I ran across the palace grounds, my untied hair lashing my face as the wind tore through it. I didn’t know where I was going, but I couldn’t be around the prince right now. What would he think if he knew I was just a hollow shell living on stolen time, no different than any of the corpses chained in the dungeon? He thought I was beautiful, but he didn’t know that I was rotting inside.
I’d dragged so many people back from the shores of death without ever really thinking about what that meant. Was I even a person anymore? Or was I like one of my old hemp dolls, just a soulless piece of fabric stuffed full of rags? I pressed a hand to my racing heart—I could feel all the blood rushing through me, nausea twisting in my stomach, cold sweat running down my face. How could I not be alive?
And more importantly, how could I have died without knowing it?
The name on my spine said Su Zilan, so it must have happened before my father left, before I was a Fan. Maybe I didn’t remember because I was so young at the time. But I had still grown up down the street from my cousins, who were older than me and surely would have remembered me dying. And who could have resurrected me? My father’s notes had theorized about how one might revive the dead, but he hadn’t written about attempting it.
I came to a stop in the middle of an empty courtyard, my legs shaking. I’d jammed on my dress and hadn’t bothered to grab a jacket before fleeing, and somewhere along the way I’d lost one of my shoes, my toes sinking into mud.
I had no idea where to go.
I wanted to talk to my cousins, the only people who would understand, but would they even open the door for me after what I’d said? Who else could I possibly talk to? Who else even knew the first thing about resurrection?
I turned my gaze toward the southern quarters, the high walls that marked the alchemy compound.
I started running before I could stop myself, shivering as I waited for the bewildered guard to let me in, wanting to tear my own skin off just to feel something other than this nauseous panic. Finally, I sprinted past the gates to the last house on the right, pounding my fists on the door until I heard grumbling and footsteps from the other side.
The door slid open sharply. The Moon Alchemist stood in the shadowed darkness, her hair in a tangled crown around her face, her grip tight on the doorframe.
“Fan Zilan—”
“I think I’m dead,” I said.
She blinked, the anger gone from her face in an instant, then let out a heavy sigh. She turned, waving for me to follow her inside. I hurried in before she could change her mind, locking the door behind me.
“I think—”
“Shh!” she said, rubbing her eye with one hand and throwing a couple cushions onto the floor around a small table. “Tea first.”
I wanted to scream at how slowly the Moon Alchemist began to boil water and measure out tea leaves. The moment she sat down with a steaming cup, the words poured from my mouth.
“I found a soul tag on my back,” I said. “I’d never seen it before.”
The Moon Alchemist hummed in acknowledgment, taking a sip of tea. “Did you tell anyone?” she said.
I stilled. Her calmness unnerved me. Was she going to turn me in to the Empress?
“Just the prince,” I said. “He saw it, but I don’t think he understood. I left before explaining.”
“Good,” the Moon Alchemist said, setting her cup down loudly on the table. “Make your excuses to him later. He’s well-educated but not particularly perceptive. He’ll believe you if you lie.”
I reached for my teacup, wanting to hold on to something, but my hands shook so much that the hot water spilled onto the table, scalding me. I pulled away out of reflex but hardly even felt it. The Moon Alchemist was so eerily calm that it only heightened my panic. Did she understand what I was telling her?
“Do you not believe me?” I said. “I know what a soul tag looks like. I resurrected people long before I came here.”
“That was obvious from the start,” the Moon Alchemist said, frowning at me through the haze of steam rising from her cup. “You have no memory of dying?”
I shook my head. “It must have happened when I was very young, because the soul tag doesn’t say Fan Zilan. It says—”
“Su Zilan.”
I froze. All the blood rushed from my face. Across from me, the Moon Alchemist took another sip of tea.
“How did you know that?” I whispered, my bones screaming for me to get up and don’t stop running.
She set down her cup, pushed it to the side, and crossed her arms. “Because,” she said, “I’m the one who brought you back.”
I shook my head slowly, unable to form words. I wanted to flip the table over and storm out into the night, but my limbs felt like granite. Why was the Moon Alchemist suddenly lying to me? I’d never even left Guangzhou until this year, so how could she have met me?
“When you came to Chang’an as an alchemist, I wasn’t sure if it was really you, at first,” she said. “Zilan is not a common name for your class, and a hùnxiě named Zilan is even less common. But you said your surname was Fan, and I knew that was not the name I wrote on a child’s spine so many years ago. That is not a day I will ever forget.”
“I met you for the first time this year,” I said.
The Moon Alchemist shook her head. “It’s unusual that you don’t remember, but then again, your resurrection was also unusual. If I hadn’t known your father, I don’t think I would have tried to bring you back at all. Recalling your soul was a very long and difficult process. Maybe that’s why you don’t remember.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, slamming my fists into the table.
