Reflection (Disney Twisted Tales) - Elizabeth Lim Page 0,24

behind them. The branches had reassembled themselves, obscuring the path they’d taken. She focused on the shapes around them. Some stems knotted one another like webs, some curled down like spiders, and others were straight like ladders.

Her stomach sank. They’d seen this area before.

“Give me your paw.”

“What?”

She picked up one of ShiShi’s paws, and scraped his claw against a bamboo stem. “We need to keep track of where we’re going.”

She pointed at a gnarly stalk of bamboo on her right, bent over like a hunchbacked man. “I saw that plant when we first left Yama’s throne room. We’re going in circles.”

“I don’t recognize it,” ShiShi said stubbornly.

Mulan sighed. So much for not arguing. “Do you know anything about where we might find Shang?”

“He isn’t fully dead yet, and he’s not fully alive. He’s a spirit, not yet a ghost.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, he won’t be allowed to traipse about Diyu,” ShiShi reasoned. “He’ll be waiting somewhere until his time comes.” He crouched, bending so he hovered over his forelegs. “Climb on my back. We’ll move faster, and I don’t tire as easily as you humans.”

Mulan ignored the barb and leapt onto ShiShi’s back. The lion was good as his word. He bounded through the forest. The mist thickened the faster he went, until Mulan couldn’t see even a few paces in front of them.

Some minutes later, ShiShi stopped.

“What is it?”

ShiShi growled and shrugged Mulan off. She pulled herself up, recognizing with a sinking heart what had angered ShiShi. They were in front of that bamboo plant again, the one shaped like a hunchbacked man.

Whispers were emanating from the stems—there were so many they’d sounded like the wind, but now that she listened carefully, she could hear them coming from individual plants.

“They’re alive,” Mulan murmured.

“They’re ghosts,” corrected ShiShi, backing away from the shriveled bamboo. “Ghosts being punished for their human misdeeds on Earth.”

A brush of twigs crunched under Mulan’s feet. She stepped aside, watching them snake over to their parent plant and reattach themselves. The scratches she’d made were gone, and all the branches ShiShi had cleared had regenerated.

She looked more closely at that hunchbacked shape. The forest’s cloudy mist gathered around it more strongly than around the other bamboo. It almost seemed to have a face. The topmost bamboo nodes bent forward, creating what looked like a neck, and she thought she could make out two eyes and a mouth. She pressed her ear against it.

Help me, a voice whispered from the plant just as ShiShi let out a terrible roar.

“I knew it,” he rumbled. “Yama tricked us! We’re trapped.” He raised his paw to smash the plant down, but Mulan raised her arms high to block him.

“Wait,” she cried. “I think we keep coming back to this plant for a reason. It said something to me.”

Help me, the bamboo repeated.

“If we’re going to save Li Shang, we aren’t going to do it by listening to a grove of demonic bamboo.”

“Just give me one minute,” Mulan said. She turned to face the hunchbacked plant. There was something forlorn about its expression—something pained and frustrated.

A man grows most tired while standing still, her father would say when Mulan would complain about having to practice good posture for hours on end. But then she would see her father limping into a room with his cane and automatically straighten her spine. She remembered how difficult it was for him to walk without it—harder still for him to stand straight.

“I think I know what to do,” she murmured.

She scanned the area by the hunchbacked plant, looking for a fallen branch. Most of them were cracked, crooked, or twisted. She needed one straight as a rod, one that could serve as a cane.…

There!

She knelt and scrabbled through the brush.

“What in the Emperor’s name are you doing?” ShiShi rasped.

She ignored him. Mulan studied the hunchbacked bamboo plant again. Its spine curled over, with a branch extending from it that slumped down like a heavy arm. If she could fit the cane just there to raise the spine up—the “man” could stand tall again.

Gingerly, Mulan nudged the rod into place.

“You’re wasting our time to do some gardening?”

“Look,” she whispered. “Now he’s standing tall.”

The bamboo began to glow, and then it shook, so violently that the rod Mulan had just inserted flew through the air.

“Stand back!” ShiShi yelled. “We must have unleashed a spirit.”

A ghost emerged from the tree, but not the angry, vicious one Mulan and ShiShi had been expected.

“General Li?” ShiShi rasped, half-frozen in shock. Mulan blinked,