Fullepub 
Chapter Thirteen: Huaxia’s Best Hope
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HUAXIA’S BEST HOPE
“Well,” Sima Yi says on the big screen in the white comm room, hands on his hips. “This is an interesting development.”
There’s a grating click as a soldier in my periphery unlocks Li Shimin’s muzzle. It drags off his face, leaving a trace of flushed, dented marks amidst his remarkably dense stubble, denser than anything I’ve seen Han men grow. A criminal tattoo of the character for “prisoner,” 囚, like a person in a cage, becomes uncovered on his cheek. My stomach turns at its raised, unsteady lines, clearly carved by a dull knife—
In a flash of orange, he snatches the soldier by his uniform collar.
I jump. Another soldier yelps a warning, raising his gun. Protests spurt from the strategists on the screen. But Li Shimin just extends his other hand in a demanding gesture. A third soldier rushes a metal flask into his grip. Only then does he release the first soldier with a harsh shove. He unscrews the flask and swigs it like it’s the first fresh water he’s found after months of drought.
Eyes wide and heart slamming against my ribs, I watch the hypnotic bobble of his throat, the tendons working in his neck, and the shining lines of liquor leaking into his heavy steel collar.
The thrill of survival must’ve made me delirious in the cockpit—there’s really nothing to celebrate about us both making it out alive. It doesn’t matter that I’ve done the unthinkable yet again. It wasn’t good enough.
I have failed to kill Li Shimin.
Now, it’ll be at least two weeks before I can battle him again in that liberating realm where the only power that matters is in the mind. Two weeks, I’ll be confined to this useless mortal body, at the mercy of whatever the army decides to do with me.
Sima Yi sighs from the screen speakers, his crooked mouth making it hard to tell if he’s amused or exasperated. “Take it easy there, Shimin.”
The flask sloshes as Li Shimin finally lowers it. He catches his breath between hoarse coughs, massaging his stubbled jaw. His chest heaves deeply. The sharp, dreadful, and familiar smell of alcohol stabs up my nostrils. I recoil, shielding my nose with one arm while holding my torn robes together with the other. Memories tear out of the depths of my mind. Memories of bottles smashing into glittering pieces around the house as my grandfather slurs out insults. The crack of his palm against my grandmother’s face. My father sitting outside, taking long drags of his pipe, unable to do anything against an elder of the family. The cuts in my sister’s, my mother’s, and my hands as we’re forced to clean up the messes.
Li Shimin’s gaze skims mine from the corner of his eyes. He does a double take, and stiffens, as if I’ve caught him licking a wound. Awkwardly—and pointless to a level I can’t understand—he shifts the flask to his side, hiding it from my view.
An eerie glare beside him catches my eye. With a start, I realize the soldiers are united with him in staring at me, faces pale and rigid.
The strategists too. They’re watching me. Observing. As if I’m a dangerous, volatile creature they’ve barely managed to corner. I lower my arms, unclench my fists, relax my brows—I’d been glowering.
My awareness shrinks around myself, around my frost-brittle skin and the aching flesh and bone it contains. The pain in my feet tells me this isn’t a dream or reverie. I’d been stewing in isolation for so long that I’ve begun to lose track of the boundaries of possible and impossible, normal and abnormal.
But no. Murdering a Prince-class pilot with my mind is not normal. Surviving Li Shimin, who’s got the biggest spirit pressure since Qin Fucking Zheng himself, is not normal.
It’s no wonder they’re looking at me like this.
That’s…
Hilarious.
Though my pulse keeps pounding at my temples and jumping in my neck, I pinch back a bout of laughter. Their unease must’ve transformed me into something more than what I am in their eyes. Even though I’m as powerless as ever outside of a Chrysalis, and they have no reason to fear me in this moment, here they are, with those delicious expressions.
This could actually protect me.
I roll with it. Play it up.
“So, what happened?” I leer at the strategists as if I’ve known what would unfold since the beginning, and now I’m taunting them. “You got any idea why I’m still alive?”
The strategists exchange a weighted look.
“Pilot Li, did you experience anything different during this battle?” Chief Strategist Zhuge waves his feather fan stiffly.
Wow. Just “Pilot Li.” He really doesn’t have any fancy titles, even among army folk themselves.
Li Shimin clears his throat, focus darting between me and the strategists. “Her mind was…loud,” he says, voice rusty from disuse. How strange that I heard his voice in his mind realm before I did in real life. The syllables resonate from the bottom of his chest, raising the hairs that are starting to grow out of my arms again.
He tells of his memories of fighting me within the yin-yang realm. Apparently, he’s never been so conscious during a battle. Which is saying something, considering he was trying to kill me the whole time.
Well, I tried to kill him first. But who knows what would’ve happened if I hadn’t?
His eyes keep straying to me while he speaks, narrowing and sharpening like daggers, until he cuts himself off with, “Who is she?”
“Were you not told?” Sima Yi speaks up. “She’s Wu Zetian, the girl who killed Prince-Colonel Yang.”
The tension between Li Shimin’s brows snaps loose. “Yang Guang’s dead?”
