Chapter Eight Strangers

CHAPTER EIGHT

STRANGERS

Shortly before noon, Qieluo pushes me in a wheelchair through the roofed walkways between the many buildings and gardens of the Gao Estate. Or the Huaxia Palace now, I guess. The vibe is completely different from when I stayed here with Yizhi and Shimin a lifetime ago. Armed soldiers everywhere, for starters. No more silk-robed drunk people laughing and hollering at all hours. No members of Yizhi’s absurdly large extended family coming to ask me invasive questions. I heard from Wan’er that many had to join the staff they used to boss around because the kitchens no longer cater to able-bodied adults who don’t contribute labor.

There’s a lot of work that needs doing as the government sets up offices in the residences here. I catch sight of a few scholar-bureaucrats shuffling through the walkways in their purple, red, or green robes, but always from a distance, and they immediately avert their eyes. Qin Zheng must’ve ordered the path from my residence to the temple cleared beforehand. I also spot, across a large lotus pond, what has to be one of Yizhi’s younger sisters playing with a wooden yo-yo. The bound-foot woman she’s with spins her away and hurries them both out of view, as if fleeing from a monstrosity.

A jitter builds in my stomach at the thought of seeing Yizhi himself soon. It may be a fatal mistake. No matter how discreetly Yizhi and I do this, there’s always a chance Qin Zheng will find out the next time we pilot together, when my memories might spill over to him. But Yizhi would know the risks better than anyone. For him to call me out here regardless, there must be a very substantial reason.

The grinding of my wheelchair and the jangling of Qieluo’s armor sound unnaturally loud when the only other noise is the trickling of water in garden ponds. The very air feels harder to breathe, as if the gray sky is pressing down on us.

“How’s Liu Che?” I say to Qieluo to break the unnerving quiet.

“Staying put in the residence His Majesty threw him into.” Qieluo turns my wheelchair onto a bumpy path across a rock garden. “He’s scared shitless. Don’t worry, though, he’ll be scurrying away in the Azure Dragon after your coronation. That’s right about when he’ll be fully replenished with qì. I’ll keep you safe from him until then.”

“I’m not worried. I just can’t believe that kid. Fourteen years old and already killing without blinking.”

“Right? Thank heavens His Majesty is here to discipline him now.”

I sigh as our path ends at a short set of stairs. Built on a mountain, the estate has an annoying number of these. Cautiously, I get to my bandaged feet and unlatch a metal cane from the back of my plain, foldable wheelchair. I don’t know why Qin Zheng forbade me from using a motorized wheelchair when I couldn’t have gotten far with it, no matter how fast it might go. Qieluo helps me traverse the stairs with one hand supporting my elbow and her other hand at the small of my back. It’s like I have to learn to walk all over again. Not to mention how much the scuffle with Liu Che set back my healing. Every painful step plants me in that moment again: his hateful eyes, the roasted scent of the guards he killed to get to me.

Though it’s not like I haven’t committed my own share of horrors. It started with wanting to kill one boy in revenge. Then I was throwing soldiers out of the Vermilion Bird’s cockpit. Torturing An Lushan to death. Squashing Xiuying and Zhu Yuanzhang in the Black Tortoise. Smashing the Kaihuang watchtower. Crushing the Palace of Sages, with my family in it.

In the fables, karma always catches up to the wicked, and kindness always gets rewarded in the end. Big Sister was the kindest person I knew, always putting others first, letting me or our little brother have more rice when there wasn’t enough to go around, and taking responsibility when my fights with him wreaked havoc around the house. Although I could take a beating from our father and remain unrepentant, a weary admonishment from Big Sister would fill me with shame for days. For most of my life, I thought I was the broken one with the rotten heart, doomed to lose everything because I’m incapable of playing by the rules. Yet she’s dead because of a depraved boy’s whims, and I’m about to become the Empress of Huaxia.

It’s almost paralyzing, gazing into the truth that the universe is indifferent at its core. There’s no benevolent higher force that rights wrongs. No guarantee of justice. Our gods actively sabotage us. Those who create and enforce the rules are the ones who break them in the most heinous ways. Here at the highest levels of power, there is only awful battling worse .

