And he remembers his first sight of Lanzhou, in a white tank top and a pair of loose shorts, dancing on her raft. Not seductively, just happily, doing a high kick here, a cartwheel there. The siren who showed up at his boat two nights later nearly gave him a heart attack.
“Hey, you’re awake. Are you okay?” She kneels beside him, her hand on his cheek, looking pale and anxious.
Lanzhou!
Her name, his most prized possession, he will think it in iterations of thousands, tens of thousands.
“I think so. I feel fine.” Except for the part about having his memories back. That is just odd, as if he can see himself from three hundred sixty degrees all at once.
He sits up, takes her hand in his, and presses a kiss to her knuckles. “Areyouokay?”
“Of course. I couldn’t be more okay.”
She does appear to be in robust health. Worried, yes, but not suffering physically.
Yet he has this phantasmagoric memory of her high-fiving Old Friend, who had a nerve gun, of all things, on her fin. And then she was writhing in pain. He tried to take her pain and…somehow ended up in the water?
Has he been hallucinating?
He looks about. They’re surrounded by shining, aquamarine sea. The morning breeze is not yet hot, just pleasantly mild. To their west looms a large, mountainous island, completely under Plant Cover. “Is that Old Ryukyu? How long was I out?”
“A little more than an hour. That is indeed Old Ryukyu. We’ll cross the Tropic of Cancer before too long.”
So hewasunconscious for a while. Are they not going to talk about that?
At least she’s no longer wearing that damnable collar. He doesn’t see the device either. Without those distractions, she is absolutely magnificent in her green dress. He, on the other hand, has on only a pair of loose trousers that he wears to go to sleep.
Loose, but dry. He’s been changed out of his wet clothes.
“Tropic of Cancer, wow,” he murmurs. “I’ve never been that far north.”
She combs through his hair again, the same gesture as earlier, as if she’s trying to make a headache go away—except he’s under no affliction whatsoever. “You’ll love the temperate climate. Autumn is beautiful and winter is fun.”
“I’ve always wanted to see snow.”
“I’ll take you to see snow.” She peers into his eyes and it’s clear that snow is the last thing on her mind. “Is your head okay? Is your stomach okay? Can you eat something?”
Now that she mentions food, something does smells divine nearby, the aroma of perfectly caramelized starch. He is feeling extremely clear-headed and equally famished. “What do you have?”
He’s sure she hasn’t been diving for sea cucumbers.
“I made some scallion flatbread. It’s my specialty.”
“Isit?”
He can’t quite keep astonishment out of his voice. Is this the same woman who didn’t know that she needed fat to create lamination? But come to think of it, she did say at dinner last night that she makes a better flatbread than his cook.
“Even my mom says it’s good.” She puts an already cooked one to reheat on a camping stove and refuses to let him help with setting up the folding table and folding stools. “She tells me in private that it’s better than my auntie’s and we all thought Auntie’s was the gold standard.”
He remembers her talking about her auntie’s scallion flatbread—he’s living in a miracle. He remembers her dress glittering in the golden light of sunset, the tiny flecks of flour stuck to her forearms, her bare feet on the beach, never remaining still, always marking squiggles in the white sand.
She brings him a beautifully golden disc accompanied by—will wonders never cease—a bowl of rice porridge, which only the old people of New Ryukyu eat for breakfast, if he’s not mistaken. When he bites into the disk, he is astounded by the layers upon layers of lamination.
“Perfect, right?”
But it was already perfect last time, he wants to tell her. Every day of the past ten years he would have swum across the Disputed Waters, with its oversized sharks and crazed sea serpents, to gorge himself on that enormous, questionably cooked scallion flatbread.
He eats two pieces in silence. Then he says, “Improved from last time.”
