Chapter Twenty-Two Bring Down the Sky

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

brING DOWN THE SKY

I wish Yizhi never rushed to tell me the truth about our world when his people had found it in the ruins of the Palace of Sages.

I may have begged Qin Zheng to erase it from my mind, to which he may have said it was impossible. It’s getting harder to tell dream from reality and lies from facts when he’s involved. I don’t wake cleanly from the dream link, getting pulled into the nightmare of dying on that beach over and over before I finally break free and stumble out of the throne room.

Qin Zheng made his point.

I think of what I saw from his memories. If he hadn’t lived by annihilating others before they could annihilate him, I doubt he would’ve survived. Maybe I’m the foolish one for getting bogged down with sentiment when our focus should be on ensuring the gods don’t get suspicious before we come for them.

After getting back to my palace residence, I find a note on my desk from Yizhi, asking to meet in the tunnels in the evening for “updates.”

When I finally see him again, I nearly burst into tears. I want to hold him so badly, yet he inches away whenever I get too close. I can’t speak a word of the mess in my head to him either. I settle for sitting beside him, wrapped in an extra cloak he brought. I breathe in his scent on the cloak as he tells me what he’s been up to since I went to the war front. He found the person who received Shimin’s kidney, for starters. To my surprise, he says it’s an old woman. I assumed it would’ve gone to a man, but Yizhi tells me there’s no difference between male and female kidneys. We all pee the same.

He tracked the woman down using his jurisdiction as an agent of the new Revolutionary Defense Department, also known as the Gewei Bu, established to gather information on corrupt officials, business executives, military commanders, and others who may pose a threat to the revolution. He’s not the head of the Gewei Bu—Qin Zheng wouldn’t put an eighteen-year-old in that position—but he has extraordinary influence over it because he’s also the Imperial Secretary. To kill multiple birds with one stone, Yizhi sent soldiers to snatch the Brotherhood’s remaining leaders in the dead of a single night, then he convicted and executed them quicker than they could react. This included his oldest brother, the original heir to the power of the Brotherhood and its underworld activities. Now there’s no one left to challenge Yizhi for control of the syndicate. To the startled underlings, he declared that those leaders were never true Brothers because they exploited the ordinary members for profit, and things would be different from now on. He’s working on repurposing the Brotherhood as a network of well-paid spies and interrogators for the Gewei Bu, putting their experience in operating in the shadows to better use than selling drugs and extorting small-time store owners.

Although his sequence of moves is breathtaking, I fear for him. But there’s no backing down for him at this point. He has tied his fate too closely to the revolution’s success.

As much as I wish he could sit with me all night, I tell him to go to bed when I notice him struggling to keep his eyes open. It seems that to be at the seat of power is to be doomed to sleep-deprivation.

The next morning, Yizhi shows up in the palace parking lot disguised as Wan’er, taking her usual place at my side so we can…go see the woman who received Shimin’s kidney. Skies, that feels so weird to think about. But if it’ll help improve my ability to sense Shimin’s spirit signature, it’ll also help secure my position after I’ve pissed Qin Zheng off yet again. I must become irreplaceable for a strike on the Heavenly Court to overpower his thoughts about killing me.

Qieluo does a double take when Yizhi climbs into a carriage with us. To her credit, she doesn’t question his presence out loud. I left Wan’er at our residence with the book Qin Zheng gave me, to see if she can make sense of his handwriting. I swear she almost jumped for joy when she realized what she was holding. She seemed a little puzzled, though, that I had nothing more to say about his decision to expand conscription to girls.

Really, what is there to say? If girls are to gain the same level of power as boys, I have to admit it’s only fair for us to take on the same responsibility for defending Huaxia.

Giant dragon heads have been plastered on the doors of our carriage to mark it as a government vehicle. The last time I rode through West Chang’an, the lavish estates had barricaded their doors in terror. Now they’re wide open, revealing people bustling in the courtyards while looking the exact opposite of rich. Shabby clothes cling to their thin frames, yet they work the gardens, carry sacks of rice and bundles of vegetables, and cook in huge vats under the open sky while laughing and singing with each other.

Yizhi tells me and Qieluo that most estate owners fled to the countryside in the provinces, where revolutionary efforts are less organized and investigators are easier to avoid. Hence the checkpoints now on every road leading out of Chang’an. No one can leave without a permit. The ones who couldn’t make it out are either hiding deep in the city, or they’ve turned themselves in to the Gewei Bu in hopes of leniency at a formal trial, preferable to judgment by an angry mob. Their abandoned estates have been reconstituted as community shelters on Qin Zheng’s orders.

Further into the city, we come across a rally of people wearing yellow sashes around their heads or waists. They wave the Dragon Head Flag, hold up portraits of Qin Zheng, and wield hammers, wrenches, shovels, and other tools like weapons. Together, they’re singing a folk song from the historical Qin kingdom that’s been featured in a lot of revolutionary broadcasts.