“Qieluo, have you ever killed a person?” I ask when we reach a pavilion at the top of the stairs, my voice sounding far off to my own ears.

She snorts while going back to haul my wheelchair up. “As if the army would’ve let me get away with that.”

“But if there were no consequences, would you do it?”

She sets the wheelchair next to me. “There are certainly people in this world I would rather not see alive anymore. Why?”

I lower myself into the wheelchair again. “Just wondering if there’s something messed up in the head with all us pilots. If someone has to be messed up to be a strong pilot.”

“Hey, don’t drag me into this. I’m not messed up.” She pushes me out of the pavilion and onto a stone bridge over a pond.

“You shoved me into a wall the first time we met! For something you saw in Yang Jian’s mind!”

“No, no, I just didn’t want to talk to you because of that. Then you got pissy and started insulting me, and that’s what made me push you. Big difference.”

“That’s…never mind.” I go slack in my wheelchair. The extent of Qieluo’s violence is admittedly mild compared to Liu Che’s. Or Qin Zheng’s. Or Xiuying’s. Or Zhu Yuanzhang’s. Or Shimin’s. Or mine.

“Do you think killing Hunduns makes it easier to kill humans?” I say in a near-whisper after a long silence.

“No? By that logic, all butchers are potential serial killers.”

“You think killing Hunduns is the same as killing animals?” I look over my shoulder at her. “When you’re in battle, don’t you feel what the Hunduns feel, how complex their emotions are? Doesn’t that ever make you hesitate?”

Qieluo scoffs. “That’s just a defense mechanism, like a bee stinging you as it dies. This is war. If you fall for those tricks and hesitate, you perish. Though I can’t deny that battles would feel a lot better if Chrysalis engineers could figure out how to keep the Hunduns from messing with our heads.”

“Have you…” My next question lodges in my throat. This is a dangerous topic, too close to what Qin Zheng would kill me for. But I have to get Qieluo’s opinion. “Have you ever wondered what it means for the Hunduns to be capable of feeling emotions so complex?” I ask in my lowest voice. “If they’re self-aware, just like us?”

“No way. If they had our level of brains, they would’ve realized the moment we created Chrysalises that this invasion of theirs backfired spectacularly. I can’t imagine any intelligent species staying here once we started piloting their corpses against them. They would’ve scrambled back to wherever they came from.”

They can’t! I want to scream, yet I bite my tongue. I imagine the way Qin Zheng’s eyes would darken if he found out I’d said too much, the way he could crush me to a pulp with my own armor. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of the truth dying with me because I didn’t wait for the right moment.

Still, my mind shrieks at every servant I see, hoping that somehow, someone can hear what’s trapped in my head.

Of course, no one perceives anything but a stone-cold empress-to-be behind a mask and veil. The truth sinks through me like acid, eating me from the inside, bit by bit by bit.

The smell of incense stirs me out of my spiraling thoughts. We’re approaching the temple. Dense, fluffy trees and manicured bushes huddle against the paved stone path that curves toward it. I grow tense when many voices carry on the wind, chanting a mantra over solemn music, though it’s quickly apparent that it’s a recording.

The temple is as Wan’er described it, a single-story building with red walls and pillars. Intoxicating smoke rises in wisps from a huge bronze incense vessel in front of it. The estate’s northern wall juts out behind the temple, painted in white and topped with curls of barbed wire. A crow flutters out of the mountain forests beyond, its cry echoing across the swells and dips of other peaks.

The urge to climb the wall and escape into the woods pulses through me, the same old fantasy of vanishing into freedom.

If only.

Ganye Temple says a plaque above the temple’s paper screen doors. The engraved calligraphy sends a jolt through my heart. The sturdy style reminds me too much of Shimin’s.

Qieluo shoves the screen doors open before I’m ready. The chant recording pours louder over us. Dull daylight falls across a cushion for kneeling and a shrine loaded with rows of ancestral tablets. Fresh peaches sit on the shrine’s offering altar. I scan the rest of the room, but I don’t see Yizhi. Not yet.

Listening for any sound other than the chanting, I get up so Qieluo can carry my wheelchair over the threshold that’s unfortunately at the entrance of every traditional building. Once I sit down again, she hands me a stick of lit incense from the bronze vessel, its tip glowing orange-red.

