“The healing will kill you,” Mother said. She’d never believed in dancing around the point with patients. “You need to heal both halves. Not doing that is just...like trying to put together a broken cup with only half the pieces. What Vu Côn will get will be so much less than what you started out with.” Her voice didn’t shake, but it took a visible effort.
Yên lay back, and stared at the clouds: swollen and grey, and branches of trees shaken like wet rags by the wind, and the sky turning darker and darker, with lighter shapes, like birds, weaving in and out of focus. More and more of them, filling up her entire field of vision. No, not birds, words. Dying. Would it be so bad?
“Can you fix it?”
“There’s a procedure.” Mother’s voice was hard. “What we need to do first is stop your mother before it’s too late.”
Thông rose, carrying Yên. They held her to Elder Giang. “Here. Hold her.”
They leapt and stretched and shifted, and stood upon the earth in their Vanisher shape, in the middle of a thousand dark rivulets of water as dark as blood. Elder Giang placed her in a hollow of the serpentine body, tearing out cloth from their robes to tie Yên to the spines on Thông’s back. Then they stepped away, watching Thông. “Don’t worry about me or Oanh,” they said, and it wasn’t clear if they were speaking to Yên or Mother or both. “Elder Sister Tho’s power is broken, for now. We’ll find our place in the new order of the village.” Their face was hard, as cutting as the edge of a sword.
Mother nodded, though she didn’t look happy. Yên’s vision fuzzed, and the next thing she knew, they were flying.
Nothing seemed to remain steady or oriented the same way. The air rushed around them, whistling and keening like lost souls; and then the river, murky and oily, came up to meet them. A flash of darkness, and they were flying in an unfamiliar sky, the stars scattered like wounds across the raw, angry surface, every one of them a hole in the fabric of the universe, bleeding the color of rust and rot onto the black canvas of heaven....
“Stay with me, child,” Mother said. Her face was hard.
Yên’s field of vision was slowly filling up with words. She blinked, dispelling them, and saw instead Vu Côn’s dark eyes, drawing her into their depths.
“How far?” Mother asked. Ahead was the smaller, sleeker shape of Liên, the droplets of water in her mane shining like molten metal.
“Not long,” Thông said. “Hang on.”
Mother’s hands on Yên’s wrists. A cool, comforting touch that reminded her of being sick as a child, of being safe, even though it had always been a lie, even though diseases took children more than they took anyone else. “I trust you,” Mother said.
“You’d be the first one,” Thông said, with a bitter laugh.
“Doesn’t your mother?”
“That’s...” Thông was silent, for a while. “She’s our mother. You’re...”
“Human?”
“A stranger.”
Mother said, “You saved my life. What else am I supposed to think of you?”
Thông said nothing in answer. They banked over a large metal structure—a sharp, serrated assemblage of towers and crenelated walls, of gardens and courtyards and spheres, rising gracefully from the dead earth—the palace. Yên had never seen it from the air. She couldn’t feel anything anymore. The knives were slipping into her cheeks just below the eyes, drawing a slow, protracted line toward her lips. A further one into her mouth, pinning the tongue in place. Numbing cold spread from there, snuffing out all the words in her throat before she could utter them.
Mother, she tried to say, but nothing would hold her anymore, as Thông dived for the palace entrance and, barely waiting for the huge filigreed doors to open, flew through the frame, arrowing through the corridors that followed with dizzying, sinuous ease.
Polished metal, impossible walls. Slowly wheeling patterns of flowers whose petals tapered to long sharp points, like fingerbones stripped of flesh. Sleek birds endlessly receding into the distance, their distorted, jagged wings becoming the bodies of gigantic fish, and the eyes of the fish becoming the bodies of the birds again. Windows opening on landscapes that kept changing weather and orientation, as if a mere step could change time and space and back again. Shapes so easily, so fluidly flowing into one another, distance altering itself until it became meaningless, dizzying heights so easily becoming close enough to touch.
