Chapter Four Same Shit, Different Man

CHAPTER FOUR

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT MAN

“You look like crap.”

I rouse from beneath my covers as Qieluo stomps into my room.

“Same to you,” I grumble, scooting up against the headboard. The dark circles under her eyes testify to her qì-exhaustion from the counterattack. She’s not wearing her armor, just her white-hemmed black pilot uniform.

When she hoists the chair near the door toward me, a soldier follows her in and closes the door behind him.

“Hey, not you.” I flash my palm.

He gets into a military stance as if he didn’t hear me, hands clasped behind his back, though he bows his head.

“His Majesty’s orders.” Qieluo sets the chair beside my bed and sits down. “No one who’s capable of killing you is allowed to be alone with you. I even had to ditch my armor.”

A cold dread sinks through my innards. I can’t say anything without Qin Zheng knowing. I can’t tell the truth about our world to anyone without paying with my life and then getting slandered into a liar.

Qieluo crosses her legs. “So…empress, huh?”

“Supposedly,” I grumble.

“Forgive me if I don’t bother with etiquette until you’re officially crowned. I need to get the insolence out of my system while I still can.”

“Whatever. Just tell me what’s happening out there. You’re the only one I trust to not bullshit me.” I eye the soldier warily as I speak, but I have too many questions to hesitate because he’s here.

Placing her elbow on an elegantly carved armrest, Qieluo scratches her temple. “Well, at first it was chaos, obviously. No one could figure out what was going on. All kinds of rumors were flying around on the networks. People were calling all the footage of the Yellow Dragon fake. But once we explained what a livestream is to His Majesty, he made several announcements that settled things down. He’s back, he’s reclaiming his throne, and that’s that.” She recoils, as though she doesn’t understand the language coming out of her own mouth. “I still can’t really believe it. It’s a gods-sent miracle.”

Oh, how enraged Qin Zheng would be at the gods getting any credit for his return.

“What else has he done these last few days?”

“Mostly he’s been getting filled in on over two hundred years of political drama by the new Sages. We’ve gone back to the old system where they’re supposed to be advisors to a pilot ruler. They’re using the banquet hall here as an assembly chamber now.”

“There are new Sages?”

“His Majesty summoned what was left of the central government and had them vote in nine of their peers as a new council. The rest kind of just…promoted themselves to fill the positions of those who didn’t respond to the summons. Since they’re probably, you know, dead.”

I tip my head against the headboard, studying the light seeping out of the wooden lattice in the ceiling. “Have you found any survivors in the ruins?”

Qieluo lets out a chortle. “You and His Majesty smashed that palace through to the bunkers. All we’ve been able to pull out is minced meat.”

I squeeze my eyes shut against a barrage of mental images: corrupt officials, toiling governmental clerks, and innocent servants all crumpling with my family under steel, concrete, wood, glass, and the Yellow Dragon’s claws. Bones snapping, skulls popping, blood soaking their clothes. Then Xiuying and Zhu Yuanzhang dying the same way in the Dragon’s clutches, then Shimin—

A sharp breath slices into me before shuddering out.

Crushed alive. What a horrible way to die.

After a few seconds, I wrench my eyes open. I did what I did, made the decision I thought best with the information I had. I can’t undo it. I can’t hide from it.

“Their families should be compensated,” I say. It’s not penitence, but it’s something . “And Xiuying and Zhu Yuanzhang’s children—can you make sure they’ll be well looked after?”

Now that I’ve had some distance, I can’t bring myself to hate Xiuying for accepting the secret task of killing me and Shimin. The Sages held the real power, driving us both into impossible choices.

“I can submit a proposal to His Majesty,” Qieluo says. “That’s the way we have to do everything now. Paper trails everywhere, no more secret deals, no more bribery, no more sloppy accounting. Officials won’t be able to expense even a restaurant bill without getting questioned. Not that it’s a bad thing. Officials shouldn’t be comfortable in their power.” She crosses her arms, looking lost in thought. “Honestly, I may have followed you to Chang’an because I was already in too deep, but I was pretty worried about how things would turn out. Now that I’ve seen His Majesty take charge, though, I’m not worried anymore.”

“Yes, he has quite the way of imposing his will on others.” I shoot another look at the soldier.

Qieluo releases a long breath and leans back in her chair. “I can’t tell you what you did wasn’t extreme, but I think it may have been for the better. With so many of those corrupt old men at the top wiped out, the replacement newbies are scared out of their minds. His Majesty can change things for real, make decisions only a pilot has the guts to make. He can lead us into winning the war.”

A silent scream rises in me. I clench my jaw, my throat, my bedsheets. “How can we keep the war going when the pilot system is so messed up, especially for girls?”

“That’s another thing His Majesty has already ordered reforms to. He’s a lot less closed-minded than those geezers you squashed. Turns out history doesn’t always move in a better direction, huh?” Qieluo rubs her chin. “I bet you could convince him to enact better legislation for women. Some more protections during pregnancy and divorce would be great.”

“What makes you think I can convince him to do anything? I can’t even convince him to let me out of this room!”

“To be fair, it is pretty dangerous for you right now. All the officials are telling His Majesty you’re a poor choice for empress and should be executed instead. They’re saying you exaggerated how terrible Huaxia was after you woke him up and misled him into destroying the Palace of Sages. You ‘stained his venerable hands with senseless blood,’ they say.”

“If he’d disagreed with anything I did, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” I say with an acrid taste in my mouth. “Trust me.”

“That’s what His Majesty told the officials! But, you see, it’s not about the truth. It’s about his plans to drastically transform Huaxia. It’s got them shitting their court robes. I think one of them fainted when His Majesty mentioned something about limiting property rights. They don’t want him to change things so radically, so this is how they’re pushing back. They can’t question Emperor Qin, the legend, but they can question the information he got when he woke up in this utterly different era. The idea is if His Majesty wants to back off, he can save face by going with the story that you tricked him.”