The Moon Alchemist looked at me with something resembling pity. It was the softest expression I’d ever seen on her face.
“Ten years ago, I met a Scotian alchemist here in Chang’an,” she said. “He’d brought his wife and daughter from Guangzhou. They intended to move here so he could study alchemy.”
I wanted to tell her that I’d never been to Chang’an before this year, but the words died on my lips. That strange day when the world went dark, the memory I knew was real but could never place, the certainty that I’d seen the gates of Chang’an before, the dizzy feeling of remembering something I wasn’t supposed to.
“I didn’t need his help,” the Moon Alchemist said, “but he had some interesting ideas, so I let him work with me. Then, one day, the Empress’s horse brigade ran over his daughter in the market.”
I shook my head, remembering the feeling of my body snapping apart, my name being called across an empty expanse. The way that our horses we rode to Chang’an had terrified me in a way Yufei and Wenshu couldn’t understand.
“I’d never heard a mother scream so loudly,” she said. “The thought of resurrecting you didn’t cross my mind at first—you hardly had a face left, and alchemists aren’t supposed to go around resurrecting all their friends. I would have been killed if anyone found out, and why would I take that risk for a family I hardly knew?”
She leaned back, glaring into her empty teacup. “But, in the whole market, no one tried to help. Even when your mother begged for a healer, no one would look at you. They kept selling their beans and porridge and just walked around you, like you didn’t even exist. This was just after the Yangzhou massacre. No one wanted foreigners—or their children—in our markets.”
But I’m not a foreigner, I thought, although I knew what the Moon Alchemist meant.
“No one wants people like us to exist,” she said, her grip so tense around her cup that I thought it might shatter. “So I decided to spit in all their faces and bring you back. I led your parents here through the tunnels and warned them that if I resurrected you, you would drain their qi, and they would be dead within four years if they stayed with you. But they didn’t care. They told me to bring you back, no matter what.”
“Stop,” I said, gripping the edge of the table. Maybe she thought it was kind to tell me how much my parents had loved me, that once I had been wanted more than life itself. But I didn’t want to hear it. Their love didn’t matter now, because it was gone. It was easier to pretend I had always been a Fan, to say I was too young to remember my real parents, to hate my father for leaving us. I couldn’t be Fan Zilan while mourning the life that Su Zilan might have had. I couldn’t think about whether my aunt or uncle would have done the same, would have given up their lives for mine. I was too afraid of the answer.
“I did the best I could with what was left of your face and hands, and somehow, I brought you back,” the Moon Alchemist said. “Your soul was very hard to find, and even when I retethered it, you didn’t wake for several days. But once you did, I told your parents that they could never tell anyone what happened, or else the Empress would chain you up as one of her monsters, and I would be killed as well. Your parents decided to spend their last four years with your mother’s family in Guangzhou, and I thought I’d never see you again.”
This is why my cousins never said anything about it, I thought. They didn’t see me die, had probably been too young to remember me disappearing for a few weeks, and my parents had never spoken of it.
“Your father returned to Chang’an four years later, looking for a cure for your mother,” the Moon Alchemist said. “He was half-dead already, and I told him the same thing—that the only way to live was to stay away from you. He was angry with me, so I sent him off with some gold and never saw him again. My guess is that he died somewhere in the city. He wouldn’t have made it far.”
I stared at my hands in my lap, the long, spidery fingers that Auntie So said were so unlike my mother’s, the alchemy rings on each hand, the dream I’d chased just to spite the man I thought had left me. But maybe he’d wanted to come back and had died in a drainage ditch in Chang’an, ending up in the dungeons like the other bodies, hollowed out and forged into a monster by another alchemist. I’d thought my mother was delusional for saying he’d return, but he’d tried. He hadn’t wanted to leave us, but to save us.
My fists closed tight, alchemy rings biting into my palms. My father had been with me this whole time, the warm and wordless voice ringing in my ears whenever I studied alchemy, and even if I’d long forgotten his language, his presence had pushed me forward until I became a royal alchemist. He’d given everything for me, and in the end, I’d become exactly like him—standing beside the Moon Alchemist, trying to fight death.
“I didn’t mean for them to never tell you,” the Moon Alchemist said. “That was dangerous. One piece of gold past your lips and you would have turned into a monster like the ones crawling around the palace. You truly never noticed?”
“How could I?” I said, staring at my hands and imagining them cracking apart into a thousand pieces, being sewn back together by the Moon Alchemist.
“Because all of your qi is stolen,” she said. “Every four years, the people closest to you must have died after you drained them. Is that not the case?”
