Page 7 of The Scarlet Alchemist

Our shop sat at the end of what locals called the “Road to Hell” because it was where the market commandant had forced the death shops to relocate, saying we brought bad luck to the rest of the market. A funeral parlor sat across the street from us, an exorcist to our left.

The road had a slight downhill slope, so when the butcher poured buckets of lamb and pig blood outside, the whole street bled like a fresh wound. Most of us were too poor to buy anything but white, undyed hemp robes, so the hems of our clothing always soaked up the blood, making it clear to everyone in Guangzhou where we were from. We were far from the shade of orange trees at the inner part of town, so summer sunlight stripped the color from our lattice windows and painted signs, as if the whole street was an echo growing quieter by the day.

I tilted my hat so it blocked the glare of the sun and followed Wenshu to the end of the road, Yufei trailing behind. Wenshu walked in front of us only because we knew it would embarrass him to be seen dragged around by two younger girls.

To the east, just beyond the clay walls that marked the border to our wards, merchant ships bobbed nauseously in the black waters. Many seamen could no longer afford both their ships and their homes, so the harbor of Guangzhou had filled up with families living on leaky wooden boats with torn sails, vomiting into the shallow water from the restless wrenching of the tide. At the start of each week, at least a few of their corpses would float to the shore, and whoever got to them first would steal their clothes and scrap their boats for parts to sell.

We turned to the main road, where Yufei immediately draped herself across a pastry cart and batted her eyelashes at a flustered young man until he handed her a slice ofniángao. She shoved it at my face and wouldn’t move until I took a big, sticky bite, then gobbled down rest of it.

Much of the street was packing up for the day, merchants herding pigs and goats back to their stables, wrapping up and boxing yards of hemp. It was the unlucky month—the fifth lunar cycle of the year—so few people wanted to stay out at night until after the Dragon Boat Festival at the end of the week. The air smelled of pomegranate and ixora flowers that hung in garlands over storefronts to ward off evil spirits, though I suspected that any demons would still smell our fear even through a whole meadow of flowers.

Around us, people spoke in Guangzhou dialect that my cousins and I used less and less each day. We tried to speak the language of the Northern capital as much as possible, partially because the civil service exams had an oral section that wouldn’t test the southern dialects, and partially because Auntie So and Uncle Fan didn’t understand it. We could discuss our resurrection plans over dinner and they’d think we were practicing for our exams. Wenshu used to be called Man-syu, but when he was eight, he’d learned thatWénshuwas how his name would be pronounced in the capital of Chang’an, and had refused to answer to Man-syu unless it was Auntie or Uncle calling him. Yufei’s name was the same in either dialect, but with a different tone. For me, the Northern dialect transformed my name from Zee-lahn to Zih-lahn, the same cheap flower no matter the inflection.

The main block still stood in shambles from the fires that had ripped across all the thatched roofs last week. I heard rumors that in the capital, roofs were made of shiny tiles that deflected fire, but that felt like a lie. Surely roofs made of tile would be too heavy and crush everyone inside.

The merchants who’d lost their shops were forced to improvise, moving the last of their unscorched wares onto carts and blankets under thin gauze canopies of whatever frames remained standing. The weaver at the end of the street had lost half her pongee—poor man’s silk so thin that a harsh ray of sunlight could tear through it. It wasn’t good for much else than the appearance of wealth. The burnt bits were in a bin on the ground for people to buy as scraps, the rest hung up on thin lines, a dozen colors blowing in the wind like a strange celebration before the singed ruins of her shop. She smiled as my cousins and I walked by, but they averted their eyes and didn’t see the way her smile thinned. It was the same smile my mother had worn, toward the end. The kind that never reached her eyes.

I pulled out a small piece of moonstone from my pocket, then cracked it into three pieces, sinking my hands into the scrap bin.

“We have plenty of scraps,” Wenshu said, but I ignored him as my fingers grew cool and damp. The moonstone drank up the burns on the fabric, blackened sections replaced by lavender and deep red and pale blue, the fabric no longer stiff and crunchy beneath my fingers but soft and new. My hands suddenly ached like I’d been molding míngqì all day.

I stood up quickly, ignoring Wenshu’s glare. It was unwise to practice alchemy in this part of town. While the rich coveted alchemists, some commoners despised us for widening the income gap and would spit in our food or overcharge us if they saw my stones. They didn’t care that most alchemists in the south never even came close to the royal palace, much less learned how to make life gold.

I turned at the sound of fabric tearing.

A low-ranking state official—I could tell from the blue hue of his robes—had torn a sheet of bright yellow pongee in half and cast it up to the sky, where the wind carried it away.

“Ten gold pieces is too much for this shit,” he said.

Yufei made a low sound of anger, but Wenshu grabbed her sleeve before she could intervene. She stayed back not because he was actually strong enough to restrain her, but because she knew we couldn’t afford the trouble.

“Any less than ten and I’m losing money,” the woman said, taking a step back. “I can give you a half sheet for five?”

The man responded by tearing another sheet in half and casting it behind him, two lavender ghosts floating up to the sky. The woman took another step back as the man crossed his arms. It was always the wealthy who haggled down to the bone. The rest of us knew that while prices were flexible to a point, there was a limit.

I jammed my hand into my pocket, feeling for the right stones. Yufei stood in front of me on the off chance anyone was looking, while Wenshu sighed but didn’t protest.

I eyed the rickety frame of the withered storefront. The wood was already weak from the fire. Were it to suddenly topple over, no one would suspect a thing.

I fished out three small pieces of amethyst—a firestone—from my bag, clenched it in one fist, and pressed my other hand to the wooden banister.

Destroying was much easier than creating.

All you needed was a tiny ember of hate and the will to set yourself on fire, let the river inside you run dry until the parched earth shattered like a porcelain plate.

With a sound like thunder, the frame split down the middle and caved inward. The man scarcely had the chance to look up before the sharp end of the broken wood cleaved into the side of his head with a wet crunch. He screamed and stumbled back, half of his face painted with blood. The woman reached out to help him, but he shoved her away and stumbled down the street, dizzy trails of blood behind him.

“Zilan,” Wenshu said, yanking my sleeve to pull me back toward the road, “do try your best not to murder people while we’re doing errands.”

“I didn’t,” I said, at the same time Yufei said, “He deserved it!”

I hadn’t intended to kill the man and didn’t think I truly had, since he’d been well enough to run away screaming, but it was hard to conjure much pity for a rich man berating a merchant over fake silk. Every day that the wealth gap yawned wider, I began to realize that evil was not found in the demons or spirits we could ward away with fragrant flowers, but in the men who thought that everything on earth could be bought.

I pulled the brim of my hat down farther to avoid eye contact with peddlers and Buddhists looking for converts until we finally reached the market commandant’s office, a white clay building with a fenced-in courtyard and barrier of plum trees. We waited our turn in line behind the other merchants, Wenshu shifting from foot to foot, wiping his sweaty palms on his robes.

“Could you at least clean your face?” he said to Yufei.

She blinked, sticky brown rice-cake crumbs lining her mouth. “Is he going to tax each grain of rice? What does it matter?”

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