Fullepub 
Chapter Two: Like Water Hurled Out the Door
CHAPTER TWO
LIKE WATER HURLED OUT THE DOOR
Istagger through the mountain paths with my bamboo cane, alone. A lattice of forest shadows crawls over me, sliced up by blades of scarlet twilight. If I don’t get home before the sun drops beyond the western peaks, my family will think this is my latest escape attempt. The whole village will start combing the mountains with flashlights and barking dogs. They can’t have their own daughters thinking it’s possible to run away.
Soggy leaves turn to mush under my tiny, battered shoes, which Yizhi has offered to replace countless times. But I could never accept his gifts, for fear of my family finding out about him. A lump swells in my throat at the memory of his horrified expression after learning of my self-imposed mission, and the broken way he called my name after I vanished into the woods to abandon the conversation. I shouldn’t have told him. There was no way he wouldn’t try to stop me.
Now that awful moment is the last we’ll have of each other.
I’m not sure if I heard the whir of his hovercycle over the treetops, but I hope he’s left the mountains. He can’t change anything. He doesn’t own me. Nobody does. They may think they do, but no matter how they scold or threaten or beat me, they can’t really control what goes on in my head, and I think that frustrates them to no end.
A bloody haze of sunset gapes at the end of the forest path. When the shadows release me, my view opens to the rice terraces I grew up in, whole mountainsides carved like stairways soaring for the skies. Trenches of collected rainwater gleam on each tier, nourishing rice seedlings and mirroring the scorching sky. Fevered clouds drift across every wedge of water as I make my way between them. My cane squelches over platforms of gray mud. Smoke from roasting dinners rises from the clusters of houses nestled in the terraces. The plumes weave into the orange, dusk-tinged mist swirling around the highest summits.
In the skin-cracking winter when I was five, when the cold pressed in so ruthlessly that the rice terraces froze solid, my grandmother forced me to walk over the ice with no shoes. After the cold crystallized deep into my flesh, turning it purple, she shooed all the men out of our house, sat me down on the frosted concrete ground, and soaked my feet in a wooden basin of boiled pig’s blood and numbing medicine. Then two of my aunts held me down against the floor as my grandmother broke every bone along the arches of my feet to crush them in half.
The force of the scream that tore out of me still flashes through my memories when I least expect it, always stunning me in the middle of whatever I’m doing.
That’s not the case for the pain, though. The pain can’t surprise me because it has never left. A lightning strike of it shoots up my legs with every step I take.
Every. Single. Step.
I don’t walk. That burning tread over the frozen rice terrace was the last time I walked. Ever since then, my feet have been bound into bulging, misshapen mounds that can only totter. Three toes have fallen off from infections that nearly took my life, ruining my balance for good. The other toes wrap around the bottoms of my feet, clutching the other side near the heels, as if trying to squeeze the mess of bones and flesh back up my legs. My soles are smaller than my palms. A pair of perfect lotus feet.
It really boosts my market value.
My family has scolded me endlessly for letting my facial hair grow rampant and having too much fat around my waist, but I face the worst lashings and screamed insults when I rebel against the tightness of my foot bindings. Hairy brows can be plucked, weight can be starved off, but lotus feet stop being lotus feet once they’re allowed to grow. And no man from a respectable family would marry a girl without bound feet.
“Without them, we’d be no different from the Rongdi!” my grandmother once yelled while I shrieked and sobbed about going through with the ritual. She was referring to the tribes that largely roam the untamed wilds with a pack-everything-on-horseback-and-run strategy of evading the Hunduns. Some were incorporated into Huaxia when we pushed the Hunduns out of whole chunks of territory; others from further out have been sneaking through the Great Wall in small, persistent trickles. Living on the frontier, we have plenty as neighbors. My family has always cautioned me against being like their women, who “run all over the place with no morals, shame, or decency.”
When I was little, I used to buy into this fear of becoming those women. But the older I got, the more confused I became about what’s so bad about them.
When I pass under a cluster of houses higher on the terraced mountainside, a few men knee-deep in the terraces lurch up from their work and ogle as I waddle by. They wouldn’t dare come after me—everyone knows everyone around here—but they never fail to make their desires clear.
