Chapter Thirty-One Defeat

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

DEFEAT

I wish I didn’t have to wake up ever again. Enduring my nightmares is more bearable than enduring reality.

A glass bottle glistens in a slant of moonlight above me, dripping into a line connected to the back of my hand. In flashes, I recall carrying the little girl to the Great Wall in the Fox’s cockpit, then being ushered to the infirmary in the nearest training camp and passing out as an army physician examined her.

Why didn’t your family evacuate? I wanted to scream at the girl, except they would’ve been fine in their cellar if I hadn’t let the Hunduns through the Wall. This is what happens when they get to humans. How did I think that mercy was mine to give?

When my gaze drops from the bottle, I find not the girl, but Yuhuan sitting in a second bed in the room, her elegant profile varnished by the moon through a window. An intravenous line connects to her hand as well. She’s staring at the white-tiled walls, seldom blinking.

A bad feeling bubbles inside me. When I went to park the Fox at its docking bridge, she and the strategists were still figuring out how to position the Plum Blossom Deer to safeguard the Wall breach while it gets repaired. She sounded perfectly perky then, but I wasn’t there to see what happened when she disconnected.

“Yuhuan?” I say.

“Your Highness!” She scrambles to get out of bed.

“No need.” I hold up a hand while scooting up in my own bed. “Yuhuan, what…happened?”

She falls still. Her gaze goes unfocused.

“I killed him,” she says, sounding more confused than anything else. “One second I could feel his mind in the back of mine, then the moment I disconnected, he was…” She puts a hand to her forehead.

A cold weight sinks in my stomach.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I rush to say. “These things happen when piloting a Chrysalis. Power comes at a price that’s usually out of our control.”

“I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t mean it.”

“Of course you didn’t. You were defending Huaxia. I couldn’t have made it without you, and you couldn’t have done such a good job if you’d held back. Your co-pilot volunteered for his role, didn’t he?”

Her breathing quickens. “He worked at his dad’s bank. They both got charged with fraud after the revolution. He took a plea deal to become a support pilot rather than do ten years of hard labor.”

So that’s how Qin Zheng is getting boys to volunteer for female pilots like Yuhuan.

I pull myself up with my drip stand and wheel it over to sit next to her.

“He knew what he was getting into. He made the decision to enlist.” I reach for the words people use for dead concubine-pilots, saying anything I can think of to keep her from shattering. “He proudly gave his life for Huaxia, and his soul will rest well in the Yellow Springs. His noble sacrifice will not be in vain.”

Leaning against me, she buries her face in her hands. “He was twenty-one. He worked at that bank for less than a year.”

A lump swells in my throat. I wrap my arms around her and mumble, “Next time, don’t ask them so many questions about themselves. It’ll only hurt more.”

Her shoulders shake. “Why does it have to be like this?”

“Because otherwise the Hunduns will kill us all. You saw what happened.”

“Wh-when they said you can feel the Hunduns die if you stab them, I didn’t think it’d be so…real.”

“That’s just a defense mechanism, like a bee stinging you as it dies.” I parrot the words Qieluo soothed herself with. One by one, I’m discovering the reasons for these platitudes I hated. Why people repeat them despite how meaningless they are to the dead. Why our ancestors, stranded in this world, invented a different reality. Why generation after generation of people in charge continued the lies.

Yuhuan is in this position because I wanted powerful supporters so badly that I brought about her conscription. When she has no choice but to fight, I cannot let her become like me, forever bogged down in battle by the truth.

The Han engineers claim my sirens malfunctioned due to the typhoon. It sure is a convenient coincidence for those who want me dead, especially when word about the breach spreads like wildfire on the networks by morning, despite the army ordering it kept secret.

Instantly, the entire scope of devastation across the south gets blamed on me. Then the blame extends to women in general. Then to the revolution as a whole and everything it stands for. It doesn’t matter that a once-in-a-generation super-typhoon did most of the damage, and it was the old order that built the buildings that didn’t hold up. People aren’t interested in facts; they’ll believe the spin on a story that best reinforces their existing opinions.

Although I would’ve liked to spend the rest of my life curled up in the infirmary, I can’t cower while the narrative spirals out of control. As soon as the army doctors clear me to leave, I drag myself back to Chang’an to face Qin Zheng.

“You failed to reply to any of my messages,” is the first thing he says upon seeing me again, hands on his hips in his quarantine chamber.

I halt in my wheelchair, too qì-exhausted to walk. “ That’s what you’re mad at me for?”

