Seeker

Beneath her, the water was very deep and very cold. Near the bottom, where the sunlight never reached, it was black. Something was down there, and it was moving. She could feel it rising from the darkness and the freezing depths, slowly climbing upward. As it rose, it moved faster, into water that was deep blue, then lighter shades. In a moment, it would break the surface. From there, it would continue rising, up through the rafters of the Bridge, through each of the lower levels, until it was here in the room with her, all around her. She could feel it now, enveloping her and pulling her back toward the ocean, where she would drown.

“We’re leaving!”

Quin woke.

She was lying in a bed near a small, round window. Her eyes moved over the room without recognizing anything. On one wall was a chart of the human body, showing acupuncture points and muscle reflexes. Near the chart was a calendar with a Chinese dragon along the top. There was an open closet with plain, dark clothing hanging in it. Next to the closet was a medical skeleton wearing a headband and a blue smock, and above the skeleton were photographs of people who appeared to be complete strangers.

Quin turned her eyes upward, and the low ceiling came into focus. There was a map pinned there, covering most of the ceiling. In the style of an old etching, it showed a dense city that covered an island and spilled over onto the mainland nearby. It was a map of Hong Kong—she could see the name written in ornate letters across the center.

On the map, between the Kowloon section of the city on the mainland and Hong Kong Island, a large bridge was visible. That’s where I am, she remembered. She was here, in her room, in the house she shared with her mother, on the Transit Bridge, which was a world of its own, running between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, in the city of Hong Kong, continent of Asia. This was home, and maybe it always had been.

She turned her head to look out the window. Through it, she could see the high buildings across Victoria Harbor, and beneath her, the harbor’s gray water, running away from her with the tide. She felt a little dizzy as she watched the current. It appeared to be morning.

“You were yelling something.”

Her mother was standing in the doorway to Quin’s bedroom. Fiona wore a bright silk dress, her deep red hair tied up in an elaborate coiffure that framed her porcelain skin and blue eyes. She hesitated at the door, looking quite beautiful. After a moment, she took a seat carefully next to Quin on the bed, almost as if worried that her daughter might bite her. Quin noticed that her mother’s motions were sure and graceful—which meant she hadn’t started drinking yet today.

“Are you all right?” Fiona asked. “You were saying something about leaving.”

Quin closed her eyes, still feeling dizzy. The sensation from her dream had a hold on her, something rising and rising …

“Are you feeling all right?” Fiona asked again.

Her mother’s cool hand touched her forehead. The dream disappeared and her dizziness faded. Her own life settled back around her. She opened her eyes.

“There you are,” Fiona said, smiling down at her.

Quin wished her mother would take her hand off her forehead. When had Fiona last washed her hands? All the men Fiona spent time with, and the drugs down in the drug bars, everything her mother touched would be carried on that hand, small pieces of other people and places, now touching Quin. It made her feel ill.

She rolled away from Fiona, closer to the window, causing the hand to slip from her head.

“I’m not diseased, Quin,” Fiona told her quietly.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” Her mother stood and moved back to the doorway. “I have an appointment. I’ll be back for dinner. If you’re feeling up to it, maybe we can eat together.” When Quin made no response, Fiona turned and left the room.

She calls them appointments, Quin thought.

“They are appointments,” her mother called as she walked down the stairs. “Just as any businesswoman might have.” A moment later, the bells that hung from the front door rang as Fiona left the house.

Quin closed her eyes and pulled the covers over her head. She lay there for several minutes, but sleep would not return. Anyway, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to sleep—that dream might still be waiting.

She could feel the place where her mother had touched her head. Those tiny particles were there, on her skin. They might be invisible, but Quin could feel them.

She threw the covers off and walked to the bathroom, where she spent several minutes washing her face and hands, avoiding, as she always did, the sight of her bare left arm. When she finally felt clean, she pulled on a long-sleeved shirt, tugged it down over her wrists, and then looked into the mirror.

“Quin,” she said, like she was practicing her own name. Her dark hair was long, and her skin was as pale as it had ever been, from spending most of her time in the twilight of the Transit Bridge. Her dark eyes looked older, she thought, than her sixteen years.

From the skeleton in the corner of her bedroom, she retrieved the white headband, which she tied around her head. She took the blue smock from the skeleton as well and slipped into it. The smock and headband marked her as a healer. At sixteen, she was young for the profession, though of course she was still in training. Her eyes ran over the photographs taped to the wall. She recognized them now—her patients. She’d done something good for each of them. She was very lucky to have such a noble calling. In a small way, she was making the world better.

She leaned her forehead against the skeleton’s bony skull and whispered, “I will help someone today. If I am lucky, I will help many people. If I am very lucky, I will—”

A knock on the downstairs door interrupted her morning ritual. Before she was halfway down the stairs, the knock came again, much harder.

“I’m coming!” she called in Chinese.

“Emergency!” said the voice from the other side, also in Chinese. It was one of the few Chinese words Quin knew well. She threw open the door to find an Asian woman around forty years old, carrying a small boy in her arms.

“Emergency,” the woman said again, switching to English this time, after seeing Quin’s Western face.

“What happened?” Quin asked as she took the boy from the woman’s arms and immediately carried him to the back room. There, she laid the child on the treatment table that sat among the high shelves of Chinese herbs and racks of acupuncture needles she was still learning to use.

“It was some kind of drug,” the woman told her. Her accent was nearly impossible to detect, almost as though she spoke English natively. She was panicked, but she spoke clearly—she was not someone who easily lost control. “His older brother—he must have left something in a drawer. Akio found it and swallowed it. I don’t know what it was. Shiva maybe, or even opium …” Shiva was one of the drugs currently sweeping through the bars on the bottom levels of the Bridge.

