by Paul Krueger
Mayon turned his back on him, looking out the window at the dawning new day. “I’m not going to get a Dahali hexcrafter to cooperate with me,” he said simply. “You are.”
And the moment he heard the words, Dimangan knew he would obey.
Her entire head felt as if it were aflame.
Which was quite the achievement, considering her frigid locale.
Memories swirled inside her skull like leaves on the wind, and she frantically snatched at them as she oriented herself. The Sanbuna skull bash. The Iron Prince, key to Ruomei’s downfall, mere inches from her grasp at last. Lee, disappearing into the dining car to distract the other—
Lee.
Desperately, she surged to her feet, but fell flat onto her stomach before she got halfway up. She exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, punctuated by a small puff of steam. Her eye had adjusted to the dark, so she could see the metal shelves lining the walls, and the carefully secured crates of foodstuffs on them. She was in the galley. Specifically, in its fridge. In the cold dark, she felt as if she’d been swallowed by some great and chilly beast.
Stupid White Rat, she cursed herself. Stuck in a trap, the stupid rat who was born doomed to die. She heaped curses onto her own slim shoulders, even as she clawed her way toward the nearest crate on the floor. She grabbed at it and levered herself up onto her knees, her stomach resting atop it. She was breathing hard and her head was pounding and all she could think about was that she had to get out, had to capture the prince, had to find Lee, had to find a new way for this story to end.
Her gaze fell to the friendly yellow Tomodanese script on the box. In her addled state, it took her a moment to translate it:
MUSHROOMS
A groan gained power in her throat, rising until it was a pure, primal growl of frustration. She unleashed it, leaving her formidable vocabulary by the wayside. Everything she had was in that growl. It reached from so deep inside her that it brought tears to her eyes just to let it out. But even as she vented all her fury and frustration, she felt the refrigerator walls stifling her voice, like a glass placed over a candle flame.
She glared tearfully at the crate’s label. “I was…so close,” she whispered to it with a shaking voice.
Cheerfully, the crate replied:
MUSHROOMS
Her skin was cold, but her tears were colder still. She wiped them away with her sleeve, then drew her coat’s folds tighter around herself. And with the dented, sputtering machine that her mind had become, she tried to think of any moments in the formidable canon of Bai Junjie where the great detective had been in similarly dire straits. To be sure, he always found himself in peril in the course of his investigations. But what she needed now was to remember a moment when he had been at his very lowest, without recourse or resource. And she needed to remember how he’d gotten out, because if Bai Junjie could do it, then surely she, Twenty-Eighth Princess Shang Xiulan, could as well.
But every time she found an example, she found one common thread between them all: the timely intervention of his trusty partner, Kou.
She eyed the heavy metal door. Her Kou could do nothing about that. The only hope she had left was her other partner.
Worry blossomed anew in her chest. Surely, the Steel Cicadas had discovered Lee. That was the only thing that could have kept her from Xiulan’s side. No, it was a question now of whether or not they had allowed Lee to live.
She dared not allow herself to feel despair. The only thing she had room for right now was hope.
Her gaze slid over to the crate on which she lay, which chimed in once again with:
MUSHROOMS
She slid off the crate and back onto the floor. Her head was starting to clear, if only a little, but the headache had not subsided in the least, and it sapped the rest of her body of its strength. She tried to lay her cheek on the floor, only for that whole side of her face to suddenly blaze with pain. She whipped her head away from the floor, certain it had been heated or something as a way to torture her.
Then it swam back to her: a foggy, distorted vision of Kurihara Kosuke, gun raised, pulling the trigger, muzzle flashing—
Her cheek throbbed all over again, as if she’d just been shot a second time. She tried to grasp at the memory, but it danced away from her. She had to focus. If she didn’t focus, she wouldn’t be able to help Lee when her partner arrived to retrieve her. Why was it so hard to—
The lock on the fridge opened, and hope bloomed in her chest, bright and fresh as spring flowers. “Lee!” she said from the floor. “I’m in here, I’m—”
But the woman who entered was not her exquisite partner, but the Sanbuna brute that had locked her in here in the first place. And she didn’t walk into the fridge, despite the appliance’s rather descriptive name. Instead, she was hurled in by a pair of Steel Cicadas, one of whom spat on her back before sliding the door shut again. A loud click told Xiulan that it had been metalpacted shut.
