by Paul Krueger
Lee seemed to mull this over for a moment. “White Rat,” she said again. She measured Xiulan with a look. “Looks like you leaned into it.”
“With Kou?” Xiulan sighed. “I first acquired him as my own little show of defiance. I never intended to pact with him. But much like yourself, my soul ended up being rather selective about the company it chose to keep.”
Lee nodded and said nothing.
When Xiulan had first become aware of Lee’s case in the course of her investigation into the looting of Daito Arishima’s home, she’d imagined at length what this mysterious Jeongsonese criminal mastermind would be like. In her mind, she’d expected a refined, upper-class criminal, like the antagonist in the third Bai Junjie novel, White Diamond in a Black Glove. Bai had faced down a dashing gentleman thief (he called himself an acquirer or fingersmith) who moved among high society, sending advance warning to his marks about what valuables he intended to steal, making it all the more spectacular when he managed to pull off his heists anyway.
But Lee Yeon-Ji wasn’t like that at all. She had no euphemisms for what she did, nor apologies for doing it. In almost no time at all, she’d become incredibly comfortable mouthing off to Xiulan in a way that would’ve gotten her mauled by a shade if she’d done it to anyone else in the family. What Lee Yeon-Ji was, was a challenge. She existed, she would keep existing, and the challenge you faced was that you just had to deal with it.
Their journey had been short, but Xiulan had enjoyed it so much more than she would have time with a gentleman thief.
“If I guess which of your twenty-seven sisters and brothers gave you that name,” Lee said eventually, “would you give me half a million jian?”
“Thirty-three,” Xiulan said. “Fourteen sisters, nineteen brothers, from nine different wives.”
“Nine women,” Lee said with a low whistle. “My record’s only three at once, myself. Your father’s gotta be one hell of a man.”
A disgusted laugh erupted from Xiulan. “You can’t just joke about my father…” She faltered. “…you know…”
“Just trying to pay him a compliment. Not often I do that to men,” Lee said. But she sank back in thought. “Why’d Ruomei put a price on you?”
“She knows of my desires to supplant her as the favorite,” Xiulan said. “And she’s the only sibling who doesn’t underestimate me. Why do you imagine she’s worked so hard to keep me down?”
“Didn’t you say she was off with a fleet, trying to stop the prince from getting here directly?” said Lee. “Why’s she care if you take a little joyride up north?”
“She doesn’t like to leave things to chance, my dear sister,” Xiulan said. She reached for her pipe, suddenly self-conscious of its absence. She’d picked it up as an affectation to mirror Bai Junjie. But over the past year or so, she’d come to genuinely enjoy the pipe, and found it soothing when she was in thought.
“Looking for this?” Lee said.
Xiulan looked up and saw Lee with the pipe dangling jauntily from her lips. She bit back a smile. “Give me that back, please.”
“Why’re you really doing this?” Lee said. Her tone wasn’t demanding, but it also left the impression she wouldn’t accept evasion. “Not just this whole thing about finding the princeling. Why’d you go and join the Li-Quan in the first place? What’s any of this about?”
Xiulan froze. The truth of the matter was painfully embarrassing. What, was she supposed to just look this hardened criminal in the eye and tell her—
“I wanted to have adventures like Bai Junjie,” she said, surprised at her own bluntness. “And I wanted to prove myself. And I wanted an effective way of antagonizing my sister while I set about saving the country from the prospect of living under her rule. This endeavor—what is the expression?—checked a lot of boxes for me.”
Lee raised an eyebrow. “So you snatched me out of the jaws of the justice system because you’re a bookworm who’s mad at her sister?”
Xiulan was a princess, one of the most powerful in the world. And she knew for a fact she had perhaps the most brilliant mind of which any branch of her large, extensive family could boast. But something about the way Lee looked at her just made her feel small and stupid.
She had no choice but to hang her head. “I sincerely wish to help the Jeongsonese,” she said. “But…yes. If you put it in those words, they would not equate to something inaccurate.”
She expected Lee to rail at her for doing something so patently stupid. No, that wasn’t right. Lee wouldn’t even bother. She’d just turn back around in disgust, leaving Xiulan alone to marinate in her own shame.
But to Xiulan’s surprise, Lee did neither. She threw her head back and cackled with delight.
Xiulan’s whole body stiffened. “Have we not already established where we fall on the matter of laughing at me—?” But even as she said it, she could already hear the difference in Lee’s tone. The other woman sounded…impressed?
“You did all this just to get even with your sister?” Lee repeated.
“There was some notion of serving the people of Shang,” Xiulan groused, but Lee had pulled herself upright, so she was sitting next to Xiulan now. The pipe in her lips didn’t look like an affectation or a costume, the way Xiulan feared it might have looked on her own person. There was something effortless and natural about the way Lee’s gently curving lips rested against the pipe’s polished wooden button. It was as if the pipe, handsomely carved piece that it was, had been made for her.
“I like audacity,” Lee said simply. “When you’re on the worst kind of job, audacity’s the only thing that’ll get you through it: being willing to do something so stupid, there’s no way anyone could see it coming.