“You know I’m only a trainee? We should get my teacher, Master Tan.”

“I have already been there,” the woman said. “Master Tan is away this morning. His mother pointed me here.”

Quin could imagine Master Tan’s ancient and tiny mother sending this woman to her. Quin was only three houses away from Master Tan’s, but that did not mean this was the best place for the boy to come. The woman was now studying Quin’s face, as though searching for something else there.

“Please …”

Quin had already begun to examine the boy’s limp body, his eyes, his fingernails, the color of his skin, all the places Master Tan had taught her to look for telltale signs. It was odd—the boy had his mother’s face, but his hair had a reddish tint. Something she’d seen before, maybe. She quickly inserted three acupuncture needles, at his head, wrist, and ankle.

“How long since he swallowed it?”

“Maybe a half hour,” the woman said.

“I actually think we should go to hospital—” Quin began.

“Quin?”

“Yes?”

The woman nodded to herself. “Quin, Master Tan trusts you. His mother said so. So I trust you, Quin.”

It was strange how the woman kept saying her name, just as Quin had been saying her own name a few minutes before, up in the bathroom. The woman put her hands on Quin’s shoulders.

“Please. It’s too late to go somewhere else. Help him.”

Quin nodded. She concentrated, willing herself to enter a state of heightened observation. Master Tan called this her special gift. He said most healers worked a lifetime to achieve what she could do so naturally. When he had seen her potential, Master Tan, one of the great healers of the Transit Bridge, had taken her on as his student.

Standing over the boy, Quin calmed her breathing. Her mind emptied of everything except the child lying in front of her. Her perceptions began to shift. After a moment, she could see things that lay beneath the level of ordinary sight. She observed bright, copper-colored lines flowing around the boy, his body’s electrical field. All people had such fields around their bodies—the fields could be measured with special instruments. But to see the field as Quin did was remarkable, a sign of intense mental focus. The boy’s bright lines were broken by dark, irregular patches hovering over the organs that had been affected by the toxin.

“He must pass out the poison,” she said. She’d helped Master Tan with dozens of similar cases—there were always problems with drugs on the Bridge—but she had never treated one so young. “Were you able to make him vomit?”

“No. I tried …”

There was not much time. The little boy was going into shock. Quin let her vision deepen. She could see her own energy field now, bright lines moving up and down her arms, and the small muddy whirlpool around the old injury in her chest. She concentrated and felt her energy sweeping down through her hands like an electrical river. Master Tan might be impressed at her ability to control her mind, but to her it seemed easy, like she’d been trained to do it all her life. Perhaps she had. Her existence before the Transit Bridge was all but missing from her memory, so she was free to imagine it any way she liked. She liked to tell herself she’d been training since birth to focus her thoughts in order to help people in this way.

She ran her fingers over the clouds above the boy’s organs, letting her energy combine with his. The dark clouds moved, seemed for a moment to spread. The boy moaned.

“What’s happening?” his mother asked.

Quin didn’t answer. She directed her energy at the boy’s stomach reflexes. His body convulsed.

She gently rolled him onto his side and grabbed a bucket. The boy convulsed again. And then he was vomiting, his whole body contracting as it forced out the contents of his stomach.

She saw the dark clouds changing, starting to break up. The boy’s eyes were fluttering open. Quin felt his pulse in several places, then began to relax. He would be all right.

“Akio, Akio,” his mother whispered, leaning over him. The boy mumbled an answer.

For a moment, as Quin’s vision settled back to normal, the woman’s face and the boy’s reddish hair looked so familiar. She could almost imagine them in a meadow with the sunlight playing over the tall grass …

“Quin.”

She looked up to see that the mother was kneeling on the floor in front of her. Akio was sitting up on the treatment table now, looking weak but much better. Time had passed without Quin noticing. She realized her eyes had been closed, her head propped in her hand. She was sitting in one of the chairs, and she was holding a full glass of water.

“I thought we’d lost you for a moment,” the woman said to her.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I … lost track.”

“How old are you?” the woman asked. There was something odd in her tone, as though she were inquiring to confirm something she already knew.

“I’m sixteen,” she answered. For a while, as she had recovered from her chest wound, she’d had trouble remembering her own age, but she reminded herself of it frequently now. She had been fifteen then, and she was nearly seventeen now.

“Sixteen.” The woman appeared to be doing some kind of calculation in her head—perhaps wondering how long Quin had been studying. “You’ve done very well. Do you have friends here?”

“Friends? Not really.” Quin was a little taken aback by the personal nature of the woman’s question, but she was also disturbed by her own answer. Why was the idea of friends a foreign concept?

She stood and handed the woman the glass of water she’d been holding. “Have him drink all of this, and then three more this morning. I need to make him a tea. Can you come by in a few hours for that?”

As the boy finished the glass of water, Quin carefully washed her hands again. The woman had touched her shoulders a couple of times, but she was fairly sure the woman’s hands had never actually come into contact with her skin. She wouldn’t worry about germs on the fabric, even if she suspected they were there. If she let herself worry, she’d spend all day washing her clothes.

When she was finished at the sink, she pulled her long sleeves back down as far as they would go. The left sleeve covered a blemish that bothered her. She didn’t like to look at it.

Soon the woman was carrying the boy Akio out the front door.

“Thank you. Quin.” The woman said her name again in that strange, careful way, like she was enjoying the sound of it.

When the door shut behind them, Quin stood quite still for several minutes. I’ve saved the life of a child, she told herself. I’ve saved the life of a child. Maybe the woman would let her take a picture of the boy to put upstairs on her wall.

There was a tugging at the edges of her lips. It surprised her—her mouth had grown unused to smiling.