Lin Kai-sheng’s scar tissue makes gripping the pen difficult. Pink-white ridges. No give. Each letter of his signature: a separate negotiation between intention and damaged nerves.
Beside him, Julia Huang signs smoothly. Her hands work fine. Everything else is dying. Thyroid. Stomach lining. Whatever the isotopes felt like eating that week. The doctors give her five years.
“Congratulations, Senator.” Majority Leader Patterson pumps Lin’s hand. “Taiwan’s sacrifice will never be forgotten.”
Lin breathes through his nose. America’s promise had been a carrier group, interceptors, the Pacific Fleet. The promise arrived four hours late. Three hours and fifty-seven minutes after Xi Jinping turned Taipei into light.
In Julia’s office—102 S. Hart, thirty feet from Lin’s door—she collapses into a chair.
“Patterson cornered me. Committee assignments. Veterans Affairs for you, Health and Education for me. ‘Thematically appropriate.’” She makes air quotes. “The wounded veteran and the sick teacher.”
“Very on-brand.”
Silence. Through the window: the National Mall, tourists between monuments. None of those monuments commemorate failure.
“We need to discuss tomorrow,” Julia says.
“I know.”
“One billion percent. It’s absurd, Kai-sheng.” She rubs her face. “China’s already cut off. Thirty countries have them blockaded. What does our little tariff add except theater?”
Lin looks at his scarred hand. “My daughter called me. Thirty seconds after the flash. She said, ‘Dad, something’s wrong with the sky.’”
He pauses.
Flash. Sky. Screaming. Line dead.
“I drove toward Taipei for six hours. The roads: full of people covered in ash, bleeding from their eyes. A soldier pulled me from my car. Showed me the radiation detector. The thing was screaming.” He meets Julia’s eyes. “I never saw her body. Just shadows on concrete where the hospital used to stand.”
Julia grips the chair arms, knuckles white. “My daughter was translating Faulkner. English literature, National Taiwan University.” Her voice flattens. “If I talk about her, I have to think about whether she died in the flash or after. Burned or starved. Or jumped.”
Lin says nothing.
“Patterson thinks we’ll behave,” Julia says. “One Republican, one Democrat. Perfect balance. Party line votes forever.”
“Let him think that.”
“For how long?”
“One day.”
The Senate chamber fills slowly. Lin and Julia take seats 101 and 102: arranged apart, slightly wrong, chairs that don’t quite match.
Senator Williams drones about corn subsidies.
Julia’s hand shoots up. “Point of order, Madam President.”
The presiding officer blinks. “The Senator from Taiwan is recognized.”
Julia stands. Her hand trembles against her notepad. “I move to introduce emergency legislation. The China Accountability Act.”
The chamber tenses.
Lin stands beside her. “Just one provision: tariff rates on Chinese goods: one billion percent. Starting the day it’s passed.”
Senator Caldwell from Ohio laughs. “One billion? That’s not a serious—”
“My daughter’s name was Huang Mei-ling.” Julia’s voice flattens, hardens. “Nineteen years old. American novels, terrible pop music, dreams of California. She burned to death March 14, 2027, at 6:17 AM, when China detonated a nuclear weapon over Taipei. So yes, Senator. This is serious.”
Caldwell’s face: red, then white.
Senator Martinez raises his hand. “With respect, China is already under complete embargo. This tariff is redundant.”
“Yes,” Lin says. “Redundant.” He looks around the chamber. Some senators look away. “The blockade: military strategy. The embargo: economic policy. This is something else.”
“A symbol,” Julia adds. “A tombstone. A flag at half-mast. A memorial for population turned into a diaspora whose home doesn’t exist anymore.”
Majority Leader Patterson stands. His expression: careful, controlled. “When we negotiated Taiwan’s admission, there was an understanding. About balance. One Republican seat, one Democrat seat. That was the arrangement.”
“We honored it,” Julia says. “I registered Democrat. Senator Lin registered Republican. On paper: balanced.”
“But on this,” Lin says, “party doesn’t matter.”
Patterson’s jaw tightens. “Everything matters in the Senate.”
“Not this.” Lin’s hand throbs. He’s gripping his pen too hard, scar tissue screaming. “Some things are bigger than your committees and caucuses and reelection campaigns.”
Patterson stares at them. Then sits.
What follows is not a debate. A procession. One by one, senators stand. Senator Kim: the sailors who arrived too late, pulled bodies from contaminated water for weeks. Senator Willis: satellite footage, mushroom cloud visible from space. Senator Rodriguez: young, second term, voice shaking, saying simply, “We failed you, and no gesture can fix that, but we can at least name what happened.”
The tally comes at 3:47 PM.
102 to 0.
In Julia’s office afterward: expensive Japanese whiskey, card from Senator Martinez (I’m sorry for my remarks. I’m sorry for all of it).
Julia pours two glasses. “It doesn’t bring anyone back.”
“No.”
“Doesn’t hurt China. They’re already dying.”
“I know.”
She holds up her glass. Amber light. “But it’s real now. In the Congressional Record. This impossible number pointing at something you can’t come back from.”
Lin touches his glass to hers.
They drink.
The whiskey burns.
Outside: the Washington Monument, white and whole, built to remember things from two hundred years ago, people who are words in textbooks now.
Inside: two senators from a dead country, holding glasses with shaking hands, and in the Federal Register a number too large to mean anything, and it will have to be enough.
It will have to be.