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CHAPTER TWELVE

WHAT ARE YOU?

The world smells of soot and smoke. I stumble up a fire--ravaged mountain between charred, fallen trees. Cinders drift like gray snow through the hazy air, landing warm on my skin. My lungs burn, and every muscle in my body strains to the brink of tearing, yet I can’t stop, or they’ll get to me.

I can hear them crawling behind me, their fractured, exposed bones scraping over the ash-coated ground. Voices swarm around my head like hornets.

“ …how could you… ”

“ …we raised you… ”

“ …heartless, rotten girl… ”

“ …now reap what you sow… ”

Tripping over something, I tumble into ash. I flail to keep going, but loops of a glowing golden thread tighten around me, binding my arms and legs. I can do nothing more than writhe in place as mangled bodies reach me.

“ You did this. ” My family digs their skeletal fingers into my flesh, speaking out of sync with one another. “ You did this. You did this. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. ”

“That’s because no one else does!” I cry. “You didn’t care about me first!”

“ I did, Mei-Niang.” Shimin’s voice flutters like summer heat into my ear. He’s beside me with only half a body, dragging along tubes and wires like entrails. “ Make me whole. You have to make me whole. ”

I scream louder.

“I see,” says someone above me. Metallic footsteps clink to a stop. “Having a guilt problem, are we?”

I snap into reality—or the fact that this isn’t real.

I glare up at Qin Zheng, who appears full-armored in his spirit form. So this dream link thing actually works…

The golden thread around me connects to his wrist. He winds it a few times around his hand and yanks me up, dangling my bound arms above my head.

An indignant noise escapes me. I squirm against the thread. “Let me go!”

“This is a dream realm manifested by both our minds. You can free yourself if you truly wish.” He lifts my chin with his free hand. “Or do you enjoy being tied up before me? Because I can make much more pleasing bindings than this.”

I’d spit in his face if I could figure out how.

“I assure you, I did not do this to you,” Qin Zheng says with an edge of amusement. “You imposed this on yourself. Do you feel you deserve to suffer for what you’ve done?”

Ignoring him, I concentrate on the winding path the thread takes around me. I compel it to loosen. It shines brighter as it does. The moment I can move my legs, I find my footing and push away from Qin Zheng.

“There, see?” He unravels the thread from me. It shortens to a direct line between our wrists.

I jerk at it, trying to dispel it altogether, but I freeze when I look down and catch sight of the crushed bodies again. They haven’t gone away. Just gone still.

“You made the correct call.” Qin Zheng peers down at them as well. “Morality is a luxury those of us born to be chewed up and spat out simply cannot afford.”

A violent wind stirs the ashes. I wish I could shove him out of my mind and rip this scene out of his memories. I don’t want him to know me, to look at me like he can see through to my deepest depths. And maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing. If this dream link works the same as a battle link, he could be trawling through my memories as we speak. Nothing in my head is safe from him. Yet I can’t seem to delve into him in return.

“ Your mind realm is an ocean of hungry ghosts coming for you,” I say. “Are you also haunted by the things you’ve done?”

He looks momentarily winded, but recovers with a shrug. “I do not let it stop me. Any so-called power obtained without a bloody fight is but a tranquilizing mirage. This is why I was not entirely resistant to making you my empress. You showed adequate resolve, at least.” He indicates the corpses around us. So many of them, overflowing down the mountainside. And not just human. Hundun husks litter the ashy slope as well, in a warped memory of the scorched valley where Shimin and I piloted the Vermilion Bird for the last time.

I turn away from the sight. “What would you have done if I’d chickened out on crushing the Palace of Sages?”

“Oh, I would’ve agreed to execute you upon the third complaint I received. I still might, if you prove to be a liability ,” he says with a snarl, his eyes burning with the same hatred he’s been directing at me since he found out I tried to talk about the Hunduns with Qieluo.

I could kill you with a nick in your quarantine glass and a wet cough , I want to say, though I think better of making threats I can’t fulfill just yet. The officials would pounce on me at once if he died. Like what happened two centuries ago to General Mi. I need to be better prepared.

I need to absorb his abilities first. Let’s see if they’ll dare pounce if I can summon the Yellow Dragon on them regardless of whether Qin Zheng remains alive.