See, when every frontier daughter who’s remotely decent-looking either enlists as a concubine-pilot or gets sold to richer men in the cities, the frontier men start having serious issues finding wives to bear their sons. The bride prices have soared up to tens of thousands of yuan, impossible for families here to afford…unless they enlist their own daughters or sell them to rich city men.
It’s a mess of a cycle, and not ending any time soon. No one stays on the frontier unless they have to. Most of us are here only because our original ancestral home, the Zhou province, fell to the Hunduns two hundred and twenty-one years ago.
I throw the men my most hateful glower. The terrace pools blaze like molten copper under the sunset, and I fantasize about real heat building up in them, boiling the men alive.
Then my cane snaps, and I tumble.
Gravity. One of the first scientific concepts I learned from Yizhi. It snatches me toward the mud path and almost into a rice paddy. The heel of my hand scrapes a harsh dent in the mud. Cold density smacks into my nose and cheek.
I push onto both arms. Gray filth plops from my heating face and latches to my tunic. I brace myself for howling laughter.
It doesn’t come.
The men are splashing through the terraces instead, hollering excitedly, crowding around someone holding a tablet.
A quiver ripples through my confusion.
A quiver in the terrace waters, specifically.
My breath hitches. Unmistakable vibrations are traveling through the ground, stirring the water.
A Hundun-Chrysalis battle is starting beyond the frontier.
I press my ear to the earth, not caring that it’s dirtying me further and dampening the rag tied around my hair. The Great Wall is only a few mountains away. On clear days, we can see the dusty, lifeless peaks that have been sucked dry of qi by the Chrysalises stationed along it.
The men must be watching a livestream and betting on the number of battle points each pilot will achieve. But it’s so much more raw and visceral and stunning, sensing the physical force of the Chrysalises through the planet.
What power.
My throat goes dry, yet my mouth waters. I close my eyes, picturing myself taking command of a Chrysalis, towering over buildings and smashing the earth with my colossal limbs or luminous qi blasts. I could crush anyone who’s ever tried to crush me. I could free all the girls who’d love to run away.
A whooping cheer from the men fractures my daydream.
I rattle my head. Flecks of dirt fly onto my sleeves. I crawl onto my knees, covered in filth, staring at my broken cane.
I should really stop with the delusions.
I don’t know if my father will count me as having reached the house before my curfew. Some last dregs of sun line our fortress of mountains with a ghostly blue halo, silhouetting them into colossal shadows that look eerily like Hunduns.
“Where were you?” My mother breathes through the barred window of the kitchen shack on the side of our house. Her voice is as frail as the steam sighing from the large wok of porridge she’s stirring. My grandmother sits on a stool behind her, descaling a luoyu, a winged fish, from the terrace waters. Firelight from the hearth flares across their weathered faces, as if they’re trapped inside a blazing dungeon.
“Was in the woods.” I pass my mother a pouch of herbs and starch roots through the window. Gathering these are why I spend so much time in the forest, and how I first met Yizhi.
“What happened?” My mother puts the pouch on a wooden shelf without looking away from my grimy state. Gray hairs stray out of the faded rag tied over her head, fluttering in the visible ripples of heat.
“Took a tumble. Broke my cane.” I resume teetering over the stone walkway that lines the row of houses. I land my feet gingerly, trying not to plummet onto the clay-tiled roof of our neighbors one tier down.
“You’re lucky a battle started.” My mother darts a look at the main entrance to the house, up ahead. Her eyes glisten orange from the crackling hearth flames. “Go quickly. Don’t let your father see you like this.”
“Right.”
“And scrub those clothes clean tomorrow. You can’t look like that when the army comes.”
She must remember how it ended for Big Sister.
Or does she? Sometimes, my mother’s so good at pretending nothing’s wrong that it scares me into suspecting I’m the one with the head full of false memories.
“I’m sure they’ll give me better clothes.” I stare at the bars of light dithering out of the kitchen window.
“But you still have to look presentable.”
I stop waddling and turn at the waist to face her dead-on.
There’s one big consequence to my assassination plans that I’ve done my best to ignore: killing an Iron Noble, a pilot with a maximum spirit pressure of over 2000—when the human average is 84—would implicate three generations of my family. My mother, my father, my seventeen-year-old brother Dalang, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles. They would all be executed along with me. Because pilots like Yang Guang are just too important to the war effort.
Give me one reason to protect you.I gawk at my mother. Stop me.
