Page 123 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
“… Are you being serious?”
“There’s a middle ground between avoiding the past and having it shoved forcefully up one’s nose. Most people have forgotten those ghosts are there, which is why they keep languishing. We can help them without risking hundreds or thousands of lives.”
Your mouth opens and shuts. “But… Kowloon! You have fought for your district, Mei Chi. Don’t tell me you are going to walk away from it!”
“I am already dead,” she says, gently. “Of course I care for Kowloon, and I haven’t walked away from it. A good friend is going to make sure the demolitions come to a halt, and that real talks begin. However… this is not my life or my world. So, I must leave that task to others and focus on my truest duty: to put right the island, and to offer healing in your life. If I can.”
You fall silent, thinking harder than you ever have before. Trying to process everything she has said, fighting against the ghost fervor in your brain and heart. Attempting to imagine a future not soaked in hate and hurt, as Wing Yun once urged you to do.
“It occurs to me that I haven’t actually said the words. Let me fix that now.” She lets go of your body and kneels in front of you, her forehead and palms pressed to the floor. “Siu Yin, I am so sorry. There is no excuse for my actions, no justification for your murder, or the hurt you’ve endured. Please, return with me to Shek Ham Chau, the place where it all began for you, and let me try to save what future you have left.”
Sentiments you never thought you’d hear, and they strike to your core more deeply than even the lightning did. Ghosts can’t cry, yet your eyes ache and burn with the desire to do so anyway.
“I’m… so tired,” you confess, dropping to your knees next to her. “Everything hurts, all the time. I wish I could breathe.”
“Me too.” She looks up. “I’m beyond tired, at this point. That’s why I think we must go to Shek Ham Chau and speak to a certain goddess.”
It takes you a moment to remember who and what she means. You have not thought of me for a very long time, or our brief encounter after your death.
“I don’t know about that…”
“But I do. I’m the ghost talker, remember?” She grins with a mouthful ofjagged teeth. “The island is where it all began, and the island is where it must end. Everything else follows from that. If it doesn’t work, you can always destroy me after. Come with me, Siu Yin, and let’s try. Please.”
She reaches out, jade-hued skin frazzling with dryness in the slacking rain. Dawn will be coming soon; if neither of you move, you’ll both die a final death. Still you hesitate, thinking and agonizing.
Mercy gives you time, and waits.
As the sun begins to set the world alight, you finally take her hand.
39DEATH AND REBIRTH
August 22, 1975 (Today)
In the distance, the city recedes like an outgoing tide.
One final glance reveals modern skyscrapers wreathed in rainclouds. All the ferries, boats, and ships are huddled in their docks, cast into shadow by the arriving dawn.
The bottle gourds with their trapped ghosts have been gathered up and returned to the canvas sack. You have left them at a seaside temple, with a note explaining what needs doing. The priests will be able to help with the duty that government officials have neglected for so long.
Individually, the people of Hong Kong are not responsible for decisions that led to the “spiritual cleansing” when the occupation ended. Only a handful of individuals chose to lock away spirits, rather than placate or honor them. Nonetheless, ghosts are a legacy of pain that belong to a whole society. Everyone in the city must bear the cost of that trauma. Pain cannot be left buried, or it will grow and put down roots, like a cursed tree.
That is not to say you are innocent, either. Mercy is guilty of her sins; you of yours. This is irrefutable, as are the deaths which lie at your feet. In your ghost heart, you sense there will be a reckoning someday, when you must go and confront the aftermath of the lives you took, examine all the harm you caused.
For now, though…
“Faster,” Mercy murmurs. And she dives.
You, carrying your own body like a precious possession, dive after her.
It has been a long time since you’ve swum like this. Ironic, really, that you have spent more time in the water as a living woman than you ever did as a ghost. Even in your days of infiltrating ships, you preferred to be on dry land, in a variety of skins. Water was something that bound you, rather than something that freed you.
Today, in ghost form, you feel anything but bound as you propel rapidly through deep green waves, with Mercy at your side. Ocean rushes past, as do wrecks and fish and litter and coral. Clouds of moon jellyfish brush your limbs as you wind through them.
Time passes along with the miles. Both of you are fast and untiring, single-minded in purpose. The burn of suffocation still crunches the lungs in this form, but you are very used to that, and almost consider it a fair exchange for the exhilarating speed that death has granted.
Gradually, the seascape begins to look familiar. You recognize the shapes of certain rocks or islands, certain wrecks and reefs. The water in Sai Kung is a little clearer, a little brighter in its green, especially this time of year.
A strange nostalgia seeps over you. As if you are, once again, a girl on the cusp of adventure, leaving behind the strife of a conflict-riddled city.
