Three roads led out of the citadel. One bisected the sleepy isle, sloping down all the way back down to old man Tong’s place. Two others ran tightly near the rim of the island as close as we could get without everything crumbling away in a rockslide. Everyone wanted a home by the skyside despite that ever-present risk. No one wanted to miss out on the view.

The isle was a great barge adrift in a sea of clouds, from the bridge of a citadel you could see every household. My parent’s home was at the end of the starboard road. It would be quicker to walk all the way down to Tong’s place and then cross up through the open fields than limp my way around the edge. But everything in my body felt broken, and if my limp leg caused me to tumble all the way down, I wouldn’t be able to get back up.

The bell had finally rung with my exit. The dead streets were revived with oxen and carts and people, every one of which I knew personally, and every one of which was staring at me. I could have been a hunchback on stage, keeled over, bent back, face slathered with mud and streaked with paint and nicks of blood. Heads turned in secondhand embarrassment and I turned away, applying what little healing salve my grandmother had given over every bruise. If there was any comfort it was that I was probably too bruised for anyone to recognize me.

I recognized them though, and I could not bear the pressure of their thoughts.

I dragged myself to Lady Yu’s place. It was right by the citadel, and it would be better for her to see me than dozens of others.

Lady Yu’s front door was always unlocked though she was rarely present in her oddly decorated sitting room. I rang a gong at her counter and then collapsed face-first on a too-soft too vomit green couch. Her footsteps creaked down the halls as I turned myself over to study the mismatched doodads lining the shelves and walls.

Lady Yu was a bit of everything for the village. Doctor, dentist, alchemist, and farrier were just some of her odd jobs. Her office was every bit an occupational chimera as she was. Teeth both human and other slowly dissolved in jars right next to sample horseshoes on the shelves. It was a weird mix of gruesome horror and mundanity that didn’t attract many customers.

Few people came to Lady Yu because of a knocked-out tooth or a bucked-off horseshoe–there weren’t plenty of alternatives in such a small village for either of that work, but people knew that you got what you paid for. Lady Yu was most sought after for one thing.

She was an undertaker.

The most unsettling thing about her office was the dozens of paintings of townspeople. Some of the people I had never even known, but that I had managed to render anyway. Even decades after their passing, family members wanted something to remember them by, and I enjoyed painting those people the most. I got to portray people as their loved ones imagined them to be back when they still had all their hopes on their sleeves and before the grim look people close to death failed to hide. A majority of my paintings felt grotty to look at without that bittersweet nostalgia. Those were the ones of old men and women as I had known them, at the end of their life, halfway to the heavens already, overshadowed by a void deeper than their sunken faces just beneath their eyes.

“Hmmm. Well, this is interesting.”

Lady Yu’s cane clanked against the coach as she leaned in over me. One of her eyes was overlaid with an alchemist’s spyglass, a telescopic series of multicolored lenses that made her vision of spirits even better than mine. She often caught things that my eyes just slid over, a necessary ability for an alchemist, but a terrifying one up close.

Through those telescopic lenses, one massive eye observed me bare.

“I’ll assume the makeup was your doing.” She mused in a voice thirty years younger than it had any right to be. “The mud and the bruises though? Little BaoBao isn’t capable of this, Lin. Who was it? I’ll give you tea leaves that’ll keep them in an outhouse for a week.”

“My brother.”

“Oh,” she said with a slight pout. “Well, I can give you tea that only lasts a couple of hours instead. I’m assuming you won’t want to be near a messy outhouse for a whole week.”

Lady Yu didn’t ask what I did to deserve the beating. She didn’t criticize me for not fighting back or tell me to practice my forms. She just smiled and joked and tussled my hair knowing that she would make everything okay eventually.

“Thanks, Lady Yu, but I’m not really in the mood for revenge right now.”

She sighed. “Really? Not even a little bit? I know there’s a little prankster in you somewhere, Lin. It’s okay to let him out sometimes.”

