A dark body lies nearby.
Pushing onto all fours, I crawl to where Leizu leans against the remains of the shattered tree trunk. She is stunned, her body burned and mangled, but she lives. Clothed in a shredded uniform, she looks like a wounded child in an adult’s clothes. Pity for her rises in my throat, an understanding of what drove her here over the ages—gnawing hunger and pain and the barren search for purpose.
“Leizu,” I say, my lips close to her ruined face, “you are right. Huangdi was a monster. It is true, we were meant to lead humankind to a great destiny.”
Her eyes are bright and awake, but she is too damaged to speak.
“Mother of silkworms,” I say, “you have become the thing we both hated. You have fed on your own kind and on the suffering of humanity, and you will never find anything to balance that.”
Dawn has broken.
Stumbling, my greatcoat flapping open, I push through the mist away from where Leizu is lying. My rifle is gone and my hat sits cockeyed on my head as I race away in unsteady steps through the misty trenches.
My old master, Huangdi, was a beast. The memory of it courses through me in jerks and hitches. The meaning of pravda, the first thing, the false human word for another, deeper thing, is evaporating from my heart. So many masters that I have tried to serve, and I never thought to listen to myself.
In the distance, streaks of light are pouring from tumbling clouds as Nazi dive-bombers attack ships fleeing over the Volga River. The blazing stars plummet from the heavens like fallen angels, moving faster than the muted scream of their own propellers.
Rifle shots are snapping blindly all around me, German and Russian, as I crunch through brittle ice on the outskirts of no-man’s-land. Near the riverbank, I rest beside a broken wall and watch troops move past in the fog. The Russian infantry are trying desperately to cover a civilian escape.
Trying and failing.
I hear the grinding purr of a German tank—a tiger-striped panzer, its color washed out in the mist and oily smoke, turret swinging, searching for targets. A handful of German troops trot beside it, like loll-tongued wolves in the wake of their pack leader.
Crouching by instinct, I pick bits of shrapnel from my chest and drop them like glittering confetti. I watch as the vehicle stops, tensing like an animal. Its soldiers drop to their knees and put fingers in their ears, a long-practiced routine, their eyes squeezed shut as a familiar shiver of force washes over their clothes.
The turret jerks, coughing a shell, furiously spitting fire from its nozzle as the metal-plated creature rocks back on its treads. A nearby berm, bristling with rifles, explodes into dirt and shrapnel and a low rolling cloud of smoke, obscenely throwing the bodies of Russian soldiers out of their cover, leaving them to join other dead things on the battlefield.
The warm anticipation of pravda courses into my body in the face of this terrible injustice. Leaving cover, I stride silently toward the tank, fists tight with righteous anger as I step over clumps of dirt and slivers of metal and empty helmets. A crater has been erased from the hill, its contents redistributed in a starburst pattern over the torn landscape.
The first German notices me as I get within arm’s reach. He lifts his sidearm. I take his hand and tuck it into his stomach and pull his finger over the trigger until no more bullets come out. His body falls on its own, I am already moving on.
Alerted by the gunfire, two gray-clothed Germans come around the side of the tank and into my waiting arms. A head in each hand, I smash them together and feel their skulls crack inside sloped metal helmets. I drop their bodies beside the tank and stop.
I am being watched.
A Russian boy is lying on his side in the mud, half buried in loose dirt, his torso stained maroon. His chest rises and falls in the shallow breaths of a wounded animal. From the clarity in his eyes, I can see he is strong.
He will live.
A round glint of metal hangs from a chain at his hip. It is a battered pocket watch—an antique from the first era of timepieces. This one is a distinctly Russian artifact, finicky, and it must have required an absurd amount of care in this desolate environment. This boy with the watch…he has the feel of a throwback, an old soul abandoned to a modern battlefield.
Even as I register the squeak of a hatch opening, a torrent of bullets rattles across my shoulder blades. I stumble forward a few steps as blunted bullet fragments spray past my face. I let myself fall, twisting onto my back at the last instant and half closing my eyes.
Soon, the silhouette of a German falls over me.
At the opportune moment, I snake out my hand and wrap my fingers around his surprised face. Squeezing, I put an end to him. Then I stand up and shake out my greatcoat, ignoring the melody of falling metal as it sprinkles to the icy dirt.
Rumbling and belching fumes, the panzer is retreating.
Accelerating through two long strides, I throw myself onto the tank. I wrench the hatch out of the other person’s grasp and rip it off its hinges. The German inside screams as I drag him out of the tank. To make him stop, I ram his head against the armored skin of his vehicle.
It is over.
Without a driver, the tank rumbles away into the mist, leaving only me and the boy with the watch. I stand for a moment in the cool drizzle, listening to war happening above the clouds. For the first time in my memory, I serve no one. Huangdi’s relic is a lump of poison in my pocket, a counterfeit prize that has lost me everything. My sister was my reason for living. And so I shall have to rebuild myself into someone who can live without her.
My heart is broken. And so is my Word.
I pull the anima from my pocket and hold it. Almost of its own accord, my hand begins to dip. The artifact slides across my fingers in the same way Hypatia’s body slid down the deck of a sinking ship. It rolls, slipping over the side, tumbling away.
The anima hits the ground and it does not bounce.
Nearby, the Russian boy is watching, eyes wide and unblinking. I bow my head and stand over the discarded anima for one more moment. I feel nothing.
From now on, I have no master to serve. No family to protect. My Word has become a tangle of barbed wire lodged in the back of my throat. Every action I take from here on will be for myself—the justice I choose to make.
I am done fighting other people’s wars.
55
CHINA, PRESENT
Wedged halfway up the side of Huangdi’s black throne, I grip the fanged mouth of a dragon and try to keep my breathing steady. Horrible things are happening across the necropolis, flashes of violence filtered through a near-constant strobe of gunfire and a reddish haze of dust thrown off by thousands of tons of shattered pottery.