“But.” She stood and stretched. “I’ve had it with partners who don’t play me straight. I got plenty of that with Lefty, and all the girls and boys who came before him. So if I’m helping you out from now on, it’s because I know where we’re headed, why we’re headed there, and what we’re getting up to once we arrive. You got that…White Rat?”
And then she extended a hand.
Furtively, Xiulan took it. “Gutter Dog.”
Gruffly, but not unkindly, Lee pulled her to her feet.
And quite suddenly, Xiulan and her partner found themselves face-to-face.
Xiulan’s breath caught in her throat. Her chest tightened. And she was painfully aware of how suddenly damp her palm had just gotten, clasped to Lee’s own.
She couldn’t tell which of them let go first. She just felt her hand fall to her side, where she carefully wiped it on her coat.
Lee coughed, then took the pipe out of her mouth and wiped its button on the dark folds of her dress. She offered it to Xiulan. “Guess you’ll be wanting this back.”
Xiulan took it. She inhaled, hoping to catch the last embers of her leaf, but the bowl had already been cashed. Only somewhat disappointed, she slipped it back into her coat pocket. “Thank you.”
Lee nodded. “Right,” she said, stretching again and stepping back from the door. “Get us out of here, then.”
Xiulan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me,” Lee said, then waggled Xiulan’s pipe in front of her face.
Xiulan’s eye went wide. She patted the pocket in which she’d just placed it, but sure enough, it was empty. She gaped at Lee in disbelief. “Again? How did you—?”
“Me stealing things is like you talking, Princess.” A mischievous grin broke across her face. “I do it all the time, and most people wish I’d stop already.”
Xiulan barely smirked. She folded her arms. “I admire you and your wit, Lee, but you’re being very childish right now.”
“Use that fancy detective brain of yours,” Lee said. “Where are we?”
“In a cell,” Xiulan said impatiently, then reconsidered. “Well. A bedroom.”
<
br /> “Right. So that door there: It’s made of metal, because it’s meant to be opened with metalpacting.”
“Whatever point you’re driving at eludes me,” Xiulan said with a tiny flare of impatience.
“I’m saying, we’re not in a prison cell,” Lee said. “We’re in a bedroom. Maybe they’re using it like a prison, but it’s not built like one.”
The simple obviousness of it hit Xiulan like a runaway car. Slowly, she turned to stare at the shiny steel door…and then at the wall to which it was joined.
She felt another surge of awed affection for her partner. Xiulan regarded herself as intelligent, but the woman was wise.
“Of course,” she whispered. “The door may be held fast, but the walls won’t be reinforced.” She pointed. “Kou!”
She remembered how Kou used to be: a tiny white ball, curled up on her pillow every night. A friendly pair of paws nudging her awake in the morning. A small lump of warmth in the folds of her daxishuan, smuggled in to keep her company through yet another long, boring state dinner.
Kou couldn’t fit into her gowns anymore. But running her fingers through his snowy fur, the warmth was still there, familiar and strong. He looked up at her with bright-pink eyes, and the shape of the feelings he sent to her asked the question, What can I do?
She nodded to the wall section above the door and thought back, What you do best.
Through the thick door, she could hear the dog barking. Xiulan didn’t know how long it had been at it, but by now there was doubtlessly someone coming. They had to move fast. Fortunately, Kou felt her urgency. With a burst of agility, he scrabbled up the smooth surface of the door and set about gnawing at the wooden wall above. It easily gave way to his curved yellow teeth, pulpy and soft as the flesh of an orange.
Lee fell in beside her, looking up at the shade with admiration. “Way to use your head, Princess.” She offered up the pipe.
And instead of taking it again, Xiulan pulled her close, closed her eyes, and slipped her lips over Lee’s in a kiss. Her heart hammered with—fear? Panic? The self-loathing that could only come from knowing you were doing something incredibly stupid and willfully ignoring every opportunity to abort?
You’ve been gifted with an exceptional brain, Xiulan, she thought as she let go and stepped back with an anxious lick of her lips. There’s plenty of room for all three.
Still feeling the taste of Lee on her lips and tongue, she realized she’d quite forgotten to breathe. “Inspector Lee—”
Lee stepped back, flushing the color of a strawberry. “Time and place, Princess. Escape now, feelings later.” She turned her attention back to Kou, who was still digging away at the space above the door. But she was smiling.
Xiulan found it impossible not to do the same.
An hour into their drive to Tajiri, Prince Jimuro finally turned down the radio and said, “Sergeant, I have questions.”
He’d punctured the conversational mode with which Tala had grown most comfortable when it came to Prince Jimuro: complete silence. She’d gained some respect for the man after he successfully saved her life, and Mang’s along with it. Twice, she reminded herself, thinking of the spider-shade on the deck. Then she thought of him severing that rope and taking out those three shades with a runaway car, and had to admit that maybe he was pulling his weight. But she hadn’t forgotten who or what he was, and it didn’t make her inclined to listen to him.