“I’ll give you a moment alone,” she says.

I nod in gratitude. She pulls the screen doors shut, though her silhouette remains in the wax paper in its frame.

With my free hand, I roll my wheelchair up to the shrine. Qin Zheng hasn’t bothered to make this place his own yet. The Gao family’s ancestral tablets persist in their rows like haughty spirits, right under the blaring brass speakers on the ceiling. Funny—if I had accepted Yizhi’s marriage proposal, I would’ve had to pray to these tablets. In a nook at the top of the shrine stands a red-faced, green-robed statue of Lord Guan, the god of money, business, and brotherhood. Of course that’s this family’s patron deity. I snort before surveying the statues at the sides of the room. Chiyou, the monstrous god of war. Guanyin, the serenely smiling goddess of mercy. Nüwa, the snake-bodied goddess of creation. And more against the shadowed back wall, like a judgmental council staring down at me.

Are all of you real? I wonder, sweeping a challenging glare across them. Do you really look like that? Do you really have those powers?

Are you watching me?

My gaze follows the plume of smoke from my incense to the ceiling. I claimed to be coming here to pray for Shimin’s spirit, but who am I supposed to pray to when the gods themselves are the ones dangling him between life and death?

Bowing my head, I raise the incense to no higher power in particular.

“Be free, Shimin,” I whisper.

The words break something in me as they leave me. I double over, the metallic veil of my mask swinging onto an angle, and I clamp a hand over my mouth to stifle my sobs. The incense crumbles to ash in my hand. Tears patter over my armored legs.

It’s not fair.

Come back. Please come back.

How could you have thrown me and Yizhi out of the Vermilion Bird without you?

I should’ve died with you.

I miss you.

I can’t do this. I’m not ready.

I’m so scared.

I…

I will make them pay for this.

My eyes flash open to the concrete floor. The chant recording resounds in my ears. I clench the ashes in my hand. Twice before in my life, I’ve felt the sum of my pain and grief and anger condense into a hot core inside me, burning for a single purpose: vengeance . Destroy the ones who ripped away those I love—Big Sister, Shimin—or be destroyed by the force of my own anguish.

I don’t lift my head. If the gods can really see my face through these statues in this moment, there’ll be no more convincing them that I am capable of obeying them.

A backdoor creaks open behind the shrine. I lurch up in my wheelchair. Pink and blue emerge from the shadows. At first I think it’s a maidservant coming to do maintenance, but then my mind readjusts its perception of her— him .

“Yizhi,” I breathe out.

I check Qieluo’s silhouette in the screen doors. Hopefully, the mantra recording is loud enough to keep her from hearing anything.

“Yizhi!” I whisper again, rolling my wheelchair toward him. My body aches with his absence, longing for the familiarity of his warmth.

Yizhi scuttles backward in his maidservant disguise and bows in the most formal way, his hands folded out in front of himself like a barrier against me.

“My lady,” he says, almost inaudible over the chanting.

“No, no.” I shake my head. “Don’t call me that. Don’t do this to me.”

His throat bobs. He remains hunched over, not meeting my eyes. “It’s good to see you well, my lady.”

“I’m not well!” I cry under my breath. “I’m not okay! You know I’m not okay! Yizhi, look at me!”

“I’m afraid that would not be appropriate, my lady. This meeting is happening with His Majesty’s permission. I will not betray his trust.”

A chill slithers around my neck, as if I’ve been seized by the specter of Qin Zheng’s grip. “He knows?”

“His Majesty is generously allowing us to find closure before settling into our new positions, so long as I dress like this so no one who might see us will get the wrong idea.”

I almost spring up to shake Yizhi and scream at him. Only a dash of rationality roots me. Given that Qin Zheng knows what Yizhi and I are to each other, he was bound to suspect we’d try to meet up. Being upfront with him is indeed one way to put him at ease and elude his wrath.

No wonder he didn’t hesitate to let me come. I can imagine what he told Yizhi: Kill the part of her that longs for you. Crush her foolish yearning.

