I remembered being eight years old when old man Leoi had caught me and my cousins climbing on his roof. Yufei and I had run away, but Wenshu hadn’t been able to climb down on his own, and old man Leoi had dragged him home, face covered in snot and tears and nervous vomit.
Auntie So had apologized to old man Leoi, then shut the door and spun around, not to Wenshu, but to me and Yufei.
You don’t leave your brother behind, she’d said. Come back together, or not at all.
But Mama, he’s so slow, Yufei said, crossing her arms and pouting. Yufei’s stubbornness was usually enough to exasperate Auntie So and make her move on to an easier problem, but this time her eyes went dark and she shook a soup ladle at us.
We have nothing without each other, you understand? Our house, our shop—all of it can burn down tomorrow. Fans don’t leave each other behind.
Now, as I stared into the candle the Moon Alchemist had given me—marked with red notches that would tell me the hour as the candle burned down—I couldn’t help but wonder what Auntie So would say about me now. I was kneeling in the bedroom of the Crown Prince, wearing a gold-embroidered dress, while Wenshu and Yufei were probably choking on mold spores, shivering in some lightless dungeon.
Fans don’t leave each other behind.
But I’d left them, because I wasn’t a Fan and I never really had been. We’d come to Chang’an to save our parents, but when it mattered the most, I’d only managed to save myself.
When the candle melted down to the last line, the other alchemists would feed the Empress’s blood to this week’s crop of monsters and release the imprisoned alchemists. The Moon Alchemist had tasked me and the Comet Alchemist with finding the Emperor and keeping both him and the prince safe while the monsters ravaged the palace around them. They’re the last of the House of Li, she’d said. One of them needs to live, or there will be another war for power.
The prince came into the room as the candle was reaching its last notch, his expression nauseous. He locked the door and lingered in front of it for a breath too long.
“What is it?” I said. “Has something happened?”
He avoided my gaze and came to sit on the bed beside me. “Durian has been pulling at your dress,” he said, tugging at a loose gold thread on my sleeve. “What if it snags on something when you’re running?”
I reached over him and grabbed a spool of thread from the drawer, the same one we’d used to try to trick the Empress.
“Somehow, I don’t think that will be my undoing,” I said, as I threaded a needle and wound it through the loose thread to knot it back into the fabric. “Do you want to talk about what’s actually bothering you?”
“There’s nothing bothering me,” he said, far too quickly. “I just worry that if you pull at the wrong thread, the dress will fall apart, and we don’t want you undressed. I mean, not in public at least. Maybe we need to get Durian something else to chew on? I think—”
“Hey,” I said, threatening to poke his leg with my needle, “what’s going on?”
The prince met my gaze, then sighed and dug into his pocket, took my hand, and slapped a cold piece of metal into my palm.
“What is this?” I said after a moment, holding it in my palm like a dead thing.
“A ring,” he said.
I turned it over in my hand, feeling its cool, smooth edges. My alchemy rings were rough and sharp, made with haste. They were never polished or beautiful like this. “Thank you, but I use iron rings for alchemy. Gold is a weaker metal, so it’s less practical.”
“I know,” he said, shifting from foot to foot. “This isn’t for alchemy.”
“Then what is it for?”
“Well,” the prince said, “I figured there would be too much excitement afterward to really talk about this for a while, what with, you know, all the corpses we’re probably going to have to clean up tonight, and there’s probably a lot of paperwork that goes along with a change in power, so this seemed like a good time—”
“Li Hong,” I said, frowning, “why are you giving me this?” It didn’t take an imperial scholar’s mind to sense that the prince was hiding something, but I didn’t understand what was making him so nervous.
He scratched the back of his neck, looking anywhere but at me. “I just think that, when I’m Emperor, the court may look down on us if my wife only wears iron jewelry. Not that it matters to me, but it gives the impression that I don’t treasure you, and—”
“Your wife?” I whispered, the ring suddenly a thousand pounds in my hand.
The prince nodded quickly, his face pink. “If you prefer bracelets, or necklaces, that can be arranged, but I thought a ring might work better with your alchemy, even if it’s not as good as iron.”
