Page 5

Why must the dead remain dead?he’d written in his last notebook.Alchemists wield life energy for their transformations, so why is death untouchable? Surely, with the right stone, it’s possible.

He’d focused his efforts on chicken-blood stone—a mix of clay and bloodred quartz—as the key material in a transmutation that could revive the dead. He hadn’t stayed long enough to find out that he was right.

Putting his notes into practice had taken some trial and error, plus a lot of screaming and praying from Auntie So when the pig she slaughtered for dinner was suddenly alive again in the afternoon. But the first time I’d tried it on humans, I’d realized that this was as close as I would ever get to being a god. For a single moment after every transformation, I was no longer a poor merchant’s daughter but an artist of the universe, repainting the constellations, smoothing mountains into valleys and parting seas.

My cousins tried alchemy when we were younger, but neither of them had been able to do much more than create bubbling pools of sludge that smelled so sharp that we nearly fainted from the fumes.

“There’s probably a genetic component,” Wenshu had said. “Your father did it, that’s why you can.”

But I suspected that Wenshu just preferred reading scrolls to getting his hands dirty.

“You smell like old fish,” Wenshu said, rolling up his last scroll and setting it with reverence on his desk.

“No, I smell like purge fluid.”

“Oh, that’s much better,” he said, putting his brushes in their drawer. I waved my hands near his face and he flinched away. “Wash your hands, you demon.”

I jokingly reached for his pillow and he grabbed a handful of soap beans from the jar on his desk, hurling them at my head.

“If the smell bothers you now, good luck tonight when you actually see the body,” I said. “It’s leaking from every orifice.”

“The body isn’t standing in my bedroom touching my pillow,” he said, turning and pulling out the inkstone from his desk drawer, holding it to the light, and scraping the crusted bits from the near-empty pan. He would have to make more before nightfall.

Yufei appeared in the doorway, holding a bundle of fabric. Our room truly was too small for three people, and Yufei and I were definitely too old to be sharing a room with a boy, but unless one of us slept in the hallway, there was nowhere else to go. Her long skirt had red dirt stains at the hem, and her hair had fallen down from the intricate bun that Auntie So did for her every morning.

“Why is there a body in the pigpen?” Yufei asked.

“That’s for later,” I said, gathering up the soap beans from the floor.

Yufei blinked but didn’t inquire further. She had such a small range of facial expressions that neighbors whispered about how she wore a porcelain mask instead of a real face. Wordlessly, she unfolded the fabric in her arms, dumping whitish-brown mush all over the floor.

Wenshu made a strangled sound and backed up. After seeing the body that afternoon, my first thought was that I was looking at several pounds of human fat. But death had a distinct smell, and this one was sharp and sweet.

“Sweet potatoes?” I said.

Yufei nodded. “Can you fix them?”

I nodded, moving over to my bedside drawer. “Yes, but why did you smash them?”

“And why did you dump them all over the clean floor?” Wenshu said, gripping his hair.

Yufei shrugged. “Needed something heavy, and they were already ruined,” she said, sitting down cross-legged.

“You needed something heavy while buying vegetables two blocks away?” Wenshu said, glaring accusingly at the mashed potatoes.

“Men are annoying,” Yufei said, as if that explained it all. At our blank looks, she rolled her eyes and elaborated, “They wouldn’t leave me alone and I had eggs in my other hand.”

“Oh,” I said. “You bludgeoned someone with potatoes?”

She nodded.

Quite a few men were desperate for Yufei’s hand in marriage, but she was just as determined to convince them they would be better off with a wild boar than have her for a wife. One unfortunate suitor had slipped her a love note last month, which she’d torn to pieces and eaten in front of him. Another man had come to the shop to give her wildflowers, which she’d tossed into the kiln. Auntie So kept telling people Yufei was fifteen, even though she’d been fifteen for over four years now, because she was getting embarrassingly old to be unwed. But no matter how hard she tried, the well of suitors never seemed to dry up.

Wenshu let out a massive sigh, hunched over his desk. “Did you kill anyone?”

Yufei shook her head. “Too many witnesses. But even if I did, Zilan could just fix him.”

Wenshu groaned and flopped facedown onto his bed. “I have demons for sisters.”