Sima Yi’s face screws up. “How did you miss a funeral that big right in your stretch of the Wall? Is that bastard An Lushan keeping you cooped up again?”
My very soul jolts at the mention of Yang Guang’s funeral. They didn’t tell me anything about it either. I need to find out more—how have the masses reacted to it? Reacted to me?
“A funeral?” I say with mock casualness. “Did the attendees know he died like a girl?”
A collective look of alarm presses in on me again.
“What in the skies is wrong with you?” Sima Yi cries with a lash of his arm. “Haven’t you realized what you’ve done? You killed a human being! You ended a life! You took someone’s son away from them!”
My grin stiffens. Not because I feel a single twinge of regret, but because my rage has boiled over so fast that I have to tense my everything to contain it.
“Yeah,” I say with bulging eyes. “I sure did.”
“You—” His face strains red.
I could fire back with how people’s daughters die in Chrysalises all the time, but I don’t want to put any effort into justifying myself. I know his outburst is coming more out of his unease about me than any degree of empathy. He sure wasn’t this devastated during our first chat, right after Yang Guang’s death. No, he’s trying to worm into my mind and shackle me down with morals, so he can feel more comfortable about my existence.
Too bad. I am exactly the kind of ice-blooded, rotten-hearted girl he fears I am. And I am fine with that.
May he stay unsettled.
He looks about to yell at me some more, but Chief Strategist Zhuge silences him with a weary wave of his fan. “Let’s not venture too far from the matter at hand, shall we?”
As Sima Yi fumes, Chief Strategist Zhuge goes back to teasing information out of me and Li Shimin. I give my answers begrudgingly.
Neither of us remember the battle climax. After getting nothing but confusion from us at his mention of our “strange transformation,” Chief Strategist Zhuge shows us a video.
The footage opens in a corner of the big screen, showing the Vermilion Bird in partial patches through fog. The Bird throws its head back, charging a pink qi blast in its beak—must be a mixture of my Metal white and Li Shimin’s Fire red—then spews it at a Hundun. The Hundun stumbles into the fog, missing half its body. But instead of moving on to the next enemy, the Bird wobbles blindly on its claws, wings flapping out of sync. It shakes its head violently. Black specks fly out.
“Those are the speakers, by the way.” Sima Yi points down at the video. “Speakers that engineers worked hard to wire in.”
Before I can pointedly refuse to apologize, white radiance splinters the Bird’s feather-like roughness. Spirit metal bursts and expands in lurching spurts, except the Bird doesn’t turn more humanoid, like higher forms should be. It fails to achieve any particular shape. Its body bloats like a red boil spewing out Metal-white pus. Some Earth yellow comes out, too, but does nothing to stabilize the transformation. The Bird becomes a diseased-looking creature as formless as a Hundun. Its wings crumble and melt into its lumpy body. Its claws swell to fat stumps.
My hand flies to my mouth.
I was definitely not conscious during this.
“There are clearly two types of transmutative qi at work here.” Chief Strategist Zhuge strokes his long, wispy beard with his fan. “However, we are hesitant to call it a proper level-three transformation.”
“Yeah, nothing Heroic about it.” Sima Yi rolls his eyes. “It’s more like a…Villainous Form.”
“Every male pilot that connects to a Chrysalis is in danger of losing his rationality to it,” Chief Strategist Zhuge adds. “The presence of the female pilot is meant to soothe his subconscious and keep him sane. However, you two—you both lost all capacity for rational thought.”
“And, gee, do I wonder why!” Sima Yi glares at me.
The video ends with the Bird hurtling right at the camera drone, one eye red and one eye white.
My head lifts with a creaky motion. “So what does this mean? Are we a Balanced Match?”
“No,” Chief Strategist Zhuge says. “That is the only thing we know for sure. Judging by the data transmitted from the Vermilion Bird, your hearts did not beat in sync.”
“Then how were we both transforming the Bird at the same time?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Sima Yi peers at Chief Strategist Zhuge, who waves his fan harder.
“Our tentative hypothesis is that you both have a very, very rare type of hyper-adaptive spirit,” Chief Strategist Zhuge says. “You could match each other’s spirit pressures no matter how they spiked, but as a result, neither of you could assume dominant command, so your Chrysalis deformed under the equal yet discordant signals.”
“Equal—does that mean my spirit pressure hit ten thousand?” I gape. Something about putting this into tangible numbers shocks me all over again.
“Try eighteen thousand,” Sima Yi says, like an accusation. “That’s the highest transient reading we got from the two of you.”
Shivers sweep up my back and shake my shoulders. The soldiers sneak bewildered looks at each other. Even Li Shimin’s head snaps up.
I breathe in and out through my mouth, trying to wrap my mind around the number. It’s so big it’s almost senseless. 18,000, when the average is 84.
“How?” I shake my head absently.