I slammed the ring down on the bed like it was made of fire, startling Durian awake. “You can’t marry me,” I said.
“Oh,” the prince said, his shoulders drooping, all the light sapped out of him. “Well, I intended to ask you rather than tell you, but words get away from me sometimes when I’m around you.”
I shook my head, inching away from the ring. “Hong, I’m not from a noble family. I don’t think you’re even allowed to marry me.” Anyone at all could be a concubine without the court making a fuss—even a peasant girl, as long as she was pretty. But the wife of an emperor needed to be someone of importance.
“My father would probably take issue with it,” he said, shrugging, “but I will be Emperor one day, and no one will question me then.”
“Have you lost your mind?” I said. “I can’t be the Empress.”
The prince frowned, scooping Durian up and cradling him. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Do you not want to be the Empress, or my wife?”
I shook my head again, my mind feeling like hot soup leaking out of my ears at the absurd question. I had never imagined either title for myself. When I’d pictured the rest of my life, I’d always seen myself as a royal alchemist until the end, and what came after was a story entirely unwritten, because what could matter more? I’d never even considered that I could be a part of someone else’s dream.
The prince sighed. “If you don’t want to be the Empress, that’s fine. I just won’t have an Empress.”
“You can’t just not have an Empress!” I said, gripping my hair. “Your mother has killed all of your relatives in the line of succession. It’s dangerous not to have an heir!”
“What am I supposed to do, then? Marry some random noblewoman?”
“Yes!”
His expression dropped even further. “I don’t want to marry anyone else,” he said, hugging Durian to his chest.
“You don’t want—” I scoffed, unable to repeat his ridiculous sentence, clapping a hand over my eyes. “You’ll already be changing so much of what your people are used to,” I said, “and you think it’s worth making them even angrier because of me?”
“Yes,” he said, taking my hand and pulling it away from my face.
“They would hate me.”
“It wouldn’t matter.”
“Think about this. Abolishing gold will cost you the rich. Marrying me could cost you the poor as well.”
“Zilan,” he said, taking my other hand, “I don’t care if it costs me the world.”
Heat bloomed in my face. I turned away, but he only squeezed my hands harder, and while I knew the rich were skilled at spinning beautiful lies to get what they wanted, somehow the prince’s words rang true. I wanted to believe in him the way some people believed in gods or gold, their promises all that you could cling to when drowning.
“I won’t eat gold to live with you forever,” I said quietly. Not unless you want me turn into one of those rabid beasts, I thought.
He shook his head. “There won’t be any more life gold to eat. We’ll live short, normal lives together.”
“Normal?” I said, laughing. “Nothing with you could ever be normal.”
“Are you referring to the current assassination plot, or just me as a person?”
I shrugged. “A bit of both.”
“I am offended,” he said, making a show of crossing his arms and turning away. “I may forgive you if you kiss me, though.”
I glanced at the candle, burning down toward the last notch. “How about we make sure your mother is dead first?”
The prince groaned, closing his eyes, and fell back onto the bed. “How does my mother ruin everything even when she’s not here?”
I rose to my feet, tugging the prince’s hands. “Come on,” I said. “I’d like to live at least one more day, and that requires you to get up.”
The prince cracked an eye open. “One more day?” he said, as I hauled him to his feet. “I think I can manage that.”
“Promise me,” I said, because his words felt more real than any religion, as bright and true as the summer constellations.
His expression sobered. He picked up the ring and placed it in my palms, then closed my hands around it. His grip was bone-crushing, like he also knew the secret weight of his words.
“One more day,” he said.
When the candle burned to the last notch, we were already gone.
We needed to be well on our way to the Emperor’s quarters when chaos broke loose in the dungeons, because the first thing the guards would do when they caught wind of trouble would be to secure the Empress and Emperor. By the time the guards came looking for him, we wanted to be deep in the tunnels on our way to a monastery, where we could shelter the Emperor until the fighting ended. The Moon Alchemist promised to send alchemists to protect him when they had any to spare.
The Comet Alchemist was supposed to meet us outside the Emperor’s quarters, but when we arrived, the only people in the hallway were the guards.
