Fullepub 
Chapter Five: Fatal Mistake
CHAPTER FIVE
FATAL MISTAKE
“Master.” We collectively get up from the bench and bow like we were taught.
Even I do it. I say it. I say the word despite how it blisters my mouth like a sizzling ember, because it brings me one breath closer to bathing my hands in his blood.
“Oh, there’s no need for—seriously, keep going.” Yang Guang waves a gauntleted hand at Auntie Dou, who’s rising behind her screens. He’s in his spirit armor, a detached fraction of his Chrysalis that he can control without a co-pilot. The amount he’s wearing is astounding. Most pilots can only solo-command enough spirit metal to cover the parts they want with a porous mesh. His full, solid suit of bristly pieces glitters with an array of greens, as if chiseled out of minerals. A crown made from the same spirit metal glimmers around his head, rough as if furred, and flaring sharply like fox ears.
Up until two hundred and twenty-one years ago, before the various tribes of the Central Plains unified into Huaxia, pilots were warrior kings. They led and defended the permanent settlements that had popped back up after the Yellow Sovereign and his wife, Leizu, invented Chrysalises some seven centuries ago (supposedly, anyway—Yizhi says historians question if they were real people). Everything noble and regal about pilots nowadays is a remnant of this tradition.
In front of me, Xiao Shufei trembles so hard her silver tassels clink with the sound of a drizzle on glass. She wrings my hairpin in both hands. I scream internally. Instinct charges my body with the urge to snatch it back, but I can’t risk it. One wrong tug, one flash of the blade inside while Yang Guang is right there, and I’m done for.
“M-master,” Xiao Shufei stammers. “We didn’t—we weren’t expecting you until later.”
He breaks into laughter, clear and bright, and it surges through the chamber like spring water into a tin bucket. He pushes off the wall and strides down from the platform in front of the doorway.
His spirit armor clatters, and the long fox fur cape knotted over his shoulder guards whispers above the metal stairs. In the hollow of his green crown, a tall, bronze headpiece adorns his impeccable topknot. If he were a regular boy, he wouldn’t be allowed to tie all his hair up until he turns twenty, but the coming-of-age traditions don’t apply to pilots. They all wear their hair like grown men. Though he’s only nineteen, he’s already ranked Colonel, meaning he’s served for over five years. But the army will probably give him a big celebration anyway when he turns—
No—what am I talking about? He won’t turn twenty, ever.
“What can I say?” Dimples curl into his cheeks as he closes in. “I just couldn’t wait to find out what lovely new girls are coming into my watchtower. But I hope you weren’t using this as a last chance to cause trouble.”
“No!” Xiao Shufei jumps. “We were—we were just—”
“There will only be trouble if that hairpin isn’t back in this hand in the next three seconds.” I hold out a palm. It’s too late to put on any of the fake personalities I’ve been trying on in my head.
She practically jams the pin into my palm. It’s slick with her sweat. Ugh.
“Thank you.” I slide it back through my fox-ear hairdo, striving to seem much calmer than I really am.
Yang Guang reaches us. Close enough to strangle.
It really gets me, how boyish he looks. Slender jaw, mischievous grin, dazzling eyes. My heart judders seeing the two circlets of his crown, a constant reminder that every pilot is searching for his One True Match. The other girls look transfixed as well, and I know we’re all imagining the same thing: him morphing one of the circlets into a second crown and placing it on one of our heads in a lavish Match Crowning. One of my most vivid memories is of swooning in sync with the other village girls as we huddled around the big screen we were temporarily allowed to watch one such broadcast on.
That was when I didn’t know any better.
I shake the fantasy from my head.
“So…” Yang Guang gazes right into my eyes. “Do you terrorize people often, beautiful?”
“Only if they piss me off first,” I say nonchalantly, though my pulse pounds harder, rising through my body.
“This is Consort Wu!” Auntie Dou staggers over, beaming, despite the tilt table still squeaking and thudding the poor girl on the platform.
My gut clenches tighter at her bringing attention to my family name, though it’s pretty common in the Sui and Tang provinces. I can’t tell if Yang Guang has made a connection to my sister. He wouldn’t talk about it if he did. No one talks about dead concubines. I’m counting on him to not even consider the possibility that a girl would doom three generations of her family to take his life.
“Consort?” He blinks and squints at me. His irises light up, neon yellow.
I flinch, despite knowing it’s just a sign of his qi conducting through the spirit metal of his armor. Having only glimpsed pilots on screens all my life has made them seem like fantastical beings that aren’t quite real, but this…this is definitely not computer-generated.
