Chapter Fifty-One Vengeful Ghost

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

VENGEFUL GHOST

There’s no time to process this. I knock aside the next machine coming for me and pump my wings to scramble on top of the ship. I kneel next to Qin Zheng, our wings almost touching, and attach my shins and palms to the ship’s new coating.

“They must intend on holding him hostage to your face so you can no longer look away,” Qin Zheng muses.

“I know! How many times do I have to show that they can’t control me with him?”

“They only need you to break once.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

The ship rouses upward and surges forth, the force of its takeoff pushing the ground machines back.

“Do not fall off!” Qin Zheng shouts over the wind whipping in our faces. “I will not catch you!”

“I don’t need you to!” I extend the edge of my helmet above my eyes to shield them somewhat.

In my sliver of vision, glittering white buildings wreathed in greenery reel past us. My stomach sloshes as the ship twists and turns between them, tipping me and Qin Zheng onto sharp angles. I tense my core to keep myself upright. My joints smart from the strain. I can tell Helan is trying to keep us out of open range for drones. Some projectiles ping against the ship anyway, dangerously close to the unprotected parts. I swing my meteor hammer, my movements awkward against so much wind, but I can guide the chain with my mind. I hit at least some drones, smashing them against gleaming walls and windows.

Out of the distance comes a humongous metallic pillar that dwarfs everything else in the ring. Sloping upward, it punctures the crystalline ceiling above and soars all the way to the distantly visible central corridor. It reminds me of a legend about the heavens being held up by four pillars. Well, here’s an actual pillar of heaven. Up closer, it’s like facing a solid white mountain.

“As we thought, the gates are locked down!” Helan says through the ship’s speakers. “But you can try smashing through one!”

“They’re those spiral things!” Yizhi adds.

It’s obvious what he means. The gates, like spiral engravings in the pillar, are spaced out vertically, and each one is at least five times the size of the ship.

“Aim high! On the count of three!” Qin Zheng swings his meteor hammer in larger and larger circles as the ship slows near one gate. I mirror him. “One, two, three— now !”

We fling our meteor hammers toward the gate. They smash through its spiral wedges, embedding themselves.

“Drop the ship, false god!” Qin Zheng commands.

The engines cut out.

There’s a weightless moment before we plummet. Our meteor hammers rip through the gate, crumpling metal and severing wires. The ship’s engines reawaken in reverse, propelling us down with even more force. Gritting my teeth, I mentally push my meteor hammer as deep as I can through the gate. A sudden give tells me I’ve punched past its thick surface. Qin Zheng touches his armor wing to mine. Every bit of spirit metal on us becomes a shared awareness. We pry our meteor hammers toward each other, gouging the gate some more, before he joins them with a crossbeam.

“Pull away, false god!” he roars.

Helan obeys. With a thunderous creaking groan, our combined efforts wrench a hole in the gate like opening a can. Once there’s enough room to slip through, Qin Zheng and I retract our meteor hammers and press low against the ship. Torn metal and frayed wires narrowly miss our heads as Helan flies into the pillar’s hollow innards.

Floodlights beam on at the front of the ship, illuminating a space like an elevator shaft the size of several buildings combined. I attach my gauntlets to the ship’s coating to secure myself through the acute climb.

“Beware—the closer we get to the central corridor, the less gravity you’ll experience!” Helan says.

I don’t really comprehend what they mean until I feel my body getting lighter as we ascend. Blood runs in reverse up from my legs. By the time the ship reaches the top of the pillar, mine and Qin Zheng’s meteor hammers are floating on their chains like balloons.

The wonder of the new experience quickly dies to how clumsy it makes us.

Getting to the central corridor is a much more complicated business than busting into the pillar. Something about the mechanics of going from a rotating component to a static one. We defer to Helan’s instructions, breaking what they tell us to break and breaching where they tell us to breach. Since falling is no longer a concern, we drift easily to whatever we need to tamper with. However, one wrong puncture and apparently we’ll suffocate to death, because there’s no air outside in space.

While we struggle with a new set of physics and technology we don’t understand, Shimin’s spirit signature gains on us by the second, coming up the pillar shaft. Yet I can also sense it somewhere ahead . What is going on? Did the gods somehow keep different parts of him alive in two different locations?

Don’t think about it , I order myself.

