Dim Sum Asylum(9)
The city lights bleached out the evening sky, turning it the color of a merrow’s dried bone, a smear of algae green and steeped blue nearly hidden beneath clots of suet-gray clouds, their lower layers turned rancid yellow from the rooftop ghettos’ cooking fires. Somewhere close, someone was turning over a batch of fermented kimchee, its fishy, acrid aroma momentarily blotting out some of the stink.
Most cops didn’t tramp through Chinatown’s underbelly in the dead of the night, and certainly not during an icy storm thundering in from the Bay, but the neon and shadow alleys were more familiar to me than my own hand. I’d been raised in the C-Town stews, and I’d run wild with packs of children, both fae and human, a lost innocence weighed down by prejudice and the badge I now wore on my hip. Many of the kids I’d run with were either looking over their shoulder for the law or dead, but there were a few who’d kept to the straight and narrow, and they’d fled Chinatown as soon as they were able, leaving its five-spice and sewage perfumed alleys far behind them.
Not me. I fought to stay there, returning again after John and the girls died. Gaines cautioned me against the move, but I’d needed to be anchored somehow. I’d been drowning in my loss, and Chinatown was… home. For all its smells, noise, and grime, the district wrapped itself around me in a tighter, warmer embrace than I’d ever gotten from my rawboned, sharp-tongued mother, cradling me in its sticky comfort.
The small of my back ached, a stinging reminder of the tiny black star I’d just paid to have inked alongside the other stars I wore for the dead I’d failed. Some were nameless, bodies frozen in death from crimes I couldn’t solve. Some were the murdered I could have saved, their footsteps haunting my nightmares, their empty eyes staring out of the darkness at me, mournful and accusingly harsh. Moira would be one for my dreams, her slender hands shaking me awake as she died in front of me time and time again.
Unlike the memorials I wore for my family, the dead riding the small of my back were tiny reminders of what I did for a living, driving me forward to bring the wicked to justice. I didn’t fear the screaming faces flowing through my dreams as much as I feared that one day, I’d run out of skin to put them on.
I turned a corner and entered Chinatown proper, the entrance to the district’s hidden weave of backstreets and doors leading to places most sane people wouldn’t imagine existed…. Like Brass Fish Alley.
The alley was wide, nearly wide enough to drive two delivery trucks down to its end, but I’d never seen it emptied of the tiny carts and temporary stalls set up along its broad expanse. It was a marketplace of sorts, a rotation of food carts, stalls, and people only the locals could keep track of. I’d lived near the Brass Fish for nearly all my life, and I still had no idea of all its inner workings.
People came by to sit on chairs, dispensing advice and sometimes holistic medicines, but were gone only an hour later, maybe never to be seen again. Nearly permanent structures cobbled together with discarded pallets and wood scraps lined the alley walls. Some of these were minidiners with fierce, loyal followings that would argue the merits of one stall’s ha gow over the next, disparaging the congee from the stall two spaces down. Makeshift tents and hastily built awnings over truck beds offered for sale practically everything under the sun—and a few things that never should have seen the light of day. It was colorful, loud, and full of people who’d be happy to slide a knife into someone’s spine just for the pleasure of warming their cold hands with hot blood.
Man, it felt just like coming home.
Like many places in Chinatown, the alley ran to bright and garish, but a few shadowy corners held up the sides. The stall I wanted was at the far end of the Brass Fish, nearly at the juncture where the walkway split into four slender pathways leading deeper into the stews. Getting through the crowd was easy enough, only a bit of a shuffle past a fresh vegetable stall selling cheap mangos and lychee. The jostling I took as my due. If I was stupid enough to be walking down the marketplace after sunset, I was going to have to expect some roughness. Most of the elderly Asian women—human and fae—were cutthroat shoppers, willing to dig an elbow in between someone’s ribs and dislodge their lung if it meant a cheaper price on lup cheong or shoyu eggs. One caught me in the sternum, expelling the air out of my chest, and I quickened my pace, excusing myself in Cantonese while I waged a territory battle with a flock of little old ladies who could give a gate dragon a run for its money.
I also kept my arm tucked in, protecting my newly reacquired gun and my wallet. As comfortable as I felt in the stews, I wasn’t stupid.
Goma and his stall were a Brass Fish fixture, the squat, round-faced fae man working the grill and noodle pots in the too narrow space between the cooktop and the long plank bolted to the front of the stall’s metal frame that his customers used as a table. I’d known Goma and his family since before I could walk, when eating at his stall meant a break from my mother’s horrible attempts at cooking a meal. He was Odonata like I was, but Japanese—a different bloodline of the same clan—and at some point in his life, he’d lost his wings. I’d asked my mother about it when I was young, but she’d been as closemouthed as ever, saying if Goma wanted me to know what happened, he’d tell me.
He never brought it up, but his shirt poked up between his shoulder blades, uneven juts creating a short span of hills on either side of his spine. I still wondered what happened but now was afraid to ask. I couldn’t imagine anyone hurting the gentle, slightly gruff man who served me noodles and snuck me sweets, but the world was a horrible place despite my best efforts to change it.