Page 17 of The Blood Orchid

I was standing in the in-between plane, where the world was only bones and darkness and qi—the life inside all of us that could fuel your alchemy if you only knew how to listen to it. I stood before the river of my brother’s life, the dark waters of his qi rushing unstopped past my feet.

Back in Guangzhou, I’d made a living by unstopping the dams that blocked the flow of qi in the rivers of the dead. I’d dragged their souls back to the plane of the living like a deep-sea fisherman wrenching monsters back to the surface, even if they were never meant to see the sun. I hadn’t cared for the consequences, only for the gold that their families paid me.

You shouldn’t be here, the river said to me, as it did every time, the words an echo that hummed through my bones.

But I had already broken enough rules to send me to hell for all of eternity, and I wasn’t going to start listening now.

I stood up straight, turning away from my brother’s river and looking out across the shadowed tree line, the prickly leaves and stark white trunks like an army of ghosts daring me to pass through.

I closed my eyes and walked forward.

The trees parted for me as I passed, the edges of their leaves knife-sharp, scoring my face. The parched earth crunched and shattered beneath my feet as if I was walking over a bed of glass.

It didn’t matter where I walked, because this plane answered to no map or compass or north star. Desire was what guided you onward, deeper into its maw.

Li Hong, I thought, repeating his name a thousand times in my mind, picturing the characters painted across the sky in gold.

I thought of the way he’d looked at me when he’d mapped every inch of my skin, tried to forge me into a treasured memory. I thought of the smile on his lips when he saw me, how it was so much brighter than the smile he gave other members of the court when he had to play the role of Crown Prince. And I thought of the pleading look he gave me right before the Empress slit his throat. That last memory always devoured the others—his eyes round with surprise, the black chasm of his pupils yawning wider until I knew he could see nothing at all.

With that thought, the forest pulled me in with urgency, the ground sloping downward, forcing me to run faster, until at last, the earth leveled out. I let out a deep breath as the night unlatched its jaw, releasing me. Slowly, I opened my eyes.

Hong was sleeping against a tree by the riverbank. He wore the same robes he’d died in, but their purple shade had grown fainter and they were splattered with mud. He did not breathe in this plane, his form so still that he resembled a painting.

I stepped closer, but my footsteps did not wake him. His mind was somewhere else completely.

The rope I’d fastened to his left wrist had come loose, revealing raw pink skin, the slack rope bundled in his lap. I’d tied theother end to the strongest branch of the tree, and now the bark was flaking away beneath the knot.How hard has he been pulling at the rope while I was away?

Hong was not an alchemist trained to understand the river plane, the way its words could infect your blood, the way it could pull you worlds away if your thoughts wandered too far. He had never taught his mind to withstand that kind of pressure.

Most of the dead lingered here for a week or so, clinging to latent memories in the scant drops of water from the riverbeds of their lives, clawing at the impenetrable dam that had sealed off the flow of qi. Eventually, they gave up and they wandered into the forest, where the darkness ate them whole.

I didn’t know what happened next, but I knew that I didn’t want Hong to go there.

It had been about four weeks since he’d died, and by all accounts, his soul should have been long gone. It would have been, if I hadn’t tethered him here.

I pulled out three moonstones, healing the torn skin of his wrist, then whispered an apology as I tightened the rope once more.

He jolted awake, yanking his wrist away and grabbing on to the low branches of the tree as if trying to anchor himself in a typhoon. For a moment, he seemed not to see me at all, his eyes a flat plane of black, like the nothingness that awaited beyond the tree line.

“Hong,” I said quietly, still kneeling in the dirt, afraid to make any sudden movements.

His gaze settled on me, his expression unchanged, and I wondered if today was the day when the darkness ate so much of him that he forgot who I was.

But then, slowly, like a flower unfurling in the early morning,the darkness left his eyes. He released the branch, a soft smile spreading across his face.

“Zilan,” he said, the word echoing as if spoken inside an immense cavern. Everything about him looked faint and far away.

He held out a hand, and I let him pull me to my feet, even though the touch of his skin spread stinging cold through my fingers. He kissed me, his lips numbing mine, like I’d kissed a block of ice.

Every day, he felt a little bit colder, a little bit farther away. Souls weren’t meant to linger in this plane for long. They could rot just like bodies, become echoes of themselves. More than anything, I feared that one day I would come to find him and would only see the tree, the rope snapped, his soul too far gone for me to call back.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He hummed in thought, the sound like a low vibration of a zither string. “I’m not sure,” he said after a moment. “A bit like I’m dreaming, to be honest. But there are worse places to be than in a dream, I suppose.”

I said nothing, sitting down on a patch of dry grass and gesturing for him to sit beside me. He looked like a sheet of silk the wind might carry away. I needed him anchored to me.

I pressed my face to his chest and listened to the cavernous silence where his heartbeat should have been, his cold hands around me while I told him about the Sandstone Alchemist and the strange transformation we’d found.

---