Chapter Twenty-Eight Liaisons

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

LIAISONS

In the mornings, Shimin is always the first to wake, diligent as the sun. He untangles from me and Yizhi, brews a pot of tea, and reads in the peace and quiet before we disrupt it with our antics. When he hears me and Yizhi bullying each other to get out of bed, he turns on the stove and makes breakfast, usually noodles or porridge. By the time Yizhi and I finally drag ourselves out, the food is ready. We thank Shimin in kisses.

There comes a thumping at our front door, though I’m the only one who can hear it. Ignoring it, I continue to laugh and eat with Yizhi and Shimin. Something terrible will happen if I acknowledge the sound. I just know.

Once we finish our food, Yizhi does the dishes while I wipe down the table. I smile when Shimin wraps his arms around Yizhi at the sink and kisses Yizhi on the head. I keep smiling despite the persistent pounding at the door—

Cracks splinter across the floor, the walls, the windows.

“No!” I cover my ears as the pounding gets louder, shaking the entire apartment.

There’s the sound of something shattering. Shimin stumbles away from Yizhi, red patches of blood blooming over his clothes. Lines like molten lava fracture across his skin.

“Stop!” I exclaim. With impossibly painless steps, I spring out of my wheelchair and wrench open the front door. “ What do you want? ”

The instant I recognize the face in the doorway, disappointment crushes me. Because if he ’s here, none of this is real.

“Enough indulging in fantasies.” Qin Zheng leans his elbow against the door frame. “We have work to—”

Footsteps storm up behind me.

Shimin swings a punch into Qin Zheng’s face. Qin Zheng collides with the wall outside, grappling for balance.

My mouth hangs open.

Bracing against the wall with one hand and clutching his cheek with the other, Qin Zheng looks as bewildered as when I brought him back to life and told him he’d overslept for two centuries. Shimin remains at my side, fists clenched.

“Impossible,” Qin Zheng utters. “This…hurts.”

I break into a cold laugh. “Good.”

Disgruntled, he straightens himself. “I suppose it bodes well for our mission when your connection to him is strong enough to create such a vivid apparition.”

I’m stung by the reminder that, no matter how solid this Shimin feels, he isn’t real. I take his hand and run my thumb over his scarred knuckles, cherishing his dream-conjured warmth one last time. How I wish I could shut off the rest of my mind and live in this fantasy…

But the real Shimin is out there among the stars, and I must return to reality to have a chance of freeing him from his torment.

“Thank you,” I whisper almost soundlessly.

The apparition of Shimin glowers at Qin Zheng, then gazes down at me with a wet shine in his eyes. If the real Shimin learned what’s become of me, he’d no doubt look at me with this same expression.

“I’ll be all right.” I squeeze his hands before letting go.

I don’t look back as I step through the doorway to join Qin Zheng, who’s still rubbing his cheek in astonishment.

“He could not have been that tall,” he mutters.

“Well, he was.”

“I’ll have you know, I was above average height for my time. Our nutrition was poorer back then.”

“I didn’t say anything about you.”

In every training session, Qin Zheng bends my mind a different way, challenging me to rethink my perspectives on everything from reality to consciousness to matter. My progress comes in small bursts, shifting the dense Earth-type spirit metal of my armor a little more each day. I get a pottery wheel and learn to sculpt clay in real life to practice making constructs. I’m nowhere close to Qin Zheng’s ability to manipulate it like mercury, but he has over a decade of piloting experience on me. There’s no catching up except with patience.

“So far, you have relied on the sheer size of your Chrysalises to win battles,” Qin Zheng says in one particular session, manifesting a training ground between brick buildings. “That is rather graceless. With more refined combat techniques, you could use your qì more efficiently. It is easy to crush whole cities with a powerful Chrysalis, but that tends to unite your enemies in outrage and invite allied retaliation on your people. In my time, the better strategy was often to sneak into the enemy’s bases and take out specific targets. Behold, this is the Yellow Dragon armor’s assault mode.”

He gets into a battle stance and forms a sword in his double-handed grip. His bead-curtain crown melts into a helmet with the rough, rippled texture of a dragon’s head. It extends in flaps down to his shoulders, protecting his neck. Antlers sprout out from its top, sloping back from his forehead. Guard plates slam together in front of his face, leaving only a narrow gap for his eyes.

Without warning, he lunges at me. I yelp as his sword slashes across my torso, leaving a gouge in my armor.

“ Keep up ,” he growls.

I have no weapon, and forging one is as hard as it is in real life when we’re in a dream scene grounded in memory. I scuttle backwards, blocking his strikes with my gauntlets while reaching for my Water qì, necessary for morphing out constructs. I remind myself of its icy, fluid feeling—the sensation that guides me to it every time I practice channeling different qì types.

