Page 9 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Water fetchers were a common enough sight. There were wells all over the district, though you couldn’t pay Mercy to drink from any of them. Any water that came from the ground in Kowloon was heavily contaminated by open sewage and industrial waste. Still, some folk had a use for it, and savvy kids could make a few pennies collecting and delivering.
“Not right now, sorry,” Mercy said finally, rubbing throbbing temples. Thankfully,the urgehad abated, for now, which was a welcome relief. She needed to get home and report to Cobra Lily.
The girl’s face fell. She muttered something rude under her breath and turned back to her work. Even with a rope, her slight form had to lean over and into the crude well, just to lower her pail.
Mercy watched, struck by immediate remorse. She herself had not been much older when she’d first come to the Walled City, alone and friendless, struggling to stay safe and find work to feed herself.
Things were better these days than they used to be, with the war long done and modernity creeping in, but kids here still had a hard life. Harder than most people’s, all things considered. A few pennies meant nothing to her, these days, but would mean a lot to this girl.
She stood slowly, brushing dust off her legs. “Hey kid, I changed my mind. How much for a couple of bottles?”
The girl did not reply. Perhaps she hadn’t heard—her back was toward Mercy, her body leaned over the well. Head out of sight.
Bao stood up abruptly, suddenly alert when he hadn’t been before.
“Hey, little niece…” Mercy began, then trailed off.
The girl wasn’t moving. Her narrow frame was slumped and completely limp.
Mercy swore under her breath and darted forward, closing the distance between them. She grasped fistfuls of threadbare shirt and hauled the kid upward and back.
Sour-smelling liquid sloshed her shirt and the ground around them. Bao hissed, leaping off her shoulder and backing away to avoid getting wet. Even as a ghost, he disliked the sensation.
Dirty, oily water surged up and over the lip of the well, as if a pipe had burst or flooded from below. It pooled on the concrete, having nowhere to sink into, and showed no signs of abating.
The girl, meanwhile, collapsed in Mercy’s arms. She was soaked from the chest up, and Mercy realized with appalled horror that the kid’s head had beenhanging upside down in water. That small face was white as death: chest not moving, lungs not breathing. She needed to get the kid breathing—
Pale lids flew open, sharp gaze fixing instantly to Mercy’s own. She should have been relieved, but instead the sight made her stomach sink. There was something watchful and alien behind those eyes. No trace of the hard-bitten child she’d spoken to only moments before.
“Shit,” Mercy said, wearily. “I’m too late.”
“Don’t worry, Madam Ghost Talker.” The girl broke into a slow, cold smile. “This body has been dead for days.”
From a few feet away, Bao hissed, ghost fur standing on end. He was telling her what she already could see for herself: the kid was possessed.
Water continued to glug from the well, slowly filling the small, sunken courtyard. It lapped at her sandal-clad feet, threatening to rise to her ankles.
None of this was good. A normal person might have dropped the kid and fled, but Mercy was too experienced for that. If it wanted to attack, it would have already. For whatever reason, this ghost wished to speak.
And talking to ghosts was the one thing Mercy Chan truly had a gift for. Best she deal with this problem, before it did harm to someone less adept.
She held the thin frame steady and said, with a calm she did not feel, “Who are you, then? What do you want?”
“I am a messenger.” The girl’s smile twisted into a snarl. “The demon who killed me wanted me to ask you a question.”
A bizarre answer. Most ghosts were confused, to one extent or another. Returning as an undead spirit meant portions of the soul were missing or fractured, and that in turn meant a ghost’s self-awareness and ability to reason were also damaged.
But this spirit did not sound confused. It sounded extremely confident.
“Who was this demon that killed you?” she asked, skin prickling with goose bumps. “Why doesn’t this demon speak to me itself?”
“How should I know?” Small flies landed on the girl’s face, crawling across the unblinking eyes, across the teeth bared in a fixed grin. “I am just a good little ghost, doing as I am told.”
“I see.” Mercy’s mouth was suddenly dry. “What was the question this demon wanted you to ask?”
The dead girl blinked first one eye, and then the other. “Do you remember the island, Chen Mei Chi?”
Her headache from before came crashing back, like a rain of stones on theinside of her skull. A strange, terrible pressure was building up behind her temples, so powerful it left her dizzy and staggering.
