Chapter Thirty-Two More Beyond This

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

MORE BEYOND THIS

The smell of rice wine pervades a candlelit room. A woman slouches against the wooden wall in a thin robe, her bare legs tangled in her stained sheets. Loose hair obscures her face, and strands of it are sticking to the glass bottle in her hand.

Mother . I intuitively recognize her.

My small hands nudge at her shoulder. “ Niáng ?”

She shrugs me away, muttering something under her wine-pungent breath.

“ Niáng , get up. Come on, get up.” I tug her arm. “You’ve gotta eat something.”

“Shut up!” She swings her bottle at me. It shatters over my cheek and sends me tumbling to the floor. “Why didn’t you die?” She holds me down and drags the broken bottle over my face as I scream and flail. “ Why won’t you die? ”

The pain shocks me free. I trip backwards, winded. The room vanishes. What remains is Qin Zheng in a blank white realm, hunched over with his back to me, clutching his cheek. His shoulders heave up and down.

Slowly, he turns around. His hand falls, revealing the jagged scars across half his face.

It’s a while before either of us finds our words.

“I suppose you’ve met your mother-in-law,” he says, eyes on his palm instead of me. He appears not in his armor, or neat historical garb, but in the plain black robe and careless bun he usually sports in his quarantine chamber.

Huh. That was the most viscerally I’ve experienced a memory of his, not to mention one he must’ve locked deep inside.

What other secrets about him can I draw out while he’s vulnerable?

Right as he moves to say something else, I reach up for his face with my gauntleted hand. Being armored has become so natural to me that it’s my default look in dream realms. He freezes up when my metallic fingertips graze his scars.

“You keep them in here, when you can look however you want to,” I remark. “Why?”

When he had the pox, he certainly didn’t let those carry onto his spirit form.

“I hold no memory of possessing a perfect face. I was much too young when I received these scars.” He curls his hand around my wrist as if to wrench my arm away, yet ends up applying no pressure. Something about that unsettles me more. I slip my hand out of his grasp, though I keep gazing up into his eyes.

“What happened to her after you rose as a pilot? The stories don’t say.”

A long, heavy sigh unspools from him, a sound holding years of weariness. He turns to walk away.

I keep up with him. It doesn’t feel like he’s abandoning this conversation, just that he doesn’t want to face me while having it. Rosy sand appears beneath our steps while the Southern Ocean spreads to infinity at our side under illusionary stars. Its waters glow pink as it swooshes and crashes against the beach. I haven’t seen it look like that during my deployments. I’m not sure if I’d have to wait for a different season, or if it’s a phenomenon of Qin Zheng’s time lost to our own.

He walks for a long stretch of silence before saying, “She may have ended up in an enemy brothel following her capture, but after we returned to Qin she had to keep selling her body. She could do nothing else. Her family would not take her back, and no man would accept her as a wife. Once I began receiving a pilot salary, I told her she would never have to do that again and settled her in a residence near the military base.”

I shield my eyes against a sandy wind, so real it must’ve been spun out of a memory. “Even after how she treated you?”

“You believe I should have left her to languish?”

“Of course not. I just didn’t take you for the forgiving type.”

“It was not forgiveness. It was…”

He slows to a stop and faces the ocean. The salt-tinged wind flutters his black robe and stirs the stray strands of his hair bun. “You must understand. For so long, she was all I had. Even in the moments I hated her, I could not stop longing for her to change for the better.”

“Did she?”

There’s another stifling pause before he answers. “She no longer dared to hurt me, but she never ceased to hurt herself. During one of my final unification campaigns, her staffers found her in her bath with her wrists sliced open. Today is the anniversary.”

“Oh,” I say, so quietly I’m not sure he heard. The wind blows colder. I wrap my arms around myself, shivering.

He squints at the luminous waves. “She often used to tell me that when she was pregnant with me, she attempted to get rid of me using every method the other brothel women knew. None of them worked. At times, I used to grieve over her lack of success. Other times, I raged over the fact that she tried in the first place. It took me many years to accept that she had very little control over the material conditions that made her who she was. She was fifteen years of age when she had me. I mourn the people we could have been if a different world had shaped us.”

He steps forth, one stride after another into the glowing water. The bottom of his robe floats up around him.

“Hey!” I splash after him, reaching out, though I drop my arm when I remember there’s nothing to worry about in here. Radiant seawater ebbs and flows around my armored legs. An ache radiates from Qin Zheng, increasing an unnatural pressure in my chest the closer I get.

With cupped hands, he scoops up some water, then lets it spill from his grasp. His hands clench into fists.

“There must be more beyond this.” He raises his head. “This ocean, these stars. We were born in a cage, to the amusement of those who imprisoned us here.”

I touch his elbow and behold the view with him, the sea and sky stretching into vast unknowns.

“We’ll make the gods pay.” I peer up at the stars, which we’ll have to somehow reach. Taiping and Qin Zheng’s calculations jumble up in my mind. I have no idea if they’ll work in practice, but it’s still the best plan we have.

A small laugh escapes Qin Zheng. “Indeed, we shall.”

He turns his gaze to me, the ocean glow shifting under the severe angles of his scarred face. He looks on the verge of saying something else, but then he bends down and fishes something out of the pink waves.

“Show me your hand. I have something to give you.”

“What…kind of something?” I eye his fist. Is he about to ruin this moment with some dream-spun critter?

“Open your hand,” he says with an edge of irritation.

“Tell me what it is first!”

“You shall find out once you give me your hand!”

Having no patience to argue further, I do it. He pulls my hand in and places something hot and radiant in my palm.

“What is this?” I gawk down at a shining spark of light.

“A star,” he says, as if it’s obvious, still holding on to my hand.

“What do you mean, a star?”

He rolls his eyes. “Imagine I plucked a star from its reflection in the ocean and gave it to you. Is that not poetic? In here, I can do that.”

“But why would you? What’s the point?”

He blinks a few times, his eyes flicking downward. “Perhaps it was simply an excuse to take your hand.”

I snort. “Since when did you need an excuse to take what you want?”

A change comes over his demeanor. Heat rises in his eyes, as if someone has struck a match behind them. “You’re right. I never have.”

He pulls me in by the nape of my neck and captures my lips with his own.

Ah, fuck .