Chapter Twenty-Six: Despite all That

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

DESPITE ALL THAT

Dealing with Gao Qiu is exactly as grating as I imagined. He will work in earnest with me only if I prove I can survive Li Shimin again.

“The Sages aren’t happy with her, so I’d have to grease a lot of palms to make them look the other way about me promoting her for real,” he tells Yizhi over a voice message, because he won’t even speak directly to me. “No point doing that if she’s just going to die two seconds later.”

So everything still depends on how well Li Shimin and I balance in our next battle.

My head clears. I stop pushing him away, no matter the things he’s done, no matter my mess of feelings about him. After he survives the worst of the withdrawal with Yizhi’s help, I do every partner exercise Sima Yi suggests without complaining. Ice dancing, regular dancing, trust falls, balancing on an elevated beam while holding hands, whatever. I don’t question his methods.

Not even when he tells us to jump off the Great Wall together.

As the moon soaks through the clouds above in a luminous smear, Li Shimin wraps his arms around me as if attempting another dance. Thanks to the cascading disasters, Sima Yi got enough support from his fellow Central Command strategists to grant us spirit armor privileges—partly to help with training, partly to deter further attacks from other pilots.

The weight of the Vermilion Bird armor’s expansive scarlet wings, each longer than we are tall, teeters us on the concrete edge we’re on. The weather-stained and lichen-coated side of the Wall plunges down through the night, the ground so distant it’s nothing but beckoning oblivion. I would’ve liked to learn to fly from solid ground, but Sima Yi says I could accidentally waste a lot of qi trying to figure it out, so he’s only letting me have one try, under his strict terms.

A night wind keens across the Hundun wilds like a dead concubine crying out from the beyond, stirring Li Shimin’s chopped hair, chilling me down to the marrow. His tremors haven’t completely stopped, and his features remain lifeless and impassive, weighed down by heavy shadows.

If it was strange to see the most powerful pilot in Huaxia without a crown before, it looks even weirder now that he’s armored. I mean, the armor is so grandiose, with its wings and long phoenix-like skirts and metal feathers flaring over his shoulders, and then there’s just his head. Something is clearly missing.

I’m wondering what his crown would look like when Sima Yi gives the official order to “Jump!”

For the first time in the flesh, I witness the spectacle of Li Shimin, the Iron Demon, conducting his qi.

Fire-red radiance scorches like rivers of lava under his skin and courses into his armor. Heat rushes against my body, pressed to his. His irises singe as bright as embers. His wings spread against the night, ablaze.

Since the maximum force with which someone can channel their qi is directly proportional to their spirit pressure, this really is the most intense that anyone in Huaxia can look right now.

By a sonic crack of his wings, he springs off the Wall with me in his arms. I cling to his hot armor, biting back a scream at the sudden weightlessness. Wind whooshes in my ears. The world loses its edges, its logic. The qi-heated gusts of his wingbeats churn around us. I have no idea if it means we’re dying or not, and I can’t bear to open my eyes to confirm.

However, as oxygen shudders in and out of my lungs, frustration sizzles inside me.

Is this who I want to be? A girl who has to stay attached to a boy?

With a deep breath, I channel my Metal-white qi outward from the meridians in my body. A cool sensation floods through my spine and into my armor. I untangle from Li Shimin, pushing off his chest for good measure.

My terror spikes when I immediately pitch down, but I flap my wings again and again, pouring my qi into them, relentless. Pale radiance puffs along the edges of my view. The gusts chill the sweat drenching me.

And just like that, I’m flying.

My vast wings buoy me on the wind, defying gravity, defying death. Exhilaration buzzes through every cell in my body, as twinkling and unearthly as starlight. Slowly, I soar higher while turning in a circle, taking in the world with new eyes. A far bigger world, filled with so much more space and sound and freedom. It’s a vantage point only Chrysalises should have, yet here I am, a human bobbling through the air as if it were as wide and cradling as the Hundun-filled ocean at the very east of Huaxia. The squares of light from the watchtowers outside the Great Wall make a serpent constellation from horizon to horizon.

I look at my arms. My very own Metal qi, cold and calm and silver-white, flows beneath the feather texture of my armor.

So many emotions spill free inside me that I have no idea how to handle it, to control it, to keep it from overflowing from my eyes as windblown tears. Sobs wrack my weightless body so hard that I whirl off balance, one wing higher than the other. Li Shimin pulses up after me and catches me by the waist. My cold wingbeats mingle with his hot ones like shared breath.

I’m so overwhelmed that I make no move to shove him away.

“Even walking was a luxury for me,” I croak, hammering my fist on his feathery breastplate. Then I outright lean against it. The heat of his qi warms my cheek.

He says nothing. Just holds me, bobbing in midair, in the unthinkable distance between heaven and earth that humans are not supposed to reach.

Despite all that, and Sima Yi looking quite pleased after we returned to the Wall, our synergy doesn’t improve.

“You’re just yielding to him, not cooperating with him!” Sima Yi yells at me after Li Shimin drags me through yet another clumsy routine on the ice rink. “It is not the same thing!”

Easy for him to yap about. He should try cooperating on slick ice with someone whose mind is constantly straying in a hundred directions, to wherever the nearest bottle of liquor is.

By our fifth day of training, a constant anxiety quivers inside me, chipping at my hope that we can pull ourselves together in time. As if mirroring my mood, a thunderstorm beats against the rink building, rumbling through the concrete and tinkling down the windows.

“Hey.” Sima Yi beckons me from the edge of the rink when Li Shimin sulks off to a lavatory break. “I need to talk to you.”