“How could you say you have no clothes to wear? I will share my robe with you. His Majesty has called his army; I will prepare my ax and spear, and share an enemy with you…”

Yizhi spins his seat around to manually drive our carriage out of the rally’s way. Closer to the front, soldiers are shoving along handcuffed men who are either dressed in fine silks or scruffy disguises ruined by their pale, pristine skin. Furious gashes of ink inscribe accusations on their faces and clothes. Thief. Exploiter. Profitizer. Leech. Landlord.

“Your Highness inspired this, you know.” Yizhi keeps his voice at a feminine pitch so Qieluo has plausible deniability about knowing if he’s Wan’er or not.

“I did what ?” I exclaim, sounding more alarmed than I mean to.

“When soldiers in Chang’an arrest prominent figures now, they escort them to the Tianlao on foot like Your Highness did. Tons of people join along the way. They call it an Empress March. His Majesty says it’s a great way to encourage people to turn themselves in rather than trying to run or hide. Also keeps revolutionary energy at a controlled level.”

“That’s…excellent.” I watch the rally with a cool satisfaction. It’s good to see proof that I’ve developed some influence among the people.

If we weren’t on a schedule to meet Shimin’s kidney recipient, I might’ve joined this rally to get more clout.

Yizhi turns the carriage toward a different street. I look away reluctantly—but then I hear a woman’s frantic sobs during a lapse in the singing.

“Wait, stop!” I lurch forth in my seat, raising a hand.

Yizhi stalls the carriage.

One particular soldier is pushing a small, weeping old woman with white hair half scattered out of its bun, forcing her to march on her bound feet.

I grasp my door handle. “Who is that? What are they doing to her?”

Yizhi looks over his shoulder in concern, but then his expression goes blank. “Your Highness…that’s Ye Xingzhen, widow of a former Minister of Finance. The Gewei Bu recently found that she embezzled four hundred million yuán from the Bank of Huaxia through shell companies and proxies.”

I jerk back like I was singed by fire only to be dunked into frost. “ Four hundred million? ”

Qieluo swiftly goes scrolling on her tablet, then makes a choked noise. “Look at this.” She shows me a video of soldiers going through a walk-in closet full of tiny shoes with intricate embroidery. “Posted an hour ago. They found three thousand pairs of luxury-branded shoes in her estate.”

Yizhi nods. “She also ran a brothel dedicated to high-level officials to keep them turning a blind eye. She had a whole operation tricking girls from the countryside into working there and then not letting them leave.”

“Oh.” I slump in my chair. Now I notice the concentration of other women around her in the rally, their eyes red-rimmed but blazing with determination. One of them holds up a sign with not only Qin Zheng, but me as well. A depiction of us as silhouettes, him holding his sledgehammer to one side, me holding my scythe to the other, and our joined hands raised between us.

How could I have only seen Ye Xingzhen and not these women?

Four hundred million yuán. That’s almost half the assets Gao Qiu had. Impressive, honestly. She must be a genius in getting what she wants. I respect her capability enough to let her take full responsibility for it.

“Let’s move on,” I say with a flick of my hand.

Our carriage’s eventual destination is the kidney recipient’s xiǎoqū , a kind of gated compound most city apartments are huddled into. Qieluo and I put on veiled hats and hide our armor under heavy cloaks. It’s best if no one recognizes us. The carriage is just wide enough that the brims of our hats don’t touch. Yizhi slows down near the xiǎoqū ’s security gate and lowers his window to show his metal identification card to a security guard in a booth.

The guard’s eyes go wide. Yizhi raises a finger in a shushing gesture.

“Not a word of this to anyone,” Yizhi says, voice remaining feminine. “This carriage was never here.”

Nodding too many times, the guard presses a button in his booth. The security gate’s crisscrossed metal bars fold to the side to make an opening for us. A sense of awe stirs in me at Yizhi imposing this kind of fear while dressed as a staffer girl.

He reels his window back up and enlarges the neon-bright map on his control panel to see the xiǎoqū ’s finer details. After driving through several blocks of buildings, he stops near an open garden with a pond in the middle. I assume it was built as a communal space to relax or exercise, but now a semicircle of tiered benches surrounds the pond. STRENGTH THROUGH SOLIDARITY reads a banner in a pond gazebo, where a large screen has been set up. In front of the screen is a soldier conversing with a Revolutionary Vanguard—one of the community leaders Qin Zheng encouraged the masses to elect. Marked by the yellow, red, and black tricolor sashes around their waists and the dragon head pin over their hearts, they’re mostly union leaders, organizers, activists, or members of the smattering of laborist groups finally emerging into the light after centuries of suppression. When Wan’er and I watched a broadcast about the community elections, she laughed and told me these groups are actually full of petty drama and love to denounce each other based on tiny differences in interpretation of laborism. Everyone agrees that exploiting people’s labor is bad, but few agree on what to do about it. And the arguments can get very heated.

