Contrary to the beliefs of Three’s fellow guard-siblings, the head shadow was not the first person who taught her how to kill. Nor was her training the cause for her scars.

  It was her own stupidity.

  Before she became Shadow Guard Three, her peers and guards-in-training called her Xiao Gua, Little Melon, because every time she had a meal she would eat and eat until her belly swelled up into a miniature melon.

  Her Stem, meanwhile, was the dignified head shadow’s daughter, so everyone referred to her as the young miss, despite her status as a guard-in-training.

  Little Melon met the young missus when she was around twelve, the other around sixteen. They got together, and then she killed the miss four years after.

  Sometimes, Three would wonder why Little Melon was able to kill her beloved so easily, so quickly. It was probably because she was such a terrible partner.

  Little Melon was utterly unbefitting of the dignified young miss. She was ugly and scarred, too skinny and short for her age. She was too dumb, both illiterate and unable to handle even basic arithmetic, often failing her duties in her inadequacy. But even then, the young miss was too kind to punish her.

  Like that first time she was asked to kill.

  ‘You hurt me.’ The young miss’s pale face and gnawed lips were as stark as fresh blood on snow. ‘Little Melon, you shouldn’t have left me alone. Why won’t you understand? Do you even love me?’ Her fingers, the nails chipped from nibbling, rubbed hard on the wooden armchair. Her heels had gouged hard lines into the dirt floor, their straw bedding strewn across the ground.

  ‘No, no, I love you, I really do!’ Little Melon knelt before the other, csping the young miss’s hands in hers, bringing those bleeding fingers to her own scarred chest. ‘It wasn’t my intention to leave you alone, it was just a quick visit to get dinner —’

  The woman ripped her hand away. ‘But I love you. And you clearly don’t feel the same way for me! Do you love that other girl, Xiao Gua? Is that why you left me? Why you left me for her?’

  ‘She’s just —’ A friend. My only friend other than you.

  ‘If you loved me,’ the beautiful woman sobbed, ‘you wouldn’t meet anyone else. You wouldn’t hurt me like this. A good partner wouldn’t have left me!’

  …She wasn’t good enough.

  Each pearl-like tear that smmed onto the ground seemed to sear a hole into her chest. The moonlight, a dazzling beam through the shredded window paper, was swallowed by the hard dirt floor.

  ‘I shouldn’t have loved you,’ the young miss said. Her voice turned into a low roar, ‘Don’t you know that you’re lucky? You should be grateful that I love you. You’re so ugly, so stupid, there’s no other idiot in this world who would love someone like you!’

  ‘…I’m sorry.’ Tears burned in Little Melon’s eyes, the acrid sourness building in her nose. But she didn’t dare cry. She couldn’t cry, not when the victim already was. ‘I’m sorry, it won’t happen, again, I —’

  ‘Silence!’ The young miss wailed and clutched at her head. ‘Be quiet. Don’t talk.’

  Little Melon fell silent.

  ‘Can you prove it to me?’ The other leaned forward, the white lily earring on her left ear swaying to brush at her ears.

  A nod.

  ‘Then… kill that girl for me.’ The young miss’s brown eyes were sharp and bright. Harder than knives. ‘You can do that, right?’

  ‘…I can,’ she began, but then she was cut off.

  ‘Just do it,’ the young miss said, ‘and please, stay quiet.’

  After that, Three brought back her best friend’s head, and the young miss smiled brightly at her. But every waking, breathing moment, her words had echoed in her head.

  Quiet.

  Stay quiet.

  Please, stay quiet.

  She never dared to meet another girl privately ever again. She never spoke to others, either.

  Because every time she did, the young miss would cry and beg, ‘Please, stay quiet. Don’t talk to anyone other than me. Your voice is mine. Others can’t steal it. Others can’t hear it. And if they do, you know how to fix it. Okay?’

  And she would nod, with blood-crusted nails, ‘Okay.’

  *

  Blood.

  There was so much of it.

  It was spttered over her hands, all down her front, and soaked into her skin. Bits of flesh and muscle were still wrapped around her fingers, seeping into her scars, drawing bold red lines across her skin. It had spttered across her cheek, wetting her hair and gluing it to her throat.

  The eunuch y before her, her fingers still buried in his neck. His tendons shuddered with each dying breath, shaking Three’s fingers — his eyes, wide and bloodshot, the fear distorting his face. The stench of sour urine rose from him; it was his rootless incontinence or perhaps his fear. What little lifeforce the man had cooled and dissipated, carrying with it the tint of terror and pain.

  Then he died.

  None of the blood had gotten onto the Third Princess, but the woman still stumbled back. Horror, a dash of fear, smeared onto her cold face. The scream that lodged in her throat made it tremble.