My head throbbed, but I closed my eyes and tried to organize my thoughts. The Moon Alchemist said I’d died ten years ago, when I was seven. My mother died and my father disappeared when I was eleven, four years later. Three and a half years later, Wenshu and Yufei died. Now, two years later, Auntie So and Uncle Fan were sick, though miraculously recovered the moment my cousins and I left for Chang’an.
We were killing them, I realized. Not just Wenshu and Yufei, but all three of us.
I’d been so certain that my cousins hadn’t loved me because they weren’t killing me. But I had no qi for them to steal. I was as hollow inside as them, siphoning qi off Auntie and Uncle. I slumped my shoulders, letting my hair hide my face, finally feeling as dead as I truly was inside. I’d been so cruel to my cousins because I’d believed in a lie.
“You need to be careful,” the Moon Alchemist said, taking my silence for an answer. “One body cannot withstand too much alchemy. I have never been able to resurrect someone twice. This life is your last, Zilan. Do you understand?”
I nodded slowly. “What am I supposed to do now?” I said.
“Do?” The Moon Alchemist frowned. “You continue what you’ve been doing.”
“How can you make it sound so simple?” I said. “I’m dead.”
“You are not dead,” she said. “You died. There’s a difference.”
“How is there a difference?”
She grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward. My pulse hammered in her hand, mockingly alive.
“The difference is that I gave you a second chance, and people like us don’t get second chances every day. Stop thinking about how and why and just figure out how not to waste what I’ve given you, what I risked everything for.”
I shook my head. “I’m no different from those monsters in the palace who rip apart little girls. How can I possibly just keep living normally?”
“I’ll tell you how,” the Moon Alchemist said. “You never let anyone see your soul tag. You never let a piece of gold or a jewel past your lips. And you never get close to anyone you aren’t willing to destroy.”
I tried to sleep for a few hours after that, but I dreamed of my flesh falling off in stiff chunks at any moment, my muscles rotting away, my bones crumbling. My whole body felt stolen and wrong, like I was wearing gloves and silks instead of my own skin, and part of me wanted to tear myself apart until I was left with nothing but my soul, the only thing that was real.
The Moon Alchemist said nothing had to change, but that was easy for her to say. She wasn’t risking her last life by betraying the Empress. I’d never thought much about dying until now, because ever since I’d learned to resurrect people, death had seemed like a temporary state, an inconvenience. But now I felt death watching me from the dark and empty oceans of the moon, whispering to me in the wind that rustled the silver grass beyond my windows, deepening the shadows across my bed and curling around me when I tried to sleep.
Death remembers me, Wenshu had said. And now I remembered death as well, the day of darkness, the feeling of becoming nothing and everything all at once. Was that what permanent death would feel like? Nothingness that stretched on for eternity?
I sat up in bed, feeling sick. I want Wenshu and Yufei, I thought, even though I doubted they wanted me anymore. But I felt so much like an untethered boat drifting from shore, and only they would understand.
I cast my blankets to the floor and put on my shoes, then slipped out into the night. The guards at the gate would never let me past them without an escort, especially at this hour, so I carved a new door in the wall with some iron and slipped through, hurrying into the street.
I hardly felt my feet as I ran. No part of my body seemed like it belonged to me anymore. I wasn’t even supposed to exist.
When I finally reached their ward, my lungs burned and sweat coated my face, but just the thought of running into their arms made me feel like all of this would somehow be fine. Wenshu would be angry, but he would tell me how to fix things. Yufei would pat my hair and stuff food in my face, and we would figure out what to do.
Their door was already open when I arrived.
“Gēgē?” I called, trying to peer through the darkness. “Jiějiě?”
My voice echoed back in the stillness. I grabbed a candle and sparked three firestones in my hand, casting weak light across the room.
The beds were overturned, scrolls unfurled across the floor with muddy footprints blurring the text. Wenshu’s jar of soap beans had shattered, coating the floor in sparkling shards and the aching smell of too much soap. They must have been in a hurry to leave if Wenshu hadn’t tried to clean up.
I stepped into the room and stumbled over one of Yufei’s shoes, still muddy. In fact, both of her and Wenshu’s shoes were scattered near the doorway, their coats still hung up on hooks. I knew for a fact that they only owned one pair of shoes and one coat each, and they hadn’t bothered to take them before leaving? My mouth went dry.
“Gēgē? Jiějiě?” I said again, rushing forward, shoes crunching over broken glass. Maybe they were out back somewhere. Maybe Yufei had just made a mess, and Wenshu had stormed off into a backyard I didn’t know about, because they wouldn’t leave willingly without their shoes or coats, so that meant—
A note was staked into the far wall, neatly folded, the blade coated in pristine gold. The paper bore the imperial seal, a crane stamped in red ink around the characters for eternity.
I yanked the blade out and cast it aside to unfold the note with hands I could hardly even feel.
There were only three words on the paper.
Nice try, Scarlet.