“Liability? Says the great emperor whose own immune system can’t handle the tiniest modern germ,” I say, a more subtle reminder of his vulnerability.

With an even more venomous glare, Qin Zheng wanders to a tree stump at least five paces wide and twice as tall as him. “A lot can change indeed in two centuries. Funny to think that these trees sprouted from seedlings and perished at such sizes wholly within the span of my slumber. In my time, this stretch of the Kunlun Mountains was much too close to the front lines to grow extensive vegetation.”

He splays his hand outward. The dream realm shifts, tree carcasses blowing away as ash to reveal a mountainside drained barren of qì by unseen Chrysalises stationed nearby. Brick buildings and canvas tents spring up in the valley below. By some sort of dream intuition, I know he’s showing me a military base from his era. The buildings look as rugged as those in my village, not like modern training camps built from smooth concrete. Vague blurs of people weave between the structures like phantoms, their weathered clothes not holding much color.

“It still feels as if I simply woke up in a faraway place.” Qin Zheng gazes upon the scene. “That I could find my way home if I headed in the right direction. If only…”

Rage flares from him, hitting me as physical heat, cut through with a twinge of bitter regret. Images flash in a deeper layer of my mind. Long tents full of pox-infested patients groaning in agony. Qin Zheng rushing bundles of linens between rows and rows of pallets. Chrysalises digging mass graves and sweeping in piles of corpses. Heaps of clothes and belongings set on fire. Qin Zheng frantically discovering a pustule on his own arm.

The force of the memories knocks me a step back. I don’t think he shared them intentionally, since he doesn’t appear to be waiting for my reaction. Plus, he wouldn’t show me he was foolish enough to go into a quarantine zone while being the ruler of a whole empire.

So this is what it takes to get a spillover from his mind. He needs to be vulnerable.

I step closer to him than I’d ever like to be. Gently, I touch his shoulder.

“So what’s our plan against the gods? We’re not letting them get away with reigning over us, right?” I lower my voice and my lashes, resonating with his rage as I think of Shimin, held captive, on that screen. Although we entered this dream realm for training purposes, it’s not lost on me that this is also a great place to discuss something in complete secrecy. It’ll do good to remind him there are way more prudent targets to seethe about than me.

Qin Zheng glances at my hand, but doesn’t push it away. With a wave of his arm, the mountain landscape darkens and gives way to a night sky salted with infinite stars. Our spirit forms float as if we’ve risen to the heavens themselves.

“There.” He points at a bright speck sailing a path through the night. The scene zooms in, stars streaking past us. The speck expands into a humongous structure made of two metal rings attached around a long central shaft, with many panels and parts protruding from the other end.

I gape at it. “Is that the Heavenly Court? What it really looks like?”

“Indeed. An image taken by a scholar who could not restrain his curiosity. He had crafted increasingly sophisticated lenses to peer into the cosmos, despite that being a field of study forbidden by the gods. I had to sentence him to death. Before I condemned him, however, I confiscated his findings.” Pages of handwritten notes flutter into existence near Qin Zheng’s outstretched hand. Writings and calculations drift off the papers in shining scrawls, organizing themselves against the starry view. “This is what I remember.”

“You memorized all this?” The numbers dizzy me. Yizhi’s math homework was the one subject I never wanted a second glance at.

Qin Zheng peers at me with a trace of smugness. “I can memorize anything I put my mind to.”

“Of course you can,” I grumble.

“Regardless, I had no other choice. I could not keep the notes.”

The pages go up in flames, but their contents remain shining before us. The Heavenly Court becomes a two-dimensional sketch with arrows around its twin rings, indicating that they move in opposite directions.

“The scholar hypothesized that the Heavenly Court is a massive artificial structure with rings that spin to generate rotational gravity, which would take effect around the perimeter of the rings.” Qin Zheng traces his finger around them. “This means the gods are subject to the same physics as us, instead of existing in a mystical form as in our legends. They would not build technology of such scale to supply gravity simply for the tribute girls they take from us.”

Right. Shimin is far from the first person to have been whisked up by the gods. Every new year, they make us leave nine girls for them along with our usual tribute of spirit metal. We don’t know why or what happens to the girls, but, assuming they’re not killed for sport, they’d be living among the gods in the Heavenly Court.