And, flying through it all, watching it blur and become alien and new, Yên understood, for the first time, what it meant to be a Vanisher.
They’d had everything, and everything had come easily to them: their own shapes, the mastery of bodies and minds, the magic that enabled them to reshape rivers and seas and hills with a single word. In time, they’d become like Elder Tho: drunk on their own power and seeing everything as their due. The world as nothing more than a toy to be broken, so that no one would ever enjoy what they’d had when they’d left. The people who lived with them as theirs, subjects to be experimented on, to be enslaved and put to work. A laughing, running child only as a life that could be molded to suit their own purposes.
She flew, paralyzed and mute, through the shell of their palace, what should have been the last remnant of their presence on earth; and she understood that they had never really left. That they all—humans, spirits, even the constructs—lived in the palaces the Vanishers had built.
It wasn’t just the broken world that the Vanishers had left behind. They’d left, too, their true victory: the standards by which people treated each other. Seeing limited resources as things to fight for, people as bodies to safeguard the villages, the old and sick as needless burdens. Weighing everyone against necessity and survival. Even Elder Giang could only see Elder Tho’s downfall as a change of powers.
Except Mother, who refused to play by the rules even if it killed her. And...
And Vu Côn.
Vu Côn was arrogant and cocksure, and she treated Yên like a child. She treated everyone, twins included, like a child, and would probably think Mother was some kind of charming primitive.
But she’d taken on two Vanisher children and had raised them, never asking them for their magic or their powers. She hadn’t even wanted Thông to bespeak the palace, and it had been Liên’s life at stake, back then. In the end, no matter how many constraints she’d placed on them, she’d left that decision to Thông. She’d freed Yên and expected nothing in return, only given Yên the choice of where she wanted to go next. Through it all, Vu Côn had striven, however infuriatingly, to do what was right.
It changed nothing. It meant nothing. She had to remember this. She—
Thông flew on. Gardens and courtyards, and towers that became chasms. The garden where she’d taught the twins, with its solitary tower. Ahead, Liên dived into an open space filled with fluted pillars, and Thông followed. As they dived, the pillars twisted, but the garden remained. Yên realized, with a peculiar lurch, that the door ahead of them was also a window in the stretched tower that stood in the center of the garden. It shouldn’t have been possible, but she was dying, and what did it matter what the palace was throwing at her?
Yên found only growing nausea within her—part of her flying, banking wildly and dangerously with Thông’s reckless trajectory, the other part still and silent on the operating table—and neither could move or talk or say anything. Ahead, Liên spoke, and her words made the palace shake. The impossible door trembled, and split open like a ripe fruit, bleeding golden dust upon the floor. And then they were through, into what lay behind.
Inside was only shadow. A dark silhouette standing by a table, holding something that gleamed. Thông slid to a stop, coils coming up to cushion Yên’s fall as she rolled off their body. And Mother pulled herself up from the landing as if nothing was amiss, and stood upright, saying, quietly and forcefully, “Elder Aunt. Stop. Now.”
TEN
The Next Breath
Vu Côn had been so focused on the operation, delaying that inevitable moment w
hen she’d have to sink knives into Yên’s flesh, opening her belly up like a bloodied flower, that anything else had barely registered. When the summoning spell rang through the palace, she dimly noted that the twins had left, and turned back to cooling the coins she’d need to apply to Yên’s sides.
Then someone spoke outside the room, and the floor under Vu Côn split itself apart as if in the middle of an earthquake. She danced over the cracks with a coin in her hand, muffling a swear as the coldness of the coin sank into her skin. This one was wasted and she’d have to do it again. She—
The twins. That voice didn’t belong to Thông, so it had to be Liên. What—
The door had slammed open. Two Vanishers flew through. A smaller, unfamiliar shape, followed by the larger one of Thông, who slid to a halt—and, clambering from their back like a woman decades younger, Kim Ngoc, walking toward Vu Côn with absolutely no fear on her face. “Elder Aunt. Stop. Now.”
