My phone buzzes under my pillow for the third time before I manage to dig it out.
7.06 a.m.
The basketball group chat is already in chaos. Someone wants to know who will get there first. Someone else says those horrible boys have taken half the court again. The last message tags me by name.
Peach. Eight o'clock. Do not sleep through it.
I sit up with my hair across my whole face.
Eight o'clock.
I leap out of bed. My basketball top is only halfway over my head when Mum calls from the living room.
‘Tao Xiyi! Are you still in bed?’
‘I'm up!’
‘We're leaving in ten minutes.’
I stop with my face towards the bedroom door.
‘Leaving for where?’
The flat goes quiet.
This kind of quiet is a bad sign. Worse than Mum shouting straight away.
I grab my phone. The family group chat is still open on yesterday's message.
Qingming ancestral rites tomorrow morning. Leaving at 7.30. Don't forget again.
Fourth reminder.
Yes, Mum. I know.
Last-night me sounded very confident.
I charge into the bathroom, wrench off my basketball top and nearly put one foot in the laundry basket. I split my hair down the middle and twist it into two quick buns. The right one is sliding off. The left has strands sticking out in every direction. In the mirror, the mole beneath my left eye is exactly where it should be. The rest of my face says one thing.
I'm finished.
The living room is running at double speed.
Mum sits at the dining table drawing on one eyebrow while her other hand checks the incense and joss paper in a carrier bag. Jun Hao is on the floor wearing one sock and staring at the other. Dad already has his rucksack on and keeps looking at his watch.
‘Come on, come on. It's half seven.’ Dad points at the door. ‘If we don't leave now, it'll be packed. Don't keep your grandpa waiting again.’
‘Your grandpa is always the first one there.’ Mum caps her eyebrow pencil. ‘Unlike certain people.’
I pull on my white hoodie and black sports shorts, snatch up my pink-and-blue jacket and shove my phone into the pocket. ‘I have basketball this morning.’
Mum turns back to the mirror and finishes the tail of her other eyebrow. ‘You have Qingming this morning.’
‘I promised everyone I'd go.’
‘And I reminded you four times.’
There is no answer to that. I bend down and search beneath the sofa, beside the coffee table, then under Jun Hao's bottom.
‘Your socks are in your room,’ Mum says.
‘I know.’
‘Then why are you looking here?’
‘I'm looking for something else.’
Mum finally turns round. ‘Peach, Qingming comes once a year. You see your friends every day. How many more times do you think you'll get to see Grandpa?’
‘I didn't say I wasn't going. I can take the MRT there after practice.’
‘You get some friends and forget all about the people who raised you.’
I am still holding Jun Hao's other sock.
‘I mixed up the date. That's all.’
Mum looks down and puts the incense back in the bag. ‘You're fifteen. How can you still mix up something this simple?’
Dad looks at her, then at me, and slaps the door twice.
‘All right, all right. Tao family roll-call. Shoes on. Out.’
Jun Hao slowly pushes his right foot into his left shoe. I tug it free. The heel nearly hits me in the nose.
‘You can't even put your feet in the right shoes. How have you survived this long?’
‘You help me survive.’
‘Then you're finished.’
I shove the shoe back towards him.
Mum does not laugh.
At last, all four of us are squeezed into the doorway.
Dad suddenly freezes.
A tiny, brief noise escapes behind him.
Jun Hao looks up. ‘Dad fart—’
‘Shh.’ Dad clamps his legs together. The colour of his face slowly changes. ‘You three go downstairs.’
Mum closes her eyes.
‘Big ones, little ones. Not a single person in this family can be on time.’
Dad grabs the newspaper and is already running back to the toilet.
The MRT train we finally catch is packed. Dad apologises all the way. Mum ignores him all the way. Jun Hao spins from a hand strap until I stop him three times. A few stations later, four seats open up together. I hug my pig rucksack on my lap and tell the team something came up at home. My thumb pauses over something came up.
I send it anyway.
‘Lower your head,’ Mum says.
I turn, expecting another lecture. She has already pulled the band from my right bun. Half my hair falls across my phone.
‘It's meant to look messy.’
‘Messy and unbrushed are not the same thing.’
Her fingers gather the loose hair and twist it back into place. Then she takes down the left one and starts again. Now and then, her nail scrapes my scalp. Same pressure as when I was little.
I keep my head down and stare at the message I have already sent.
When she lets go, both buns are finally the same height. Mum glances at my phone and says nothing.
At Hongshulin station, we follow a crowd carrying flowers and fruit onto a Qingming shuttle. It runs along the coast first. The sea appears to our left, vanishes behind a line of buildings, then appears again. Once the bus turns into the hills, the houses thin out and wet green rises in layers beyond the windows. The Qingming sky is dim. Cloud presses low. Far away, only a narrow strip of grey-white sea remains.
