Page 85 of The Blood Orchid

This, at last, forced me to my feet. I wedged myself in front of Wenshu, squinting through the barrage of rain, reaching for three firestones.

But as I drew closer, I realized this couldn’t be the Silver Alchemist. This figure was much smaller, their fingers too thin and pale. That was all I saw before a gust of wind pulled at their hood, and in the darkness of the alley I caught a glimpse of two golden eyes.

I raised my firestones, but Wenshu seized my wrist.

“You walk too damn fast,” the stranger said.

The words felt like falling into a frozen sea. I knew that silvery smooth voice, the same one that haunted my dreams.

In the darkness of the alley, the stranger pulled her hood down, and I stood face-to-face with the rain-drenched Empress Wu.

“Jiejie?” I said the word so quietly that I wasn’t sure if she’d even hear it over the roar of the rain.

The Empress locked her gaze with mine, but her expression hardly changed save for a raised eyebrow, and yes, that was the Yufei I knew—the girl with so few facial expressions that neighbors whispered about how she wore a porcelain mask instead of a face. The Empress was like a painting, a thousand stories behind her eyes, but Yufei had always looked like she couldn’t bother to expend the energy to change her expressions.

“Why were you sitting in rotten fruit?” she said.

I let out a sharp, delirious laugh. “Why were you sneaking around like you wanted to mug us?” I said.

“The whole country knows my face and thinks I’m dead,” she said. “I couldn’t exactly pull my hood down from three blocks away and shout your name.”

I crushed her into a hug that punched her breath away, andeven though it felt wrong to be wrapped in the Empress’s bony arms, to hear the Empress’s traitorous heart beating against my own, in that moment it didn’t matter what form my sister took as long as she washere.

Wenshu crossed his arms, scanning her from head to toe. “You should really try to tell usbeforeyou fake your own death, not after,” he said.

“Where was I supposed to send the letter?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “And I was in a bit of a hurry.”

“I guess I can forgive you this once,” Wenshu said, pulling her into a hug the moment I stepped back.

Under the awning, she told us how she’d watched from her window as the private soldiers finally broke through the main gates of the palace. She’d managed to hide herself in a potato barrel in the cellar and remain undetected while the soldiers killed all the servants trying to flee. After the soldiers gave up, she’d swapped clothes with a dead servant and left the body in the dungeon staircase, where it looked as if she’d fallen and broken half her face off. She fled through the tunnels and wandered through the wet darkness.

“Which, by the way,” Yufei said, “are impossible to navigate. You know how long it took me to find my way out of there? At least a day. I was starving by the time I got out.”

“That’s sort of the point of the tunnels,” I said, clinging tight to Yufei’s arm, even though both of us were shivering from the rain.

“You did a pretty convincing job of faking your own death,” Wenshu said, arms crossed. “Except for one thing.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“There were no shoes on the illustration of the Empress,” Wenshu said. “You never walk around the palace fully dressedbut barefoot. The Empress’s shoes were too small to fit onto a random corpse, weren’t they?”

Yufei smirked. “The opposite, actually,” she said. “The shoes were too big, and they fell off when the soldiers dragged the corpse outside.”

“You knew?” I said, smacking Wenshu’s arm.

“I told you the shoes were suspicious!” Wenshu said. “And I told you not to worry about it!” He turned back to Yufei. “So how did you find us?”

“You sure didn’t make it easy,” Yufei said. “It took me forever to figure out you were traveling with three people instead of two. Which, by the way—who’s the servant boy?”

“He’s not important,” I said. “Are we really that easy to track?”

“Zilan is,” Yufei said.

I froze. “Me?”

“The vendors always remember you,” she said. “Two aristocrats buying plain congee and yóutiáo every day? It stands out.”

I grimaced. I’d grown up eating congee for breakfast simply because it was always there—meats and vegetables were sometimes scarce as the seasons changed, but we always had rice, so we always had congee. Eating it reminded me of sitting in the kitchen with Auntie So while she brushed my hair back.