All I need is one sign that they’re worth my mercy. One sign that they value my life as much as I’m expected to value theirs.
Since there’s no point holding back now, I spew my most burning thought out loud. “Are you honestly more worried about me looking presentable than me going off to war?”
The fire cracks and pops beside my mother. She squints at me through the woodsmoke and fragrant steam. Then a smile blooms across her face like a wildflower in a burning wasteland. “Your brows—you listened. You look beautiful.”
I whip my head away and trudge on, no matter that every step is like stomping on a live wire.
It’s like she didn’t even hear what I said.
Electric lanterns blink on across the village, lighting up windows like the glowing eyes that Chrysalises have but Hunduns don’t. A breeze sweeps through the rice terraces, swirling a reedy musk into the roasting scent of humble dinners.
Wheat-colored light spills out of the open main doors of my house. A battle commentator’s tinny shouts punch into the falling night, blasting from the tablet granted to our family by the Huaxia government (though, of course, only the males can use it freely). My grandfather, father, and brother have propped it on our grease-blackened dining table. Their eyes bulge at the screen, reflecting the flashing colors of Hunduns and Chrysalises clashing.
I take the chance to step over the house threshold. I hurry toward the room I’ve been forced to share with my grandparents since my second attempt at sneaking away during the night, years ago.
“—and here comes the Vermilion Bird!”
I halt, almost toppling over. My blood runs cold.
Oh, not that unit.
Even my Chrysalis-obsessed family, which usually cheers at every big-name unit, remains uncomfortably silent. Nobody wants to acknowledge that the Vermilion Bird is the strongest Chrysalis in Huaxia right now. At over fifty meters tall in its Standard Form, it’s the only King class we have. But it’s piloted by Li Shimin, the Iron Demon, a half-Rongdi death-row inmate who murdered his own father and both brothers at just sixteen. He’s nineteen now. His execution has been indefinitely delayed only because of his freakishly high spirit pressure, the highest in two centuries.
While concubine-pilots are always in danger of dying in battle, only when it comes to him is death so certain.
No one has ever survived a ride with him.
A girl will die soon.
“Hey!”
My father startles me out of my thoughts. I jump, clutching the wooden walls.
His chair screeches back on the concrete floor. He rises, shadows sliding over his frown lines. “Why do you look so dirty?”
Icy sweat beads under the edge of my hair rag. “I fell on the terraces.”
Not a lie, for once.
The clashing of spirit metal and qi blasts ring on in the livestream. My grandfather and brother keep watching, as if nothing is wrong. My father steps around them and stalks toward me. His topknot, tragically loose due to his thinning hair, flops against his head.
“You better not have been fooling around with a boy.”
“Of course not.” I back away, shoulder hitting the door of my grandparents’ room.
Half a lie. I was breaking one’s heart instead.
My father charges closer. His looming figure doubles in my view. “You better be able to pass the maidenhood test when—”
That one jolting word makes me forget how to fear him.
“For the last time, nothing’s ever been up inside me!” I scream. “Stop being so obsessed!”
He blanks out in shock, but I can feel the utter fury that’s coming.
I slip through the bedroom door and slam it in his face.
“What did you just say to me?” His shout shudders through the house, and his fists thunder against the door. The brass handle jangles so hard it sounds like something broke inside.
“Unwrapping my feet!” I jam my back against the door while acting on the threat. Unwrapped feet are more indecent than naked breasts. Not to mention the rotting flesh smell, which is possibly its own class of biological weapon. Girls are supposed to maintain the fantasy of their dainty prettiness by always wearing perfumed, embroidered shoes and never removing the bindings in front of anyone, not even their husbands.
My father’s fists leave the door, but his lungs bellow on. Disrespectful. Ungrateful. Whore.
The typical.
My mother’s mist-frail voice emerges, trying to calm him down. My brother is laughing. My grandfather has turned the livestream to peak volume. A girl is dying in a Chrysalis in the name of mankind.
I don’t risk leaving the bedroom for dinner.
My stomach rumbles, bubbling like the porridge it wants, but I stay in the woven wicker chair my grandmother knits in, soaking my feet in the same wooden bucket that prepared them for being crushed.
See, this is why it doesn’t matter if you implicate them, the rotten, putrid core of me drawls from deep inside my head.
I uncork the wooden plug on one of the tall thermoses my grandparents keep in the room.
