“Elena,” says Peter. “The alternative is extinction—”
In one motion, I snatch the key from the lock and yank the door open. Instantly, the schoolgirl clamps fingers over my forearm. Then Peter is holding her by the shoulders, twisting her away from me. The bracelet on my wrist shatters, a cascade of pearls rattling to the stones.
I dive behind the cracked-open door and slam it shut behind me.
Cranking the lock, I lean my back against rough wood. A stripe of bruises are already starting to cloud the skin of my forearm where the girl gripped me with inhuman strength. I hear arguing outside, and something thumps against the door.
This dim anteroom is like a museum, filled with antique furniture, a golden spittoon, and Chinese silks draped over lacquered Oriental screens. In urgent crab steps, I drag a heavy wooden bench over and wedge it under the locked doorknob.
I dig the cedalion out of my clutch and raise it to my eye. Faint light intensifies into crisp details. Something is glowing dimly up a set of cramped stairs. Wincing at the loudly creaking boards, I head up to the second floor.
A narrow hallway stretches along the spine of the building. The floors are made of raw timber, slats stained and scarred. Old lamps hang on the blackened walls, the ceiling smudged with soot. This building has to be hundreds of years old. The walls are out of kilter, warped floors rolling like waves. It is vaguely nauseating.
Downstairs, something thumps against the door.
Tromping over the rough boards, I rush headlong down the hallway, navigating by the faint lines of light glowing under the doorways. Holding the cedalion to my eye, I can make out the glowing shape just ahead, beyond a final closed door.
I press against lacquered wood and the heavy door glides open.
Inside, the walls are draped in fabric, dust hanging in the air. The room is cocooned in layers of silk, but otherwise empty—save for an antique table, its mahogany legs carved into dragon mouths closed on ball feet. And resting on the ornate table is a kind of glass coffin, edges wrought in gold.
Holding my breath, I tiptoe closer.
My breath expels in a burst as I see an angelic woman, lying on her back under the dusty glass surface of the coffin. She is beautiful, her eyes closed as if in sleep, wearing a gray riding dress from at least two centuries ago. Her chin is slightly crooked, a trace of stubbornness there, even in repose. Braids of blond hair are carefully arranged over her shoulders and her arms are at her sides, a long silver saber laid over her chest.
“Who are you?” I ask the empty room.
I’m sure this must be an avtomat, reconstructed and maintained as perfectly as this ancient building. Something bad has happened to her. I can see repaired skin at her throat, and there are water stains on her otherwise immaculate clothing. From the beat-up scabbard I can tell the weapon isn’t ornamental—it has been used.
“Her name was Hypatia,” says a voice.
Startled, I turn to see Elena standing in the doorway behind me, her arms crossed. The girl doesn’t look angry anymore, just tired and sad.
“She passed into sleep two hundred years ago,” says Elena. “I dredged the Thames up and down for a decade to find her vessel. Then I put her back together, bit by bit. But I never could find the most important part…I never found her heart.”
I step away from Hypatia, hiding the cedalion in my fist.
“If we find Huangdi, I could learn how to revive her,” I say. “I may be short-lived, but it’s my expertise.”
“Do you think I haven’t poured billions into research and development?” she asks. “I have laboratories on every continent. How could you solve a problem the brightest minds in centuries have been unable to even comprehend?”
“Because I’ve got something they don’t have.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’ve got Peter.”
Elena blinks, then lets out a sharp laugh.
“How could that possibly matter?”
“I’ve seen inside you. I used a bi disk to transfer power from Batuo to Peter, put a Shaolin spear through an avtomat ’s cradle and watched him die, and I found this room with a cedalion.”
I open my palm to show her the artifact.
“Elena, I grew up with an anima hanging around my neck, thinking about it night and day. The artifact you described as a sun disk in your letters to Batuo—the spiritus vitae…I think it’s the key. And I think Huangdi can give it to us.”
