Enter your cages? I thought. Those are actually for us?
If this surprised the other alchemists, they didn’t show it. All of them bent down and crawled inside, so I hurried into one as well, hugging my knees to make myself smaller, metal bars digging into my back. The guards came around and locked the doors, one by one. When they finished, the official in yellow once again stepped forward, and all eyes turned to him. He stood beside a long table of five men in red and green robes, a massive wooden board beside him covered in blank scroll paper.
“Aspiring alchemists,” he said, “your task is to break free within the hour, but you will soon find that these are not normal cages. Our judges—” he turned, gesturing to the table of scholars “—will be watching you carefully. The first ten to escape will move to the second round in Chang’an. Best of luck to you all.”
Then he moved back, and more officials came up and down the rows, laying trays of alchemical stones on the ground in front of our cages. I supposed this was meant to make the exam fair, so that the wealthy scholars couldn’t bring wagons full of every stone in the world.
I peered through the bars while I waited for them to reach my cage, trying to discern the stone types from color alone, but I needed to feel them to be sure. My fingers twitched as the other alchemists started sifting through their supply. I couldn’t sit here and wait patiently for my turn. I needed a strategy.
I ran my fingers up and down the bars. You will soon find that these are not normal cages, the official had said. What did that mean?
The metal was silver-colored, at least on the surface. I closed my eyes and tried to identify the metal type by feel, but I was used to holding stones in my hand, testing their weight against each other. I scraped my thumbnail against the bars but couldn’t scratch the surface.
At last, the guards reached my cage. I leaned forward, gripping the bars as the man shifted to set a tray in front of me.
He hesitated, his gaze dropping to my wristband. Then he stood up swiftly, withdrawing the tray and instead setting it down at the next alchemist’s cage.
“Wait!” I said, swiping a hand out as if I could snatch the stones back, but the guard ignored me, hurrying to distribute the rest of the trays.
My hands shook against the bars, heartbeat throbbing in my ears as I realized what was happening. It didn’t matter how good of an alchemist I was. They weren’t even going to let me try. They’d decided it the moment they’d learned what I was.
I smashed my fists against the floor, the echo ringing out across the courtyard, making the other alchemists flinch.
“Hey!” I shouted. “You forgot about me!”
The judges glanced at me and whispered to each other, but made no move to intervene.
“Shut up!” a man said somewhere behind me. “Some of us are trying to concentrate here.”
I whirled around, shooting him a look that could melt iron. “This isn’t fair!” I said, slamming my fist against the top of the cage, even though it rattled through my bones and would probably break my hand if I kept going. “I paid fifty gold like the rest of you!”
“You should have stayed home, little girl!” someone shouted from across the row, and I recognized his voice as that of the annoying mustache man. A few others made sounds of agreement.
I slumped against the cold metal floor of the cage, my skin burning, out of breath and ready to tear my hair out or scream until the world ended. The urge to cry crashed over me in a hot wave and I swallowed it down, fingernails pinching into my thighs. I thought of Wenshu and Yufei, who were probably locked in their testing rooms by now, worrying about trying to recall Confucius’s words instead of yelling like a feral animal. At least they had a chance.
I turned to the alchemist in the cage closest to me, who was busy sorting through the stones that should have been mine.
“Give me some of yours,” I said.
His eye twitched, but he ignored me.
“I’ll pay you,” I said. That was all rich people cared about, wasn’t it?
He scoffed, shaking his head. “You wear rags. I doubt you could pay me enough for a bowl of rice.”
“Give them to me or the second I get out of here I’ll rip your ears off with my teeth.”
The man hesitated for one glorious moment before shaking his head. “You don’t scare me, hùnxiě,” he said, even though that was definitely a lie.
He grabbed three pieces of silver and pressed them to a pile of copper-colored stones. With a flash, the silver disappeared and the copper re-formed into a short blade. The man began sawing at the bars.
“This was supposed to be my competition?” I said, hanging my head. The bars were obviously hard metal. Copper wouldn’t do anything to it.
“Shut up,” the man said, sawing harder.
I sighed and turned to the cage on my other side, where an alchemist had heated a pile of rubies into a small fire and was trying to melt the bars. That might have worked if he’d had a few hours to spare, but the flame was small and ate through the rubies quickly. The metal glowed a weak blue before quickly cooling back down.
The color made me pause, a memory coming to me as if floating to the surface of a dark pond.
