Page 88 of The Blood Orchid

“Get over it,” I said. “It’s not even your real clothes.”

“Shockingly, eating spirit mud tastes almost exactly like eating real mud,” he said, glaring at me.

I took a steadying breath and turned to the sky. “Just think about Emperor Taizong,” I said.

“What about him?” Zheng Sili said. “I never exactly saw his face.”

“His name,” I said. “Just close your eyes and imagine you’re writing his name into the sky.”

Zheng Sili glanced unsubtly in Yufei’s direction. “Can your sister write?”

Yufei raised an arm to smack him, but I held her back. “Yes, all of us can write, asshole,” I said.

“It’s a valid question for peasants,” Zheng Sili said, crossing his arms.

“We’re not peasants!” I said, yanking on the rope to force him to uncross his arms again. “Can you shut up for five seconds?”

He looked like he wanted to say more, but mercifully closed his mouth and looked to the sky. I took a deep breath and curled the rope up in my palms—if their minds wandered, I’d rather have rope burn on my palms than have my shoulders yanked out of their sockets.

I took a steadying breath and focused only on the sensation of the ground beneath my feet, the all-consuming darkness that made my eyelids grow heavy, as if nudging me toward a deep and eternal sleep. With my next exhale, I imagined a fine brush in my hand, painting the characters of Taizong’s name across the sky.

I took a step forward.

The ground whispered fast under my feet, like each step carried me a hundred miles. The stinging wind rushed past us, whipping my hair back, sealing us in a tunnel of screaming air.

I knew we were drawing closer when the winds grew quiet enough that I could breathe once more. I drew to a stop, the ground jagged and frozen beneath me. Then I opened my eyes and lurched backward.

I stood at the precipice of a dark and endless canyon. My toes just barely hung over the edge, the wind rushing up from the chasm in a high-pitched scream. While the living and the newly dead had running rivers or withered riverbeds, the place of Taizong’s soul was a ribbon of vast nothingness that had been ripped out of the ground.

I knelt down, the rope going slack as Yufei and Zheng Sili knelt beside me, peering into the darkness. I extended my hand, and the air parted like lukewarm water, ribbons of invisible silk tangling around my fingers.

I glanced over my shoulder, where the forest should have been, but there were only thousands of dark holes in the ground where the trees used to be. Out into the horizon, the sky was a lightless whisper of silver that bled into black. The darkness rendered Yufei and Zheng Sili’s faces papery white and gray, as if this place had stripped us of all our colors, extinguished the memory of light.

I turned back to the river of nothingness and leaned closer. Yufei gripped my arm as if to hold me back, but I only used her as an anchor to lean farther across the yawning chasm, extending my fingertips out into the night, where the darkness seemed to shroud them completely.

Something brushed across my hand—a tiny spark of brightness, perhaps a silverfish glinting over my knuckles. I jolted back, the sensation like a needle driven up under my nail. But as the pain bloomed bright, the lights of the main dining hall in the palace of Chang’an flashed across my vision.

I had only ever seen the empty hall shrouded in a haze of incense, but the vision before my eyes was bright with jewels, warm with laughter, the sharpness of ginger knifing up my nose, so vivid in contrast to the nothingness around me.

Then the light glinted away, and the image was gone.

“There are residual memories,” I said, pulling my hand back, examining where a single drop of water tracked down my palm, running down my wrist—moisture pulled into the air, trapped in clouds, thin and distant remnants of the river that used to be the Emperor’s entire life. Death could never erase anything completely.

Yufei took my wrist in her hand, pulling it closer to her. Under the gray light, I realized that the nail of my ring finger, where the water droplet had landed, had turned purple as a corpse. She prodded at it, and I watched the nail flash white from pressure before darkening to purple again.

“I don’t know about this,” Yufei said.

“Me neither,” Zheng Sili said. “This definitely feels like a place we’re not supposed to be.”

“Because we’re not,” I said, frowning. “All kinds of life alchemy go against the natural order of the world.”

A cold breeze shivered up from the base of the canyon, like a wintery sigh.

I handed Yufei and Zheng Sili the ends of the rope that I’d gathered. “Hold on tight. I’m going in.”

“Inthere?” Yufei said, raising an eyebrow. “Into the death pit?”

“It’s not a death pit,” I said, kicking my shoes off so I could feel the moisture on as much of my skin as possible. “Just give me thirty seconds or so?”

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