“Have we messed up the timing?” the prince whispered.
“How could we mess up burning a candle?” I said, unease simmering in my stomach. How could our plan already have gone wrong? We waited another minute in the shadows, but we couldn’t linger forever and risk being caught up in the carnage that was sure to follow.
“We’ll find the Comet Alchemist later,” I said. “Let’s just get the Emperor.”
Unsurprisingly, the guards outside the emperor’s room weren’t thrilled with our demands.
“The Empress says you’re not allowed in,” one of them said, while the other didn’t even acknowledge us.
“And what does my father have to say about it?” the prince said. “Because you answer to him, not my mother.”
“Look, I’d like to keep my head attached to my shoulders,” the guard said. “The Emperor can’t help me with that at the moment.”
The prince sighed and held up a satchel of gold. “Is five hundred enough? Just a quick visit. No one has to know.”
The guard frowned. “My head is worth a hell of a lot more than five hundred gold.”
“One thousand.”
The guard’s eye twitched, lips pressed tight as if considering it. But I knew the look in his eyes. You couldn’t buy people’s fear away. I glanced out the window at the sinking sun and elbowed the prince.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said. “You tried playing nice.”
“It was worth a shot,” the prince said, sighing. Then he wound back and smashed the satchel of gold into the guard’s face. I grabbed some silver from my bag and pressed it to the other guard’s thigh, making his legs go numb—a trick that the Paper Alchemist had recently taught me as an apology for my unwarranted kidnapping. Both guards collapsed to the ground and one crawled away. He wouldn’t get far, and we would be long gone before he caused us any problems.
I pressed a firestone to the door and snapped the lock, and the prince rushed inside.
We stumbled into a dark room, full of cobwebs and settled shadows, no light but the pale murmurs of gold embroidery on the silk curtains. The room felt carved out like a gourd, the patterns of dust telling the stories of everything that used to be but no longer was. The prince tore back the canopy around the bed, but the sheets were flat, the bed empty.
“He’s not even here?” the prince said. The curtains trembled in his hands for a moment, then he let out a furious sound and ripped them down, blasting clouds of dust into the air.
“We should go,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. First the Comet Alchemist, and now the Emperor was missing. Something had gone wrong, I was sure of it.
“Without my father?” the prince said. “Who knows what the Empress has done to him. I can’t go without him.”
I wanted to tell him that the Emperor was as good as dead, that he hardly mattered anymore, that Hong’s survival was the only thing that mattered now.
But then I thought of anyone telling me to leave Uncle Fan or Auntie So behind.
“Okay,” I said, gripping the bedpost, trying to figure out our next step. “Okay, so where could the Emperor be?”
“The palace is massive,” the prince said, shoulders drooping. “We’re not going to just stumble across him.”
He was probably right. Where would the Empress hide him? I thought of her staring at me across the table, sipping her tea, smiling as if she knew all my secrets. She knew damn well what I was up to, yet she was so confident that she’d shared a meal with me.
“I think wherever the Empress is, your father can’t be far,” I said. “She keeps her enemies close.”
The prince trembled for a moment, then turned and stormed past me. He drew to a stop in front of the fireplace and picked up a long fire poker from the metal stand. I saw a flash of Wenshu stabbing the magistrate in the inn—what felt like ages ago. The prince whirled around, gripping the poker in both hands, his eyes dark.
“Let’s find Mother,” he said.
As we ran, the palace began to crumble. The wallpaper had been torn off in the wake of the pearl monsters, windows shattered in, floor tiles crushed into soft powder. Like a lizard sloughing off its grayed skin, the palace trembled out of its gold shell, revealing the pale stone foundations underneath.
Members of the court were screaming and sprinting down the halls, slipping on bloody tiles. Bodies of prisoners bobbed in the courtyard ponds with ducks floating around them in scarlet waters. Some guards led the court ladies across the rickety bridge toward the northern gate, while others fought back the prisoners. I could tell them apart from the other alchemists by the deathly cast of their skin, the scent of mildew that clung to their clothes, the way they fought like they had seen things worse than death.