Something brightens in Chief Strategist Zhuge’s eyes. “Although you were not a Balanced Match, you are truly an extraordinary pair. If you could achieve a stable bond, it could change the dynamics of the entire war. You could indeed have the power to liberate the Zhou province. The Emperor-class Hundun defending the replication nest in the Kunlun Mountains is Metal type. Given that Metal is weak to Fire, a proper Heroic Form in the Vermilion Bird would be Huaxia’s best hope for defeating it. It sounds like there is plenty of room for improvement in your synergy, which is excellent. In your next battle, could you perhaps try not being hostile toward each other?”
A cross between a snort and a scoff rips out of me.
Me. Li Shimin. An assassin. A murderer. Huaxia’s best hope. Not hostile.
“And what would you give me for trying?” I purr. “At least every privilege a non-criminal boy with my spirit pressure would have, right?”
I stare at him for a long moment.
Then I lumber toward the nearest soldier.
“Hey!” The soldier raises his gun.
I don’t stop. I don’t blink. Not when adrenaline crashes through me and sets off my nerves like Hundun sirens, not when other soldiers lurch into motion, not when his finger meets the trigger.
I push my skull right up against the barrel.
Shouts muffle through the roar of blood in my ears: Sima Yi blurting out curses, Chief Strategist Zhuge shouting, “Don’t shoot!”
“Go ahead,” I say, cold as the metal circle burning into my forehead. The barrel doubles in my view. My pulse climbs into my throat, thrumming so hard and fast I can hardly hear my own voice. I could die. I could really die with one twitch of the soldier’s finger. Bang, and then nothing.
But if I don’t detach myself from this fear, they will pummel me with it, choke me with it, enslave me with it.
What would be the point of sticking around then?
I actually feel a rush of disappointment when the soldier’s finger leaps off the trigger. The instant the cold circle leaves my forehead, a surge of madness makes me seize the gun with both hands and grapple it back. Its sullen metal, chilling my palms, becomes the only constant in my frenzy of thoughts and sensations. The muzzle wobbles in my view, a gaping black hollow that could suck me in and end me.
“You think this scares me?” I say, unbelievably calm for how rabidly I’m fraying apart on the inside. “You think I ever liked being alive? Go ahead. Do me a favor.”
The other soldiers wrench me away. After a brief struggle, one clamps my arms firmly behind me. But I think I’ve made my point. I catch a glimpse of Li Shimin’s stupefied expression and hold back a satisfied grin. It feels good, unnerving a boy as powerful as him.
“If you want something from me, you better pay what I’m due!” I yell to the strategists with a cock of my head. The tangled mess of my hair drapes over my cheek and across my throat.
“Consort Wu…” Chief Strategist Zhuge says, much more cautious than before. “It’s not that we wish to deprive you of anything. It’s that the situation is more precarious than you think. Truth be told, there is much division among us strategists on how to handle you.”
“Yeah, we’re not the ones who want you dead, you unhinged bitch!” Sima Yi says, sounding winded.
“Explain,” I demand.
Chief Strategist Zhuge sighs. “To be honest, there have been certain rumors claiming that you are, how should I say this, a fox spirit. The spirit of an actual nine-tailed fox, possessing the body of a beautiful girl in order to devour men.”
What?
I nearly burst out laughing. But judging by the tense looks on the strategists’ faces, even their educated minds—which should know that spirits only do stuff like that in legends, and that nine-tailed foxes are normal animals—are finding it difficult to entirely dismiss the idea.
“Oh?” I simply say. “What gave them that idea?”
Sima Yi lashes a dirty look onto me. “Do you not remember how you acted when you came out of the Fox?”
I flash back to me dumping Yang Guang’s body at my feet and laughing maniacally. “Oh. Did the Sages not order that footage removed?”
“They did, but too many people saw the livestream! Skies know why they were up that early, but by morning, the rumors were everywhere. Trying to remove the footage just made it worse. Aiya, why on earth was doing that your first impulse after finding a boy dead?”
I shrug. “Sorry, I got caught up in the moment. It happens.”
Sima Yi scowls like he wants to tear my arms off. “Listen, not-so-little girl: your existence is making people question the army’s integrity. There’s something messed up with you in the head, and everyone can see it. The only reason you’re still alive is because Chief Strategist Zhuge and I are willing to look at the bigger picture and not give up on your potential. Though I’m really starting to regret it. So if you want any privileges, you’d better prove you can work well with Shimin!”
His tone may be nasty, but my mind hitches on the confirmation that real pilot privileges are a possibility for me. At last, we’re getting somewhere.
“And what exactly does all of this entail?” I squint. “What would I need to do before the next battle?”
“Well,” Chief Strategist Zhuge says, “we are still negotiating the training arrangements with the Sui-Tang strategists. But at the very least,” he beams at Li Shimin, “you’ll be gaining a roommate, Pilot Li.”
My gut ices over. “I’m—I’m not going back to the prison cell?”
I finally fail to hold back my laughter.
Chief Strategist Zhuge furrows his brows in confusion.
Oh. He’s dead serious.
Terror streaks through me. My awareness slashes to Li Shimin, who’s taking another swig from the flask.
They want me to live with this murderer. This convicted murderer, who needs to be muzzled, collared, and held at gunpoint to be forced into cooperation while sober.
What in the skies will he be like once the alcohol kicks in?