Lady Yu’s smile dipped as I gave her a haggard and pained smile in response. She could see my bruises well enough but she also saw something else behind my bloody teeth.

“Okay, you’re really down in it today, huh? Alright, follow me. Let’s get you patched up. You can tell me all about it.”

Some part of me knew that a chat and some tea with Lady Yu was what I needed right now. Lady Yu was the kind of person you could cry in front of and not be overwhelmed by shame and embarrassment. There was a dam of emotions I was doing my best to hold back, and I knew that in the safety of Lady Yu’s back room, I would allow it to burst, but I couldn’t let those emotions out of me right now.

I didn’t know what they would do. There was a whistling pressure valve over my heart, and if I relieved it then a hot burst of steaming rage would burn everyone around. Lady Yu include.

Rage. Pure and simple. I wanted nothing more and nothing less than to kill my brother. I didn’t want to prank him with some tea. I didn’t want to tell on him to my parents and have them chew him out. I wanted to take a knife and stab him for what he did to me.

Rage was what I felt. Sure there was shame and embarrassment and a sea of sadness there as well but rage was simmering underneath it all and I had no idea how to deal with it but curling up in a ball and hoping it would pass. This feeling was too new for me to deal with. I had been angry before. BaoBao kicked my ass nearly every day, so of course I had been angry, but I had never wanted to tear him to shreds like this. I had never imagined him desperately holding onto the edge of the island and me stomping down on his fingers. I did imagine that for my brother.

My brother had never touched me before. He ignored me most of the time, and I thought, I genuinely thought, that it was okay for us to have that kind of relationship. I thought that’s just how older brothers were. He was a decade my senior and we had little in common. He didn’t hate or despise me, he was just too big for me.

He cleared that up today. He despised me all along and the sudden and brutal knowledge of that finally gave me permission to despise him too.

But I didn’t want to hate my brother. The thought of losing Sen to rage made me want to vomit so I would curl up and wait until these thoughts faded.

Lady Yu bit her lip with worry. I had gone a long time without giving her an answer. “Thanks,” I said, “but my injuries really aren’t that bad. Can I just sleep here until tomorrow? I think with a night of rest, everything will be fine.” And the boiling fire in my chest will go away.

“No.” Lady Yu smiled. “Customers will come, and if they see something beaten and half dead lying on my couch without even being wrapped in bandages they’ll think I’m as bad of a doctor as I am a dentist.” Lady Yu reached out her hand, “So you’re coming with me for treatment young man.”

She was just too kind to let me rest. I looked at that outstretched hand and my gut reaction was to slap it away. A stray thought that terrified me enough to take it. I felt like if I didn’t deal with this rage now, it would lash out at everyone near me, not just Sen.

With strength defying her years, Lady Yu pulled me out of my funk and onto my feet.

“Good. Now can you walk or do I need to get a stretcher?”

—

Lady Yu was easy to talk to. Well, she moved so unbearably slow that you’d want to start talking to avoid the mind-numbing clacks of her cane against the floor. She and Tong were weirdly similar in that respect. They were slow-moving and stubborn old people that wore angry snarls when you approached, but they didn’t resist flashing a gapped-tooth smile when you needed one, and they both listened with such compassion you felt at ease talking with them.

They were great people to be around and it wasn’t weird at all that I spent all my time with the oldest people in the village.

“So your brother beat you up just for wanting to attend the island fights? Hard to believe Sen would do something like that.”

I had told Lady Yu what had happened from my perspective, my admittedly terse and resentful perspective. She had clearly picked up that there was more to Sen’s side of the story and began to pry, but I knew she would drop the subject if I held my guns.

I had never held my thoughts from Lady Yu before and I was ashamed this situation tempted me to do so.

“I think he wanted to teach me a lesson.” I finally managed. “He wanted to show me how painful it would be to be ganged up upon in the fights. He said that he expected better from me than siding with Lao and that I was a disappointment.”

