Chapter Twenty-Nine Iron Widows

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IRON WIDOWS

Doctor Hua determines that the anti-microbial shots wreaked havoc on my body. I breathe a sigh of relief when he discontinues them. With that layer of precaution gone, maybe Qin Zheng will think thrice before coming through that divider again.

Since I’m sick, I put off returning to the war front past a typical recuperation period, but soon the compounding crises in the Han province get too acute to ignore.

“The storm season has come to the south, Your Majesty,” Sima Yi says in front of the quarantine chamber one morning, showing an image on his tablet that features a swirl of vivid colors over the Huaxia coastline. “The venerated gods above are warning us about a once-in-a-generation super-typhoon on course for the Han frontier. The pilots will need all the support they can get.”

Qin Zheng peers at me across the glass divider. “Do you feel well enough, empress?”

Sitting at the foot of my bed, I drum my fingers on my knee. I could lie.

But what kind of example would I be setting for the newly conscripted girls? How could I convince them to respect and follow me if I’m avoiding a war they don’t get to run from? Not to mention that this typhoon does sound like a serious threat. The Han province has been plagued with the strongest reactionary activities. We cannot risk anything when it comes to it.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll go.”

With a look I can’t quite decipher, Qin Zheng rests his hand against the glass. “Are you sure?”

I hitch in surprise that he would ask. Then it hits me—is he doubting my ability to battle properly after last time?

“Yes, I can handle it.” I push to my feet, decently healed now that it’s been almost two months since the surgery. “Your Majesty doesn’t need to keep telling me how important it is.”

It’s his turn to look taken aback. Instead of recovering with some smug comment, he blinks, eyes flicking aside. It’s a strange reaction, but I’m guessing he’s distracted, thinking about how to prepare communities for the typhoon.

“Very well.” He takes his hand off the glass and turns toward his throne dais. “Do not forget to study the book I gave you. I will not tolerate having made all those annotations for nothing.”

“Understood, shīfu !” I say with fake eagerness.

He hurls me a dirty glare over his shoulder. I fix my face into the very picture of adulation, because that gets on his nerves more than my blatant insolence. This is how he wishes I would act, yet I’m taking all the satisfaction out of it.

After he heads up the dais, giving up on scolding me, I reach for my glass door. I catch Sima Yi looking at me weirdly.

“What?” I snap on my way out.

He ducks his head the moment he’s in danger of meeting my eyes directly. “Nothing, Your Highness.”

The first thing I do upon landing at the Han frontier again is visit the conscripted girls at the nearest training camp.

When Qieluo and I push through the cafeteria’s greasy glass doors, the hubbub inside dies in a receding tide, from the tables nearest the entrance to the very back. Qieluo closes our umbrella and shakes water from it. I survey the rows of tables until I spot what I’m looking for—the Iron Widow table.

Using my scythe like a staff, I make my way toward them. Qieluo keeps at my side. Our capes flutter behind us, and the clanks of our armor echo beneath the drumming of rain against the building. Although the super-typhoon isn’t here yet, the sky is already pouring water.

Metal benches scrape against the concrete ground as pilots, soldiers, and maintenance workers get up and raise their fists in salute. They’re all wearing yellow sashes around their waists.

“May my empress live for a thousand years, a thousand years, a thousand upon a thousand years!” they chant out of sync.

Goose bumps spread beneath my Nine-Tailed Fox armor. How many of them are doing it in earnest and how many still want me dead?

I focus on the table I’m approaching. The girls on one side spring up on natural feet, while those on the other side try to rise from wheelchairs. All conscripts with bound feet have gotten priority reversal surgeries.

“No need.” I flash my hand to excuse them from getting up, speaking beneath a cloth veil hooked over my ears. I couldn’t be bothered to replicate my Yellow Dragon mask with the Fox’s spirit metal.

“Power to the laboring class!” Qieluo gives the girls a raised-fist salute, shouting the slogan that’s caught on as a revolutionary greeting. She and Taiping have been extra diligent in keeping up with these trends. It’s dangerous to come off as an elite nowadays. The lowliest peasant can denounce even a governor for not showing enough enthusiasm for the revolution.

The girls call out the customary reply. “In solidarity we rise!”

“Sisters, may we join you?” I say.

The standing ones shuffle to make room on their bench. I lean my scythe against the wall and sit down with Qieluo. The moment we do, so does the rest of the cafeteria, sending a collective collapsing sound through the air.

This is going to be a very uncomfortable conversation if every eye is on us and every ear is listening.

“Get on with whatever you were doing!” I wave my hand at the other tables.

Hesitantly, they turn back to their food and friends, though their voices don’t rise above a murmur. I accept this as the best privacy I’ll get and go ahead with confirming the girls’ names and hometowns. I’ve had to make a chart to keep track of all the female conscripts across the frontiers.

