin grinned manically. “I hadn’t recognized you, but it’s good to know that I’ll have to kill you when I’m done with her so there are no witnesses.”
“But-”
“I was lucky enough to know she’s unTalented, so I brought a very mundane weapon to kill her with – when the two of you are dead, there will be no sign that your homicides are related to Talent at all. They’ll assume it was a robber.”
Jason moved his hand, probably about to cast a spell, but the assassin was quicker. A single flick, and he had a sheet of shimmery blue Talent pinning Jason to the wall.
“Tsk, tsk,” the assassin said. “Let me assure you. This is my job, so I will always be stronger than you, faster than you, more Talented than you. Nothing you do can change that, so don’t even try.”
Jason shot a despairing look at Avi and she could tell he was out of ideas. The ball was in her court now. “Wait,” she said as the assassin raised his gun again.
“This should be good,” the man said. “What, you’re going to beg for your life? People do that a lot. What’re you going to offer me – gold? Jewels? Power beyond my wildest imagination?”
“I just wanted to talk,” Avi said evenly.
“Talk isn’t going to help you get out of this,” the man laughed. “Go on, what have you got to say?”
“I was just noticing – you can’t be much older than me. How long have you been killing for Wang Family?”
“Why, you want my life story or something?” The man laughed again, a brittle, manic sound, and Avi briefly wondered how long it would be before Maya sounded like that as well. “It won’t help-”
Mid-laugh and mid-statement, the man suddenly gasped, and fell to the ground. Behind him, Maya stood, her hands still faintly glowing blue with residual Talent.
“That was quick thinking, distracting him by keeping him talking,” Maya acknowledged.
“Is he dead?” Avi asked quietly.
“Yes he is,” Maya said, then saw the look on Avi’s face. “What, you’re going to judge me for killing him? He was going to kill you.”
“Maya, we want to the same Talent school, grew up in the same community. I know that you believe the same things I do, underneath it all. You know this is wrong.” It wasn’t just the loss of life that was considered immoral, it was using one’s Talent to do so – Talent was designed to help, not hurt. People who took life with their Talent invariably ended up having their own life taken by Talent, whether theirs or someone else’s. It was some sort of narrative inevitability. It also perverted your Talent, but Avi didn’t know as much about that – she didn’t take the higher-level classes when it became obvious she’d never have Talent of her own.
“Well, we don’t always have choices,” Maya said bitterly.
“And now, Maya, what are you going to do? Are you going to finish the job?” Avi challenged.
“What?”
“You’ve already given me two warnings. Is this going to be the last one? Or are you going to kill me now?”
“Avi,” Maya said. “I’m serious when I saw that Zhang Matriarch will not hesitate to order me to kill you. This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“Do you see me laughing, Maya? You know I’m not going to let her push me around.” And that was the point. Zhang Matriarch shouldn’t be allowed to just terminate the people who didn’t do what she wanted, nor should she be allowed to manipulate them like she had Maya. She needed to learn.
“And when I come to kill you next time, how are you going to stop me? It’s obvious the Liang Heir isn’t much help,” she sniffed.
“Hey,” Jason said, “I thought it would be polite for you to finish your conversation before intervening.”
“And is that what you thought about the Wang assassin, too?” Maya asked scornfully. “You weren’t pinned to the wall, you were just 'waiting until it would be polite to intervene'?”
“I had back-up plan,” Jason said coolly, snapping his fingers as a short sword fell into it.
“Do you even know how to use that?” Maya sniffed.
“I know enough,” Jason said. “Enough to have protected Avi.”
“That’s enough,” Avi said, cutting off the increasingly-louder argument between Maya and Jason. “Maya, if this is my third warning, then I have something to tell you.” She paused, then corrected herself. “Or actually, what I mean to say is I have something I need you to tell your Matriarch.”
“You won’t be able to change her mind with a message,” Maya sighed.
Avi ignored her. Zhang Matriarch was a reasonable woman. Her every move was calculated. She’d probably even calculated that Avi would do this, had probably arranged everything just so Avi would say what she was about to say.
Avi drew herself up, and spoke.