Lady Yu stopped in her already slow tracks. “Do you think that you’re a disappointment, Lin?”

I suddenly felt uncomfortable in my own skin like I was a bunch of worms swarming in a human body trying to figure out how to get the vocal cords moving again. I wanted to answer ‘yes’, I manipulated my lips to open, but in front of Lady Yu, I just couldn’t vocalize the words.

Lady Yu painstakingly turned around in a half circle her cane clanking in tiny degrees. When she finally managed to face me, she lifted her cane with incredible swiftness and bonked me on the head.

“Bah.” She said, her cane returning to her side before her body could even begin leaning to the side. “Get that thought out of your head right now Lin.”

This wasn’t where I thought we would have this conversation. Both of us standing uncomfortably in the hallway, portraits of the dead judging us from above. Lady Yu did her best to hide her shivering legs, we both wanted nothing more than to collapse on soft cushions right now but her muted green eyes refused to flick away from mine, and she was not about to start walking backward. “Promise me right now that you’ll put that thought out of your head.”

I looked away.

“Lin.” She said with a rare firmness. “Look at me.” I did so.

“The only way you would ever be a disappointment is if you believed you were. You’re angry at your brother for believing that. Hell, I’m angry at your brother for believing that, but none of our thoughts matter. Only yours do. Do you understand? You are what you believe yourself to be not what others say you are.”

It was hard to swallow that. Believing I was a Cultivator wouldn’t stop me from falling if I tried to fly away from the island. Believing that I was strong wouldn’t stop BaoBao or Sen from kicking my face into the dirt. Believing that I was Lyn… was a thought I didn’t want in my head right now.

I gave a shy smile as she looked into my eyes. “So, do you know much about the island fights?” Lady Yu sighed and shook her head. She wanted more from me but she wouldn’t push. She would never push me like my family would.

So she dropped the subject like an actor skipping lines in a script. “Know about the island fights, boy? I competed in nearly every one of them back when I was your age. Almost weekly in fact, and I won almost weekly too. By the time I was Sen’s age I was undefeated.”

“What happened then?”

“Oh I got married, oddly enough to the man who gave me my nickname in the fights. Ironclad Yu, he called me. That and some other words I won’t share. We were more rivals than lovers back then and he hated how every sword and spear he brought against me shattered with my punches. Then one day I shattered that hard heart of his and somehow managed to put it back together before he died from cardiac arrest. We fell in love that day on the bloody sands of the training hall.” Lady Yu turned to a picture of a bald man I had no recollection of. “Thirty years I spent with that man. I miss our fights.”

I wasn’t nearly as interested in her romance as the fights. “Ironclad? Did you have a potion that gave you steel skin or something?”

“Hah. I wish. Boy, never stop believing that I’m that good of an alchemist, will you? I adore the encouragement. But no, I never did get that recipe figured out, so I just put on a couple of caestus and went hunting for teeth every night.”

I couldn’t help but blink and this feeble old woman in front of me. “You won the fights with a pair of gloves?”

“To be fair, they were a very special pair of gloves,” she said. ”They’d leave dents in your skull if you got me angry enough. Are you interested in learning my old ways? You and your crab friend would be perfect students.”

“No no. I’m too weak. Wait. What Crab?” I reached above my head by instinct. Lady Yu was surprisingly quick, taping my hand down with her cane before the spirit crab could pinch my hand with its claw. Its other claw still bopped me on the nose. I wanted to slap him off my head but I managed to resist putting a hand anywhere near the creature.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Instead, I sighed. “I think it just tormenting me today.”

“Hmmm. Well, I think I can help you with that along with your injuries.” We had finally arrived at a small arched doorway at the end of the hallway. She pulled out a key, and we finally entered her room.

