by S. L. Huang
The words rang in Rosa’s head as they limped along in silence, their legs and feet dragging and crashing through the brush. It was almost too dark to see, now. Fortunately Feng Meng’s flight was easy to follow; he’d been badly injured enough himself to crash a broken path through the undergrowth.
Old women who have hurt their children.
On some level Rosa had always seen her flight as a type of consequence. She had run from the punishment the law would have meted out to her—imprisonment, or more likely execution. Didn’t she merit whatever lonely emptiness filled her life now?
She’d never thought of it as another in her long string of wrongs, this time against Mei and Xiao Hong. She’d never thought of it as an act that hurt them. She’d regretted every toxic part of herself and her past with vicious self-loathing, but leaving had always seemed the proper choice, the choice that spared them, and the way it had torn Rosa to the core had only added to the righteousness of it.
Now she saw it for what it was: only a clumsy, flawed decision, like so many others along the twisting path that had brought her here.
She’d spoken truly to Hou Yi a moment ago, even more truly than she’d known. She was a coward. She didn’t want to face her family not because deserting them was somehow the moral choice, but because she didn’t want to own up to the fact that she had hurt them so badly.
It had been so much easier, running. Running, and telling herself she’d done what was best.
Hou Yi stumbled and dragged against her. Rosa tightened her grip, keeping them upright by the force of panic alone.
“Hey!” Rosa said, louder and sharper than she intended. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll go find my family”—her heart beat faster—“if you find yours. Do you hear me? You have to live. If I have to…” If she had to face the terrifying task of rebuilding her relationship with Mei and Xiao Hong, if she had to face the chance that she might fail—“Do you hear me? We do this together.”
“I … do not think…” Hou Yi’s voice was so weak now Rosa could barely hear her, even with her lips so close to Rosa’s ear. “I think my son has already … rejected … your plan for me…”
Rosa tried to bring up an appropriately caustic response to that sort of humor, but before she could, they stumbled out into a clearing, one so large that the starlit night stretched wide above them.
The first thing Rosa noticed was the full moon, impossibly huge, a giant white pearl suspended in a sky that was now velvet black. The woods surrounded them in dark shades of silver, as if the trees had themselves been carved from moonlight.
A broad slope of smooth rock formed the floor of the clearing, with a spring bubbling into a clear pool in the middle, and behind the pool, its roots sprawling wide and gnarled, a single ancient tree spread its branches over the scene. It looked like it might fill the place with a heady perfume at another time, but now its limbs were heavy only with tight, clustered buds. And at the end of a long, black smear, collapsed by the water, lay the dying form of Feng Meng.
Rosa felt a stab of guilt and grief. I did that. I’ve killed him.
Feng Meng might not be blameless. But if he deserved to die … well, she and Hou Yi’s souls were just as rancid.
There was no justice here, only death.
Hou Yi lunged forward, and Rosa helped her stagger the last short distance, until they fell against the tree at the edge of the pool. Hou Yi lay half across Rosa, a dead weight.
Feng Meng’s eyelids fluttered. “I thought I wanted to see you die,” he bit out. “But perhaps it’s best if you see me die first. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To watch me die, and then live on forever.”
Hou Yi tried to lift a hand toward him, but it dropped back to the ground. “I never wanted that,” she said. “I never … I was so shortsighted. You were right; I saw only my own desires. I didn’t—I didn’t think.”
“Yes,” Feng Meng said. “You never thought of me. No matter how much I worked to please you.”
“I’m sorry,” Hou Yi pleaded. “I’m sorry. My son. I failed you.”
Feng Meng coughed and spit blood into the crystalline water, and when he spoke, it was not to forgive.
“Ha. The easy path. You say this and then escape from this life—you could never love in a way that did not suit you; you don’t have the capacity. It’s work you would never do, and I won’t release you to death thinking you made up for a lifetime in one instant—”
Something pawed at Rosa’s hip.
She twisted to look around, and jerked back against the tree, trapped by Hou Yi’s body. The hare. The hare had followed them here somehow.