“Tell Zhang Matriarch that I understand her concerns regarding my allegiances, but please
remind her that I do not yet consider her an enemy simply because she is not my friend. When I have recovered my Talent and become powerful beyond her wildest imagination, she does not want me to remember her as my biggest obstacle and an enemy. It is not I who should be concerned about whether she sees me as an enemy. It is she who should be concerned about whether I see her as an enemy. As long as these tacky attempts on my life cease, I won’t need to consider her an enemy and I won’t make a move against her.”
It was important to sound confident, she reminded herself. She leveled a very serious look at Maya.
“If there are any more threats on her end, I will make certain to include her among my enemies and act accordingly,” she said in a warning tone. “Can you convey the message?”
“I believe so,” Maya said, quirking a smile, well aware of the stance that Avi was taking.
Avi was taking a side, (her own side, of course) and committing to defending her own interests (always a tricky matter), but if everything worked out she’d be out of the country by the end of the year anyway, so it shouldn’t matter.
And with that, Maya shimmered and disappeared.
Avi collapsed into a chair, as the adrenaline that had been washing through her ever since a man started waving a gun in her face finally disappeared.
“Well, that was badass,” Jason commented, “and very important, and I’m glad you bought yourself some time but … uh … what are we supposed to do with the body?”
And he gestured to the very dead man currently lying on her kitchen floor.
Please see Chapter 1 for the Summary, Author's Notes, additional details, etc.
Avi woke up early the next morning. She was so high-strung on all the stress and recent developments that trying to get a good night’s sleep was no longer possible. Instead, she brewed herself a pot of herbal tea and spent the pre-dawn hours combing the Internet for information. At dawn, the files from the National Library of Talent had arrived, and she was combing through those for information instead. She tabbed the portions she felt most important or relevant, tabbing the sections that pertained to her Family with a different color. She also started scribbling down brainstormed ideas of her own on a separate yellow legal pad as she skimmed through the files.
A few hours later, her fax machine started beeping, and more information started coming through. As Avi sifted through her sister’s pages of brainstormed ideas, annotations, and research, she mentally thanked her sister for getting such thorough information back to her on such a short turnaround. The information wasn’t as organized as she might have liked, typical Susan all-over-the-place stream-of-consciousness, but organizing the information into some sort of system also allowed her to have a better grasp of major details and the most relevant ideas.
An hour before she and Jason were set to meet, Avi set off for the café, lugging her boxes of files with as much grace as she could down the stairs, along the street, cursing the whole way. Beijing’s streets were too crowded for the ordeal to be an easy one, and she got quite a few dirty looks as she bumped into people on her way to her destination. She arrived at the café half an hour early, and set up shop at a table in the corner, arranging files into piles from most to least important, with the files under the table containing other information that might be pertinent but wasn’t enough so to deserve table space.
By the time Jason arrived, she’d quite a system going. He raised an eyebrow at all her papers. “Well, it seems like you were certainly very diligent,” he observed.
“I’ve got some of my sister’s preliminary findings as well as my general theories,” she said, pointing to the respective piles in their spots on the table, “along with some files on the Yang Family and some background on symbology as a starting point.” Here she indicated the respective files and boxes under the table.
Jason looked impressed with the amount of work she’d already done. Then he snapped his finger, and three thick tomes thunked on the chair beside her, one on top of the other. “These are just some basic symbology and theory texts,” he said casually. “I went through and dogeared all the relevant pages, highlighted some important passages, and noted ideas in the margin.”
“Show-off,” Avi rolled her eyes at his melodramatic Talented stunt, but her tone was exasperatedly affectionate, without the sting. “So, what have you deduced so far?”
Jason laid out a copy of the map, used a few Words, and in a blue flash, a replica of the map was floating above the table, pulsing slightly. He flicked it until it was vertically between them, then used his finger to draw three concentric circles.
“His handwriting was atrocious, but he was very meticulous about his diagram. I think he layered some of his writing, but I couldn’t quite make out-”
“You mean he wrote over himself to convey the sense of multiple layers?” Avi interjected. “My sister ran an analysis of that and came up with this.” Avi flicked through piles of papers until she found the one that had been tabbed accordingly, then showed him the mockup her sister had done of three different layers. “It doesn’t make much sense though,” she freely admitted.
“That’s because your sister didn’t organize it the way I think Old Yang did,” Jason said. “If you take this …” -he used a few Words to peel the words off the paper and paste them to his map- “and do this … There.”
