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The prince took my hand under the table again, his touch gentle. He knew as well as I did that we wouldn’t get the Empress’s blood, at least not today. Another day for my cousins to suffer in a dungeon. Another day for the monsters to carve open court ladies, for little girls to burn in the western wards.

When my hand stayed limp, the prince laced his fingers between mine, thumb rubbing across the back of my hand. His pulse beat in my palm, the rush of blood saying everything he couldn’t in front of the Empress.

As his heartbeat stayed furiously fast even as the minutes wore on, I remembered what one of the scholars had said when I’d first come to Chang’an.

You are the keepers of gold, which runs through the veins of the family that Heaven has chosen for us.

I knew the blood of the Lis wasn’t literally gold, but if you ate enough life gold to stop aging, some of it must end up in your bloodstream.

Maybe we didn’t need a golden thread after all. Maybe the prince himself could be the conduit.

I hesitated. There was always the possibility that I’d accidentally tear all his veins open or explode his heart. I thought of the soup bowl I’d shattered instead of gently reshaping a teacup.

But I was a royal alchemist. If I couldn’t perform alchemy correctly when it mattered the most, then what good was I?

I did a quiet transformation under the table, sharpening the ring on my right hand into a small point, mentally apologized to the prince, then jammed the spike into his leg.

He flinched, leg twitching, but must have trusted me enough not to make a sound as my alchemy wound its way through his body, through the rushing rivers of his veins, around the delicate organs in his abdomen, the pulsing muscle of his heart, up to his mouth until finally—

Blood gushed from his nose, splashing across the table and spreading fast. He let out a choked sound and clapped a hand over his nose while servants fluttered around him, offering him rags.

The Empress rolled her eyes. “Hong, honestly, you’re not making a very good case for yourself. You have the constitution of a sickly peasant girl.”

She popped another piece of gold into her mouth and didn’t notice the alchemy that rushed across the surface of the table, carried by the metals in the prince’s blood. It soaked into the bottom of her golden plate, wound up through her pile of gold, all of the energy tunneling into the next piece that she reached for.

It is easier to destroy than to create.One of alchemy’s central tenets. Creating the life gold that filled the Empress’s plate was a complicated alchemical endeavor, the secret of the royal alchemists. But breaking it down into its constituent parts was simple, lazy alchemy.

Gold, qi, blood, iron.

Before the Empress picked up her next piece, the gold sloughed off of it like dead skin, the qi and blood trickled down the rest of her plate, leaving only a hardened sphere of iron.

She popped it into her mouth and bit down, expecting the usual crisp shell of gold that gave way to a buttery interior.

The resoundingcrackof her next bite silenced the frantic servants. I caught a quick glimpse of blood on her lips before she clapped a hand over her mouth and shot to her feet. The servants abandoned the prince, leaving me to hold a rag to his nose as they flocked around the Empress. Her eyes watered, one hand frozen over her mouth, the other gripping the edge of the table like it was the only thing anchoring her to the earth.

I did something that surprised the Empress, I realized, warmth swelling in my chest. The look in her eyes as her perfectly plotted dinner began to slip away was glorious. She might have made me a royal alchemist, but just like every judge and scholar I’d encountered on my journey, she was still underestimating me. I was not her science experiment anymore. I was the end of her story, the girl who would stand over her when she died, prying her kingdom from her withered hands.

The Empress stood up sharply and turned away, one hand still over her mouth. “We’re finished here,” she said, then hurried out of the garden.

“So are we,” I said to the prince. A healer was about to be called to fix the Empress’s cracked tooth, and someone needed to intercept him.

Just after sundown, I pounded my fist on the Moon Alchemist’s door.

She answered within moments, and before she could speak, I shoved a handful of bloodied rags into her hands.

The Empress might have been difficult to outsmart, but her healer wasn’t. I’d taken a servant’s uniform and offered to throw the rags away for him, and he’d handed them over without question. I’d even managed to get the Empress’s extracted tooth.

“How soon can we do it?” I asked.

The Moon Alchemist looked down at the blood-soaked rags as if she didn’t understand them.

“Zilan, did you really—”

“How soon?”I said. “I need to find my cousins.”

I waited a few torturous moments as the Moon Alchemist took in the bloodied rags, her hands slowly clenching around them as if to make sure they were real. When she finally looked at me, all the gold in her eyes burned, like a comet rushing overhead in one brilliant flash.

“I’ll gather the others,” she said. “We’ll strike tomorrow.”