Ashore

The sea gave her back like it didn’t want her either.

Mei Lin came to on her stomach with a mouthful of sand and her wedding sash wrapped so tight around her ribs she couldn’t tell if it was holding her together or trying to finish what the storm started. Her ears were ringing. Not the pretty kind of ringing. The kind that came after something loud and wrong.

“Han Wei,” she said, into the sand.

Nothing.

She said it again, louder, and pushed herself up on her arms, and the whole beach tilted sideways like it was still part of the storm, like the world hadn’t finished deciding whether it was going to keep her.

The ship was gone. Not sinking. Not burning. Gone, like it had never been a ship at all, just splinters scattered up and down the shore, black wood and pale wood and one single lacquered chest bobbing stupidly in the shallows like it had somewhere to be.

She screamed his name until her throat gave out, and the ocean didn’t answer, and neither did he, and somewhere in the screaming she noticed there was a whole part of her head that felt like a room with the furniture moved out of it. She knew her name. She knew she’d been on a boat. She knew there had been a wedding, hers, waiting for her on the other end of a sea crossing she could not, now, for the life of her, remember agreeing to survive.

She did not remember his face.

She remembered the loving him. The way you remember a song you can’t hum anymore.

“Okay,” she said out loud, mostly to hear a voice, even her own. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay.”

Crying wasn’t going to build her a boat. She got up, wrung out her sash, and started walking, because walking was doing something, and the alternative was lying back down in the sand and letting the crabs sort it out.

The city arrived before she was ready for it.

One moment there was coastline, gulls, the smell of salt and rot. The next there was a gate, actual carved stone, dragons curling up either post, gilding gone dull with weather, and beyond it, streets. Real streets. Lanterns on hooks, unlit. Shopfronts with their shutters down. A whole city laid out like a table set for a feast nobody had shown up to.

“Hello?” Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

Nothing answered. Not a dog. Not a chicken. Not the creak of a door.

She walked the main street with her arms wrapped around herself, waiting for someone, anyone, to come out and ask what a half-drowned woman in a torn silk sash was doing wandering into their town like a ghost that hadn’t gotten the news yet. Nobody did. Baskets sat outside stalls, still stacked with fruit that hadn’t started rotting. A pot hung over a cold fire pit with something in it that had gone thick and gray. It was the kind of empty that didn’t feel empty. It felt held.

She could feel it, the way you feel someone’s eyes on the back of your neck in a crowded room, except there was no crowd. Just shuttered windows and the specific, prickling certainty that something behind every one of them was watching her walk by and deciding what she was.

“I don’t suppose,” she said to the empty street, to whatever was or wasn’t listening, “any of you want to tell me where the men went. Or the women. Or the children. Or literally one single person.”

The street did not want to tell her that.

She found a bench outside what looked like it used to be a teahouse and sat on it, because her legs had officially stopped being interested in her opinion, and she put her face in her hands, and for the first time since the sand, she let herself cry properly, big, ugly, gulping sobs, the kind you’re not supposed to let anyone see, except apparently nobody could see her anyway, because this was, unmistakably, the most abandoned city in the history of abandoned cities.

She did not notice the sun was setting until the shadows started moving.

Not shadows from something. Shadows that were the something.

The lanterns lit themselves. That was the first sign that she had badly, badly misjudged this town.

Not lit, she didn’t see a hand or a flame, one second dark, hook empty, next second glowing warm gold like they’d never been out. Up and down the street, one after another, quick as a held breath let go, until the whole avenue was lit up like New Year’s and full, genuinely, densely full, of people who had not been there ten minutes ago.

Mei Lin stood up off the bench so fast she nearly went straight back down again.

There were children. That was the part that undid her a little, at first, because children made a street feel safe, and these ones were laughing and chasing each other around a fountain that hadn’t had water in it an hour ago and now did, silver and sparkling under the lantern light, and it was all so normal looking that for one full second she thought, oh thank god, people, finally, people, And then one of the children stopped mid-run, turned its head all the way toward her like an owl deciding whether a mouse was worth the effort, and smiled with teeth that had absolutely no business being in a child’s mouth.

Mei Lin did not scream. She would tell herself later, repeatedly, with great pride, that she did not scream. She did, however, sit back down on the bench extremely fast and stare very hard at her own knees.

“You’re new,” said a voice above her.

She looked up into the face of a woman roughly her own age, dressed finer than anyone Mei Lin had ever personally spoken to, silk the color of a bruised plum, hair pinned with something that caught the lantern light like it was arguing with it, looking down at her with the exact expression of a person who has found a stray cat sitting on their favorite chair and hasn’t yet decided whether to be charmed or annoyed.

“I...” Mei Lin’s voice cracked. “There was a storm. A ship. I don’t... I washed up. I don’t know where I am.”

“Mm,” said the woman, unbothered, like shipwrecked strangers turned up on this bench with some regularity. “You smell strange.”

“I’ve been in the ocean for most of a day, I imagine I do...”

“Not like that.” The woman crouched, unhurried, silk pooling, and studied her the way you’d study a coin you weren’t sure was real. “Strange strange. Sweet. Warm. What clan are you from?”

“...Clan?”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“I don’t know the question.”

The woman’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, the ghost of the idea of one, and she reached out and, before Mei Lin could flinch back, tilted her chin up with two fingers, cool as the inside of a shell, and looked at her the way you’d look at a puzzle box you’d been handed with no instructions.

“You’re not one of the bottom-clans,” the woman said slowly, mostly to herself. “You don’t move like one. And you’re too, clean, for a stray.” She let go. “But you’re not court, either. So.” She stood, brushed off her skirts, and offered a hand down like this whole conversation had been a formality she was now finished with. “What are you.”

Mei Lin took the offered hand because it was that or keep sitting on the bench forever, and let herself be pulled up.

“I’m hungry,” she said, which was true, and also the only sentence she currently had the strength to construct. “And I’m cold. And I would very much like to know why that child had teeth like that.”

The woman actually laughed at that, short, surprised, real. “Oh, I like you.” She looked Mei Lin over once more, head to foot, filing something away behind her eyes. “There’s a house on the corner that’ll serve you something warm if you’ve coin. Go. Before the market clears out and the only thing left open is the sort of place that asks fewer questions and wants worse answers.”

“Wait, what’s your...”

But the woman was already gone, folded back into the crowd of silk and lantern light like she’d never been standing there at all, and Mei Lin was left alone on a street full of strangers who all, every single one of them, seemed to be very carefullynotlooking directly at her while somehow managing to watch her every step.

She dug in the hem of her sash and found the few shillings she’d sewn in there before the wedding, for luck, her mother had said, you never travel with empty pockets, and closed her fist around them like they were the last solid thing left in the world.

“Right,” she said, to nobody, to the lanterns, to the too-quiet fountain, to whatever this place was. “Food. Warm. Fine. How complicated can that possibly be.”

She would, within the hour, discover the answer was: extremely.

She squared her shoulders. Smoothed down what was left of the wedding sash, for whatever good that was going to do her.

“It’s food,” she muttered, marching herself toward the corner house before she could talk herself out of it. “It’s a warm room and some food. You’ve survived a shipwreck. You can survive dinner.”

She had no idea, walking through that door, just how wrong she was about to be about the word dinner.