Chapter Sixteen: The Crownless King, the Heartless Queen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE CROWNLESS KING, THE HEARTLESS QUEEN

“Shimin, put your arm around her,” Sima Yi says as the elevator shudders down from the Great Wall. “It’s showtime.”

When Li Shimin’s hand grazes my shoulders, I do my best to swallow my panic. The tight sleeve of his conduction suit, poking out of his pilot coat, glazes every rise and valley of his muscles like thick white paint, contrasting glaringly against my black uniform. The heat and weight of his arm, along with his suffocating proximity, make my every cell shrink against my thudding veins.

But even if I protested, I wouldn’t have a choice. A soldier has had to drag me everywhere so I’ll keep up with Sima Yi. They won’t let me have a cane because…I don’t know, fox spirit danger or something. Now Li Shimin has to take over the duty because the soldiers are not to appear in frame with us, lest they make us look too dangerous. The collar around his neck is proof that he’s under control, while his arm around me is proof that I’m under control.

It’s a delicate balance.

“With bound feet, you learn the value of the bonds between family.” My grandmother’s voice saws through my head like a rusty knife. “No one can do everything alone. We all must rely on one another.”

Yeah. Now I have to let strange men touch me when I want to go anywhere. Thanks, Grandmother.

I fume, trying to radiate the message that no, I have not been “tamed,” but the instant the elevator doors grind open, revealing a valley full of buildings and people about to scrutinize my every move, my blood goes cold. A calming cold that switches on a completely different circuit in my brain: the circuit for slow-brewed vengeance.

For the sake of pacifying those in the army who want me outright executed, I follow Sima Yi’s instructions: I make myself small and keep my eyes on the paved stone path cutting through the camp, performing the role of Li Shimin’s accessory.

It proves difficult when, after a few moments, it becomes clear that I’m not the only one who needs support to walk straight. Li Shimin leans just as heavily against me, steps wobbling dangerously. I’m forced to brace him with a hand on his back.

“He told you not to drink so much!” I hiss, then immediately hate myself for how Hopeless Wife I sound.

“I’m sorry,” he slurs breathily.

“No, you’re not! Or you wouldn’t have drunk in the first place!”

He has no response to that. His bleary gaze just floats somewhere much, much farther in the distance.

I focus on matching his rhythm and balance so we don’t humiliate ourselves by crash-landing on flat ground. While the black lines on the white leggings of his conduction suit disappear into sturdy boots, the white lines on mine extend toward a pair of tiny shoes that look like a tacked-on joke, with a bunch of deformed butterflies shoddily embroidered on black canvas.

The tiled roofs of the training buildings on either side of the path flare like claws against the clustering storm clouds. There aren’t that many idlers milling about outside—pipe-smoking pilots, mostly—but people alert each other behind windows, and whole clusters of ogling faces rush up against panes of glass. Lit from within by fluorescence brighter than the dreary weather, they point, exclaim, and run their oily stares over every detail of me. I take long, tranquilizing drags of the cool air, crisp with the tension of impending rain. The sound of a shuttle, now as distant and unearthly as a ghost wail, lures my awareness over my shoulder.

This section of the Great Wall is one of those that actually look impressive, silhouetted a heart-jolting height against the somber clouds, filling the valley entrance. The shuttles racing over it now look as small as eels. The Kaihuang watchtower looms outside like a giant spying on humanity, housing the most important strategists and equipment of the Sui-Tang frontier. My eyes linger on it for a moment extra, as if searing a mark, before peeling away.

When Sima Yi pushes through the cafeteria’s double doors, sticky heat pours over us, filled with chattering voices and clinking noises. I recoil—I’ve never seen so many people in the same place at once.

Then the camera flashes come.

Reporters with neat topknots and stunningly clean city robes swarm up to us. Soldiers cry for them to keep their distance, while Sima Yi leads us to the food lineup. Even though I’m freaking out on the inside like a spirit spooked by firecrackers at New Year’s, I keep my expression unchanged.

Quick glimpses fly from the tables we pass, but they must’ve received an announcement to ignore us. Their reactions are a lot more subdued than the ones outside.

There are also a lot more different kinds of personnel here, making me realize the sheer collaborative effort it takes to keep the Wall running. Soldiers in olive green, slurping huge steaming bowls of noodles and porridge as if they have a ten-second deadline to finish. Maintenance workers with neon vests over their tunics, wolfing down even bigger bowls. Strategists and student strategists in blue-gray robes, debating with their tablets out, while their food gets cold.

The pilots are the definite stars, though, with their carelessly loud talking and explosive laughter. Their double-circlet crowns glimmer under the greasy lights: stylized beast horns, fish fins, butterfly wings, and more. Everyone makes way when one of them strides between the tables, especially if it’s an Iron Noble powerful enough to command a substantial amount of spirit armor. My belly jumps whenever I recognize one from media promos, but I remind myself that I have no reason to be impressed.