“Three layers bound by three different boundaries as well,” Avi said, impressed. “My sister didn’t think to look for three different-sized layers. So that means this is …”
Avi and Jason exchanged looks.
“A Blueprint,” they said simultaneously.
The two of them continued poring over the files in concentration, bouncing ideas off each other and going through each other’s notes, making the occasional call to an expert to ask about any variety of questions on topics ranging from Chinese gardens to Suzhou’s canals, to Chinese riddles. Avi found that she was glad she’d agreed to work with Jason, not just because of his useful connections in the Talented community. It was more useful than she’d thought, having someone to talk ideas out with, to laugh over absurd trivia with, to puzzle together with. And since Jason had been taken off the potentially-more-than-friends list and moved to the simply-allies list, there wasn’t even any latent awkwardness, just easy camaraderie with someone who was too charming to hate, even if she no longer completely trusted him.
They worked through the lunch hour, ordering some food as they worked, and Avi felt thankful quite a few times that the mundane unwillingness to see the supernatural meant nobody noticed much less questioned the way Jason often used his Talent as a shortcut in his research.
They finally agreed to rest after both were fighting off yawns (wading through dry material for five hours straight was tedious) and decided to meet again at the same time the next day. Avi wasn’t planning on quitting her research for the day, but the calls she needed to make and stuff she needed to do just required an Internet connection, and she could do it at home sprawled out on her bed while playing a TV show in the background.
Avi and Jason had just left the coffeeshop when Jason suddenly shoved her into the middle of the street. She stumbled, barely avoided getting hit by a swerving taxicab whose driver shouted out quite a few words out the window, just as Jason yanked her back onto the sidewalk in time to avoid a collision with a bus.
“What the hell-” she started to ask, but something else caught her attention.
On the sidewalk, a glittering blue arrow was embedded in the stone tiles where she’d been standing mere moments ago. She reached out to touch it but Jason stopped her. “Those are the Family colors of …” Jason began, frowning in concentration, but Avi put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. He looked up at her, inquiring.
“It’s Zhang Family,” she finished for him. She looked up and around her until she spotted what she was looking for.
Maya stood maybe twenty feet away, a single breath of stillness on a bustling sidewalk. People brushed past her, walked around her, all without giving her any consideration. She had in one hand a giant bow, and in the other another arrow. Of course, mundane people see only what they want to see, so they didn’t give her or her weapons a second thought.
When Maya saw Avi looking, she held up the second arrow and broke it in half, tossing the halves over her shoulder. A moment later, she had flickered and disappeared.
“Who was that?” Jason had followed Avi’s gaze.
Avi came to with a start, realizing Jason had yet to meet Maya. “She works for Zhang Family. This was a warning. They gave me 48 hours to choose their side, or they would treat me as an enemy. She just let me know that my 48 hours are up …”
---
“It’s not safe,” Susan said predictably when they Skyped. “Come home at once. Take the first plane out of there, Avi – I’m not playing.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Avi said instead. “It’s an illogical move on Zhang Matriarch’s part, and out of character. She doesn’t do stupid things, and killing me would be a very stupid move.”
“I don’t care how competent or incompetent you found her, she ordered an attempt on your life, Avi!”
“It was just a warning. Maya wouldn’t just shoot me without advanced warning. She even threw away the second warning arrow,” Avi said, trying to calm Susan down.
“You told me Maya is a fucking retainer. She doesn’t exactly have free will in the manner. Throwing away the second warning arrow just means Zhang Matriarch is going to be more specific in her orders next time to make sure Maya doesn’t let you go,” Susan said, frustrated. “Look, I know you really want to stay, and you really want to follow up on this lead, but it’s not safe.”
“I just need to talk to Maya and find out what’s going on,” Avi tried to soothe.
“No! That is not what you need to do! In fact, that is the last thing you need to do. Zhang Family put a kill order out on you, and you want to meet the retainer who’s supposed to do the actually killing in a private, one-on-one rendezvous? Is the air in China curdling your brains?”
“I repeat, Susan, it was just a warning,” Avi said. “My life wasn’t in any actual danger.” At least, probably not. She hadn’t even told Susan how close the arrow had come to hitting her, or how lucky she’d been that Jason had pushed her out of the way. And from the way Susan was overreacting to this news, she didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring it up.
