by Ellen Oh
“Not quite.” He fished the bullets from his pocket and tossed one to each of his friends. “But as promised, souvenirs—and proof.”
Chen whistled as he held his bullet beneath his lamp, admiring its new, near-liquid shine. “And the girls?” he asked, grinning.
He was already engaged, dealt away to a girl from Keqiao in the southwest, whose family owned large chunks of that district’s farmland. The alliance was part of Shangyu’s plans to reestablish the import of meat. But Chen had yet to meet her, had no clue what she looked like or was like: his loyalty to the arrangement lay in his duty to his family and not much else.
Liang laughed. “They were there.”
“And?”
And there was only one girl who mattered, he thought as he flopped down on his bunk, suddenly unmindful of his sore joints and the pieces of his disguise still wound around him. “I’m going back.”
Wei lifted a brow, and Tao laughed.
“One more day, then?” Chen tossed his bullet into the empty medicine cup still beside his pillow.
Liang nodded.
But one more day became two, then three. Then a week.
Other illnesses came to the city, their names ugly and unnatural, lapping over Shangyu in relentless waves and lingering behind like poisonous salt leached from a mysterious and dangerous sea: blue fever, numb throat, K3L3. News reached the recovery ward of classrooms where coughing was as incessant as a strong wind, of the pharmacies selling jars and bottles even less than half full now, of doctors who had begun to accept only food as payment, of more and more farms being looted of their crops and animals. It was yet another truth of their at-war world—that as much as China’s warring cities were threats to one other, they all shared the enemies of illness and starvation, in the agonizingly slow production of medicine and the constant shortage of healing, nourishing food. Felled by our own flesh, by our own soil, Shangyu’s officials lamented, and yet we will continue to fight for both.
For Liang’s family, life went on as it always had. After his mother developed a persistent fever, his little sister was bartered away to a family in the north of Shangyu—two months of her labor in their kitchen in exchange for a tiny basket of medication. His mother recovered in a few days and returned to her medic station in the fields. His father agreed to a temporary truce with Yuecheng in the west—for a year of peace along that stretch of the border, Liang’s older brother would marry a daughter of one of Yuecheng’s commanders. Children, if they eventually came, would prove useful as future trade goods.
In the ward, Wei recovered first, then Tao, and then Chen. One by one they moved out, handfuls of days apart, until only Liang remained. Without an influx of sufferers fresh to their illness—he and his friends had fallen sick during its last throes—he was left free of new roommates, even as the rest of the ward remained bustling. Good-bye to reading passages out loud from books, card games with rules no one seemed to follow, and conversations that ran on long past lights out, ones as much about nothing as they were about everything; hello to guns and bombs and the rest of their lives as soldiers.
The ache in Liang’s joints eased and he had fewer medications to take. His cough went from stubborn to sporadic, and he stopped wearing a medical mask. He got better at braiding his hair. The clothing raided from the lost and found grew grimy, so he went back and stole more. He continued to fool the armory’s guards and security cameras, and aside from Zhu, he was careful to stay away from the girls. His friendlessness kept him a mystery. And safe.
By the time he realized Zhu was as much a danger in her own way, weeks had passed, and it was too late. She didn’t question his shyness, only understood that it was him. She’d grab him by the hand and guide him through the workings of each area of the armory until he knew them as well as she did. She’d show him the quietest parts of the whole place, where she liked to eat away from the worst of the fires and heat and metal, in the slivers of space still secret from the guards and cameras. And—as they shared soldier-grade meals of gritty bread, coarse meat, or rice that had the odd stone in it to break a tooth if one didn’t notice it in time—she’d slowly reveal to him who she was.
I have a sister, she’s the pretty one of the family, and the nicest. I got better grades while we were still in school, though. My mom says I have a bad temper. I used to ask for mandarin oranges for my birthday, until I finally realized I was asking for the impossible.
Liang did the same, as much as he could.
