Six Years Later
Emma’s mum did always say that her slant eyes would stick if the wind ever changed, but Emma never thought it would happen like this.
Today was the second week after she woke up in the infirmary and realised that she was Chinese. Or, well, a little Chinese girl woke up realising that she was Emma. Or had been Emma at some point, if, you know, you wanted to be specific about it.
Turns out there wasn’t any Heaven after you died: just another life. What was it called again? Right, re-incarnation. It was all pretty complicated, but the long and short of it was that Emma’s mum had been wrong about the afterlife and her friend Xinh had been right.
It was a weird place where she ended up. The people… Maybe she could describe it as if someone had fired off a Chinafying beam in the middle of Sydney. Here, people had all sorts of hair and skin colours, just like back home, but for some reason everyone’s eyes were like Xinh’s. Almost like everyone was Chinese, but only between the eyebrows and the neck. Even the rare Africans. Wild.
To put it chronologically, Emma had died at some point, probably, although she couldn’t exactly remember how. She had been at Manly Beach, which was uglier than Bondi, when her foot got snagged underwater. Seaweed? Riptide? Irregardless, there was a lot of panicked splashing and drowning.
It had been Jessica's birthday or something. Hopefully Emma had died right in front of her. Emma had only gone because Xinh asked, anyway, and hopefully a corpse would finally be the thing to wipe the smugness off Jessica's face.
After that, about six years ago, Emma was born again as a little slanty-eyed Asian girl. It took a little longer to get all her memories back. What was six years minus a week? Err, about six years still.
Anyhow, last weekend Emma had cried so hard that she somehow got her past life’s memories back. Or Uné had. That was her name now. ウネ or Uné in normal people alphabet.
All the Chinese squiggles she had to learn now were going to kill her one day…
True story. When Uné was five, she almost failed to get into school because of Chinese. Could hardly read a thing. She had just barely managed to pass the written section, but ended up failing anyway because she flunked the rest.
When she finally passed the entrance exams six months later, the nightmare started all over again with daily Chinese lessons. Obviously, it made sense to teach kids how to write. She didn’t want to live like the smallfolk in Game of Thrones. What didn’t make sense was the writing system. It was legitimately one of the worst things she had ever seen.
In history class, Mr. Pollock used to talk about how amazing the ancient Chinese were. Emma used to wonder why everybody spoke English now instead of Chinese, if they were really so amazing. Now she knew; while Einstein was busy inventing nucular weapons, Wangstein was still stuck in Chinese class, learning a unique new squiggle for every word.
Emma plodded down a familiar paddy-lined road.
She was, really slowly, coming home from yet another exhausting day at school. ‘School.’ It was basically a slave camp. She was one of the slaves. No, a child soldier camp. She’d seen the docos about it. Well, clips of the docos on social media. They’d tried to stop all the horrible stuff in Africa, but Kronii 2012 hadn’t worked.
The school worked Emma’s class of six, seven, and eight year olds to the bone. After their minds were drained with maths and writing lessons, they were forced to run their bodies ragged doing kung fu and magic. In the movies they never talked about how exhausting magic would be. It was like all the juice and soul had been sucked from her brain.
Every day ended in Emma slowly trudging back out into the sticks where her house was. Kilometres by foot, every muscle aching. Her calves and bum always burned the worst. At least there was no rush, thank god. It was getting a little darker, but this time of year the streetlights hadn’t even turned on yet. Early evening at the latest, right now, and even at night these parts weren’t dangerous.
Well, maybe somebody really unlucky could trip, knock themselves out, and drown in one of the iné paddies. This far out of town, there wouldn’t be many pedestrians around to save them, either. Fifteen centimetres of water didn’t look like much, but it was enough to drown somebody as surely as the Pacific had drowned Emma. Her homeroom teacher said that was next month’s lesson, though.
A little dark, but that was 'shinobi' school for you. A 'shinobi' was, as far as she could tell, some sort of battle wizard ninja assassin. Actually, before she remembered being Emma, Uné hadn’t even seen what was wrong with the school, which was a whole nother bag of worms.
Well, maybe she still didn’t. Somebody had to kill the enemy shinobi, after all. It’s not like you could expect them all to just go home and do the job—
…Mmm. The biggest messed up part was that she was supposed to do the killing one day. That was what the school intended, at least. To be honest, though, that probably wasn't going to happen. Thankfully.
Unlike her show-off brother, Uné wasn’t particularly talented. Actually, the gap in their abilities was so freaking wide that whenever he was around she felt lowkey retarded. Like, an actual special needs child, not that Uné had known what that was before Emma ‘woke up’.
The only reason she didn’t feel actually, actually retarded was that all the other clan members were, no cap, as useless as she was. In the modern day, most of them weren’t even shinobi, just farmers that grew herbs and food. In other words, they were all normal, and her brother was the freak.
Out of all her relatives, the only recent shinobi of any noteworthy talent were her brother and her dad.
Well, that was fine with her. It hadn’t led either to anything good. Her bigshot brother had already graduated from school, and where did that land him? Working already. As a six year old. Forget the Hunger Games, this was the true disstopia.