Lady Yu’s failures at alchemy, dentistry, and bending iron into horseshoes, were certainly not due to her organizational abilities. If I used a ruler to painstakingly trace every line, I couldn’t draw a picture of her lab as straight-laced as the real thing was. Books along all four walls were shelved by letter and color in a rainbow cascade of knowledge. Every jar, vial, or beaker was neatly labeled, and every page of her immaculately scattered notebooks was covered in a tiny efficient scrawl.

It was likely the only aesthetically pleasing alchemy lab in the empire. Most alchemists kept their secrets very well hidden. Their labs were more trap dens and mad jumbles of alchemic reagents than places of precise experimentation. Lady Yu eschewed all that crazy competition and secrecy as many in the Floating Isle did. No one would bother to steal the notes of an unascended alchemist, and if her notes were written to deceive thieves she’d inevitably end up deceiving herself once she forgot the tricks at play.

There were also very few thieves in the Floating Isle in general. It was hard to commit any crime once you realized people could throw you off the island if you were caught.

“Sit down there. Feel free to touch anything.”

She’d probably said that to every child that ended up in her lab. The couch she directed me to was adjacent to a shelf of mostly harmless nicknacks that didn’t break or leave stains if you dropped them. A book on herbalism sat half open on the table, probably what Yu suspected most farm kids would be interested in, though it was easily overshadowed by a large jar of floating eyeballs that stood taller than me.

One of the many reasons I didn’t become an alchemist. If I knew the ingredients of the things I ate or rubbed on my skin I’d probably vomit with every act.

“Alright Lin, look at this.” The old lady was remarkably quick within her own lab. Lady Yu had dumped herself into a wheelchair and rolled about with a large wooden case splayed on top of her knees.

“Let me help you with that.” We struggled with the bulky thing but managed to dump it on the table in front of the couch. I helped Lady Yu as she fiddled with the brass locks. “What is it?”

“Something that’ll solve all your problems. Now push that button over there.”

The case flung open with a click, and I stepped back as fog poured out on the sides so cold that frost crept along my feet. “What. What are these?”

In the box was a heavy set of prisoner’s chains, two crude iron bracelets that would clamp uncomfortably around the wrist. Attached to each bracelet was a dazzling set of silver rings each attached to each other by tiny silver chains. The rings were beautiful, and the whole gauntlet felt like it belonged more to an exotic dancer than some captive of war. “What are these, Lady Yu?”

“Don’t you start using honorifics with me boy. Aunty Yu is fine.” She reached down and picked up the chains. They jangled like silver coins in her hands. “These are my old caestus and now they’re yours.”

“Mine?” The chains looked heavy like they were made of wrought iron, and I couldn’t imagine moving the fingers without the chains between the rings getting snagged on one another, but the fundamental problem was that these did not look like caestus at all. Fighting with these would be worse than going bare knuckle. “What would I use them for?”

“To win the island fights. Keep up now. I know there’s a brain of yours in there.”

I backed away. “No. No way I’m going to the island fights.” I thought of my brother back in the training hall, this time with a sword and me with these chains weighing me down. I told you to stay home, Lin. he would say, and then he would break my teeth, shatter my bones, or cut off a limb. No. I would not be going to the fights. I looked at Lady Yu and her gap tooth smile. “I don’t even know how to use them.”

“That’s why I’ll teach you.”

“But.”

“But nothing. Now you put these on so I can teach you. Or I’ll show you how they work by wearing them myself.”

That threat was real. Lady Yu’s legs might have given way over the years but her arms were quick and I knew she was strong enough to kick my ass even in a wheelchair. I was just that weak and I didn’t want to fight.

“Lady. Aunty Yu. Please. I’ve had enough fighting for today.”

“Lin you haven’t fought at all today. You’ve just been punched.” Lady Yu nearly rolled on my toes moving towards me, backing me away until I fell on the coach. “Lin in your eyes is anger like Dragonfire and it will consume you if you don’t let it out. Tell me right now that you don’t want to punch your stupid brother in the face. Or worse. Go on. Tell me.”