“Avi, you need to tell Mom and Dad.”
“No, I don’t. And you don’t need to either!” Avi said sharply. “Mom and Dad will just worry, and then they’ll overreact. They’ll try to come back to protect me or something, and they didn’t spend all that time building up our Family name just to ruin it all with one misguided attempt to protect their daughter.” And not even a daughter that was worth something, like Nadia – they’d be ruining it all for a Talentless Dud. Avi refused to be a liability.
“Our Family future is worth risking if your life is at stake, Avi,” Susan said exasperatedly. “My life’s not what’s at stake,” Avi said. “The only reason I called you at all was to check if you knew what the protocol in this situation was.”
“I’ll look it up,” Susan said.
“And-”
“Yes, yes,” Susan said. “I’ll do it discreetly. So even if somebody out-and-out asks me why I’m looking up what you should hypothetically do if your life is being threatened by a Family because you didn’t pledge allegiance to them, I will tell them it’s for a completely hypothetical school project and not at all based on a real-life situation that my baby sister is facing down by herself.”
“Thank you,” Avi said sweetly.
“In return, though,” Susan said seriously, “I need you to promise me that you won’t seek Maya out to ask her the hows and whys of what’s going on. I know you think she won’t kill you, but if she’s been ordered, there’s nothing you or she can do about it and the least you could do is keep out of her way and make it harder for her to do so.”
“I promise not to seek her out and endanger my life,” Avi said scrupulously.
Susan eyed Avi suspiciously through the webcam, probably trying to figure out how Avi would try to bend the words of her promise, but then her roommate was yelling at her to “Take the fucking Skype conversation out of the room or I’ll curse you I swear oh my god do you even know what ungodly hour of the morning it is!” and Susan had to end the call.
Avi sighed, and leaned back, working out the kinks in her shoulder. She checked her cell phone – one text from Jason (he’d been so worried about the whole thing, had insisted on walking her home, and was checking in every few hours to make sure she was still alive), another from Aly (she wanted to know if Avi was free for drinks and clubbing that night; Avi quickly texted back in the negative), and two spam messages about starting a new phone contract and an opportunity to win 1 million kuai, respectively.
No message from Maya.
Avi sighed, and guessed that calling Maya and asking her to meet in public, or asking her to ask Avi to meet, probably both qualified as breaking her promise to Susan. Fortunately, Avi knew enough about Family lore to know that warnings usually came in threes. The first one had been that morning. If she oh-so-casually took a public walk in the nearby park, by chance putting herself out there as a target to anyone who might want to issue more warnings, and then Maya who may or may not be stalking her nearby just happened to take a potshot, there really wasn’t anything Avi could do about it or could do to prevent it, so certainly she wouldn’t be breaking her promise then.
---
It was afternoon, so many of the disgustingly fit grandmothers and grandfathers who spent the morning practicing Tai Chi or dancing Yang Ge in the park had gone home already. There was still plenty of hubbub, though, and Avi enjoyed the fresh air and pale sunlight as she leafed through the symbology text Jason had tabbed.
When the attack came, it was quick and sudden. One second she was making a note in the margins of the book, next second she was tumbling backward over the bench as a huge wind swept her way. Fortunately, most of it subsided upon hitting her unTalented self, but it still gave her bruises, and she filled the air with curses, glad that the kids around (who were mundane and hadn’t seen the wind, just seen the funny lady do a back-somersault over the back of the bench for no reason) didn’t understand English.
Avi looked up and saw Maya, her hands still glowing blue from the Talent she’d expended with her wind. She mouthed, “That’s two,” and probably would have left if Avi hadn’t gone running straight at her and grabbed her, negating the transport spell at the last possible second.
Avi didn’t feel a thing, but Maya reeled a little from the backlash. She’d probably have a killer headache for the rest of the day. Avi might have felt bad, but she’d already almost died twice that day, so she wasn’t feeling too sympathetic.
“We need to talk,” Avi said firmly. “And I’ll be holding on to you the whole time, so don’t get any ideas about using your Talent.”
Of course, Maya could still do more complicated and powerful spells and could still kill Avi in the blink of an eye if she felt like it, it would just take a little more time and be a little more difficult, and Avi didn’t think Maya really wanted to kill her that badly. Probably not, at least.