Rosa wanted to crawl out of her skin.
The hare pawed her again, regarding her with solemn eyes, and then sat back on its haunches to stare upward. Rosa slowly tracked its gaze. The full moon shone through the branches of the tree above them, a round disc of polished silver-white with black leaves laid across it like cut-out paper. The moon was low, and the branch crossing it hung heavy in the foreground, its thick bundles of buds close enough for Rosa to reach out and touch.
The moon …
Something inconceivable tickled at Rosa, the intersection of magic and gods and demons, here on this island that defined its own tilted reality.
The hare raised up on its hind legs, pawing at the air, and then back down. A drift of clouds crossed the moon, and at the moment they passed the moonlight seemed to grow brighter, the leaves gleaming in the beam like a metal sculpture. And there hanging from the tree branch—
Rosa blinked. Even in the dark, she would have sworn the thing had not been there a moment ago, as if it had grown from one of the curled buds in the space of one blink itself: a small, flat fruit, squat and round like a flower, or the shape of an apple compressed top to bottom.
Do you know what I sought? The peaches of immortality, Hou Yi had said, so angrily … a fruit that only ripened once every three thousand years.
But Chang E, Hou Yi’s wife—with the powers of a goddess—When she left she said she would reach the moon. Who knows?
The moonlight shone through the branches, making the squat little fruit glow. What did gods do, if not the impossible?
The hare batted at the air again. The moon seemed to shimmer down at them like it was winking, and for a moment Rosa was certain she saw the hare’s shape reflected in its surface.
Could it be that Rosa’s wife wasn’t the only one who followed?
Hou Yi and Feng Meng were still spilling their dying repartee, words falling discordant and bloodied into the pool between them. The hare turned back to Rosa and twitched its ears.
“I don’t understand,” Rosa said to it, even though she thought she did. Find your family, she’d told Hou Yi. She hadn’t known she’d spoken of something possible.
Magic. Gods. One last chance to take the hard path, the right path. And no one had more reason to ask that of these two than Chang E.
In the moonlight, in this quiet, fantastic clearing, anything seemed imaginable.
Rosa reached out her hand and tugged at the squat little peach. It took a hard twist to break it awkwardly off into her hand, and she worried she’d bruised it—the flesh was soft and ripe, full to bursting with its juices. It was small enough to fit within her palm, the skin pale and velvety soft.
She glanced back once more at the moon, and somehow it seemed to nod.
“Stop,” she said. Hou Yi’s and Feng Meng’s hopeless, fractious last words scattered into silence.
Rosa held out the peach.
For a moment the silence was as heavy as death.
Then Hou Yi tried to push her hand away, too weakly. “No … no, what is this? I told you, it ruined me, and you would tempt me now? Why?… How?”
“You could do the work,” Rosa said. “You could promise. If he will let you try.” She extended the fruit to Feng Meng.
He gazed blankly at her from the ground, uncomprehending, his face half in the bloodied spring.
“Are you
determined to die here and make your mother watch?” Rosa asked quietly.
“Give it to him instead,” Hou Yi said. “I can’t make up … the first time … but let him have a second chance. I beg you, Flower.”
“There’s enough for two,” Rosa said. She dug her fingers into the tiny fruit’s flesh and twisted it apart.
Feng Meng took his in limp fingers and did not bring it to his lips. Rosa had to fold Hou Yi’s hand around hers, next to her mouth, only the smallest movement away from living forever.
An eternity of working to earn back the trust and love of her family. The prospect dizzied Rosa just to contemplate.
The hare hopped forward and stood with one paw braced on Rosa’s thigh, watching, the moonlight gleaming against its fur.
Hou Yi found Feng Meng’s eyes one more time, and she would have spoken too softly to hear if not for the stillness of the clearing. “I won’t … unless you ask it,” she said. “If you live, or no, I won’t unless you want me to. If you do … I want to try to make up for the lifetime … even if it takes many more. I promise…”
Feng Meng blinked, and suddenly, behind the anger, Rosa glimpsed such a depth of neglected pain, the face of the ten-year-old boy who had been so proud to show off his archery skills and then so broken at being discarded.