“You don’t understand,” Vu Côn started. And then stopped. Behind Kim Ngoc, Thông was shifting shapes, back to their genderless human body in scholar’s robes. And, as they rose from the floor, they held Yên in their arms.
Vu Côn turned to look at the operating table. The still, pale shape of Yên, lying unconscious with the needles at the various paralysis points. She turned again. In Thông’s arms, a second Yên dangled, arms and legs completely limp.
No.
“Yên was the one who summoned us,” Thông said. “She said she could feel the needles you were sliding into her.” Their face was expressionless, but talking cost them an effort. They were reproaching their own mother.
“There’s a story,” Kim Ngoc said. She faced Vu Côn, much as her daughter had once faced a dragon. “About a person who left his shadow-self with the Vanishers, and his lover's quest to rescue him.”
“It’s...” Vu Côn forced herself to speak. “It’s a story.”
“So are dragons.” Kim Ngoc’s face didn’t move.
Vu Côn’s fingers trailed on the operating table, took Yên’s pulse. She heard that odd, arrhythmic beat; and with absolute certainty she knew it to be not one, but two heartbeats mingled together. She looked from Thông to her operating table, from Yên to the other, ghostly Yên. Am duong, the two selves entwined in a human body. One half of each. “I can heal her,” she said.
“Not like this,” Kim Ngoc said. “You can’t heal half a person.”
A flash of anger, as cold as the depths of the sea. “You don’t know anything. You’re—” She was just a small healer in a small village, struggling to survive, and what would she know of the human body?
But Thông was holding Yên’s other-self, her shadow-self, her broken soul. And Vu Côn’s fingers, still on Yên’s pulse, could hear that echoing heartbeat.
She’d been wrong. Her diagnosis had been wrong. Her planned cure had been wrong, and the wrong cures were death.
She’d ignored the warning signs. She’d been so confident she could fix things, she’d browbeaten Thông into silence, and she’d ignored the call the twins had answered, the one that had brought half of Yên back into the palace. She’d thought it was a choice between doing nothing and letting Yên die, but it wasn’t that, not at all.
Because she hadn’t stopped. Because she’d been so convinced she was right, she’d almost killed or maimed Yên.
Stop hiding things. Stop making the decisions for me.
Stop.
I want to know.
She’d stumbled and failed, and she could go on and on and pretend everything was fine. Or she could follow her own advice, and strive to make things right.
Thông had said Yên had summoned the twins. Which meant that some part of her had been awake, at some point. Before the operation had started. Who knew if she would wake up. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Vu Côn would stop making excuses for herself.
“Will you—” She took a deep, shaking breath, and said to Kim Ngoc, “Will you help me heal her? Please?”
Kim Ngoc’s smile was tight. “I can try, if she’s not too far gone. I can put both halves back together. But you need to wake her up now.”
Vu Côn slid the acupuncture needles from Yên’s body, one by one. And then stood back, and waited.
In Thông’s arms, Yên stirred. Her body arched once, twice, flopping back weakly. Vu Côn forced herself not to run to her. Thông knelt, putting her on the floor, gently propping her up. Her eyes opened. Her gaze slowly focused, and she looked straight at Vu Côn. “Elder sister,” she whispered. “You—” She closed her eyes again, leaning on Thông. “Hiding things,” she whispered. “I told you—”
On the operating table lay Yên’s duong-self, silent and unconscious, paler than she was. Duong, the dormant fires, the scorched earth that only needed shade and water to come alive again. “You were right,” Vu Côn said. “It should be your choice, not mine.” She walked slowly, unsteadily, toward Yên, knelt by Thông’s side so that she would no longer tower over her. She was half in dragon shape again—antlers and scales, and her tail lengthening beneath her robes—as she always was when under stress. The floor was cool and cold to her touch, steadying her. “Just tell me what you want.”
* * *
Yên hadn’t expected the question, and she hadn’t expected it coming from Vu Côn. No one had asked. Not even the twins or Mother. Everyone had been so caught up in the heat of the moment, of trying to get her to the palace before it was too late. But even before that, there had been no time.
