Chapter 8

When lessons began in full force, the apprentice hopefuls were thrown straight into the deep end. The masters had no intentions of going easy on them, with each lesson packed to the brim with theories and equations, design and practical work. For someone like Ying, who had never undergone formal training before, keeping up with the pace was a struggle.

Back in Huarin, her father had never imposed such a rigid curriculum on her, allowing her to experiment with anything and everything she fancied. Whenever she had a question, he would patiently explain the background theories and concepts to her; whenever she had an idea, he would work on it together with her to make it even better.

Over here, no one cared.

If she got an answer wrong, her classmates would laugh and mock her incompetence. If she asked a question, the masters would cluck their tongues and brush her off with their brusque replies. Gerel was especially impatient with her. Chang-en or An-xi could ask a question and he would sometimes bother to provide semidecent explanations, but when she was the one who opened her mouth, all she received was a sharp rebuke.

"Aihui Min, are you telling me that you still haven't memorized the chapter on yun-mu discovery in The Annals of the Nine Isles?" Gerel rapped her tabletop with his wooden staff.

The Annals of the Nine Isleswas a massive tome that was considered the most critical and influential text in an engineer's training, a consolidation of knowledge from the wisest minds that ever lived. Her father had used the book as a footstool. Perfect thickness, he said.

"Master Gerel, it's not that I haven't memorized the text. What I'm trying to say is that the properties and composition of yun-mu recorded in the book aren't entirely accurate—"

"So you think you know better than the great masters?" Gerel interrupted, his pitch rising a notch.

"No, that is not what I'm saying. I have the fullest respect for the great masters, but—"

"If you knew what ‘respect' meant, then you would be treating their books the way they should be instead of using them"—Gerel jabbed his wooden staff and knocked over the thick tome that Ying had been sitting on—"as a seat for your useless posterior."

Ying tumbled onto the floor. The other apprentices hid their laughter.

Gerel stared down at her with the same amount of disgust one would accord a worm. "Exactly like your father. Cocky and arrogant. Always thinking he knew better than everyone else, too busy showing everyone else up just to boost his own ego. Did you know that he told the masters that the Annals were wrong too? But look where we are now. The Annals"—Gerel tapped the thick volume lying on the floor with the tip of his shoe—"are still here, and Aihui Shan-jin is not." His lips curled in a cruel sneer. "You'd do well to learn your place, Aihui Min, if you don't want to end up like him."

Ying's facial muscles tightened, the color draining from her cheeks. Her fingers clenched into fists. The man Gerel described was not her father. It was Gerel's jealousy rearing its ugly head. She couldn't let him smear her father's name this way.

"My father was not—"

The gong cut off her words, ringing out to signal the transition between classes. Gerel promptly turned his attention away from her.

"We will be learning about the development of irrigation mechanisms during the next lesson. I expect everyone"—he gave Ying a pointed glare—"to have read and memorized chapter four of the Annals. There will be a short test at the start of the next lesson to make sure there are no skivers about."

After Master Gerel left the room, there was a rumble of activity as everyone rushed to pack their belongings and hurry to their next class.

"You all right?" Chang-en asked, reaching out his hand to help her back to her feet.

Ying took it gratefully, moving to sweep the dust from her robes once she had straightened herself up. "I'm fine," she mumbled, fingers reaching for the space within her sleeve where her folding fan should have been. Perhaps Ye-yang had been wise to confiscate it, because she would have lost control when Gerel insulted her father.

"Come on, let's head for the airship yard, then. The carts will already be waiting up front," Chang-en said, heading toward the door.

For Ying, the next item on her timetable was repairs and maintenance duty at the airship yards. Everyone was assigned shipyard duty twice a week. It was positioned as "valuable practice to help hone your practical skills," but they all knew it was just an excuse to exploit them for hard labor.

Ying actually found shipyard duty the most enjoyable out of all the classes she had to sit through. At least there wouldn't be an uptight master breathing down her neck, trying to find fault so they could get her expelled. If she hadn't entered the trials on Ye-yang's account, they would already have kicked her out just for being an Aihui. There was no shortage of people waiting to see her fail—including the masters.