“The sun disk, imbued with the breath of life,” says Elena, shaking her head. “It’s supposedly a battery that has been charged with ancient souls. They say it has the ability to rejuvenate an anima, restore memory, smite our enemies—everything except cure cancer. It’s a legend, June.”
Off her skeptical look, I urge: “Elena, it’s worth trying. And if anybody can figure this out, it’s me.”
A faint smile settles on the girl’s lips, eyebrows rising.
“I thought you were just another thing for Peter to protect.”
“He tried that,” I say. “I shot him.”
At this, Elena’s smile widens.
“You’re not the first.”
“Peter means well,” I say. “Overprotective, maybe. But he’s trying.”
Elena walks to the glass coffin.
“I only ever tried to help him,” she says. “To find a way to make him happy. But after I sent Peter away…he was lost for a long time. I was afraid I had broken him.”
“Maybe you did. But I think he’s found a purpose in this.”
“To save us all, of course…oh, Peter,” says Elena, her smile turning sad.
The girl slides her fingers lightly over the glass of Hypatia’s coffin, peering at the still woman inside. The movement is familiar, as if she’s stood in this room alone and done it a thousand times before. I imagine she has.
“Who was she?” I ask.
Elena stares at the sleeping woman through the glass.
“She was my friend. Someone who saw me for what I am, and not for what I look like. Hypatia used to say that I did not need protection from the world, but that the world needed protection from me.”
“What happened?”
“The mother of silkworms, of course.”
Elena steps toward me, her eyes on my purse.
“Leizu will come for that anima,” says Elena. “But mostly, she’ll come for Peter. Her Word is darkness and she needs his light. Since she conquered her husband, I think Peter is the closest thing she’s found to a replacement. You should start running now and never stop.”
“Is that why you won’t tell me where Huangdi is? You’re afraid that Peter can’t defeat her?”
Elena’s eyes go back to Hypatia’s body, and both of them seem like ghosts in the dim sunlight falling through gauzy white silk.
“He can’t,” she says, shoulders slumping nearly imperceptibly. “Only dawn can chase away the dusk.”
Dawn and dusk. Light and dark. White and black. The symbol on my relic comes into focus in my mind—a teardrop with a solid dot inside it.
“Wait, Elena,” I say, starting to pace as I think. “Leizu’s word is—is symbiotic with Huangdi’s? The two of them created some kind of dyad, and they can only be whole together. So without Huangdi, Leizu will keep hunting Peter forever. Eventually she’ll kill him.”
“That’s right.”
“Elena, the symbols you’re talking about are yin and yang, aren’t they?”
Elena nods. She is watching me now, keenly interested.
“I’ll revive Huangdi,” I tell her. “When I do, Leizu will forget about Peter. Yin will find yang. It may be crazy, it may be nearly impossible, but it’s the only logical answer. If you want Peter to live, then you’ve got to help me find Huangdi.”
Elena pauses for a long moment, then sighs.
“I don’t know where he is. Not exactly,” she says. “His vessel is most likely somewhere in the Hubei province of China. His tomb is buried, nestled in the coils of the Yangtze River.
”
“How do you know this?” asks a deep voice.
Peter stands in the doorway, the sleeve of his jacket ripped and his feet muddy.
“Favorini,” says Elena. “I contacted our maker after we fled Saint Petersburg. The old man escaped Catherine and returned to Italy. He told me where we were found.”
“Where we were found?” asks Peter, not understanding.
“Our bodies, Peter. Scavengers found us together, preserved in mud on the banks of a river in China. You…were holding me in your arms.
“It was from those remains that Favorini rebuilt us.”
Peter’s eyes widen, recognition in them.
“Where?” he asks. “Where were we found exactly?”
“I can give you the coordinates, but it doesn’t matter. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Leizu began using shadow companies to propose the construction of a dam. It took nearly a hundred years, but she finally did it. The Three Gorges Dam flooded the whole countryside; millions of people were displaced.”
