Page 100 of The Scarlet Alchemist

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.

“Gege?” I called, trying to peer through the darkness. “Jiejie?”

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.

“Gege?Jiejie?” 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 foreternity.

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The sun rose over the alchemy courtyard, where I lay on my back in the dirt, birds circling overhead, probably debating if I was dead. My feet ached from running around the city all night and my palms had blistered from the alchemy of breaking into so many buildings. After returning to the palace, I’d stormed through the dungeons, but my cousins were nowhere to be found. Wherever they’d been taken, it was a place I had never been before.

The Empress must have noticed something in her tea. Maybe the taster had said something about the texture, or the strange encounter with us in the hall. Maybe the River Alchemist or the Paper Alchemist had reported me for asking about arsenic. Only now did I realize how many open ends we’d left, how it had been a foolish and doomed plan from the start. Now my cousins were probably chained up in some moldy cell like the rest of the corpses the Empress bought. And if what the Moon Alchemist said was true, I couldn’t bring them back this time if the Empress killed them.

I curled onto my side, cheek scraping into sharp grass and roots.My cousins will die for a second time because of me, I thought, my tears darkening the dirt.

The only thing I didn’t understand was why I was still walking around freely. The Empress definitely had my blood. She could have easily made a monster to eat me. Surely it could have found me and ripped my throat open by now.

I felt like the prince, worrying over the fact that I was safe, and what that meant. The Empress was clearly keeping both of us alive for a reason, and I had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t mercy.

The Moon Alchemist hadn’t been in her quarters when I’d come back after scouring the city, or at least she hadn’t answered the door, perhaps sick of handling all of my problems. I knew it wasn’t her job to unravel the mess I’d made for myself, but I had no one else to turn to.

The doors to the courtyard creaked open and I sat up straight, backing against the tree trunk. A man entered first, and for a paralyzing moment I thought it was the prince. The last thing I wanted was to answer his questions about my abrupt disappearance. My head started swimming. I couldn’t handle my cousins maybe being double-dead and me being single-dead and my first kiss all at once. I had to prioritize, and finding my cousins was the biggest problem right now.

But I didn’t need to worry, because it wasn’t the prince. It was the Empress and her guards.

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