“I wish I could get that ribbon,” Dad was muttering to himself when Mei came upstairs to help cook dinner. Chara must have gotten home from (clothing) shopping with her friends to mind the store.

  “You should go into the workshop to get whatever you want,” Mei informed him.

  “You know we can’t do that when your mom and sister are busy, Mei.”

  “Well, if they can’t let the rest of us see what they’re doing, then they shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

  Dad eyed the set of her jaw and seemed to decide that now was not the time for a lecture on family history.

  I stepped in. “C’mon, Mei, more cooking, less talking.”

  Of course, Heaven forbid she listen to her older sister, so she leaned across the table from Dad, her sharp eyes following the progress of his needle. “You should make the waist skirt a little longer. Then it’ll look more like the painting that Madame Yang showed us.”

  Dad leaned back in his chair and held the doll at arm’s length. “Hmmm…but I already cut the cloth.”

  Drifting over, I studied it too. “That’s okay, just glue it lower down. You’re going to put a ribbon around her waist, right? That’ll hide the top part of the skirt.”

  “Hmmm,” Dad repeated, and I knew he was thinking, But I would know. He shook his head and reached for the scissors to cut a new piece. “Thank you, Mei. You’re right.”

  She grunted, embarrassed. “C’mon, Dia, aren’t we supposed to be cooking?”

  Grandpa Earth save me from surly tween sisters. I opened the fridge and took out the hunk of pork that our third-oldest sister, Electra, had bought at the open-air market this morning. Next to it, she’d rather hopefully set several Cantonese sausages – Dad’s and most of us kids’ favorite.

  I waved them at Mei and Dad. “Look what Electra got! You know what this means?” After a dramatic pause, I pronounced, “Youfan! We’re making youfan.” Electra had even pre-soaked the dried shiitake mushrooms for us.

  “Shouldn’t a starving artist think more about her music and less about her stomach?” muttered Mei, but she sliced the stems off the mushrooms fast enough.

  I washed the sticky rice, then took over at the cutting board. By the time I’d prepped the rest of the ingredients, she was already heating oil in the wok. Taking turns, we tipped everything in. Mei might bicker with me all the time, but we got put on dinner duty together often enough that we worked smoothly.

  “Want me to transfer it to the rice cooker?” I offered. The youfan needed to be steamed to finish it off, and I was, after all, stronger than Mei.

  “I can do it.”

  But of course she couldn’t. She strained to lift the wok, failed, and set the rice cooker on the counter next to the stove instead. Then she proceeded to ladle the rice mixture from the wok to the rice cooker ladle bit by bit. It was painfully inefficient, and I gritted my teeth watching her.

  “Stop backseat-cooking, Dia!”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay.”

  “Whew! It’s hot!” she commented when she finally finished. “Do we need to do veggies too?”

  “Nope.”

  Garnet and Sam, our two oldest sisters, had been on dinner duty last night. They’d prepared a salad of chopped cucumbers with vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and minced garlic and put it in the fridge overnight to pickle. “One less thing for you to cook tomorrow,” Garnet had said with a wink. At twenty-four, she was already working as an engineer, and she acted like a second mom to the rest of us. Which often had its advantages.

  “We’re done for now,” I told Mei. “Shoo.”

  She didn’t need a second invitation. Once her footsteps had thundered upstairs, I dropped into the chair next to Dad. He was just about done with Chang’e’s robes. All that was left was the ribbon that would go around her waist, which he couldn’t get until Mom and Tania finished. He set the doll down and stretched his back.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “Mmhmm?”

  “Um, with the MEC inspectors here, and, um, Mei’s so anti, you know.” I pointed down in the direction of the workshop. “Plus she keeps reading that book about Leo Wolf.” I hated to suspect this of my own sister, but – “She won’t report us, will she?”

  Dad smiled sadly. “Be patient with Mei. It’s especially difficult for her, being not just the sixth daughter but the twin.”

  That was true. I at least had missed being the heir by two spots and four years. Mei, though – Mei had missed it by minutes.

