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“Do you have any scrolls on alchemical resurrection?” I asked.

The Moon Alchemist froze. Her sharp gaze slid over to me. “That is forbidden,” she said, each word clipped. “You know that.”

“Yes,” I said, “but is reading about it also forbidden?”

The Moon Alchemist watched me for an uncomfortably long moment, as if searching for something in my face. “We will cover that—and everything else—in time. But only under my supervision. It’s very dangerous.”

“But why?” I said.

Something in my voice must have sounded too desperate, because the Moon Alchemist’s eyes narrowed.

“Zilan,” the Moon Alchemist said stiffly, “I heard that your parents passed.”

I opened my mouth to tell her this wasn’t about them, but hesitated. Maybe it was better if she thought I was just a sad orphan instead of running an illegal resurrection business. I sank lower in my seat, dropping my gaze to my lap.

“My mother passed,” I said, keeping my voice quiet, weak. “My father left. I just wish my mother could have seen me being a royal alchemist. I wish she could have been proud of me.”

The words were true, but somehow I felt the Moon Alchemist would sense the lie behind them. I didn’t dare look up, certain she would see straight through me.

At last, she sighed. “Zilan,” she said, “if you were to resurrect your mother, she would not be human anymore.”

I felt like a rock had lodged in my throat. I pictured Yufei braiding my hair, Wenshu making tea. How could they not be human? They were more human than the gold-guzzling court scholars.

“When you die, all of your qi goes back into the universe,” the Moon Alchemist said. “You can’t simply call it back to an empty husk. Your mother would need another source of qi.”

My stomach clenched. My cousins didn’t have enough qi? Was I supposed to be finding more of it for them? I cleared my throat, trying to keep my tone even. “So if I brought her back, I would have to give her—”

“You can’tgivesomeone qi,” the Moon Alchemist said slowly. “They take it.”

I clasped my hands together to still their trembling. “From where?”

The Moon Alchemist crossed her arms, her eyes burning amber.

“From you,” she said.

My heart felt like it stopped in my chest, my whole body suddenly marble stiff and deathly cold. “From me?” I whispered. “You mean—”

“From whoever they love,” the Moon Alchemist said. “The dead are like a parched riverbed, sucking up anything they can find. They can siphon off the qi from their loved ones, one drop at a time, until they grow sick and die.”

I shook my head, wishing I could take the question back, return to the life when I’d innocently wondered what the true cost of resurrections was. If the Moon Alchemist was right—if the cost of one life was everyone they loved—then I had never really brought back the dead through some alchemical miracle, I’d just traded one life for countless others and doomed the revived to a life of grief and loneliness. I’d ended more lives than I’d restored.

My thoughts snapped to my aunt and uncle in bed, inexplicably growing sicker and sicker. Yet, as soon as we’d left, they’d claimed they felt better. I’d thought they were lying for our sakes, but what if Wenshu and Yufei had slowly been killing them?

If I told my cousins the Moon Alchemist’s theory, they would never want to go home again. They could never see their parents because of what I’d done.

I’d tried so hard to fit seamlessly into their lives, never give them a reason to question my presence, to regret me. But now our family was fractured in half because I’d played around with alchemy as a desperate child. Would they all hate me if they knew? I prayed the Moon Alchemist was wrong, if only so I would never have to tell them.

And what aboutme?

If my cousins had been stealing qi from their parents, surely they’d been taking mine as well. Perhaps I’d lasted longer because I was younger, but did that mean I was going to drop dead at any moment?

“How long?” I said, unable to hide the shaking in my voice. “How long does it take to...to take all of someone’s qi?”

“It’s not an exact science, but about four years,” the Moon Alchemist said. “The closer you are to the dead, the faster it happens.”

The trembling in my hands stilled. I gripped handfuls of my dress, pinching my legs beneath the fabric, the distant pain the only thing keeping me tethered.

That didn’t make any sense. It had been about three and a half years since I’d resurrected my cousins. Surely if three quarters of my qi was gone, I would have noticed by now. I wouldn’t have been able to do alchemy, wouldn’t even be able to stand up, unless...