Page 19

“Hey!” I shouted. “You forgot about me!”

The judges glanced at me and whispered to each other, but made no move to intervene.

“Shut up!” a man said somewhere behind me. “Some of us are trying to concentrate here.”

I whirled around, shooting him a look that could melt iron. “This isn’t fair!” I said, slamming my fist against the top of the cage, even though it rattled through my bones and would probably break my hand if I kept going. “I paid fifty gold like the rest of you!”

“You should have stayed home, little girl!” someone shouted from across the row, and I recognized his voice as that of the annoying mustache man. A few others made sounds of agreement.

I slumped against the cold metal floor of the cage, my skin burning, out of breath and ready to tear my hair out or scream until the world ended. The urge to cry crashed over me in a hot wave and I swallowed it down, fingernails pinching into my thighs. I thought of Wenshu and Yufei, who were probably locked in their testing rooms by now, worrying about trying to recall Confucius’s words instead of yelling like a feral animal. At least they had a chance.

I turned to the alchemist in the cage closest to me, who was busy sorting through the stones that should have been mine.

“Give me some of yours,” I said.

His eye twitched, but he ignored me.

“I’ll pay you,” I said. That was all rich people cared about, wasn’t it?

He scoffed, shaking his head. “You wear rags. I doubt you could pay me enough for a bowl of rice.”

“Give them to me or the second I get out of here I’ll rip your ears off with my teeth.”

The man hesitated for one glorious moment before shaking his head. “You don’t scare me,hùnxie,” he said, even though that was definitely a lie.

He grabbed three pieces of silver and pressed them to a pile of copper-colored stones. With a flash, the silver disappeared and the copper re-formed into a short blade. The man began sawing at the bars.

“Thiswas supposed to be my competition?” I said, hanging my head. The bars were obviously hard metal. Copper wouldn’t do anything to it.

“Shut up,” the man said, sawing harder.

I sighed and turned to the cage on my other side, where an alchemist had heated a pile of rubies into a small fire and was trying to melt the bars. That might have worked if he’d had a few hours to spare, but the flame was small and ate through the rubies quickly. The metal glowed a weak blue before quickly cooling back down.

The color made me pause, a memory coming to me as if floating to the surface of a dark pond.

The metal fire pokers that we used in the kilns to bake míngqì always changed color when heated. Iron pokers, which we used most often, turned red. Steel pokers turned blue.

These bars were the right color and hardness for steel. The most common metals—gold, silver, brass, bronze, nickel—were all too soft to damage it.

Had they given the other alchemists anything harder than steel to use? I pressed my face between the bars, searching for iron or diamond or tungsten among my neighbor’s stash, but the alchemist frowned and turned his back to me, shuffling his stones out of my sight.

I leaned heavily against the door and crossed my arms, rattling the lock.

The lock.

I sat up straight. If they’d given the alchemists a soft metal to melt down, they could carefully pour it into the lock and then quickly cool it with a waterstone, attach a handle, and then it would no longer matter if you could break the bars. You would have a key.

“If I tell you how to get out, will you give me the rest of your stones?” I said to the alchemist on my right.

“I know how to get out,” he said, molding another blade.

“Clearly not. If you would just—”

“You’re wasting your breath,” he said. “Stop distracting me.”

No matter how much I rattled the bars, insulted him, and criticized his attempts, he kept ignoring me. For an excruciating amount of time, I watched him heat and reheat all the firestones he could find and hold them to the bars, even when his palms burned and blistered, the air reeking of cooked flesh. With a feral grunt, he wrenched the glowing bars apart a fraction. He was wiry like Wenshu and managed to force himself out of the gap, singeing his robes. He fell onto the ground outside his cage, panting.

“The first alchemist has escaped!” the official announced. Then he turned to the wooden board, dipped a brush into a pool of ink, and drew a single tally mark across the paper.