“How?”
Zen gritted his teeth. “Just…watch.I cannot possibly explain in the span of a few seconds what I am about to do.”
She gave him a skeptical look, but then half-shrugged and took a step closer. She placed her palm gently over his. It hovered a hairsbreadth away, a question hanging between. “Why are you helping me?” There was no jest in her tone this time. “Your contact is dead, and I’ve nothing more to offer you.”
Zen parted his lips to answer when his gaze caught on something. A pale pattern peeking out from beneath the sleeve of her left wrist like a curved crescent moon. A breath of wind stirred between them at that moment, lifting the gauze of her sleeve further, and he saw it then: a puckered scar across her skin, the strokes arranged in likeness to a Hin character, encircled by a smooth, uninterrupted arc.
A Seal.
One he had never come across before.
His mouth fell open, and when he looked up at her again, it was as though he’d been looking at her through a smokescreen that had finally cleared.
The yin energies he’d sensed in Old Wei’s shop.
The way she’d killed the Elantian soldier in an explosion of qì.
The reason the Royal Magicians were after her.
This girl had a Sealonher person, which yielded only one possibility: a practitioner had left it on her, and with it, sealed away inside this girl whatever secrets they’d carried. A secret, perhaps, that explained the yin energies she exuded.
Had she any idea?
She was still waiting for his answer.
Whatever false reply he had been about to give dissipated on his tongue. Instinct was calling on him, and this time it told him to improvise. He flipped her wrist over and peeled back her sleeve with his other thumb, careful not to touch her skin. “Because you have this,” he said.
“You see it,” she whispered, and the fear on her face gave way to wonder.
Zen was mentally preparing himself for more needling questions when she let out a breath. In a sudden, unexpected move, she closed the gap between them and slipped her arms around his waist. Her head bumped against his shoulder. There was nothing romantic to the gesture; it was a moment that sent a strange ache through Zen’s chest, a motion drenched in desperation. A little girl clinging to the last piece of refuge in a dying world.
Gently, Zen let his arms fall around the small of her back. Her hair tickled his chin, the scent of lilies wrapping around him. Calming him. Exhaustion dragged at him, and in a way, she, too, was an anchor in the storm, her presence steady and solid.
The worst, though, was yet to come.
“Hold on,” he said, and let qì flow through him.
The Light Arts was a branch of practitioning that channeled qì in a precise way through focal points in the body to achieve extraordinary movement—often exaggerated in stories and tales of practitioners flying or dancing on water that made their way to the common folk. Yet to get over those walls would take the skills of an extremely advanced practitioner…and impeccable timing.
Zen harnessed qì flowing from all around, letting its currents pour into him and trapping it all within. Ordinary people had qì inside them, too—it flowed everywhere, was the makeup behind everything in this world—yet it was the ability to draw in and control qì that gave practitioners their powers. Practitioners spent cycles cultivating and expanding the amount of qì they could hold within their cores. At this moment, Zen knew he was lighting up like a beacon, the pull of energies signaling his location to the Elantian magicians in the vicinity. Within moments, they would be on him.
The girl’s arms were tight around him, as though she’d sensed the stir of qì around them. In the distance, he heard shouts, saw flashes of metal, smelled the acrid singe of Elantian magic.
Just a little more…
The soles of his feet were tingling, the flow of qì surging within him and filling him with a sense of vitality, an intoxicating rush of power. The colors around him became sharper, the sounds clearer, as though the world had spilled into fragments of painted crystals, blade-sharp and diamond-bright. At the same time, something in him stirred: a great beast inhaling, rumbling to wake with the influx of energy.
Zen clamped it down.
The flashes of silver armor winked between the crenellationsin a rhythmic beat, the patrols still unaware of what was happening below. Zen counted down in his head, the energies at his feet burning.
And then he kicked off.
The world opened to him in a thrilling rush of light and darkness, yin and yáng: the alleyways zigzagging between crumbling roofs of dilapidated houses, strings of fluttering laundry trailing outside windows like pale souls, a flickering candle here and there whispering yellow through paper windows. He could sense it all, elements of the world constituting the flow of qì: the sodden earth weeping beneath streets coated in waste and grime, the stale air hanging over hunched residences. The small pools of water choked with sewage, the coal fires lending little warmth in the autumn chill.
You could do something,a voice whispered in the recesses of his mind.You could end the suffering of your people. All this power, all yours to command.
If you would only break free.
