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“The bodies are used to make soldiers,” the Moon Alchemist went on. “I’m sure you’ve seen them in the palace by now. The Empress isn’t one for subtlety.”

“Soldiers?” I whispered.

The Moon Alchemist walked past me, waving for me to follow her deeper into the darkness. We approached a hall full of bamboo cells, where people were chained to the floor, rats scurrying around them. We stopped in front of a man who lay so still that at first I thought he was a corpse, but he flinched away from the light and curled into himself like a dying spider. He had a name carved into his cheek, the wound still raw, like someone had sliced it haphazardly with a blunt knife.

“He’s been resurrected, but I think you already knew that,” the Moon Alchemist said.

I ripped my gaze from the soul tag, face red. “I—”

“I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, but these are the only people we are allowed to resurrect now,” she said. Then she drew a handful of pearls from her pocket. “The Empress is expecting this one to be done today.”

“What do you mean, ‘done’?”

She held the pearls up to the dim light. “Life pearls,” she said. “The kind that the Empress eats.” Then, with one hand, she reached through the bars and opened the man’s slack jaw.

“Eat,” she said, popping the pearls in his mouth.

Maybe a more conscious man would have refused, but this one was half dead from starvation, and everyone knew that pearls were sustenance for the rich. He chewed through them with a horrible shattering sound.

Slowly, the man sat up. He shuttered like a rickety old house in a typhoon, and with a thousand tiny cracks, glossy pearl began to envelop every inch of him in a second skin. The colors in his irises vanished, his eyes replaced by two smooth pearls, his white teeth sharpening. His jaw hung slack, tiny pearls spilling past his lips, clattering to the floor.

I backed up against the other wall. These monsters had tried to kill me and my cousins, yet the Moon Alchemist didn’t seem afraid. In fact, the pearl monster wasn’t doing anything at all. He was just staring forward, drooling pearls.

“Eating alchemical gemstones may provide eternal youth to the rich,” the Moon Alchemist said, “but this is what happens when you perform too much alchemy on one body. You get eternal life, but not the kind you wanted.”

I crept closer, waving a hand in front of the man’s face. But his eyes didn’t even track the movement.

“I’ve seen people like this before, but they were dangerous,” I said. “Why isn’t he doing anything?”

Instead of answering, the Moon Alchemist snatched a rat from the floor. It writhed and angled to bite her, but she pulled out a knife and slashed a shallow line across its spine, then tossed it into the darkness of the cell. She turned to the pearl man, cranked his jaw open, and held her bloody blade over his tongue, tapping a few times until the drops fell into his mouth.

The man’s jaw clapped shut, nearly splitting his lip on the Moon Alchemist’s knife.

His head cranked around to face the rat, tiny pearls rushing from his slack lips. He lunged back into his cell, rattling his chains as he crushed the creature in his bare hands. It squeaked and twisted, but he held it by the tail and sunk his teeth into its torso.

“They only hunt what they’re told to, unless you try to stop them,” the Moon Alchemist said. “They are lethal, but of no danger to their creators.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked, wincing as the pearl man crunched down on the rat’s skull.

“Why didI?” the Moon Alchemist said. “Because if I send the Empress a pearl monster that doesn’t perform properly, she’ll throw me in the cell next.”

“Do you know what these monsters have been doing?” I said.Devouring the House of Li? Getting girls burned alive in western wards?

“We don’t know where most of the blood we feed them is from,” the Moon Alchemist said. “We’re still running a lot of experiments, and at times, there is collateral damage.”

I remembered the slaughtered librarian, the bloodied pearls in my satchel he was supposed to protect. Maybe Wenshu was right and the pearls were lost in a robbery gone wrong, their owner one of the unfortunate victims of the Empress’s experiments. The monster had probably killed him first, then still smelled his blood and come after the pearls next. The librarian had only gotten in the way.

“We bring them back here eventually,” the Moon Alchemist said, “and destroy them when they’ve served their purpose.”

“Destroy them?”

She pointed to the man’s cheek. “We remove the soul tags.”

The man continued to tear the rat apart, its tendons snapping wetly, bones crunching, blood dribbling into the dirt. I’d always maintained that it wasn’t my problem what happened to the bodies I resurrected, as long as I got paid. But did the families who sold these bodies know that this was what would become of the people they loved?

“I don’t know if I can—”

“If you refuse to help, then you’ll be chained up here as well,” the Moon Alchemist said. “You will starve to death and the rats will eat you, then the other alchemists will be forced to resurrect you. If you’re lucky, you’ll be made into a pearl monster, kill someone who nobody else liked, and be put out of your misery quickly. Do you want to know how I know that, Zilan?”