There is another slope after we get off. Mum's heels knock against the stone road, one sharp tap after another, until she slows halfway up. Every year she knows there is a hill. Every year she still dresses as though Heaven itself might be checking.
From below, the memorial tower looks like a great warm-yellow hall set into the mountainside. The lawns are neatly cut. Late cherry trees scatter petals in the wind. Coffee drifts from a bright lounge where families sit round tables eating breakfast, while children run beneath the trees with bread in their hands. If every family were not carrying flowers and fruit, it would look as though everyone had arranged a day out in the hills.
Grandpa is waiting outside the tower with two bags of fruit and a bunch of flowers at his feet. The instant he sees Dad, he raises his wrist and points at his watch.
I am sweating from the climb. I take off my jacket and drop it on a stone seat outside.
‘Not bad,’ Grandpa says. ‘Only one hour late this year.’
Dad accepts both fruit bags with great dignity. ‘There was a situation on the way.’
Jun Hao says, ‘Dad had to poo.’
Grandpa nods. ‘A serious situation.’
Mum laughs once. Very quietly. Then the sound disappears.
The tower is busier than last year. The walls are warm ochre and vermilion, and the lights are bright. Someone cannot find the right niche. Someone else is borrowing a cloth. A child has to be told to stop running three times.
Grandpa leads us upstairs, taps his card at the entrance to the niche hall and wipes Grandma's photograph with a damp cloth. Her cremation urn rests in the small compartment behind it, with narrow spaces for flowers on either side. Grandpa trims the stems and places them one by one.
The fruit came from the market yesterday. Apples, oranges and a bag of wax apples. Grandpa inspects every one. When he finds a pale bruise along the waist of one wax apple, he turns it towards the back.
‘Your grandma loved these,’ he says. ‘And she was the fussiest person alive about choosing them.’
‘She saved the good ones for us.’ Mum turns the bruised side forwards again. ‘Every time, it was “this one's damaged” and “that one isn't sweet”. Then she'd eat the smallest herself.’
I remember the back of the fruit knife resting against Grandma's thumb as she peeled. I remember her hands being warm. In winter, I used to push my feet beneath her quilt. She would complain that they were freezing, then wrap them up anyway.
I nudge the wax apples closer to her photograph.
Grandpa lights the incense and has us tell Grandma one piece of news each. First, he reports that his blood pressure is normal. Mum immediately says it reached one-fifty yesterday. Dad says work is the same, and Mum adds that his back has been hurting. Jun Hao thinks for a long time, then announces that he has a new front tooth.
My turn.
Everyone looks at me.
‘I…’
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I do not need to look. It will be the team.
‘I've grown one centimetre,’ I say.
Grandpa peers up at me. ‘You said that last year.’
‘Still growing.’
Mum lays the incense in its tray and does not expose me.
Once we have finished, the adults stay to tidy. Grandpa crouches over the joss paper. Dad goes to ask where it should be taken for burning. Mum gathers the empty flower bag, then calls back to me.
‘Watch Jun Hao for a moment. Don't let him wander off.’
‘He's right here.’
‘Which is why I'm asking you to watch him.’
I lean against the rail and take out my phone. One of my teammates has sent a photograph of the empty court with three crying faces underneath. I type half a reply, remember Mum is nearby and close the screen. Then I unzip my rucksack and hunt for food.
A bottle of milk tea is sitting on a half-finished packet of biscuits. I pull both out together.
When I look up, the only thing beside me is Jun Hao's water bottle.
‘Jun Hao?’
I look down the corridor.
Nothing.
‘Jun Hao!’
Mum calls his name from the other end of the stairs, faster than me and much more frightened. She comes out of the shrine hall gripping his wrist. His other hand holds a fortune stick.
‘Didn't I ask you to watch him?’
‘I was just—’
‘Looking at your phone.’
‘I wasn't looking at it the whole time.’
‘He disappeared. Would that have happened if you spent less time on your phone?’
Jun Hao shrinks behind Mum. Heat builds behind my ribs.
‘He only went over there to draw a fortune. He didn't run down the mountain.’
‘You do this every time. You can forget Qingming. You can forget your brother. The moment your friends call, everything at home comes last.’
‘I haven't forgotten this family!’
People nearby turn to look. Mum lowers her voice. Every word gets harder.
‘You can't even look after your own brother. How is that not forgetting?’
‘I didn't give birth to him. Why am I always the one who has to look after him?’
Mum stops speaking.
So does Jun Hao.
I stuff the food back into my rucksack and walk out to the viewing terrace.