"Why does Gerel keep picking on you?" Chang-en asked while simultaneously digging his nose. For one of the more refined-looking candidates, with his narrow nose and silky hair, Chang-en had some nasty habits. Nose digging was one, farting in his sleep was the other. "I mean, he picks on everyone, but with you it's like he has a very specific axe to grind. For the record, I completely agree with what you were saying about the inaccuracies in the Annals."

"Didn't hear you stick up for me in front of Gerel, though," Ying replied drily.

They were all squeezed in the back of a horse-drawn cart, en route to the Order's airship yard, a half-hour journey from the guild. Horses had been her main mode of transportation on Huarin, so Ying had never felt they were slow. Compared to the fancy steam-powered carriages and palanquins that zipped through the streets of Fei, though, the trot of the horse slowed to the pace of a snail.

"Why would he? Speaking up for you means getting into Gerel's bad books. Not a very smart trade," An-xi said matter-of-factly. "And Gerel doesn't hate Min—he hates Min's father. I heard my father talk about this before. The rivalry between Gerel and Aihui Shan-jin was intense back then. My clan elders were not pleased at all when Min's father beat Gerel to becoming the grand master's sole disciple."

Ying pursed her lips together and remained silent. An-xi's words reinforced what she had learned from Ye-yang about the animosity between Gerel and her father. She had to investigate, to determine whether Gerel could have played a role in her father's death. Still, it was difficult to believe that the cranky guild master would resort to murder. But what about someone else in the clan? Those elders that An-xi spoke of? The Niohurus were powerful, and it was entirely possible that someone had ties with the Empire and had tried to sell her father's work there. That would be tantamount to treason.

She carefully shelved those thoughts in the recesses of her mind, holding out her hand to catch the flecks of snow drifting down from the overcast skies. There would probably be a heavier snowfall later, hopefully after they were done with shipyard duty.

"It's been years since Min's father left the guild. You're saying the masters have been holding a grudge against him for so long?" Chang-en snorted. "Either they're really petty or Aihui Shan-jin ran off with their women."

"It's called jealousy," An-xi replied. "All the incumbent guild masters crossed paths with Aihui Shan-jin at some point. Out of all the apprentices in the guild, Grand Master Aogiya chose only Aihui Shan-jin to tutor personally. If you were in their shoes, how would you feel?"

Chang-en shrugged. "If I'm not good enough, then I'm not good enough," he said. "But that'll never happen to me, because I'm the best." A cocky smile stretched across his face, and he broke into a laugh when he saw the disdain written all over An-xi's.

"Well, I'm not afraid of any of you. I'm going to get into the guild, by hook or by crook, so all of you can step aside." An-xi turned and stared at Ying with such intensity and determination in his beady eyes that Ying thought they would start spitting fire.

Sighing, she stared up at the sky, letting the small flakes of snow land on her cheeks and eyelashes.

The Order's airship maintenance and repair yard was a sprawling compound that could fit as many as ten large airships, kept away from the prying eyes of commoners by a surrounding stone wall and an imposing wooden gate. Guards from the Order, clothed in their stern black uniforms, patrolled the perimeter of the compound. Two ran checks on the apprentices at the gate before letting their cart through. The heavy doors groaned loudly, heaving shut behind them.

Once they were inside, Ying and the others hopped off the cart and proceeded across the sandy terrain to the rallying point where the shipyard's chief engineer, Kyzo—affectionately known as Master Potato for his potato-like girth—was waiting to hand them instructions for the day's repair and rescue works. Unlike most Antaran men, who wore their hair in braids, Master Kyzo had shaved all his off, purportedly to hide a bald patch. It only made him look more like a root vegetable. He also had a mechanical left arm fashioned from metal—the first person that Ying had ever seen using an actual mechanical limb, one of the more sophisticated inventions of the Engineers Guild. He had apparently lost his arm in a cannon blast when he was accompanying the banners on a guerrilla attack against pirates.

"Tongiya and Jalai are on Berth One, regular maintenance; Kaldasu and Narai on Berth Three, also maintenance; Mardan and Tanggur on Berth Six, got a stuck propeller there; Niohuru and Aihui on Berth Seven, that baby's got an engine issue, might need a bit more work," Kyzo rattled off the scrap piece of parchment he was holding in his hand that looked as if he tore it off the corner of an illicit book he had been reading. Ying thought she could make out the svelte lines of a woman's body on the back of the scrap.