I need to keep moving. That’s all I can do.

While traversing between modules, Qin Zheng and I grill Helan and Yizhi more about the worlds beyond ours. They tell us the other inhabited planets in the universe are so far apart that only with a technology called “jumpgates” can they contact each other. Before its invention, people had to venture in slow ships across hundreds of years to get from one planet to the next. Things often went wrong, leaving pioneers stranded, without the means to preserve their knowledge and technology. Their descendants were then doomed to start from scratch. Spacefarers became foragers. Data became stories. History became legends.

“That’s probably what happened to the first wave of our ancestors,” Yizhi says through the ship’s speakers.

“Two thousand years ago, right?” I ask while thrusting my sword through a control panel Helan told us to deactivate. That’s how long ago the Hunduns supposedly invaded us. The number must’ve been passed down for a reason.

“Around that time, yes,” Yizhi answers. “But there were more waves. The better-equipped ones discovered how valuable spirit metal is in making things. Not just Chrysalises, but spaceships and jumpgates, too.”

“But only spirit metal from Hunduns is effective, so the Melians dropped prisoners on our planet to hunt them?” I muse, piecing together the folktales I’ve heard. The Rongdi stories of being “stricken from the heavens” as punishment. The Yellow Sovereign getting “help from the gods” to craft the first Chrysalis.

“Melia wasn’t a country when that started happening. It was a bunch of other galactic powers that dropped their own prisoners on different continents to stake their claim to all the spirit metal in certain areas. But the Melians won the last major war over access to our planet and cut everyone else off.”

Finally, after much blundering, we tear our way through to the central corridor. It’s so massive it gives me vertigo—countless clear hexagons fitting together to form a cylinder taller than a skyscraper and extending as far as the eye can see. Behind each hexagon floats a mass larger than Helan’s ship.

Hundun husks.

“The Melians have a monopoly on spirit metal trade,” Yizhi says while the ship flies past husk after husk. “Our whole planet supposedly signed a contract with Vivasi Minerals, a Melian company, four centuries ago.”

“So…” utters Qin Zheng, who has been uncharacteristically silent for a while. His chest heaves so erratically he looks as though he’s on the verge of choking. “All along…our existences…our ceaseless war…it was for these foreigners’ profits ?”

“Basically, yeah,” Yizhi says, with an emptiness that can only come from being exhausted of anger over the course of months.

My vision fries black for a moment. Seeing all these Hundun husks lined up for sale makes the truth sink in like nothing else. I think of the colorful family in the pictures we saw, the joy on their faces as they posed in front of the planet where we were born besieged by fear. Where wave after wave of pilots, most no older than twenty, fought to their deaths for the belief that they were heroically defending our species from a celestial invader. Every single one of these husks was paid for with our blood and anguish on the battlefield.

I’m glad I can’t reach Helan right now, because I would very much like to hear a false god scream.

“Where…where are the Earth types?” To my own ears, my voice sounds disembodied from the storm roiling inside me. I push past the haze of my rage to scan the cells of husks. If we found enough Earth type, we could rebuild the Yellow Dragon. Our armor still carries its special property of being able to assimilate other husks.

“Oh…” Helan makes a disappointed sound. “I think they ejected all the Earth-type stock to prevent you from using them.”

I curse, noticing the empty hexagons that offer nothing but glimpses of our planet or the cosmos beyond.

In my last-ditch effort to find an Earth type the Melians missed, I notice something else: some husks are vivid blue. While Wood-type spirit metal can look almost bluish, as with the Azure Dragon, I’ve never seen any as rich as a sapphire.

“Why are some of these so blue?” My eyes follow one until it vanishes far behind us.

“That’s a type of Hundun they have in the west!” Yizhi says. “Those strongholds call it Water type, too, but it’s slightly different from ours. They also don’t have a Wood type or a Metal type, but they have an Air type. Those are the very pale green ones!”

Before I can ask him to explain further, a noise erupts far behind us, echoing through the vast corridor—the same noise our ship made when breaking in.

In my spirit sense, Shimin’s signature blazes on a direct line to us.

I double over, chest constricting. My hands dig into the ship’s coating.

I can’t look behind me.

I need to look behind me.

I don’t want to see what’s coming.

I have to face it .

“It’s another ship!” Qin Zheng readies his sword.

