Gia Canh had tried to kill Liên. Truth was, in the same situation as Thông, she’d have killed him herself in a heartbeat. But it would still have been a mistake.
Vu Côn knelt by Thông’s side, stared at them. They’d always be the small, slight child she’d found in the breeding grounds, their eyes too big for their face, dark tears running down their cheeks as they said “Mamma mamma” over and over again. They’d always be the toddler clinging to her legs as she tried to examine patients: the preternaturally serious child announcing they wanted to be a doctor and memorizing all the symptoms of all the illnesses in Vu Côn’s medicine book. Her child. “Listen to me,” she said, lifting Thông’s head to stare at her. “He wasn’t about to kill Yên. He was barely clinging to her. You could have moved them away from each other with a flick of your fingers. But that’s not what you did.”
A silence. Then Thông said, not looking at her, “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think. I just wanted him to go away.” They took a deep, shaking breath. “But the palace doesn’t care, does it? It...just thought I wanted him gone. For good.”
Vu Côn didn’t answer, because there was no need to.
And, after a pause, Thông said, “How do I make sure it doesn’t happen again?” It broke her heart, because she had no answer to that question.
“It won’t happen again,” she said, but her certainty was lies. They were what they were, and a single one of their words shook the palace to its foundations. She’d known this. She’d raised them, knowing what they could do. And, desperate to find Liên before it was too late, she’d let Thông speak to the palace. She’d opened the floodgates, and now Gia Canh was dead, Yên was unconscious, and how was she to make everything better again?
* * *
Yên lay on something cold and damp, struggling to breathe. She tried to get up, but she had no strength. Demons wove in and out of her field of vision: beings with teeth and claws, and then they shifted, and became the many-limbed, sharp monstrosity of Liên’s Vanisher shape, slipping out of Gia Canh’s grip and joining Vu Côn—
No no no.
“Child?” It was Mother’s voice. She. She had to be hallucinating. She couldn’t be back home. She tried to speak, but her lungs felt gummed shut. “Help me!” Mother said, at someone she couldn’t see.
A brief, intense argument. Then Mother’s voice, calmly stating what was going to happen. Yên couldn’t hold on to any words. Every time she tried to focus on something, the world contracted and fuzzed again. In the background, blurred and distant, Thông and Liên were looking at her, once more human and looking drained and frail.
A flash of darkness. Then she was lying in a bed in a familiar room. It smelled of camphor and lemongrass, with a faint aftertaste of rice. The walls were bamboo, and above her were the distant rafters of the thatched roof. The wind sang through the holes, a comforting, familiar tune.
Home.
She was home.
She ought to have wept, or rejoiced, but she couldn’t even muster the energy for that. Shadows hovered at the edge of her field of vision, becoming the deep, sweeping trail of Vu Côn’s clothes, on the edge of shifting into a tail again, becoming Vu Côn’s eyes, burning into hers....
She fell again, into darkness.
In her dreams, she lay upon the cold, merciless floor of the spheres. A heartbeat, and then the dream shifted, and Vu Côn was carrying her, as effortlessly as she’d carry a child. No, she said, no, but no muscle would answer her, and all she could do was lie, limp in the dragon’s embrace—staring at the twins walking by Vu Côn’s side, holding each other’s hand as if afraid they would vanish—at Thông’s somber face, at Liên’s torn and burnt clothes and the way she held herself, fragile and hurt, like a child huddled after a fight.
No. Vanishers. They’re Vanishers.
She had to remember that. She had to remember that Vu Côn had known. That she’d never told Yên anything. That she couldn’t be trusted, that she would always ignore Yên’s desires and fears, always do what was best for Yên or others without actually asking.... She had to hold on to something, to anything, but the world kept sliding away, again and again.
When she woke up again, drained and hollow, Mother was sitting by her side.
She’d changed, but Yên couldn’t pinpoint how. She’d expected—she’d feared—that Mother would become frailer and more ethereal, but the grey hair, pinned into a topknot, looked much the same, as did the aquiline face, in which she could trace her own features.
“Where—”
“We found you on the steps.” Mother shook her head.
