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Chapter Twenty-Two: Mess
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MESS
We find Li Shimin collapsed on the floor of his room, clutching the woven mats in agony.
“Shimin?” Yizhi drops down beside him, taking his hand, feeling around his wrist to diagnose his pulse. A slight hoarseness in Yizhi’s voice is the only indicator of what we were doing. “What are you feeling right now?”
“Wende?” Li Shimin looks at Yizhi with an expression so raw and tender it stops me dead in the doorway, my moon-cut shadow looming over the pair of them. He cups Yizhi’s face with a scarred, shaking hand.
Then terror kindles in his eyes, and he pushes at Yizhi. “Don’t…no…get away from me, Wende…don’t go into the cockpit…”
“What in the skies is wrong with him?” I make myself totter in and crouch down. The smell of acid and herbs gags me. He must’ve retched up all the medicine Yizhi barely managed to coax into him.
“He’s hallucinating and delirious.” Yizhi grimaces with his fingers on Li Shimin’s pulse, then brushes Li Shimin’s short hair out of the way and puts his forehead to his. “And he’s burning up. Skies.”
“All this, just from not drinking alcohol?”
“That’s exactly how bad withdrawal can get, Zetian. Stay with him. I’ll go call Sima Yi and the doctors. Outside.” Yizhi pushes off the woven mats. “I think I’m confusing him.”
“Wende…” Li Shimin latches to Yizhi’s robes. “Don’t go into the cockpit…don’t go…”
A startling feeling clamps around my heart. Shaking it away, I wrench Li Shimin’s face toward me. “That’s not your dead partner!”
“Zetian,” Yizhi gently berates over his shoulder as he shuffles out of the room. “No need to make it harder on him.”
I huff, but catch Li Shimin’s lolling head. His scalp heats my palm through his chopped hair. Sweat beads at their roots. A tremor comes over me, almost matching his.
I gnash my teeth together. Why does my body keep reacting to him in ways I don’t want it to? Is my subconsciousness that determined to serve the male master the world appoints for me?
“I hate you.” My voice squeezes high and unsteady. “You’re messing me up.”
His gaze swims in and out of focus. “Sorry.”
“And stop apologizing!”
“Sorry.” His eyelids fall shut, yet continue to quiver.
“Aiyah, I didn’t know it had gotten this bad,” Sima Yi grumbles, rocking on a stool in the medical bay. His hair is tied in a hasty topknot, and his strategist coat is draped over his night robe like a cloak. “I cannot believe the incompetent fools at Sui-Tang let it get to this point.”
“Central Command wasn’t aware of his condition?” Yizhi sits on another stool beside Li Shimin’s bed, holding his hand while he shakes uncontrollably.
“No. He wasn’t like this when I trained him. I even left them with a detailed training plan, yet here we are.” Sima Yi draws his robe coat tighter and turns away. “Though it’s true that I didn’t leave him in the best mental state, after what happened with Wende. They likely got tired of dealing with his emotions and just enabled him.”
Medicine like that makes me nervous. It’s not natural to mess with your qi flow that drastically. But I guess that was exactly what he was doing with the alcohol, long term.
The doctors say Li Shimin’s primordial qi—the qi that breathed life into him, that runs out over a lifetime with no possibility of being replenished—has been severely damaged, and his liver is hanging on by a thread. We can’t call the detoxing off. If he relapses, the next withdrawal will be worse. And no one knows if he’ll survive that.
No one knows if he’ll survivethis.
A thin pitch sharpens between my ears. The world crumbles away, closing in on Li Shimin’s trembling arm in my grip.
Wouldn’t it be perfect if he died now? If I kill him in the Vermilion Bird, the Hunduns will sense his death and be pacified into backing off a little, so the army will feel less pressure to keep me around. But if he dies of natural causes, not only will the army have no crime to execute me for, the Hunduns will keep coming at their current intensity. The power vacuum might make the army desperate enough to let me inherit the Bird in my own right.
“—especially when he lost half his liver in prison.” Yizhi’s words rupture my reverie.
“Wait, what?” I blink, raising my head.
“Half a liver and one kidney.” Yizhi’s eyes flick up at me. “That’s what they take from every healthy death row inmate. For anyone who needs a transplant.”
My blood crawls into slush. The kidneys are the most important vessels for primordial qi. By losing one, Li Shimin’s healthy lifespan has essentially been slashed in half.
“Could you not buy him replacements from another murderer?” Sima Yi asks.
“I could,” Yizhi says. “But a surgery that big would leave him unable to pilot for months, way longer than this. Would the army sign off on that?”
Sima Yi’s mouth goes tight. “Not until after we take back Zhou.”
“Always comes back to that, doesn’t it?” Yizhi sighs, clasping Li Shimin’s hand tighter.
