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The ground beneath my face pulsed like a heartbeat, so many footsteps all at once. I tasted parched dirt, scorched earth, bright with spices. A stranger called my name, and when they lifted me off the ground, I fell to pieces, shattered ceramic twinkling back down to earth in a thousand sharp chunks.

I woke with my face against Yufei’s sweaty robes, blood pooling in my head. I was upside down, tossed over Yufei’s shoulder. The hot sun burned my neck, my face jostling against her back as she walked.

“Put me down,” I said.

She stopped walking, squatting down until my feet touched the road. I stood up straight, my body tingling as blood rushed back down to my feet. I pressed a hand to my forehead, rubbing where I was sure a bruise would form.

“You okay?” Yufei said, standing too close, shielding me from the busy road.

“Where’s Wenshu Ge?” I said.

Yufei looked over her shoulder as Wenshu stomped toward us, arms full of fruit. He didn’t look relieved to see me upright, eyes narrowing as he approached.

“Did you eatanythingcold today?” he said, shoving a cucumber at me.

I took a bite rather than answer. The thought of eating fruit before we left had crossed my mind, but Yufei had eaten the last pear yesterday and I’d wanted to avoid exactly this—Wenshu spending money we didn’t have on fruit that wouldn’t help me.

Every now and then, I blinked and woke up thrown over Yufei’s shoulder while she carried me home, the last few minutes scraped from my memory. Other times, the world rippled like the surface of a pond before swallowing me whole. Auntie So said I fainted because my fire element was unbalanced, so I needed to eat lots of cucumbers and melons to quench it. Wenshu thought it was an illness, but I never actually felt ill. It was more like I’d stopped existing. Somehow, I didn’t think all the cucumbers in the world could change that.

Wenshu pushed my hair aside, poking at the sore spot on my forehead and frowning. “You need to say something before that happens,” he said.

I nodded, even though I knew I couldn’t have said anything, and by this point Wenshu surely knew it too. Just like the rules of the commandant, it was out of my hands, up to some higher power who cared nothing for me at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

In hindsight, attempting a resurrection half an hour before dinner was probably not the best idea we’d ever had. We’d come back from the market to find Auntie So insisting she felt well enough to cook all the potatoes Yufei had bought, meanwhile old man Gou was loitering by the pigpen with crossed arms and a sack of gold, unwilling to leave without his brother. We could have made him wait until the sun fully set, but having a rich man standing in our backyard with a bag of money would make the neighbors ask questions.

“Can you do it in less than an hour?” Wenshu whispered to me, glancing at old man Gou glowering over Yufei while she counted his coins.

I wasn’t sure, but soon I would be taking the royal alchemy exam and would have to do transformations under far more pressure than my aunt yelling for me to come eat. I imagined my father traveling across the world, using alchemy to slay wild beasts with a flick of his wrist, climbing mountains and wading through rivers. Surely he had faced more peril than a cranky old man, so if I wanted to be better than him, I would have to get used to performing with an angry audience.

Yufei finished packing up the gold, giving me a nod from across the yard.

“Let’s get ready,” I said.

So, as the smell of sweet potato and ginger wafted out the windows, we locked the door to the pigpen and took out our tools, old man Gou waiting just beyond the gate.

Our pigpen was a wooden cage screened in with windows that had once been meant to keep the pigs cool in the summer, back when we could afford our own pigs. Now it was just a cool slab of dirt and old hay with snakes hissing in the thatched ceiling. It was better to do this sort of complex alchemy after the sun fell completely and no one walking by could see us, but days were stretching longer and longer in the summer months, and pale orange light still glowed through the windows.

“Let’s make this quick,” Yufei said, cracking her knuckles. “I’m hungry.”

“You look at rotting human flesh and think of food?” Wenshu said, counting out his needles.

“I see unappetizing things all the time,” Yufei said. “I eat dinner next toyou, don’t I?”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to laugh, too focused on the corpse on the ground. I had to be in the right mental space for this level of alchemy.

I bent down and pulled the sheets off the body—old man Gou had said his name was Gou Jau Gam—and rolled him onto his back. I could hear his organs sloshing around inside of him like a mushy pie, his skin doughy under my fingers. Yufei handed me a knife, and I split his robes down the middle, exposing the grayed skin of his back and jutting knobs of his spine. The smell of human rot mixed with the scent of hot potatoes from inside the house, creating a nauseating sweetness that coated my throat.

I opened my bag of gemstones and fished out three chicken-blood stones, turning them over in my palm under the dim light of the pig pen. Bloodstone was a hybrid gem, made of clay, quartz, and cinnabar that together made an earthy stone with bright splashes of scarlet. I’d only ever been able to find it when merchants from Zhejiang passed through our city. I’d spent enough time studying gems that I could identify most of them by touch, but there was no room for error with this kind of alchemy, so I always triple-checked that I had the right ones.

Larger alchemical transformations like this were easier if three people were involved because everything in alchemy followed the rule of threes—Heaven, Man, and Earth, the cosmic trinity. You needed all three things in some form to produce alchemy. Three symbolic gemstones were often good enough stand-ins, but for intense creation magic, having three people made the transformation more stable. Or at least, less likely to take too much from me. Alchemy always had a price. Sometimes it didn’t take what you offered, but what it wanted.

Wenshu heated a blade over a candle until it glowed a furious red, sterilizing it. He dipped it in a cup of water to cool it, the metal hissing and steaming in protest. When the steam began to abate, he passed the blade to Yufei and offered her his palm, turning away. He could never manage to do this part himself because the sight of his own blood made him woozy. Yufei gripped his wrist and carved a thin line against his palm. Wenshu winced but didn’t make a sound, clenching his fist and letting the blood pool into a small bowl.

Yufei sliced a line across her own palm, then passed the knife to me. The blade was a bit too dull, dragging unevenly across my skin, but it did the job. I added my own blood to the bowl, squeezing my fist to force more of it out.

Wenshu’s face had gone pale as he swirled his calligraphy brush around the blood offering, but he scoffed at my offer to do it for him.