Page 27 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I flinched at the sound of a gong, sure that it meant the guards had somehow found us. But no one paid any attention to me. Everyone rushed to clear the streets, pressing themselves against buildings, ducking behind merchant carts, scooping up their children onto their shoulders. Wenshu and Yufei rose and stood behind me, trying to get a closer look.

Purple-robed officials on white horses trotted down the street, not even sparing a glance at the people below them. Their faces had a sharp brightness to them, like the ocean sparkling under midday sun. I’d heard that the more gold you ate, the more luminous you became, but I had never seen anyone with such a glow around them, as if the sun wasn’t shining on them but from within them. How much gold did they have to eat to look like that?

Behind the officials, four servants carried a gold-embossed palanquin at their waists. Everyone bowed as it passed, but when the wind blew the silk curtains back and I caught a glimpse of the person within, I couldn’t bring myself to move.

The warm, golden pools of her irises blazed as they captured the sunlight, matching thehuadiànon her forehead made of delicate gold foil and insect wings. Gold ornaments and flowers decorated her elaborate hairstyle, shimmering constellations in the glossy night black of her hair. She looked more like the perfect clay míngqì women in our shop than anything real, as if she had been shaped with exquisite care, hand-painted, polished with a ceramic glaze, baked at a perfect temperature until the colors grew deep and rich. She turned slightly and, for a single moment, met my gaze.

I suddenly felt bloodless, my feet rooted to the ground, breath trapped in my chest. Something about her stare felt almost physically sharp, like a hand clamped around my throat.

Someone tugged my sleeve—a merchant scowling at me from where he knelt on the ground.

“Are you a fool?” he whispered. “Bow or the guards will come for you.”

I dropped to the street as the palanquin rode past. “Who is that?” I asked.

The man’s frown deepened. “Do you live under a rock?” he said. “That’s the Empress.”

My gaze snapped back to the retreating palanquin. Empress Wu—who the people called the Eternal Empress—was celebrating her hundredth year as regent, one hundred years since the Emperor grew too ill to rule on his own and handed her the reigns to his kingdom, and still she looked barely older than me and Yufei.

In Guangzhou, the scholars said that under the Empress’s command, alchemists had discovered ways to measure time, ways to heal the sick, and of course, ways to stop aging. The Empress had thousands of questions about how the world worked, and using an obscene amount of the Emperor’s money, she’d set out to answer them all.

Following behind the Empress, with noticeably fewer guards, two young girls on horseback laughed and tried to race each other, forcing the disgruntled guards to grab the horses’ reins. They didn’t look older than ten, but if they ate gold like the rest of the royal family, their appearance said little about their true age. I’d heard of some aristocrats who liked to keep their daughters small and cute for decades.

The crowd began to murmur, some shouting curses as the girls rode past. Someone threw a persimmon at them, startling the horses, who took off faster down the road. The merchant beside me spat in their direction as they passed.

Wenshu nudged me to the side so he could get a better look. “What have they done?” he asked the merchant. “They’re only children.”

“They’re the traitor’s daughters,” he replied. “The Empress only lets them live out of kindness.”

“What traitor?” I said.

The man turned to me, expression pinched as if physically pained by my ignorance. “Consort Xiao. She killed the Empress’s daughter in her cradle,” he said slowly, “yet the Empress is merciful and lets the traitor’s daughters live as princesses.”

I mumbled my thanks and watched the princesses hurry after the Empress in a flurry of rotting fruit and insults. The last horse in the procession thundered past us, far too close. I jumped back and a sudden pain lanced through my head like a fire stoker.

I fell to my knees and kept falling, the ground nothing but silk under my palms. I tumbled forward into an empty sky and crashed onto my stomach, slamming the air out of my lungs. My fingers twitched across soft dirt, powdery red under my nails, ghosts of footprints beneath my fingertips. Voices spun above me in watery clouds, but even though they seemed miles away, I knew that some of the shapeless sounds were screams; I could feel the terror and agony in the pitch even without understanding the words.

I sat up and faced a wide, empty street of red dirt. In the distance, a gate with five great arches yawned open into nothingness. Their hungry darkness sapped the light from the street, swirling deeper, beckoning.

“Zilan?”

I blinked, the ground coming into focus beneath my hands. I was on my knees, Wenshu gripping my shoulder. When I raised my gaze to the path that the horses had followed, I saw the same five arches at the end of the street.

“I’ve been here,” I said, grabbing Wenshu’s sleeve. “I’ve been here before.”

Wenshu looked past me, probably at Yufei. “That’s not possible,” he said. “You need food and water.”

“No,listen to me,” I said, but he and Yufei—mostly Yufei—were already hauling me to my feet, dragging me away from the crowd. I heard Wenshu asking about shade, then they were pulling me down the street in the opposite direction from the gate. I tried to turn back, but my head still felt like it had been split open, so it was easy for Yufei to force me around a corner, where I couldn’t see the gates anymore.

I stumbled alongside the drainage ditches, glimpsing my watery reflection in the murky pools of rainwater. I smelled the sharp scent of citrus, then Yufei pushed me down by the shoulders, forcing me to the ground under the shade of an orange tree. She plucked the straw hat from my head and fanned me with it. I hadn’t seen where Wenshu went, but he reappeared moments later with three pieces ofhúbing—a flat bread covered in sesame seeds.

“Eat,” he said, sitting in front of us. “Both of you.”

I took a bite and then couldn’t stop eating until the bread was gone and my stomach felt tight. I’d finished before both Wenshu and Yufei, who looked at me like I was a caged animal. Yufei tore off a piece of her bread and offered it to me, but I pushed her arm back.

“No, I’m full,” I said. “And my head hurts, but I’m not losing my mind. I’ve definitely been here before.”

Wenshu sighed. “Zilan, you lived down the street from us for as long as I can remember, which is longer thanyoucan remember, because I’m older. Your parents never took you this far north, and our parents certainly didn’t. Why would any of us come here?”

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