She liked Kyzo, though. He was the only guild master who didn't flinch at her clan name. He also didn't worship the texts like they came from the mouths of gods. "No point in memorizing a whole pile of horseshit if you can't build a decent engine or fix the cannons," he had said to them on their first day of reporting. It sounded like something her father would have said. She made a mental note to ask Kyzo if they had known each other back in the day.

Ying and An-xi headed to the assigned berth where their airship sat waiting, its ballonet deflated and lying limply across the hull. A few engineers had already opened the access panel on the starboard side and were crouched inside the compact space, fiddling with the wooden bolts and axles that were responsible for keeping the airship's propellers spinning.

The Antaran airships ran on engines that burned kaen gas, unlike the more common vehicles seen on the streets of Fei that ran on steam. Kaen gas was lighter and more efficient, the large quantities of energy generated from its combustion powering the rotation of the massive airship propellers, but it was also far rarer. The only source of kaen gas for the nine isles was the Juwan mines—and it was rapidly depleting.

The engine was the energy-generating heart of the ship.

The young apprentices weren't allowed to touch actual engines—there was far too much risk involved—so their role was only to serve as errand boys for the senior engineers.

"Bring me some water."

"Fetch the chisel."

"It's getting hot inside here. Fan harder."

Ying did everything without a single word of complaint. She executed her duties as if there were wings on her shoes. All she wanted to do was to rush back to the engine hold as quickly as she could so she could observe what the senior engineers were doing. There were no airships in Huarin, so she relished every moment of witnessing an actual engine being taken apart before her eyes. Every single word that passed from the lips of the engineers was diligently recorded into her notebook.

"Stop behaving like such a frog in the well," An-xi hissed, pushing past her to deliver a sack of charcoal. When he came back, he shoved a different sack into her arms. The stinging smell of sulfur made her eyes water. "Take this back to the stores," he said. "I have to get more water for them." He wiped the sweat off his brow and plodded off, dragging his leaden feet behind him.

Hugging the hefty bag of sulfur to her chest, Ying made the trip to the store, located within large hangars on the west side of the shipyard, and hurried back toward the ship. As she walked, a merry smile stretched across her face as she looked around the sandy compound, breathing in the chilly but refreshing air. The expansive grounds of the airship yard, with the vast blue skies and billowing clouds stretching overhead, were a welcome contrast to the claustrophobic corridors and stuffy classrooms of the Engineers Guild.

Arriving at her berth, she hummed a tune as she headed to the engine hold. Then she stopped in her tracks. A separate panel on the airship's port side had fallen open, revealing two ominous barrels hidden within.

The ship's air cannons.

Ying slowly walked forward, eyes fixated upon those dark, circular hollows. She took a quick look around—there was no one in the vicinity. She sucked in a breath and grabbed on to a rung of the wooden ladder that was built into the side of the ship's hull, scaling upward to the open panel. Stretching across, she deftly slipped herself into the cabin where the cannons were housed.

Ying ran her fingers across the icy cold surface of the innocuous iron barrel, her breath hitching in her throat. Reaching beneath her clothes, she pulled out her father's journal and withdrew the loose sheet of parchment from between the pages. She unfolded it carefully, staring at the complex construction of lines and curves that her father had drawn.

It was an incomplete set of instructions for building a cannon—she was certain of it now.

When she had first discovered the drawings and equations, the only thing she had recognized was the bizarre recipe for gunpowder. Even after staring at the parchment night after night, she had not been able to figure out what everything else on the page meant. But that was because she had never seen actual airships up close, nor the destructive weapons they carried.

The moment she laid eyes on those cannons, the connection formed.

"But it's not the same," she murmured, her gaze flitting between the airship's cannons and her father's drawings. She walked around the cannon, peering left and right, up and down. There were parts of the cannon that she could identify, but upon closer look, there were many things that looked different. Then there were the parts that were missing altogether. Unfinished.

"Who's up there?" a gruff voice barked.