“Yes, I feel it now!” He nods, eyes waving golden light in the dimness. “That’s a pretty big spirit pressure. Huh.” His luminous gaze slides over me like melting honey. “You really are an interesting one.”
Auntie Dou glances knowingly between him and me. “So, young master, are you here to choose your companion for your shift?”
“Oh, I think I’ve found her.” He offers his armored hand to me, the golden rings of his irises beaming brighter.
I tense away the tremors in my fingers as I place them in his, bare flesh on warm metal. My insides roil like I’m back on the tilt table.
I’m touching him. Touching the hand that ended Big Sister’s life.
I came here with a head full of blade glints and murder, yet he’s smiling at me like I’m another plaything ready to please him.
A grin crawls up my face. Xiao Shufei’s head is bowed, but I catch her flustered yet fuming expression, and feel a twinge of pity.
He’s not worth it, I want to tell her. I’ll show you.
But my smirk disappears the next second, when the strength of his grip curls around my fingers.
There is no possible way I could overpower him while he’s awake. I’ll have to wait until he’s asleep.
Before I do any throat slitting, I am going to have to be his plaything.
Yang Guang takes me to his loft by elevator, a thing I thankfully won’t have to get used to. It’s like a creaking metal casket being wheeled up by demon spirits. He carries me, armored hands bunching my gauzy robes against my shoulder and thighs, arms like heated iron clamps around my body. I couldn’t say no when he scooped me up, given the rule against reacting negatively to his touch. When the elevator finally clatters to a halt and groans open, I realize I’ve been latching on to him too tightly, my forearm digging into the orange-brown fur of his cape. My panting breaths gust right against the fine angle of his jaw. I loosen my grip, cheeks heating painfully.
It’s fine, I tell myself while swallowing the hot shame. It adds to my act, and anything that furthers my plan is not a wrong move.
Silver starlight soaks the round loft and splashes over the furniture inside. With the month’s new moon not yet reincarnated into the night, the stars flicker like a sea of pinprick flames in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beneath them, the barren Hundun wilds race all the way to the jagged black hints of mountains on the horizon. A shiver goes through me at the thought of being beyond the Great Wall’s protection. But if I went to the window and looked down, I’d be able to see, with my own eyes, the beacon of human resistance that is the Nine-Tailed Fox, and maybe other Chrysalises as well. A buoyant feeling rises in my chest.
Then guilt spears through it.
No. I can’t think about the war. It can’t matter to me. Not when I’m here to kill one of Huaxia’s strongest defenders.
Yang Guang briefly lifts his hand from my shoulders to flip a brass switch. A ring of painted lanterns blinks on around the ceiling, banishing the stars and sending the wilds into darkness.
I can’t help but glance around as he carries me over the reed mats on the floor. I’ve never been anywhere so clean, artful, and pristine. There’s a couch of carved red wood and a huge screen in front of the windows. A dining table in the middle of the open space with disks of jade hanging over it. An altar to Chiyou, the god of war, against the rounded brushed steel wall, with incense sticking up in an offering bowl. Silk curtains on a curved railing—
I yank my gaze away, skin flashing hot and cold.
The bed must be behind there.
My eyelids flutter as if I’m drunk, and I catch Yang Guang gazing down at me. Fluorescent lantern light arcs over his soaring bronze headpiece and dances across his mineral-green crown and armor as he walks. He flashes that dimpled smile of his, then sets me down on the cushions of the couch.
Some part of my mind is still crackling like parched wood thrown into a fire, reaching for survival, trying to figure out how I could run away after plunging a blade through his neck. But it’s just illogical instinct. What is there to hope for?
Look on the bright side, I tell myself. After this, I can die. Finally.
Being alive has been painful, exhausting, and disappointing.
There’s a rustling as Yang Guang unfastens his fur cape. He drapes it over the carved back of the couch and sits down beside me. His armored weight crushes the cushion almost to the bottom, making it slope beneath me.
“So you’re pretty cynical about this piloting business, huh?” he says.
“And what if I am?” I manage to react in time without stuttering.
“Well…” A golden radiance rouses in his eyes again.
A small web of yellow light cracks across his breastplate. With a slight scraping noise, spirit metal spirals and rises from it, forming a rough blossom.
My jaw slackens.
“I get where you’re coming from, but it can be pretty magical, don’t you think?” He plucks the blossom. It remains connected to his armor, to his control, by a thin tether. He offers it to me with a small, almost embarrassed smile.
I let out a humoring laugh while taking the blossom, but hammer a reminder into my mind that this is not magic. It’s just his qi pumping into his armor via hair-thin needles in his spine, stimulating the spirit metal.