Qin Zheng’s irises beam silver in the shadow of his helmet. The same radiance spreads along the edge of his sword. His next swing, sharpened by Metal qì, hacks through my arm, hitting bone. Blood bursts from the gash, drawing a hiss out of me.

He backs me against a building and drives his sword all the way through my torso. The blade wedges into the brick wall behind me.

I cry out from a detonation of pain. I grab his shoulder guard with one hand and his sword with the other to keep him from thrusting it deeper inside me. The blade cuts through my gauntlets and into my hands. Blood dribbles from my grasp. The awareness that this isn’t real does nothing to shake the dream realm’s binding effects.

“I could kill you over and over,” Qin Zheng murmurs, his shielded face almost touching mine, his eyes half-lidded with an odd tenderness.

Of course he enjoys this. Sick bastard.

He twists his sword. I bite back another scream, refusing to give him the satisfaction of hearing it.

Laughter rolls low in his throat. “How does it feel, knowing you can never best me in anything?”

Venomous hatred courses through me. I imagine it darkening into the black of Water qì.

His shoulder guard softens in my hand. I pry it off while stretching it into a weapon. It breaks free, crooked and uneven, but good enough for stabbing his neck. I sharpen it with my naturally dominant Metal qì and puncture his neck guard. He lurches back, pulling his sword out of me. Blood gushes from my wound. I ignore the illusion and keep going at him with my crude blade. Summoning what little I can of Earth qì, I reinforce the blade so his counterstrikes don’t sever it.

“That’s it!” he shouts while parrying my frenzied attacks. “Remember this feeling, this clarity of purpose, and learn to channel it!”

My snarl loosens. I meet his sword with slightly less ferocity, feeling like I’ve been swindled into improving.

I always wake up from dream training feeling as if my mind has been shredded apart and then crammed back into my skull. Too often, I find myself pausing in the middle of a moment and questioning if it’s real. It’s hard to keep track when everything I feel in reality can be replicated in a dream realm. There are but a few reliable differentiators: If Qin Zheng can touch me, it’s not real. If my body aches after a few moves, it’s real.

There’s been a learning curve to balancing on my new feet. My hips and legs burn from using slightly different muscles. While I have to admit I feel a lot less pain in each step, I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely free of it. I practice walking without my scythe or spirit armor in case I have to go without either, and I spar with Qieluo to build muscle memory for the combat techniques Qin Zheng teaches me. I can keep decently steady by expanding the soles of my armor and maintaining a wide stance. I’ll never be an impressive fighter in my human body, but I can sure make it as difficult as possible for someone to hurt me.

Throughout my jam-packed schedule of lessons and training, the ultimate goal of taking down the gods and freeing Shimin never stops thrumming in the back of my mind. The big problem is how to get Taiping and her math skills in on the plan without alerting the gods. Her spirit pressure definitely can’t sustain a dream realm with me, and randomly asking her to go down to the tunnels with me would scream “Suspicious Activity!”

Though…not if the gods think we’re doing something else .

I begin to give her long looks during our dinners, touching her arm more than necessary. I laugh too hard at her jokes. I take a set of bedding down to the tunnels along with a bag of supplies, throwing in pen and paper as if as an afterthought.

Once Taiping is okay to leave her wheelchair for short periods—her surgery was easier to heal from than mine since it involved no bone remodeling—I coyly lead her down the rickety elevator to the tunnels one night, telling her I want to show her something.

“Y-your Highness,” she stammers when she sees the bedding. “I am very sorry, it’s not that I don’t find you attractive, but I cannot in good conscience be with you when you are so much younger, not to mention you used to date my baby brother, which is way too weird —”

I give a vigorous shake of head and put a silencing finger to my lips. I’m pretty sure the gods can’t see so deep into the ground, but I’m still paranoid they could hear us. Sound travels far in the tunnels. As Taiping stands in awkward confusion, I dig the pen and paper out of the bedding and get to the ground to write NEED MATH HELP .

“Is that…a euphemism?” She raises a brow.

I gesture harsher for her to be silent, then I write TOP SECRET MATH. CANNOT TELL YOU WHAT FOR. YOUR LIFE DANGER.

Her expression shifts into a different breed of concern. She sits down and waits for me to elaborate.

With clumsy writing, I explain the calculations we need and that they must be done without digital devices. In our last dream session, Qin Zheng conjured a diagram consisting of our planet, the Heavenly Court orbiting around it, and the Yellow Dragon, accompanied by giant numbers with units I don’t really understand. He made me copy the diagram over and over in the dream realm, literally several hundred times, until I could produce every line and digit from memory.

I replicate them for Taiping now. I don’t explicitly tell her our goal is to ambush the gods, but judging by the way all color leaves her face, she has a good guess.

IMPORTANT , I write. MUST DO FOR FREEDOM.

I circle FREEDOM several times.

Taiping shuts her eyes, chest rising and falling with weighty breaths. Then she nods.