We? Before Yên could speak up, floorboards creaked, and Elder Giang came into view. “Child.” They didn’t look happy. “I see you didn’t follow my advice.” Behind them was Oanh. Yên’s friend was almost unrecognizable, sharpened into skeletal thinness, her skin darkened, with a scarlet tinge like blood.
Yên’s wounds had been bandaged, but she still felt lightheaded, and her lungs still afire. A heartbeat was all it would take for the fever or the cough to return. She tried to speak, found her throat was burning.
“She shouldn’t be here,” Elder Giang said. “You know the other elders—”
Mother’s voice was steel. “Did you want me to dump her in the wilderness and leave her to die there?”
“You know what I mean,” Giang said. “They barely tolerate you as it is. If they find out you broke the village’s quarantine laws, that you’re sheltering someone they sold away into servitude...”
If they found out, it wouldn’t be just the wilderness. It’d be the purifying circle, for her, for Mother. “Leave me,” Yên whispered. Every word felt like raking her throat dry, and a cough wracked her entire body. For a moment she felt herself dying, struggling for breath and finding none. And then it passed, leaving her wrung out and exhausted.
“Oh, child,” Mother said. She was barely holding back tears. “You need to care a little more about yourself and your own happiness.”
How, when just a moment of getting what she wanted—a single night of sated desire—had so catastrophically backfired?
“Save your strength,” Mother said. Behind her, ghostly shapes. Vu Côn, lining up instruments in a faraway room, lifting a needle to an invisible light and watching it sheen a cold, merciless blue. Thông, pacing the floor, reciting diagnoses and surgery procedures, and Liên, her hair tied behind her, looking something up in a book. “You’re not well. And there’s certainly no question. I’m not abandoning her again.”
She had to say it. “Contagious,” Yên said. It took all the strength. She fell back, exhausted.
“I don’t think so,” Mother said. She frowned, as if trying to decide how much she should tell Yên. It didn’t really matter, because the shadows were growing again: Vu Côn’s face lengthening, becoming that of a dragon again, the twins Vanishers, and the gate shimmering in the background, waiting to lead her back to the palace, to Vu Côn and everything that had happened there.
No. She was out. She’d escaped. She’d rest and recover, and do what she should have done in the first place: run away into the wilderness rather than endanger everyone else. She didn’t have the book anymore. She felt its loss like a loss of her own self, but she had the magic. She could do some spells, and even the gates didn’t scare her anymore. She’d find a place that would take her.
The world contracted and fuzzed again, and the darkness closed in from all sides. She didn’t so much lose consciousness as let go, sinking into a place where pain and worries didn’t mean anything anymore.
* * *
In her dreams she was on a hard metal surface, while above her, red and blue lights blinked. She tried to get up, struggling to breathe through lungs that seemed to have shriveled away, but Vu Côn was there, pushing her down, holding her gently, rocking her back and forth. Everything was fractured and slightly distorted; and cold, so cold, as if all warmth had been leeched from her bones, leaving her brittle and exhausted, utterly drained of thou
ght or gestures. In the distance, a slow, rhythmic, obsessive sound, stuttering, again and again, until she found herself listening, waiting for it to fall forever silent.
“Shhhh,” Vu Côn said. “It’ll be all right, lil’ sis. I have you.”
And then she was lying in another bed, in another room. In Mother’s patient room behind a hastily drawn curtain, listening to faraway voices. Except that the sound she’d heard wouldn’t fade away: a halting rhythm, always on the verge of failing. And she knew, suddenly, what it was.
Her own heartbeat, magnified ten thousand times until it made the walls of their small house tremble. She lay back, listening to it. She’d have asked how bad it was, but she didn’t need to. Because no one healthy had that kind of rhythm in their chest. It wasn’t just the weakness, but it was completely irregular.
What was happening?
Outside the house, the life of the village was going on. Yên could hear people calling to each other, the laughter of children in the streets. Were some of these her own students? And, in the distance, the sound of rice pounded in pestles.