  A swallow. It must have been dry and painful; Three watched the hurt of it fsh across her eyes.

  Then, she straightened and pulled her fingers from the corpse’s neck. She grinned, roughly wiping the blood from her face. ‘Oh, right, I didn’t finish. I’m not quite sure of my age, but in theory I’m around nineteen. Though the malnutrition made it harder to tell —’

  ‘Why?!’ The princess gasped, ‘Why did you kill him? He was just — Three, are you crazy?!’

  ‘Didn’t you give me an order?’ Three turned to the other woman. She could feel her lips twist; the confusion distorted her face. ‘I thought you were pretending. Wasn’t that “stay silent” your euphemism for death? I thought —’

  I thought you wanted him dead. Don’t you hate him?

  ‘You killed someone!’ The princess’s face turned terrified, horror painted across thin lips and pale skin in a net of goosebumps. That look sent hurt through her blood — even her master was scared of her? ‘Just for, just for an illusory euphemism?! He’s the head eunuch! How dare you!’

  Three’s hurt morphed into anger. ‘I’m a shadow guard! What else do I do?!’ She pointed to the corpse and snapped, ‘Well, guess what, Your Highness, I’d dare to kill anyone with an order!’

  The princess flinched, then quashed her scream into a whispered one as she gripped her hair with cwed fingers. ‘Regardless, how in the heavens — how can we handle this? This wasn’t, this wasn’t in my pns! When the emperor finds out, the Ministry of Justice will investigate, how can we — no. Hide the body, we need to hide it.’ She scrubbed her hands hard over her face, as though wanting to cram her brain back into her head. She mumbled, ‘Hide it. No-one can know. But how…’

  She whipped to Three. ‘You. Can you dispose of the evidence?’

  The familiar, soothing relief of an order, of a direction, washed over Three. She gave a forced smile. ‘Of course, Your Highness.’ She tilted her head — and her eyes nded on the night-soil vat.

  She pulled a knife from her boot, then kicked the eunuch over, his back now facing the air. With rough flicks of her wrist, she cut off the man’s clothes, casually rolling them into a blood-soaked ball and dumping them on the ground.

  Then she bent over and sank the tip of her knife into the eunuch’s neck, the skin letting out a soft sucking sound. With quick pops, she dislocated each joint of his spine.

  She worked quickly. Blood poured from the corpse, pouring down in rivulets.

  ‘You… what are you doing?’

  Three sawed off the hands and feet. ‘I’m dividing the corpse, Your Highness.’ Picking apart the limbs, she carefully sorted the corpse into three piles — skin, flesh, and bone. ‘Normally, I’d dump it into a river or bury the body, but that won’t be possible in a big city.’

  ‘…So, what are you doing now?’

  ‘I’ll let others do the work for me.’

  ‘I don’t see how that’ll work.’

  ‘It will.’ She then moved onto the torso, pulling and ripping the flimsy body apart with smooth, practised motions. ‘Your Highness, do you know what night-soil vats are?’

  ‘…No.’ The princess’s voice still had a quiet tremble. ‘Expin it to me.’

  ‘Night-soil vats are run by groups of farmers and local officials.’ She dumped the mess of red flesh into the butcher’s pot; the bones, she snapped into thin slivers and shards. ‘The common people dump their compostable rubbish, their waste, their leftovers, into these vats, and the farmers take them to giant mills. These mills grind everything to a paste that is then stored and treated for three years. Once completed, it becomes the fields’ fertilisers, feeding all in the four regions.’

  ‘…And this body, you intend…’

  ‘Butchers toss out carcasses and bad meat all the time.’ Then, she paused. ‘The guards and eunuchs won’t search through what they deem dirty.’

  It was in less than a shichen that the entire body was dealt with.

  Then, she turned to the princess.

  The horror had yet to leave the other woman’s face. With that pristine expression, those spotless clothes, that pure and clean countenance, Three suddenly realised with a drop in her stomach that she was utterly filthy in comparison.

  She was covered in blood, the excitement of killing having yet to leave her features. The stench of murder covered her body in a net of scars, the bck she wore seemingly hiding the stains yet bearing her coarseness for the world to see.

  She wanted to be a little shameless. She had made a mistake, that she knew far too well, but a mix of habit and a strange, twisted desire seized hold of her numbed tongue. ‘Your Highness. I completed your order. May I — may I rejoice?’

  She was given a strange, narrowed-eyed look. ‘What do you mean, Three?’

  She licked her dry lips. ‘I wish to make merry, Princess.’

  A pause. It was a heavy one — the weight of it pushed on Three's shoulders, so immense that she didn’t dare to lift her head. She stared at the ground, at the bck stains that had seeped into the cracks and the damp sptters on her boots.

  ‘Well,’ the princess asked, ‘what do you have in mind?’