I have a sister and a brother. My parents are both in the fields. Stations along the fence are the most dangerous, but I don’t think I’d mind too much—at least you get to see out past the city. Things I haven’t tasted since I was little—persimmons, dragon eyes, star fruit.
Eventually it seemed they were speaking of nearly everything—the rumors of Shengzhou in the south secretly bottling illnesses and disease for use as future weapons; that Shangyu’s long-fragile truce with Yuyao to the east was on the verge of collapse; how before they died they each wanted to see a star that was naked and unveiled of gun smoke, to eat a handful of real sugar, to fall asleep truly full. And as their fingers worked steadily beneath the armory’s soot-stained ceiling—over its endlessly winding belts, beside its fires throwing writhing shadows on their arms—she touched him casually, then trustingly, making his blood sing at her nearness.
She got to him like a fever.
At the end of each workday, Liang would make his way back to the recovery ward, his head full of her thoughts and ideas and scent, his tongue imagining her taste as he drank up the sound of her voice to keep it from fading.
That was how it was. How it happened. How over the pouring and casting and unmolding of thousands of butterfly bullets, over days of their hands working together and around each other, he fell in love with her. And she remained clueless that the girl she declared she loved as her best friend was, in reality, a boy.
So it began to consume him, both the need to let her know and his fear of her reaction, of being discovered by someone else at the armory. Because only one thing rivaled respect for one’s family, and that was respect for Shangyu’s army—to make fools of its top commanders was punishable by death.
For Liang’s deceit, the city would string him up from the great barbed fence and bellow for its street crows to feed, for its citizens to see and remember they were soldiers first and humans last.
And yet.
Liang’s heart hurt with wanting Zhu, and it became a game of self-torture—the hints he let drop, the half-truths he told, wanting her to guess who he was, so his being discovered was no longer his choice to make. Did that make him a coward, when he’d been trained to look into the eye of any enemy and smile while shooting?
He sketched for her a pair of mandarin ducks. His ever-scalded finger pulled clumsily through the thick layer of silver dust that had collected on the surfaces of the armory’s melters, drew lines in the small, snowlike drifts that formed on the edges of the pots and molds.
“Look, it’s us,” he said as he finished his drawing. The ducks were the Chinese symbol for lifetime love between a man and woman, when the death of one meant sure impending death for its mate.
“Except we’re not a couple that way.” Zhu smiled as she rolled just-cooled bullets into packets and sent them down the chute to be distributed. “But find a symbol of forever friendship, and I’ll draw it for you, Lin.”
Liang cradled fresh metal so that it singed his palm, but he barely felt the pain. “And if one day I woke up a boy?” His voice was huskier than it should have been, and he cleared it, lifted it. “Because of a magic spell of some kind, maybe? And because I was in love?” How about that, Zhu? Could you love me, then?
She hissed, a bullet burning her hand in turn, and tears came to her eyes as the fiery metal fell to the ground. “Boys or girls, friends or lovers,” Zhu murmured as she inspected her palm, “it wouldn’t matter. Don’t forget we’re only ever soldiers here in Shangyu, and soldiers never get to be th
e ones who wake up from a spell, or who even get to break a spell. We’re just the dragons guarding the gate, ordered to keep breathing the fire of those who cast the spell in the first place.”
Before Liang could stop to think, he took her hand and slowly pressed his mouth to the wound. She went still, and he felt questions jolt through her even as her breath caught—Lin? A kiss? What?—but before he could make himself release her and step away, she suddenly curled her fingers around his, holding tight.
“Promise me, Lin,” she said, “that wherever we end up stationed, we’ll stay alive long enough to find each other again, to be friends always.”
He nodded. It was all he could do. His throat was full, his skin hot where it touched hers.
“Good.” Zhu dropped his hand with the bleakest of smiles, which didn’t crinkle up her eyes at all but instead left them hollow and too dark. And they went back to work.
