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“It’s . . . complicated.” I take a deep breath and snap the stem of an azalea, twisting it around and around my finger. The fragrance is fainter than it would be in real life, as much an imitation as a painting of a flower, but the familiar scent still calms my mind. “He needs my help. That’s the only reason he’s kept me alive this long.”

Hanchen’s eyes bulge. “What in the Three Realms could he possibly want your help for?”

I hesitate. “He’s—in pain.”

It sounds absurd, even to my own ears.

Clearly, Hanchen seems to think so too. “Are we talking about the same thing? How could the Death God be in pain? He doesn’t feel pain. He doesn’t feel anything. Everybody knows that. They say someone once stuck a knife through his rib cage just to see his reaction, and do you know what he did?” His eyes widen farther, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper. “He threw his head back and laughed. He didn’t even flinch or try to take the knife out. I’m more inclined to believe a nine-headed snake is in pain than Death himself.”

“Someone did that to him? What kind of sick test is that?” The words are out before I can stop them. My stomach clenches around the thought of the Death God with the knife in his chest, while everyone watches, every bit as unfeeling as they claim him to be. I feel a terrible, unexpected surge of anger inside me like a black ocean wave, rising higher and higher, high enough to block out the light of the sky and fill my ears with its roaring. “What’s wrong with them?”

Hanchen stares at me as if he is wondering the same thing about me. “Don’t tell me you actually feel sorry for—”

“Look, the point is, the Death God could be playing a trick on you,” Yuemo interjects, looking toward me with concern. “Perhaps he is only pretending, or he has created an illusion. Nobody knows the full extent of the Death God’s powers . . .”

“I assure you it’s not an illusion,” I say with more force than I meant. But how do I explain it to them? How could I show them what I’ve seen, the desperation with which the Death God had looked up at me, the choked sounds he’d made? “You don’t have to believe me, but—it isn’t like that. It’s real.”

A look passes between the two gods.

“You’re not under some sort of spell, are you?” Hanchen asks, raising his brows. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were defending him.”

“Of course I’m not,” I say, dropping the flower stem with horror. “I want to escape. But there are barriers everywhere. I’d need to slip past the Death God and his ghosts and physically leave the palace, then cross over to the Celestial Realm, then prepare the protections against him so he doesn’t find me again—”

“We can do that,” Yuemo tells me. “We can put up talismans around your cottage and train them to let only you in. I will make them myself so they should be strong enough.”

“He is being modest,” Hanchen puts in. “His talismans are some of the best you’ll find in the entire realm. They will definitely be strong enough.”

“The flattery is unnecessary,” Yuemo says without even glancing at him. “My point being, we can assist you, but you’ll still have to get around the Death God. Can you find a way to do that?”

I stare. There’s a funny, foreign feeling in my stomach, like homesickness or embarrassment, that makes me simultaneously want to hide my face and stay inside this dream forever. It seems hardly real that we are standing around the gardens in my cottage, plotting my escape and looking out at the sea, while my body still lies within the gates of the Death God’s palace. It seems even more bizarre that they’ve come to find me.

“Why?” I ask, but that’s only part of the question nagging me. “How did you know I was gone? Did anybody else . . .”

Did anybody else notice?

The Death God’s words from that first morning circle my head like dark smoke: How sad, after all you’ve done for them . . .

“Nobody else said anything,” Yuemo tells me plainly, and I find myself grateful for his honesty, the absence of any pity in his dark eyes. “The other officials were busy—there was something about a mural that needed fixing. But Hanchen and I went to visit you yesterday—to thank you, for what you did, and to tell you my leg was already feeling much better. Nothing had changed in the room at all since we last saw you, and we guessed something must have happened.”

So nobody noticed—but they had.

Of the hundreds of gods I’ve seen and treated, two of them had cared enough to ask where I was. That is still two more than I’d dared hope for. And they are proof that the Death God was wrong. I try to cling on to this small fact, like a plank of wood amid roiling currents.

“You didn’t have to,” I say, still unused to being in this position, to relying on others, extending a hand rather than taking someone else’s.

“Don’t waste time being polite with us,” Yuemo says, his face stern. The God of Stone, they used to call him during our lessons together. Perhaps because he seldom ever smiled and had a tendency to speak to everyone in that flat, severe tone, or because he’d invented his own trick talismans, which encased you in solid rock for an hour. Most people ended up turning to stone at least once. Hanchen was subjected to it so many times that it became quite normal, not even worthy of a reaction, to walk into the classroom and find him frozen there, a mischievous smile still fixed to his face, a fresh orange or phoenix feather or half-finished poem in his hand. The memory reignites now, vivid as flame after all those years. He’d never turned me to stone, but then there was no reason to; we’d barely even spoken. Strange, how some things stay the same, and how other things thaw over time, revealing more of themselves to you. “Can you get past the Death God or not?” he asks.

I nod.

Chapter Seven

A healer can make for a very talented killer.

They are two sides of the same coin, really. In knowing which parts of the body are most vulnerable, which organs we must protect first, which wounds will cause someone to bleed out the fastest, we naturally also know which parts we should attack, if needed. In cutting through infected flesh and stitching up ruined skin, we inevitably become quick with the knife and learn how to rip someone open, where to slice and how much pressure is needed, how fast we should move, how to leave a wide mark or a near-invisible one. Most of the medicines we create to soothe the mind and put someone into a gentle sleep could, in another concentration, also shatter the mind and put someone to sleep for eternity. Most of the antidotes to lethal poisons are also poisons on their own.

So while I cannot kill the Death God, I hope to be able to slow him down. On the floor lie the materials I’ve gathered slowly, secretly, over the last few days: the sweetened osmanthus petals sprinkled over yesterday’s sticky rice cake, the chrysanthemum tea leaves poured out from my cup and dried in paper, the slices of ginger saved from a bowl of beef noodles, the cinnamon and coriander used to season the braised lamb dish from the other night. I throw everything together into a clay bowl and grind it into a fine powder, so fine that it can fit inside the glass vial he brought me.

I feel a dull stab of guilt in my chest as I pour the seawater out over the window, then tip the dustlike poison inside, corking it with my thumb. He had meant to bring me a piece of home.