“Just tell me exactly where,” Peter insists.
“A short way from the dam. At the foot of a plateau on the western bank of the Yangtze River. They called it the dragon’s tooth. I have no memory of that life, but you and I were living at the same time as Huangdi. His empire would have been near where…where we—”
“Where we died,” Peter says, resting a hand on the glass of Hypatia’s coffin.
“What is it, Peter?” I ask.
“I know where to find Huangdi,” he says. “I remember.”
PART THREE
PRAVDA
(Truth / Justice)
The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time…
—LIEZI TEXT, FOURTH CENTURY BC
46
STALINGRAD, 1942
An old man, long dead by now, once asked me a question in the candlelit twilight. My son, he said. What is the first thing? And when I reached inside myself for the answer, I found an overwhelming instinct stamped into my mind. It translated into a simple word, as much a part of me as my hands or face.
Pravda.
I was a newborn with a mind as blank as a still pond, and the old man took me by the shoulders and led me. I followed without hesitation. He asked me to serve a tsar and told me I had a divine purpose. Like a child, I believed him. When my tsar was gone I served a king. Then I tried to serve a little girl. And when she left me, I chose to serve a long-dead ruler by protecting his anima.
For two hundred years, I have faithfully served. I am an instrument of truth, and I exist to create justice from injustice. I have done so through the first war between all men, and now I continue, deep into this second world war.
And all the while, it feels as though my true purpose has been hidden just beyond the next blasted crater, around the corner of another shattered building. Fighting through the agony of failing to fulfill my Word, I push onward like a broken machine, repeating the same motions of battle around the world, in the name of generals and kings and presidents.
The city of Stalingrad is a familiar kind of wasteland to me, a city of ghosts, under siege and mortar fire for months now. Only the scale of it is new. Millions dead instead of hundreds of thousands. A keen nostalgia haunts me as I fight house to house in this dying city, back within the ancient boundaries of my first country.
And falling into my old patterns, I have made an old mistake: sparking legend.
I hunt the German invaders during the night, running trench raids on their positions on the city outskirts. It was Russian women and children who dug these trenches as the German infantry made its way toward the city, never guessing the horror that would soon be unleashed. As homes burned, soldiers filtered in to take up residence. The last refuge of long-dead civilians now provides harbor to the enemy.
But in the night, something inhuman haunts the trenches of Stalingrad.
As the distant orb of the sun fades behind gray clouds, I don armor and a gas mask to protect my vessel from damage. Armed with a pair of trench knives, my hands wrapped in thick leather gloves and my fingers threaded through spiked knuckles, I set about my grisly work.
Sweeping through muddy culverts under the gleam of moonlight, I take no pity on the scared, wounded soldiers who I find cowering in their holes. The men and boys are freezing, far from home and underprepared. They’ve reached Stalingrad and set about gorging themselves to death on the flesh of my homeland.
Each morning I return to the Russian line, my sleeves glistening with frozen blood.
As I repair myself during the days of siege and bombardment, rumors spread among the Axis of my nighttime exploits—a jackbooted killer who leaves fortified trenches filled with corpses, each with a neat red smile beneath his chin. They fear the coming of the tall Soviet in the greatcoat, the one who leaves no survivors, who sees in the dark and makes no sound.
My error was an old one, and a legend soon took root. Not a man-eating tiger but an angel of vengeance. A living embodiment of justice, sent by an angry god.
The rumor catches up to me after midnight, as I am slogging through knee-deep water in a flooded trench.
A gray-green flare climbs into the sky, spitting and sparking, sending my shadow exploring the rugged contours of the German trench. This rut has been dug in what was once a neighborhood. The main house is a pile of bricks, the streets and trees shredded by mortars for a mile around. Only a backyard shed remains, a spot where this squad has been cooking their meals, storing cigarettes and scavenged tins of sardines.
