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chapter 24
a dragon in the streets below
esmeralda
Surrounded by the trinkets like a tea party of my oldest friends, I sit cross-legged on the floor of what I’ve established to be Meilin’s room, although a ghost’s chamber has little in common with what constitutes a bedroom — which makes sense, considering she has no need for furniture.
More a storage unit or a hoarder’s closet, the space is a mishmash of random objects, which have been abandoned in this or that corner of the room like someone’s task had ended at delivering the merchandise. The objects, as she’s explained to me, are mementos from the places she and Teizel have visited over the years, and I have to tell myself that not all of those travels meant a soul taken.
The Persian rug I’m sitting on doesn’t mean a challenger in Tehran; the watercolor of St. Peter’s Basilica doesn’t mean another one in Rome. But at least some of the objects do come from travels that involved a failed attempt at solving the box’s riddle, and I can’t shake that thought.
A slither of sunlight peaks through the French window to land on my thigh, and I wiggle my fingers over it, basking in its warmth. Someone, I would assume Tei, has put a vase of fresh flowers atop a wooden crate pushed by the wall, presumably in an attempt to perfume the room, but Mei spends too much time in this space for the scent of decay to be anything but front and center. It doesn’t bother me as much as it would’ve a few days ago — as I come to accept the monikers of death as natural, they don’t flare my alarm bells anymore. I still have to fight against years of taught survival instincts, but something more primal, something innate, is fighting back for me.
“Tell me how far you came,” I say, breaking the silence between us.
Mei lifts her clouded gaze toward me, breaking out of the haze she sometimes falls into. “Uh?”
I gesture to the trinkets splayed around me. “In the game. How far did you come before your time was up?”
Her expression downturns into an unnaturally long frown. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea…”
“Please. You’re the only other being who can relate to what I’m going through. I need to feel like I’m mildly prepared for what’s to come.”
She takes a few steps closer in that mechanical, robotic way of hers and drops to the floor in front of me. “Just because I suffered the fate I did, doesn’t mean you’re destined for the same.”
Getting on my hands and knees, I crawl to her. “I’m not trying to make a comparison, I’m just…” I blow out a sigh and fall back on my heels.
All right, maybe I am drawing comparisons, but how much worse can that make the situation? From my point of view, not a whole lot of damage can be done by sharing in the misery. “You’re the only person who knows what I’m going through.”
Mei runs a hand down her face. “I bargained for a way to be with a woman I loved, without having to hide. Back then, playing a deadly game with a monster seemed like my only way to make the life I dreamed of happen.”
A slow, bitter smile spreads across my lips. “It’s crazy what we will do to be with the people we love, uh?”
“Who did you bargain for?”
“My mom,” I admit. And since in for a penny in for a pound, I continue, “I lost her when I was four, and I feel like I was robbed of a whole lot because of it. She was the only other person… like me. Teizel knows more about my skills than I do. And I can’t find any other reason for that other than growing up without my mom.”
Mei’s incisors dig so deep into her bottom lip it looks like she could rip it to shreds. Her gaze scans across the trinkets, one by one, from the one I’ve solved — the egg — to all the others. When she lands her eyes on the set of keys, she sighs. “The one with the dragon head, can you show it to me?”
I reach for the keychain and flip through them until I find the one she’s talking about. The keys are all golden but covered in a heavy layer of patina, making them dark and dull; the stem is identical on all of them, long and skinny with two baubles in the middle, and the teeth are all slightly different variations of three wards that don’t match the locket’s notches. The most distinctive elements are the twenty-nine different grips: all with a large central hole, they each have different decorative elements around it.
Without Mei mentioning it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the key I’m holding is depicting a dragon, but now that she’s said it, I can see how the notches on the inside of the bow would represent a scaled belly, and the ridges on top would be spikes. Mei inspects the key, cocking her head left and right, her lips wrinkled in a deep frown.
“We were celebrating the Lunar New Year that day. There was a paper dragon dancing in the streets below.”
My eyebrows pinch. “Is that a meaningful occurrence in your life?”
Meilin chortles a bitter laugh. “I’d say so, since it was the last one.”
A chill runs down my spine. The day Mei died would have been the day she lost the game. “Mei, how… how did you die?”
For what feels like endless minutes, we both stare at the key. Finally, with the tiniest of voices, she says, “I jumped out of a window.”
There was a paper dragon in the streets below.
“How many times have you watched…” I sweep my arm to indicate the trinkets. “This?”
Mei’s jaw ticks. “Three times.”