She gets to work on my pad of paper, scrawling calculations while frowning at my diagram.

I’m not aware of dozing off against the tunnel wall until she wakes me up several hours later, looking frazzled, sitting among a mess of ink-filled pages. She hands over her own set of numbers and amendments to the diagram, with many question marks and a written list of things she needs clarification on.

Sneaking the papers to Qin Zheng would be too suspicious, so I once again copy the contents until they’re burned into my memory, then I rush over to the throne room to relay them in our dream realm.

Like this, he and Taiping communicate via me across several nights, talking about concepts I pass on without fully comprehending, having debates across the boundaries of reality. Especially about something to do with “matching velocity.”

IF YOU DO NOT MATCH THE HORIZONTAL VELOCITY, YOU WILL BE VAPORIZED UPON CONTACT , Taiping writes in huge, bold characters.

The debate ends with Qin Zheng relenting to change the Yellow Dragon’s projected trajectory from straight up to diagonal.

I hope the gods don’t read too much into this pattern of me spending the first half of my evenings with Taiping and the latter half with Qin Zheng. I hope they’re merely entertained by my salaciousness.

The only person I wish didn’t misunderstand my liaisons is Wan’er. She had a decent streak of being less harsh on Taiping following her friend’s arrest, but after I started fake-flirting with Taiping, she became utterly different around us, too stiff and formal. Finally, I can’t stand it anymore and take her along to the tunnels one night so we can tell her it’s not what she thinks. That it’s too dangerous for her to know exactly what we’re doing, but it’s nothing decadent.

When Wan’er looks up in astonishment from the paper Taiping wrote this down on, I go farther down the tunnels to give them some privacy to sort things out. I know too well what it’s like to be forced to keep a distance from someone you treasure, despite seeing them every day. I can’t do the same to them.

I can’t help but look over my shoulder every so often. With distance, they become shadowy figures scribbling on a piece of paper they pass back and forth, faster and faster, until Wan’er balls it up and chucks it at Taiping. Taiping surges forward, seizing Wan’er by the wrists. Their silhouettes meet at the mouths.

I turn around very quickly.

A wide grin pushes onto my face, but I also feel a hollow ache in my heart, mourning how I can no longer have the same.

As my recuperation period reaches its end, counting down to when I’ll have to head to the war front again, I somehow feel worse than when I was qì-exhausted by battle. One early morning I wake up with the worst nausea I’ve ever felt and a pinching pain low in my belly. I mean to climb out of bed but end up tumbling to the floor.

“Empress?” Qin Zheng sits up under his covers and palms the glass between us, his shoulders traced out by the barest hint of blue light from the throne room’s paper windows. “Are you all right?”

When I let out nothing but a weak groan, Qin Zheng lunges to press an intercom on his wall. “Send in a physician! Quickly!”

I pull myself up by my bed frame, but can’t do anything more than rest my throbbing head against the cool metal. Qin Zheng throws on his black robe and marches to the front of his chamber. He gives the glass a frustrated slap, then paces back to the intercom to call for a physician again. After he does so, he leans over his bed, his knees on the mattress, and thumps his fist on the glass divider between us.

“Speak to me,” he demands. “What symptoms do you feel?”

My mind is too cloudy. Speaking is too difficult.

“Empress!” He pounds the glass twice more.

I resign myself to the idea of spending the rest of the day in this spot, half draped over my bed. But, seconds later, there’s a metallic clatter, followed by the hiss of pressure unsealing.

Qin Zheng slides open the door in the glass divider and storms toward me.

“ Whatthefuck —” I scramble backwards across the white-tiled floor, shielding my nose and mouth. Has he lost his mind? Even with the shots I’m getting, there’s no guarantee I’m not carrying a disease he has no immunity to. “Stay away! I could kill you!”

His momentum hitches, but he drops to one knee in front of me, hand splayed on the ground.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he insists, half shadowed in the thin dawn light.

I breathe too quickly against my palm. His proximity charges every fiber in my body to full alert. It reminds me of a time I was sure I heard a tiger growl in the woods near my village, how I stood paralyzed against a tree, mind blanking on what to do. I was supposed to be safe on this side of the glass, beyond his reach, no matter how close he pressed.

“I’m…” I shift awkwardly, feeling a dreaded wetness between my legs that suddenly explains a lot. “I think my bleeding’s come early.”

Qin Zheng goes still. Several expressions twitch past his face before he says, “I see.”

The sound of rapid, muffled footsteps approaches from outside the throne room.

“Go back!” I grab a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol from a cabinet behind me and spritz him several times.

He recoils against the stringent mist like a disgruntled cat, but slips back into his chamber and seals the door just as Doctor Hua races in with a few staffers, shouting apologies for the delay.

“Tend to her.” Qin Zheng gives a flick of his hand and leans backward against the glass he shouldn’t have breached, as if he couldn’t care less what happened to me.