At the bottom of the trench, in dirt conquered and reclaimed, lay the stiff gray bodies of Russians and green-uniformed Germans. The dead men are reduced to frozen angles of human figures, sharp geometries of smashed bricks and round, sloped helmets. It is a silent, fossilized hell, lit in stark relief by the flare.
I imagine it was the meager shed, leaning pathetically, that brought these Germans so deep into no-man’s-land. Around us are collapsed buildings and cratered holes in the dirt, all of it marbled with dirty ice. The invading soldiers have spread out now, their offensive stalled, and these boys grew isolated.
A distant gunshot barks, and then another.
Some detail is off, something wrong. The cigarettes and sardines. They are impossible to find this late in the fight. Someone has brought them in.
Bait.
This hole in the middle of no-man’s-land has the feel of a trap. Sardines and cigarettes to lure Germans to this vulnerable spot. And here they served their purpose as more bait. A furor of bullets cough into the night, Russian guns, urgent, firing closer to my position now.
I scan over the lip of the reinforced trench, toward the gunshots.
In my eyes, the dead expanse of no-man’s-land is alive with flickering traces of heat. Over the cool sucking mud and toothy barbed wire and skeletal fists of trees, I see the storm trooper coming. The figure runs in a hunch under the harsh light of another sputtering flare, coat flapping, chasing his own elongated shadow toward me.
I vault the trench wall and hit the mud running.
Pulling my hat on tight, I grip my rifle in both hands and launch myself forward. Another flare snaps into the cloud-filled sky, hissing to itself over the clomp of my boots and the squelch of mud. Bullets flicker through the night, chased by the distinctive report of German rifles. Both sides are firing, pinpointing the two of us as we lope across the sparsely lit devastation, breathless, both of us silent.
The storm trooper wears a Stahlhelm, a German helmet, gunmetal gray and shaped like a low-slung turtle shell. Where horns would be on a bull, it has bolts to secure a full steel face guard. This type of plate is only worn by snipers; it is too heavy for a man to wear beyond a fixed position.
So, this is not a man.
Wit
hout slowing, I toss my rifle to the ground and draw both trench knives. The blades flash under greenish clouds as my arms pump mechanically. The storm trooper also accelerates, its face blank behind a sheet of steel with two slits for eyes. A stray bullet strikes him in the shoulder, tearing fabric in a puff.
He does not lose stride.
We meet at the base of a blasted tree, stripes of its bark ripped away in pale rivulets, its white heart exposed. The storm trooper draws a long saber, dull yellow, familiar. In rapid motions we are upon each other, no grunting or cursing, only the sound of our blades ringing, biting, and tearing through fabric as we feint and dodge.
The gunshots have stopped from both sides.
In a flurry of movement the storm trooper catches my fist. His blade pierces my torso, splitting my coat and cracking my lower ribs. I try to pull away, but the masked man is too strong. With my free hand, I grab him by the face and pry the steel plate and helmet off his head.
An artillery shell whistles for attention.
Dirt sprays and thunder rolls as the ground opens up and swallows us. Blade lodged in my stomach, I am thrown against the tree, slipping in the mud under the weight of the storm trooper. Shrapnel falls in a hot rain as a mass of long black hair spills over my face. A red hilt streaks in my vision and I recognize the divine blade—Xuan Yuan. This is not a man…and it is not truly a woman.
“Leizu,” I say, in shock.
She rams a knee into my chest and pulls the blade free. In her other hand, I can make out a device that looks like a tuning fork. She jams the hard fingers of the device against my sternum and speaks into my face, her breath invisible. “You say my name as if it means something, Pyotr. But you do not remember me. Not yet.
“Witness,” she says.
The tuning fork sprays tree roots of electricity over my chest. The twisted branches above me look like claws scrabbling against throbbing green clouds. My back arches, body convulsing. A buzzing sensation traces over my teeth as the device injects writhing filaments of power through my anima.
Another mortar is whistling into existence, I think.