Two flights up, a splintered door gives way and she spills out onto the roof. Sunlight and heat envelop her. Even with the sun hammering down, it is cooler than her five-by.
All around her, clotheslines draped with rustling pha sin and trousers rustle in the sea breeze. The sun is sinking, glistening from the tips of wats and chedi. The water of the khlongs and the Chao Phraya glistens. Kink-spring skiffs and trimaran clipper ships glide across red mirrors.
To the north, the distance is lost in the orange haze of dung burn and humidity, but somewhere out there, if the pale scarred farang is to be believed, windups dwell. Somewhere beyond the armies that war for shares of coal and jade and opium, her own lost tribe awaits her. She was never Japanese; she was only ever a windup. And now her true clan awaits her, if only she can find a way.
She stares north a moment longer, hungering, then goes to the bucket she stowed the night before. There is no water on the upper levels, no pressure to reach so high, and she cannot risk bathing at the public pumps-so every night she struggles up the stairs with her water bucket, and leaves it here in anticipation of the day.
In the privacy of the open air and the setting sun, she bathes. It is a ritual process, a careful cleansing. The bucket of water, a fingerling of soap. She squats beside the bucket and ladles the warm water over herself. It is a precise thing, a scripted act as deliberate as Jo No Mai, each move choreographed, a worship of scarcity.
She pours a ladleful over her head. Water courses down her face, runs over breasts and ribs and thighs, trickles onto hot concrete. Another ladleful, soaking her black hair, coursing down her spine and curling around her buttocks. Again a ladle of water, sheeting over her skin like mercury. And then the soap, rubbing it into her hair and then her skin, scouring herself of the previous night's insults until she wears a pale sheen of suds. And again the bucket and ladle, rinsing herself as carefully as with the first wetting.
Water sluices away soap and grime, even some of the shame comes with it. If she were to scrub for a thousand years she would not be clean, but she is too tired to care and she has grown accustomed to scars she cannot scour away. The sweat, the alcohol, the humid salt of semen and degradation, these she can cleanse. It is enough. She is too tired to scrub harder. Too hot and too tired, always.
At the end of her rinsing, she is happy to find a little water left in the bucket. She dips one ladleful and drinks it, gulping. And then in a wasteful, unrestrained gesture, she upends the bucket over her head in one glorious cathartic rush. In that moment, between the touch of the water, and the splash as it pools around her toes, she is clean.
Out on the streets, she tries to blend into the daylight street activity. Mizumi-sensei trained her to walk in certain ways, to accent and make beautiful the stutter motion of her body. But if Emiko is very careful, and fights her nature and training-if she wears pha sin, and does not swing her arms-she almost passes.
Along the sidewalks, seamstresses lounge beside treadle sewing machines, waiting for evening trade. Snack sellers stack the remains of their wares in tidy piles, awaiting the day's final shoppers. Night market food stalls are setting out little bamboo stools and tables in the street, the ritual encroachment on the thoroughfares that signals the end of day and the beginning of life in a tropic city.
Emiko tries not to stare; it's been a long time since she risked walking streets in daylight. When Raleigh acquired her five-by, he gave her strict instructions. He could not keep her in Ploenchit itself-even whores and pimps and drug addicts had limits-so he installed her in a slum where bribes were cheaper and the neighbors were not so picky about the neighboring offal. But his instructions were strict: walk only at night, keep to shadows, come directly to the club, and return directly home. Anything else and there was little hope of survival.
Her nape prickles as she makes her way through the daylit crowds. Most of these people will not care about her. The benefit of the daytime is that people are far too busy with their own lives to worry about a creature like her, even if they catch sight of her odd movements. In the deep night of green methane flicker, there are fewer eyes, but they are idle ones, high on yaba or laolao, eyes with the time and opportunity to pursue.
A woman selling Environment Ministry-certified sticks of sliced papaya watches her suspiciously. Emiko forces herself not to panic. She continues down the street with her mincing steps, trying to convince herself that she appears eccentric, rather than genetically transgressive. Her heart pounds against her ribs.
Too fast. Slow down. You have time. Not so much as you would like, but still, enough to ask questions. Slowly. Patiently. Do not betray yourself. Do not overheat.
Her palms are wet with sweat, the only part of her body that ever really feels cool. She keeps them open wide like fans, trying to absorb comfort. She pauses at a public pump to splash water on her skin and drink deep, glad that New People fear little in the way of bacterial or parasitic infection. She is an inhospitable host. That, at least, is benefit.
If she were not a New Person, she would simply strut into Hualamphong Railway Station, and purchase a ticket on a kink-spring train, ride it as far as the wastes of Chiang Mai, and then proceed into the wilderness. It would be easy. Instead she must be clever. The roads will be guarded. Anything that leads to the Northeast and the Mekong will be clogged with military personnel transferring between the eastern front and the capital. A New Person would excite attention, particularly given that New People military models sometimes fight on behalf of the Vietnamese.
But there is another way. From her time with Gendo-sama she remembers that much of the Kingdom's freight moves by river.
Emiko turns down Thanon Mongkut toward the docks and levees, and stops short. White shirts. She cringes against a wall as the pair stalks past. They don't even look at her-she blends if she does not move-but still, as soon as they are out of sight, she has the urge to scuttle back to her tower. Most of the white shirts there have been bribed. These ones… She shivers.
At last, the gaijin warehouses and trading stations rise before her, the newly built commercial blocks. She makes her way up the seawall. At its top, the ocean spreads before her, bustling with clipper ships unloading, dock workers and coolies hauling freight, mahout coaxing megodonts to greater labor as pallets come off the clippers and are loaded on huge Laotian-rubber-wheeled wagons for transit to the warehouses. Reminders of her former life litter the view.
A smudge on the horizon marks the quarantine zone of Koh Angrit, where gaijin traders and agricultural executives squat amid stockpiles of calories, all of them waiting patiently for a crop failure or plague to beat aside the Kingdom's trade barriers. Gendo-sama once led her to that floating island of bamboo rafts and warehouses. Stood on its gently rolling decks and had her translate as he confidently sold the foreigners on advances in sailing technologies that would speed a shipment of patented SoyPRO around the world.
Emiko sighs and ducks under the draped lines of saisin that top the levee. The sacred thread runs down the seawall in both directions, disappearing into the distance. Every morning the monks of a different temple bless the thread, adding spiritual support to the physical defenses that push back the hungry sea.
In her former life, when Gendo-sama provided her with permits and indulgences to move inside the city with impunity, Emiko had the opportunity to see the yearly blessing ceremonies of the dikes and pumps and the saisin that connects it all. As the first monsoon rains poured down on the assembled people, Emiko watched Her Revered Majesty the Child Queen pull the levers that set the divine pumps roaring to life, her delicate form dwarfed by the apparatus that her ancestors had created. Monks chanted and stretched fresh saisin from the city pillar, the spiritual heart of Krung Thep, to all of the twelve coal-driven pumps that ringed the city, and then they had all prayed for the continued life of their fragile city.