‘Three. You’ve… been quiet.’

  Three didn’t move from her on the ceiling beam. ‘I’ve been talking enough.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ The princess, seated at the desk, lobbed a scrunched-up ball of paper at her head. It fell short and dropped to the ground. ‘You seem lifeless.’

  No, not lifeless.

  She blinked her eyes.

  I’m alive, aren’t I?

  ‘I’m fine, Your Highness.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ With the princess’s words came the soft, wet slide of an ink brush on paper. A flicker of dark red eyes. Thin lips exhaled a sigh. ‘You even rejected the baijiu that I offered you.’

  She took a deep breath. That breath rattled down deep into her, into the emptiness of her stomach and chest.

  It was a heavy breath. Like iced mud.

  ‘I can’t protect you properly when drunk, Your Highness.’ Three shifted on the beam, dust sprinkling down. The wooden splinters rubbed against her calluses and thickened scars.

  ‘Really. Is that the only reason, girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lies.’ The princess crossed her legs. She scrunched up another piece of paper and threw it. This time, it hit the mark — it thudded against Three’s breasts, dropping to fall into her p, leaving bck dots of ink spttered across her colrbones. ‘Well. You’re upset. Though honestly, I don’t see why.’

  A pause.

  ‘Tell me why you’re upset. A story, if you will.’

  Three looked down, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Is that an order, Your Highness?’

  The princess turned back to gaze at her. ‘Do you want it to be?’

  Then, she got up from the beams and jumped down to the floor. She knelt. She took a shuddering breath and began, ‘One had a sister, before.’

  ‘A sister?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was quiet as she said, ‘They were both trainees in the same generation, competing for the position of Shadow Guard One. They were each other’s Stems, and he killed her on their Ripening Day.’

  ‘What’s a “Stem”?’ The princess put her paper and brush down. ‘Or a “Ripening Day”, for that matter.’

  ‘A Stem is… your pair. The person you train with. The… closest person you know.’ She swallowed. ‘A Ripening… is when you prove that you can obey any order. It is when Stems are ordered to kill their other half.’

  ‘I see.’ A heavy, mounted pause. Then a swallow. ‘Well, do continue.’

  ‘After his Ripening, he returned to his living quarters and found a baby girl on his sister’s bed.’ Three slid from her kneel, dropping into a loose, leg-up-leg-down sitting position. ‘One kept her as his daughter. The head shadow never mentioned it, so the guards of his generation took it as a silent assent and cared for the girl. Not as a shadow trainee, but as… a girl.’ The word was foreign on her tongue. ‘A… person.’

  ‘Then the guards must have been close with her.’

  ‘They were, though I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t dare to get close.’

  ‘Because of your lover?’ The princess snorted, ‘Again, it is far beyond my capacity to comprehend what you saw in that woman.’

  ‘One needs two hands to cp. We both contributed to the colpse of our retionship.’

  ‘Sure. Totally. And I’m a bodhisattva, with a heart of gold.’

  She smiled, but then it fell off her lips. ‘Well, after I Ripened into a true shadow guard, I grew very close with Four and One. I don’t know who reported us, when we became too close. When the head shadow began to doubt us. But... my fourth mission was to torture the girl to her death in front of One. “Ensure that the guard watches,” the head shadow told me. “Make it painful. Use lingchi.” I never knew,’ she ughed, ‘that the first time I would kill someone by the means of a thousand cuts it would be to hurt my favourite teacher.’

  The princess fell silent.

  ‘One nearly killed me that day.’ She leant back, propping herself up with her arms. ‘It was Six who saved my life. He ran to One, held him down, and yelled at him, screaming that I was on orders. But I think One might’ve gone deaf from the shock, because he didn’t stop.’

  She pulled down the colr of her robes and pointed to the scar on her neck.

  She couldn’t see it. She could only feel the roughness of it, the length of it, how it wrapped around her ear and crawled down to the edge of her colrbones.

  But she saw the princess’s eyes widen.

  ‘He nearly tore my head off. And in return, I slowly cut finger-sized pieces from his niece, until she was only a skeleton.’ She took a shuddering breath and whispered, ‘Six said it was all on orders. Do you think… he would feel the same way now?’

  The princess looked down at her. ‘I don’t know. You’ll never know, either. But you’ll just have to deal with that, Three.’

  She stood up. ‘No-one will break up our fights anymore.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No-one will tell us that it’s just orders. Not anymore.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your Highness,’ she asked, ‘Did you feel this way when you saw your mother’s corpse? When you walked away and shut the door, without crying for help?’

  Did you feel like there’s a monster in your chest, a creature that’s trying to drag you down?

  Will it force you to drown?

  The princess whispered, ‘Yes, Three. I did. I still do now.’

  ‘…Then why didn’t you stop me back then?’

  Cold red eyes stared into hers. ‘If I had stepped into that room, would you have attacked me? Would you have stopped me?’ The princess’s voice grew harsher. ‘Do you think I could have done anything?!’

  She fell silent.

  ‘I see, Your Highness.’ Three bowed and turned to the window. ‘It’s a bit te, but I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll just be outside. Call if you need me.’

  She put a leg through the window, then paused as she shuffled onto the window frame.

  ‘It’s not much,’ she added, ‘but I think you’d like to know. General Jian — it was her own bde, and her own hands, that slit her neck. Not mine.’

  The princess didn’t respond.

  Then, she climbed out, clinging to the wooden stakes to stare at the moon’s reflection.

  She would occasionally try to grasp it between her fingers, but it always shattered, flowing down her hands. Then, it would tremble, stilling back into that hard, yellow orb floating on the water.

  …It was clearly right there, but she couldn’t touch it. Not ever.

  Even as sobs gently billowed into the air, softer than snow.