Chapter 4The Move That Wasn't Allowed

The point in the puddle had not gone out.

That patch of water was in Shanghai, the size of a palm. It lay by the leg of the seventh table, and on its surface floated a white streak from the elevated road. The half face in the water did not belong to Shanghai. From jaw to ear, a broken earring lay beside the point of light.

Eight hundred kilometres away, the owner of that face stood in the centre of his own practice room, grey dust from the seams of the floor clinging to the edges of his white shoes. The same point sat on his own jawline, growing larger together with his face.

Three millimetres. He no longer needed to measure this number.

His fingertip slid from below the ear to the corner of the chin. Midway along there was a faint ridge, and three millimetres above the ridge was the face that would pass. Pushing it up took two seconds: first find the ridge, then lift the skin and flesh together with it, and once it was in place he had to stop and wait for the face in the mirror to hold still. Letting it fall back did not take two seconds. From letting go to resetting, less than one beat. He had counted this end. He had never counted that one.

When the floor of the practice room rose up on all four sides, his face was cut into panels. The brow was one panel, the bridge of the nose was one, the jaw was one. Each panel had a seam along its edge, and any of them could be pulled out and swapped at any moment. He stood in the middle. The fill lights from four sides lit him so that not one natural shadow remained on him, not even beneath his nose.

Now that line lit up on its own.

The light began at the centre of the jaw and spread out to both sides, very slowly, as if someone were dragging a fingernail along the bone. The cyan crawled along the line of the bone to the root of the ear, reached the broken microphone earring behind it, and the violet core showing through the break flared once, then dimmed back. The break was ragged. It had gone three years unrepaired. Mending it meant recasting the whole piece, and once it was recast there would be no break at all.

The panels began to scorch open. Wherever the cyan crept across a panel, that panel curled at the edge, whitened and dropped away, as if someone had held a flame to it from behind. Fragments fell by his shoes. White high-top dance shoes, toes worn and fraying, laces loose and untied. These shoes had never met the rules. The rules called for black low-tops.

He did not dodge. That hand had come down long ago, and this time it did not go back up. The zero point four centimetres was still there. It had been there all along.

“This face was always mine.”

※

In the same second his hand came down, twelve hundred kilometres away another hand was pressing a sheet of paper that had already been flattened.

The last train in Tokyo had stopped where it stood and would not move. The carriage was empty. The ceiling lights were white enough to fill the whole carriage, so white that not one dark patch could be found on the floor. Mitsuki sat at the far end, the leave slip spread across her knees. Two old creases and one new, three in all, crossed the sheet and cut it into four strips, like three old rivers.

She pushed along the creases with her thumb, flattening them one by one. At the third crease her hand stopped at the middle of the fold for half a second, the same length as the half second she had learned at fourteen in front of the wooden box. For eleven years she had pressed that half second down, and not once had a pressed corner lifted. This time, once she had smoothed it, she lifted her hand away and did not press it a second time.

The words were in her own hand, written very small. The reason field was blank. She had filled it in once, then crossed it out herself, two strokes, very light. The marks were still there.

On the glass her face lay over the sheet of paper. The crescent-shaped mark beneath her left eye was dark at first, then began to glow from the outer corner, a little at a time, until the glow reached her cheekbone. The light came down from her face, passed through her neck and collarbone, climbed along her right arm to the back of her hand, and finally fell into the crease she had just smoothed. The crease took hold of the light, and the whole line lit up.

She did not put the sheet back in her inside pocket. She folded it back along two creases only, and left the third unfolded.

※

Paris. On the stone steps, Swan’s hand braced on the edge of the third step.

Red tape crept down from above, winding round her ankles in rings. It had wound round the right foot first, over the old trainer. The tape was wide, the red of an official seal, and winding on made a faint sticky sound. She had lifted her foot once. It would not come up.

She had been counting. Eleven turns on the right foot, seven on the left. The right was wound tighter, because that shoe should not be here. The return slip in her bag had already been folded in half twice, and it lay at the very bottom. It bore the return number and nothing else. Whatever else there was had been said to her in person, by someone holding a pen who did not look up.

She looked down at her feet. The left was a satin pointe shoe, its ribbons crossed up to the calf, the toe box hard. Standing in it, a person grew two inches taller. The right was a trainer, the outside of the upper rubbed bright by a ticket barrier, the laces tied in a careless knot with a little grey from a metro passage still caught in the knot. The two shoes had been worn together for six years. For the first three years she had swapped out the right one before going in. For the last three she no longer did.