Barely perceptibly, he nodded.
Hou Yi struggled to turn and shift back to Rosa. The hand that did not hold the fruit fisted in Rosa’s clothing. “You promise me, too. Together. You said.”
“I promise,” Rosa said, and she was crying.
Hou Yi slipped the small slice of impossible peach into her mouth.
The moonlight seemed to grow brighter, and brighter, until it overwhelmed every sense, until the trees were silhouetted black on white instead of silver in the darkness. Rosa could not have sworn to what came next—sight and sound and feeling were all somehow both intensified and absent. Hou Yi’s weight was gone from her, but Rosa didn’t feel her own weight either, so that seemed to mean very little.
But then Rosa saw two people standing—Hou Yi and Feng Meng, their forms indistinct but somehow clear, standing at a careful distance from each other, considering, taking the first step toward bridging the emptiness between them. And when she turned her head to the side, Rosa saw the hare, the moonlight emanating so brightly it seemed the animal stood in its very source, and next to the hare, a woman, a woman Rosa had seen in a dream whose face was plain but arresting, a woman who carried herself like a god and gazed at Hou Yi and Feng Meng with both sadness and love.
Some sort of emotion welled within Rosa, flowing out with her tears like an unchecked mountain spring—not gladness, exactly, and not unlike a heart-stopping fear, but also something very much like hope.
Then Rosa turned to her other side, and somehow she saw—still far away but hiking closer and closer, coming straight as one of Hou Yi’s arrows toward the very spot where Rosa stood—she saw Mei and Xiao Hong.
And even as Hou Yi and Feng Meng and Chang E and the magical hare burst into transcendence and were gone, Mei and Xiao Hong became ever more real and solid, and then Mei looked up and locked eyes with Rosa and stopped dead before beginning to run. And in Rosa’s ear she heard the whisper of Hou Yi’s voice: “Promise. Together.”
Rosa only had the tail end of a single lifetime, but she thought it might be just enough.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing and publishing are so very far from being an island. On this one, I owe many, many thanks to my editor, Diana Gill, who made this book a reality and put her faith in it from start to finish. She is joined by her colleague Kristin Temple, assistant Robert Davis, the tireless team at Tordotcom Publishing—Irene Gallo, Mordicai Knode, Ruoxi Chen, and Christine Folzer—my publicist, Lauren Anesta; my cover artist, Victo Ngai; and everybody else at all levels of editing and production. A particularly heartfelt thanks to Ruoxi Chen for stepping in on this book under difficult circumstances during the pandemic and taking the wheel as smoothly as humanly possible. I am also extremely grateful, as always, to my agent, Russell Galen, and my film agent, Angela Cheng Caplan, who are my champions across every aspect of my career.
My first readers on this book were Rob Livermore, Effie Seiberg, Maddox Hahn, Elaine Aliment, and Jesse Sutanto; their time and perspective were invaluable. And the very first person who gave me any feedback was, as always, my sister, who is a constant in my writing life. I have no idea what I would do without her—probably wallow in despair.
A big shout-out to my uncle for helping me out with a language question!
Finally, a very, very special thanks goes out to Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Book Smugglers, who published the first stories in this universe, and without whose encouragement and support this novella would never have been written.
Many other people are of continual, invaluable help to me in both my writing and real life. I wish I could mention them all. To all of my communities—and on this one, in particular my queer, BIPOC, and feminist communities—thank you.
ALSO BY S. L. HUANG
Zero Sum Game
Null Set
Critical Point
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S. L. HUANG has a math degree from MIT and is a weapons expert and professional stuntwoman who has worked in Hollywood on Battlestar Galactica and a number of other productions. Huang’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. She is the author of Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Acknowledgments
Also by S. L. Huang
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BURNING ROSES
Copyright © 2020 by S. L. Huang, LLC
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Victo Ngai
Cover design by Christina Foltzer
A Tordotcom Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-76399-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-76398-3 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250763983
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First Edition: 2020