The alchemist who had grabbed my sleeve in the dungeons caught my gaze as he forced a guard facedown into the pond, pinning him in place with a knee to his back. In daylight, he looked like a beast wrenched up from the pits of hell, drenched in blood that I doubted belonged to him. He tossed the guard aside and shifted toward me, but another guard tackled him into the pond and he vanished in the black waters.
Pearl monsters tore across the courtyard, their skin a spectacular flash of white in the afternoon sun, leaving stars in my eyes as they raced past.
“They must be going after the Empress,” I said, tugging the prince’s sleeve. He didn’t move at first, staring at the ruins of his palace, but I yanked his arm harder until he stumbled after me.
We rushed around a corner, my feet slowing at the sight of the Comet Alchemist with a spear through her neck, insides splashed across the hallway. She’d been wrenched in half from just below her rib cage, her jaw gaping open in a silent scream, the floor so thick with blood that it formed a glazed red mirror in front of us.
The prince stumbled to the wall and vomited behind me, but I couldn’t turn away from my own scarlet reflection on the floor.
The guards couldn’t have done this. No human could have. The Empress must have managed to find some monsters and fed them the blood of the alchemists.
“We have to go,” I said, my voice shaking as I reached for the prince, tugging at his sleeve with hands I could hardly feel. “Something isn’t right.”
But before I could pull him up, someone grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against a pillar. My head smashed against the stone and my vision swirled into a hazy cloud of gold. I reached for my stones but the hands around my shoulders shoved me back again and my hands fell limp beside me.
“Where the hell did you get that blood?” she said.
It took me a moment to realize it was the voice of the Paper Alchemist. A cut on her hairline had gushed across her face, painting her tan skin with a mask of blood. The prince was trying to wrench her off me, but she pushed him away with one hand.
“What are you talking about?” I said, my tongue heavy in my mouth.
“The blood that you gave the Moon Alchemist!” she said, her knuckles white where she gripped the front of my dress. “That wasn’t the Empress’s blood, Scarlet. It was ours.”
I shook my head. “No, no, that’s not possible,” I said, my voice trembling. “I gave her the Empress’s blood.”
“Then why did the monsters turn on us the second they tasted it?” the Paper Alchemist said, her eyes wild and bloodshot.
“I saw the healer leave the Empress’s room,” I said. “The rags had her tooth in it!”
“Did you actually see the healer use the rags on her?”
I felt like she’d dropped me from a rooftop, like I was falling faster and faster toward an earth that would swallow me whole. Humiliated tears burned at my eyes, and that was the only answer the Paper Alchemist needed. She let out a furious cry and shoved me hard against the wall, releasing me. “Scarlet, half the other alchemists are dead!”
“I’m sorry!” I said, folding into myself, gripping my hair and wishing I could disappear. “I’m sorry, I’ll bring them back, I—”
“There’s nothing left of them!” the Paper Alchemist yelled, jerking a hand at the remains of the Comet Alchemist. “The monsters are tearing them apart!”
A window across the courtyard burst open. A pearl monster crashed into the pond, sending waves of red water across the dirt. Its eyes locked on us, and in half a breath, it tore through the pond, vaulting the gate, skidding through blood puddles toward us.
The Paper Alchemist cursed and reached for her stones, but I pushed her behind me. I threw a handful of firestones at the monster, singeing its face, but it only stumbled back a moment before surging forward.
“Scarlet, get out of the way!” the Paper Alchemist said, grabbing my arm, but I elbowed her and she slipped in the pool of blood.
“Go find the Empress!” I said. Maybe the Paper Alchemist would know a way to salvage the mess I’d made, to make sure all the others hadn’t died in vain.
This is your last life, the Moon Alchemist had said. My last chance. So many people had died for me, for a life that never should have been mine. The Paper Alchemist wouldn’t be one of them.
The prince threw his fire poker at the monster, but it bounced off its surface with a hollow clang, skittering across the hall. I transformed a small iron blade, even though I knew it wasn’t sharp or hard enough. I’d never thought I was the kind of person who would sacrifice myself, but in the end, it wasn’t even a choice. It was easier to meet death than to watch someone else die for me.
The monster rushed toward me, its teeth bared, and I stepped forward to meet it.