“I will not fault you for an equipment failure,” he says, more gently. Or maybe he’s just exhausted, too, from the countless problems he has to deal with on his end. I didn’t know it was possible for the shadows under his eyes to get even darker.

I clasp my hands in my lap, my thumb swiping back and forth on my gauntlets. “I don’t believe it was an accident. I think there are reactionaries among the Han engineers.”

“Agreed,” he says, with a look that raises the hairs on my arms, the look that gets in his eyes when he deals out death as statistics. “I’ll be sending personnel for an independent review.”

“Good,” I say to the floor. I can’t stop thinking about that little girl in the flattened cellar, how she trembled as she climbed onto the Fox’s rain-slicked paw so I could take her away from her destroyed home and dead family. It’s dumbfounding that people would resort to endangering Huaxia itself to frame me, but that’s how the counter-revolutionaries are. They’d rather die than accept a changed world that doesn’t privilege them as much.

At least I don’t have to worry about who will take care of the girl. Orphanages have been getting much better support under Qin Zheng. Since, you know, his executions are creating a notably increased need for them.

I don’t notice the silence that fell in the throne room until I hear him take a step forward.

“Are you—”

His knuckles hit the glass. My head jerks up.

He gawks at his hand, looking just as startled, then gives a huff and shakes his head.

“Are you all right?” he says.

“I’m…fine.” I shift in my wheelchair, not liking the way he’s looking at me, as if I’m a broken thing to be pitied. “The villages near the southern coast are the ones suffering. You need to get them aid right away.”

“Of course. But first—” He goes up on the dais to his desk and comes down with a thick piece of paper and a pen. He places them in the glass wall’s transfer box. “Sign this.”

I take it out from the hatch on my end, only to be stunned by the words at its top. “This is—”

“Our marriage certificate. It occurred to me that we neglected to file this document after things took an…unexpected turn…at our wedding.”

“Why would we need to sign a marriage certificate?”

“Recordkeeping is fundamental,” he insists. “Particularly at the highest levels of government. Every meal you eat is logged and every cent spent on your transportation is deducted from a precise palace budget, or have you not noticed? Legally speaking, whatever an ordinary citizen must file, we must as well. This includes changing our marital status and registering as a new family unit at this address.”

“We’re not a…Okay, fine.” I scribble my name as messily as I can, because I think that’s what you’re supposed to do when signing something. His own signature gives me pause. I run my finger over its ferocious strokes, pressed into the paper. “This document looks ridiculous. Our birthdays are over two hundred years apart.”

“How questionable can a difference in age be after the one-hundred-year mark?”

Unamused, I stuff the certificate back in the box. He fetches it with an air of triumph, though I really don’t know why this was necessary. He could’ve gotten a clerk to fake my signature, and I’d have nowhere to complain.

“Stay here. I have something else for you as well.” He returns the certificate to his desk before disappearing to the back rooms behind the dais. When he reemerges, he’s holding a steaming bowl of something with a spoon in it.

“My shīfu ’s recipe to aid qì replenishment,” he explains. “Lotus seeds, peanuts, red beans, jujubes, goji berries, silver ear, and rock sugar.”

A recipe by General Mi Xuan?

“You just randomly had that back there?” I stretch to try and see into the bowl.

“I made it.”

“ You made it?”

“Sometimes it gets rather aggravating to wait for the kitchen to test everything for poison, so I requested some cookware and installed a pantry.” He slides the bowl into the transfer box. It quickly fogs up the small space.

“Uh. Thanks.” I take the bowl out. It’s a dark purple congee, its warm vapors caressing my face when I stir it with the spoon. This is so uncharacteristic for him that it’s concerning. It feels like a certain trap, though I don’t know why he would poison me when the Wall breach gives him the perfect excuse to execute me in a great public spectacle.

“I must say, automatic pressure cookers are a marvel. You can leave a recipe in there for hours, and it’ll stay warm without burning.” Qin Zheng hauls a chair up to the glass wall and straddles it in reverse, resting his arms on its back. “Eat it while it’s hot.”

I guess there’s no graceful way to carry this elsewhere in a wheelchair. And he would probably get angry enough to make that execution happen if I refused it.

I scoop up a spoonful, blow on it, then give it a taste.

“It’s good!” I look at him in genuine delight. “Like, the perfect level of sweet.”

He breaks into a smile he tries to hide, moving his hand in front of it as if he’s wiping his face.

I expect him to leave me alone to eat it, yet he soon goes back to watching me with a severe gaze. Does he plan on supervising me until I finish the whole thing? I try to ignore him, focusing on the miracle of Mi Xuan’s cooking reaching me across centuries, but halfway down the bowl, I decide to mess with him a little.