To Liang, it felt as though they were casting strange spells of their own, with each bullet they unmolded and caught and packaged. That with each silver butterfly they encased in a shiny cocoon, they were asking it to sleep forever, and wishing for more time, and begging death to wait.
Then Liang stopped coughing.
It took his mother calling him through the room’s old intercom to wake him up since he’d slept through the incoming message on his health monitor. As an army medic, his mother was transmitted the news from the lab at the same time—that he was fully recovered, and that he’d been stationed in the south of the city, guarding a piece of land left vacant by a newly killed soldier. More details would come, but in the meantime, he was to prepare to leave the recovery ward.
Thunder sounded in his ears and turned his pulse uneven as he waited outside the armory for Zhu that evening. He felt raw, exposed—still sick, even—as the late summer wind blew through his old T-shirt and the jeans he was just starting to fill out again; he’d worn neither beyond the walls of the ward during his months of recovery, of lying. And he’d already returned all the raided clothes so they were once again lost, no longer found. Only his long hair in its braid remained, and he planned on cutting it later that night. Still, he hoped it would be enough to let him reveal his secret before it revealed him.
Liang dreaded telling Zhu, yet he wanted nothing more.
She emerged from the armory, her bun a high crown of shadow, lifting her deft bird-wing hands to cover a dusty cough before lowering them to smooth down the front of her shirt.
He met her halfway up the hill. “Zhu.” His heart felt like a bird, full of flight and air and cautious, suspended things.
Through the dim of late dusk, he watched her eyes skim over his unfamiliar clothing, the clash of it with his braid, the suddenly low boom of his voice. They filled with confusion. “Lin?”
He took a deep breath and stepped closer—Zhu appeared flushed, her breaths coming in light rasps—and slowly he pushed his hair away from his face. “My name isn’t Lin; it’s really Liang.”
“No, you . . .” She wavered, her careful hands clenching as they darted to hide in her trouser pockets. Beneath the flush, he thought her skin pale, the shade of bared bone. “Who are you? Where was Lin today? She’s a girl, and you—you’re—”
“I’m me,” Liang said again, simply, softly. He wondered how she couldn’t hear the pounding of his heart as he spoke, so loud it had to be bending the air around them, a land mine going off and carving haloes into the earth. “I’m sorry I lied. I’ve been sick, and living in the recovery ward. Sneaking into the armory dressed as a girl . . . it was a bet—”
“What?” Zhu shook her head, confusion still in her eyes even as anger began to grow. “A bet?”
“I wanted to tell you, but— Zhu, I’m no longer sick. Which means I have to leave. I’ve been stationed, and—”
“This whole time, a game. You— Why, Lin?” He heard her breathe, her air catching. “Liang.”
“It was only meant to be for one day, but then I met you, and—I had to come back. Again. And again. Zhu, I love you. I—”
She turned and ran.
And Liang could not blame her.
His mother called back later that evening with the rest of the details, her voice set. As he listened to her read aloud over the intercom the new terms of the alliance, he stared numbly around his nearly emptied room, at the suitcase at the foot of his bunk already packed and ready for departure.
Liang hadn’t thought it possible—that his heart, already hurting over Zhu, could hurt even more.
Why did you have to be that dead soldier in the south, Chen? To leave behind the girl who was promised to you?
“Liang, are you still there?” Suddenly his mother sounded exhausted instead of hardened. “It’s sudden, I know, with the ceremony still set for next week. But the alliance will prove beneficial for both families, and it needs to take place quickly.”
“Of course.” He also knew he had no choice, whatever the circumstances—for his family and for Shangyu, his loyalty could never waver. “I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
The knock came as soon as he hung up. When he opened the door, there was Zhu, standing in the hall. He was speechless, helpless, his mind gone blank.
“Just so you know, I love you, too,” she said in a rush. Her midnight eyes glittered, seeming almost fevered, and she laughed as she stepped closer. She touched his newly shorn hair, the back of his freshly exposed neck, and encircled him with her arms. “Boy or girl, Lin or Liang, it’s you I love, okay? And like this.”