The Sanbuna woman groaned, the same noise over and over again. It took Xiulan a moment to realize it was no mere grunt, but rather a word in its own right.
“Mang…” the woman said. “Mang…Mang…”
Even with all her mental faculties intact, Xiulan still wouldn’t have understood what the woman was saying. And since she felt as though her brains had been pulverized into congee, she said in Tomodanese: “Do you mind?”
She’d tried to keep her tone polite, but the woman’s eyes snapped open. She scrambled to her feet and shouted: “Mang! Dimangan! Mang!”
Xiulan didn’t know Sanbuna, but she was aware of their widespread practice of nicknaming. So Mang was a name, then, diminutive of Dimangan. And using that key piece of information, she could use her formidable detective acumen to deduce…
…not a blasted thing.
“He’s not here,” she said, taking a stab in the dark on the gender. “I fear the only companionship Heaven has seen fit to provide you is my own.” She was frustrated by her own tongue. She’d put a great deal of practice into her elocution, but suddenly her mouth felt like too clumsy and blunt an instrument to express her words.
When the door didn’t budge, the Sanbuna slumped down it until she was sitting on the floor, mere feet from Xiulan. Her broad shoulders heaved with effort, and beneath her hair Xiulan spied a thin trickle of blood. She was about to point it out. Then another memory formed: the soldier, seizing her by the shoulders and ramming her skull into Xiulan’s hard enough to turn the world dark.
But Xiulan was a woman above spite. So she said, “You’re bleeding.”
The soldier dabbed at the back of her head with her fingers, inspected the blood on them, then smeared it irritably on the door. “I’ve had worse.”
Xiulan nodded—a difficult thing to do, lying down as she was. “I know I have little in the way of credit with you,” she said, “but may I ask you to do me the favor of sitting me up?”
The soldier scowled and said nothing. Xiulan was about to resign herself to a facedown view of the refrigerator and a sullen companion with which to share it. But then one hand wedged itself beneath her like a spatula, the other carefully supporting her head as the Sanbuna forced her upright and leaned her against a nearby shelf.
“I don’t believe we were formally introduced,” Xiulan said. She’d been in such a haze when she made her last-ditch effort to capture the Iron Prince, she had no clue what she’d said and what she hadn’t.
The woman grunted.
“I’ll assume that to be a Sanbuna colloquialism in the negative,” Xiulan said. Her mouth continued to form the words clumsily, slurring one into the other, but she refused to truncate her vocabulary. This was merely something else to be overcome, just as she’d clawed through everything else in her way. “In which case, I believe it would behoove me to introduce myself as Twenty-Eighth Princess Shang Xiulan, Lady of Moonlight, and an agent of the Li-Quan in…w
ell, not the best of standing.”
The woman scowled, then muttered: “Sergeant Tala. Thirteenth Regiment, Fifty-Second Company, Second Platoon.”
“Tala what?”
“Just Tala.”
Xiulan nodded, then decided to prod. “And who is Mang?”
Tala grew even colder than their surroundings. “Get fucked, Your Majesty.”
The brusqueness cut through her mental fog the way pepper oil cut through a stuffy nose. “Lee,” she said, with sudden urgency. “Sergeant, I know we engaged each other in an adversarial capacity, but in our current predicament, I hope we can speak with candor. On your way to the scene of battle, did you by any chance encounter a tall, striking woman of Jeongsonese descent?”
Tala shrugged.
Xiulan cursed under her breath in Shang. “You’re certain?” she said. “Not among the hostages? Not in the clutches of Kurihara and his comrades?”