The metal fire pokers that we used in the kilns to bake míngqì always changed color when heated. Iron pokers, which we used most often, turned red. Steel pokers turned blue.
These bars were the right color and hardness for steel. The most common metals—gold, silver, brass, bronze, nickel—were all too soft to damage it.
Had they given the other alchemists anything harder than steel to use? I pressed my face between the bars, searching for iron or diamond or tungsten among my neighbor’s stash, but the alchemist frowned and turned his back to me, shuffling his stones out of my sight.
I leaned heavily against the door and crossed my arms, rattling the lock.
The lock.
I sat up straight. If they’d given the alchemists a soft metal to melt down, they could carefully pour it into the lock and then quickly cool it with a waterstone, attach a handle, and then it would no longer matter if you could break the bars. You would have a key.
“If I tell you how to get out, will you give me the rest of your stones?” I said to the alchemist on my right.
“I know how to get out,” he said, molding another blade.
“Clearly not. If you would just—”
“You’re wasting your breath,” he said. “Stop distracting me.”
No matter how much I rattled the bars, insulted him, and criticized his attempts, he kept ignoring me. For an excruciating amount of time, I watched him heat and reheat all the firestones he could find and hold them to the bars, even when his palms burned and blistered, the air reeking of cooked flesh. With a feral grunt, he wrenched the glowing bars apart a fraction. He was wiry like Wenshu and managed to force himself out of the gap, singeing his robes. He fell onto the ground outside his cage, panting.
“The first alchemist has escaped!” the official announced. Then he turned to the wooden board, dipped a brush into a pool of ink, and drew a single tally mark across the paper.
My hands tightened around the steel. Only nine more people could pass.
I slipped my arm through the bars, reaching out for the alchemist’s discarded stones. Auntie So always said I was long-limbed like a wind sock, so I prayed that would finally be good for something. But the stones were too far away, no matter how much I stretched.
On the other side of the yard, metal clinked and clanged, and the audience cheered as the official drew another tally mark on the board. Soon after, a third.
As the tally marks kept coming, panic ignited in my stomach and I started hammering my fist on the cage again, even though it wouldn’t help. I knew the answer. All I needed was a few stones, and I could be out in moments. How could I come so close and go home with nothing?
The man with the cockroach mustache strolled over to my cage, shoving a quartz key into his pocket. Apparently not all the men were fools, but I loathed that this was the one who had found the same answer as me.
“Poor thing,” he said, kneeling in front of my enclosure, eyes glinting with gold. “Nothing but a little caged bird now, aren’t you?”
“You’re actually proud of yourself?” I said. “You can’t even win a fair fight.”
“I don’t need to prove myself to you to be worth something,” he said.
In a burst of rage, I reached out and grabbed his beard through the bars, yanking him face-first into the dirt. He bit down on his tongue, red spilling past his teeth.
The satisfaction lasted only a moment before he spit a mouthful of blood at my face, then grabbed the dirtied hem of my skirt spilling through the cage.
I didn’t see what stone he’d grabbed for his transformation, but my dress burst into scraps of fabric, fluttering to the ground around me. I had nothing but a long, thin undershirt made of pongee to cover me. The man reached for me again, but I raked my nails against his outstretched hand, shifting against the other end of the cage so he couldn’t take what little clothing I had left.
I shivered and hugged myself to hide what I could, the steel cage burning against my skin from the afternoon sun.
The man sat back and laughed as the scraps of my dress settled around him, the horrible sound echoed by at least a dozen other men. Hands pawed at me through the bars, no matter which side I leaned to. Someone grabbed my head, and my hairpins clattered to the floor of the cage, hair falling over my face. Someone else sloshed hot tea over my bare back, another hand tugging at the edge of my undershirt. There was nowhere safe but to curl deeper into myself, wishing for the thousandth time that I was smaller, that I could fold myself up and tuck myself away like a used rag. Tears burned at my eyes. Was it not enough to take away my dream? They had to humiliate me for daring to try?
The man with the terrible mustache reached through the bars again and swiped a thumb across my face, catching the traitorous tears. I wanted to push him away, but no matter where I went, more hands would seize me.
“If you ask me nicely, maybe I’ll let you out,” he said. “Just admit that you can’t do it yourself.’”
I can do it myself, I thought, unable to stop more tears as another hand ripped at the seams of my shirt.
