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After all, what did she owe anyone still left inside this shell she called her life? Really?

I always knew it, she thought, amazed at her own perceptiveness. That if I only didn’t have to feel—then nobody could hurt me. Nobody.

Because: When you feel nothing, you can do . . .

. . . anything.

* * *

Later that night, after Doug and Janice had smoked and screwed themselves to sleep, she found their stash, their money, Doug’s ridiculously “high-class” straight-razor. Turned it in her hands thoughtfully, thinking about what if this was America, what if the razor were a gun. Standing over them in the dark, watching them breathe and grumble until the weight of her shadow brought Doug up from sleep . . .

“Pie—” he’d begin. And:

“My name is Hepzibah,” she’d answer. Then shoot him in the face.

Janice might even have time to scream, once.

Resurfacing in darkness, turning away. Musing how in a perfect world, a movie world, this ultimate revelation would have come to her just in time for the nightshade harvest, so she’d have already had time to gather and dry enough atropine-laced leaves to cut her parents’ brownie-hash with dementia and blindness. But you couldn’t always get what you wanted, as she knew all too well; daffodil bulbs stolen from the corner flower-shop and added to tomorrow’s salad would simply have to do, in terms of a stop-gap. Not that she suspected either Doug or Janice would be in any ultra-big hurry to call the cops, anyway, especially over something like the famous disappearing kid having finally just . . . well . . .

. . . disappeared. For good.

Hepzibah slipped the razor in her jeans pocket and the pre-baggie’d weed down the back of her waistband, pulling her sweatshirt down to cover it. She paused by the hall closet to “choose” between her usual thin coat and Doug’s thick sheepskin jacket, then paused again by the front door to dredge a single marvellously unfamiliar word up from the very bottom of herself, a new mantra, well worth saying over and over and over. Forever.

“No,” she whispered, into the newfound night—an ornate and intact sound, utterly crackless. It pleased her so much that she made it again and again, in time with her own footsteps: Down the stairs, onto the pavement, ‘round the corner. Gone.

A new poem growing, unstoppable, in every fresh beat of her tread.

But beyond their art still lies my heart

Which no one knows, or owns.

A porcelain frame for my secret name;

An eggshell, crammed with broken bones.

* * *

It would be thirteen more years and too many dreams of murder to count—fulfilled, unfulfilled, otherwise—before she finally made her first mistake.

The Emperor’s Old Bones

Oh, buying and selling . . . you know . . . life.

—Tom Stoppard, after J.G. Ballard.

ONE DAY IN 1941, not long after the fall of Shanghai, my amah (our live-in Chinese maid of all work, who often doubled as my nurse) left me sleeping alone in the abandoned hulk of what had once been my family’s home, went out, and never came back . . . a turn of events which didn’t actually surprise me all that much, since my parents had done something rather similar only a few brief weeks before. I woke up without light or food, surrounded by useless luxury—the discarded detritus of Empire and family alike. And fifteen more days of boredom and starvation were to pass before I saw another living soul.

I was ten years old.

After the war was over, I learned that my parents had managed to bribe their way as far as the harbor, where they became separated in the crush while trying to board a ship back “Home.” My mother died of dysentery in a camp outside of Hangkow; the ship went down halfway to Hong Kong, taking my father with it. What happened to my amah, I honestly don’t know—though I do feel it only fair to mention that I never really tried to find out, either.

The house and I, meanwhile, stayed right where we were—uncared for, unclaimed—until Ellis Iseland broke in, and took everything she could carry.

Including me.

“So what’s your handle, tai pan?” she asked, back at the dockside garage she’d been squatting in, as she went through the pockets of my school uniform.

(It would be twenty more years before I realized that her own endlessly evocative name was just another bad joke—one some immigration official had played on her family, perhaps.)