I can’t stop staring at their joined hands. A slender one meant for sorting medicinal herbs and pipetting solutions in a lab, entwined with a brutalized one meant for beating enemies half to death.
Or for conjuring poems in stunning calligraphy, apparently.
My awareness strays to Li Shimin’s face, then darts away from the anguish contorting his features.
No, never mind, he can’t die like this. Yizhi would be held responsible for making him detox.
“Power through this, Iron Demon.” I squeeze his arm.
He coughs, dry and raspy. He tries to get up.
“Don’t move.” Yizhi rushes to cradle his head.
“Don’t go,” Li Shimin murmurs, nuzzling against Yizhi’s hand.
“I won’t.”
My gut twists. This level of caring for someone else is beyond me. I shouldn’t rely on Yizhi, shouldn’t drag him into my mess, yet I could never support Li Shimin through this.
Yizhi helps him to a mug of water. Li Shimin takes a shaky sip, then immediately retches over the side of the bed. I suck in a sharp breath when blood dribbles out of his mouth in addition to acid.
Then everything goes red.
An alarm bleats through the watchtower’s concrete hollows. A large, round bulb on the ceiling floods the room with a warning light.
“Um…” I sit straighter.
Sima Yi rises from his stool, mouth moving absently and inaudibly over the sirens before he raises his voice. “This is very soon for another Hundun attack!”
“Does it concern us?” I shout.
“No, ignore it!” Sima Yi waves his hand, sitting back down. “You aren’t on active duty!”
“Right!” I say, but can’t wrestle down the urge to do something. It feels different, now that I know there’s such war-changing power within me. Like every girl that dies after this would be partly my fault.
A massive crash outside quakes the walls. Then another. Then another. Then another, growing in speed.
I stagger up from my stool and toward the buzzing window. I throw the curtain aside.
The White Tiger has awakened. It races away from the watchtower on all fours. Its pale limbs, striped by green and black, blur into spectral streaks, smearing into the night. The thundering impacts of its motions swiftly fade out. Metal-type Chrysalises may not be good at conducting qi into outward blasts, but they can harness their internal properties. The lively Wood qi humming through its body makes it run astoundingly fast, while the adaptive Water qi keeps its movements fluid and easy.
“Wow,” I breathe, relaxing a little. “Look!” I turn to Yizhi.
He’s paying no attention. Instead, he’s wiping the blood from Li Shimin’s mouth with a wad of gauze, saying something I can’t hear over the sirens. Li Shimin nods, though he keeps shivering like it’s the dead of winter.
An absurd feeling of being left out throbs within me.
But it’s not like this room needs two Yizhis. I have my own strengths in other things.
The sirens fade after a minute, giving way to the tinny noises from a livestream Sima Yi opened on his wristlet. I limp over to him, kneading along the bed frame for balance.
With a burst of green light on the screen and a roar that crackles the speakers, the White Tiger rises on its hind paws while transforming. Legs lengthening, shoulders growing, paws extending into clawed hands. Its jaw gapes wide, and a human face morphs out inside it, so it ends up looking like a warrior wearing a tiger helmet. Its torso becomes like armor sculpted from milky glass. Solid green and black highlights transmute around every piece.
A Heroic Form, achieved in less than three seconds. Even though Metal-type Chrysalises are the second hardest to transform, right after Earth types.
“How do they work together so well?” I shake my head. “What’s the secret?”
“They know they’re supposed to be a team.” Sima Yi angles an unamused, condemning look at me. A strange shame sears through me. “They do the parts they’re good at, then pull back when it’s necessary. They don’t fight each other for control. They trust each other.”
The White Tiger slaps its breastplate and begins wrenching a long dagger-ax—its signature weapon—out of its chest. Its eyes dim from Wood green to Water black, from most yang to most yin. Which makes sense, because while Wood qi is best for triggering transformations, it’s Water qi that’s best for shaping spirit metal. A black-hazed dent sinks around the dagger-ax as it emerges. The moment the end snaps free, the breastplate morphs back to its original look.
Twirling the dagger-ax, the Tiger takes a springing leap into battle. Its eyes change color: one green and one black, two qis surging in sync, two hearts beating as one. It vaults, stabs, and sweeps through a glinting swarm of Hunduns.
I peer at Li Shimin over the top edge of the screen. My teeth dig into my lip.
“Hey, what’s that noise?” Yizhi’s head perks up.
“The ba—” I start. But then I hear it too.
A storm of boot steps grows steadily louder in the hall outside. Shouts surge from the soldiers at the door. I look to Sima Yi.
Before anything helpful makes it out of his mouth, the door bursts open, revealing a strategist with a huge potbelly. He must be An Lushan, Chief Strategist of the Sui-Tang frontier. Sima Yi cracked a few jokes about him during my solo lessons.
“Here you are.” He breathes deeply, then points at Li Shimin. “You. Into battle. Now.”