Far away, I saw the official drawing the eighth tally mark on the board.
The bars around me started to blur into a lake of silver. I placed my bare palms against the burning metal just to keep myself grounded. Please, not now, I thought. Starbursts flashed behind my eyes, the white sky dripping into the horizon like sheep’s milk. This really wasn’t a good time for one of my fainting spells. Who knew what these men would do if I stopped fighting. I fell onto my forearms and pressed my head to the cool metal, sucking in deep breaths as the world spun around me.
The man’s words fell over me in sharp waves, and in the distance, the official called out another number, another mark painted on the board, another chance gone.
This isn’t fair, I thought. But what part of my life had ever been fair? I was foolish to expect them to let me compete. I wanted to cry in Yufei’s arms and let her break all these men’s faces. I wanted Wenshu to take me home and feed me and scrub the tears from my face until my skin was raw. Everyone who would help me was far away.
And then, strangely, I thought of the handsome stranger by the well, and the purple orchid crushed in his palm.
I will go to Chang’an to be a royal alchemist, I’d said to him. I’d been so certain at the time. So naive. I’d thought that skill and dreaming were enough.
That man had come all the way from Chang’an for me, not for any of these men. I was a great alchemist that they whispered about in the North. I was worth traveling across half of China to meet. I could do things that no other alchemist could dare to dream of. I was Fan Zilan.
I closed my hand around the man’s wrist, the cold touch anchoring me, the dizziness ebbing away. Maybe he thought it was desperation, because he didn’t pull away, even as my nails dug into his pale skin.
“Ready to give in?” he said.
I smiled, the sharp expression startling him back, but it was too late. I already had him in my grasp. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to give me any stones or metal to work with. But alchemy was everywhere—in the earth, the sky, the seas, our breath, and our blood.
I grabbed one of my hairpins from the floor and stabbed it into his wrist.
A tortured wail ripped from his mouth and he reared back, but I held his wrist tight as blood gushed across his white skin, splashing over the floor of my cage. If I couldn’t get a key, then I needed something harder than steel to saw my way out, and blood was full of iron.
The copper in my hairpin acted as the catalyst metal, drawing the blood up from his wrist, splitting the wound wider as an iron blade ripped from his veins, clattering to the floor of the cage. The reaction was unstable because I’d neglected the rule of threes, singeing my palms and bare knees and casting dizzy shapes across my vision, but it didn’t matter. Let the alchemy take what it wanted from me, crack me open and tear me to pieces, as long as it gave me its power.
The man fell back, scrambling away and screaming as I hacked at the bars with my iron blade. Everyone had backed away from my cage in terror, watching the bleeding man stumble drunkenly as red painted the dirt. The bars of my cage fell away, and at last I rose to my feet, standing in only my blood-soaked underclothes.
I raised the blade at the crowd of gawking alchemists, who flinched back, retreating. I turned to the judges and the stunned official in yellow, still holding the brush in his shaking hand. Ten tally marks had been painted across the board. I was too late.
“Damn all of you!” I said to them, tearing away my wristband, hurling it to the ground, then grinding it under my heel.
“Who the hell is she?” I heard one of the judges whisper, cowering away.
I hurled my blade at their feet. One of the judges screamed and threw up his hands to shield his face as the knife staked itself in the dirt.
“Fan Zilan,” I said.
“Zilan xiǎojiě,” one of the judges said, raising his trembling hands, “please—”
“Go to hell,” I said, stomping toward them. They shrieked and cowered, but I only snatched my bag of stones from their table and turned away. I grabbed a jacket from a spectator, who bowed and apologized as I tore it from her shoulders, then stormed off to wait for the next merchant cart back to Guangzhou, where I could say goodbye to my dream of ever becoming a royal alchemist.
“Stop!” I said as Yufei sloshed another bucket of freezing water over me. I stood in our backyard at sunset in only my underwear. “That’s enough!”
Yufei tossed me a rag and I caught it with trembling hands, then scrubbed the blood from my face. Wenshu had nearly passed out when he saw me waiting for him and Yufei in the city center in nothing but a blood-drenched undershirt, and hadn’t let me into the house until I cleaned up.
“You missed a spot,” Yufei said, snatching the rag and scouring the back of my neck. My teeth chattered, but I let her finish.
Even though my bloodstained, half-naked appearance had certainly soaked up all the attention upon our reunion, I hadn’t missed how gray Wenshu and Yufei had looked after their test, lips cracked and eyes shadowed. They both said it had been “fine” but the word felt too careful, too rehearsed.