Or had that just been excuses she was making for herself?
Her vision was still swimming. Now that she was in the same room as her other-self, she could feel a dull tug in her legs, a sense something else was there that she ought to take a look at. But nothing that would banish the all-encompassing weariness in her legs.
Tell me what you want.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
Vu Côn’s hands held her, cold and steadying. “It’s all right. You don’t have to.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t— I can’t—” She thought of flying through the Vanishers’ Palace, of that moment of understanding like an awakening, that they all lived in the ruin of a world the Vanishers had made. All of them, except the people who now surrounded her. Vu Côn. The twins. “I can’t go back.”
Vu Côn was silent, for a while. “I made you an offer, once. You can still stay in the palace. You too,” she said, to Mother. A slow, amused laugh. “I guess we could use other healers here.”
“Child. You’re running out of time.” Mother’s voice was matter-of-fact. “It’s not really a choice, Yên. You saw Oanh. She would have died.”
“It is a choice,” Vu Côn’s voice was almost gentle. “Everything is. Yên?”
She wanted to live, because who would choose to die? And yet... Mother had Oanh and Elder Giang, so it wasn’t even as if she was indispensable anymore. The same chasm she’d seen once yawned under her feet. A world where she didn’t have the safety of returning to the village, to any village, anymore, where her life wasn’t the slow wait for the elders to cast her out, where there seemed to be no roads to the future.
Vu Côn bent, and slowly, carefully kissed her. A surge of cold on Yên’s lips, the river that took her, that saw every measure of her body and still rose to drown her, that same slow rise of desire, hardening her spine and breasts. For a moment—a brief, exhilarating moment, she was on her back in the bed in her room, watching the dragon towering over her—feeling coils wrap around her legs, and the wave of desire that had crested in her then, that simple moment of slaking her thirst, of breathing after so long spent choking.
“That’s—” Yên fought to speak. “That’s not an answer.” It couldn’t possibly be one.
Vu Côn simply kissed her again. Yên’s lips felt twice too large for her face: that same pleasant numbness, stealing over her and making her whole.
Vu Côn said, “Of course not. No. It never is. But you take
the future as you take everything else: one step at a time. What do you want, Yên?”
The palace. The hospital. The twins and Mother, helping. And Vu Côn and everything they hadn’t said to each other, all the pathways into the future. She thought of the river and the dragon rising from the heart of it, sleek and shining and so beautiful. Of what it had felt like, to run away from the palace in the wake of the one night they had spent together. Of reading the book and learning how magic worked. That heady feeling of understanding how things worked, of words coming alive and singing for her in the dark of the night, much as the scholars of old had once pored over books to write their own life-shattering poems.
You need to care a little more about yourself and your own happiness.
She wanted to say that too many things separated her and the dragon, that it wouldn’t last, but then she understood that Vu Côn was right. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need a pathway into the future, or a road that took her years ahead, all the way to old age.
She just needed a reason to take the next breath.
She reached out, arms trembling with the effort, pulled Vu Côn to her: no kiss this time, but merely holding the dragon against her, feeling Vu Côn’s rapid heartbeat, the panic and fear she wasn’t showing. Feeling the coldness of her, the dampness of the river and the storms, washing over her, taking her whole.
“Please,” she said, to Vu Côn. “Help me.”
* * *
She’d not been sure, before Mother and Vu Côn put her to sleep, that she would ever wake up.
But she did, and found herself in her old room. The infinitely receding walls felt almost familiar, almost comforting. The bed was warm and soft, and there were two Vanishers perched on the end of it, with no regard whatsoever for privacy.
“She’s awake!”
“She can hear you, you know.” Thông’s voice was darkly amused. “Hello, Teacher.”
“How—”
“It went well,” Vu Côn said, from the door. The dragon stood leaning against the doorframe, sleek and elegant and perfect, her face once more a mask.
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