Chapter Nine The Re Nobody Wanted

CHAPTER NINE

THE REUNION NOBODY WANTED

I decide to have faith in Yizhi and no longer twist myself into knots worrying about him. I immerse myself in lessons with Wan’er for the final few days before my coronation, kicking up no further fuss about leaving my room, spending only a couple of hours outside to attend a tech rehearsal for the coronation. I’ll be in a much stronger position once I’m formally crowned the Empress of Huaxia and he can no longer depose me on a whim.

The night before the ceremony, though, he summons me to his throne room for a reason he won’t specify to Qieluo, who once again escorts me through the estate.

Lanterns glow like fireflies under up-curled eaves, illuminating the stone paths and reflecting in sickles of light off dark ponds. The fragrances of grass and flowers drift on the air, released by dew. Freshly swaying from the rafters of many walkway roofs is the original flag of Huaxia, a golden dragon head against a red triangle on a black base. When I came across it a few days ago in a history lesson with Wan’er, she told me the red triangle represents the blood of rising laborers, while black was the national color of the ruthless Qin kingdom that Qin Zheng hails from. After the turmoil that followed his disappearance and the fall of Zhou, the flag got changed to the “less aggressive” one I’m more familiar with: a white lotus on a light-yellow base. But now the Dragon Head Flag has been revived with Qin Zheng.

He made a throne room out of a banquet hall in the estate’s central building—the three-story structure that Gao Qiu emerged from during his welcome party for me and Shimin. Qieluo leaves me at the back entrance, saying Qin Zheng ordered her to stay outside. Having been to the throne room for the tech rehearsal, I have no problem navigating the revamped building. I ride the elevator to a hallway on the top floor. Here in one of the private rooms is where I had that horrible dinner to strike a deal with Gao Qiu. I roll my wheelchair along the same route I took to find Shimin afterwards. The entrance where the hallway used to open into the banquet hall is now veiled by a bead curtain, and the view beyond is cut off by a newly constructed dais.

I part the bead curtain and wheel around the lofty dais. The vast hall is somber as a tomb without the tech rehearsal crew around. The only light, low and warm, comes from atop the dais, where Qin Zheng is sitting in an ornate chair that is now the throne of Huaxia. Except he’s…slumped across his desk?

Quietly as I can, I unlatch my cane from my wheelchair and make my way up the dais. I don’t believe my eyes until I see it more clearly: Qin Zheng is passed out amid a storm of documents, graphs, handwritten notes, and open books on a long desk, one antler of his crown bent against the surface. Shit, did he actually drop dead?

No, no, he’s breathing.

Wow, would I have panicked if he’d died? Ridiculous. I shouldn’t need him. I don’t want to need him.

An electric lantern casts shadows from his lashes over his ghost-pale cheek, the unmasked side of his face looking so delicate and fragile. The urge to do… something to him sharpens in me.

Then a map of Huaxia beside his head catches my eye. Little markings and dates adorn our borders. Hundun attacks in the past two weeks, clearly. My skin crawls at the concentrated number of them along the southern coast of the Han province, the supposed ancestral home of us Han people. Although I can’t read most of the notes he’s scribbled beneath them, I’d recognize the character for “dead” anywhere. One dead. Three dead. And so on.

Bile climbs into my throat. Of course. Just because I pushed the war out of my mind doesn’t mean the Hunduns aren’t persisting in trying to destroy our Chrysalises, smash down the Great Wall, and kill us all. They must’ve realized the Han frontier is shorthanded. These casualty numbers probably aren’t even counting concubine-pilots. They never do.

Hand-drawn arrows from Zhou to Han indicate that Qin Zheng is moving a few Chrysalises back, but it couldn’t have been an easy decision, given that the Zhou frontier has no Great Wall. They’re facing increasing attacks, too, from Hunduns coming across the Xihuang Desert. They need to keep as many units as possible during the reconstruction.

I assume Qin Zheng and I will be deploying soon after the coronation to alleviate this crisis. The thought makes me lightheaded, as though I’m on the verge of tumbling off the dais. I reach for him.

A sudden noise escapes his throat. In a blur of violent motion, the throne scrapes back and he’s behind me, pinning me against himself while holding an ice-cold blade to my neck. Every cell in my body freezes around my thumping heart. His hot, shallow breaths gust near my ear. Through our connected armor, I’m aware of his entire contour, the rapid rise and fall of his chest against my back. The rhythm wanes several moments later, and he releases me with a gruff grunt. I brace against my cane and twist to face him, breathing hard as well.

