Page 25 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I threw open the chest at the foot of the bed, blood splattering over all my notes, all my stones. I’d already resurrected mice and pigs and pangolins. If that worked, then why not this?

I put three bloodstones in each hand and took Yufei’s cold palm in my left and Wenshu’s in my right, my blood running down their wrists.

A hot breeze rolled by and my father’s notes spun across the room, fluttering down in front of me.

You cannot create good without also creating evil, they said.

I didn’t care.

Let all the evil in the world sink its teeth into me. Turn every clear river to sour blood, scorch every forest, hammer every mountain peak into the ground, take every piece of goodness left in this crooked world and give it to my cousins, and we’d figure out what to do about the rest. All I needed was them, even if there was no world left for us.

I clawed apart the darkness to bring them back from the river and carved their names into their spines with an old knife, and when the sun rose, there were three of us once more.

It didn’t matter then what the cost was, or when I would pay it. In the years since, sometimes I’d forget that there was any cost at all. But then I would wake up and my cousins’ eyes would be white and frosted, their bodies still, like their souls had once again crossed the river and had to be called back. They told me they didn’t feel dead, that they didn’t even feel sick anymore, that I’d saved them and didn’t need to worry.Whatever the cost is, it can’t be worse than death, Wenshu had said, and never wanted to bring it up again. But while Wenshu knew more about literature than me, he didn’t understand alchemy or its intractable laws. Nothing this important could be free.

At last, I couldn’t fight my exhaustion anymore, and I fell asleep to the sound of my cousins’ breaths.

I woke to my teeth slamming into the floor.

I jolted awake, my hands scrambling for purchase, my mouth filled with blood. Hot fingers latched onto my hair and dragged me back.

Wenshu was facedown on the floor, a man in a cyan robe jamming a knee into his back. Yufei was spilled halfway over a table, another man yanking her across it by her hair.

The man from the pub loomed in the doorway, his arms crossed, gold flecks in his skin sparkling in the pale sheet of moonlight bleeding through the window.

Of course he came for us, I thought. What rich men couldn’t buy, they took.

I clamped my hand around the wrist above me, releasing the tension on my hair, and drove my elbow backward. A man huffed out a surprised sound of pain—surely he thought a woman would scream and cry and fall limp like a wet flower. I didn’t give him a chance to recover, grabbing him by the beard and yanking his face down to my level. I clapped my hands over his eyes, my copper rings heating up, and transformed the gold flecks in his eyes into needles, skewering his irises. He screamed and stumbled away, hands clapped over his eyes, bloody tears pouring past his fingers.

Yufei had already rolled to her feet and jammed the heel of her palm into the other man’s nose with a crunching sound and a burst of blood down his face. The man collapsed against the wall and probably would have given up at that point, but Yufei stomped on his hand and then his groin.

I whirled toward Wenshu, who was still struggling to get up while another man crushed his face to the floor. My copper rings had burned up in my last transformation, so I snatched my satchel and tightened the rope, slamming it into the side of the man’s head.

He fell off Wenshu, tripping over the table and onto Yufei, who kicked him under the chin. I heard Wenshu groaning but getting up behind me, probably panicking at all the blood on the floor.

The magistrate stood in the doorway, his face white and eyes wide.

“What kind of demons are you?” he said, his voice trembling as he took a step back.

“I thought you wanted us as brides?” I said, cuffing the blood from my face.

Before the magistrate could answer, his gaze settled on something behind me. I didn’t have time to turn before Wenshu shoved past me and gouged the magistrate with the fire poker, spearing him into the wall. He gasped and clutched at the wound, blood gurgling past his lips.

“I said they’re not for sale, asshole,” Wenshu said, spitting at his feet.

As the man slumped to the floor and fell silent, we looked around at the ruined room—table overturned, walls splashed with blood.

Wenshu inhaled a shaky breath, pulling his hair from his eyes. “We need to go,” he said.

We crammed our possessions back into our bags, abandoning a few bloodstained bananas, and hurried out into the night.

Is this what the rest of our journey will be like?I thought. It seemed that fate frowned on those who ventured too far from home.

We managed to climb back on our horses and headed out into the quiet night unnoticed. Once my heart stopped thundering in my chest, I felt shaky and sick. I pressed my cheek to Yufei’s shoulder, hugging her from behind, and this time she didn’t complain. We rode out into the wilds of Yuebei as the sun rose bright red over the fields of sugarcane, toward a world that would do anything to keep us away.

CHAPTER NINE

We arrived in Chang’an in three weeks and three days. For what felt like an eternity, we’d ridden through farmlands, fields of rice and soybeans, mosquitoes and locusts buzzing in our ears. Our bags quickly grew lighter as we had to eat all our fruit before the summer heat spoiled it, our stomachs sloshing with citrus as we rode over jagged, unpaved ground.

---