“Mmm, this is soooo good.” I give the spoon a slow, languorous lick.

He winces, eyes snapping shut, and his whole body clenches against the chair. I fight down a laugh.

“There’s more in the back, if you want,” he says, voice rougher than usual.

“Oh, yes, shīfu , please .”

He buries his face in his hands. The tips of his ears go red. “Will you stop that?”

“Stop watching me eat, then.” I shove another spoonful into my mouth. “Go start on getting aid to the south. Oh—actually, let me go personally pass out relief packages. Maybe that’ll get the people to hate me less.”

He falls still, hand partway down his face. “You realize nothing will salvage your reputation short of making the announcement, don’t you?”

My stomach sinks, though I’ve been prepared for this for a while now. When the reactionaries’ strongest tactic for swaying soldiers to their side is to pin everything on me , a more acceptable target to rage at than Qin Zheng, becoming a less acceptable target really is an effective counter.

“Yeah. Let’s tell everyone I’m pregnant.”

I appear silent beside him in his next broadcast, where he announces to Huaxia that “we” are pregnant. He reiterates that pilot titles cannot be inherited—he was the one who banned that two centuries ago—so the child won’t automatically be heir to the empire, but he expresses his optimism that the kid will one day test to be a powerful pilot and do great service for Huaxia. He speaks of his pride in my fertility, as if it takes some kind of talent to lie there and let a man (or syringe) shoot the necessary fluid into me, and how I’m determined to keep up the war effort even as an expectant mother.

In reality, I was filmed completely separately from him, and then my footage was stitched onto the same throne room background. A fitting arrangement for two people supposedly having a baby together despite not being able to touch skin to skin. The only ones who know it’s a bluff are me, Qin Zheng, Yizhi, Sima Yi, and Doctor Hua, who gives me a guide on how much padding to gradually add in front of my belly to make it look like there’s a baby growing in there. Not even Wan’er, Taiping, or Qieluo know the truth. The fewer people who are in on it the better.

Even though I was counting on the announcement to transform my image, I hate how well it works. All of a sudden, I am no longer the conniving yet incompetent vixen who nearly doomed Huaxia; instead, I’m a pregnant girl who did her best. Wan’er tells me that digital comments speak of me with newfound sympathy. Some actually worry about me, suggesting I take a break from the war. They yell at anyone who continues to blame me for the Wall breach, especially after Qin Zheng’s independent inspection team uncovers evidence of tampering in the siren systems. It implicates a suspiciously large number of personnel at the Han frontier, but what do I know about technology? I feel no rush to beg for their lives. The entire province could’ve fallen because of what happened.

During my post-battle recuperation period—which the military’s existing pregnancy guidelines extend to a month instead of two weeks—I fly across the south with a production crew to get some good shots of me hand-delivering aid to devastated villages. If I’m going to be a motherly figure now, I might as well commit to the bit. The visits are awkward at first, with the villagers staring at me blank-faced after hearing so much about how wicked and devious I am. But the free stuff soon gets them to relax. I convince them the clump of cells allegedly growing in my uterus has compelled me to become an utterly different person. By the fifth village, there’s cheering when my hovercraft lands. Peasant women shout to me from behind the lines of my guards, waving little shoes, clothes, or toys they made for my nonexistent baby, from whatever material they could salvage after losing most of their worldly possessions to the typhoon. I truly do not know what to feel about this.

New revolutionary posters get plastered everywhere, featuring me holding a baby bundle up on the Nine-Tailed Fox’s shoulder, or in front of a smoldering battlefield, my eyes determined and my cape billowing behind me. They often come with a caption in big block text: Iron by Birth, Made Steel by Motherhood .

It always provokes a twitch under my eye, but I never turn down a posing session for the Ministry of Culture, which now funds Huaxia’s best artists to churn out posters, pamphlets, plays, games, radio dramas, and screen dramas espousing laborist principles. Whatever works to strengthen my position.

In private, my obvious displeasure saves me from hearing much talk about the baby from Wan’er, Taiping, and Qieluo. Yet they do act more cautiously around me, advising me on what or what not to eat and rushing to support me if I show the slightest unsteadiness. I can’t stand it. It’s like I’m walking around with a giant bruise of defeat for the world to see.

I keep reminding myself this is a temporary ruse, no longer necessary once we defeat Zhuge Liang, Kong Zhuxi, and their reactionary forces. The Gewei Bu is closing in on them with every foiled plot and uncovered base.

I cannot wait for this fake baby nonsense to be over.