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Seichan sighed and removed an antique Dunhill lighter from a pocket. It was brass and plated in silver. She snapped it open, rolled up a flame, and offered it to her mother.
Guan-yin leaned down to light her cigarette. The flame illuminated her jagged scar, a wound carved across her cheek by an interrogator with the Vietnamese secret police twenty-six years before. Her mother had turned that wound into a badge of honor by incorporating it into an intricate tattoo, transforming it into the tail of the dragon now inked across cheek and brow. It matched the silver dragon pendant hanging from her neck. Seichan wore a similar one, but it was subtly different, sculpted from a childhood memory of her mother’s pendant.
As her mother straightened, puffing out a stream of smoke, Seichan’s hand drifted to her dragon. She pictured herself as a girl, sprawled on her belly next to a garden pond, not unlike one of those below. She remembered tracing a finger in the water, trying to lure up a golden carp—then her mother’s face appeared in the rippling reflection, unscarred and perfect, sunlight glinting off the silver dragon resting at her mother’s throat.
The moment felt like someone else’s life.
Seichan still struggled to fully bring past and present together.If they ever would. Like their two pendants, their two lives had been forged and set into hard metal, leaving them forever similar, but never the same.
“Jack has grown so much,” Guan-yin finally whispered to the night, breaking the silence.
Seichan heard the scolding edge in those few words, admonishing her long lapse between visits. “It has been hard to get away.”
Her mother merely exhaled a stream of smoke, leaving the accusation hanging in the air as much as the pall.
Seichan waved aside the cloud, along with the tack of the conversation. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Zhuang doesn’t like it. He keeps hiding my packs.”
“Clearly, he takes his role as yourbodyguard quite seriously. Maybe you should heed him.”
“I can take care of myself, Chi.”
Seichan bristled at the use of her old childhood name. In Vietnamese, Chi meanttwig. Her mother had christened her triadDuàn zhi—which meantbroken twig—after the daughter she had thought had died. And in many ways, that girl had died.
“You know I prefer Seichan. Or shall I start calling you by your old name, Mai Phuong Ly?”
Her mother stiffened. Neither of them were their past selves. And neither liked to be reminded of the loss they had sustained or the misery that followed.
For the first nine years of her life, Seichan had lived in a small village in Vietnam, raised by her mother. Those bright and happy years had ended one awful night, when men in military uniforms had burst into their home and dragged her mother away, bloody-faced and screaming.
It would take decades for Seichan to learn the truth, how the Vietnamese secret police had discovered her mother’s dalliance with Seichan’s father, an American diplomat, and of the love that grew from there. The Ministry had sought to ply U.S. secrets out of her mother, holding and torturing her in a prison outside Ho Chi Minh City. A year later, she escaped during a prison riot, and for a short period of time, due to a clerical error, she had been declared dead, killed during that uprising. It was that lucky mistake that gave her mother enough of a head start to flee Vietnam and vanish into the greater world.
By then, abandoned and alone, Seichan had been shifted through a series of squalid orphanages across Southeast Asia—half starved most of the time, maltreated the rest—until finally she’d taken to the streets and back alleys of Seoul. It was there that a shadowy terrorist organization, called the Guild, found and recruited her. Their trainers hadsystematically stripped away not only her remaining childhood but also much of her humanity, leaving behind only an assassin.
With the help of Sigma Force, she eventually took down the Guild. Afterward, she had been left adrift, orphaned once again, until she discovered a new purpose in Sigma—and a new home and family with Gray.
Her mother took another long draw on her cigarette.
Similar to Seichan’s own path, her mother had turned her anger and grief into purpose, founding theDuàn zhiTriad in Hong Kong and carving her own place into this hard world.
“Deui m` hjyuh,” her mother apologized in Cantonese.
Seichan dipped her chin in acknowledgment. “It is late. I should be getting to bed.”
Her mother touched her arm before she could leave. “I heard you declined Gray’s proposal last night. That is why I came out to speak to you.”
Seichan closed her eyes. “That is between us, Mother.”
“He asked me for your hand. Two days ago. Before the eve of the New Year. I gave him my blessing. I wanted you to know. If it makes any difference.”
“It doesn’t.”
Her mother looked down, but not quick enough to hide the wince in her eyes.
“I don’t wish to be married,” Seichan said. “Ever.”
“It is a sentiment I understand. I’m glad you turned him down.”