Sure, it was just nonsense like patrolling the town or whatever, but how messed up was it to start working at six? The retirement age was getting higher and higher all around the world, everyone knew that, and knowing her luck, she didn't think Macro Economics would care that she was in another dimension now. Uné was probably going to farm iné fields every day until she was a wrinkly old lady.
And OK, maybe it made sense to start early as a shinobi because heaps of them died—the clan elders could never stop talking about the previous war—but that was just messed up in another way.
Emma avoided a pebble. The birds were really chirping this evening. The sound of the water in the wind, the summer cicadas, it was like a different world to the bustling town centre Emma had just come from. Kind of peaceful. Kind of lonely. Kind of boring too.
It was definitely going to get old, this scenery. Especially once she, inevitably, started farming the paddies.
The downside of not graduating as a shinobi was that only shinobi had any real business leaving town. That wasn't really something you could do without permission.
It was a bit of a bummer. On the bright side, though, Emma didn't think there was all that much to see out there, anyway. It wasn't like she could go to New York to see Time Square, even if she was allowed to leave the village, and Emma wasn't super interested in seeing the Terracotta Warriors or whatever this version of China had.
If there wasn't anything fun to do inside or outside of her town, then she would just have to find a really hot boyfriend or something.
Emma turned left at a familiar tree.
She was almost home now. It was quiet and boring at home, but at least she could clean up, cook, and then sleep after some homework.
“I’m home,” she said to nobody and slid the front door open. To her surprise, her brother was standing in the doorway to the living room. Emma kicked off her shoes before stepping up into the house.
“You’re back early,” she said.
“You’ve still been crying.”
What? Straight to that? Emma's face burned.
“Who told you that?” she demanded.
He looked at her. “Does it matter?”
Uné was a huge crybaby. It wasn't so bad in the daytime, but she’d been bawling pretty much every night since Dad abandoned them. It had only gotten worse last weekend once she remembered two more parents that she'd never see again.
Was that her fault though? It was probably genetics or something! Emma would bet her metaphorical left nut that it was Mum’s fault. After all, her brother was like a little clone of Dad, and at Story Time Dad always—ah crap, no crying, no crying—Dad always talked about how much she looked like her mum, after all.
“Was it Rin? It was Rin, wasn’t it?” It was always Rin, that two-faced little… “What’s it got to do with you, anyway?”
Wasn’t like he’d been around.
Her brother looked uncomfortable. …Had her tone been too harsh? Maybe she ought to go easier on him. He was only her older brother by a few minutes, and, also like… fucking six years old.
Shit. Emma was being a fucking loser, wasn't she?
She decided to change the subject. Emma sniffed and looked towards the kitchen.
”Niisan, have you been cooking again…? I told you to leave it to me.”
Niisan was Chinese for ‘older brother’. There were at least seven different ways of saying ‘older brother’ in Chinese, but she was only six and would probably encounter more in the future. More importantly, Emma wasn’t too thrilled about this blockhead wasting her ingredients. This was the third time this week.
She marched into the kitchen, but found herself narrowing her eyes.
“Fish…?”
“I caught it from the river,” her brother said. “I know you don’t like me touching what’s in the fridge.”
Because they were ingredients she bought and had plans for, and her pompous brother was never there to go shopping with her.
“Don’t word it like I’m starving you,” she said acidly. “I cook dinner every night for someone I barely even see.” Well, that was her official stance. Their extended family brought them food pretty regularly, but she actually just wanted something to keep her occupied at night. No phone. No internet.
“Some of us need to train.” Her brother returned to the fish on the stove.
Emma ground her teeth. How dare he talk to her like that? He was literally six years old. Barely bigger than a potato. To think that before she regained her Emma memories she was a little intimidated by this back-talking, pompous, ridiculous little weirdo. What was the deal with that stupid mask?
"I appreciate the food," he said after a moment. This time Emma could feel her hackles rising for a different reason. Ever since Dad left them, her brother had gotten weirdly choosy with his words. It was really irritating for some reason. Did he have to hesitate before every sentence?
"Well, you definitely finish it."
For a while, the room was silent again except for the sounds of roasting fish.
"Uné, Rin says she's worried about you."
“Because I’m still crying a week after the funeral? I’m surprised you aren’t. You’ve always been Dad’s favourite.” Regardless of what Dad said.
Uné had always been a little sad about that, but thinking about it now, it was only natural. A genius shinobi child for a genius shinobi father. Emma’s parents had been better, though.
“Shinobi don’t cry.”
“Well, that explains why you’ve graduated and I haven’t then,” she said a little meanly. Ah, boy. There she went, arguing with an orphaned six year old again. It was definitely Uné's fault, because Emma would have remembered having such thin skin in her past life. She pulled out some leftover omelette from the fridge and grabbed a pair of chopsticks.
For a moment she paused, almost asking how her brother was doing. Then the moment passed and she decided that the super shinobi seemed to be coping just fine. It was wild how fine he seemed.
“I’ll eat in my room.”
Despite not being a very skilled shinobi, Emma could definitely sense her brother’s eyes on her as she left.