My mother’s lips part. “Y-…Y-Yi…,” she rasps.
Hope roars through me. “Ma?” I whisper, my voice shaking. “Ma—”
But the moment’s gone; the spark in her eyes is fading. Her head lolls back against the wall, gaze blank again.
I draw a deep, long breath. Exhale, my whole body trembling.
Then I finish tucking her in, fluffing the pillow one last time before I turn away.
“Ying’ying, your arms.” Méi’zi’s voice is barely a whisper. She’s sprung back now that our mother has calmed down and stands by our kitchen table, her arms wrapped around herself. She looks so small and forlorn, younger than her fourteen years of age.
I look down and notice the blood pooling along my elbows. My mother has gouged gashes in my forearms with her nails this time.
“I’m fine.” I force a smile as I take my sister in my arms. She snuggles in quickly, and I feel her tension disappear as I stroke her hair. We stay like this for a while, each drawing strength from the other.
“I’m going to clean up,” I whisper, pressing a kiss into herhair. She smells like flowers, like bedsheets, just as I always remember her.
She nods against me and pulls back, then sets to cleaning up after me.
I stalk over to the bedroom my mother used to share with my father, which Méi’zi and I have taken over. I slide the old bamboo doors shut and cross to the farthest corner of the room. There, I sit, draw my knees to my chest, and hold myself tight, waiting for tears that have long run dry.
2
I doze off at some point, and I dream of her. In my dream, it is night: she stands outside my window beneath the old plum blossom tree, skin pale as milk, hair the black of a raven’s wing, lips red as blood. She does nothing. Only watches me. When I turn to look at her, she’s gone, and all that’s left is a swirl of crimson petals, silvered by the moon. It’s the same nightmare, the one that jerks me awake in the dark, wondering about the shadow outside my window shutters. The one that I no longer know how to distinguish from reality.
I wake with my heart thumping, mouth dry, drenched in sweat. Méi’zi is curled up next to me in a pool of sunlight. For a moment we’re ten and five years old again, sleeping in the daytime, huddled together on the floor of our living room. We were terrified of the dark and took to sleeping only when the sun rose and its light warmed us. There is no sense to that—mó have no preference as to whether they hunt us during night or day—but it was one of those foolish childhoodbeliefs that helped us survive the first years: get through one more night and the sun would be up, and we’d live.
Méi’zi and I got through it all together.
I don’t move but hold her tightly against me, breathing in her scent and soaking in the warmth of the sun. After our province fell, several in our town chose to end their own lives. Our world was barren, bloodied, and dying, and they found no reason to live any longer.
But I know my reasons to live. I count them to myself every night, like a litany in the darkness. Three, to be exact.
To protect Méi’zi.
To save Ma.
And to hunt down that Higher One who took my father’s life and my mother’s soul.
All this I can achieve at the Temple of Dawn, the fabled practitioning temple the immortals in the Kingdom of Sky once set up with the mortals of the Kingdom of Rivers to train us in the arts of practitioning. It’s said that the temple is more beautiful than any mortal palace, with burnished golden roofs wrought from molten phoenix feathers, pillars built from the pearls of the Four Seas, and jade floors gifted by the gods themselves. The temple has produced the most powerful mortal practitioners in history, some so great the legends say the gods took favor upon them and granted them immortality.
With tales like that, it’s no wonder thousands of mortals used to kill themselves trying to get there and get in each year. Hope, as I’ve said, is the cruelest affliction.
And I’m no exception to its lure.
I know from Bà’s notes that the tales are real but that reality is not nearly as romantic as the stories. Each year, theTemple of Dawn accepts mortal disciples and begins their training. At the end of the discipleship, the temple holds a set of trials. The mortals who pass these trials—the best of the best—are granted a pill of immortality to strengthen the spirit energy in their cores. As a result, some grow so powerful that they live to be hundreds of years old…or even become immortal. Those who choose to accept the pill are offered a place in the Kingdom of Sky, a chance to cultivate the eternal life of glory and power the immortals hold.
But my jade pendant told me something my father’s notes did not: a pill of immortality can also mend a broken soul. A mortal’s soul is made of life energy that is slowly drained throughout the course of our limited years. But spirit energy, the makeup of an immortal’s blood and soul, is eternal, and even one drop can replenish a mortal’s soul and save it from the brink of death.
That’s what the pill of immortality contains.
Without disturbing Méi’zi, sleeping against my chest, I reach to my neck and pull out my jade pendant. It glimmers in the sunlight as I brush a thumb against it, my heartbeat calming at the familiar sight. It is a broken circle of jade, plain and jagged at the edges where the missing half should be, but it is the reason I have found the courage to go on all these years.
This pendant is another riddle of my father’s that I may never solve. He gifted it to me along with my blades when the Kingdom of Rivers first fell.Keep this with you at all times,he said.Inside is a magical guardian who will always watch over you, even if I am not there. All you need to do is speak to it.
I thought he was just telling a story at the time—for how could a piece of jade watch over me, and why would I need itwhen I had my own father and my family? I wore the pendant to humor my father, though I misliked how it slapped against my chest when I ran and how its jagged edges sometimes pricked my skin.
But on the night my father died and my mother’s soul was half-eaten, I spoke to the pendant out of desperation. I was curled up in this very spot, doors locked, my mother lying prone on the bed outside, my baby sister in my arms. I was looking for something—anything—to hold on to when I thought of the little pendant. I took it out, and it winked at me in the moonlight.