Tala shook her head. But then Xiulan saw something change about the way the light hit her eyes. Her expression softened a degree. “I was distracted when I made my way through. I could’ve missed her.”
Xiulan’s mind worked furiously, though forming thoughts was like trying to ride a bicycle through a muddy field. If Tala hadn’t seen Lee, then there was hope yet. But perhaps she’d gotten waylaid in some other manner.
Or perhaps she’s just a criminal who remembered who she really was.
Xiulan dismissed the thought immediately. She’d never felt for anyone what she felt for Lee Yeon-Ji. If she seriously considered that line of thinking, she would poison all of those deep, genuine feelings. Xiulan had already worked so hard to undo her prejudices just by taking the woman on as her partner, and this choice had rewarded her in all the best ways. She refused to regress now.
But none of that changed the fact that Lee wasn’t here, and she was trapped in a refrigerator.
“What happened to the Iron Prince?” she said.
Tala glared at her. “I know we’re stuck in the same tight spot, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten you were here to kill him.”
“Quite the contrary,” Xiulan said. “My father’s preferred heir wishes to kill him. I merely wished to present him as a gift to my father.”
“Who would kill him.”
Xiulan shrugged. “Perhaps. I’ll confess, the Iron Prince’s well-being was a secondary concern here.”
Tala narrowed her eyes. “What was the main one?”
“Saving my country from misrule that would take a generation to undo,” Xiulan said. “I don’t expect a soldier such as yourself to be concerned with the larger diplomatic field, but you should take it to heart when I say that you’ll thank me someday.”
“And what about the Tomodanese?” Tala said.
“What about them?” Xiulan said. “We Shang have a rather old and famous saying about victors and spoils.”
“ ‘To the victor goes the spoils’?”
“Yes, that’s the one.” She reached into her coat and found her pipe still there, mercifully intact. The leaf was all spent now, but even the weight of it on her teeth was a comfort when precious little else was. “Tomoda inflicted all manner of horrors upon Shang and its people. I don’t feel particularly beholden to their well-being in turn. In truth, I’m surprised that you appear to. The atrocities the Mountain Throne visited upon the Sanbu Islands are not unknown to me, Sergeant.”
Tala’s mouth tightened. She stared down at her hands and said nothing.
Xiulan rolled her eye, but was rewarded with a headache that immediately made her regret the gesture. “We can negotiate a truce of sorts,” Xiulan said. “But that can’t happen without key information. So again I ask: What happened to the Iron Prince?”
Tala didn’t meet her eye. “I don’t know,” she said. “He shoved me onto this car, then cut the joins so he could sacrifice himself. The idiot. It didn’t even work.”
Xiulan fiddled with her pipe, agitated. “Sacrifice himself?” she said. “To what?”
At last, Tala looked at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Despite everything, Xiulan found it in herself to muster up a very Lee-like smirk. “Try me.”
So Tala told her.
“I don’t believe you,” said Xiulan.
“I don’t care,” Tala said.
“Surely you must appreciate how preposterous that sounds,” Xiulan said. “The soul can’t fracture more than once. And it certainly can’t steal shades from another one.” But even as she said it, more hazy memories floated to the surface of her mind…a wholesale slaughter in the woods, a mass shade attack whose forensic evidence didn’t add up to any logical conclusions…
“It can,” Tala said quietly.
“I’m not unfamiliar with the Sanbuna folklore on the subject. What is the term you use? Splintered soul?”
Tala grimaced. “Your accent sucks.” She began unbuttoning her shirt.
Xiulan made to avert her eyes. “I fear you’ve misread the situation, Sergeant.”
“No, you idiot,” Tala said, pointing to her chest. When Xiulan looked, she saw a trio of interlocked purple rings across her upper sternum. A pactmark.
“Yes,” Xiulan said irritably as Tala turned around. “I have one of my own.”
“That’s the thing,” Tala said, pulling up her hair. “I don’t have just one.”