I drift closer to the rings. “So are the gods just…regular humans?”

“We would have to see for ourselves.”

The sketch of the Heavenly Court fills with realistic detail again while rapidly expanding. On and on it grows, reaching a size that sends terror swooping through me as I tip back to take it all in. From the side, the rings are as wide as earthbound cities. From the front, their diameters must be thousands of meters across.

“The Court moves extremely quickly, orbiting our world once every hundred and eighty minutes,” Qin Zheng says. “However, theoretically, it should be possible to intercept it with the correct timing based on precise calculations.”

A tremor runs through my spirit form at what he’s suggesting. “Were you planning on doing that two hundred years ago?”

“I held the thought in the back of my mind, though I seldom entertained it, for it would almost certainly be a suicide mission. Now, I have nothing left to lose. I see the truth that nothing I do for Huaxia will last through the ages as long as the gods lord over us.”

Another wave of his anger assails me as physical heat. But this time, I feel a sense of dread for him. For us .

“You really think we can reach them in, what, the Yellow Dragon?” I question.

“It would take an unparalleled effort. We would get but one chance. And we must betray no outward hint of planning it until the moment we depart.”

The Heavenly Court’s twin rings spin before us in opposite directions, impossibly large. I feel reduced to a speck, a flea gazing upon a colossus, paralyzed with the same helplessness as when I stared up at the Black Tortoise in my regular human body.

Yet somewhere in this metal monstrosity is Shimin, ensnared as a plaything between life and death, along with the tribute girls taken each year. I can’t imagine they’re living well. Forgiving the gods is not an option.

“I’m in,” I curl my fists and say. “When do we go?”

Qin Zheng rubs his chin. “We would need to refine my calculations. Mathematical instruments and knowledge of physics have surely improved since my time. The issue is seeking what we need without rousing the gods’ suspicions. Now that I am stuck in a quarantine chamber…” His jaw tightens.

“A quarantine chamber in a university . Everything we need should be right on campus. Yizhi would know who or what to find, and what excuses to justify contacting them.”

“Do not speak of this to Secretary Gao unless you can do so as discreetly as possible,” Qin Zheng warns.

“I could just enter a dream link with him, couldn’t I?”

“No. The disparity between your spirit pressures is too great. Head deep underground instead. That worked for me to evade the gods’ surveillance in my time. As I understand, there exists a network of tunnels beneath the palace.”

“What if their surveillance tools have since gotten better?”

“If even the depths of the earth cannot grant us secrecy, we have no hope of keeping this from the gods.”

I sigh. “So it’s a gamble.”

“The biggest of our lives,” Qin Zheng says. “Hm…Let’s hope you can recall the feeling of Pilot Li’s spirit signature when we ultimately make our move. It could be an asset in tracking the Heavenly Court’s exact location.”

My chest clenches as if he punched me. “I’d never forget.”

His gaze softens, going misty. “You’d be surprised by how quickly your memory of someone can blur once the world no longer carries any trace of their existence.”

“But—” An electric shock of an inkling streaks through my mind. An idea so absurd my first thought is to laugh it off, yet it just might make a difference. “But there are traces of Shimin left in Huaxia.”

“ Half a liver and one kidney .” Yizhi’s voice echoes by my ear. “ That’s what they take from every healthy death row inmate. For anyone who needs a transplant. ”

“The kidneys—” I say. “Each holds half of someone’s primordial qì, right? Shimin was forced to donate one of his. Would it still give off a spirit signature that feels like his, even in someone else’s body?”

Qin Zheng’s face seizes up in bafflement. He opens his mouth, looking ready to call me ridiculous, but the insult never makes it out. He slips into a vacant frown before saying, “This is…worth looking into. Find the person who received Pilot Li’s kidney. Visit the locations he once frequented, as well. That could strengthen your spiritual bond with him.”

“Will do.” I make note of his every word, weaving them into a plan of action. “And what about my training? I’ll have to be as skilled as possible with spirit metal if we’re to attack gods . Don’t tell me you’re planning on handling everything yourself. Let me be useful.”

“Very well.” Qin Zheng waves his hand. The stars wink out. A different section of the Kunlun Mountains returns through the darkness. The Great Wall of two centuries ago rises beneath our feet, piled up with rough bricks instead of concrete, marking what must’ve been the Zhou province’s frontier. We look out across the Xihuang Desert, which separates us from other human strongholds in the west.