  Had Garnet ever gone through a “difficult” phase? Had she ever wondered why our family couldn’t be like every other family on Jade Island and favor the eldest child? (Well, usually the eldest son, but the main line of our family never produced sons.) Or had she been content with her position as the first child? The first was always special, after all.

  I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t know how to ask.

  Dad was still speaking. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Mei. She’ll accept it in time. She’s not the first older sister in this family to feel lost, and she won’t be the last. We just need to be here for her.”

  What about me? I wondered, but was too old to say.

  I’d felt lost ever since I was old enough to count to seven, or, rather, to five. Being surrounded by family had yet to change that.

  By the time Mom and Tania finished, the table was set and everyone except Po-Po, who was resting on the sofa again, was hovering in the kitchen. Mei and I had arranged the youfan and cucumber salad in the middle of the table. We’d also reheated leftover fish head soup and stir-fried bok choy. Eleven rice bowls, plates, and pairs of chopsticks encircled the food. My stomach growled.

  “Mmm, that smells good,” Garnet praised us.

  “The youfan looks great,” Sam added.

  Electra, on the other hand, was darting glances between Gong-Gong, who’d already taken his seat, and the youfan and trying to decide how much trouble she’d get into if she snuck a bite early. Given that it was Gong-Gong, not much. She grabbed her chopsticks and went for it.

  He raised an eyebrow, but all he said was, “Don’t let your Po-Po see.”

  “They’re here!” Chara announced, and Electra dropped her chopsticks.

  Mom and Tania trudged into the kitchen, looking ready to collapse. “Dia, go get your Po-Po, will you?” Dad asked.

  I ran into the living room, where Po-Po was keeping half an eye on her show and half an eye on the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready, Po-Po.” I got her walker positioned in front of her, locked the wheels, and helped her up.

  “Hmph. That took much longer than it should have. Tan-Tan is so weak. A little spell like that wears her out? My mother could….”

  As I got her settled in the seat of honor against the wall, she kept up a rant about how much more powerful Weaver mages used to be. In the past, the Seventh Daughter had always married one of her cousins (outside of the main line, Weavers did have sons), but of course that led to health issues. Not to mention that, with the advent of the Scitech Age, marriage between close relatives had become illegal. The authorities certainly weren’t going to grant us a special exemption so we could preserve the family’s ability to do spell-work. And anyway, we got so many weird looks from having such a large family that we didn’t need to add incest to the mix.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Mom squeezed Dad’s hand under the table. They knew Po-Po’s rant was aimed at him, the outsider of Cantonese descent, and at her for picking him.

  Like a coward, I focused on my bowl and hoped that Po-Po would be so preoccupied by the fading of magical inheritance that she wouldn’t notice the youfan.

  No such luck.

  “Aiyah!” she interrupted herself. Accusingly, she held up a chunk of sausage. “What is this?! Who cooked today?”

  Her eyes went straight to Mei and me. She knew who’d been on dinner duty.

  There was no point in lying. “Mei and I did, Po-Po.”

  “And why is there Cantonese sausage in Jadean youfan?” She waved the chunk, as if we might have dropped it in by accident.

  Electra, I noted, was hiding behind a curtain of hair.

  I glared at her but didn’t tattle. “Because we like it this way, Po-Po.”

  Sam nodded.

  “Aiyah, Diadem, Meissa, Samaya Weaver, it doesn’t matter what you like or don’t like! It’s about doing things properly. This isn’t proper youfan! Proper youfan never has sausage in it!”

  “Then maybe we shouldn’t call it that,” Garnet spoke up. “Maybe we should give it a new name. Like, um, Weaver rice!”

  “That’s not the point! Don’t spoil your little sisters, Gar-Gar. They need to learn that there is a proper way of doing things, or they’ll never get ahead in the world.”

  Garnet drew a breath to either argue further or placate her further, but Mom gave a quick shake of her head. Garnet let the breath back out.

  Needless to say, it was a bit of a subdued dinner.

  Afterwards, the adults retired to their rooms, and Garnet got up to do the dishes. Electra stopped her.

  “I can do it, Big Sis. You’ve got work tomorrow. You should go home before it gets too late.”