“Did you call me here just to tell me goodbye?” My voice comes out small and cracked. It’s maddening, being a mere pace apart yet unable to touch him.

Yizhi’s bottom lip quivers. “This isn’t goodbye. We’ll still see each other around.”

“If you can’t even look me in the eye, we might as well be dead to each other.”

Grimacing, he breathes slowly and deeply before speaking again. “His Majesty is the only one capable of protecting you, my lady.”

“Haven’t you heard about the way he treats me?” I slam my hands on my wheelchair’s armrests. “I’m just a game piece to him. No, worse—a doll . I bet he doesn’t put anyone in the central court under the knife because he doesn’t like the way they look!”

A tremor starts in Yizhi’s arms, still held out in a circle in front of him. “The rest of the world would do much worse to you if they could, my lady.”

My mouth slips open.

Yizhi goes on. “His Majesty may have his…demands, but ultimately he will defend you against every threat to your life. He doesn’t rule by mere whim. He wields power with a purpose beyond glory and fortune. He has some surprising beliefs the legends didn’t pass down, don’t you think?”

“If you’re talking about how much he hates rich people, yeah. But in other ways, he’s exactly what I expected.”

Just another man who gets off on controlling women , I don’t say out loud. Is this the choice I face? Let one man terrorize me or be terrorized by the world?

“More than anything, His Majesty is right ,” Yizhi says. “Huaxia has fallen too far into corruption and decadence. We’ve lost our way, and there is no one more capable of guiding us onto a better path than him. His Majesty defies impossibility. He remade the world once. He can do it again. For this, I’m willing to forsake my personal attachments, because what do they matter compared to the future of Huaxia?”

Each word of this spiel burrows a deeper cavern inside me, yet I can’t demand that Yizhi tell me what he truly feels. To survive, he can’t do anything but sing Qin Zheng’s praises.

“My lady,” he adds, “I’ve come to see that His Majesty is a reasonable man, more reasonable than we could’ve hoped for. He won’t hurt you grievously if you don’t give him reason to.”

I can’t listen to this anymore. This isn’t Yizhi. This is an act, one he can never drop as long as Qin Zheng holds power over us. All the grief that aches to burst from my chest has to stay right where it is. I can’t share it with a stranger.

I shouldn’t have come here. The longer I stay, the more it hurts us both.

“I see your point. I should go.” I turn my wheelchair toward the doors.

“Wait,” Yizhi says. “There’s something else I want you to know.”

My attention swings back to him. He’s finally dropped his arms, though he continues to speak without returning my look.

“I’ve done many things I couldn’t risk admitting to you before my father…passed away. But I can tell you about them now.”

“What kind of things?” I say, a numbness spreading out from my lips. Qin Zheng’s taunting words ring in my head: “ You imply that your memories of him, the side he has shown to you, are true reflections of who he is. Funny. I have already seen enough evidence to the contrary. ”

Yizhi straightens a bit but keeps his head low and his hands folded at his waist. “My tattoos…what they represent is my rank in the Brotherhood, a syndicate that controls the Chang’an underworld—its casinos, brothels, drug dens, all the places that don’t operate in the light. Most of my family is involved. My father was its leader. That’s how he amassed his fortune.”

Goose bumps rise across my shoulders, intensified by the mantra recording resonating in my bones. But at the same time, I’m not surprised. It’s no secret that Gao Qiu had dealings outside the law. I relied on that exact capacity of his to save myself and Shimin from the Sages. Until that stopped working, anyway.

What I didn’t know was the extent of Yizhi’s involvement.

“I swore my oath to the Brotherhood when I was a child, before I really knew what it would mean.” Yizhi cracks a strange smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He scrunches up the pleated blue skirt of his maidservant disguise. “I’m rather lovely for a boy, aren’t I? That’s what they all say. My father thought so, too. He used to bring me to meetings with many powerful men. He would tell me beforehand to keep my eyes and ears alert for information to use against them, and then he would…leave me with them.”

I forget how to breathe.

“For years, I dreamed of escaping to the frontier.” He twists his skirt fabric tighter, his hands pale and trembling. “When I first met you in the mountains, that was after I’d finally made the attempt to run as far as I could.”