Qin Zheng leaps onto the Wall’s edge, armor clattering. “As I’ve mentioned, you first must liberate your mind from restrictive preconceptions about spirit metal, Chrysalises, and the world itself.”

A Water-black Chrysalis materializes outside the Wall like ink gathering shape, almost as tall as the Wall itself. It steadies into the form of a crow with three legs, its sharp eyes shining Fire red.

“Which class is this unit?” I climb to join Qin Zheng on the Wall’s edge. The drop to the bottom doesn’t look as steep as at the modern Great Wall, but it’s hard to tell by how much, and thus hard to judge the Chrysalis’ weight class. “Prince class? King class?”

“Queen class.” Qin Zheng gives me a pointed look. “This is the Three-Legged Crow, my mentor’s Chrysalis. We used feminine terms for a unit if the commanding pilot was female.”

Ah. So this is what he meant by not clinging to assumptions.

“I take it she wasn’t part of a Balanced Match,” I say, feeling a ripple of grief at how, with no one to pilot it, this Chrysalis must’ve been destroyed during the fall of Zhou. “Then who served as her secondary pilots?”

“Condemned men, mostly. Criminals.”

Something sours in me as I think of Shimin in his bright jumpsuit and chains. Yet I don’t know what other policy I’d wish for the army to follow. Would it really be better if they manipulated regular boys into signing up as concubine-pilots the way they do the girls, calling it a noble sacrifice?

Well, I guess that’s what they already say when conscripting boys into the war. It’s just not enough to get them to proudly die in service of a female pilot.

“What do you think Chrysalises are?” Qin Zheng goes on before I can muse further. “Why do they take the forms they do?”

“Uh…”

When I think hard about the question, a spilled-over memory belonging to Shimin surfaces in my mind: him and his previous partner, Wende, manifesting the Vermilion Bird out of a King-class Hundun husk. As if I were there myself, I feel their mutual excitement and uncertainty as they plugged into the mind link, then how their shared desire for freedom spread expansive wings out of the Fire-red spirit metal over the course of hours.

“The forms reflect the pilots’ minds,” I answer.

“But why are they always an animal or a figure of legend?” Qin Zheng points at the Three-Legged Crow, without a doubt a manifestation of the creature that resides in the sun in our myths, carrying it across the sky every day.

“That’s just how things…are?” Admittedly, I’ve never given this much thought.

“There is, in fact, no reason other than that someone, at some point long ago, determined that animal forms provide an efficient framework for conceptualizing Chrysalises. The Standard Form on all fours for easy balance, then increasingly humanoid in more advanced and controlled forms. The truth, however, is that Chrysalises can be anything.” Qin Zheng lifts the glowing thread between our wrists. “Just as I morphed this thread out of my spirit armor, a pilot can manifest any form out of a Hundun husk. And they can completely reshape an existing Chrysalis if they wish to. The issue lies in whether their mind can inhabit that form without breaking.”

With a swing of his arm, the Yellow Dragon lunges into existence beside the Three-Legged Crow. Wind gusts across my cheeks as the Dragon curls itself into a massive mound taller than the Wall.

“To embody a Chrysalis is to embody a new identity,” Qin Zheng explains. “If that identity is weak, the pilot’s control of it shall be weak as well.”

The Dragon melts into a golden blob like the Emperor-class Hundun it must’ve been made from.

“I could morph the Yellow Dragon into a shapeless mass, but I would not be able to pilot it well. On a subconscious level, my mind would not make sense of existing in such a vague form. As with the details in this dream realm, Chrysalis manifestation relies a great deal on the subconscious. For example, I see that you once brawled with a Chrysalis called the Headless Warrior.”

Qin Zheng makes it appear, slightly smaller than the Three-Legged Crow. I jump at the reminder of how deeply he can dive into my memories.

“I would guess that it initially failed to form a head during its manifestation,” he says. “However, this then reminded the pilot of the headless warrior of legend, which used its nipples as eyes and its navel as a mouth, and so the Chrysalis developed further in that direction, because the pilot’s mind could accept it as a strong identity. In this way, preconceptions provide convenient guidance to manifesting and advancing Chrysalises. What you must be wary of is letting the framework restrict your imagination.”

