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...unless they didn’t love me.

The thought cut off my breath, washed all the heat from my body. I couldn’t hear anything at all but my heartbeat, so mockingly loud.

I thought of Wenshu and Yufei walking side by side to take their tests, whispering to each other, trading secrets about me in the dark. Even in death, they were together, bonded in a way I could never understand. Maybe they thought they loved me because they’d grown used to my presence, but alchemy had a way of unveiling truths that even alchemists didn’t know.

“Are you sure?” I whispered, hot tears burning at the corner of my eyes.

“Why are you crying?” the Moon Alchemist said, the words a sharp accusation.

I shook my head, swallowing down my tears. “How do you know?” I said. “If it’s so forbidden, how can you be certain of the cost? Have you even resurrected anyone?”

The Moon Alchemist’s eyes darkened. She stood up slowly, and as her shadow eclipsed the section of the floor where I sat hugging my knees, for once I felt incredibly small.

“I wanted to make this easy for you,” she said, “but if you’re so certain that you’re ready, wipe your face and come with me.”

I rubbed my eyes on my sleeve. “Where—”

But the Moon Alchemist had already turned away, storming out the door. I hurried after her, nearly tripping over the low table. She didn’t even check to make sure I was following, striding swiftly across the courtyard. I walked a few paces behind her as she charged out of the alchemy ward, across the central palace, where the walls grew shorter and pathways narrower. The walls had a different cast in daylight, but as we drew closer, it slowly dawned on me that I’d been here before.

The guards to the dungeons bowed and unlocked the doors for us without question. Once more, I headed into the cool underbelly of the palace. The Moon Alchemist grabbed a candle and strode unwaveringly into the darkness, down the spiral staircase, deeper and deeper until we’d long passed where the princesses had been kept. The farther we went, the more the air smelled of death. Not exactly rot quite yet, but the sour scent of decay creeping in. My breath rose in shuddering clouds and I hugged my arms around myself, annoyed at the thin, decorative silk of my dress.

At last, the staircase came to a stop on dirt ground, so cold and parched that it cracked beneath our feet. A curved doorway led into darkness thick as a wall of painted black.

The Moon Alchemist handed me the candle, then pointed ahead.

“Go on,” she said.

I looked between her and the doorway. “Why—”

“You wanted to know,” she said. “Go find the answers you wanted.”

I swallowed. The Moon Alchemist might be terse, but she wasn’t wrong—I had asked for this. Besides, this was my job now. I needed to stop acting like the prince, who turned away from the palace’s ugliness.

I stepped into the shadows, the weak light of the candle illuminating little more than my own feet and the cracked ground in front of me. Maybe it was my nerves, but the air here seemed harder to breathe, so moist with decay.

My circle of light swallowed a pale hand lying in the dirt, palm facing down. The skin had started to peel back from purple nails, revealing red muscles underneath. I drew closer, fishing out a firestone and brightening my candle so I could see better.

A thousand faces stared back at me.

Bodies stacked from floor to ceiling, stiff arms and legs jutting out, jaws slack in silent screams, eyes shrunken into pools of jelly dripping out of their sockets, bloody foam oozing from nostrils, flaps of skin hanging off limbs and shuddering like limp flags.

My heel crunched down on something as I backed up. I whirled around, jumping when I realized I’d stepped on another hand, stumbling into a mountain of bodies on the opposite wall. I tripped over another arm, jostling the corpse at the bottom of the stack, the whole pile trembling at the disturbance. Each of them had thin strings tied around their wrists or ankles with names written on scraps of paper.

How had all of these bodies ended up here? Corpses were supposed to be buried in coffins crammed full of míngqì, not stacked in a frozen dungeon.

“Who are they?” I said, turning to the Moon Alchemist, who stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “Why are we hoarding corpses under the palace?”

“I don’t know who they were. They have names, but it hardly matters now,” the Moon Alchemist said. “And we don’thoardthem, Zilan, they’re here for a reason. Wipe the shock from your face and start asking the right questions. You are a royal alchemist, so speak like one.”

I took a deep breath of stale corpse air and tried to organize my thoughts. “Who brought them here, and how?”

“The Empress’s night guards,” the Moon Alchemist said. “At the end of every week, they go to the poor districts. They’ll buy blood for fifty gold, and fresh corpses for one hundred.”

One hundred?That’s a week’s worth of food in this city. But I supposed many couldn’t afford a burial anyway. “Why does the Empress need either of those things?” I said.

“It’s not the blood she wants, but the qi. If you take enough blood to bring someone near death, you can access it. It’s the key ingredient in life gold.”

So she was after the same thing I’d used in my final alchemy trial. It made sense that qi was needed for life gold, but something that valuable seemed worth more than fifty gold pieces. One bowl of rice at the palace probably cost more.