I twist around. A vessel not too different from ours emerges from the distance. Its front window pops open. A beam of red light shoots out.

Qin Zheng and I dodge to the sides. The light hits his wing—and punches straight through, leaving a melted hole.

We exchange a wide-eyed glance. Nothing can destroy Earth-type spirit metal like that except…

Another blast of Fire qì streaks toward us. This time, when we duck, I spot what it came out of: a red palm in a glistening, dark-gray arm.

It takes me several stupefied seconds to parse out what I’m looking at. Shimin climbs halfway out of his ship with a body made of glossy mechanical parts and embedded spirit metal. Only his head is still visibly human. Not even all of it. A mask like a muzzle is clamped over his lower face, covering every feature except his eyes. Red light kindles in his irises, brightening.

Qin Zheng throws himself over me as another qì blast fires from Shimin’s spirit metal palm. The ship lurches sharply. There’s a sound of glass shattering ahead, then we zip past a hexagon with a melted hole in it.

“We cannot let him hit the ship!” Qin Zheng shouts near my ear. He mends his wings and bats them, poised to take off.

He’ll kill Shimin without hesitation.

I shove him back and launch myself off the ship first. My body hurtles through the weightless air, spinning.

“Empress!” Qin Zheng calls after me.

“I’ll take care of him!” I heave my wings to steady myself. “Don’t follow me!”

“I was not going to!” Qin Zheng’s voice fades further by the word.

I watch him leave on the ship upside down. No—it’s me who’s upside down. Yet it doesn’t feel like that at all. No blood rushing to my head, no tug on my arms and legs.

A qì blast skims my neck guard, searing the skin beneath. I hiss. Any deeper, and I’d be dead.

“Shimin, it’s me!” I wriggle upright in the air while retracting my face guard. What have the Melians done to him? “It’s Zetian!”

He charges another blast in his palm.

I detach my meteor hammer from my hip and hurl it at him. By my mental will, the chain stretches then lashes around his mechanical body, binding his arms to his torso.

“Shimin, I’m your partner! We piloted the Vermilion Bird together!” I croak, while beating my wings backwards and winding the chain around my arm to keep it from loosening as his ship draws closer. Wobbling tears blur my view of him. “Remember me?” A growing lump in my throat warps my voice. “Remem-ber Yizhi?”

“Yes, I do,” he says flatly while straining against the chain.

I falter for an instant. I didn’t expect to actually hear his voice.

The single moment is enough for him to free one elbow and snatch the chain from beneath. Fire qì heats in his grip. I yelp as a burning sensation from the chain reaches my senses as intensely as hot metal on flesh.

“You’re the one who left me to die,” he says, like the mutilated figment of him that haunts my nightmares. His words crackle through his mask, as if the Melians put a speaker in there to ensure I hear every word. “You and your selfish, petty obsession with vengeance. You don’t care who you hurt, who gets in your way.”

Bearing the burning pain, I channel Earth qì to reinforce the chain. But I can’t hang on much longer. His ship closes in too quickly. I can’t flap my wings fast enough to stay ahead. I can’t do this. I can’t fight him. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—

He breaks the chain, severing my meteor hammer, and aims his palm at me.

I snap my wings behind me, generating a forward momentum that lets me tackle him. We tumble over the raised front window of his ship and then off it entirely, my shoulder grazing its bulk before we’re free-floating through the corridor. I clamp his arms against his hips. A slow, heavy heartbeat startles my ear through his mechanical torso.

He presses a hand to my ribs and injects a direct surge of heat. A cry rips from my lungs. I swing him in an arc and throw him as far out as possible.

As he sails through the corridor, turning a full circle, I spot a red spinal brace in his mechanical back. I draw my sword. If I were to guess at how his artificial body works, I imagine there’s a hidden path of spirit metal from his spine to his palms. If I can sever it, I can stop the blasts.

He bounces off a hexagon and continues to skid and drift, but he recovers his orientation with spurts of qì from his palms. Using both hands now, he assails me with smaller, short blasts, as if hurling fireballs. I bend and whirl in wild directions to dodge them. Each flash shatters a hole in a hexagon past me. One blow catches my thigh, igniting a pain that joins the relentless pulsing from my side. I don’t dare to look down at the damage.

