Page 118 of The Blood Orchid

I am lying in a field of blood, face-to-face with a dead soldier. The earth is cracked and sun-scorched beneath my palms, trembling from hurried footsteps. Someone trips over my legs, another person stomps down on my fingers, but I barely feel the pain because I am the earth and the roots, I have always been here, this is where I will die.

The face of the man across from me is streaked with tears that cut like white scars through blood and dirt, and I want to look away but cannot move. I try to draw in a breath, but it gurgles in my throat. There is a spear at the base of my neck, hot metal lodged in my windpipe, blood spilling hot and fast, wetting the parched dirt. I have died many times and know there is never any dignity in death, but knowing is different from feeling, and in this moment I am both scorched alive by the sun and drowning inside myself.

I am so very close to home.

It is night, and the cicadas are screaming in the tall grass around me, and there, at the end of the path, candlelight is burning through the windows.

I clutch a handful of bayberries as I fall to my knees, then my face, unable to catch myself. The hunger is a beast that has built its nest deep in my stomach, carving me apart from the inside. But these berries were the only ones in a flood-drenched field, all I have to show for my day, and I will not eat them for all the world. Even when the pain in my stomach settles deep between my ribs, an ache that grows and grows until it consumes me, and the cicadas are so loud, they are all that I can hear, the starless sky all that I can see.

I am the fever that burns through small children at night, blooming scarlet across their cheeks, reaching in and stealing their breath from their mouths.

I am the smoke that chokes the sky after lightning strikes, the simmering embers that devour thatched roofs.

I am the tiger’s teeth as they bite down on a child so very far from home.

I am the earthquakes that rip the earth to pieces and the corpses that fall into its fresh chasms.

I am the bones of all the planets.

I am silence.

I am the end.

And at last, I am standing on golden sands, a firm hand closed around my wrist, yanking me to my feet that no longer feel like mine, all of my bones borrowed, skin stolen.

“Zilan,” a man’s voice says.

And when my vision settles and I find myself kneeling in the desert, I look up at a pair of bright green eyes.

The man in front of me was a foreigner, skin pinkish and pale like uncooked jellyfish, his hair coppery under the desert sun.He said my name again, and the tones were wrong, but I understood anyway because this was a voice I had always known.

“Bàba?” I whispered.

He smiled down at me, and the sight was so new yet so familiar, and I knew even before he answered. I had died so many times that my memory was a patchwork quilt, but I was certain that I had seen him before.

“How are you here?” I said.

He looked at me sadly for a moment, and I wondered if he didn’t understand Chinese. He’d named me Zilan, after all. Only a foreigner would give a child that name.

But his next words came in unsteady Guangdong huà, my first language.

“Penglai Island amplifies alchemical power,” he said. “It allows me to manifest here in ways I couldn’t before.”

“And where ishere?” I said.

He looked out across the sands, not unlike the desert of Lanzhou, though this one somehow felt flat, as if the world dissolved at the edge of the horizon.

“In your mind,” he said.

“Then where are you really?” I said, my fists closing in the sand. “I’ll come find you.”

He let out a sharp laugh, shaking his head. “I am in an unmarked grave just beyond the outskirts of Chang’an,” he said softly.

I turned away, unable to bear the pitying look on his face. I had known my father was probably dead, so I wasn’t prepared for the swell of disappointment, the way my throat closed up and tears burned at my eyes. Maybe some small part of me had always hoped that, since I had never seen a body, he wasn’t truly dead. Resurrection alchemists never really believed in endings.

He took my hand, kneeling in front of me. “That is where my body is,” he said, “but my qi runs inside of you, so I’m with you as well.”

He placed a hand on the inside of my wrist, feeling my pulse. Our heartbeats drummed in sync, the gentle hum of alchemy between us like one long, unbroken river. Of course, he’d died because I’d devoured so much of his qi after he’d resurrected me, so part of him was inside me forever. Perhaps his voice that I’d heard had never been my imagination at all, but the part of him that still lived within my soul.

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