Chapter Fifty-Two The Spark that Cannot be Extinguished

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

THE SPARK THAT CANNOT BE EXTINGUISHED

Traveling along the corridor, I feel shrouded in the same harrowing emptiness I would always feel while trekking back to the Great Wall after a battle. The quiet desolation, discomforting after such violent intensity. The death and destruction lingering everywhere.

Keeping an arm around Shimin’s waist, I mentally peel off the melted metal over the various burns on my body. With my free hand, I spray Helan’s healing substance on the raw, blistered skin beneath, roasted red, with nauseating patches of yellow and black. The foam fizzes, numbing the pain and creating a glistening layer sealing each wound. Thank the skies I had the foresight to take the can.

Well, I guess it’s not the skies I should thank, now that I’ve broken beyond them.

After flying past so many hexagons that my head throbs from the effort, Shimin’s duplicate signature leads me to one cell whose contents are much more scattered than the others.

Vermilion fragments.

I blink back a vision of the Black Tortoise crushing the Vermilion Bird’s head. On a surge of adrenaline, I use my sword to shatter through two layers of a substance that appears to be glass but is obviously more high-tech. Its broken edges light up and begin to heal themselves. I stuff Shimin through the shrinking hole and into the cloud of red chunks. Most are bigger than us. The duplicate signature somehow spans across them. Our planet looms beyond the other hexagons that make up the cell, wholly bathed in daylight and outlined in radiant blue. I can no longer see any semblance of Huaxia, only unfamiliar land masses and oceans that flow from blue to crimson.

I kick up to a vermilion chunk and maneuver it with both hands against Shimin’s spinal brace. I don’t know what to expect. I imagine him sparking back to life.

Nothing happens. His spirit signature remains dispersed like smoke.

Do I need to put the fragments together? I ease the chunk toward several more, trying to figure out how they fit. If I could reassemble the head, maybe…

I test the fragments’ sharp edges against one another. There are so many. Too many. I find what appears to be the beak and work my way out from there.

Every time I move, the pieces drift farther apart. I pull them back toward each other. My heart beats faster and faster as my efforts prove futile, and a pressure builds beneath my skin until, finally, I hurl one chunk against another with a hoarse cry.

Both chunks simply sail out of my reach and keep going.

I fall apart suspended in this wreckage I can’t put back together, this puzzle I can’t solve. The world I left behind glows softly in the beyond. Instead of rolling down my cheeks, my tears collect in globules around my eyes.

“What the fuck?” I choke out to no one but myself, dabbing at the fluid. Small drops float off like glass beads. I fling more away until my vision clears.

I behold our planet. Orichaea . I’m still getting used to it having a name. It looks so peaceful, turning so slowly that I can’t perceive it moving unless I pay distinct attention. If this were all I saw of my world, I would never guess that lives were beginning and ending down there. In countless indiscernible points on these massive pieces of land, friends are making each other laugh. Lovers are embracing. At least one person has to be looking right in this direction, with no clue of what’s transpiring up here.

Is this how the Melians can live with letting us suffer down there? By being so high up they can’t see we’re as human as them?

A rage stirs in me, simmering, boiling. The same rage that led me to sharpen a hairpin and enlist as Yang Guang’s concubine. That compelled me to drown An Lushan in his own blood. That drove me to crush the Palace of Sages with everyone inside.

This rage is what has kept me alive and rising, rising, rising, rising. There is a spark in the human heart that cannot be extinguished, that yearns for freedom no matter the price, no matter the odds, no matter the weight that smothers it down.

I turn away from the world and back to Shimin. I don’t know why I still feel his spirit signature. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself, imagining it, so I don’t have to face the truth that, because of the Melians’ trickery, I killed him by my own hand.

I almost shatter again. It’s the rage that holds me together, a pure, distilled need to ensure they don’t get away with this. I brush his eyes closed and kiss his forehead, leaving a fleeting warmth on his cold skin.

“I’m sorry, Shimin,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry. Thank you for giving me the chance to keep living. I’m sorry I couldn’t do the same for you. I hope you’re at least at peace now. Rest. Please. I love you. I always will.”

I let him go. He floats among the fragments of his Chrysalis as if he’s simply sleeping.

Flaring out the range of my spirit sense, I feel for the other two signatures familiar to me. Qin Zheng and Yizhi don’t move with the speed of a ship anymore. They’ve reached a destination teeming with other signatures.

I shatter out of the cell to join them.