“I gave my life for you, and what have you done?” Shimin’s voice thunders through the corridor. “Massacred innocents. Laid waste to society. Whored yourself out to your tyrant master while I was stuck here, alive, without a proper body!”

Clarity cuts through the haze of pain over my senses.

When would Shimin ever say something like that to me?

I remember the boy who squeezed himself into a narrow space over a cold floor so I could sleep in a real bed for the first time in my life. Who seemed to scowl at everyone he met when he really just couldn’t see well because he loved reading too much. Who wouldn’t defend himself against insults but risked the most severe punishments to pummel a man on my behalf. Who carried me wherever I needed to go. Who lowered himself to one knee in our red-lit room and pressed a kiss to my knuckles.

This is not him. This is as much a dead husk as what’s in the compartments around us.

I shield myself with my wings and swoop to grab his wrist. My other hand jams my blade under his arm. Hooking my leg around his for leverage, I rip my sword all the way through the arm. Wires spark on the stump around a core of Fire-type spirit metal.

He doesn’t scream. Before I can do anything else, his one remaining hand seizes my sword-wielding arm and singes .

My shriek cuts jagged into the air, warped by the agony shooting through every muscle in my body. I writhe against his scorching grip. I can’t get my arm free to use my sword. But since everything floats here…

I release my sword. It joins his severed arm in rotation above us. I grasp for its hilt with my other hand. He hooks his leg around mine, copying my technique, and wrestles to keep me from reaching it. His blazing fingers melt through my trapped gauntlet. Bile heaves from my stomach at the scent of my own roasting flesh. Darkness chars at the edges of my vision.

But the wavering sight of his hand, its spirit metal underside so distinct from the rest, gives me a spark of inspiration. I cleave around the gauntlet palm of my free hand and compel the cut-out portion to stretch toward my sword. It wraps around the hilt and reels it back to me. My fingers clamp around it.

I plunge the blade into Shimin’s back, right where I can feel his heart pounding.

The sword scrapes past metal and through thick, thudding flesh in a sickening sensation. The tip stops against my chest with a dull clunk . A spasm goes through his body. Radiance sputters out of his irises.

No , I want to scream, even though I’m the one holding the weapon. Through it, I feel the hot spillage of his blood, the dwindling of his heartbeat.

“ You ,” he says like a curse. Devoid of their red light, his eyes go cloudy and unfocused. “How could you? After everything I did for you, how—Ze…tian…”

His voice abruptly goes dull and muffled when speaking my name, sounding as though it has switched to a different source. And for the briefest second, I swear the syllables overlapped with the words before. Like when Helan speaks under their artificial translation.

Coldness douses me like ice water.

“Shimin?” My voice comes out small and distant, as if whispered from the end of the corridor.

His eyelids droop. “Make…me…whole…”

He doesn’t collapse in my arms. There’s no gravity to topple him. There’s only stillness, almost calming, until it drags on for too long.

“No…” I shake him. “No, no—Shimin, stay with me!”

I can still sense his spirit signature. It’s faint, but still there, even though his heartbeat isn’t. I can’t have killed him when there was a chance his mind wasn’t gone. I can’t have.

“Shimin, wake up! Wake up!” I touch his cheek, his half-closed eyes, his forehead. Cold.

There’s a way to restart a heart—I have to pump my hands against his chest—

I yank my sword out of his back and flap my wings to guide him against a hexagon. Using it for leverage, I thrust my hands against his chest.

Blood spurts out of his wound, lingering in a glob in front of his chest.

Fuck! Why did I stab it all the way through?

The can of healing spray flashes in my mind. I dig it out of my armor, fingers numb and shaking uncontrollably. I spray a thick coating on both ends of his wound.

Nothing happens. No fizzing. I give his chest another pump. Blood seeps right through the foamy substance.

I clutch my helmet and scream.

When I feel again for his spirit signature’s weak presence, I trip upon a reminder that there’s a duplicate up ahead, somewhere that Qin Zheng’s massive moving signature has already passed.

“ Make…me…whole… ”

Why did Shimin say that?

The corridor’s countless hexagonal cells seem to funnel toward a pulsating void in the distance. I don’t know if I’m imagining his other signature. I don’t know how this makes any sense.

What I can’t do is stay here.

Looping my arm around Shimin’s cold metal body, I fly toward the unknown.