“About what?” I skate toward him hesitantly, shifting my wings behind me for balance. Having armor has at least stopped us from falling all over the ice and kept my feet from hurting too much.

Sima Yi clenches the low glass barrier surrounding the rink. “You’d better not be tangled up in a love triangle.”

My tiny skates screech to a stop. I open my mouth to splutter a denial.

“Don’t try.” Sima Yi flashes his palm. “I’ve seen the way you and Rich Boy look at each other. But you’d better not be doing anything out of line with him.” He hunches lower, voice dropping low. “Shimin is the one who’s supposed to be your partner, your One True Match. Remember that. And especially stick to it in public. Popular opinion in the army is already against you. You cannot afford to be labeled a cheater as well.”

Regaining my composure, I roll my eyes. “Quit worrying. I know my priorities.” Not a lie. I haven’t kissed Yizhi since that mess of a night. “Besides, don’t you know basic geometry, Strategist Sima?” I make a triangle with my fingers and look through it. “A triangle is the strongest shape.”

“I’m being serious,” he snaps. “You and Shimin are so unnaturally uncomfortable around each other. What’s going on? Are you not doing your chamber duties properly?”

When I realize what he means by “chamber duties,” heat blazes from my neck to my ears. “No! That’s none of your—we’ve never done it at all!”

Sima Yi smacks both hands over his face. “Oh, that explains so much. No wonder you’re making no progress!”

“What does that have anything to do with our training?”

“Are you joking? It’s the ultimate partner bonding activity! Why haven’t you done it?” Sima Yi demands, as if asking why I didn’t turn off the stove before leaving the suite.

I glide back on my skates, waving my wings to stay steady. “I…I just don’t want to!”

“This isn’t about what you want,” Sima Yi says through clenched teeth, and my gut chills with how utterly stern he is about this ridiculous subject. “If you could do it with Prince-Colonel Yang, you can do it with Shimin. I understand if you’re terrified about being with a Rongdi, but—”

“I didn’t do it with Yang Guang either!” I practically scream to shut that sentence out of my ears.

Sima Yi gapes for a long moment. “You’re still a maiden?”

“Does it matter?” My cheeks have gone so hot that I’m sure I’ve turned fluorescent red.

“Yes!” He slaps the rink barrier. “Listen, you cannot pilot properly with Shimin if you have this mental blockade against him, so you need to get over it. I will literally let you and Shimin go and get it done right now. This is urgent. It is not the time for you to be such a little girl about it!”

“Too bad—I am a girl!” Tears prick my eyes, welling to the dangerous brink of spilling over. “All my life, I’ve been told this is the worst and filthiest thing I could do! Do you know how many times my family has threatened to shove me in a pig cage and drown me because they suspected me of getting close with a boy? And now you want me to spontaneously sleep with a guy I hate?”

My voice snaps off the concrete walls in cavernous echoes. Sima Yi opens his mouth to argue back, but does a double take to the side.

My attention whips that way as well.

Li Shimin stands halfway back from the lavatories, gawking at us. We failed to hear the clattering of his armor over the rain beating down the walls. Thunder rolls above the building, booming.

Regret breaks through me. I almost go to cover my mouth.

But it’s not like I ever hid my disdain for him, so what does this matter?

I keep my hands in fists at my sides.

“Oh, whatever.” Sima Yi rattles his head. “Might as well—Shimin! Get over here! I need to talk to you about consummating your partnership with Pilot Wu!”

Li Shimin’s brows twist in an emotion I can’t decipher. He pivots on his heels and storms back toward the lavatories, the long skirts of his armor clinking against his greaves. “I am not having this conversation.”

Sima Yi chokes on thin air. “What’s the matter with you? She may be a little chubby, but she’s still decent-looking!”

Li Shimin lashes a look over his shoulder with the kind of fury he unleashed in the cafeteria fight. “I am not an animal, Strategist Sima.” His eyes flick toward me, mellowing. “We are not animals.”

“No, but you’re pilots!” Sima Yi insists. “And your very lives depend on your next battle. Look how awkward you two are around each other—you need to fix this!”

Li Shimin keeps walking away. I shut my eyes, breathing slow and deep.

Arewe messing this up for ourselves? Maybe it really is part of our problem.

I force myself to stay logical: if we don’t resolve this now, it will hang between us, making us stumble even harder than before. And we don’t have the time or luxury for more stumbling.

Face searing with another flare of heat, I draw a deep breath. “Li—!”

Red lights flick on in the ceiling. Hundun sirens bellow through the building, resounding.

Li Shimin whirls around.

Panic flashes across Sima Yi’s face, but he tames it within a second and starts shouting legitimate, non-absurd commands.

Survival instinct erases all jagged edges of our conflict. Li Shimin runs toward me. I wrap my wings around my torso to make it easier for him to carry me. He scoops me up, because it’ll be faster than my attempts at walking. We can’t fly. We’d become huge glowing targets against the night, and any soldier could shoot us down with the excuse that they were preventing our desertion.

But we don’t make it more than ten steps out of the building before soldiers crowd around us anyway, boots splashing in the storm. I flare my spirit sense by conducting my qi through my armor at a special intensity. Like a third eye opening, my body gains a new layer of awareness, picking up on the spirit pressures scattered through the camp. More signals are approaching from every direction.

Did every soldier in the camp receive a command to corner us?

“Oh, you won’t be dodging battle this time,” An Lushan’s voice hisses out of a tablet speaker. A soldier holds up a livefeed of his face, while another angles an umbrella over the screen.

Sima Yi lashes his sleeve, already drenched. “I have orders from Central Comm—!”

“Orders overridden.” An Lushan holds up his own tablet, displaying a document. “By sagely decree from Chairman Kong himself.”