They don’t care about you.
I pour another steaming stream into the bucket. Medicinal leaves and roots scramble wildly in the flow, steeping the water maroon, like blood forgotten in a dark corner.
You don’t need to care about them.
A lantern buzzes above me. Shadows shift in the room’s grimy corners, seeming to creep closer. I set the thermos down and stare blankly at the straw I sleep on, right beside my grandparents’ bed. There’s a saying in Huaxia: a daughter married off is like water hurled out the door. Unlike my brother Dalang, who will pass on the Wu family name and stay in the house for life to take care of our parents, I was born to have a transient existence in my family’s lives, something to set a price on and trade off. They never bothered to give me my own bed.
The clatter of chopsticks on bowls and the babble of Dalang raving about the battle come muffled through the walls. The Chrysalises won. Of course. If they hadn’t, breach sirens would’ve gone off from the village speakers, and we’d be scrambling east, just like our ancestors did from the Zhou province.
No one else says much. I hope they’re thinking of me.
I hope they go to their graves regretting the way they treated me and Big Sister.
People sentenced to familial extermination don’t get to have graves.
I wince, shoving away the image of our rotting corpses dangling off the Great Wall.
The door opens. I flinch against the chair, not knowing where to look, hoping my eyes aren’t as red and swollen as they feel.
My mother totters to me on her own bound feet, offering me a bowl of porridge. I take the bowl with an awkward nod. My cold fingers wrap around the hot porcelain. A bitterness like tears floods my mouth. My mother sits down beside me, on the foot of my grandparents’ bed. Tension coils tight in my belly.
What does she want?part of me snaps, while another part goes, Stop me.
“Tian-Tian.” She starts with my baby name, picking at some old burns on her hands. “You shouldn’t have talked to your father like that.”
“He was being weird first.” I glare at her, though a stifling shame heats my cheeks. I tip the bowl of porridge to my mouth to hide my face.
Stop me, thumps my heavy heartbeat. Stop me. Stop me.
My mother only gives a sad frown. “Must you always make things so difficult?”
I grip the bowl tighter. “Mama, do you honestly feel like your life has been easy because you always give in?”
“It’s not about having it easy. It’s about keeping peace in the family.”
I laugh against the bowl, the sound hardening with a dark edge. “Tell him to not worry. I’m only here for two more days. Then he can have all the peace he wants.”
My mother sighs. “Tian-Tian, your father just feels emotions very strongly. Deep down, he knows that you’ve matured after all. That you’ve understood what really matters. He’s proud of you.” She smiles. “I’m proud of you.”
I raise my head stiffly. “You’re proud of me for sending myself off to death?”
“You don’t know if that’ll happen.” She evades my eyes. “You’ve always had a strong mind. Didn’t the testing team say your spirit pressure might be over five hundred? Six times the average! And that was four years ago. It must be even higher now. You and Prince-Colonel Yang could turn out to be a Balanced Match. You could be his Iron Princess.”
“There are only three Iron Princesses in all of Huaxia!” Tears tumble from my eyes, hazing my view of her. “And their spirit pressures are in the thousands! It’s just a low-odds fantasy that gives girls delusions of surviving!”
“Tian-Tian, don’t be so loud.” My mother darts a panicked glance at the door.
“Is it a fantasy that comforts you, too?” I go on. “Does it help you sleep at night?”
Her eyes glisten. “Why can’t you accept that you’re doing a good thing? You’re going to be a hero. And with the money, Dalang could pay the bride price for a—”
I smash the bowl to the ground. The porcelain shatters, and porridge escapes in a slimy, steaming burst.
“Tian-Tian!” My mother stumbles to her feet. “Your grandparents sleep here!”
“Yeah? And what are they going to do?” I yell pointedly at the door. “Beat me, so I can turn Yang Guang off with my fresh wounds? Make me sleep in the pigsty, so I can turn him off with my smell? If you all want the money so bad, you can’t do anything to me anymore!”
“Tian—”
“Get out!”
You can’t speak to her like this, a voice in my head chides, sounding achingly like Big Sister. She’s your mother. The woman who gave you life.
But a mother who has failed me so thoroughly is no mother of mine.
My chest heaves. I lean forward, hands clutching my knees. My voice squeezes out around a hard sob in my throat. “In the next life, I hope we have nothing to do with each other.”