In the other room, only silence. The liquid sound of tea poured into three cups, and the sharp, moldy smell wafting up to her. Then, Oanh’s voice: “I don’t know what happened, but—”
“She’s scared.” Mother sounded...angry, as if she’d made a mistake somewhere. Don’t be, Yên wanted to tell her. It was my own fault. Because I trusted Vu Côn. Because I’d wanted it so badly to be true. Because I’d needed to feel happiness so badly after so long without it. But speaking was too much of an effort.
“She escaped,” Oanh said.
“We don’t know that,” Elder Giang said.
Mother said, slowly, “She said she was setting Yên free.”
“When?” Giang’s voice was sharp. And, when Mother wouldn’t answer: “Then all we have to worry about is the elders.”
“And the disease,” Oanh said. “Have you forgotten she’s sick?”
“I haven’t,” Mother said, mildly.
“How—” Elder Giang paused, and started again. “How bad is it?”
A silence, filled only by Yên’s stuttering heartbeat. The floor itself trembled, a shiver that seemed to be all of Yên’s world, and a growing cold in her limbs. Vu Côn’s embrace had been cold, but this was different. This merely told her she’d never feel warm again.
“She’s got what I had,” Oanh said, softly. “Doesn’t she? The symptoms...”
“They don’t all match, though it could simply be a mutation,” Mother said. “She’s almost all âm. Her duong is completely exhausted, and it’s choking her. And her heartbeat is odd.” She paused, then said, a little hesitantly, “It’s fast and slippery, but there’s this sort of echo to it. Like the pieces of a mirror.”
An echo.
Yên lay back, and listened. Her own heartbeat. Her own life, slipping away as she lay on that bed. Focus focus, hear only the rhythm. Like a healer, seeing the body first, the person second.
Mother was right. It was two rhythms. The first faltering one, and a second one on top of it, even weaker than the first one. A fraction of a second after the first one, like a call-and-answer. As if she had not one but two pulses.
She tried to lift a hand, to check her own chest, but she had no energy for it. Two pulses. That was new. She hadn’t heard it, before passing the gate. Her own disease, progressing? Or had Vu Côn heard it already, and simply chosen not to tell her?
“You think she’s growing a second heart?” Oanh asked.
“I don’t know,” Mother said. “It doesn’t seem to come from a second organ. It’s just superimposed. If there’s a second one, it’s quite close to where the heart normally is. I can’t be sure without opening the chest. And...” A pause. “That reminds me of something, but I can’t remember what. I’ve seen this before, or heard of it, in a different context....”
Her chest. Her life. Yên was just too tired to care, too tired to hold on to it.
Giang sucked in a breath. “What Oanh had didn’t have a cure. Except—”
Mother’s voice was hard. “If it comes to that choice, I’ll summon the dragon again. And give her a piece of my mind while I’m at it.”
No no no. She couldn’t. Just the thought of Vu Côn walking into the house. Of her gaze, surveying Yên’s meager possessions, meager existence, weighing Yên, deciding what she was worth, whether she was worth saving...
Please, no.
Outside, the noises of the village had fallen silent. All Yên heard was footsteps on dry earth. A child’s voice, excitedly saying something about a body in the mud. And the voice, calmly answering them, telling them that the problem would be dealt with.
Elder Tho.
Body. Arrival. Mud. Her. That was her they were talking about.
They were coming for her. And this time, they would finish what they had started: not leaving it up to a dragon and her quixotic ideas of servitude, but executing Yên and Mother and the others.
She. She needed to get up. She pushed with all her strength, but her limbs didn’t answer her. The footsteps were mingling with her own faltering heartbeat now, strong enough to make the house vibrate.
Get up.
The room was growing dark again, and her chest was burning, except she couldn’t even cough anymore. Just choke, in the growing silence.
Get up.
In the shadows, shapes coalesced and then came apart again. Serpentine and fluid, they might have been Vanishers or dragons. They might have been Thông or Liên, or even Vu Côn.
Get up.
Don’t, Yên thought. Magic. There had to be something she could do, with her dim memories of the book. But she had no energy left for that. Instead, she put everything she had into the act of getting up. And, measure by measure, she did: pulling herself trembling and shaking to her knees, just as the footsteps crashed down on the stairs at the house’s door, and Elder Tho’s voice said, “Now, what do we have here?”