“Don’t startle me!” he chides, his spirit metal blade unraveling into tendrils and fusing back into his gauntlet. “Have you any idea how many assassinations I’ve had to fight off?”

“You’re the one who called me here!” I rub my throat, though my anger goes muddled at the way he can barely keep his eyes open. “Have you seriously slept at all since…?”

He scrubs his hand down his face. “I’ve gone longer during my unification campaigns. ’Specially against Chu. Now that was a fuckin’ palaver.” He’s slipped into the coarse dialect he must’ve grown up speaking before he reinvented himself as a pompous ass.

“That doesn’t mean you should keep doing it. You’re as human as the rest of us.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear ya’. Come on.” He beckons while turning away.

“Where?”

“You’ll see soon enough.” He heads down the dais.

“Uh, your antler—” I point. It’s still crooked.

He looks back at me in bleary confusion, then breaks into an exasperated sigh when he notices the problem. He squints in concentration. The antler tilts outward, yet remains uneven with the other one.

“Ugh.” I trudge down to him with my cane and grasp the antler myself. It’ll bother me if I have to keep looking at it.

He jumps at the contact, but keeps the antler flexible to let me fix it. As I look at him up close, something feels increasingly off; his face is too flushed, and his eyes are unfocused, devoid of their usual domineering intensity. Before his guard can come up, I touch my knuckles to his forehead. A startling temperature comes through my gauntlet.

“You have a fever!”

“No, I’m channeling Fire qì,” he says sarcastically, but his irises blaze red for real. With Fire-boosted strength, he picks me up by the waist with one arm.

“Hey—!” I cry, the sound cutting off in an embarrassing squeak.

He hauls me down the dais and dumps me like a sack of rice into my wheelchair.

“You’re welcome.” He pushes me forward.

“Can you not ?” I scramble to keep my cane on my lap. He goes much faster and more fiercely than Qieluo. There’s something about having my wheelchair in the control of someone I don’t trust that’s especially discomforting, as if he’s seized one of my organs.

He turns me around the dais, through the bead curtain, and into the hallway I came from. At the third door down, he comes to an abrupt stop. I nearly pitch out of my wheelchair. Another protest trips from my mouth, but I fall silent upon catching sight of the bronze plaque on the door. Specifically, the chrysanthemum engraved in front of the room’s name.

It’s the same private room where Shimin and I met with Gao Qiu.

Qin Zheng opens the door and pushes me in. My eyes squeeze shut ahead of an onslaught of bad memories.

“Lady Wu,” says someone in the room.

The instant I place who the voice belongs to, my eyes fly open, and a killing rage bursts through my body.

“ Sima Yi! ” I spring up in my wheelchair.

Qin Zheng presses me down by my shoulder guard while kicking the door shut. My armor pieces lock around me. To my horror, I can’t move anything. Even my lungs stop short of a full breath against my breastplate. I knew Qin Zheng might be able to do this, but to feel it for real injects me with a dread more potent than when he held that blade across my throat.

Sima Yi rises from the dining table, wearing a Sage’s gold-embroidered purple robes and round black hat with two flaps in the back. “I figured we should have this meeting before you saw me at the coronation tomo—”

“You killed Shimin!” I scream with all the force my throttled lungs can muster, straining against the cage my armor has become. “Qin Zheng, let me go!”

“It was not my call!” Sima Yi raises his voice right back. “I argued against it, believe me! But orders were orders.”

“Coward!”

Sima Yi breathes deeply. The room’s amber lighting leaves much of his face in the gloom. “Can you blame the former Sages for making such a decision? Look what you did to them because you happened to survive!”

“Only because they tried to kill me first!”

“Only? What about Strategist An? Did you think we wouldn’t find out what you and Pilot Li did to him?”

Memories rush to the forefront of my mind, of torturing and killing that bastard An Lushan after getting his confession that the pilot system is skewed against girls to ensure that boys have a better chance of surviving a battle link. My original plan was to upload the video as proof to the public, but with Qin Zheng himself decreeing the system be reset to equal inputs, the video became unnecessary. It would just corroborate the accusations of me being a bloodthirsty menace.

I don’t regret it one bit, though. I’d do it again.

“You didn’t even like An Lushan!” I yell. They must’ve found his body during our counterattack on Zhou.

