Lianlei. Ongjié.
Elect, Lianlei had said, the tip of her serpentine body wrapped around Xuân Thao’s legs, leaving a trail of fire on her ankles. She’d moved away from Xuân Thao to touch the other elects in turn, her absence almost making Xuân Thao’s legs collapse. Prove that you are worthy of leaving with us, Lianlei went on.
Ongjié’s smile had been fractured, his fangs shining like sheened oil. Run, he’d said. Get to the doors.
Xuân Thao ran, away from the entrance and the masters. Under her feet, the ground of the gardens curved upward; if she lifted her eyes, she’d see the infinitely receding spheres, dotted with trees that bore the liquid fruit the masters so loved to share among themselves, sipping on their glass openings as they decided which of their shell-thralls should be genmodded, which of them had failed, and which of them needed to be recycled for blood and organs. Shells, the masters called them. Easy to break, easy to put back together, easy to discard.
Not her.
She was alone; the others lost a long, long time ago: looking at each other by unspoken agreement and stumbling in three different directions, hoping to split the hunt. Hoping for one more chance to survive, no matter how slight.
Xuân Thao stumbled on a branch—bit her lip so as not to cry as it stabbed her through the thin soles of her shoes. The sounds of the hunt were getting closer—the beating of wings filling the air, the masters’ laughter merging with the endless tides of pain in her gut and lungs. Outlive the hunt and leave with the masters, or die. There was no other choice.
A sound boomed in the air, starting like a bell-toll in the shell-thralls’ pagodas, but then deepened and expanded until it seemed to underlie the room like a booming, rising heartbeat. Xuân Thao fell to her knees, her hands desperately scratching at her skin, desperately seeking to pull the sound out of her—ancestors, please watch over me, please keep me safe . . .
The sound came again. The gates. Xuân Thao couldn’t see them from the gardens—she wasn’t even sure they were in the palace—but it meant the last of them were closing. That the masters would be leaving this world forever; and what they couldn’t take with them, they would savage and tear apart.
Khuê . . .
For a brief moment she saw her daughter in her mind’s eye: ten years old and holding her favorite writing brush against her chest, her face creased in that familiar stubbornness that refused to give way, the same one Xuân Thao was so afraid would get her killed one day.
Mommy . . .
No, she wouldn’t think of her daughter, or she would never get up.
She pushed herself up, muscle by muscle—every movement sent a fresh jolt of pain, and her lungs were still afire—and started running again.
Ahead, the trees gave way to a field of saplings as sharp as impaling spikes. And something . . . something was off. Xuân Thao set off through them, acutely aware that the slightest stumble would send a spike through her foot, incapacitating her. Shadows moved across the surface of the sphere: the hunting birds, the sound of their wings echoing like thunder.
They couldn’t be far away. She had to keep running, but her muscles were seizing up. And there was no refuge, no hiding place she could find.
No.
That wasn’t true. Slightly to the right, there was a sapling a little larger than the others—no, not a sapling. An opening in the gardens’ spherical surface, a door that had to be barely large enough for her to slip through. And she shouldn’t have been able to see that far, but now that she’d noticed it, she couldn’t tear herself away. The genmods? She didn’t know what the masters had sought to engineer, the endless tinkering with their thralls’ bodies until organs were spat out as incompatible. They wanted their thralls to be more like them—less easily broken, less easily felled by disease—though of course they’d never uplift them all the way, would never turn them into their equals. What would have been the point of losing their own playthings?
Xuân Thao turned, slightly—shouldn’t have, because she saw that they were close enough for her to see Lianlei’s eyes—the scales shining faintly behind the sclera, the elongated, beating pupils, the dark amusement in them.
Prove that you are worthy of leaving with us.
The door didn’t seem to get any closer as she ran—weaving her haphazard way between saplings, stumbling and catching herself just in time, thorns slicing the palm of her hand until the floor beneath her became stained red, the color irising and pulsing like a beating heart.
Something grabbed her from behind—Xuân Thao fell backward, kicked, with a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, feeling cloth and flesh tear from her back, and kicked and kicked again, striking a welter of razor-sharp feathers and talons—one or two hunting birds, trying to grab her again, trying to feast on her blood.
Time blurred, stopped. Xuân Thao found a prayer to her ancestors on her lips, even as the world froze and changed around her. One moment she was standing in the midst of saplings, fighting the birds; the next she was free of them, and standing on the threshold of the door with nausea flooding through her.
No time. She stumbled through, drawing the panels shut as she did so—and the last thing she heard was Lianlei’s laughter: not malicious or frustrated, but the good-natured one of a parent satisfied with a child’s first words.
Beyond the door, everything was dark for a moment. Time stretched, agonizingly slowly. There was nothing but silence. No masters, no birds, nothing—no, that wasn’t quite true, because something moved in the shadows.
A master.
No time to turn, or flee, and the door had closed. Xuân Thao sank to her haunches, tensing for the words that would hold her submissive.
Footsteps, coming her way. Not the masters’ serpentine shapes, though they would sometimes turn human, just as they sometimes took their names from the humans they’d subjugated. These steps were not brash or assured, but slow and deliberate. They couldn’t possibly be the masters—
A hand, reaching down. Xuân Thao took it without thinking, and the other person hauled her to her feet without any hint of weakness.
She stared, gape-mouthed, at them.
They were tall, with long, dark, flowing hair spread in a mane around the nubs of antlers, and scales dotting their cheeks and the backs of their hands—and everything about the way they stood spoke of arrested movement—of stretching and flowing, effortless and graceful, under the waters of some river or lake.
“Rông,” Xuân Thao said, before she could clamp her lips on the words. The masters had spirits serving them, of course—so lowly, so insignificant in their view that they never even attempted to genmod them, but she hadn’t thought . . .
“My name is Vu Côn,” the dragon said, amused. The pronoun she’d used to refer to herself was feminine, and encompassed all the years between her and Xuân Thao. Her face was dark. “You’re in shock.”
All Xuân Thao could find in the scorched desert of her mind were the old prayers, the beseechings Mother and the other aunties had passed on to her—asking for the crops to be blessed, for sickness to depart the house, for treasures as numerous as the raindrops of the monsoon—the prayers Khuê so loved to sing in a halting voice, mouthing each of the words as if they were unexpected treasures . . .