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“Junyi?” she whispered.

His fingers tightened around the hairpin. This kill ought to be easy too. He lifted the weapon, drawing his arm back in midair, aiming for the heart—but at the very last second, something made him stop, the hairpin quivering between them.

Maybe it was the trust in her eyes. Even now, she seemed to believe that he wouldn’t hurt her. Or maybe it was the way she had spoken his name. The present shifted, and a memory welled up through the smell of blood: a festival of lights, and her walking by his side, pausing to smile up at him, a glittering powder spread over her skin that reminded him of stars, kissing her cheeks. We should do this again next year, she had said, half joking, and he’d thought privately that there was nothing he looked forward to more.

Sweat prickled above his brows. His grip was so tight that his nails had split through the flesh of his palms; his arms trembled from the pressure of restraint, the pressure to act. He felt like his mind was splitting open.

Kill her. Kill her—

But I don’t want to, he thought with a fierceness that was unlike himself. I can’t. I refuse.

The voice laughed, dark and melodic. Of course you can.

Cries sounded from behind him. He spun toward the commotion. At least forty people had stormed onto the shore, lured forth by the bloodshed, axes and swords and halberds raised in a mess of glinting steel. They were all injured, all ready to injure. They had surrounded Rujia and Keran and the other two like a small army, crowding in, prepared to fight to the death.

See? the voice said, gleeful. No matter what you do, they will die anyway. So stop hesitating. Pierce her heart. Make up for what has been lost.

His gaze snapped back to Ziyan, red clouding his vision. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to protect her, even if he couldn’t protect anyone else. But his body seemed incapable of listening to his own commands. It was as if a greater force had wrestled over control of his limbs; he lunged a second time, the hairpin racing toward her—

“No,” he gasped.

With all his strength, he changed direction halfway and drove the hairpin back into his own chest. Just beneath the breastbone, where his heart was. His shoulders spasmed. He thought he knew pain, but the pain that blistered through him was unlike anything he’d felt before, spreading fast, devouring his flesh. Yet it was also cleansing, scouring away everything else that haunted him. The voice in his head went quiet. The skies swayed and the sun wobbled as he fell and did not rise again. Ziyan was by his side in an instant, taking his hands in hers.

“Ziyan,” he said. It was a sigh, a confession, an apology. As his breathing slowed and the pain dispersed into a dull throb in his veins, a million memories and thoughts rushed back to him. Now he remembered. His whole life and the life before it. He closed his eyes to the past. He saw the blank gold of the Celestial Realm’s palaces; his father setting a chess piece calmly on the board, the steam from his tea unfurling in wisps; servants bowing low in the shadows, silent feet shuffling over the carpets, a maid offering him a basin of boiled water. He saw the veil dropping from a mural; the green glimmer of the ponds; flowers fed on his blood, blooming over her corpse. He saw the hand-painted lanterns of the brothel; a silhouette in the screen; a cottage hidden far away from it all; the whisper of ribbons and fabric; her lovely, aging face for the first and last time. Tell me a story, he said, and when she asked, he always chose the scary one over the happy one, because there were a thousand different ways to be afraid but only one way to be happy. He saw the Death God stopping under the moonlight; struggling against the chains, screaming; waiting for him after the exams; reading over his essay on the other side of the room, his head lowered in concentration. His tutor and his enemy—and his friend, perhaps, if only the circumstances had been different. He saw himself, a child and then a god and then a child again. Junyi, the mortal. Junyi, the crown prince. Junyi, the one who was celebrated, the one who was scorned, who had fallen in love and into despair and out of favor and through the space between realms.

If he could be the god of anything, he muses to himself as his heart stutters out one final beat, he would be the god of time. He would collect all the seconds, hoard all the years, just so he could remain here a little longer. He would trade an eternity of glory for one more moment with Ziyan.

One more moment to simply look at her. Squeeze her hand. Tell her how glad he is to have found her again.

A pity that he has run out of eternities.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Everything is wrong.

The last mortal slumps to the side by the other bodies just as I see Junyi drive the hairpin into his heart. One movement, and the whole world fractures.

“No,” I scream, but it’s useless. His eyes have already fallen shut when I rush over, his head lolling on Ziyan’s lap, his hand limp in hers. It should be impossible. I cannot believe it, even as I feel for his pulse and find only stillness. It had all happened too fast. No, I’d thought he was safe. That after we had saved him from Qiming, his first tribulation was over, and all would be well. This isn’t how any of it was supposed to go.

“We can’t help him now,” Keran says, staring down at the body, his eyes black with a hundred different contradictory emotions. His revenge, my redemption—both are out of the question. “He’s dead.”

“He can’t be,” I whisper. But Junyi’s face is gray, his mouth stained with something dark. I remember how he had stood and bowed every time I entered the room for our morning lessons. Rujia-Jiejie, he’d greeted me, almost shyly. After the past few months in the Mortal Realm, I don’t know how to mourn him. I hadn’t prepared myself for it.

Silent tears rush down Ziyan’s face as she holds his body closer. “He did it to save me,” she weeps. “He— His eyes were red. Like the others with the Killing Plague. But he stopped himself and he . . .”

“The lake,” Keran says suddenly. He moves closer to the edge of the shore until his boots are almost touching the water. Then he bends down, skimming one finger over the murky surface. “It’s been contaminated,” he confirms. “That must be what’s causing the plague.”

“Contaminated by what?”

He lowers his voice and guides me a few steps away, blocking Ziyan from the conversation. But I’m not sure if we’d even need to; Ziyan seems unable to absorb anything else right now. She just whispers Junyi’s name, over and over, cupping his cheek. “I recognize that water,” he tells me. “It’s from the Yellow Springs.”

“What?” It feels like I’ve been jerked backward by an invisible hand. My vision shrinks; my balance fails. “But— That’s— How could it come here?”

“I don’t know,” he says grimly. “It makes sense, though. How the plague would spread so quickly. The lake is frequented by almost everyone in the city, and its waters flow straight through the markets. Junyi would have been forced to swallow water from the lake when that mortal pushed him in.”

He says the name very fast, his voice flat, like a hand brushing over a wound, trying hard not to feel it.

“All right,” I say, taking a deep breath. I want everything to stop. I want to sit down and scream my throat hoarse with frustration and let someone else figure it all out and tell me what to do and how. The world feels off-kilter. Even the air tastes strange, like some kind of decay is silently settling into this place. But there is nobody else. We are the gods, and for every second that passes, every second I take to grieve and hurt, more mortals will die. “All right,” I say again, quietly, rolling up my sleeves, bracing for the impossible work ahead of me. The expanse of the lake looks as large as the sea. “Get Ziyan out of the way. Collect Junyi’s soul. Once I’m done, ask Yuemo and Hanchen to share the purified lake water with everyone. They’ll have to be quick if they want to stop the plague before it can spread beyond the city.”