Fullepub 
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Forget her Not
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
FORGET HER NOT
When the girl kisses me on the forehead in the cramped bunker we call home, a cold current of dread and panic cuts beneath the blooming warmth I’m meant to feel, because I know this does not have a happy ending.
—get away! get away! get away! get away!—
She takes my hand and presses her lips to my knuckles. The gesture makes my heart shudder off a layer of grime, and soothing words flow from her mouth, yet the rising screams in my head drown them out.
—run! run! run!—
I don’t want to experience another second of this, but I’m powerless to stop the scenes from carrying me on like a tide.
It’s like watching a rabbit stumble into a wolf’s den. Except she is no rabbit. Despite her tiny size and sweet face, her spirit pressure is a beast of its own. Together, we activated one of the heaviest Hundun husks ever to be salvaged. It took on the shape of a zhuque, a vermilion bird. Our hearts were beating in sync as we did it.
They say she is my One True Match.
—lieslieslieslieslies—
Strategist Sima trains us. He teaches us to dance on ice. She teaches me to dance in fight. Bagua Zhang, the martial art of spins, wind, and evasion. Our steps leave spirals and coils of footprints in the snow. Our time together passes in circular motions, with neither of us knowing how quickly it’s running out.
—don’t go into the—
We think we are ready for battle. I think I can do anything, as long as she is at my side.
—don’t go—
But the Hunduns push back, push back hard. The battle demands more and more power from us. It’s all I can think about. It’s all I can claw for.
I don’t realize it when I consume her mind.
—don’t—
—go—
I feel every nuance of her last emotions like a silk cord slipping through my hand, the end coming rapidly in sight, yet I can’t hold on. She is terrified. Of me. She regrets everything that led her to this moment. She wants nothing more than to get away from me forever.
She gets her wish.
“I hate this!” I scream into the dimness, clawing at my scalp. “Get this out of my head!”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Was it one of my memories?”
I fall dazed.
I should not be the one being comforted. That was his memory. Not some grotesque nightmare, not something he can scream away, but something he lived through.
“I dream about walking on daggers every night, you know,” he murmurs tenderly. “It feels like a nightmare, but I think it’s just your life.”
It sounds about right, but doesn’t make me feel any better.
“I dreamed about her,” I croak.
It hits him like a bullet. His hand drops from my back and makes a small thud on the mattress.
“Wende?” he asks on a lost ghost of a voice.
I nod, grimacing.
A long sigh leaves him. His eyes press shut.
I rub his hand, warming it. It’s coarse in some spots but stunningly soft in others. An artist’s hand, drowned by scars and calluses. “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever felt. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry it got passed on to you. I wouldn’t wish it on—no, that’s a lie.” He clenches my hand. “I wish it on plenty of people.”
Not knowing what else to say, I draw him closer and lean my forehead against his shoulder, right next to the sharply scented steel of his army collar. He wraps his arms around me, stroking my hair absently.
There’s something fundamentally different about the kind of pain I endure and the kind of pain he does. My pain is solely due to being born a girl. I know it for sure, I know it’s ridiculous, and I can hate and rebel to my heart’s content.
But for him, it’s complicated. Wrapped up in fault, in guilt. A tangle of impossible choices, each of which has bound him into a deeper mess. Even when he did what he believed was right, the universe only punished him for it.
“I don’t understand karma.” A tremor comes over him. “Wende was the one who was kind, innocent, and believed in better things. Yet I was the one who lived. And lived for so long, despite knowing I was doing nothing but killing a girl every time I battled.”
I shake my head while lifting it from his shoulder. I take his face in my hands, my thumb skimming the “prisoner” tattoo on his cheek. “You didn’t do nothing. You were still fighting for Huaxia. And it’s not wrong to want to live, in any circumstance. Sorry that I ever…implied otherwise. I didn’t value my own life back then.”
Since the day I was born, the world has told me I must accept whatever worth men assign me. And maybe, despite my nonstop rebellion, I did. They told me to choose between accepting their doctrine or dying, and I did. I chose death. It was the surrender that made me fearless.
Tiny chips of city light quaver in Shimin’s eyes. “It’s okay. It’s a messy issue with me.”
I clench my jaw. What would Yizhi say? I try my best to channel him. “You have to remember that pilots are tools. Weapons. None of us have any real agency. It’s the strategists and army higher-ups who are controlling everything in the shadows. And they were the ones who decided to keep sending girls your way. Any choice they gave you was nothing but an illusion meant to make you bear the weight of the guilt, so they didn’t have to.” My voice charges with fresh anger. “Don’t let them get away with it. That would mean accepting things as they are, and we shouldn’t.”
He raises his eyes but doesn’t look any less lost. “What are we supposed to do about it?”
Something hits me: this is our last night in Gao Qiu’s territory. In the morning, a hovercraft will take us back to the Great Wall. Anything I want to say against the army, I have to say now. It’ll be much more dangerous to bring it up after I’m back in their grasp.
“I’m not saying it is, but girls are naturally weaker in spirit than boys,” Shimin says, soft and sad. “How would we justify an overhaul?”
I suck my teeth. “Is that factoid even true, or do things just seem that way? There’s probably a girl with a higher spirit pressure than me in this city right now. But her family will never let her be tested, because they know—”
My words, my whole train of thought derails as two pieces of a puzzle slam together in my head. I lurch onto my knees, facing Shimin straight on. “Wait a minute—girls have lower spirit pressures, yet those pressures can be sensed more acutely?”
“Yeah?” He frowns.
“Why? How? What makes a girl’s spirit pressure fundamentally different from a boy’s?” I flash back to the butterfly Yizhi and I saw our last time in the woods, the one with both yin and yang wings. The casual proof that male and female are not concrete, unbreakable categories. “Something—there’s something not right here!” I scour my fingers through my hair. “Take Wende—she was supposed to be your equal. Why did she die?”
Shimin’s posture crumples. “I wish I knew. Believe me.”
I feel terrible about bringing her up again, but my mind is spinning so quickly toward something game-changing, something world-shattering, that I can’t help but push further. “Do you think the pilot system is rigged against girls in some technical way? Beyond only pairing us with stronger boys?”
Shimin’s eyes widen with slow-dawning horror. “They…why would they rig the Chrysalises themselves? It would lower the number of Balanced Matches. They need those. One Balanced Match is as powerful as at least five unbalanced matches.”
“But would it honestly surprise you?”
Shimin’s mouth wavers several times before he says, “No.”
I scrunch a fistful of our red silk sheets. “Then we need to investigate if it’s possible. If it’s true.”
“How? If this is really how the system is, it must be classified beyond classified. We’d never get access to proof.”
My thoughts continue to race. My eyes dart side to side, then snap up. “The strategists, the highest-ranking of them—they must know, right?”
“They would never admit it to us.”
“Unless we make them.” A dark energy pumps through my blood, faster, hotter, harder. “The night before the counterattack, we’ll be invincible. We’ll be able to do anything, and they won’t be able to punish us, even if they find out.” I gulp. “Anything.”
I don’t speak in more than the most careful of whispers, yet it’s like I’ve fired a gun in the dim silence.
“What are you saying?” Shimin’s brows pull tight.
“Do you know how karma really works, Shimin?” I snarl. “It’s not something that can be prayed into existence or counted on to fall from the sky. It has to be hand-delivered. A certain senior strategist has made us suffer very much. I’m saying we make him suffer too. So badly that he’ll tell us the truth to beg us to stop.”