Anger flared in my chest with those words. They were too much like Sen’s earlier teasing. Too much confidence in her eyes as if she was right about everything and all I could do was listen while she beat me up. That rage I was holding back finally came out.

“Fine!” I shouted. I snatched the chains from her arms, bubbling with anger as I figured out to wear them. A large iron bracelet went on each arm and I threaded my fingers through a set of three rings. The rings felt like they were supposed to lay on top of each knuckle but they hung loosely from my fingers instead. These chains were not fitted to my smaller hands. “I don’t think these are my size. Ow!” As I finished with the last ring the shackle came to sudden life and started pulling the chains into itself like a rising anchor. “Ow. Crap. Ow. Ow.” My fingers were bending backward at compromising angles, and if I did nothing the chains would pull them off of me.

“You have to fight against it Lin. Form a fist.”

“It’s too strong.” I dropped to my knees, putting my entire body into a ball, trying to just close my hand into a fist. It took so much control. If I focused too much on one finger, my attention slipped from another and the chains were unforgiving in their struggle. My hand took on every shape but a fist finally settling on a right angle as I ran out of energy to resist.

“Lin you got to believe you can do this. If you fail to believe in yourself then you are going to fail to keep your fingers. Tunshi gauntlets will devour you bit by bit if you do not resist them. You must bend them to your will. You must believe you can.”

“I don’t-”

“Then believe that I do.” Lady Yu said in a frantic voice that made me gulp. “If you can’t believe in yourself. Believe that I know you can do this.”

“Lady Yu.”

“Aunty. Lin. Aunty.”

I screamed. My fingers fell away into the gauntlet's jaws, and with a smack of the head from Lady Yu, I found the power to wrench them back with all my energy, balling them into a tight fist. My fingernails dripped with bits of blood they drew from my palm.

Like the turning of a lock, the shackle stopped screaming and the iron gears inside spun down. There was still some resistance, still a slight tug of danger layered in the tension of the chain, but I had mastery over it now. I stretched my hands to check that everything was okay. The chains followed my gestures perfectly, extending and constricting as needed. The rings stayed firm on top of my knuckles.

“Great.” Lady Yu said with a relief matching my own. “Now we do the other one.”

As I struggled to get the other chains to obey, Lady Yu dressed my bruises with bandages and a bit of the tincture my grandmother had made for her. It was a painkiller that technically was too strong for a child my age, but my “exceptional injuries” needed “exceptional treatment.” Maybe excessive treatment as well because in her mirrors I looked like a Cultivator just risen from their grave.

“Okay, now for the first lesson.” Lady Yu said biting off the last of the bandages. “There’s aren’t ordinary caestus.”

“You don’t say,” I said massaging my reddening knuckles.

“No snark young man. Now if you would be so kind…” She pulled over a standing mirror so I could see my haggard appearance and the smug crab lounging on top of my head. “Touch that crab. Gently please.”

“But it’ll pinch me,” I mumbled but started the motion anyway. Just saying the word “but” in Lady Yu’s presence made her flash me a look like she had another pair of this caestus around somewhere.

The crab didn’t panic as my hand got closer. It watched me watching it in the mirror while slowly moving my hand. Surely it knew that even though it could touch me, I could touch it too, but it sat regally as if I couldn’t hurt it. To be honest, anything I did to the crab was mute. It would just reform and torment me with a newfound vengeance.

Until now that was.

The chains shook as I touched the crab. A faint blue light pulsed down from the rings into the shackle. The crab suddenly registered that something might be amidst, but it was too late. I already started wrapping my fingers around its shell. In the mirror, the chains split. A pair of ethereal blue chains suddenly broke from the cold iron and wrapped tightly around the crab sealing its claws at its side. I lifted the crab off me, it’s scurrying legs weren’t built to be airborne and there was nothing it could do with claws tied down. I smiled right into its mortified face.

“Now what do I do?”

“What else?” Lady Yu said plainly. “Let go.”