Ying jumped, and she hurriedly shoved her father's journal and parchment back beneath her clothes. Adjusting the fabric to make sure everything was secure, she popped her head out of the cabin. It was Master Kyzo, looking unsurprised to see her. He raised his mechanical hand and beckoned for her to come down.

"The catch of the panel came loose, so I went up to shut it," Ying blabbered, praying that he wouldn't call her bluff.

"You do know that apprentices aren't supposed to touch the cannons, eh?" Kyzo replied. It sounded like a reprimand, yet at the same time it didn't because of the twinkle in the guild master's smiling eyes. He slapped her across the back, so hard that it sent her flying a step forward. "I was wondering whether I would get one of you Aihuis in my shipyard. Shan-jin was so determined to cut off ties with the guild I imagined I'd have to travel all the way to Huarin to see any of you."

"You knew my father?" Ying asked, jumping at the chance to probe further.

Kyzo nodded, then shook his head. "He was a few years older than me, so we moved in different circles." A slight crease crossed between his brows, then disappeared. "He did mentor me on a few occasions though. Such an excellent mind, particularly when it came to airship design," he said, gesturing toward the looming vehicles. "I expect no less from you, young Aihui. Now hurry up and get back to where you're supposed to be. Don't let me catch you wandering again."

Ying opened her mouth to ask more questions, about what Kyzo used to work with her father on, about who else in the guild her father might have been close to, or might have offended, but the master had already walked off to examine the other ships. What if Kyzo was the one that her father had been communicating with?

Taking one more glance at the ship's smooth hull, the cannons now concealed, she sighed, then quickly headed back toward the engine hold.

Later that night, Ying lay tossing and turning on the bed, her mind plagued by thoughts of the air cannons and her father's work. She could feel the journal pressing against her chest, constantly reminding her of its presence.

"Burn it," her father had said.

She sat up, eyes wide open as she stared into the darkness. On one side of her, Chang-en released a loud fart that punctuated the snoring coming from the fellows on the other end of the long platform. On her other side, Ye-kan was curled up in a ball, plastered tightly against the wall so that there would be as large a berth between him and the rest of them as physically possible.

Ying slid off the platform and adjusted her robes, making sure that the bindings across her chest had not come loose. Then, she headed outside. She made her way quietly to the workshops in the north wing that the apprentices were allowed to use for their own work. Clearing some space on a table, she lit a lamp and smoothed out the parchment containing her father's half-finished cannon design.

She picked up a stray bamboo brush and dipped its pointed tip into some leftover ink. In her mind, she imagined the lines slowly forming on the sheet, extending out in myriad directions from where her father had left off. She lowered the tip of the brush to the parchment.

Then she lifted it again, slamming it down on the table.

Focus, she reminded herself. I shouldn't be wasting time like this. I need to find the person who sent that letter to Wen, and the one who's been working with A-ma on all this.

She wasn't just here to become an apprentice, or to build things like cannons. She was here, first and foremost, to uncover the truth behind her father's death.

But what would she do once she found out who the mastermind was?

Ying stared at the warm amber glow of the candle's flame, and then back down at her father's drawings, the twisting lines extending like tendrils on the page, suffocating her. She wanted to avenge her father's death, but she wasn't sure she was capable of getting anywhere close. Time was already running short as they inched closer to the first test of the guild's apprenticeship trial.

Burn it, Ying. Do it.

She picked up the sheet of parchment and slowly raised it up to the flame. Her father had wanted her to get rid of it, to destroy these vile inventions that had taken him away from her before his time. The flame licked at the corner of the rice paper, a wisp of black smoke rising as the edges began to singe.

"What're you doing?"

Ying's hand went back down to the table, and she quickly stamped out the glowing embers with her other palm. A sense of relief washed over her when she saw only a slight charring at the parchment's corner. She folded the sheet back up and slipped it under a stack of books lying on one side of the table.

"Nothing," she answered, turning to face Ye-kan.

The boy was eyeing her suspiciously from the doorway. When he heard her reply, he marched in and peered down at the empty table space in front of her. "I saw you looking at something," he said. "Where did it go?"