“Are you not allowed to discuss it?” I’d said, after ten minutes of them avoiding eye contact.
Wenshu shook his head. “Zilan, I don’t know how I did,” he said. “It’s like I spent a year in a cave and only just saw sunlight. Maybe it was fine, or maybe I don’t know what words are anymore.”
It was the most humble Wenshu had ever sounded about his own abilities, so I stopped asking questions, and neither him nor Yufei had offered any more information.
Yufei wrapped me in a blanket and led me back inside, where Wenshu peeled himself from bed and stood in the hallway long enough for me to get dressed in our room, then the three of us lay unmoving on our backs like garbage washed up on the shore.
“I’m going to kill all of them,” Yufei said, once I finally told her and Wenshu the details of my test. Wenshu crossed his arms and glared accusingly at the wall.
“I’ll cut all their greasy fingers off and make them swallow them,” Yufei said. “I’ll—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s done. I failed.”
“You got out of the cage,” Wenshu said, frowning. “Was that not the test?”
“I wasn’t fast enough,” I said.
“Maybe they’ll make an exception?”
I huffed and gripped my blanket. “Don’t you get it?” I said. “They didn’t want me there! They wouldn’t even take my name! What are they going to do, write hùnxiě on the results list?”
“Only one of us needs to pass,” Yufei said. “The rest can follow and get other jobs in Chang’an.”
Wenshu made a face but didn’t argue. He knew as well as I did that wasn’t exactly true. Life in Chang’an was expensive, far more than in the south. We would need high salaries if we hoped to both live somewhere decent and send money home to Auntie and Uncle. It was pointless to move to the capital just to be merchants again.
They were both looking at me like I was just another question on their test to figure out, and I knew what they were thinking: Do we go to Chang’an without her?
Maybe they would pretend to ponder it for a few days out of courtesy, but eventually I would tell them to go. What kind of monster would I be to make them stay?
I would have to remain at home and work in the shop. Wenshu and Yufei together would probably have enough money to afford a real doctor for Uncle and Auntie, and maybe even some food. If that didn’t work, I could sell myself as a bride. Maybe if Auntie So advertised me as “Fan Yufei’s little sister” and I wore enough makeup, I could trick someone my age into marrying me before they realized what I really was.
A wave of bitterness rushed through me like sickness and I rolled over onto my side in bed, unable to look at my cousins any longer. We’d all worked equally as hard for our future in Chang’an. But in the end, they’d had their chance, and I hadn’t even been allowed to try.
Eventually, they blew out the candles. Yufei pulled the blanket over both of us and threw her arms over me, but I lay stiff beneath her touch, unfairly furious with her. Why did she deserve parents and beauty and a chance at her dreams, while I got nothing at all?
By morning, my anger had drained away and I felt like a ravaged sea vessel, its treasures spilled out into the ocean, just rotting wood bobbing in dark waters. A good sister would have gone with Wenshu and Yufei to the town center, where the list of second-round candidates would be posted. But instead I just lay in bed and told them I didn’t feel well, even though all of us knew it was a lie.
They shut the door and left me in the dark, and I remembered the hands of the men scraping across my bare back, ripping away everything I’d ever wanted. Tears wet my pillow, so I pulled my blanket over my head and ignored Auntie So asking if I was going to open the shop. The idea of selling míngqì the rest of my life in that tiny store made me want to disappear.
I hugged my bag of stones to my chest and wondered what my father would think of me now. He’d been a great alchemist in the West, but his only child would be no one at all.
I lay there even after the sun grew too bright for sleeping and began to scorch my cheek, then hid my face under the blankets, because if I was to be a bride, I couldn’t get too tan.
The door slammed open.
I winced, but didn’t lift my face, even when someone tore my blanket away.
“Zilan,” Wenshu said, breathless. “Get up.”
“No thanks,” I said, determined to crush my face into my pillow.
“Zilan, we’re going to Chang’an,” Yufei said.
“I knew you would,” I said, too tired to even feign enthusiasm. A cruel part of me had hoped at least one of them had failed, just so I wouldn’t be alone.
Wenshu sighed, yanking my pillow out from under me, my forehead smacking the floor.
“Hey!” I said, sitting up. “What are you—”
“Not just me and Yufei,” he said. “All three of us.”