The tape on her ankle was burned into fine cracks. Not by fire, but by light: the awakening markings ran down the inside of her calf, and where they reached the tape, its edge curled first, then split, and the split went from a single crack to a row.

She did not kick, and she did not pull. She drew her foot out an inch at a time: one inch, then a pause, letting the cracks open a little more by themselves, then another inch. At the third inch the tape caught on the knot of the laces, so she pressed the knot loose with two fingers of her other hand. It took three pushes before it gave. The heel came out first, then the upper, and last the whole shoe. The loosened tape dropped onto the stone step, still holding the shape of an ankle, empty, the hole in its centre a little smaller than her foot had been.

She stood up straight. Her shoulders came back to their old line, a little more than half a head higher than they had been a moment before.

“This shoe, I won’t swap.”

※

On the same beat, at a pharmacy corner in New York, a man was still crouched down.

Price tags had settled over Andrew’s shoulders and back. Small white paper tags, one after another, drifted down from beneath the lid that had closed overhead, and landed on his shoulder lines, on the backs of his hands, on the tops of his shoes, on the screw lying in his open palm, and on the dog tag at his chest. The dog tag was blank. Nothing was engraved on it. It hung on a double chain, the shorter one lying against his collarbone. The tag fell on it exactly and covered that blank patch.

The screw lay in his palm, damp with sweat. Of the six, this was the one that had been replaced. It was shorter than the other five, and its thread was coarser. It had spent three weeks in his jacket pocket, wearing a round hole through the lining, and the edge of the hole had frayed.

The first tag slid from his shoulder, shattered on landing into a thin film of white, and a breath of wind took it away. The second and third followed, from the top down: the shoulder, the arm, the back of the hand, and last the one on the dog tag. The dog tag came clear again, and its chains swung twice.

He pushed himself up off his knees and stood. His left knee cracked first, a dull old sound. He knew at which bend it would crack, and he knew that past that bend it would not. When it had cracked, he waited a moment, then straightened.

“Standing up is free.”

He said it quietly. The corner held only him and a row of emptied medicine shelves, and at the far end of the shelves a lamp was still on, a small dim yellow point.

※

Shanghai. Someone began to speak.

Qingluan stood two paces out from the plastic awning, her glasses already in her pocket. She wanted to see clearly, not to be seen clearly. She opened her mouth. What came out first was not a word but a breath, pushed up from a point two fingers’ width above her collarbone.

The tattoo of concentric arcs behind her right ear lit up. The innermost ring lit first, then the second, the third, each wider than the one before, until the light reached her collarbone. The order of the lighting followed the order of her speech: at whichever word she reached, that ring lit. She could not see it herself. She could only feel something under her skin, pushing outward in rings.

Behind her, the two narrow bands of light that had lain flat along her spine loosened. They opened without a sound, into two feather shapes that did not meet, with a gap between them through which the road behind could be seen.

Under the awning, the stall owner had his back to her. He had only just brought the soup back to the boil, and it was rolling now, the steam lifting the lid into a gap. The iron ladle rested on the rim of the pot, and he did not touch it again.

In her pocket her phone was still lit. On the screen was the line she had just typed, exactly the same as the line that had been swallowed. Beneath it was a note with only one time on it: half past ten at night. It was the knocking-off time that an aunt who swept the streets had given her that day. When she wrote it down she had not decided what it was for.

The light that rose from the tower, directly overhead, broke for a moment at this second. It broke for about half a second, as if someone very far off had blinked.

※

In that half second, the Tokyo carriage went dark.

Mitsuki stood up. She tucked the sheet back into her inside pocket, and did not hold the rail as she rose. A stopped carriage is steadier than a moving one.

She sank her weight onto her left foot. Her right hand hung at her side, fingers loosening, then closing again. There was nothing at her waist, no scabbard, no hilt. But the hand remembered where it should be: the thumb resting where the guard should be, the other four fingers loosely curled, a gap left at the web of the hand.

The winter she was nineteen, on the snowfield behind the training hall, the snow had reached her ankles. There was no opponent that day, no examination, and no one watching. She only wanted to move. So she left the wooden sword indoors, walked one pass through the snow with empty hands, and then drew once. As she finished the form, her right foot came down into nothing, half a step short, and she pitched forward, her knee pressing a hollow in the snow. It looked awful. She remembered laughing, and the white breath she let out while laughing was longer than the line of the blade. Back inside, she wrote the whole thing down on a record sheet, then tore it up. That kind of blade she had drawn only that once in her life.