Maya didn’t say anything, but she didn’t resist as Avi pulled her over to the bench, so Avi took that for agreement.
When they’d settled down, Avi unleashed her questions.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Zhang Matriarch gave you 48 hours to respond to her offer of alliance or leave the country. When you didn’t respond, she assumed that you would rather be allied with her enemies and is reacting accordingly. You have been issued two warnings already. Upon the third, your life will be forfeit,” Maya said evenly, as if she’d done this a thousand times, as if this wasn’t crazy.
“My life will be forfeit? She put a termination order out on me?” Avi asked, shocked. Sure, she’d joked with Susan about a kill order, but she hadn’t thought there’d really be one. “Why would Zhang Matriarch put a termination order out on me? My Family would never stand for it.”
“Well, apparently you made a certain promise to a certain Matriarch of a certain other Family that your Family would not step foot in China within the next decade.” Here, Maya slit her an admonishing look very much along the lines of I told you that you shouldn’t have messed with Liang Family.
“I said my Family wouldn’t expand into China within the next decade!” Avi corrected. “I didn’t say they wouldn’t step foot here.”
“Avi, do you have a handle on the situation at all?” Maya asked tightly. “Your Family can’t step foot here without taking a side, which you’ve promised they won’t do, or making their own side. If they ever step foot, it’ll be construed as an act of war.” Maya sighed. “They can’t do anything to avenge your death. You’ve promised they won’t expand, and even if there wasn’t anything binding about your promise, it was a promise made nonetheless. If they take any action to retaliate, all the Families will rise up against them, and your Family can’t afford that.”
“I …” Avi realized that she hadn’t even considered this when she’d made her promise to Liang Matriarch. It had seemed like such a small thing at the time.
“Avi, what were you thinking of to make such a promise?” Maya said exasperatedly, but Avi could hear the very real stress behind the exasperation.
“I was thinking that my parents weren’t planning on expanding here anyway. I certainly didn’t realize some people would be taking it as license to kill me!” The Talented world wasn’t normally this cutthroat. And even if the Family Feuds had flared up in recent weeks, there must be something more serious in the works for Zhang Matriarch to risk killing her and making an enemy out of her Family, non-binding promise or not.
“Well, what’s done is done,” Maya said grimly. “You have a termination order out on you, Avi, and I’ve given you two warnings already. You get one more warning, and then I have to finish the job. I’ll put it off for as long as I can, Avi, but you know that it’s impossible for me to disobey a direct order, so you need to leave the country.”
“I can’t leave, Maya. I’m so close to figuring everything out.” Not that she’d figured out the riddle, of course, but she was so close to figuring out her life, why her siblings were prodigies and she had … nothing.
“This is your life we’re talking about, Avi! It’s not a game!” Maya was growing visibly agitated, a sign of her distress. She was normally so good at hiding her emotions.
“I know that! Don’t you think I know that?” Hell, it was her life she was risking. But she was so close to figuring out the mystery, and she was sure there was more to this termination order thing than a simple matter of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” She could figure out the map, and she could figure out how to get out of the termination, she just needed time! “I just … I need time to think.”
“Time is a luxury you can’t afford. At the very least, buy a ticket to Taiwan, or to Korea, or to some place nearby. Think of it as a vacation. Wait it out there, think it through, just leave China!”
“I… I can’t promise anything,” Avi said, letting go of Maya and symbolically setting her free of responsibility. “But I promise I’ll try not to make things too hard on you.”
Maya recognized the vague non-promise for what it was. “You’re really going to stay, knowing that assassins are after you, because there’s an off-chance you might find your Talent even after you’ve always made such a point that you don’t need to have a Talent to be validated?” Maya said.
“I need to know,” Avi said. And really, that was it. Her whole life, her unTalent had defined her and she’d fought against the definition but now that she had the chance to change things, she couldn’t just … pass it up completely. She’d spend her whole life wondering “what-if.” “Anyway, just because there’s a termination order out on me doesn’t mean I’ll die or anything,” she said with false cheer. “You, and anyone else out there, will have to find me first.”