The wind is stronger here. A long bench beside the stone steps faces down the mountain. At its far end, a small offering table from the shrine hall holds an incense tray and a porcelain bowl of uncooked rice. Beyond them, the sea has been flattened beneath the clouds into one grey line. Trees move on the slope. Their leaves turn pale undersides to the wind.
I sit and kick a dry clod of mud from the sole of my trainer.
When Mum comes back, I stare at my shoes.
She does not call my name. She does not stop. My jacket lands beside me, one sleeve brushing the stone, folded almost neatly. Her heels carry her back towards the tower.
I push the jacket away.
The mountain wind rises again. I pull it back over my knees.
Jun Hao peeks round the corner with a piece of paper in his hand.
‘What now?’
He holds it out.
‘Oh, a present for your big sister? Thank you.’ I take it and wave it at him. ‘A forgiveness voucher, is it? Fine. Accepted.’
‘Big Sis… I can't read it.’
It is the fortune slip.
One root sends branches east and west awhile.
Clouds veil the sky; no road runs clear for miles.
Call no broken page a story at its end.
Where silence cracks, the truth will show its face.
I read the four lines again.
‘The first one is very nosy.’ I look over the rest. ‘Fortunes are always like this. Whatever happens, you can claim they were right.’
Jun Hao sits pressed against my side. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It's like the story from the night before last.’
‘How?’
‘There's a front. No back.’
I am about to laugh at him, but my hand is already inside my rucksack. The old book is wedged behind my light novels. It takes two pulls to free it. I turn to the four words.
A hundred years later—
The fortune slip lies across the blank page. The mountain wind lifts one corner, again and again, as though someone is trying to turn to what comes next.
A tiny sound comes from beside us.
Tick.
Inside the porcelain bowl, a single grain of offering rice has split cleanly in two.
Jun Hao looks down first.
‘Big Sis.’
No one has touched the bowl. The two halves lie apart, their broken edges shining white.
I look at the incense.
Three threads of smoke stand perfectly still.
Then they wrench straight upwards.
The whole mountain jolts.
Someone inside the tower shouts, ‘Earthquake!’ Fruit rolls from the offering tables. Metal racks slam and ring. Jun Hao grabs my arm. I clap the book shut, but the first place I look is not the ground.
It is the sky.
A rainbow has appeared behind the clouds.
Red. Yellow. Green. White. Black. Five colours crushed together, like the one drawn wrong in the old book.
It tears down the middle.
‘Big Sis…’
‘I see it.’
The trees on the mountainside are turning white.
Not their undersides. White crawls from leaf-tip to branch, one tree after another, as if someone is drawing all the colour out of the hill. Someone screams in the distance.
The middle of the grey sea sinks.
Water circles the hollow. Faster. Faster. Then the whole sea tears free of the earth and launches into the clouds.
The sea from the book.
I seize Jun Hao. ‘Back inside. Now!’
The stone steps split beneath us.
Dad bursts from the tower and catches Grandpa as he falls. Mum runs past them in those heels, straight towards us.
‘Peach! Jun Hao!’
The ground drops again.
A fissure rips across the steps. Jun Hao's feet vanish beneath him. He slides towards the gap.
I throw myself forwards and catch his wrist.
My knee smashes into the edge of a step. White pain bursts across my sight.
His weight drags me after him. Chips of stone jump past my elbow and vanish into the fissure. I never hear them land.
‘Big Sis!’
‘Don't let go!’
Mum is on her stomach on the far side, reaching for him.
Almost.
Almost.
I jam my heel into a crack and catch Jun Hao's collar with my other hand. His whole face crumples as he cries. He is still slipping.
The roar of water climbs the mountain.
There is no time.
I release his wrist, get my hand beneath his waist and push with everything I have.
Jun Hao flies across the fissure.
Mum's hand catches his sleeve—or misses it. I cannot see.
A wall of water strikes the mountain.
Earth and sky turn over together.
My rucksack straps cut into my collarbones. The water tears me from the steps and hurls me upwards, into a sky that should not have a direction.
Jun Hao reaches for me. Mum is on her knees across the fissure, her mouth open as though she is shouting my name.
I cannot hear anything.
Water turns me once. Twice. It feels as though two iron nails have been driven deep into my ears. Pain bursts again and again behind my skull. The torn rainbow sweeps across my eyes. White mountain, grey sea, Mum's face—everything slices into pieces.
Did Jun Hao make it across?
Did Mum catch him?
I open my mouth. Water rushes in. Only bubbles come out.
I didn't forget you.
The words have no sound. Nowhere to go.
Mum is still shouting.
Or perhaps I only remember her shouting.
I reach for her. My fingertips touch nothing but water flowing into the sky.
Just one more second.
Let me see.
Pain splits the back of my skull and drives into my eyes.
The last of the light goes out.