Chapter Eleven Out of Time

CHAPTER ELEVEN

OUT OF TIME

Behind a wall of glass, Qin Zheng lies in a harshly lit sterile room, his hair loose and his armor replaced by a hospital gown. We took him to the medical school of Chang’an University, built on the mountains as well, a short electric carriage ride from the Gao Estate. The coronation meant no classes were in session today, no gawking eyes to question who was under the sheet--covered, heavily guarded stretcher being rushed through the halls.

Sima Yi, Yizhi, and I sit in a dark observation booth facing the sterile room. We can’t confirm what’s wrong with Qin Zheng until the lab results for his blood come back. The obvious guess is poison, and so the first suspect was me , the last person to be alone with him. Accusations spewed from the officials as soon as the cameras shut off. If Qin Zheng didn’t maintain enough lucidity to deny I had an opportunity to poison him, they were ready to have me tortured for a confession.

Bastards. As if it’s not more likely that one of them did this to protect their dirty fortunes.

Snippets of noise elapse beside me as Yizhi and Sima Yi scroll on their tablets, trying to keep up with the videos being uploaded across Huaxia. Spontaneous worker rallies in every major city, crowds chanting in front of the homes of local menaces, walls being spray-painted with slogans condemning the rich and corrupt. The army has orders to stop any looting, assaults, and excessive property damage, but I’ve glimpsed many clips of luxury carriages getting turned over and set on fire.

Huaxia had been a pile of ash that hadn’t known it was gunpowder until Qin Zheng threw a match at it.

Yet these common people unleashing their long-repressed grievances have no idea the savior who swore to protect them is slumped here, hooked to an infusion drip to stave off the fever he’s been hiding for days. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. Men, I swear…

Thankfully, the livestream’s ten-second delay worked to prevent anyone who wasn’t in the throne room from seeing him collapse, resuming, as I’d hoped, with Sima Yi’s concluding speech. Our official story is there was a network failure due to literally everyone in Huaxia watching the broadcast at once. I’m sure there are people questioning that narrative, but the riots in the streets should be a bigger distraction now.

We can’t erase the memories of the officials at the coronation, though. I recall the way most of them made no move to help Qin Zheng. They’ll probably breathe a sigh of relief if he doesn’t make it. Then they’ll exact retribution without mercy from the masses who dared to rise up. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope Qin Zheng pulls through.

There’s an urgent knocking on the door behind us.

“Come in!” Sima Yi calls over his shoulder.

A soldier outside lets in Doctor Hua Tuo, a medical professor at Chang’an University and a family friend of the Gaos. I heard from Yizhi that he’s the one who’s been overseeing Qin Zheng’s flowerpox recovery.

“Your Majesty.” The out-of-breath doctor bows, his topknot and long beard as white as his lab coat. He shuffles past us to an intercom in the glass wall. A piece of paper quivers in his rubber-gloved hands. “It’s not poison, Your Majesty. It’s infection. Two of them, with no relation to flowerpox.”

“Two infections?” Yizhi launches to his feet. “Doctor, are you sure?”

Doctor Hua passes the lab results to Yizhi. “Yes, and I’m afraid both are opportunistic infections.”

“But His Majesty’s immune system measures have been normal!” Yizhi checks the results.

“What does this mean?” Qin Zheng’s hoarse voice emerges through the glass, barely audible. He scoots up in his bed, scars visible on his unmasked face.

“It means…” Doctor Hua sinks into another bow, gulping. “It likely means that, being two centuries removed from the rest of us, Your Majesty lacks immunity to many of our modern pathogens.”

“Fine. Then cure me.”

Sweat beads at Doctor Hua’s temples. “We can certainly treat the current infections, but I’m afraid…I’m afraid Your Majesty risks catching a deadlier infection at any moment if you continue mingling among others. To be safe, Your Majesty must stay in sterile quarantine.”

“For how long?”

The doctor, still bowing, appears to hold his breath for several seconds before saying, “For good.”

His words are quiet, yet they strike like a thunderclap. Sima Yi lurches out of his chair, glancing between Qin Zheng and Doctor Hua, whose aged body trembles with its effort to remain bent. Yizhi grips the lab results with both hands, crinkling the paper as he reads it again.

Qin Zheng sits with his eyes glazed over, expressionless, but the rigid set of his shoulders betrays the explosive reaction he’s holding in.

“Surely, you jest,” he says, without lifting his head.

Yizhi scans the lab results over and over, then slowly lowers the paper. “Your Majesty…the science makes sense.”

“You’re saying I must stay in this room for the rest of my life.”

Doctor Hua drops to his knees, bone impacting the floor with a cringe-inducing sound. “I am truly sorry, Your Majesty, but every time you leave a sterile space, you risk catching a disease we cannot treat! We already gave you every vaccine theoretically safe for you to receive, so it’s evident that there’s no cure for this condition, since Your Majesty’s very existence in this century is meant to be impossible. There are consequences to defying the natural order, and this is one of them.”

“Get out.”

“Your Majesty—”

“Out!” Qin Zheng raises his cough-ruined voice. “Get out!”

The four of us exchange wide-eyed looks, then Sima Yi, Doctor Hua, and Yizhi file backwards out the door. Yizhi keeps it propped open for me. I shake my head. Concern crosses his face, but he lets the door close.

