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Yuemo reacts first. Before the last of the loose leaves have even scattered on the ground, his hand shoots out, a paper talisman flying in a perfect line from his two extended fingers. It hits the mortal square in the forehead, and he goes motionless at once, his head lolling to one side, eyes sliding shut. The blunt knife in his hand clatters to the floor, covered in blood and the wet slide of guts.

“It’s only a sleeping talisman,” Yuemo explains to us, his boots crunching over the dried tea. “It’ll send him into a deep dream.”

I crouch beside the mortal. The foul, rusty stench sharpens as I peel back his robes and examine him cautiously, methodically.

“Do you see anything strange?” Yuemo asks.

“No,” I say, frowning, feeling along his pulse. It beats under my fingers, soft and steady. “There are no marks. No infected wounds. No enchantments. Not even a rash. Everything is normal.”

“I may not be the smartest god here, but I can guarantee that this is definitely not normal,” Hanchen says, pointing out the torn window, at the deserted streets. Now that the mortals have either fled or locked themselves up in their houses, an eerie silence has descended over the city. In the first cracks of morning light, all the windows are shut, the doors closed. It feels impossible that every dawn before this one, those streets had been aglow and humming with crowds and music and the flow of coins from store to store. It doesn’t even look like the same place anymore.

“What about you?” Yuemo asks Keran. Though his voice is harder than it had been when he was addressing me, and he avoids staring straight at Keran, his expression is not entirely hostile either. More how you would speak to a stranger than an enemy. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

Keran hesitates.

“Wait,” Hanchen interrupts. He’s still staring outside. “I just saw someone else out there. A woman.”

“Block the entrance,” Yuemo tells him.

“I don’t think— Her eyes aren’t glowing red,” he says. “And she isn’t carrying any weapons. She looks like . . . like she’s searching for something.”

I stand up and peer out through the window too. Even though she’s a few yards away, her head turned in the other direction, I recognize her robes instantly. They’re the same robes she was wearing when she came to our feast.

A cold, sick feeling hits my gut. She’s alone. There’s no reason she would be, except—

“Ziyan,” I call out, the name echoing down the lanes and alleyways.

She freezes, then whirls around. “Rujia?” As she picks up her skirts and rushes over, I notice with deepening dread the vivid bruise stretched across her temple, the fresh cut in her lips.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, reaching through the hole in the window to grab her trembling hands. Her entire body is shaking, and when she breathes in, a sob rattles through her throat. And even before she says it, I know.

“Junyi,” she chokes. “It’s Junyi—you have to help him.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Junyi was born without a heartbeat.

Ever since, he had lived in terror that one day, his heart would simply cease beating again. That moment seemed to loom over him now as Qiming gave him one hard, final shove. He went to his knees on the shore of the lake, the pebbles digging into his skin. His palms were rubbed raw, and he tasted dirt in his mouth and the sickening tang of his own blood. His vision was still blurry from the first kick to his skull, yet he could see the stretch of water just ahead. Usually, in clear weather, the lake was a glittering blue, so clear that the silver flashes of fish and the slow-dancing weeds were visible beneath. On days of storm, the surface turned a dull gray.

But right now, the water was almost black, as if gallons of oil had leaked into it.

“Tell me how you did it,” Qiming demanded, his voice ringing high over his head. As high as the sun, it seemed.

“Did—what?” Get up, he urged himself. Get up now. But his legs ached, and his back would not straighten, and he was exhausted down to the bone. He managed to crawl forward a few inches, excruciatingly aware of every scrape and cut of the rocks littering the banks, before Qiming’s boot crushed down on the back of his robes.

“How did you weasel your way onto the roll?” Qiming went on. “Did you bribe someone? Who?”

“I—I just studied—I had tutors, like you—”

“Lies,” Qiming snapped. He grabbed a handful of Junyi’s hair, forcing his head up, and everything was lost to the horrible tearing sensation in his scalp. Tears leaped to his eyes. Qiming pulled with such brutal, relentless force that Junyi had the image of a farmer ripping wild grass straight out from the dirt.

“I’m telling the truth,” Junyi croaked. “Please. Haven’t you heard—there’s something strange going around. A—a Killing Plague. People are—dying in the streets. You should go home. Protect yourself. Why do you even still care about the rankings—”

“Why do I care?” Qiming barked a laugh. “Spoken like a true peasant. You’re so naive it’s disgusting, you realize? You have no real understanding of how the world works at all. I don’t give a shit about the plague. My father would rather that I be killed by the plague than lose to trash like you.”

Junyi felt an involuntary stirring of sympathy. He was not well-versed in many subjects, but on the subject of awful fathers, he was an expert.

Then the hand in his hair twisted and dragged him the rest of the way to that dark, motionless lake, as if he were already a corpse. The pain was like having your flesh separated from your bones. Junyi couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t think, could only pray it would end. He caught a blurry glimpse of the dawn sky—such a deep, violent red, like the horizon had been lit on fire—before Qiming shoved his head into the freezing water.