“No one hates laborists more than other laborists,” she quipped.

I don’t understand how they thought it was productive to split their already small ranks into even smaller ranks while getting persecuted by a common daunting enemy, but now, if they want to be leaders in this revolution, they all must accept Qin Zheng’s militant, aggressive interpretation of laborism and work together under his directives.

The Vanguard and the soldier glance briefly at our carriage but continue to talk while scrolling on a shared tablet. I guess they have no reason to be suspicious of a vehicle allowed through the security gate. I’m heartened when I realize the Vanguard is a middle-aged woman. The broadcasts said the elections aren’t limited to men, but I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it.

Yizhi spins his seat back toward me and Qieluo. He pulls his tablet out of his robes and shows me a file of another middle-aged woman. “Tang Anding and the other residents of her building are scheduled for a community outreach session in about ten minutes.”

I take off my veiled hat and clutch it like a shield in my lap as Yizhi lists off more facts about the woman. She’s fifty-nine this year. Chang’an native. Unbound. Managed a textiles business with her husband, the kind that’s a twinkle compared to the blinding glare of the mega corporations Qin Zheng and the Gewei Bu have been going after. When a degenerative disease struck her kidneys, her family pooled money to buy her a replacement. It’s unlikely they know they got it from the infamous Li Shimin. The prisons don’t tell people about the inmates they harvest each organ from, just how well they match up with the recipient.

More and more residents gradually file out between the buildings and onto the benches. While we wait for Tang Anding to show up, Yizhi twirls his thumbs, his head hanging low.

“What are we going to do when we see her?” His natural boy voice slips out for the first time on this trip, almost inaudible.

“I don’t know,” I say. I imagine yanking the woman into the carriage and telling her where her replacement kidney really came from: a boy she likely thought of as a monster, a boy I loved. She’d probably freak out and beg for forgiveness.

But then what? Neither Yizhi nor I have the right to grant that forgiveness. We can’t make her return the kidney, either. Not while the gods are holding Shimin among the stars.

Has a transplanted organ ever been returned to its original owner? Could it still function the same? Though, with the condition Shimin is in, he would need a lot more than one kidney back…

I shudder at the memory of him being forced into consciousness in that fluid-filled tank. I clutch my face, trying to somehow banish the image.

A hand pats my shoulder. I peek between my fingers at Qieluo, who’s doing her best to make a comforting expression. It’s not very effective on her face. She gives me two more light pats.

Before either of us can muster something to say, Yizhi straightens in his seat. “It’s her.”

A muffled barking approaches from behind the carriage. I twist around and, through the back window, spot a small white dog skittering down the road, wagging its stubby tail. At the other end of its leash is Tang Anding, looking older than the picture in her file but much more joyful. The lines on her face crinkle in a laugh as she jogs after her dog, nimble on her unbound feet.

Her joy paralyzes me. She is alive to feel this joy because of Shimin. However unwillingly, he shared his life force with this woman. He lives on within her.

I close my eyes and activate my spirit sense. Qieluo’s massive spirit signature hits like a punch at first, then I push past it and feel out Yizhi’s, then Tang Anding’s, and even her dog’s tiny flicker. After concentrating hard on Tang Anding’s signature, I can indeed sense two layers to it, as if her soul has an ember at its core, blazing with an agonizingly familiar warmth. I clasp my trembling hands together and press them to my forehead.

It’s you. I miss you so much.

When the spirit signature passes the carriage, I imagine it’s Shimin chasing after the dog. In my mind’s eye, he looks over his shoulder at me and Yizhi, cracking one of his rare yet dazzling smiles.

Tears scald down my cheeks and patter onto my cloak. When I open my raw, aching eyes, Yizhi and Qieluo are watching me with concern.

“I can sense Shimin,” I say, sniffling. I think it’s the first time I’ve been able to speak his name since the gods ripped him away. “A piece of his spirit is still alive inside hers.”

“Should we confront her?” Yizhi asks softly.

I give a firm shake of head. “No. If we do, she’ll be terrified. She’ll always be suspicious of strange carriages parking beside her. I want to be able to come back and feel that piece of Shimin’s spirit in peace, just like this.”

When Qieluo puts her hand over mine, I’m assured that this excuse sounds plausible for someone in grief. May the gods sense no sinister motive when I visit Tang Anding many more times after this.

May they have no clue I’ll be training the range of my spirit sense, wider and wider, until I can pinpoint them in the sky and bring them down.

After all, what is the point of a revolution if we don’t overthrow those who truly hold the most power over our world?