Page 53 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I coughed, stones slipping through my sweaty fingers as I wasted precious seconds fumbling with the lock. But with a few firestones, it unlatched and we rushed into the dungeons, slamming the door shut behind us.

The sounds of fire faded, the air suddenly cool and moist. We stood in a shadowed hall of slick stone walls covered in ominous black fungus, lit only by sputtering candles on the far ends that cast sickly circles of gray light across the doorways.

“No guards?” I said, rubbing the sting of smoke from my eyes.

“Only on the outside,” the prince said. “They say the mold in here makes them sick.”

“Wonderful,” I said, already feeling like the air was coating my throat in slime. The prince hurried to the left, nearly skidding on the wet stone floor. He grabbed a candle from the wall and rushed down a spiral staircase, slipping on the last step as we emerged into a long, dark hall of cells with bamboo bars.

I hesitated in the doorway, even as the prince ran forward. I knew this scent.

This was the stench of corpses with teeth rotted from bloody vomit, skin spoiled with sores. As shops in Guangzhou shuttered with black X’s painted across their doors, I had to charge half price for dead children because there were just so many of them. It was an illness that answered to no one, that stopped at nothing. Sick bodies started to rot even before they died, and they smelled like this.

“Yiyang!” the prince called out. “Gao’an!”

Formless whispers floated up from the cells, murmurs of pain or thirst, but nothing that told us where the princesses were.

The prince slipped his candle between the bars to peer inside. Most of the prisoners cowered, hair draped over their faces, shielding them from the light. What unspeakable horrors had these people done to end up here? Was I walking among Chang’an’s most dangerous murderers with nothing but bamboo between us?

The prince’s expression hardened as he moved down the hall, calling for his sisters. He was hurrying farther away with our only candle, so I plucked another from the wall and quickly lit it with some firestones.

A hand shot out from the closest cell, grabbing my sleeve, tearing the fabric. I gasped and pulled backward, breaking the weak grip easily, but my candle tumbled to the ground and extinguished itself in a puddle.

Through a cool sliver of moonlight pooling through the barred window, I caught a glimpse of a light brown eye with flecks of green.

Auntie So had always said my eyes were like honey, not warm and dark like my cousins’.It’s because of your father, she’d said. I’d never seen anyone else with such light eyes, but of course, I’d never met anyone else with a Scotian father. Only foreigners had green eyes.

“You’re an alchemist,” the voice said. A man’s voice, so distant that it was hardly there at all. He didn’t sound like a foreigner.

I snatched my candle, edging away from him.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I am too. Or, I was.”

He’s lying, I thought. The prince had already said how much the Empress liked “collecting” alchemists, that she wouldn’t hurt us because she needed us for her precious life gold.

“Touch me again and I’ll break your hand,” I said, fishing for more firestones.

The man shook his head, curled hair falling over his face. “I don’t mean any harm,” he said. “But I saw you walking with the prince.”

“You sawnothing,” I said through gritted teeth. I hadn’t planned on killing anyone tonight, but if this man kept talking, I might have to.

He sighed, hunching over, sharp shoulder blades jutting from his back. “It’s not as if anyone would listen to me, even if I told them,” he said. “Once you get on the royal family’s bad side, no one believes anything you say. You need to stay away from them.”

“I don’t take advice from people rotting in dungeons,” I said, lighting my candle. I only caught a quick glance of the man’s gaunt face before he drew back at the sudden brightness.

“You want to be one of their lapdogs, don’t you?” he said, his greasy hair shielding him so I could see only the gaunt silhouette of his profile. “They don’t want your alchemy. They want yoursoul.”

Cold rushed through me in a violent wave, my hand clenched against the wet stones. I rose to my feet, my skirts soaked through, and hurried after the prince. I didn’t need warnings from a starving, disgraced alchemist probably hallucinating from all the mold and spores growing in the dungeon. Clearly, I could handle myself better than him. I was the one outside the cage.

“Zilan!” the prince called from the other end of the hallway.

When I caught up to him, he was kneeling on the ground before a cell, clutching two pairs of pale hands reaching through the bars.

Two round faces peered through the darkness, their bright skin smudged with dirt, streaked through with tears. I recognized them from the procession, but up close, I could see the way their faces glimmered with gold flecks, hinting that they were older than they appeared. They had papery pale complexions, sweet and smooth like newly bloomed azaleas, moon eyes, and full cheeks.

“Did they hurt you?” the prince said.

The girls shook their heads. “We’re okay, but it’s cold and wet in here,” the older one said. The other one had angled herself toward me.

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