I obliged. The chains pulled the crab into the hungry shackles. The crab started resisting but the more it scurred the more ghost chains split and wrapped themselves around its legs. Slowly it was pulled into the maw of the shackles. Past the tiny slot the chains emerged from, raging gears buried deep like spinning teeth waited. My smile twisted in sudden horror as the spirit was pulled right into those teeth and the gears crunched it into nothing.

“Oh, crap,” I said in a panic. “Did it die?”

Lady Yu rolled her eyes. “How can a spirit die Lin? It’s just been captured. Well. Mostly.”

The ghost chains were gone but the gears powering them still spun with madness. The shackles shook with a storming rage and I had to hold them down to stop the shaking from further bruising my skin. “What’s happening?”

“The spirit’s deciding whether it wants to be part of you.”

“Part of me?” I yelled, but no answer was forthcoming. The chains shivered to a still at my shout.

“There.” Lady Yu said with smug satisfaction. “Looks like it liked you after all.”

“It did? Wait back up. What did you mean by it becoming part of me?” I turned my hand over and over again confused more than anything else. All of a sudden there was a tattoo of an angry crab on my forearm.

“I mean that,” Lady Yu said pointing at the tattoo. “It decided to stick around with you. It was doing that anyway so I’m not surprised. Don’t give me that look. It’s not a bad thing. Here. Think of something. Hmm. What now? Oh. How about crab claws?”

“Crab Claws?” Crab claws. The shackles rumbled and suddenly a ghostly crab claw shot out from my fist toward Lady Yu. They opened around her throat and pinched down. She hiccuped.

“That’s very unsettling from the other end.”

“Lady. Aunty Yu, are you okay?” The spirit claws were firmly pinched around her throat and I was stuck in too much horror to simply pull my arm away.

“Of course I am,” she said through the claws clamping down her throat. They’re just claws from a spirit. What would they do to me? Though that brings up an interesting question. Can you use them on yourself?”

I immediately regretted succumbing to my curiosity. I ended up rubbing a second reddening shackle on my arm. “Yeah. I can use them on myself.”

“Hmm. That’s unfortunate. Or not. It all depends on how you use them I suppose.”

I imagined going up to BaoBao and pinching him with spirit claws. I shook as dream BaoBao immediately started kicking me in the gut once he realized the trick. “What am I going to do with a pair of fake claws?”

“You’d be surprised. In my championship days, I won by merging with a pair of monkey spirits and painting my arms the same odd spirit color the gauntlets gave them. I could bring out all four of their arms. Now imagine trying to dodge six ghostly arms in the middle of a scrap while knowing only two of them could actually hurt you but not knowing which two in time. Won a lot of fights by just kicking men in the balls 'cause they were staring too intensely at the wrong limbs.”

“Do you still have those monkey’s lying around?” My eyes traced the office. “Trapped in some ancient jar maybe?”

“Hah no. They only stayed around for the fights. The gauntlets don’t trap the spirits. They’re free to leave whenever. Once I got married and bought this place they had other more interesting places to be. I don’t know where spirits like that would want to go but I could tell it irked them to be stuck here.” Lady Yu’s attention turned elsewhere. Around this small personal space that could fit her and another person, her eyes were sad but the ghost of a smile came from the slight upward tip of her lips. She removed her collapsed spectacles, wiped them with a handkerchief, and put them back, returning her gaze to me as if she too hadn’t gone somewhere far from here.

“I named them Wu and Kong. You should name your crab friend too. And all the others you’ll come across. You can carry as many spirits as you can make friends with and have space on your body for. Don’t take them for granted though. The second you get too boring they might just fade away forever.”

I looked at the tattoo of the crab, somehow it had changed to an image of him crossing his claws and frowning at me. I didn’t even know crabs could frown.

“That one’s probably itching of a fight. Speaking of. Time for lesson three.”