For a province that’s mostly rural farmland, the Han girls are disproportionately city dwellers, either from the provincial capital Chengdu or one of its few other cities. Which isn’t surprising. Urban testing centers can go through hundreds of kids in a day, while rural families have to either wait for a mobile testing team or trek to the nearest town.

In general, revolutionary change spreads more unpredictably in the countryside. After the initial wave of peasants forcing their landlords to burn their land titles, landlords have been fighting back with the help of the elite families that have escaped the cities with their dirty fortunes. They pay people to set fire to harvests, poison livestock, and murder rebellious tenants, often leaving their disemboweled bodies as a warning. Since the countryside is so vast, and extensive tunnels exist beneath them from the Warring Era, it’s very easy for the culprits to vanish.

“Guerilla insurgency,” Wan’er told me this was called.

They also spread wild misinformation among the peasants, such as that we’re forcing people to share everything down to their blankets and toothbrushes, or that we’re no longer recognizing marriages and will mandate every woman to sleep around, particularly with Rongdi men. Nonsense like this is turning a concerning number of people toward Zhuge Liang and the reactionaries. I almost feel bad for Qin Zheng whenever I see how stressed out he gets at every report from the countryside.

When I don’t have the knowledge to solve these problems, the best I can do for the revolution is to keep the frontiers secure with these new Iron Widows. Yet the more I hear them laugh and talk about how great it’s been since they became pilots, how they got to move their families into luxury apartments expropriated from real estate developers, the more I regret coming to face them. Images of them getting crushed in battle flicker behind my eyes.

I make them confirm that, in addition to typical strategist training, they’re getting dream training as well. The practice has spread pretty widely since Qieluo and I reintroduced it, with Han pilots going to other frontiers during their recuperation periods to enlighten the pilots there. There was apparently a lot of ruckuses on the boys’ part about falling asleep next to each other, but they got over it. During this deployment, I can teach Qieluo the fresh round of stuff I learned from Qin Zheng; then she can pass it down the chain to these new girls, hopefully before their first battles.

While I only know the local Han girls from digital conversations facilitated by Wan’er, two here are from the seven in Chang’an that I presented to the cameras. Liang Yuhuan, the one with the highest spirit pressure, already has her own Chrysalis: the Plum Blossom Deer, manifested a week ago from a Count-class Hundun I’d taken down with a clean strike. Her Metal-white spirit armor covers her torso in solid plates and her limbs in a flower-patterned mesh. Her pilot crown consists of two wreaths of blossoms with four antlers sprouting out like tree branches, further adorned with petals.

“Did you have to pick such a girly form, though?” Guo Anle, the second Chang’an girl, pokes a blossom on Yuhuan’s crown after Yuhuan retells the thrill of manifesting her Chrysalis.

“I didn’t choose it!” Yuhuan laughs while popping a lychee into her mouth. “I swear, I saw a deer spirit coming toward me in my mind, and then, before I knew it, that was what my Chrysalis was becoming. Besides, ‘girly’ doesn’t mean weak .” She beams, one cheek full like a chipmunk’s. “Wait until you see me in battle. Then you’ll eat your words.”

Bile rises in my throat. I grab my scythe and pull myself up from the bench. “All right, sisters, this has been a good talk. Work hard on your control over spirit metal. You’ll need the skill.”

I get away from the table as fast as I can. Qieluo hastens to follow me, glancing back and forth between me and the girls.

Halfway to the doors, a shout from a familiar young voice sends a prickle up my spine.

“Your Highness!”

I turn to see Liu Che running toward me in his Azure Dragon armor. He crashes to his knees before me, cape pooling behind him. His hands splay on the stained concrete, one of them with an unnerving stump where its little finger should be.

“I solemnly apologize to Your Highness for my foolish, ignorant actions.” He knocks his forehead against the ground, yet he sounds as flat as the guidance voice in electric carriages.

My skin shrivels at a memory of him standing over me, sword glowing with Fire-red qì, the smell of burnt flesh drifting from the two guards he killed.

The cafeteria has gone quiet again except for the sound of rain. Everyone is staring.

“You’re excused,” I say, my mouth sour.

He hammers his forehead against the ground a second time. “I deserve a thousand cuts and ten thousand lacerations.”

“Okay, calm down! You’ve been punished already. Just don’t do it again.”

“In my next life I shall serve as Your Highness’ cattle or horse!”

I almost start cussing at him. Scrutiny skewers me from every direction, including from Qieluo.

“I am very busy, Captain Liu,” I say. “I’d rather see you serving Huaxia to your full abilities in this life than wallowing about what you might do in the next. Take care.”

I whirl away.

I don’t know who made him do that, but if they meant for it to comfort me, they accomplished the exact opposite.