"This is actually pretty interesting." Mabel thumbs the pages with practiced ease. She's got a bunch of articles on her phone, too—she'd read them to Sky over breakfast—but after all this time she's still retained a quiet love of guidebooks she can hold in her hands. Today she's dressed in a sensible sun visor and light clothing, her sneakers scuffing out an eager rhythm on the sparse gravel. "Did you know Tai Shan is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites that meets the most standards? Seven out of ten, along with the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in Australia." She skims a few more passages, mouthing the words along to herself as her eyes shine with interest. "I wonder when they built the steps up the mountain—it's six thousand six hundred sixty steps to the top, you know."
"Yeah? I'm gonna savor each one." Sky cracks his knuckles menacingly as he leans back, eyes fixed defiantly on the point where the wrinkled cliff columns pierce the deep blue sky. It's the peak of July in China right now, which means it's the worst weather to spend four hours slogging his way up a mountain; the city is actually not quite as bad, but the humidity hangs low and heavy around the dense mountain forests and even back home Mabel's already been bitten by a few mosquitoes at night despite the incense coils around their bed. Even so, something about being here at the bottom of this mountain makes him feel jittery. It's a live-wire feeling he hasn't had in a while—a potential energy feeling, like he's gonna vibrate out of his skin. An escape feeling. "Fuck you, sky mom." Ha—sky mom, Sky mom. "No more locking me in my room."
"Are you sure this is the mountain?" A frown flits briefly across Mabel's face as she flips back and forth on a single page, a bare flicker followed by a complicated symphony of other notes: contemplative, concerned, curious, eager, affectionate. It's been four years, now, since Sky's seen her face as still as the side of a mountain. Four years since they found each other again; he's had four years to learn each feeling that crosses her face, and he's still surprised by just how much it is all the time. "It's been here for a while, and it's been pretty important. This says emperors used to climb it, and that was long before we reached the ADs, let alone when you...you know."
"Well..." It's tough to explain—the mountain he had been under had never had other people on it, on a plane of existence isolated from life itself—but five hundred years is long enough to make any place home, even a prison. Even swarming with tourists in neon sports attire and citizens with flapping pant legs and dusty sandals, even with the faded public restrooms and off-red lacquer walls rimming it, he knows the earth he's standing on. The escape feeling is the feeling of unwanted homesickness that becomes a fear of inertia, the caged animal instinct that only comes from being in a place you're starting to worry you could get used to staying in forever. He'd mistaken it when he was in the mines, but here, with the sky rich and shining as a plaster wall, he can see it for what it is. "...Maybe not this version, specifically. But yeah, this is it for sure."
"Alright, if you say so." Mabel shrugs, moving behind Sky to put her guidebook back into the waterproof backpack on his shoulders. There's the distinct sound of weight shifting as she does so—water bottles and extra shoelaces and hand sanitizer and lightweight rain jackets and god knows what else that she'd packed the night before. She's so smart. Mabel really is something else. "There's twenty-two temples at the top, including some for B—Bi—I can't pronounce it, but the lady of the mountain sometimes gets conflated with Guanyin. I know you don't want to meet her, but it'd be nice to have family to visit back here, you know? All my parents are dead."
"I didn't have parents," Sky grumbles petulantly. He gets a soft pat on the head for his troubles; Mabel brushes a tangle of wet bangs off his sweaty forehead. "I sprang—"
"—fully formed from a crack in a rock in the ground, yes, I know." Mabel's tone is fond as she zips the backpack up sharply. "But don't be too mean to your mom if you see her up there, okay?"