I am now more powerful than them, after all.

Only when we get to the food lineup do I find other women: aunties in stained aprons, hustling in a large kitchen behind steamy windows. They’re ladling soy milk, frying dough sticks, stirring porridge, and draining noodles. Grimly, I look back to the tables in search of black uniforms like mine, for the fellow lucky girls allowed out with the boys to fuel the illusion that the world is just and hope exists.

Instead, my attention hitches on a ranking board on the wall. Pilot names and their respective battle points shine in neon against the black screen in two columns, one for Huaxia overall and one for just Sui-Tang. The camera flashes in my face make them hard to read, but I don’t need to, to know who’s first.

The top rank for both is blank.

My gaze crawls toward Li Shimin. He’s staring blankly ahead. It gives me a sick satisfaction to know that the army punishes and taunts him in this way, and ensures the other powerful pilots hate his guts. There’s supposed to be an annual King of Pilots award given to the top-scoring pilot, which comes with a huge cash prize to the winner’s family. The award has not been given for the two years he’s been active.

Instead of a revered champion, he’s nothing but a nuisance dragging the others down.

Squinting, I try to decipher who’s currently in the unlucky second place. It’s usually a tight race between—

The screen suddenly changes to a black-and-white picture and some text.

A picture of Yang Guang.

Oh.

It’s his obituary.

Sweat breaks across my back like condensation on steel. Not because I’m struck with guilt, but because the cafeteria chaos noticeably chills and quiets. Only the reporters continue to buzz like wasps.

If anyone was doing a proper job of ignoring me before, they aren’t anymore. Glares slice into me like razor edges, glinting with a demand for justice. I swear I even spot Xing Tian, pilot of the Headless Warrior, in the fuming masses across the tables. The phantom pain of his grip, quivering with crushing force as he wrenched me away from Yang Guang’s corpse, throbs in my arm. The bruises are still a deep, sickly green.

Despair sinks through me, filling my limbs like the cement of the Wall, numbing me to my fingertips. I shouldn’t have been giddy about these army people hating Li Shimin—they must hate me so much more. I don’t want to imagine the things they’d do to make me pay for taking their beloved golden boy’s life.

How will I possibly convince them to accept me?

The reporters are allowed to capture us for only a brief few minutes before Sima Yi shoos them back to their cities. After a breakfast of tea eggs, soy milk, fried dough sticks, and wonton soup—which is named after how they pronounce “Hundun” in the south, Sima Yi randomly tells us—he introduces me and Li Shimin to a partner exercise called ice dancing. The training camp has an artificial ice rink to simulate the frozen lake surfaces of the Qing province up north, where the exercise originated. For the longest time, Sima Yi explains, strategists used plain old regular dancing to improve the synergy of Balanced Matches, but adding ice to the equation boosted the effectiveness so much that even strategists in provinces with warmer climates now swear by it. The instability of skates forces partners to work together and lean on each other to do basic routines on the rink.

Theoretically, anyway.

After a full morning of stumbling across ice, enduring blazing agony in my feet, yanking each other out of balance, and bruising every substantial surface of our flesh with our endless falls, Sima Yi leads us back to the cafeteria for lunch, his face as sullen as the sky. I don’t know what he expected. We’re the duo that kicked the Vermilion Bird into an unprecedented monstrous form yesterday; how could we do any better in less than twenty-four hours?

“How hard is it to just work with each other?” Sima Yi launches into another rant as we walk with our metal trays of greasy soup and stir-fry toward a cafeteria table. “I swear, you’re the worst couple I’ve ever—!”

A rushing maintenance worker trips into him.

I catch the distinct moment Sima Yi’s tray tips, yet I’m unable to stop it. His bowl of egg and tomato soup overturns. Both of them cry out, though Sima Yi’s exclamation sharpens into a scream when the hot soup drenches his robes. The bowl smashes on the floor in a steaming puddle.

Insults more creative than I could ever imagine spew from Sima Yi’s mouth. The worker apologizes while bowing endlessly, clenching his hands together and shaking them over and over.

“Ugh! You two eat first; I’ll go get changed,” Sima Yi says to us, then sulks off, soup dripping from his hems. The worker scrambles after him like a startled rat.

I blink blankly at his storm of a departure, but we’ve still got two soldiers supervising us. They sit down with us at an empty table.

At this point, I don’t know if they’re guarding the masses from us, or us from the masses.

I focus on my cluttered plate of rice and vegetables, ignoring the assorted death glares jabbing toward me. I especially don’t look anywhere near the ranking screen, which, as I discovered during breakfast, shows a rolling memorial of recently deceased pilots every few minutes. I thought about asking Sima Yi to remove Yang Guang from it, but I don’t want him to know how terrified I really am. And the noticeable breach in tradition would probably make people angrier.