Her kiss went through him, melting him. Liang silently begged for time to stop as he held her mouth with his own.
But time couldn’t stop, because the war wouldn’t. And he was a soldier.
He slowly pulled away. “Zhu, we can’t.”
Color bloomed high on her cheeks. “Still a game, Liang?”
“I’ve been traded away,” he said quietly, “to marry the betrothed of a friend just killed in the fields. My father is the commander who oversaw the original alliance, and he’s arranged that I marry in my friend’s place.”
Zhu fell back into the hall. Liang’s heart wrenched.
“No,” she whispered. “Break the arrangement.”
They both knew it was impossible—they were, after all, who they’d been born to be. Soldiers, first and foremost.
“I love you, Zhu.” His voice was a husk. “Always, no matter what.”
She began to move away, and he wanted to yank her back, wanted what he could not have.
“Liang, I—” Her flushed cheeks were wet as she turned to run. “Good-bye.”
Only after she’d been gone for long, long moments could he move again.
Later that week, on the morning of his wedding—as Yuyao declared its truce with Shangyu over and promised immediate invasion, as Liang adjusted the faded silk tie that had once belonged to his father in the mirror and tried not to think or feel—a letter arrived for him at the door.
Zhu, dead.
A new infection. It started with fever and ended with flesh turning to ash at a touch.
The sickness had cut through her as swiftly as a blade.
Her best friend would need to know, her parents had written, relaying their daughter’s dying words, so he would never have to wonder. She’d left him a note, they wrote, and Liang tore open the accompanying letter with shaking hands, soaking up her words with eyes that ached.
I love you, Liang.
We’ll find each other again, when the war is over.
Butterflies defy gravity, so maybe they can defy death, too.
The world swayed as images of Zhu as he last saw her—pale beneath the flush, eyes too bright—flashed through his mind. The letter fluttered to the floor as Liang staggered out of his house and down the road, toward the city’s long-plundered depths. His heart went to tinder and splintered into shards; his mind wrapped into a knot of grief.
He did not feel the thunder of careening war tanks—Sleek, silver, so much faster than the old one
s! his commander had screamed in delight at seeing them for the first time—shaking the ground beneath his father’s old shoes that Liang had done his best to polish; he did not hear the sharp crack of gunfire closing in from the east, from just beyond Shangyu’s border; he did not understand that his tears were also from the fresh smoke that blanketed the air and blocked the sight of the land’s mountains. People ran along the sidewalks, medical masks over their faces tinged a dull gray from the grit in the air. The city smelled sour and unwell and lost.
Liang wondered, vaguely, if he’d fallen sick, too. If his and Zhu’s final kiss had held more than love and desperation and the wish for what could not be. Wouldn’t that explain why his chest ached as though choked with fever? Why his eyes hurt as they combed the streets and saw nothing but her?
Zhu, I love you! Please tell me this is just a deception of your own!
He reached the old temple—war-ravaged, its roof half gone, walls and windows punctured through—and staggered inside. With hands that were once again clumsy—her hands, deft as birds—he began to look through the rows of the dead on the floor awaiting their final restful fire. Those of the order would arrive soon to strike their matches, to utter their last prayers.
When Liang found her, his low cry rippled through the air, an ugly parody of the wedding bells for which he had dressed in his worn suit and old silk tie. He slowly and carefully crawled into the hollow formed by her long-stiffened arms.
Zhu’s lips dissolved into ash beneath his. Flakes drifted down Liang’s throat and covered his heart, stopping its beating as it, too, became ash.
Outside, a group of children ran home to hide from Yuyao’s attack. They halted in their tracks as something like smoke began to billow from the temple’s gaping roof. The children were silent in their awe as they watched the gray climb and twist, their hands lifting so they could point. Look.
A pair of silver butterflies, their shapes formed by two swirls of ash, dancing upward into the sky.