"I wasn't looking at anything," Ying fibbed. "I couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd come out and do some reading. Memorize those chapters that Master Gerel assigned." She did have to find time to swallow those dry books eventually, since the first trial was almost guaranteed to be a test of how much knowledge one could squeeze inside their brain.

The first test was the easiest for most candidates, but for Ying, who had always been more of the trial-and-error sort of engineer, a theory test was equivalent to pointing a knife at her throat.

"You must think I'm awfully gullible," Ye-kan replied, narrowing his eyes. "If you're really here to memorize books, then why haven't you got a copy of the Annals with you? You're hiding something."

"I was looking for it and then you interrupted me." Ying reached out, pretending to riffle through a stack of books. "What are you doing here?"

"Needed to relieve myself." Ye-kan flipped through some books on the top of the pile.

Ying swallowed, her gaze flicking to where her father's parchment lay hidden. Thankfully, Ye-kan stopped and circled to the other end of the table instead. He ran his fingers back and forth across the candle flame, looking amused by how he was disrupting its steady glow.

"How did you get nominated by the fourth beile?" he suddenly asked.

"What do you mean?"

A touch of irritation flashed across Ye-kan's eyes. "Do I have to repeat myself? I'm asking how you managed to get into the guild? Did you know Ye-yang beforehand? How?"

Ying studied the boy curiously. Other than the older beiles, she had never met anyone who dared openly address Ye-yang by name, and in such a rude tone, no less. Ye-kan had always been a bit of an oddball, but surely this level of arrogance and audacity was not normal. The more she stared at his features, the more she started seeing the possibility. It was barely there, but there was something about the angular jawline that seemed to match.

Ye-yang. Ye-lu. Ye-han…

"You're brothers?"

Ye-kan's fingers froze in midair, his index finger in the middle of the orange flame, and he immediately leapt backward with a loud yelp. He quickly shoved his seared finger into his mouth, sucking at it gingerly.

"You're brothers," Ying repeated, more confidently this time. "How could I not have realized this!" In hindsight, it was so obvious.

Ye-kan was a prince of the nine isles, one of the High Commander's many sons. That explained his high-and-mighty attitude and disdain for practically everyone in the guild. To him, they were all commoners, unworthy of being in his presence. But there were so many other things about Ye-kan that didn't make sense.

"But if you're a prince, then why are you skulking around and sharing a dormitory with the rest of us? Why are you even taking part in the trial?"

"Shut up!" Ye-kan exclaimed, lurching forward to clap a palm over her mouth. He looked around in alarm, as if there would be people bursting into the workshop at any minute. "You're not to tell anyone about this, not even Ye-yang—clear? This is an order."

Ying couldn't get a single word out beyond a muffled grunt, so she nodded her head instead.

When he was convinced that she had understood his intentions, Ye-kan finally let go. "If you dare breathe a word of this to anyone else, I'll have you hanged," he said.

"You don't have to threaten to kill people all the time," Ying muttered. This kid really wasn't cute at all. She watched as his eyes kept darting back and forth, like a rabbit expecting an eagle to swoop down from the skies. "Nobody knows you're here," she said. "Your brothers don't know that you entered the trial."

Ye-kan pursed his lips together in a stiff line.

"But how did you manage to get past the guild masters? We were all supposed to register on the first day and—"

She saw his hand slide subconsciously to his waistband, where a luminous white jade pendant was hanging from its matching silk cord.

"You used someone else's clan name." Reaching out, she yanked the pendant off the cord and flipped it around. The characters carved in the jade read "Bayara" instead of the High Commander's clan name of "Aogiya."

"Give that back! You already know who I am. I'm the fourteenth prince. When I become High Commander, I'll have your entire clan exterminated," Ye-kan yelped. He launched himself at her, fists raised.

Ying ducked, sliding deftly to the side. The boy went hurtling into empty air, collapsing onto the ground in a pathetic heap. He groaned.

Laughing, Ying squatted down beside him, patting him on the head like she did with all her younger siblings. "Bayara Ye-kan, maybe when you decide that you're ready to be an Aogiya again, then you can come at me with those threats," she said patronizingly. "Until then, I think it's probably wiser if you're nice to me, unless you want me telling the beiles that you're hiding here, so they can send you back to where you belong."