Page 86 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I pushed myself up dizzily, but I could already tell I hadn’t done it right.

Her body wasn’t shaking the way suddenly uprooted souls were supposed to. Instead, she breathed shallowly, as if asleep. I reached for the knife to carve her soul tag into her skin, just in case, but my hands trembled too much, and I knew it was useless. I had restored her qi, but I hadn’t brought her soul back with me. She was hollow inside.

“I’m sorry,” I said, the words blurring together, “I’m sorry, it’s the best I can do right now. Her soul—”

“It’s okay,” the prince said, cupping my cheek. “It’s okay. She’s alive, Zilan.”

“She’s empty,” I said.

“Maybe she’ll wake up later,” the prince said, tucking the other girl against him. “We need to...need to... What should we do?”

I rubbed my eyes, which felt coated in sand.

“Get the Moon Alchemist,” I said. “Tell her what happened.” She would probably be furious with me for resurrecting the girls—even more furious that I’d failed with one—but she would handle it.

The prince nodded quickly and cast aside the outer layer of his bloodstained robe, pulling on something clean before charging out into the hallway.

I must have fallen asleep leaning against the closet, because I woke to the sound of the door sliding open, the Moon Alchemist and the prince carrying two stuffed hemp bags. Strangely, it reminded me of old man Gou back in Guangzhou, dragging a corpse into the míngqì store. How much things had changed since then.

“You’re a fool,” she said to me, dropping a bag. “You could have died, and I’m tempted to kill you myself. Do you even care what you’ve done to these girls?”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to apologize, too tired to even form words. The Moon Alchemist went on grumbling about how foolish children were forcing her to risk her life as she dumped out the bodies of two young girls from the sacks while the older princess huddled in the prince’s arms.

Once she’d finished berating me, the Moon Alchemist worked in silence. She laid the bodies out in the closet, switched their clothes with the princesses’ dresses, then used a firestone to shatter their faces inward like crushed melons until they weren’t recognizable.

“Give me five minutes, then report their deaths,” she said, wiping her brow with the back of her arm. “Once it’s confirmed, I’ll be allowed to dispose of the monsters.”

She narrowed her eyes at the older girl, then picked up the younger from my arms, which finally fell limp at my sides. “I’ll have the River Alchemist take them to a western convent through the tunnels, but destroying the monsters that can track them has to be my priority.”

“What about Gao’an?” the prince said, looking to the girl unconscious in the Moon Alchemist’s grasp.

“They have healers at the monastery,” the Moon Alchemist said. Then she offered me a hand and all but yanked me to my feet before I could even accept it. The world spun, but she shoved me against a wall to hold me steady. “In five minutes, call the servants,” she said. “That’s all you have to do.”

“Call the servants,” I repeated, nodding even though it made the world slide back and forth.

The Moon Alchemist took the older girl’s hand, but she reached out for the prince.

“You’ll be safe this time,” he said, patting her hair. “I’ll come for you soon.”

She cried as the Moon Alchemist tucked the younger sister against her chest and left, the door closing quietly behind her.

Then it was only me and the prince, standing before a pool of blood, by the stiff corpses of the girls who were not his sisters, but maybe they had been someone else’s.

I rested my head against the wall, not sure how I was even going to stay awake for all the commotion that was sure to follow. “You need to change back to your other robes,” I said quietly, because I had no idea what else to say. “Ten men saw what you were wearing. The change will be suspicious.”

“Zilan.”

I looked up. The prince stood stiffly before the closet, hair hanging over his face, hands clenched into fists.

“You were right,” he whispered.

“I’m right about many things,” I said, thumping my head back against the doorway. “What is it this time?”

“I should not have waited this long,” he said. “I can’t sit around and hope my father recovers enough to handle this for me.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “What do you want to do?”

The prince turned to me, his eyes fierce, blistering gold.

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