  Ha. She must have been feeling guilty about the sausage.

  Garnet hesitated, looking between the ginormous heap of bowls, plates, chopsticks, and pots in the sink and on the counter. Eleven people generated a lot of dirty dishes. Mei and I had just cooked, which exempted us from cleaning duties, and Chara put herself into the same category because she had minded the store this afternoon. She opened her purse, took out a brand-new bottle of nail polish, and started painting her nails.

  Meanwhile, Sam had opened her laptop and was groaning over the cost of med school textbooks and scheming how to team up with her classmates to buy joint copies. Tania was slumped over with her cheek on the table and her hair falling into spilled soup. It was obvious that none of us had any intention of helping Electra.

  In the end, Garnet couldn’t let her little sister do it alone. “How about this? You wash, I dry.”

  Po-Po might have a point: Our oldest sister really did helicopter-parent us more than Mom or Dad.

  I nudged Tania. “Hey, your hair’s in the soup.”

  Moaning, she hauled herself upright and blinked at the soggy strands. When she put them into her mouth to suck dry, Mei passed her a napkin.

  “So…how did it go?” I hinted.

  Tania bit her lip and looked down at the napkin. She smoothed it out on the table and folded it in half precisely.

  “You know she can’t talk about it, Dia,” Sam scolded without looking up.

  I felt as if I’d been slapped. I knew Tania couldn’t tell me about The Spell itself. I’d just wanted to know – well, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know. About anything she could talk about, I supposed. What it was like to have Mom all to herself for an afternoon, to train under her, to learn how to perform the family magic so she could continue it after Mom retired, and so she could pass it down to her own seventh daughter, who would pass it down to hers….

  All the rest of us could do was stand by. No matter how much we wanted to help, to contribute, to matter.

  “Well,” said Tania hesitantly into the silence, “we finished. Po-Po says it took longer than it should have…. Um.” She cast about for anything she could tell us.

  “Which shrine is the image for?” asked Garnet, who’d had longer than I to tease out what could and could not be asked.

  The identity of the shrine would not be a secret. The image that Mom and Tania had labored over would be displayed in public, after all.

  “The Grandpa Earth shrine by the River’s Edge Night Market,” Tania answered. “Oh! Grandpa Tu dropped by to check on it this morning. He said to say hi to everybody.”

  Grandpa Tu was an old, retired gentleman who volunteered at the Association of Shrines and Temples. It maintained all the, well, shrines and temples across the city, and part of its responsibility were the shrines to Grandpa Earth, the protective deity of each local patch of land. His shrines ranged from knee-height boxes tucked between shops or apartment buildings, to dollhouse-sized structures like the one Aly and I had rested by this afternoon, to lavish edifices with vermillion columns and carved dragons on the roof.

  “Oh, that’s why I saw him at the market,” Electra commented from the sink. “He told me he likes the mantou here best!”

  I laughed. “I’m pretty sure he says that about every place he goes.”

  I’d once run into him Downtown and he’d told me that he liked the steamed buns there best. “Do you just like whatever shop you just visited best?” I’d asked him, and in response, he’d winked, pulled off a hunk from the other end of his brown sugar mantou, and passed it to me. It was fluffy and delicious, of course, but I didn’t think it was all that special.

  Tania folded the napkin in half again. “Grandpa Tu said the image needed replacing because the….” She swallowed and whispered the next words, “The Spell on it was running out.”

  That was not exactly news to any of us. Prior to the magic ban, not only the images of the gods, but also the altars and the walls of shrines and temples had been spelled. (Not by us. There were plenty of other mages back then.) According to the old tales, the spells made it easier for the gods to speak to humans. Most people these days held that those tales were just relics of a bygone, unscientific age. They said that Jadeans still prayed at shrines and temples out of habit, for the comfort of the timeworn ritual, not because the gods would actually answer.

  However, if you believed in the old tales, you might say that after the magic ban, the mages who knew how to perform those spells died without passing on their knowledge, and the old spells faded away with no one to refresh them, and that was why gods no longer walked among us. (You’d never say that in public, of course.)

  I wasn’t sure which side I belonged to. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted our family’s work to mean something – or not. Depended on my mood, I supposed.