---
Unsurprisingly, Avi found it almost impossible to sleep that night. She’d been all bravado with Maya, but she really had no idea what to do. Or rather, she knew that there must be more to this termination order than Zhang Matriarch was letting on, and until she knew her real motive, she couldn’t decide how to negotiate with her.
Because meditating on her impending death was too much of a headache, she started working at the map instead. She read the poems and the riddles so many times she had them memorized, analyzed them so thoroughly she could recite them backwards as well as forwards, compared and contrasted them to the map, considered them in conjunction with the symbols, and then considered them separately, as if they were two separate pieces of the puzzle that just happened to be on the same page because the restaurant’s napkin hadn’t been big enough for a multi-page dissertation.
She worked through the night until the next morning, so she was pretty startled when someone knocked on the door, jumping out of her skin. For a moment, she was terrified Maya had come to kill her, but then sense reasserted itself. Maya hadn’t issued a third warning yet, and she wouldn’t ever knock.
“Who is it?” Avi called out.
“It’s me,” she heard Jason’s voice on the other side, and remembered that after the incident yesterday, she and Jason had decided to minimize public appearances in case of a repeat incident and agreed to meet at her apartment at the same time the following day.
She opened the door and let Jason in.
“You alright?” he asked. “You sounded kind of frazzled through the door.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not every day people put a kill order out on you,” Avi half-snapped.
“Zhang Family’s got a termination order out?” Jason asked incredulously. “And you’re just … here?”
“Look,” Avi said, “this is the safest place I can be, right? Termination orders rarely happen on home turf because of the narrative disadvantage, and nobody’s going to kill me in front of Heir to Liang Family. It could be construed as an indirect attack on your Family.”
“Using me as a shield?” Jason asked wryly, but he accepted her assurances. What she said was true – the likelihood of being attacked in the next week, actually, was unlikely. Termination orders generally took a bit of time to take effect. As long as Zhang Matriarch didn’t give Maya a specific order of expedition (unlikely, order amendments were a costly waste of Talent), Avi had a little time before she might have to fly out of the country to regroup. It did give her a time limit, though – a week to solve the mystery.
Unlike the day before, Jason and Avi had made enough headway on the puzzle that they no longer needed to brainstorm together. In fact, they had separate facts to check and leads to follow, and the room quickly became filled with the sounds of their polite Mandarin attempts to make contact with someone important enough to know what they needed but not too important that they got blown off.
Avi was so busy trying to find an English-speaking Sinologist specializing in the symbolism of botany who would give her the time of day that she didn’t notice someone had entered the room until Jason gave a shout of surprise.
Avi looked up expecting to find he’d made some sort of breakthrough, only to see a man with a gun walking toward her. “What on Earth?” she said, wondering if she were imagining things.
“Compliments of Wang Family,” he said in Mandarin, scowling, and raised the gun to fire.
Before Avi could react, Jason stepped in front of her. “You may not realize,” he said smoothly in the same language, “but I happen to be Heir to Liang Family. If you want to shoot Avi, you’ll have to get through me first. And I’d like to remind you that if you shoot and kill the Heir to Liang Family, Wang Family will have more to worry about than the to-be-decided alliance of the Lau Family.”
“Thank you for letting me know,” the assassin grinned manically. “I hadn’t recognized you, but it’s good to know that I’ll have to kill you when I’m done with her so there are no witnesses.”
“But-”
“I was lucky enough to know she’s unTalented, so I brought a very mundane weapon to kill her with – when the two of you are dead, there will be no sign that your homicides are related to Talent at all. They’ll assume it was a robber.”
Jason moved his hand, probably about to cast a spell, but the assassin was quicker. A single flick, and he had a sheet of shimmery blue Talent pinning Jason to the wall.
“Tsk, tsk,” the assassin said. “Let me assure you. This is my job, so I will always be stronger than you, faster than you, more Talented than you. Nothing you do can change that, so don’t even try.”
Jason shot a despairing look at Avi and she could tell he was out of ideas. The ball was in her court now. “Wait,” she said as the assassin raised his gun again.
“This should be good,” the man said. “What, you’re going to beg for your life? People do that a lot. What’re you going to offer me – gold? Jewels? Power beyond my wildest imagination?”
“I just wanted to talk,” Avi said evenly.
“Talk isn’t going to help you get out of this,” the man laughed. “Go on, what have you got to say?”
