Daughter of Calamity by Rosalie M. Lin

Author:Rosalie M. Lin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

My grandmother lights her shrine in the early evening when the sun drops over the river. Kneeling before the terrifying nuo mask of a wizened hunter—forest-green mien with sharpened canines and the branching antlers of a stag—she arranges her incense sticks in a brass tripod. The incense smells like musk and pepper tonight.

I sit in the windowsill drinking coffee, as the smoke trails swirl around my head. The more I ignore it, the more it follows me.

“When I left my hometown to come to Shanghai, I brought these incense sticks with me,” Liqing explains to me. “They were a gift from a traveling half-saint who stopped by the town, whom my father invited to stay in our house. I’m lighting them today in celebration of the journey we’re about to begin together. All my career, I have dreamed of having an apprentice, and I always knew you were the right one to inherit my mantle.”

On the clinic walls, demons glower through wispy clouds and frazzled gods ride on thunderbolts through the skies.

I force a smile. “I’m very excited to learn—oww!” The incense smoke kisses my cheek with a painful hiss, as if it can tell I’m lying, and I swat it away.

My grandmother rises to her feet from her knees, wincing at hidden aches and pains.

“Who will the patient be tonight?” I ask.

“A boy,” she responds. “We’ll be giving him a new arm.”

The most fundamental of her operations. Of course. I’ve watched her perform this procedure hundreds of times throughout my childhood. Although I never held the scalpel, I could recite the order of the cuts she makes in my sleep.

We wait for the boy, and I watch her lay out her tools on a sheet of linen at the edge of the operating table—lovingly, the same way a dancer lays out her pearls and her headdresses when she is choosing her outfit for the evening.

Liqing smiles as me. “You know what the legends say, when the goddess Nuwa created the first humans, she was drunk. But when I operate, I make sure to remain sober. You don’t drink at this dance school of yours that you attend in the morning, do you?”

“No,” I promise.

For a minute, the only sound in the clinic is the muted tinkle of her surgical instruments, gently laid against the operating table through the sheet.

“Waipo,” I say quietly, gazing upon the giant swan wings on the wall. “Did you know there are other surgeons in Shanghai trying to copy you?”

I remember the man from the Dove House with the mutilated arm—not quite silver, not quite flesh, but these two things rotted together—whom Usugi said liked broken things.

My grandmother straightens one of her scalpels. “Let them try.”

She looks up, her eyes sharp under her eyelids, which have fallen just a bit lower in her age. She doesn’t have to say anything for me to know.

“You asked the Blue Dawn to kill them.”

“I didn’t have to ask.” She cleans her hands on a towel. “Those doctors failed. That makes them self-aggrandizers, not healers.

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