All around them, the Tomodanese countryside blurred past. For a nation so invested in its own industry, it surprised Tala to see how much greenery there was. But through the thick, verdant trees and tall, swaying grass, someone had gouged out a wide gash of open land, then paved it over in black-gray asphalt. According to the prince, such highways crisscrossed all over the island, to bring its people closer together. It was a far cry from the packed dirt roads she saw on pretty much every island of Sanbu except for Lisan.
She eyed him sidelong. “Do you?” Despite her discipline, she fidgeted in her seat. The Tomodanese clothes draped differently across her figure, and it was taking some getting used to. The prince had chosen for her a slim gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, with a wide-brimmed gray fedora pulled down to shade her face so she could hide her Sanbuna coloring. Of her old uniform, only her weathered boots remained, bouncing on the dashboard where she’d propped them.
“Indeed.” The prince sat at the iron wheel, while his feet lay bare on the metal floor of the driver’s seat. At first, Tala had been disappointed in the effect of metalpacting; it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as summoning a shade. But then again, she supposed with another glance out the window at the blurry green expanse, they were moving, weren’t they?
It wasn’t the first time Tala had seen the trick done. The massive Tomodanese warships that had been the scourge of the sea were powered by dozens, even hundreds of Tomodanese sailors all metalpacting in concert. But it was the first time she’d seen it done so up close, and part of why she forced herself to look out the window was to stop herself from staring.
“Well,” Tala said, “are you going to ask me any?”
“I was considering how best to word them,” Prince Jimuro said. “You have something of a temper, you know.”
She cocked an eyebrow his way. If he thought this was a temper, he didn’t have the measure of her at all.
“Very well,” he said. “As I understood it, the way your magic is supposed to work, those of you capable of manifesting a…shade…are only capable of manifesting one. The man in purple was able to defy this hard-and-fast rule. And so, for that matter,” he added, “are you.”
Tala crossed her arms over her chest as the prince’s lips moved, but Mang’s voice came out. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
“I suppose my question, simply put, is: How?”
Her mouth thinned. “What makes you think I know?”
“Surely you must. If not you, then whom?”
Tala didn’t answer; just returned her attention out the window, where it belonged.
They drove on for another minute before the prince tried to pick at it again. “I ask because if that man should return—and given how intent he was on ending my life, it wouldn’t surprise me—insight will be our most effective survival tool.”
Tala frowned. Since her fight with Mang earlier this morning, she’d been doing everything she could not to think of the other splintersoul. She’d thought she was the only one like herself, and she’d been much happier believing that.
“Nothing, then?” the prince said. “Nothing to contribute at all?” She could feel him struggling to be polite about it, and somehow that just made him even more aggravating.
She shook her head. “We don’t need to know how men like him are made.” She patted the gun hanging from the shoulder holster in her suit jacket. “Not when we know how to unmake them.”
Prince Jimuro opened his mouth to say something else, but suddenly his entire body went rigid. The car screeched to a halt so suddenly, Tala’s seat belt nearly folded her in half at the waist.
“What the—?” she began, but before she even finished the question she saw for herself what had made them stop.
A bright-red car with the white crane of Shang splashed across its door had pulled across the road, barring their path. Two red-jacketed soldiers slouched against the car like delinquents. A third sat behind the wheel, looking bored. And a fourth stood slightly in front of the car, legs planted and shoulders squared.
“Come out with your valuables,” he called in clumsy Tomodanese. “Do now, or we shoot.”
“What do you think?” Jimuro hissed to her. “Have we been betrayed?”
For a moment, Tala considered it…but no, that was impossible. There was no way anyone could’ve known they’d survived the shipwreck, if they’d even known there was a ship to wreck.
“I don’t think so
,” she said. “They’re probably just soldiers.”
“ ‘Soldiers’?” he growled. “They’re highwaymen with matching coats. They probably extort money out of every single law-abiding citizen of Tomoda that passes through.” Jerkily, he resettled his cobalt-colored blazer on his shoulders and glared at the Shang soldiers over the top rim of the steering wheel. “What these monsters have done to my country…”
Tala eyed the clothes the two of them wore, the car they sat in, and bristled. It wasn’t that she wasn’t concerned about the Shang in the road, but this was rich to hear from the prince when everything around them had been stolen from the Tomodanese people by their own ruler.
The air split as the Shang leader rolled his eyes, pulled a narrow-barreled pistol from his belt, and fired a round skyward. “I was meaning it,” he called, then leveled the gun at their windshield.
Tala shot Prince Jimuro a look. She frowned. “Stay behind me,” she said, and popped her door open.
As she got out, she ran the math in her head. If she left her car door open, it would serve as suitable cover in a prolonged firefight. The pistol in her coat had two rounds, and she was a good enough shot that she could make both of them count before anyone made things messy by summoning a shade. If she kept this to bullets, she’d only have to kill a few of them. If she summoned a shade of her own, she’d have no choice but to kill them all.
That said, what she really wanted was to end this without firing a shot at all. Her Tomodanese was more passable than these soldiers’, so hopefully if she kept her distance she would be able to maintain the ruse that she was as native as Prince Jimuro.