“I was just noticing – you can’t be much older than me. How long have you been killing for Wang Family?”
“Why, you want my life story or something?” The man laughed again, a brittle, manic sound, and Avi briefly wondered how long it would be before Maya sounded like that as well. “It won’t help-”
Mid-laugh and mid-statement, the man suddenly gasped, and fell to the ground. Behind him, Maya stood, her hands still faintly glowing blue with residual Talent.
“That was quick thinking, distracting him by keeping him talking,” Maya acknowledged.
“Is he dead?” Avi asked quietly.
“Yes he is,” Maya said, then saw the look on Avi’s face. “What, you’re going to judge me for killing him? He was going to kill you.”
“Maya, we want to the same Talent school, grew up in the same community. I know that you believe the same things I do, underneath it all. You know this is wrong.” It wasn’t just the loss of life that was considered immoral, it was using one’s Talent to do so – Talent was designed to help, not hurt. People who took life with their Talent invariably ended up having their own life taken by Talent, whether theirs or someone else’s. It was some sort of narrative inevitability. It also perverted your Talent, but Avi didn’t know as much about that – she didn’t take the higher-level classes when it became obvious she’d never have Talent of her own.
“Well, we don’t always have choices,” Maya said bitterly.
“And now, Maya, what are you going to do? Are you going to finish the job?” Avi challenged.
“What?”
“You’ve already given me two warnings. Is this going to be the last one? Or are you going to kill me now?”
“Avi,” Maya said. “I’m serious when I saw that Zhang Matriarch will not hesitate to order me to kill you. This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“Do you see me laughing, Maya? You know I’m not going to let her push me around.” And that was the point. Zhang Matriarch shouldn’t be allowed to just terminate the people who didn’t do what she wanted, nor should she be allowed to manipulate them like she had Maya. She needed to learn.
“And when I come to kill you next time, how are you going to stop me? It’s obvious the Liang Heir isn’t much help,” she sniffed.
“Hey,” Jason said, “I thought it would be polite for you to finish your conversation before intervening.”
“And is that what you thought about the Wang assassin, too?” Maya asked scornfully. “You weren’t pinned to the wall, you were just 'waiting until it would be polite to intervene'?”
“I had back-up plan,” Jason said coolly, snapping his fingers as a short sword fell into it.
“Do you even know how to use that?” Maya sniffed.
“I know enough,” Jason said. “Enough to have protected Avi.”
“That’s enough,” Avi said, cutting off the increasingly-louder argument between Maya and Jason. “Maya, if this is my third warning, then I have something to tell you.” She paused, then corrected herself. “Or actually, what I mean to say is I have something I need you to tell your Matriarch.”
“You won’t be able to change her mind with a message,” Maya sighed.
Avi ignored her. Zhang Matriarch was a reasonable woman. Her every move was calculated. She’d probably even calculated that Avi would do this, had probably arranged everything just so Avi would say what she was about to say.
Avi drew herself up, and spoke.
“Tell Zhang Matriarch that I understand her concerns regarding my allegiances, but please
remind her that I do not yet consider her an enemy simply because she is not my friend. When I have recovered my Talent and become powerful beyond her wildest imagination, she does not want me to remember her as my biggest obstacle and an enemy. It is not I who should be concerned about whether she sees me as an enemy. It is she who should be concerned about whether I see her as an enemy. As long as these tacky attempts on my life cease, I won’t need to consider her an enemy and I won’t make a move against her.”
It was important to sound confident, she reminded herself. She leveled a very serious look at Maya.
“If there are any more threats on her end, I will make certain to include her among my enemies and act accordingly,” she said in a warning tone. “Can you convey the message?”
“I believe so,” Maya said, quirking a smile, well aware of the stance that Avi was taking.
Avi was taking a side, (her own side, of course) and committing to defending her own interests (always a tricky matter), but if everything worked out she’d be out of the country by the end of the year anyway, so it shouldn’t matter.
And with that, Maya shimmered and disappeared.
Avi collapsed into a chair, as the adrenaline that had been washing through her ever since a man started waving a gun in her face finally disappeared.
“Well, that was badass,” Jason commented, “and very important, and I’m glad you bought yourself some time but … uh … what are we supposed to do with the body?”
And he gestured to the very dead man currently lying on her kitchen floor.