I’m shoving my food down as fast as I can when a loud argument erupts at a table nearby.

I seize up, but thankfully, it has nothing to do with me. It’s one pilot shouting about owed money and another shouting about “not being a good pal.”

A wave of whoops and whistles sweeps through the cafeteria.

“Fight!” someone shouts, laughing.

“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” others join in.

The argument spikes in volume like a hot wok splashed by oil.

Our soldiers snap to attention, hands tensing beside their trays. I start swallowing whole mouthfuls without chewing much. I’d like to get out of here before—

The first punch is thrown.

Half the cafeteria springs to their feet, exploding into cheers. Tables squeal aside as people stampede toward the fight. The rumble of boot steps fills the building like a storm on a thick roof. I back toward the end of my bench and against the grease-sticky wall, clutching my chopsticks.

Our soldiers jump up and elbow through the crowd coagulating dangerously near us. A pilot with a partial suit of Earth-yellow armor stumbles back, laughing.

His attention catches on me and Li Shimin. His grin morphs into something more dubious. He glances between us, then at the empty seats beside us.

Don’t, I plead in my head.

He sits down next to me, and I almost scream. Much of his spirit armor is stretched as a thin golden mesh over the tightness of his conduction suit sleeves and the cut-off shoulders of his white pilot coat, but his gauntlets and diamond-shaped breastplate are solid. That amount looks about Earl class, the starting rank of Iron Nobles. His spirit pressure should “only” be in the 2000s.

But it doesn’t matter how badly Li Shimin and I beat him out in that regard. It means nothing without armor of our own.

“Wa sai,” the pilot remarks with amused wonder, almost inaudible under the crowd’s racket. “Li Shimin, the Iron Demon, here in the flesh.”

Li Shimin chews a bite of bean sprouts without reacting.

“I have to say, you look a lot more…wild than I imagined.” The pilot leans across the table, chuckling. The dog ears of his golden crown perk up, kept under command of his spinal signals by a thin strip of spirit metal along the back of his neck. “Are you sure you won’t turn the Vermilion Bird around and crash down the Great Wall to let the rest of the Rongdi in or something?”

I pause with a mouth full of rice and green beans.

A memory rushes out at me, one that isn’t mine, but a fragment I glimpsed in Li Shimin’s mind realm. Him, laying bricks to reinforce the Great Wall under the constant threat of a zapping electric prod.

Bile rises like lava in my chest.

I shouldn’t say anything. I wouldn’t need to if Li Shimin would defend himself.

Yet he just lowers his head and keeps chewing.

I swallow my food like a gulp of fire and say, loudly, “Why would you think he’d do that when he’s been in more than a dozen battles already? And if you didn’t know—he worked on the Wall, genius.”

The pilot’s armor makes a scraping noise as he turns to me. The air chills several degrees, prickling my skin. It’s not common for male pilots to have yin-based qi—with Qin Zheng being the notable exception—so it takes me a second to realize I’m not imagining the effect. This pilot’s dominant qi must be Water, the most yin type. Its pervasive coldness is conducting through his Earth-type armor. His eyes don’t glow; they subtly darken into a deeper, icier black.

“So you’re that girl who killed Colonel Yang, huh?” he drawls.

His presence and the noise of the fight press against me like a swarm of flies, burrowing into my ears and cluttering my head. I eye the crowd, hoping the soldiers will come back soon. Or Sima Yi. How long does it take to change a freaking robe?

I fling a large piece of ginger out of my stir-fry. “Not my fault he couldn’t handle me.”

“Oh? What tricks did you use?”

“That’s classified. I don’t think you’re important enough to know.”

A muscle twitches under his eye. “I’m Wang Shicong, Earl-class pilot of the Sky Dog.”

“I don’t care.”

He draws a sharp breath, then laughs it out. He peers at Li Shimin. “She’s a feisty one, isn’t she?”

Neither of us acknowledge him.

“Are you really a fox spirit?” His breath comes right against my ear.

I whip around, intending to slap him away, but he grabs my wrists. His Earth-type gauntlets give him such inhuman strength I gasp. Pain shoots through my arms.

Li Shimin slams his chopsticks down and rips him off me. The force screeches the table onto an angle.

Wang Shicong braces against the bench, a look of utter scandal on his face.

Partly hunched over the table, Li Shimin stares him down. His leash clatters over his tray.

I see Wang Shicong eyeball it. I see his hand dart out, snake-quick.

I don’t see how the colossal crash ends up happening.

Food flies everywhere. Grease splatters onto me. I shudder, but then the sight before me freezes my breath in my lungs: Li Shimin, wringing his leash around Wang Shicong’s neck, dragging him kicking and choking away from me.

He’s strangling someone with his own chains.

I shouldn’t be happy about this. It won’t end well. Yet I can only watch in awe, feeling the rising pulsation of a single word inside me: Finally.