Now her hand sank at her side, and then drove out.

It was half a beat late. She knew it was late herself: at the start she had held a moment too long, longer than any manual had written, long enough to break the rules. Then she sent it out in one motion.

The cyan in her palm was stretched out, from the web of her hand to a foot beyond her fingertips, drawn into a shape with an edge, and down its centre a brighter line flowed along it. For a moment the lights of the whole carriage were dragged dim, then came back.

“This one is something I wanted to do myself.”

The shape scattered. Her hand stayed open, palm up.

※

Shanghai. The other pair of hands turned palm up.

Qingluan lifted both arms from her sides and up over her head: the elbows led, the wrists followed. This was the opening pose of the Flying Apsara, which she had learned as a child by watching from backstage at the storytelling hall. That day someone had said, “What are you looking at, little girl?” She did not leave. She stood at the edge of the curtain and watched the whole piece through.

The silk shawl rose with her and swung out into half an arc. Its far end was no longer cloth. It had become scattered points of light rising upward, and halfway up they could no longer be seen. At the top of the arc her foot left the ground by an inch, only an inch, and then came down into the puddle. The water that splashed up did not fall back. It hung in the air.

This beat came a little after her heartbeat. Her fingers were still pressed to the outside of her thigh, still keeping one strong beat and three weak, only this stroke came half a weak beat late tonight. She did not go after it. Catching up would make it even again.

※

Those points of light passed through the window of the Seoul practice room.

Jaewon danced.

There was no music. He counted the beats for himself, and at the third beat he stopped. He held the stop longer than anyone would, long enough that the copies in the panels that had not yet been scorched away stopped too. Then he burst: the shoulder went first, the ribs followed, and the feet came down only on the last half beat. After landing, he stopped again. Pause. Hold. Burst. No one had ever permitted this sequence.

A sheet of paper had once been pinned to the wall, listing the day’s routine: what time to arrive, what time to be weighed, what time to go into the mirror room, what time to return to the dormitory. Three years ago someone had torn half of it away. The other half was still pinned there, its corners curled. When he danced, he faced that half sheet.

The copies in the panels could not keep up. They stepped squarely on the beat, their shoulder lines at the same height, their strides the same width, in neat rows. When he was half a beat out, they chased him half a beat behind. When he went out again, they broke: first the hands, then the shoulders, then the whole body, falling away panel by panel, the fragments sliding far across the floor.

The horizontal line and three dots on the back of his hand flickered in time with the beat. The broken microphone earring swung up and struck his ear, and it stung a little. He did not stop to rub it.

“If you can’t keep up, don’t follow.”

※

A glint from one of the fragments fell onto the stone steps in Paris.

Swan stepped back three paces, to the top edge of the steps. Her hand opened at her side, fingers spread flat, the tips drooping a little. She had been taught this hand at ten, and the teacher who taught her had later written four words at the judges’ table.

She leapt.

Two running steps, the right foot pushing off, the left leg swinging up first, and in mid-air she turned a quarter turn. This take-off was not in any orthodox routine. The manual said that kind of start was “centre of gravity unclear.” She stayed in the air for less time than the manual prescribed, because she was half a beat early. How early, she alone knew.

She landed on the right foot. The old trainer touched the stone first, the sole grinding, a dull rough sound, and a small patch of grit was ground away. The satin pointe shoe on the left came down after, almost without a sound. The two shoes landed half a beat apart, and she had left that half beat herself.

The flat ring on her left wrist opened. Hexagonal scales turned out one after another and fitted together into an arc, but only half of it had formed before it stopped. The other half was still empty, only an outline lying against the outside of her practice cardigan’s cuff. She did not wait for it to form fully.

※

A flash from one scale on that arc swept across to New York.

Andrew flung off his jacket. It came half off and hung from his elbow. He shrugged, let the whole thing slide down, and it dropped onto the pharmacy steps. Underneath was a grey crew-neck T-shirt, the neckline loose.

At twenty, he had danced this section on a concrete yard. He had got as far as the fourth eight-count when someone stopped him. The one holding the form, which had a column headed “Demeanour”, said it was unsuitable: this could not be danced here. He remembered that he had been wearing the army boots he was issued that day, hard-soled, the laces tied all the way up to the top eyelet. When he swept his leg, the heel scraped two white marks across the concrete. Afterwards he rubbed the marks out with the sole of his shoe, rubbed for a long time, until his palms were sweating. From that day on he never danced again.