I flash back to stumbling upon Yizhi in the woods, how I was so unsettled by the cleanliness of his robes that I attacked him with a branch to see if he was real. He should’ve warded me off before I backed him into a tree, yet instead he started asking why I was in the woods, if it was where I got my food, where my clothes came from, and more questions that unfurled into hours of conversation.

I suck in a sharp breath. “Is that why you asked me all those things about life on the frontier?”

“Yes. It made me realize the frontier had its own problems I’d been too naive to consider. And that as long as I had no power, nowhere in Huaxia could I truly be free. So I came back to Chang’an. But from then on, I was determined to climb higher through the Brotherhood’s ranks. I took more initiative in getting information for my father. I found ways to leverage that information myself. I hoped one day I could rise high enough to be untouchable, and then I could take you here without anyone daring to question it. Whenever I felt like I couldn’t go on, I thought about how much harder you had it in your village, and it would keep me—”

He gives a start, having come close to looking me in the eye. He bows deeper.

“I’m sorry I never told you any of this, my lady.” His voice breaks. “Father had ways of knowing everything I did. Everything. He—he would’ve killed me for speaking of the Brotherhood to an outsider. He would’ve killed you.”

“Don’t apologize,” I rush to say, reaching for him. At the last second before my hand touches his, I remember to stop myself. My armored fingers snap closed with a metallic noise. “Don’t ever apologize for this. I’m glad you killed him first.”

Gao Qiu died too quickly, even. I almost wish he were still alive so I could give him a death as long and painful as he deserved.

“So are you the Brotherhood’s leader now?” I ask, trying to make sense of its existence.

Yizhi shakes his head. “Not exactly. No one could stop me from doing what I wished with my father’s fortune because I had you and His Majesty behind me, but the Brotherhood’s true heir is supposed to be my eldest brother, Changzong. Their loyalty to him runs a lot deeper. Many believe that killing my father was a breach of our oath never to harm a fellow Brother without provocation. They see me as a traitor.”

“He provoked you plenty!” I hiss. “For your whole life!”

“That’s not how those Brothers see it. But since I immediately got us more power under the new order, they’re calm, for now. It remains to be seen if I can expand my own base of loyal underlings.”

I break into a sweat under my armor, as if my wheelchair is hanging halfway off a skyscraper roof and Yizhi is beside me on the edge. He’s been walking an even more precarious balance than I thought, one wrong step from being thrown off, not just by Qin Zheng, but by this Brotherhood that resents him for taking over.

I look to the back of the temple, thinking of the mountain forests outside.

“Run,” I urge him. “Get away from here. Qin Zheng wouldn’t care to chase you down, and the Brotherhood shouldn’t be so thirsty for your blood that they’d go looking all over Huaxia for you. One day, when it’s safer, I’ll come find you again.”

“I’m afraid I can’t agree to that, my lady. I am not going anywhere.”

“Yizhi!” I plead.

“I’ve given way too much to not get what I want!” His eyes snap to mine for the first time since Qin Zheng forced us apart.

The mantra recording drones on in the silence I’m too stunned to fill. Yizhi looks away again.

“What I want is for everything I did to get to this point to mean something.” He speaks more quietly. “As His Majesty would say, power should belong to those who want to make real change, not those who indulge in empty pleasures. I’ve spent years collecting the secrets of everyone who had any significant power in the old order, and they are truly rotten through and through.” He bares his teeth in a snarl. “I can name the exact people responsible for the worst corruption here in the heart of Huaxia, and I can help His Majesty clear them out.”

I gulp through a drying throat. “I see. I understand.”

I underestimated Yizhi. He isn’t in this just to secure protection for us both. He has his own convictions, and they may be as strong as Qin Zheng’s.

“Besides, I do have siblings I actually like,” Yizhi adds. “I can’t abandon them. Or you. Or…” His eyes flick upward, cautiously, briefly, but enough for me to know who he means.

There’s a moment when we should take each other’s hands and pull each other close, finding comfort in our shared grief. Yet the distance between us can no longer be crossed.

“There’s no need to worry about me, my lady.” Yizhi flashes a small smile. “I told you all of this so you’d see that. We’re in my world now. I know how to play its games.”