Chapter Six: Let’s Dance

CHAPTER SIX

LET’S DANCE

No. No.

There was just an attack on this stretch of the Wall two days ago. This is not supposed to happen.

Why is this happening?

Yang Guang checks something on a wristlet, its small screen blanching his face. Then he draws me up in the bed.

“It’s okay.” He rubs my shoulders while I stare at him in a daze. “It’s going to be okay. Believe in me. Believe in us.”

Us.

When called to battle, a pilot must take whichever concubine is closest to him.

I scream, scrambling from the bed.

“No! Calm down!” He wrenches me back.

Pain detonates across my side as I tumble into the bed frame. But I don’t stop screaming. I don’t stop kicking, thrashing, and biting at him.

With a heavy sigh, he slams me face-first to the mattress and presses his knee into my spine. My shrieks deform into a croak under his weight.

“Sorry about this.” He ties my struggling arms with my robe garland.

I gasp and choke, cheek scuffing on a growing patch of tears on the sheets. Makeup rubs off on the stain.

A drawer opens. Rummaging. A slick tearing noise.

His hand comes around and slaps a wide piece of tape over my mouth. No matter how I try to scream, the sound can no longer escape.

In my moment of shock, he hauls me over his shoulder. I wheeze for air through my nose alone. My legs flail uselessly against his armor. Hairpins drop onto the reed mats. My eyes are too flooded to catch if my killer pin is among them. Tears blaze down my cheeks and dampen the top edge of the tape. With me bound and struggling, he runs through the curtains to a pole behind the couch. He grabs the pole, then kicks at a ring of metallic pieces at its base, sliding the ring open. The musk of the wilds whooshes in on a gritty wind. Faint yellow light streams over a gridded steel bridge below. He hooks one leg around the pole, grabs it with one hand, and leaps.

His armored grip scrapes sparks out of the pole as we plummet into the earth-scented night. The concrete of the watchtower rushes behind us. He lands with a concussive force that rings through the whole bridge.

At the other end of the bridge, gleaming like green mineral under the stars, so big it doesn’t seem possible, is the back of the Nine-Tailed Fox’s head. The rest of it goes on beneath the bridge, perched in Dormant Form, nine tails curling like tulip petals around its body.

I’ve watched clips of it in battle. I’ve seen it crush house-sized Hunduns with one claw. I’ve snarled at promo shots of Yang Guang posing on its head, braced against an ear as tall as himself. Beneath him, the glowing, slanted slit of one eye has always barely made it into frame.

But none of that has prepared me for this.

Dread carves ever deeper into my gut, yet my squirming and my smothered cries do nothing to stop Yang Guang’s momentum. He clanks across the bridge and yanks open a hatch on the back of the Fox’s head.

The yin and yang seats are faintly visible in the dark, round cockpit: one low one high, one black one white, arranged like one lover embracing another from behind. The Fox’s second suit of spirit armor lies open on the lower yin seat, the pieces wide and slightly curved.

It’s not meant to protect me.

It’s meant to trap me.

Just like so many girls before.

Another muffled scream strains against my lungs. Yang Guang drops me to my feet, sending a burst of pain up my legs, and tears my robes off. The night chill presses in around my body, naked but for my smallclothes. I try to cover myself, but my arms are still bound, trapping the shredded remnants of my robes.

He tosses the tattered fabric aside and forces me into the yin seat’s armor pieces. Cold spirit metal smacks into the back of my thighs.

Terror surging to an animalistic height, I kick and flounder. He drops into the yang seat without letting go of me. His golden Earth qi lights up through his armor and sweeps across the green cockpit walls like autumn decay across foliage.

“Come on, don’t make this so difficult,” he says through gritted teeth. “There’s an invasion coming.”

With his heels, he presses my bare legs into the greaves of my set of armor. The pieces snap closed at his mental command, immovable. It frees him to untie my arms and pin them into the gauntlets on the armrests. Those ensnare me as well, and he jerks me back. My spine collides with a column of icy pinpoints—the connection needles, about to bore into me.

Spots rush in from the edges of my vision, brighter than the cockpit. A ringing pitch sharpens through my skull. My stomach convulses uncontrollably. I strain to get enough air through my nose, but I can’t.

I can’t move. I can’t scream. I can’t do anything.

The rest of the armor pieces crawl and click into place around my body. His legs settle on either side of my seat. His chest presses against its back. His armored fingers lace into mine with unchallengeable firmness.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispers in my ear over my shoulder. “Let’s dance.”

The needles pierce my spine.