Symbiosis - Chapter 9

In the end, I didn’t get to eat that candy.

Not because I couldn’t bear to.

Because Shen Lin found out.

It almost sounds like a joke. When I flung myself into the snow to pick it up, astonished and delighted, my father was standing nearby, watching.

As soon as I came home, he called me into his study.

Not many people in Jinque Bay had an education or had been to university. Shen Lin was one of them. He set aside a large room as a study. Outside, he spent his days ordering beatings and killings. At home, he shut himself in that room for hours.

He read an assortment of books there. Sometimes, when the door wasn’t fully closed, I saw him staring at my mother’s photograph.

When I entered that day, the last light of sunset streamed through the window.

Her photograph on the desk had been turned face down.

I wanted to see her, but couldn’t.

So I lowered my head. My hands trembled slightly at my sides with fear and nerves.

To stop them, I quietly pinched my palm.

Then—bang!

Something heavy hit the floor and shattered. The crash startled me so badly I imagined my ears were ringing. After a long moment, I barely dared look up. Shen Lin was already standing before me.

He bent down and looked at me.

“Shen Yi, you’ve done something wrong again.”

“Do you know what it was?”

Sometimes he put on an act of kindness before his adopted sons. With me, he never concealed his volatile moods.

He had more reasons to punish me than I could count.

Only last week, he’d thrown me out at night to sleep in the street because I hadn’t walked quietly enough past his study and disturbed him.

Anything I did might anger him. It was very hard to guess what I had done “wrong.”

“I… don’t know,” I finally whispered, my voice shaking with fear.

“You don’t know? You’re becoming more useless by the day.”

He gave an odd laugh and asked again:

“Do you think I mistreat you? That I’m not good to you?”

Before I could answer either question, he stopped talking, strode back to the desk, picked something up, and hurled it to the floor.

I looked where it landed and froze.

It was the candy I’d found that afternoon. I had left it safely in my room when I came home.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Xiao Yi?”

He braced both hands on the desk. His voice had abruptly become calm, his mouth even curving into a smile. To me, it was terrifying. Even his face seemed hideously distorted.

His calm didn’t last.

The next words came in a sharply raised voice.

“I saw what you did this afternoon. Shen Yi, you really know how to make me angry.”

“You’re my son.” He walked toward me and suddenly seized my arm.

How could a child resist a grown man like Shen Lin? I stumbled several steps as he dragged me over and pinned my hand flat to the desk.

“You’re my child, Xiao Yi.” His grip was crushing; he spoke almost through gritted teeth. “And you pick up things other people don’t want off the ground?”

“Do you want to die?”

No. Of course I didn’t.

But in that instant, I felt with chilling certainty that he really might kill me.

Helplessly, I shook my head and stammered apology after apology. I didn’t want the candy anymore. I shouldn’t have picked it up. I didn’t want it.

But what good would apologizing do?

Perhaps he’d never considered me a person at all.

I couldn’t see his face from where I was. At the edge of my vision, though, a clear ashtray rose high into the air.

Crack!

The glass came down hard, its edges striking my finger bones. Pain raced from my hand toward my heart. Instinctively, I struggled, but my hand was pinned and couldn’t move.

Waves of black mist clouded my vision. For an instant, I thought I could hear the dreadful sound of bones breaking.

“Do you know you were wrong now?” he asked from behind me.

Blood poured from beneath my skin, staining that hard, colorless glass scarlet.

I fought the dizziness. Only after a long time could I force out a sound.

“I know… I know. I’m sorry.”

“Quick to apologize, aren’t you? So afraid of pain?” He snorted coldly. A moment later, the bloodstained ashtray rose again.

Perhaps my nerves had gone numb. This time it struck my fingertips, but it didn’t seem to hurt more than before.

There was only more blood. My whole hand was unrecognizable, a horrifying mess of torn flesh that could steal your breath with a single glance.

“An apology isn’t enough, Shen Yi,” he said beside my ear. “You need a little punishment too.”

“You’ve done wrong. You should be punished.”

“Don’t you agree?”

I bit my lip fiercely, as though that might share some of the pain in my hand. Then I glanced slightly to the side and said yes, repeating my apologies numbly, mechanically.

At last, he released me.

He bent to pick up the candy, now broken on the floor.

Then he took me to the basement.

Shen Lin had always enjoyed watching people fight.

But he disliked crowds.

So he kept several enormous iron cages in the basement. Those cages were his boxing rings.

With so many children under his control, whether through threats or rewards, there was always someone willing to fight there for his entertainment.

That day, he casually tossed the broken reindeer candy into a cage. Pointing to the child sitting idly inside, he smiled at me.

“Get in there, Shen Yi.”

“Take the candy back from him.”

“Don’t you want it so badly?”

I lowered my head to stare at my bleeding palm. I didn’t dare look at his face again.

But his plainly delighted voice reached my ears unhindered.

“You can’t get what you want by picking it up,” Shen Lin said. “Take it. Once you’ve taken it, it’s yours.”