A small subunit emerges from the blob that used to be the Yellow Dragon. It looks like Qin Zheng in his spirit armor, except it has an actual dragon head and bat-like wings on its back. With a few beats of its wings, it flies to the Three-Legged Crow and drops down on one knee on its head.

“You were surprised by the Yellow Dragon’s second form. This was because you were bound by the idea that a more advanced form ought to be larger and taller. It did not occur to you that there is no reason you could not go smaller if the situation called for it.”

“Right.” I study the subunit’s every detail. “Is it possible to do simulated battles in here? Now that you can’t jump into the Yellow Dragon willy-nilly anymore, I should learn how to use it, right?”

Alarm flashes across his face. “The Dragon was never a unit to be used ‘willy-nilly.’ Its recuperation period is a full month, rather than half a month, and thus it must be reserved for my most important battles. I deployed my first Chrysalis, the Black Bird, for more casual purposes.”

Another Water-type, bird-form Chrysalis springs up beside the Three-Legged Crow, almost its twin, except without a third leg. In a storm of dark feathers, Qin Zheng’s spirit armor changes from the Yellow Dragon’s to a skin-tight black one with a feathered crown framing his face and gauntlets tipped with sharp claws. I swear his eyelids gain a dusting of smoky pigment. For some reason, I can easily imagine him sauntering his hips in this look.

“What?” He squints, probably noticing how I’m holding back a laugh.

“Is this what you wore while convincing people to bow to your rule?”

He flexes his black-clawed fingers near his face. “It worked.”

“Well, I’m assuming the Black Bird got destroyed with the rest of the Zhou province, so the Yellow Dragon is all we have. It’s just a matter of time before people question why we’re not flying to the frontiers to…”

I mean to say, “destroy the Hunduns,” yet I can’t get the words out of my mouth, even as the map of the relentless attacks on our frontiers flashes in my deeper consciousness. If we don’t do something soon, more concubine-pilots will die , I tell myself. Yet it doesn’t get any easier to speak.

“The Yellow Dragon is not an effective unit for combating Hunduns,” Qin Zheng snaps with more than a little possessive reluctance. “They can sense it coming from too far away, and they run to avoid it. The battle at the Zhou frontier only worked in our favor because we were able to ambush them from underground. The Dragon is meant for inter-Chrysalis warfare.”

“That won’t stop people from expecting us to act if things get worse at the frontiers!”

The idea of rebuilding the Iron Widows nudges at my mind again. Even disregarding my agenda to pry the secrets to piloting the Yellow Dragon out of him, if any of the frontiers fall, so will the revolution, because there’s no justifying this new order if we can’t keep our people safe.

Rebuilding them is also the most efficient way to develop my own power base. After all, what kind of powerful allies can I count on to be more loyal to me over Qin Zheng if not fellow Iron Widows, especially if I take them under my wing?

“How about we do a sweep for girls with high spirit pressures and give them their own Chrysalises to command?” I say, swallowing all bitter, confounding thoughts about the war itself. “If we double the number of pilots, there’ll be less scrutiny on why you’re not deploying.”

He stares into my eyes as if trying to read my thoughts. Can he actually do that in a dream link? I hope not. I focus on thinking about the frontiers’ safety. Nothing else. Certainly nothing about building a power base independent of him.

“Your era has not seen female commanding pilots for two centuries,” he says, with a cautious slowness. “I faced quite the resistance from the central court simply to restore the pilot seat calibrations to equal levels.”

“Didn’t you tell them about Iron Widows like General Mi?”

“I did. They still blame those female commanding pilots for the fall of Zhou.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I grasp my head. “Then—then all the more reason for me to go show them it’ll be fine! That letting a girl command a Chrysalis won’t be the end of the world!”

Technically, I already showed them when I seized control of the Nine-Tailed Fox from Yang Guang, but given the drama and grief his death caused, it’s probably not the best example of “fine.”

“You are getting far ahead of yourself.” Qin Zheng suddenly advances in on me, forcing me backwards. “You have much more to unlearn. Answer me this: What are you?”

“Huh?” I trip a little before resolving to stand my ground.

He presses closer. “Answer the question. What are you?”