  Glancing around the kitchen at my sisters, I guessed that they felt the same way. Even Tania, perhaps. Because if it were outdated superstition, then we could all be free.

  Except – how did you explain the fact that each seventh daughter of the Weaver family only ever bore seven daughters, for as far back as recorded history went? It was possible, of course. Just nearly impossibly unlikely.

  “I can tell you a bit – ” Tania faltered. “It’s only The Spell itself that’s secret. Well, and also – ” She bit back the rest of the sentence before she could give away too much.

  Sam shut her laptop. Garnet’s hands stilled on the drying cloth. Electra turned off the faucet and started soaping dishes very, very quietly. Chara held out a hand, supposedly to admire her nails, but she was looking through her fingers at Tania. Only Mei slouched in her chair and folded her arms across her chest.

  Addressing her napkin, Tania said, “Um. So, the images. Of Grandpa Earth. In the shrines. We – I mean, the Weavers, um, I mean, the Seventh Daughters – make them. Always. It’s the agreement we made with him long, long ago. There’s a special spell that goes on them, to make it so he can live among us and protect us and be everywhere all at once.”

  Mei snorted. I elbowed her.

  Luckily, Tania kept going. Having resolved to tell us everything she could, not even her twin’s scorn could stop her. “I don’t know if The Spell originally came from him, or if it came from the Weaver Maiden, but it’s a song that’s passed down from generation to generation. It’s played on a special xiao.”

  That was an end-blown bamboo flute with six holes. Mom must have hidden it well, because none of us had ever glimpsed it.

  “Does it have to be played on that particular xiao? Or on a xiao at all?” Electra asked, curious. She was the music major at NJU. “I took a magihistory class last year, and the professor said that only the tune matters, not the instrument.”

  Tania’s shoulders rose and fell. “Dunno. Our xiao has been passed down for generations…but I dunno if it’s original.”

  “Probably not, if it’s bamboo,” commented Garnet. “It’s so humid that I doubt you could preserve it for millennia unless it’s in a museum.”

  “Mmm, it looks like bamboo,” Tania confirmed. “Um. Anyway. We have a set of molds that are passed down too, which we use just for Grandpa Earth images. The porcelain’s normal though.”

  That we had also inferred already, since Dad poured the porcelain for the images as he did for the other dolls.

  “The fabric’s normal too. It’s just, the biggest difference is that at the end, we play The Spell over the image to – well, you know.” Tania looked up at last, from face to face, as if pleading with us for something. “It’s really hard.”

  Garnet returned a comforting smile. “Of course it is. You’re still learning. Everything grows easier with practice.”

  “But what if – what if Po-Po’s right? What if our – our inheritance is running out? What if – what if – when it’s my turn, I can’t – ”

  “Po-Po’s just extra grumpy because we had the AC on all day and her joints ache,” I reassured her.

  Mei sniffed loudly. “If you’re really worried about our ‘inheritance’ running out, you can marry Constantine.” She named our least favorite cousin. The one who’d putted past me on his scooter without offering me a ride.

  “Eww!”

  “You know,” I teased, “historically, people liked marrying their cousins, as long as they had a different last name. Binding the family together even more tightly and all that. Plus he’s our third cousin, so it’s even legal. Hey, Sam, don’t you think Tania and Constantine would make a cute couple?”

  “Eww! Gross gross gross!” Tania cried, just a normal twelve-year-old again. “I’m not marrying our own cousin! Especially not Constantine! I refuse to marry Constantine!”

  From the sink, Electra started to sing in her beautiful voice, “Tania and Constantine, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G….”

  Tania clapped her hands over her ears and shook her head furiously. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

  Chara joined in, her voice twining around Electra’s in two-part harmony, “First comes love, then comes marriage.”

  The rest of us, even Mei, bellowed the final line: “Then comes Tania with the baby carriage!”

  Then we all burst out giggling while Tania swatted at whatever sisters were within arms’ reach, namely, Mei and me.

  While we laughed and laughed, I caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my eye. Po-Po was standing in the doorway, smiling at all of us.