Like everything else in the world, qi and spirit metal—which is just qi in pure, crystallized form—are governed by the five subdivisions of yin and yang: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. From most yang to most yin, in that order. They’re more metaphorical than literal, and interact with each other in countless combinations. The Nine-Tailed Fox was made from a Wood-type Hundun husk, which doesn’t mean it looks anything like lumber, but that it’s very conductive and dynamic, like how trees grow on and on and everywhere. When Yang Guang influences his armor with the golden Earth qi dominant in his body—the kind of vital force that provides balance and stability—of course he can churn out constructs easily. It’s nothing too impressive.
Despite trying to douse myself in logic, however, I struggle to keep my cool, being this close to him. My every cell hums with not only alarm, but something else. Frantically, I look for distractions from the strange tension tightening around us. My attention snags on a cluster of hotly beaming electronic posters at one end of the windows. On the biggest one, a tiny silhouetted figure stands at the apex of a golden, winding dragon, raising one finger to the heavens.
It’s Qin Zheng, the only Emperor-class pilot outside of legend, who had a spirit pressure that was straight-up untestable with the equipment two centuries ago. The authority of his power was what ensured Huaxia’s unification. Yet because he suddenly succumbed to flowerpox, a plague going around back then, he left a power vacuum between humans and Hunduns that led to the fall of the Zhou province. That was enough to convince people at last that having pilots as actual rulers was a terrible and outdated idea. So now they’re just celebrity soldiers with fancy titles.
“Hey, do you think it’s really possible that Emperor-General Qin froze himself in the Yellow Dragon to wait for a cure for his pox?” I ask to change the topic, touching the spirit metal blossom to Yang Guang’s breastplate. The blossom wheels back with a surge of yellow light, smoothing out, as if it never existed.
Yang Guang’s demeanor turns serious. “Well, they do say his Water qi was so cold he could instantly freeze whole herds of Hunduns without even touching them, so the possibility is definitely there. The problem would be keeping up an endless supply of qi. But there’s Mount Zhurong, isn’t there? You know, the volcano in the Kunlun Mountains? I’ve heard strategists theorize that the Yellow Dragon could’ve been sturdy enough to be dipped into the magma beneath it without melting. That’s like soaking right in the qi of the planet then.” Yang Guang air-traces the winding body of the Dragon on the poster.
“So he really could be lying at the Zhou frontier, just waiting for someone to wake him up? Have the strategists managed to check?”
“No. Nothing can fly that far out with Hunduns all over the place. But I swear”—Yang Guang leans closer to me, expression darkening—“it won’t be long before we take the province back.”
“You mean a counterattack is finally happening?” I blink fast, breathing hard to contain the thumping in my chest at his proximity.
“Hopefully. The balance of power is tipping in our favor. Ever since…well, ever since Li Shimin showed up.”
“Oh,” I say, hollow and quiet.
“I know.” Yang Guang sucks his teeth. “No one’s happy that a family killer like him is the strongest of us. But there are things more important than a single person’s issues.” His gaze swings back to the poster of Qin Zheng. “There are still some of our own people out there in Zhou, hiding like Rongdi, waiting for salvation. With our current forces, we’ve never had a better chance of setting them free.”
A wave of sickness sweeps through me, crawling under my face.
I push to my feet, unable to sit in place any longer. I stagger toward the poster of Qin Zheng under the guise of paying it more reverence.
A pile of tiny things on the desk nearby catches my eye. They turn out to be pieces of a half-assembled Chrysalis model, made of wood, glass, and metal. A high-end model kit sold by the games division of Yizhi’s father’s company. Beside the desk, there’s a glass cabinet full of these finished figures.
I spin in a panic. I can’t look at them. They make me imagine Yang Guang buying the model kits and assembling the pieces with a boyish fervor, and it makes everything so much more confusing.
I thought I was sure about the kind of person he is. By the way Yizhi froze stiff when I told him my sister had been whisked into his watchtower reserves. By the black eye she carried during the only video call my family had with her, a bruise she claimed she got from “walking into a drone.” By the way she died without any alert of her falling ill.
But this whole time, Yang Guang has shown no sign of being a monster who would murder a concubine outside of battle.
Did I make a mistake?
Have I assumed wrong?
If I’ve assumed wrong, I’d be dooming not only myself and my family, for no reason, but this hope of taking back the Zhou province.
“I’ve heard bad things about him.” Yizhi’s hushed words flit through my head. But, unusually, a second part drifts along. “Though he did turn down several media contracts with Father’s company, so I might be hearing biased opinions.”