“This is not a matter of personal feelings, but of basic humanity, of which you have none!”

“Chairman Sima,” Qin Zheng warns, “I suggest you refrain from speaking to my empress-to-be in this way. I might not be able to hold her back much longer.”

My armor loosens slightly. But, wait, did he just call Sima Yi—

“You made him the new Chairman of the Sages?”

Qin Zheng releases a low sigh. “As the envoy of the gods, he is entitled to the highest position in the central government.”

“That’s correct.” Sima Yi straightens his deep purple robes. “After I narrowly escaped your wanton destruction of the Kaihuang watchtower and went into hiding, the venerated gods above called upon me. They tasked me with the duty of relaying their will to His Majesty. Since, as I understand it, there’ve been some difficulties in communication.”

“What do you mean, they called upon you?” I demand. “How?”

“I received a message on my tablet unlike any other.” He takes a handheld device out of his robes and holds it up like a sacred relic. “I didn’t believe it at first, thinking it was a trick by you and the rich boy to lure me out. But then I was sent a video of Huaxia from high above, higher than any camera or aircraft could reach.” Wonder enraptures his face. “I saw the pattern of shining lights in every province, the shape of our coastline, and even the curvature of our planet. It could not have been faked. It could only have been taken from the Heavenly Court.”

Sima Yi’s words race in circles through my head, spinning off into implications. Everything the gods do betrays a little more about themselves. They showed Sima Yi a different video than the one they showed me—that of Shimin suspended in a fluid-filled tank—to prove they weren’t scammers. But of course, that video wouldn’t have convinced Sima Yi when he wasn’t there to hear Qieluo’s story of the hovercraft appearing out of thin air and taking the remnants of the Vermilion Bird’s head. Without that context, that video could’ve been filmed in any room. A view of our world from the Heavenly Court, though? That’s irrefutable. Yet it might also divulge clues about what the Heavenly Court really is.

“Did you save that video?” I ask, unable to suppress the urgency in my voice.

“It, unfortunately, vanished from my device soon after it was sent.” Sima Yi regards his tablet as though he’s longing for a lover. “But I have no doubt it was a view from the eyes of the gods. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.”

I curse in my heart.

It’s telling, however, that the gods resorted to revealing themselves to a third party in order to contact me and Qin Zheng.

“How did the gods communicate with you in your time?” I tip my head toward Qin Zheng, speaking quietly.

“I would get cryptic telegrams,” Qin Zheng mutters. “I never confirmed if they were truly from the Heavenly Court, but their threats never failed to pan out.”

So they’ve always contacted us through tangible devices, never appearing as apparitions or anything mystical, like in the legends. Well, nobody sends telegrams anymore, and Qin Zheng has been meticulously keeping digital devices away from me and from himself.

Could it be that the gods can only send messages to us through technology, so he inadvertently forced them to involve Sima Yi? You can’t threaten someone who can’t receive your threats. This would mean that, whatever the gods are, their reach isn’t supernatural. It’s limited.

“What would happen if we just killed him?” I say, pointedly louder, my eyes on Sima Yi.

“They would simply choose another envoy,” Qin Zheng grumbles. “And we would be direly punished.”

Sima Yi lets out a bellowing laugh, raising his arms at his sides. “Indeed, I have no fear of whatever you wish to do to me. My spirit will rise to join the gods in the Heavenly Court. Until then, I shall go ahead and fulfill my duty.”

He turns on his tablet, the light bathing his face. After several swipes and taps, muffled audio plays from it.

“ When you’re in battle, don’t you feel what the Hunduns feel, how complex their emotions are? ” It’s my own voice coming through the speakers. “ Doesn’t that ever make you hesitate? ”

I go cold below the neck.

“ That’s just a defense mechanism, like a bee stinging you as it dies. ” Qieluo’s response is much clearer. This must’ve been recorded on a device she was carrying.

Qin Zheng’s hand tightens on my shoulder. So does my armor over my whole body. I choke for air, spots seeping into my vision.

As the tablet plays the rest of the conversation I had with Qieluo, Sima Yi saunters over to me.

“As the envoy of the gods, this is the first message I am delivering to you.” He stands over me, backlit by the amber lights. “It would be good if you stopped discussing matters like these, Lady Wu.”

I don’t know what scares me most: the fact that the gods can listen in to this extent, the thought of Sima Yi having free rein to watch my every move, or the prospect of turning to face Qin Zheng’s wrath.