“Will…he?” I grow acutely aware of the soldier’s presence and how he could report our every word to Qin Zheng, but I have to know.

“Oh, absolutely not,” Qieluo says without hesitation. “It’s only made His Majesty more determined to make you empress. It’s like you’ve become a symbolic measure for how much his judgment can be questioned. If he accedes to the wishes of the officials and executes you, they’ll hold it over him forever. Every time he makes a decision they don’t like, they’ll be able to say, ‘Is Your Majesty sure about having reliable information regarding the situation? Remember the time that wicked woman almost tricked you into abolishing private property?’?”

“I don’t even know what that means!”

“I think it’s when no one’s allowed to own stuff anymore,” Qieluo says with a frown, not sounding sure. “My point is, you do need to lie low for a while. Don’t give the officials any more excuses to call you a conniving vixen.”

I snort. “As if they’ll ever stop.”

“You still have to try! You’ve basically gotten onto the back of a wild, raging beast. There’s no getting off without breaking every bone in your body, so you need to do whatever you can to stay on. Look.” She pulls a handheld device out of her pilot coat. After assuring the soldier she won’t let me touch the screen, she shows me a picture.

My stomach plunges. It’s a shot of Qin Zheng coming out of the Yellow Dragon with my unconscious body in his arms, uncannily similar to when I carried Yang Guang’s corpse out of the Nine-Tailed Fox. It’s as if all the fight I put up, all the pain I endured, and all the power I thought I’d grasped since that moment has come undone in one image.

“This is the kind of thing that will save you.” Qieluo’s voice reaches through a hollow ringing in my ears. She shakes the device for emphasis. “You have to act like His Majesty, uh, mellowed you out.”

“This is the same thing they tried with me and Shimin! Same shit, different man! And nobody bought it then!”

“Yes, but…this is no ordinary man. Not that I’m saying Pilot Li was ordinary, but… you know . This time, if you act like you’ve been ‘fixed,’ people will believe it. They could get used to it, and you could influence His Majesty into doing more for women.”

“Ugh.” I bury my face in my hands. For that short, precious while when I believed I’d overcome everything in my way, I thought I could be the one to make the changes. Now, whatever I want I’ll have to grovel for from Qin Zheng.

“I’m sorry about Tengri, by the way,” Qieluo mumbles.

“Tengri?”

“That was Pilot Li’s Xianbei name. Daye Tengri. He told me during that time Gao Qiu crammed us onto the same hovercraft to Chang’an.”

My heart squeezes painfully. I didn’t know Shimin had a Xianbei name. Even after all those times we entered a mind link, there’s so much I don’t know about him. We had so little time together.

It’s not fair.

Qieluo has no idea he’s still alive…maybe, in the most horrifying way possible. And I can’t tell her.

Her eyes flick toward the floor. “And I’m…sorry for how I acted when we first met. I think I just didn’t know how to react to you. I knew the strategists didn’t like me and my personality, but for years I thought they had no choice but to put up with me because I was the strongest female pilot. Then you showed up, and just like that, I wasn’t the strongest anymore.” She lets out a huff, shaking her head. “But clearly the power rankings mean nothing if they truly want a pilot gone.”

“Well, they’re dead and we’re alive, so who’s laughing now?”

We crack faint smiles at each other, yet we’re not really laughing, either. I don’t think I can laugh ever again.

Qieluo sneaks a glance at the soldier over her shoulder, then leans forward, speaking quietly. “I’m sure Tengri would want you to do whatever is best to protect yourself. And honestly, you could do worse than the most powerful man in Huaxia’s history.”

“Right.” A throbbing intensifies in my post-surgical feet. I swallow the bitter bile in my throat. “How is Gao Yizhi doing? Is it true he’s now the Imperial Secretary?”

Qieluo balks, blinking.

Ah, that probably sounded like a very abrupt tangent, to someone who doesn’t know what we were to each other.

“He was just as close to Shimin as I was,” I hastily explain. “That’s why I’m worried about him.”

Qieluo leans back. “The three of you had a weird relationship.”

“You have no idea.”

“Well, Imperial Secretary Pretty Boy’s been very busy. He did a lot of work pulling lines of communications together so His Majesty can run the government again. I can’t imagine the rest of the Gao family is happy with him declaring their company nationalized and handing their entire fortune to the state treasury, but they have His Majesty’s favor for it, so they can’t complain.”

“He gave all their money to the government?”

“All of it. On paper, this family is destitute.”

No wonder Qin Zheng is willing to trust him.

I relax a little. Yizhi is making the best out of this situation, seizing whatever power he can. Maybe I can do the same. Being a political symbol to Qin Zheng means I have more leverage than I thought. I can use it to make him give me what I want, like my spirit armor. I need to show him I’m not a doll to cut up and use as he pleases.

“Given that you announced yourself as the Empress of Huaxia, I suppose I must marry you to avoid the inelegance of having to refute that statement ,” he said. A remark that betrays more weakness than he intended, now that I think about it. In his version of the story, the coup was his idea, and everything that happened was by his will. If the officials or the masses find out my declaration was something I yelled in the heat of the moment with no prompting or approval from him whatsoever, his story falls apart. He’d be admitting he wasn’t in control. I’m no longer sure how functional his mind really was during the coup, but if he doesn’t want people to get suspicious, he has to defend the idea of me becoming empress as if it was his own carefully considered decision, told to me before we reached the Palace of Sages.

“Can you bring Secretary Gao a message from me?” I say to Qieluo. “Tell him…tell him to not worry about me. I’ll be okay.”

“Funny. He told me to tell you the same thing.”