* * *
Vu Côn went to see Diêm Châu, before she operated on Yên.
The little girl slept under the glass surface of the sleeping berth, unaware of anything that went on outside of it. Her face was set in a grimace. The stasis was neither pleasant nor restful. But it preserved. It healed. It extended lifespans.
Vu Côn ran a hand slowly, carefully, on the berth. “I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t even know if Diêm Châu could hear her. “There’s something I need to do before I can take care of you. But I haven't forgotten you. I'll heal you. I promise.”
There was no answer. She hadn’t expected one.
She walked back slowly to her laboratory, and sat for a while, staring at the darkness.
Yên was still lying where Vu Côn had left her. She’d woken up once, screaming and thrashing, and Vu Côn had rocked her back to sleep, pressing her down on the table until Yên fell silent again. Now she was sleeping again, unaware that Vu Côn was there, or deriving any comfort from her presence.
Though would Yên have been comforted, or repulsed? The look on her face, as she’d run away from Vu Côn, from the palace...
No. Vu Côn couldn’t afford to think of this, or she’d never do what needed to be done. She had to focus on duty.
On the smooth steel surface of the foundry bowl was the diagnosis she’d entered a few hours ago, after examining Yên. The White Tiger, Changing, its letters flowing in the spirits’ alphabet. Ironically, the same thing that had brought her to Yên’s village: an illness that destroyed the khi-metal in the body, causing deep, fatal exhaustion.
She only had to send it through: to command the foundry bowl and be presented with the array of things she would need to operate on Yên. Acupuncture needles, scalpels and knives, thread to sew it all back together when she was done.
It might well kill Yên. But, if she did nothing, Yên would die anyway. She thought she could live with the risk, but in truth, just the sight of Yên lying cold and breathless—just the thought she and Yên would neve
r speak again—tied knots of ice in her guts and squeezed until everything hurt.
Behind her, footsteps: Liên and Thông. Liên looked better, wearing an elegant tunic in red silk with embroidered flowers and peach tree branches, her skin with a scattering of scales, her face slightly longer than usual, with the shadow of a snout.
Thông looked despondent. Their deep purple robes were folded and rumpled, something they’d never have tolerated in better circumstances. Oh, child.
“Do you want tea?” Vu Côn asked, because she didn’t think they’d bear a hug at that time.
Thông nodded. “How is she?” they asked.
“The same.” Vu Côn reached into the foundry bowl, sending the commands for tea. Three celadon cups shimmered into existence, full of a deep grassy-green liquid. The smell of leaves filled the room, banishing that of disinfectant for a bare moment. “How are you?”
“The same.” Thông didn’t even smile.
Vu Côn watched them drink the tea in silence. She said, finally, “You asked me what you’d do, to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Thông’s head came up, sharply.
She’d had time to think about it. A sleepless night that felt like a wake. A moment, stretching into eternity, holding Yên down as she’d hold down any other patient, except that it was Yên and that she’d think of kisses and naked bodies if she allowed her thoughts to stray. “You’re doing all you can,” Vu Côn said. “And maybe it’s your fault, maybe it’s the palace’s fault. I don’t want to attribute blame. It’s pointless. It’s not what matters. What matters with mistakes is what you do afterwards. How you choose to fix it.”
Thông said, slowly, “You can’t understand—” and then stopped, aghast at their own daring. It’d have been funny in other circumstances. A Vanisher, looking very much like her old masters, afraid they’d disrespect her. But no, they weren’t a Vanisher. Or, more accurately: they were, but they would always be, first and foremost, her own child, her and Hoang’s own child, and so would Liên. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“No, you’re right,” Vu Côn said. “I’ll never be what you are. I’ll never walk in your skin. But that’s the doom of all parents. And I can tell you that it goes the same way for everyone. We all stumble. We all fail. You always do the same thing: you apologize and change, again and again and again. There’ll never be a place where everything is right, but we can try our best to strive towards it. It’s the striving that defines us. That makes us different from them.”
In the Vanishers' Palace Page 13