“I meant you as well,” Qin Zheng snaps when the lock clicks shut. He presses the heel of his hand to his forehead.

“No.” I roll my wheelchair toward the glass wall’s intercom. My armor glistens under the pale light from his side. “What did you want to do alone, lie there and sulk? There’s no time for that. You set Huaxia on fire with your little speech— literal fire in many cities—and now the people are counting on you to back them up as they go after their bosses and governors. You can’t rile them up and then leave them fending for themselves!”

Qin Zheng barks out a scratchy laugh, sounding on the verge of losing his mind. “Since when did you care about the people?”

“You convinced me to!” I knock on the glass with my armored fist. “You made me and everyone on the streets right now believe Huaxia can be less rotten, less unfair, because you’re Qin Fucking Zheng and you defy impossibility! I was ready to put up with your shitty personality for the rest of my life because I saw the value of what you want to do!”

He regards me in stunned silence, then shakes his head and throws his hands up, jerking the infusion line attached to his arm. “How do you propose I do anything while confined to this single room?”

“You can still make speeches. You can still go on camera. You can call officials here or talk to them over the networks. Plenty of women live their entire lives confined to a handful of spaces. It’s what you were doing to me . Surely you can handle the same.”

His glare turns murderous. It fails to faze me. What is he going to do, come out and risk another infection to choke me?

“Get yourself together, Qin Zheng,” I say. “Huaxia needs you to keep your promises. I’ve heard a lot of stories about you since I was little. None of them ever mentioned you were pathetic under pressure.”

He crosses his arms, eyes falling shut. Medical equipment blinks and beeps beside his bed.

Right as I’m about to insult him some more, he flips his covers aside and swings his bare feet onto the white-tiled floor. He pulls himself up with his drip stand and wheels it toward me. Along the way, he picks up a metal chair. His loose hair sways and his long, pale legs wobble with each step, flashing beneath his hospital gown. He should seem vulnerable, being so exposed, yet the unnaturalness of his movements is unnerving instead, as if I’m facing a nightmare creature beyond prediction. I fight down the urge to wheel backward.

He sets the chair across the glass from me and takes a seat, gripping his drip stand like he’s still holding his ceremonial sledge-hammer. With him in the fluorescence-bathed sterile room and me in the dim observation booth, it’s as if we’re in a real-life version of the yīn-yáng realm. I see his facial scars more clearly than ever, how they streak across his brow and cloudy right eye.

“Go tell Doctor Hua to return with the medicine to treat my infections,” he says, some composure back in his voice.

“Okay.” My fingers drum on my knee. “Then can you…write down the old ways of pilot training or something? I don’t want them to be lost with you if the treatment doesn’t work.”

He gives a start at my bluntness, then lets out a humorless chuckle. “The old ways cannot be conveyed by words alone. Stay the night with me. I will show you.”

He reaches behind his shoulder. Metal-white qì rises in his irises and meridians. Using its precision boost, he weaves a golden, glinting thread of spirit metal out of the spinal brace he kept on his back. He presses the tip of the thread to the glass. A second circuit, bright green, lights up across his skin—Wood qì for speed. The thread whirls like a drill through the glass. Tiny shards splatter like frost around the puncture.

I’m not sure what its purpose is, but I take the thread with my armored fingers. The shape of his spinal brace emerges in my awareness, floating like a sixth sense across the thread.

“The most effective pilot training is done through a mind link,” Qin Zheng says. “That is why only a pilot can truly mentor another pilot.”

“Mind link? Should you really risk going out to the Yellow Dragon with me?”

It hits me that he can only pilot the Dragon if absolutely necessary now, when its omnipresent threat should’ve been this revolution’s strongest defense. The public cannot find out about his condition.

On the flip side, this is a good excuse to make him train me for the prospect of piloting the Dragon without him. He can’t complain about me stealing his Chrysalis if leaving quarantine to use it might kill him. Though my eagerness about learning from him cracks when he gives me a look so condescending I consider tugging him face-first against the glass with the thread.

“Let this be your first lesson,” he says. “Empty your mind of preconceptions about Chrysalises and spirit metal. Popular understandings of their properties are either grossly simplified or deliberately kept enigmatic to prevent the crafting of rogue Chrysalises. The truth is that spirit metal itself is all that’s needed to conduct a mind link.” He glides a finger along the thread. “We simply need to fall asleep while sharing this connection.”

“That’s it?”

“Indeed. Less human engineering goes into a Chrysalis than one would expect.”

“Huh.” I thumb the thread, feeling another level of reverence for the material. No wonder the gods trapped us in an eternal war to have a steady supply of it. It makes me wonder more intensely about what the Hunduns truly are, to be made of this, though I quickly snuff out the thought. If Qin Zheng and I are to share a mind link again, I can’t let him catch me thinking these things.

I hate the idea of opening my mind to him, of course, but I can’t turn down this form of training if it’s as effective as he says. Aside from when I threw the vase at that screen, I haven’t figured out how to conduct my qì through this armor. I can’t turn this situation from a calamity to an opportunity if I don’t have the skills to back myself up.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s start tonight.”