“I swear, Tian-Tian, I really did run into a drone.” Big Sister’s voice further clutters my mind.
Everything’s going too fast. I stumble aimlessly, so distraught I forget to avoid my reflection in the windows.
It stops me dead.
This is the first time I’ve seen myself since Yizhi groomed my brows two days ago.
Oval face pale and flawless with powder, watery eyes looking twice their usual size thanks to black liner and peach shadow, button nose contoured thin and straight, lips painted like lacquered rose petals—I look as beautiful as everyone told me I’d look if I conformed to their standards.
I look as beautiful as Big Sister was.
Yang Guang comes up behind me with a gentle smile. We look as though we could be on a poster too. The charming Iron Prince and his lovely concubine.
Except for the wooden hairpin in my swirling fox ear hairdo.
I touch the crudely carved pin, gifted to me years ago by Big Sister and then secretly modified by me into a weapon. I hate to admit it, but Xiao Shufei was right. It does look horribly out of place.
“Say, what’s the story behind this?” Yang Guang lays his fingers over mine, touching the pin as well.
I seize up. Thankfully, the looseness of my robes hides the hint of panic.
Focus, I command myself. He must have killed Big Sister—who else could’ve gotten away with it?
“Is that really what you want to spend all night talking about? Hairpins?” I move my hand to his face, finding his cheek while staring at our reflections in the window.
I can’t believe how smooth I sound. I can’t believe how heated my gaze can be.
His lips part in surprise. He leans down, almost nuzzling my ear. “You tell everything like it is. I love that.”
The heat of his breath on the shell of my ear triggers something visceral in my body. My muscles tighten as if pulled by a string. My breaths shallow and quicken. My blood rushes to startling places, and I have to clench down my surprise.
“Do you now?” I say, a shadow of sound.
His interest travels to our reflections again. “There’s something special about you. You see more than most girls. Most of them are so shy, so dodgy about the things in their minds. Not you. You own right up to them.”
“You have no idea.” I caress his lips, though what I really want to touch is his crown.
I hate the way I’ve contorted myself into what people think a girl should be, ready to please, ready to serve.
Yet I love the power it’s given me, a power that lies in being underestimated, in wearing assumptions as a disguise.
He takes my hand and kisses the pads of my fingers. With a long, weighted sigh, I turn in his arms and cup his face the way I did Yizhi’s this morning.
It aches me, how this is not happening with him instead, but my body is mine and mine alone. I have chosen to use it for murder and vengeance. And I will succeed by any means necessary.
I draw Yang Guang down into the second kiss of my life. It’s less gentle, less timid. Less chaste.
When the hot blade of his tongue parts my lips, I can’t help the gasp that rushes out of me. His mouth moves more aggressively than before, scattering my mind. His armored hand runs down my back, making me feel every crease of my robes against my skin. My head lolls as he scoops me into his arms again. His steps rustle over reed mats and toward the silk curtains veiling the bed.
So this is it. This is happening. The thing my family has only ever spoken of as the utmost crime. The surrender of what is supposedly “the most precious gift” I could give to a boy.
At least I’ll find out what the big deal is before I kill us both.
All I feel is heat by the time Yang Guang lowers me onto his bed. It’s set inside an elaborate carved wood frame, like a tall dresser with a round opening. My hair tassels tinkle against the cool silk sheets. He climbs on after, knees denting the mattress on either side of me. His metallic scent huddles me. I become hyper-aware of how he’s still in his spirit armor. I wonder how a pilot takes it off. If he’d have to use his hands, or if it would slip off like a real chrysalis at his mental command.
He kisses a trail down my neck. I reflexively arch my head back. Tingles scurry like electricity through my body, switching on sensations I didn’t know I could feel, threatening to undo me. I bite back a whimper. I don’t want to lose control.
But if I want him to drop his guard for the night, I’ll have to.
I imagine that it’s Yizhi touching me, kissing me, and I dare to relax a little, even as my heart pounds against my ribs like it’s trying to escape a burning cage. Hazily, I stare at the lantern light glowing through the carved grape vines on the bed frame. I could be diffusing into steam.
Then Yang Guang pulls back, brushes my chin with his knuckle, and looks me in the eyes.
“Are you sure about this, curious girl?” he whispers.
I snap out of my trance.
And out of my resolve, my certainty.
My mouth moves, but nothing comes out.
Are you really the one who killed my sister?is the question I must not ask, yet direly need to find the answer to.
I search his eyes. They need to stop being so sincere. I need to make up my mind. I need to—
An alarm fractures my thoughts, blaring. Red light screams down from the ceiling.
Yang Guang curses, lurching up. “Hunduns.”