Xiulan squinted her eye to see better in the dark fridge. But when she caught sight of it, she gasped. It was mostly hidden by the sergeant’s hair, but just beneath, barely visible, she could just make out the lines of…
“A second pactmark?” Xiulan gasped. “How?” In all her reading, she’d never encountered any reports of people whose soul bore more than a single pact.
Tala scowled.
Xiulan decided not to press that, but her curiosity was too powerful to be tamped down on entirely. “Can either of them get us out?”
Tala scowled further.
The pieces all felt as if they were hovering just out of Xiulan’s mental reach. A man who could steal shades. A soldier with two pactmarks.
And the name Dimangan.
A vision slammed into her skull like a bullet. She was on the floor of the compartment where she’d had the Iron Prince and Kurihara cornered. Though she’d been incapacitated, she hadn’t been knocked unconscious. So she’d seen it: the wall being torn apart by huge hands. And the monster on the other side…human-shaped, but inhumanly huge, his skin pocked with bony plates and wounds fizzing with purple sparks.
And at his side, a Sanbuna woman in a sodden gray suit.
Just like that, the pieces fell into place. Xiulan’s horror deepened. A person with more than one shade was impossible.
But a person with a human shade was unthinkable.
“Sergeant Tala,” she said slowly. “Did the man in the purple coat…is Mang with him?”
The sergeant was a gray blur, and then Xiulan’s entire body jerked up by her coat lapels. Tala was in her face, hatred and hunger mingling in her eyes. Danger wafted off her like a bad smell. “You don’t get to talk about him,” she rasped.
Xiulan’s eye widened with fear. She tried to wriggle free, but the soldier was far stronger than she. Her pipe clattered from her teeth to the ground.
The noise seemed to bring Tala back to her senses. She looked at Xiulan as if she were only seeing her for the first time. Carefully, she lowered Xiulan back to the floor, then staggered back in a daze. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. Then again, slightly louder: “Sorry.” She fell back against the shelf opposite Xiulan, suddenly out of breath. Frantically, she tugged at the collar of her shirt again, and Xiulan could see that despite the chill in the fridge, her whole body was covered in sweat.
Xiulan’s misgivings had only magnified in the last ten seconds, but once again she forced herself to set them
aside. Heaven had seen fit to drop her into this situation and provide her with only the sergeant as a potential ally. She knew she was in no shape to escape on her own. And she needed to escape. She needed to re-secure the Iron Prince and dethrone Ruomei once and for all.
But more important, she needed to feel the delicate touch of a thief’s hands across the small of her back once more.
Her eyelid felt heavy, and she indulged by letting it fall closed. Even shutting out the dim light of the fridge’s inside eased her headache, if only an iota.
Snap.
She started back to wakefulness, to see Sergeant Tala’s hand hovering an inch from her face, fingers primed to snap again. “You can’t fall asleep,” she said. She tapped her temple. “You’re concussed. I’ve seen it before.”
Xiulan wanted to snipe that what Tala had just said was a common misconception about the proper treatment of concussions, and that she’d read many books by credible experts that would testify as such. But the truth was, she hadn’t wanted to fall asleep anyway. Not when there was work to be done. And step one was getting the sergeant on her side.
So instead, Xiulan settled back and kept her eye visibly wide open. “Thank you,” she said carefully.
The sergeant gave her a slow, careful nod and sat back.
For a long while, the air held only the hum of the refrigerator’s motor and the rumble of the rails.
Then Xiulan carefully picked up her pipe and slotted it back between her teeth. “What’s happening to you?” she said.
At last, Tala seemed to notice that she was sweating. She wiped her brow with the sleeve of her coat, but already Xiulan could see new beads forming. “I don’t know,” she said, and Xiulan heard the tiny chord of fear in the back of her voice. “This is new. I’ve seen all kinds of shit, Princess, and I’ve never seen this.”
Xiulan nodded. “I understand.” She inhaled from her pipe, savoring the stale echoes of flavor trapped inside it. “Perhaps you should tell me just the same.”