Now he was still in army boots, but the laces at the top were left undone, hanging down either side.

He crouched first, one hand on the floor, and his right leg swept a full circle, brushing the dust on the tiles into a ring. Then he went down, turned half a turn across his shoulder, pushed up onto one hand, and held his whole body on that one hand. Above his left forearm the amber ring turned with him, slower than he did, half a turn behind before it caught up. The dog tag swung up onto his shoulder, and the chain wound once around.

At his side a half-formed steel beam took shape, its cut ends rough and rusted, stopping at half and breaking off, the other half not yet there.

“This dance wasn’t allowed back then.”

He landed.

On the same beat, in five cities, five people each brought their movement down to the ground: a carriage floor, a wet road, the wooden floor of a practice room, the stone steps, the tiles at a pharmacy door. The ground in all five places shook once at the same moment.

※

When that line lit up, the view came down to the same height as them.

First, a step formed beneath Qingluan’s feet.

It was not the road she was standing on. She looked down. The wet road was still there, and at the same time a step rose out from under her sole, solid and hard, its edge broken off. She shifted her weight onto it, and the step held. The break was rough, the kind made by snapping, not by cutting. When she ground her sole down, a few specks dropped from the edge. They fell into the black below and made no sound at all.

She crouched and touched the break. The face of it had small pits and bumps, and pressing a fingertip on them caught it. It had not been poured, nor ground down. Someone had snapped a piece off somewhere else, carried it over, and set it here. Along the edge of the step ran a shallow groove, as if something had been carved there and then trampled flat. Her fingernail caught in it and scraped out a little grit. She could not make out what it had been.

There was more than one step. They made a path climbing upward, one step after another, but the path was broken between them and did not connect. Where it broke, the gap was exactly one stride wide, neither more nor less, as if someone had measured it. Looking into the distance, five beams of light stood in five different directions, none of them touching the next.

Then she saw people.

Mitsuki was ahead of her to the left, about six paces away. The two of them were not standing in the same room: under Mitsuki were the seams of a train floor, and under her there was water. But the floors had joined, and so had the light. Mitsuki raised her eyes. Her hand was still open, palm up. Neither of them moved.

Further to the right, Jaewon stood among fragments still falling, grey dust on his white shoes. He first nodded towards the far end of the corridor. Over there no one could be made out. Only two things could be seen: a hexagonal scale catching the light, and the outline of a steel beam not yet fully formed. From over there, a nod came back, once.

For the first time, five people half a world apart were seen eye to eye. No one spoke first.

It was Qingluan who spoke first. As she did, the innermost ring of the tattoo lit up once more.

“We don’t know each other. But I saw you.”

No one answered. No one walked away.

※

The view rose up from between them.

As it rose, the steps beneath them shrank one by one, and the five beams shrank to five points. Above came cloud, the edge of the atmosphere, and the night side of the Earth.

For the first time the five towers came whole into the frame. Until now no one had seen their tops. People looking up in the street found the tops eaten by cloud. From the foot of a tower, the light ran up to a point no one could see. From this height they were five things standing on the curve of the night side. They had tops, and they had ends, and all five together were no longer than a short stretch of that arc.

On the far side of the arc, orange-red dawn light was seeping out along the edge of the atmosphere, a very thin strip that had not yet spread.

The black mouth could be seen from this height too. It was not over any city. It hung above the ocean, far nearer to the ground than the moon, and tens of thousands of times higher than the five towers: a black disc, with a thin white ring around its edge, and the starlight outside the ring bent into arcs. None of the discs that people saw overhead in the streets were here. Nothing hung beside the black mouth.

Then the light of the Shanghai tower moved. It turned once, slowly, as if picking someone out.

Qingluan raised her head in the lower left corner of the arc. She was not wearing her glasses, but she could see clearly.

The tower had spoken two sentences tonight. “The sky is too high. We have touched it for you.” “Those who stand beneath the tower need never look up again.” She had heard these two under the awning, and heard them again in the puddle. Now she took them apart. The first half she kept, the second half she threw away, and then she pieced them together again.

“They built the towers to touch the sky. We climb them to let people out.”

When she had finished, she lowered her hand. The tower’s light was still on her, and did not move away.

She did not lower her head either. The step was still under her feet. The grit her nail had scraped from its edge had already fallen far away. Below, there was the road, the puddle, and the pot under the awning, which had come back to a boil. Dawn was coming to Shanghai, still two hours off.