I push against his shoulders to keep him at arm’s length. “I’m a human girl! What kind of question is this?”

“What makes you who you are?”

“What do you mean by—”

His clawed fingertips strike my chest. My dream form peels apart from the point of contact, flesh and tissue flaying away in layers. I scream. The sound cuts off when the carnage reaches my throat, shredding my voice. My bones crumble to powder and fly off on the wind.

“What are you?” Qin Zheng asks again. “I strip away your skin, your flesh, your bones, and what are you? What makes you who you are?”

I plunge into darkness as I lose my eyes and ears as well. I can no longer see, hear, or feel.

This isn’t real! I remind myself, but it does nothing to get my senses back. His control is impossible to resist.

You are a collection of nerve impulses believing themselves to be a singular entity named Wu Zetian . Qin Zheng’s words come to me like thought, not substantial enough to be sound.

Somewhere in my consciousness arises the idea of a brain and the nerves that trail from it in branches, a storm of electrical signals firing within them. It’s like a diagram out of Yizhi’s biology notes. The outlines of the brain and nerves then fade away, leaving nothing but the dazzling signals.

What you are, what we all are, is an illusion. Accept the pretense of your own existence, and you can extend the illusion. You have always been the pilot of a vessel. You simply became accustomed to thinking of the cells that make up your body as yourself, even though you could lose much of those cells and still exist. Once you understand that spirit metal is not so different, you can unlock its true potential.

The storm of electrical signals stretches onto a diagram of the Yellow Dragon, streaking like lightning along its long form.

In your human body, your will can only conduct in predetermined ways. You can consciously hold your breath but not intentionally stop your heart, for example. This is a necessary system of order to bind together the chaos of elements that assembled to create you. Spirit metal, on the other hand, has no inherent restrictions. Subconsciously, you limit yourself so this does not overwhelm you, but as long as you find the balance between order and chaos, you can achieve more control over spirit metal than you ever imagined.

The signals disperse from their lightning-like paths, filling the Yellow Dragon so the entire diagram glitters with activity.

I want to react, to ask questions, yet I can’t find a way to speak. I try to fight out of the oblivion, yet I have nothing to fight with. Soon, the Dragon fades away, and no more thoughts come from Qin Zheng.

I’m alone in the void. In some way, it makes me understand what he means by chaos without order. That’s how I am now, existing everywhere yet unable to act, like mist that can’t gather into form. I am free, yet I am nothing. Is this what it’d be like to be dead? To be untethered from a vessel that can interact with the physical world?

This must be a test, a challenge from Qin Zheng to reshape myself out of the vast everything. But am I supposed to become my human self or the Yellow Dragon?

Just as I aim for the latter, a loud, pounding noise jolts me out of the dream.

Reality bombards me with sensation. Even though the room is dark, it takes me a solid half minute to readjust. Being human feels much more intense than I remembered. I pat myself all over, astonished to have a body again.

I sit up in the bed a soldier wheeled into the observation booth for me. My breaths come short and quick. My feet give their usual dull pulses of pain.

Across the glass, Qin Zheng stirs awake as well, his bed parallel to mine. Medical machinery hums in the darkness, its scant lights tracing his contour out of the gloom. I yank off the thread of spirit metal connecting us and toss it away like a snake, though I realize a second too late that it makes my unease too obvious. Qin Zheng gives me a knowing look. I can’t help but feel that what just happened was not merely a lesson in piloting, but a lesson in not getting any ideas about replacing him.

The pounding noise sounds again.

“Your Majesty,” a soldier calls through the door of the observation booth, “Chairman Sima and Secretary Gao wish to speak to you regarding an urgent matter.”

“Let them in!” Qin Zheng shouts, his voice much hoarser than in the dream realm.

The door unlocks. Yizhi and Sima Yi shuffle in, accompanied by a spill of daylight. We slept for longer than I thought, while they look as though they haven’t slept at all, their robes wrinkled and hats skewed. Yizhi turns on the lights.

“What is it?” Qin Zheng winces against the blast of fluorescence. He looks marginally better after a night of intravenous antibiotics.

Sima Yi hurries forth with a tablet in hand. “Your Majesty, you need to see this video released by Chief Strategist—no, my apologies. I mean this video released by the rebel leader Zhuge Liang.”