—

Lady Yu waved at me as I slinked off toward the training grounds. She was still an incredible fighter even in a wheelchair, and oddly enough, when I talked to her about forms she just gave me a blank stare. She had never learned them. I suppose that since she wasn’t a native to the island she would never have had access to the knowledge. The forms were for Cultivators after all and she didn’t come from a once great line of them as the rest of us did.

Instead, she taught me to fight as people did on the mainland. Forms were only useful as a way of channeling qi. There was so much more you could do if you didn’t focus on straining your meridians. Instead of rigid forms, we focused on moving with fluidity and surprise, taking a punch when needed, and giving plenty of punishment back in return. It was weirdly enough like dancing and Lady Yu also showed me a few moves she knew from the mainland as well.

After several spares, a few rough attempts at dancing, generous amounts of healing salve, and a shower, I just wanted to go home. Lady Yu was adamant that I go face Sen at the fights and make sure that he got a bloody nose even if it meant me getting a chipped tooth. These gauntlets weren’t for knitting after all.

I seriously doubted Sen would be there after everything he pulled, so I humored Lady Yu while she implied that I could ever touch my brother in my fight. I went to the training hall instead of going back home.

I had to go. A part of me knew that if I went back home from a beating after being pampered and taken care of only to be further pampered at home, I’d never be the man Lady Yu saw in me. I didn’t want to be just some fop who painted all day and ran home whenever you kicked him. I didn’t want to be a coward any more than I wanted to be my brother or my sister.

I wanted to be me.

And the me I had in my head would be at the training hall holding his own against the world if need be. The me I had in my head would be themselves no matter if a whole village laughed. And to be the me I had in my head, all I had to do was stand around with Lao and make sure I didn’t get my ass kicked by those who weren’t in on his grift.

Let’s just hope Lady Yu wasn’t as bad of a boxing instructor as she was a dentist.

The training hall had transformed in my brief time away into a bazaar packed with men and women selling salves and weapons all of which were surprisingly deadly. I don’t think I knew any of them. I couldn’t help but stare at the biggest man I had ever seen. An ash-skinned man that could have masqueraded as a giant’s tombstone planted on the side of the road. He was selling actual ironclad caestus but one look at mine and he nodded as if we came from the same line of fighters.

That nod of acceptance weirdly meant more to me than the dozens of assurances from Lady Yu. I felt that the people in my life were accepting and encouraging because they had to be. To receive the same amount of approval from a stranger gave me the strength I didn’t know I had.

I felt hyped. Suddenly I started to believe Lady Yu’s words. That is until I got to the front door.

A sleepy adult I had never met took one look at me and shooed me off. “This is no place for a kid. Come back when you’re a few years older and a few feet taller.”

“I’m no kid,” I said. “I’m a fighter.” I did my best with the words but my voice broke with the strain. The man in line behind me laughed. The bouncer did his best not to. “Look. There are kiddy fights at month's end. I really advise trying those one’s instead. These fights are for killers, kid. Real weapons today too, none of the training stuff. Steel kid. Hard steel. You ain’t a killer, you ain’t going to dodge steel, so I’m not about to let some kid get diced up in the arena.”

“I definitely am a killer.” Again my voice cracked, but I stayed as he kept trying to shoo me away from the door. The bouncer didn’t believe anything I said, but he acquiesced eventually. A line was forming behind me and I wasn’t worth the trouble. “Sure. Fine. You can enter the arena but don’t expect anyone to pull you out. Especially not me. What’s your name?”

“Li Lin.”

The bouncer started scribbling the name on the scroll but halfway through his page was snatched from him.

“Hey!”

“And you can cross that name off.”

“Sen you touch my crap again and I’ll ban you from every island fight in the country.”

All of a sudden my brother was there, feigning an apologetic look while making a mark on the same scroll the bouncer was demanding back.

“Sorry,” Sen said as the bouncer finally snatched the paper from him. The bouncer put up a fist but Sen just backed away.

“Do me a favor and keep him out of here. He’s my brother,” Sen said suddenly turning to me, “and he should not be here.”